Spectator Life

The British government is going to war with 4chan, the controversial internet message board that has been around for more than 20 years. It’s surprising that it has taken them so long. 4chan users have committed murders, propagated hoaxes and shaped much of the online right. Since the Online Safety Act came into effect, no one at the site has responded to Ofcom’s statutory information requests or explained how 4chan will ‘comply with … safety duties about illegal content’. Officials want 4chan to get better at removing illegal content and to introduce an age-verification system. Under the new law, tech owners are legally responsible for protecting users from each other. 4chan will be fined £20,000 a day until the nastiest place on the internet can sort itself out.

Next month is the 30th anniversary of the death of the American ethologist John B. Calhoun. In the early 1960s, he created an series of experiments to discover the causes of social dysfunction. His most famous work involved a so-called ‘rat utopia’ in which rodents were provided comfortable living quarters with unlimited food, water and warmth, and protection from predators. In this cosy environment, the only bar to ratty heaven was that space was limited. Nonetheless, the happy rats bred prodigiously until their quarters became uncomfortably overcrowded. This lack of space meant they were unable to control with whom or how often they came into social contact.

I’m not awfully keen on family members of famous people putting themselves in the picture; nepo babies are the worst, the equivalent of Japanese knotweed when it comes to the landscape of modern popular culture. But pushy parents are annoying too: Stanley Johnson and the wittering senior Whitehall jumping on the bandwagon when they should be putting their feet up, or the phenomenon of the creepy ‘momager’ touting out her daughter for the delectation of the paying public. But when I saw a photo on Instagram of Liz Hurley, 60, with her mum Angela, 85 – both in leopard-print swimwear from Hurley Junior’s extremely successful beachwear range – I felt absolute glee.

Like the fearful townsfolk of Dodge City awaiting the arrival of outlaws, the residents of Notting Hill have been chalking off the hours. Many have resorted to drilling wooden boards over their windows and doors. Some have hired private security and left the city for the weekend. It’s Carnival once again, that annual ritual of comradeship which often degrades into violence, passed off as a community triumph. Yes, it’s time for the traditional bank holiday fib. If only those most directly affected could speak freely. The police officers, for instance, who must wear coat-hanger smiles, even as they see drugs dealt openly by aggressive young men. These smiling officers sometimes find themselves spat at, punched and headbutted. But they must continue grinning.

Recently, I was on my way to buy the Saturday papers when my ears pricked up. In the distance, I could hear the unmistakable sound of a protest: whistles, slogans, klaxons. I strained to make out what people were shouting, but, given the grim images recently beamed from Gaza, odds were, it was about the Israel-Hamas conflict. What had promised to be a typical day in suburbia was about to get more interesting. I imagined the ranks of police retreating under a barrage of missiles. The keffiyeh-wearing protesters surging forward, battering the coppers with their homemade placards. As the din grew louder, I wondered if I’d make it to the shops before the street battles began. And then they came into view.

There are opinion polls that are so striking they change history. Many Britons will remember the YouGov poll in September 2014. It was the first poll in the Scottish independence referendum campaign to show the Yes side ahead by 51 per cent to 49. That poll shocked SW1, panicked the Cameron government, and led to ‘The Vow’ – the last-minute promise of further devolution if Scotland stayed in the UK. And lo, ‘No’ scraped home, and Britain staggered on. Then there are polls that go beyond striking into ‘whoah, can that possibly be true?’ territory. Polls so unexpected they feel world-changing. The same company, YouGov, has produced just such a poll. It shows that religious belief among 18 to 24-year-olds has tripled in just four years, from 16 per cent to 45 per cent.

To anyone brought up in the seventies and eighties, the fact that so many Palestine Action protestors are themselves in their seventies and eighties is the least surprising fact of the year. These people were the original ‘Boring Old Hippies,’ those dreary teachers and lecturers whom so many of us had to suffer the first time round. Since age confers a harmlessness on everyone, it was rather sweet to see them again, enjoying one last stab at rebellion before marching off to that Great Student Demo in the Sky. And yet when I was growing up, these ‘rebels’ were the very people we rebelled against. Musically, we couldn’t bear their Pink Floyd, their early Genesis and those heavy slabs of prog rock inspired by the Hobbit-y tosh of Tolkien.

