Spectator Life

Dennis is having a little holiday with a sitter in Kent because I’m in Italy, a meandering trip from Rome to Florence and then Venice via Chianti. Unfortunately, I realise on day one that I’ve become the sort of unhinged tourist who accosts people with dogs. In Rome’s Piazza Navona, I spot an elderly Parson terrier ambling stiffly over the cobbles and hurry over to its middle-aged owner, chic in her silk neck scarf and quilted jacket.   ‘I have the same in London,’ I say, thrusting my phone at her and pointing at the screen. She’s very gracious and we have a faltering conversation in which I learn that her rough-coated Parson is called Lola and she’s ten years old. In a Montepulciano wine bar, I meet a Boxer called Evie.

In 1983, having fought with my stepfather, I spent a night beneath the stars. Having run away from Yorkshire to London with a few pounds I’d saved working, I slept in a bed and breakfast but soon ran out of money. When a policeman kicked me awake in Victoria Station, I decided the coast might be an easier proposition. So it was that one night, after hitching across Sussex, I curled up in a bush near a railway station called Three Bridges. I was 16. Though I had known homelessness as a toddler with my teenage mum – sleeping in tents, communes and squats – and would experience insecure housing over the following years, as far as I can remember, that was the only night I had absolutely no choice but to sleep rough.

All three surviving Traitors in the flame-lit final episodes of the BBC’s Celebrity Traitors pronounced the word ‘traitor’ as ‘trai’or’. They’d been ‘recrui’ed’, for better or for worse, and had ‘had the hea’ pu’ on them’ at various times throughout the series. ‘This is the final murder and it’s really impor’an,’ said Maya Jama at midnight in the turret. ‘I’m not goin’ down wivou’ a figh’. I’m ge’in’ shivers,’ said Kenny. The habitual dropping of the ‘t’-sound is an affectation, even if a subconscious one To me, the lack of a ‘t’-consonant really lets these celebrities down. Of course, they can and sometimes do pronounce the letter ‘t’: they always say it at the beginning of any ‘t’-word.

When Freddie Bampfylde became Chairman of Christoby’s UK, the first thing he did was get rid of the desk in the mahogany-panelled study which became his with the new role. As he told a journalist from the Telegraph, he needed a much larger desk to accommodate Johnny the Antelope, the huge, purple antelope head by Damien Hirst which he strokes for luck before he takes an auction. He is also rather fond of the photograph of him dressed as Batman taking an auction at the Royal Hospital in aid of the Pensioners and has placed it next to the silver-framed photograph of his wife, children and pugs sitting on the sweeping stone steps leading to the doors of his house, Evenlode.

The third round of protests in France takes place this Saturday. Participants are being urged to come dressed for Halloween. Social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram are teeming with memes about the upcoming ‘Night of Darkness’. Oh, and don’t forget to wear a mask. If the French weren’t depressed already, what with the riots and looting during the first two weekends of protest, now comes further evidence that they have lost the cultural war to America. French baby boomers were more open-minded about America than their parents Halloween was popularised Stateside in the middle of the 19th century, although in 1876 The New York Times declared that the festival was in danger of dying out. It rallied.

The USSR is striking back. Nearly forty years after its collapse, there are a growing number of young people in the West who are now avid enthusiasts of the Soviet Union. Curiously, this is a somewhat apolitical phenomenon. Lenin and Stalin apologism still remains the preserve of the chubby, the slobby, the grizzled and the graduate student, no matter how avidly they wave their flags at protests. Instead, Soviet culture and style have become decidedly in vogue, whether that be the resurgence of the Slavic doll look, schoolboys making TikToks to the USSR national anthem, or viral videos of abandoned Communist buildings. Defanged and denuded of its political belief system, Soviet aesthetics are decidedly cool.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was, at the end of his life, a committed Spiritualist, and so knew all about authors writing posthumously from the Other Side. But he might still have been taken aback by Sherlock, a book of short stories which has a profile of the great man on the cover in his distinctive deerstalker and meerschaum. Closer inspection shows it to be ‘authorised by the Conan Doyle Estate’ rather than authored by A. Conan Doyle, but the reader’s first response is, goodness, is there more Sherlock out there? It’s a bid by the literary estates of the authors to squeeze more from their authors once the original copyright expires At second glance, you see: ‘Ten New Stories, Ten Incredible Writers; the Game is Afoot…Again’.

Should we be horrified that The History Boys, Alan Bennett’s 2004 play about a grammar school class applying to Oxbridge in the 1980s, is to be revived for a 16-week run at the Theatre Royal Haymarket next year? It was, after all, voted the nation’s favourite play in 2013. But it comes with a very big problem, which is inevitably going to attract negative attention when put on stage now: it revolves around a pederast schoolmaster who is portrayed extremely sympathetically, even to the point of making him the hero of the piece. An awful lot has happened in the field of public opinion on that subject over the past two decades.

London Fields, East London. Saturday the 17th of October. A slight north-northeastern wind is blowing. The sky is overcast, with a drizzle earlier in the day making the ground slightly softer than usual, but still firm enough to get a good grip. Perfect weather for the joust to make a return, after six hundred painstakingly long years. At long last, the beautiful game is back. Here we are in heaven. Like many things in the last six centuries, the mechanics of the joust have changed. Where men used to ride on warmblooded chargers and destriers, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has had its way and transformed their steeds into equally noble Lime Bikes – the iconic green rental bicycle that plagues London’s pavements and gives transit to its most downwardly mobile residents.

Nobody likes being asked for their ID once they are over the age of 25, unless they flatter themselves that it’s because they genuinely look younger than they are. For many years, unless going abroad, I’ve simply stopped carrying ID. I’m over the age of 18, don’t carry a wallet and frequent the same pubs in Westminster sufficiently regularly that the prospect of being turned away for failing to produce a driving licence has rarely seemed worth worrying about. Perhaps the next generation has decided that a night out is simply too expensive But there are always some overzealous watchmen. A few weeks back, I found myself in Northallerton at a bar named The Potting Shed, where a bouncer seemed determined to establish whether I was legally entitled to drink.