Spectator Life

Reading about the break-up of the 19-year marriage of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, I was interested in some comments from our old mate ‘A. Source’ about the possible cause. According to the Sun: ‘Keith put a brave face on Nicole’s raunchy screen roles and all the comments she’d make about her sexuality. But he didn’t react well when people teased him about Nicole getting it on with hunky younger guys, albeit only on camera, and it was a sensitive topic that became a real issue as time wore on.

An upper-middle-class former banker friend recently attended a Reform UK selection meeting for council candidates in a decaying southern coastal town. Although he is a man of the world who once worked on oil rigs and in a shoe shop, my banker friend professed himself ‘shocked’ by the standards of dress and deportment of the other would-be candidates. Naturally all were overweight and tattooed, and all were dressed in shorts, baseball caps and hooded tracksuit tops – the standard everyday uniform of most British men under the age of 60. They were, it is fair to say, an average representation of the male members of what was once called ‘the working class’. The story reminded me of that classic TV sketch from the early 1960s.

There was confusion in Canterbury Cathedral this week as the Dean and Chapter gave permission for this most venerable shrine of world Christendom to be redecorated in the manner of the M4 Chiswick flyover. Photographs appeared of the cathedral’s ancient walls and columns irregularly plastered in jagged and bulbous graffiti, picked out in the sort of gaudy palette you might see in an amusement arcade. Even vice president J.D. Vance has questioned whether this is the right way to treat the house of God, saying the graffiti made a ‘beautiful historical building really ugly’. It soon transpired that this graffiti spattered over the site of Becket’s martyrdom was in fact a temporary art installation.

Elitism has had a bad press in recent years. The concept has, alas, been tainted by its association with the numerous elites who have corrupted it by allowing self-interest and prejudice to become self-perpetuating. It’s been sullied by its association with old school ties and masonic-style handshakes – by closed networks which work to exclude those who happen to fall outside the pre-determined in-group. So no wonder we don’t like it any more. Who would? But its gravest sin of all has been its role in pulling up the drawbridge to protect privilege in general, through a kind of unspoken fish-knife test. If you don’t know what it’s for, you don’t get in. One way people used to storm the castle of privilege was through grammar schools, of course.

When I found out about the death of Dame Jilly Cooper while waiting for a train, I said, out loud, ‘Oh no!’ with such vehemence that several of the commuters around me shuffled away, clearly frightened by their proximity to a madman. Cooper’s death at the age of 88 – a good innings, but also wholly unexpected, occurring after a sudden fall – brings to an end the life of Britain’s pre-eminent romantic novelist, aka ‘the queen of the bonkbuster’. It is testament to her vast popularity that many of her millions of readers felt that they knew her intimately, and those lucky enough to meet her were invariably charmed by her good humour, self-deprecating wit and charm.

As a woman in my early thirties, it is my God-given right – arguably my duty – to have an opinion when Taylor Swift releases an album. And it’s a role that I’ve always performed without compunction. But on this occasion – the release of album 12, The Life of a Showgirl, my ability to get into the weeds (does ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ represent close text analysis of Shakespeare?) was hampered by my shock at one particularly audacious lyric.  Previous albums have had the the odd raunchy moment. So when, on this new album, she sang ‘His love was the key that opened my thighs’ in a song titled ‘Wood’, I was unmoved.

My colleague seemed surprised that I replied ‘no’ when asked if I was sad at the news that G-A-Y bar – a staple of Soho for decades – was closing. A more intelligent answer would be that the closure of any ‘gay space’ is sad, but the truth is this is not somewhere that many in ‘the community’ will mourn. I tried to think about the last time I went to G-A-Y and I can’t remember. I texted a dozen friends and they can’t remember either. I guess that speaks to part of the problem. Jeremy Joseph, the owner of the bar, announced the closure on social media on Wednesday. But the speed of its closure this weekend, just days after the announcement, is surprising. Joseph says that ‘Old Compton Street has lost [its] LGBT identity’.

For a long time it was handy dinner party fact that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One (2010) briefly filmed at my late grandparents’ house, and appeared as Hermione Granger’s house in the film. Even this required extensive exposure of my grandparents to Warner Brothers’ lawyers, the film crew and, of course, to young Emma Watson herself. Neither of my grandparents had heard of Harry Potter before they were approached, and throughout filming, they failed entirely to notice her, though there was some vague recollection of ‘that rather mousy girl’ from my grandpa, who was far more taken with Susan, the 60-something woman in charge of props. This description stayed with me as Watson’s star rose and rose, plateaued, and turned gender political.

It’s relatively common, I find, when opening a newly purchased second-hand book for the first time, for something to fall from its pages. Most likely this will be a branded bookmark or printed stocklisting paper from the dealer who sold it. But it’s not unusual to find something more interesting, something belonging to the book’s previous owner. Apparently the singer Nick Cave donated 2,000 books to an Oxfam in Hove this summer, and new owners of his paperbacks discovered old plane tickets and Post-it notes tucked inside. We serial readers of actual physical books are constantly in need of bookmarks and will grab at anything to hand to use as one.

Early in 2020, inquiries for our speech-writing services were arriving in their droves. From Westminster to Washington, weddings to wine tastings, people needed our help. We cancelled our weekends and prepared for life without a mortgage. Covid gave us our weekends back. And all the other days. Yet when parties and events returned, a significant chunk of our clients did not. It was weird. But this wasn’t a vaccine complication, just a new player in the market. Previously we’d only had to win business against other humans. Suddenly, we were faced with a competitor able to provide speeches for any occasion in seconds. ChatGPT was doing to us what PornHub had done to the top shelf in the local newsagent. We weren’t the only ones.