Fran Lebowitz, the apparently acid-tongued commentator on Manhattan manners, will slip through British customs next month to dazzle the easily dazzled. Though to judge by the interview she granted an earnest lady in the Observer, other verbs leap to mind. From this distance it looks suspiciously like a fog of self-regard. According to the profiler, Megan Nolan, Lebowitz is ‘a poster girl for a certain kind of crusty but erudite and essentially good-natured New York archetype, intellectual and judgmental, and walking the line between rudeness and frankness with engaging grace’. Cor! Is this a private ritual between consenting adults, or can we all join in?

We’ve all seen appalling stories of people, usually – but not exclusively – women, being stalked by a spurned suitor, and how this can have terrifying and sometimes life-threatening sequelae. However, the popularity of social media has brought about the advent of the less dangerous but mighty irritating social media stalker – or ‘smalker’, as I like to call them. The smalker is usually a spurned friend who has been chewing her lips with fury since you removed her from your Facebook ‘friends’ list. Sometimes they only requested to be your ‘friend’ in the first place so they could lurk on your page, twisting their face into a sucking-a-wasp grimace: an upside-down smile with a wrinkled nose.

A recent, rather beautiful piece published here told of how the writer, Druin Burch, initially somewhat alarmed by the variety of naked bodies he unexpectedly encounters while swimming in the Med (‘I wouldn’t mind if it was only young women,’ he says to his wife) comes to appreciate the loveable imperfection of the human form. I can’t say I’m with him on this. I totally understand fit women wanting to take their tops off in public as an expression of sheer high spirits; as a teenager, I used occasionally to do it. But humanity generally? Put it away, puh-leeze! As a resident of the fair city of Brighton and Hove, I’ve got skin in the game, metaphorically.

Don’t women have a bum deal? Not only do we have to bear children and make our way on the harsh plains where second-wave feminism and rampant neoliberal professionalism meet, but apparently now we must also perform ‘emotional labour’ for our husbands. Sorry: husbands and partners. This emotional labour has been christened ‘mankeeping’, the latest feminist buzzword. Dreamed up by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a psychologist at Stanford, it describes the heavy lifting that women in heterosexual relationships do to keep ‘the family harmony alive’.  And it appears to have struck a chord. ‘Mankeeping: finally, a word to describe the emotional labour of my 38-year marriage,’ declared a recent Telegraph headline.

So far this summer we’ve had the blackouts in Portugal and Spain, that rather astonishing Heathrow fire, yet more sabre-rattling between Russia and America and the former head of the Army warning that Britain must be ready for the ‘realistic possibility’ of war within five years. Then there was an old general on the radio telling civilians to prepare themselves for the struggle both mentally and practically – by stocking up on foodstuffs, loo roll, an FM radio and cash. Normally I don’t do what the radio tells me, but he got me thinking. And it turned out my wife – who is an actuary and is to risk what the Wicked Witch of the West is to tap water – had been pondering something similar. So we’ve begun ‘prepping’.

That it has taken its sweet time getting here cannot be denied, but, at last, it has happened. More than 70 years after the novel by Josephine Tey became an overnight sensation in 1951, a stage adaptation of The Daughter of Time has arrived in the West End. Voted the greatest crime novel of all time by the Crime Writers’ Association back in 1990, The Daughter of Time is Tey’s most unusual but brilliant detective story. It’s her most unusual because its sees her Inspector Alan Grant – the central character in five of her detective stories – solving a crime from his hospital bed while recovering from a broken leg.

I’m of an age where a summer’s evening often means a few gin and tonics on my balcony along with cheese, olives and an Etta James soundtrack. But it wasn’t that long ago that the slow descent of the amber orb meant trekking into Chester city centre to catch a minibus that would take me to a shampoo factory on the outskirts of Flint. There, from 9 p.m. until 7 a.m., my job was to screw the tops on to bottles of shampoo and conditioner to a soundtrack of scatological invective from my workmates, broken only by a 2 a.m. canteen break for cigarettes and a semi-melted KitKat.

