Spectator Life

For the first half of the 2010s, any teenage girl in her room had a chance of amassing more political influence than a junior Spad. She could define political terms and concepts, blacklist undesirable elements, and argue for a different kind of society. Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of other teenage girls would be following her, reading and engaging. These were the days of Tumblr, a youth blogging website that functioned like a dysfunctional think tank. I first found out about Tumblr in 2012, when I was in Year 7; a girl in my year group started a blog about her depression and anxiety and linked it from her public Facebook. I wanted in on her mental anguish – the posts she shared would ring safeguarding alarm bells today, but they seemed impossibly grown-up at the time.

Odysseus is back on his eternal journey to Ithaca – and he’s sailing towards your cinema screen. Ralph Fiennes is playing Odysseus in The Return, released last week. And Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, starring Matt Damon as the cleverest of the Greeks at Troy, should be out next year. I criss-crossed the Mediterranean for three years, in the wake of Odysseus, for a book – and I’m convinced The Odyssey is true. OK, the monsters, like man-eating Scylla and the one-eyed Cyclops, might not have existed. And you’d have to be a Zeus-fearing type to believe in the gods toying with Odysseus’s fate on Mount Olympus. But the catastrophic storms that tossed Odysseus back and forth across the Med are certainly true.

You will be aware that we face a national emergency. I’m not referring to the fact that our closest ally has seemingly taken leave of its senses or the astonishing news that apparently one in four Britons is now disabled – nor that more than nine million of us of working age are economically inactive. I’m not even talking about the parlous state of the NHS. The national emergency I’m referring to is one that trumps even Trump, so brace yourselves. Soon we are going to run out of Red Arrows. The jolly red-painted planes they fly – the Hawk T1s made by BAE Systems – are now so old, they’re even older than Putin’s fighters.

Sometimes it seemed to me as a young hack that writing obituaries must be the best job in newspapers. You can’t get sued – though people tend not to take the gloves off out of ‘respect’ and use ancient phrases like ‘bon viveur’ and ‘did not suffer fools gladly’ when everyone knows you mean ‘well-connected drunk’ and ‘ill-tempered’. It’s only once in a blue moon that someone really says what they think, like when the ‘social influencer’ Jameela Jamil barely waited until the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld was cold in his casket before X-ing that the capering clown – widely being celebrated as a ‘genius’ – was in fact ‘a racist, misogynistic, fat-phobic rape apologist who shouldn’t be posted all over the internet as a saint gone-too-soon’.

At last, somebody has said it. Busking is akin to psychological torture, especially for those who have to live or work within earshot. This damning comparison came from no less than a judge at the City of London magistrates’ court, following a suit brought by Global Radio, the Leicester Square-based owner of LBC and Classic FM. The judge noted ‘the use of repetitive sounds is a well-publicised feature of unlawful but effective psychological torture techniques’. He found that the ‘volume’ of the buskers’ music was ‘the principal mischief’ but also delivered a damning assessment of the way out-of-tune pop songs are offensive to the human spirit. ‘It is clear that the nuisance is exacerbated by the repetition and poor quality of some of the performances,’ said the judge.

My home city of Oxford has been ravaged by shop closures over the past decade but there is still one outstanding second-hand bookshop (the estimable antiquarian department at Blackwell’s apart) and it’s the Oxfam bookshop on St Giles. Thanks to a regular donations from dons and writers, there are invariably high-quality and interesting items on its shelves, priced sensibly and reasonably. In the past, I reckon I’ve spent a decent three-figure sum there most months, which I persuaded myself was going to developing countries and their good work, rather than growing my unreasonably large collection. Yet I’ve rather fallen out of love with the Oxfam St Giles ever since it did something unexpected a couple of months ago: it stopped me buying books.