‘Prizes are for little boys,’ said Charles Ives, the American composer, ‘and I’m a grown-up.’ It’s a pretty sound rule of thumb. The prizes worth having are usually those which reflect a body of work, not a single achievement. Cary Grant, the greatest leading man in the history of cinema, never won an Academy Award. Neither did Alfred Hitchcock, who made a few half-decent films. They received ‘lifetime awards’ from the red-faced academicians, but those gestures merely endorsed William Goldman’s view that, in Hollywood, nobody knows anything. As Billy Wilder told the producer who asked what he had been up to: ‘You first.’ Nobody takes much notice of the Grammys, which were designed to reward commercial success.

‘I was born to play Lady Bracknell,’ Stephen Fry swanked recently, in an interview to mark a new production of The Importance of Being Earnest, running until January. I can’t be the only one to greet the idea of another round of Fry interviews with a desire to go to bed and not come out till it’s all over. But that would be a long hibernation. For Stephen Fry pronouncements are like professional tennis; it’s always open season. You can’t get away from the clown, particularly when he’s lecturing women on how they should feel about having great hairy men in mascara sharing their private spaces. Magnificently, J.K.

Most of our politicians themselves are not obedient, kindly and loyal. Similarities between candidates and their faithful cat or dog are few – but as trolls now deter supportive spouses and photogenic children from saccharine election leaflet photos, pets are increasingly becoming familial proxies. When Nigel Farage does a TikTok about his dogs Pebble and Baxter, thousands comment approvingly. But finding a family photo of the Reform UK leader is nearly impossible. And that, says Farage and many like him, is entirely deliberate. Political animals are not new. Caligula threatened to make his horse, Incitatus, a consul. Cardinal Wolsey’s cat is immortalised in a bronze statue in Ipswich.

There’s was so much to loathe and laugh at in Peter Mandelson’s contribution to Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘birthday book’ (which inadvertently has turned into more of a ‘burn book’). But the words ‘yum yum’ were, for me, in a league of their own. Whatever they were referring to – it could have been the peachy posterior of a pool-boy or a particularly perfect profiterole – they identified Mandelson as a practitioner of verbal infantilisation. For this alone, he deserved to be sent packing. I spent five months in hospital during last winter and spring, and though the nursing staff were generally excellent, we were oft spoken to like children in preschool.

Miriam Margolyes is on the road, bringing joy to every corner of the kingdom, and aren’t we the lucky ones? It’s a kingdom she no longer has much time for, if she ever did, however hard the coiners of trite phrases try to dress her in the garb of a ‘national treasure’. When the tour is over she’s off quick-smart to a new life in Tuscany, where British folk who dislike their native land have always found a bed. There’s a book out as well, so there is no excuse for not paying attention. As dozens of chat shows have tried to persuade us, she is a bona fide ‘character’, fitting into the English pageant somewhere between Lady Godiva and a bearded lady. Have your tummy tickled as she farts merrily along the rolling English road.

As a species we are richer than we’ve ever been before. We live longer. We have more food to eat than is good for us. We have abundance in all things. And yet we are no happier than we were. In fact, many of us are downright unhappy. Among our woes is an epidemic of loneliness. Some 8.4 million of us are now living alone in Britain, and more than 3.8 million report being chronically lonely. We lock up more people in our prisons than ever and we can see for ourselves the signs of friction in our society, one which is clearly not entirely at peace with itself. So somewhere we have gone wrong. And I think I know where. It’s our families. They are simply too small. The average number of children born per woman in England and Wales has fallen to 1.

Whenever Europeans feel inadequate in relation to America, and have a yearning to console themselves, there is one subject that always comes up: the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, i.e. gun law. Yes, the Yanks may be richer than us. Yes, a dockworker in Delaware can earn more than a British cabinet minister. Yes, America has a dynamic economy and the world’s most powerful military, with a huge lead in science, tech and finance. But remember: ‘in Europe we don’t have mass shootings.’ ‘British children aren’t taught how to dodge bullets.’ ‘You may have Silicon Valley, but we don’t have lunatics wandering around Tesco with AR-15s.’ This feels even truer right now, as America reels from a horrific assassination, by a shooter on a roof with a rifle.

As I write, a copy of The Hallmarked Man sits beside me. Not being on holiday, spending the morning reading a new detective novel would seem as louche as a pre-brunch martini. Not being David Niven, I’m making the book wait until at least after lunch. J.K. Rowling’s new book, under her pen name of Robert Galbraith, comes in at around 900 pages. I expect to rip through it smartly. I am not an ideal reader of detective fiction, nor the thrillers and mysteries that have a whodunit at the core of their tightly planned plots. My ability to figure out the murderer – even my interest in trying – is vestigial.

Studying our national character and current malaise has convinced me that the root cause of Britain’s problems is that we are too nice. Compared with our nearest European neighbours, let alone with most other countries in the world, being British automatically confers a series of characteristics not generally shared elsewhere. For a start we are polite. We do not shove ahead of other people in queues like the Italians, nor do we scream obscenities at random strangers in the street as they do in New York, and buying a cup of coffee is not regarded as a personal insult by cafés staff, as it is in Paris, for example.