The greatest living American until this week has died at the age of 97. I refer to Tom Lehrer, the finest satirist of the 20th century. He’s the one who observed that satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was the genius who put the entire periodic table of the elements to the tune of ‘I Am the Very Model of A Modern Major-General’ (Gilbert and Sullivan was his childhood obsession). He was a mathematician who could be as funny about maths and science as about poisoning pigeons in the park (yes he did) or contemporary pieties (‘National Brotherhood Week’).

In my corner of Bristol, alongside drug dealers, shoplifters and street drinkers, we now have our very own pyromaniac. They started small – an abandoned office chair, a clothing bank and an old telephone box – before moving on to bigger things. Half a dozen cars have been torched over the past few months, including two on my road, and, most recently, a derelict pub. The other Saturday, hearing a commotion outside, my wife jumped out of bed and flung open the curtains. The scene that greeted us was apocalyptic. In daylight, on a narrow suburban street, the arsonist had set fire to three motorbikes parked in a row, which in turn had set alight a car and a hedge. It was pandemonium.

It begins with an electric swish sound that makes you feel like you are falling backwards, followed by an arresting synthesiser da-da-dum drumbeat. Then we get the voice, in double-time: ‘She came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge. She studied sculpture at St Martin’s College…’ With those words, singer Jarvis Cocker and his fellow members of Pulp caught the attention of a nation. And chances are, three decades on from the release of ‘Common People’, this musical intro will still send a tingle down your spine, particularly if you’re aged anywhere between 40 and 70.

There are 1,000 spaces available for the 6-9 a.m. lane swimming session at Tooting Bec Lido in south London. On Sunday it was fully booked. After a few frantic lengths (at 91m, it is Europe’s longest), we are all shooed out at 8.50 a.m. by the lifeguards to make way for the daytime swimmers. Those slots are like gold dust and sell out within minutes of becoming available. Across London it’s the same story: swimming spaces are a precious commodity. After three heatwaves so far this summer and the warmest June on record for England, it’s easy to see why so many people are craving access to outdoor water. In total, the capital has just 15 lidos (if one includes a couple of ponds). Even the Serpentine is fully booked on good days.

The Proms – the BBC Proms, to stick a handle on its jug – remains a good deed in a naughty world. Eight weeks of orchestral music, mainly, performed nightly at the Royal Albert Hall by artists from every continent, for as little as £8 if you are prepared to stand. One of those artists, the Georgian fiddler Lisa Batiashvili, supplied the highlight of this year’s ‘first night’ with a mighty performance of the Sibelius concerto. The concert ended with Sancta Civitas, a rarely heard choral work by Ralph Vaughan Williams, performed with love by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under its principal conductor, Sakari Oramo. Musically, it was a good start, despite the tiresome clapping between movements of the Sibelius. So why did the occasion, carried live on BBC2, fall flat?

Ordering things online can be a lottery. You can’t touch, smell or taste the product you’re buying, so it’s hard to know whether you’ll actually want it when it arrives. But we keep clicking anyway because it’s more convenient than trudging to the shops and things are often cheaper. For me, another reason to order online is the dash of childlike joy it brings to my to life when I click ‘buy’ and instantly set up a future treat. In fact, it’s even better than childhood because now I can have a parcel to open any day I want, not just on birthdays and Christmas. But most of all, I shop online because I love tracking my parcel. Anytime I like, I can check in and see where my purchase is in the delivery process.

Neil Young once saved my life. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.  This was at an outdoor show in Finsbury Park in July 1993. I had pushed and squeezed my way almost to the front of a large crowd shortly after being passed something of dubious provenance to smoke. One moment everything was perfect: he was playing that romantic late career hit, ‘Harvest Moon’, the sun was setting, the moon, conveniently, rising, and I was swaying along, rapturous. But then, suddenly – bang… I fainted.  This is the only time in my 45-year gig-going career that this has happened. But I was gone. I was briefly unconscious, then I came to lying on my back on the grass, looking up at dozens of legs all around and above me, almost on top of me.