Spectator Life

Ever fancied an extra family member or new best friend supplied on demand and available for as long as required? Ever dreamt you could summon up a surrogate to explain yourself out of an awkward romantic entanglement, or a presentable spouse to secure an employment opportunity (like Alan Partridge’s rented wife in the ‘Hamilton Water Breaks’ episode)? All of this, and more, is readily available in Japan, for a fee, courtesy of the ‘companionship agencies’. This decidedly odd business is the subject of the film Rental Family currently on release across the UK.

One of the funniest - and in my opinion, falsest - things women have long said is ‘I’m doing it for myself - not for men’ about improving the way they look. Men have rarely said the same about women, which reflects that men have never been principally valued for their looks, historically, as they generally earned far more money than women. Women had to look as pretty as possible in order for a man to pick them and support them financially, thus my brilliant line ‘Men are judged as the sum of their parts; women are judged as some of their parts.

In all the recent hoo-ha about banknotes and who or what to put on them, one name has been curiously absent – that of John Constable. Born 250 years ago this year, he was the son of a prosperous Essex miller and merchant who would rise to become probably the greatest proponent of landscape painting in history.  Where his contemporary Turner – who got the £20 note, of course – had an expressive style that took landscapes towards ethereal impressionism, Constable took nature itself to his heart and somehow made it even better – not unlike a portrait painter flattering his subject. If we weren’t British, we would probably have a major gallery in his name.

In his novel Coming up for Air (1939), George Orwell has his benighted protagonist, George Bowling, bite into a sausage, only to discover that it tastes of something else altogether: ‘...pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish!’  I thought of George Bowling as my disgruntled family sat outside Felbrigg Hall in North Norfolk last week, eyeing me balefully — and I envied him. At least his sausage tasted of something. For I had just spent £43.

When most readers think of the late novelist David Lodge, it is his peerlessly funny and incisive campus novels, such as Changing Places and Small World, that immediately come to mind. While his satires on progressive academia are indeed some of his finest achievements, this is down to Lodge’s Catholicism, which was not merely a religious faith but a central guiding principle of his writing – if you were being pretentious, you might say ‘a calling’ – and his life. He may have called himself ‘an agnostic Catholic’, and from a religious perspective, this may have been true, but it remained a vital part of his literary career.

It’s a funny thing, being a feminist surrounded by women on weight-loss drugs. As someone who recognises the health risks of being clinically obese, I’ve never been a fat liberationist – but pretty much all of us used to be against prescribed beauty standards. In practice this meant we would critique the harmful impacts of the ‘size zero’ or ‘heroin chic’ trends rather than obsess over having gained a few pounds over Christmas. Yet, with the rise of weight-loss jabs, skinniness has become a norm rather than a feminist discussion. And twee ideas about ‘being good’ or ‘cheating’ have been replaced by – well – feeling too nauseous to cheat at all.  Which is why Easter is a fascinating holiday in this era of weight-loss jabs.

When you have children, it’s incumbent upon you to develop a variety of new skills – paramount amongst which is the ability to ignore unsolicited advice. From the moment you share a grainy black ultrasound with the world, it rolls in. Birth, breastfeeding, sleep, diet, teething, clothing, tantrums... everyone’s got ideas about how to do it right. If your choices diverge from their wisdom, you immediately become tenants of different camps. The only sensible approach is to put your hands over your ears and go ‘La la la la’ until your children are emotionally well-regulated, financially independent adults with a 2.1 from a Russell Group university.

There are plenty of reasons to be depressed about Britain right now. From our government, which consists mainly of sixth-formers with special needs, to our sporting teams, which conspire to lose across the world. And polls show this depression is real: in a poll on ‘national happiness’ in different countries Britain has plunged from 13th place to 29th, in only a few years.  But if I was asked to name one small but daily aspect of modern British life that gets me down the most, I would answer: litter. All the bloody litter, everywhere. My despair gets so bad that sometimes I convince myself I’m imagining it; did London always look like this? But then I check old photos, and I realise I’m right.

The first time I took a ride in a Waymo was in 2024. It was summer in San Francisco, and my wife and I had spent several weeks watching these curious, sensor-laden Jaguar I-Paces gliding– driverless – up and down the city’s famous slopes. Intrigued, we downloaded the app, summoned one and climbed in.  It was the stuff of sci-fi. The car knew my name and displayed our route on a screen as we traced through traffic. Uncannily, the wheel still turned; phantom hands steering us into every corner. My wife was slightly perturbed; I loved every self-driving second.  But what struck me most wasn’t the technology, but how little fuss these all-electric cars were causing.

When we describe something – or someone – as an ‘acquired taste’, it is rarely a compliment. If we say it of Sharon, for example, it means that she is a bit of a pain in the neck. It's the same with food: olives, anchovies and oysters are some of the finest foodstuffs on God's earth but sometimes, in order to truly enjoy them, you have to first quiet your inner doubts by tuning out all the reasons why other people don’t like them.  Those of us who like to devote time to thinking about matching food and booze get called snobs – but we all do it all the time. You would probably choose to have a mug of tea rather than a cup of coffee with fish and chips – and fair play to you if you do.