Once at my old local paper, the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, a trainee made the mistake of sniggering when asked to cover the allotments sub-committee. ‘Don’t ever fuck with allotment holders,’ the news editor warned. ‘It may not matter to you, but they take those little patches of land very seriously indeed.’ Like most of the news editor’s salty words of wisdom, this advice was forged on the anvil of bitter experience. Grimsby’s allotmenteers guarded their marrow and runner bean patches with a Balkan-esque blood-and-soil passion. The slightest mistake could generate no end of angry phone calls and green-ink letters. I am not sure allotment coverage was quite what King Charles had in mind when he lavished praise on local newspapers last week.

How do you walk away from greatness? How do you vacate the position of being literally the best person in the world at something? Most of us never have to face this challenge, but at some point Ronnie O’Sullivan will. In Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry he has contrasting examples of how to tackle it. I’d argue that Davis’s approach is by far the better – and indeed teaches all of us about life and the way it should be lived. ‘If he plays his best, he wins. It’s as simple as that.’ There aren’t many who disagree with Hendry’s verdict on O’Sullivan, his successor as the king of snooker and the greatest player, by common consent, ever to pick up a cue.

It is the evening of Monday 23 September 1985. A band called the June Brides are playing a free gig in the bar of Manchester Polytechnic’s Students Union, the Mandela Building (of course) on Oxford Road. I find myself among the audience of freshers’ week first-year undergraduates. I am 18, a small-town boy who’s been living in a big city for just 48 hours.  The place is half empty, the audience awkward. But I am quite taken with the band and the following day go to Piccadilly Records to buy their just-released mini album, There Are Eight Million Stories. The US novelist Dave Eggers would later recall being a teenage Anglophile indie fan in the suburbs of Chicago and cycling 20 miles to get this record that autumn. I could just get the 85 bus from Chorlton.

I like to think of myself as good at making friends. I tend to rank them. There are kindred spirits (rare), very good friends (perhaps five at the most), and good (ten or more). Friendships, like plants, need looking after; they require time and attention. One rank below friends are acquaintances. Acquaintances add warmth and comfort to life but are not essential. You can abandon an acquaintance without much compunction. But good friends nurture the heart and soul and are therefore vital. Kindred spirits? By them you know you’re not alone, not mad, not a terrible person and, amazingly, that you’re loved. I think back to childhood when the need for a best friend was absolutely paramount. I suppose it’s an early version of wanting a mate.

Is nothing sacred? Not quite, as it turns out. There remains one last object of piety in these, the early days of the third Christian millennium (don’t laugh). Surprisingly, it is a fictional bear from darkest Peru. Yes, Paddington is back in the news. Because he hath been desecrated. There is, or was, a sedentary statue of St Paddington Bear on a bench in Northbrook Street, Newbury. He was depicted clutching a marmalade sandwich in both paws, wearing an expression that was probably intended to be thoughtful, but that to any reasonable person appeared feral and malevolent. One dark night a few weeks ago, Daniel Heath and William Lawrence, RAF engineers from the nearby base at Odiham, both 22, decided – after drink had been taken – to remove Paddington for a laugh.

I’ve been to a few underwhelming Unesco World Heritage Sites. Take the Struve Geodetic Arc, which curves almost invisibly across Eastern Europe. I visited without even realising. As for the Fray Bentos corned beef factory, in Uruguay, I’m writing this about 20 minutes from the Fray Bentos corned beef factory and I’m still reluctant to go and see. The same might be thought of Australia’s Lakes of Willandra, which I visited around 2014. Unesco itself describes them as ‘fossil remains of lakes and sand formations from the Pleistocene’, which is not exactly heart-racing. They are unhelpfully located in the south-west corner of New South Wales – lost in semi-desert, far from anywhere.

Years ago, newly triumphant from getting my first book published, I went to my parents’ house for a celebration dinner. Having duly toasted their son’s modest literary success, they then revealed that I wasn’t the new author in their social circle. An old university friend of theirs from Holland – we’ll call him Jörg – had just sent them a copy of his new book, ‘a sort of travel memoir, a bit like yours’. This was not a comparison I welcomed. My book was about quitting my job as pot-holes correspondent on the London Evening Standard to freelance in post-Saddam Iraq – not exactly Michael Herr’s Dispatches, granted, but more gripping, I liked to think, than writing about roadworks on Streatham High Road.