The past few years have seen a slew of devastating style assaults on the English language known as ‘LinkedIn speak’. You know the type of word salad: ‘synergise’ instead of ‘combine’, ‘ideated’ instead of ‘thought of’, ‘holistic’ instead of – well – looking at something as a whole. Alarmingly, there is now an app, Kagi Translate, that allows you to type any sentence and it will deliver it for you in this wretched patois. For instance, write ‘I went to the zoo,’ and Kagi gives you: ‘I had an incredible opportunity to observe high-performing teams in a diverse ecosystem and reflect on the importance of adaptability and strategic positioning.’ Go on, try it.

Bottomless brunch: it sounds disreputable, to start with. There’s the suggestion of indecency; that lower garments are optional, perhaps on the part of the poor waiting staff, like those ‘Butlers in the Buff’. And ‘brunch’ is surely the louchest of meals, invented purely so that people could roll into a restaurant after a long lie-in and commence drinking before noon. There is none of the briskness of ‘lunch’ or the cosiness of ‘dinner’. No one’s going to go for a ‘constitutional’ after brunch. No, they’re going to have ‘just one more’… I’ve had some lovely brunches in my time.

If you tweeted about a particular snooker referee being the ex-boyfriend of one of the women in The Human League, and a friend of yours replied with ‘Don’t cue want me baby?’, how would you react? Would you groan, sneer and dismiss the pun as the lowest form of wit? Or would you – like me – laugh out loud and feel a surge of joy at the beauty of the wordplay? If the latter, come and stand with me in defence of puns. Not in a ‘guilty pleasure’ way, either, but as a proud statement that puns are wonderful and important. I hate the snobbery that surrounds puns, the way they’re seen as second-rate language. A good pun – be it a joke, a newspaper headline or simply thrown into conversation – is everything language should be about.

The Japanese are fascinated by the scandal concerning the aristocrat formerly known as Prince Andrew. The main themes resonate powerfully. The concepts of duty, shame and being a burden to one’s family are deeply woven into Japanese culture and so embedded in the language that it is hard to express yourself without touching on them. There are at least four expressions for ‘black sheep of the family’ in Japanese and one of the very first kanji I learned was for the word ‘muru-hachibu’ (eight against one) which means ‘sent to Coventry’ (shouldn’t that be Norfolk now?).   There might also be a sense of ‘there but for the grace of god’ relief for the Japanese in watching a fellow constitutional monarchy floundering.

The forces of taste, fashion and regard have long colluded in a disconcerting way around Banksy. He is an ‘artist’ that the great and the good of the auction world take as seriously and reverently as your more common or garden fan who gazes upon his grim graffiti and feels they really ought to like it. In a saner world, in which everyone had not colluded on the premise that Banksy is Important and Good, he would be seen mainly as a vandal and a nuisance.  His vandalism is lucrative in part because it is a parade of ‘subversive’ clichés, so saccharine and obvious they hurt. Thus, we have little black stencils depicting policemen kissing, the House of Commons filled with chimpanzees, or a girl reaching after a heart-shaped balloon.

Beulah Hill in Norwood is an overwhelmingly uninteresting stretch of South London road; the kind of anonymous thoroughfare that can induce mild depression on a day of drizzle and delayed buses.   Yet, as is often the way with these tedious parts of suburbia, visual perseverance can reap rewards. It was only last week, on my hundredth trudge down the hill towards home, that my fiancée spotted a blue sign above the doorbell to a typically fusty looking mansion block.   Stalking up the driveway to look closer, I read that this was the spot where, 60 years ago, the Jules Rimet trophy (aka the World Cup) was found in a hedge by a mixed border collie dog named Pickles.

Peter Mandelson — twice-resigned Cabinet minister, architect of New Labour and, until recently, His Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States — went to the University of Oxford from Hendon County Grammar. Mandelson read PPE at St Catherine’s College from 1972 to 1976. Young Mandelson’s impressions of Oxford, as detailed in Donald Macintyre’s Mandelson: The Biography, are mixed at best: Hertford College ‘stank of cabbage’ while St Edmund Hall was ‘sort of thirteenth century’, the Union ‘hoorayish’ and ‘off putting’. With too many Peters in his year, Mandy was known, simply, as ‘Benj’.   Fast forward some 40 years and Mandelson was awarded an honorary fellowship by St Catherine’s College in 2018.

I almost spat out my toast (smothered with the As Ever, The Raspberry Spread Trio - ‘Made To Keep On Hand And Enjoy Often’ $42 - natch) in pure molten anticipation when I read that my role model in spreading jam to flour, sorry, speaking truth to power, will be hosting a women-only weekend ‘retreat’ in Sydney during her forthcoming Australia jaunt, with tickets ‘a steal' at £1,700. I already had my credit card in my hot little hand until I remembered that though I love to lunch tête-à-tête with one lady, being in the company of many women at once - with not one awful toxic man around - makes me feel like drawing crude approximations of penises on fragrant toilet doors after around half an hour.