According to MailOnline, Kate Moss ‘sparked fan concern as she’s spotted looking “fraught” and “on edge” at Paris Fashion Week’. Good. Kate Moss is one of the very rare celebrities who I’m interested in – because she’s one of the very few celebrities who’s interesting – but in recent years she has become a bit ‘basic’, to use the word she once tossed along with ‘bitch’ at the pilot of the EasyJet plane. Police led her away from the plane after she was caught drinking her own booze after being refused airline hooch. (‘She was not aggressive to anyone and was funny really – the crew were acting out of proportion’, said a co-passenger.

Time was, you knew where you were with the patron saint of Ireland whose feast is 17 March. He was a Briton and he tells us in his Confessions that, when he was a teenager, he was captured by Irish slave traders and taken to Ireland, where he herded sheep. He turned to God and was told that he would escape; he duly got a passage back home. But in a dream, he heard the Irish calling out to him to come back to Ireland and walk again among them, and he knew his mission was to bring them the gospel. So he had himself consecrated bishop, returned to Ireland in AD 432 and converted the Irish in short order, with many miracles.

I recently made a programme about the British jazz pioneer Arthur Briggs. Yes, I know. Arthur who? The much-missed Jeremy Clarke told me: ‘If only he’d been called Arthur “Big-Boy” Briggs or “Honeydripper” Briggs, maybe things would have turned out differently.’ As it was, his name always suggested a painter-decorator from Edwardian Brixton rather than one of the hottest cornetists on the prewar jazz scene. Briggs was a Caribbean child of empire who, as a teenager, fell in with makers of the new music in New York, then after the first world war helped bring jazz across to Europe.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the London Book Fair has been gracing our nation’s capital this week, down in Earl’s Court. There, the publishers, agents and buyers of the literary globe (London is second only to Frankfurt in ‘book fair importance’) have been feverishly buying and selling the rights to hot new titles, hot new authors, maybe the odd lucky midlister, while identifying the trends, writers and genres that conceal the ultra-precious kernel of hotness to come. In today’s market it’s likely that buyers have been looking for visually rich comic books for children – enjoying a resurgence – and anything in a newish genre called ‘romantasy’ (think Fifty Shades of Grey meets Game of Thrones, with more vampires and less spanking).

Experts warn that doctors like me risk a condition known as ‘compassion fatigue’ – an emotional numbness that comes from too much caring for too long. But aren’t we all on the edge? Distant hardships are now visible as they happen, and the sense that victims are everywhere becomes vividly real. Newsreaders, documentary makers, editorialists, politicians and campaigners imply we’re shallow unless consumed by the wretchedness they describe. I meet the unfortunate, struggling and afflicted on my ward rounds. And I deal with those who have been made frail by age, bad luck and bad choices. Obstetricians get flowers and wine for helping bring wonder into people’s lives, orthopaedic surgeons for fixing hips and restoring freedom. I tend not to get gifts.

The decline of Radio 3 makes a sad story. Established in 1967 to reflect the world of classical music, and high culture in general, it has become a swamp of mediocrity, peopled by presenters who might feel more comfortable on a pick ’n’ mix stall. Every day, in almost every way, it seems determined to forfeit the goodwill of listeners who remember what public service broadcasting used to sound like. Last week, building up to International Women’s Day, the station fluttered its feathers like a randy peacock. The Kanneh-Mason family, those latter-day Von Trapps, were on parade, and there were lashings of featherweight female composers. In the case of Florence Price, a favoured daughter, featherweight is possibly a division too steep.

Any old fossil like me keen on harrumphing that popular music isn’t what it used to be will have taken a certain snarky pleasure on reading that, last year, no British act figured in the world’s top ten singles or albums for the first time since 2003. To be fair, 2003 wasn’t the best year for chart music ever; Dido had the top-selling album – going 6x platinum – with Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Daniel Bedingfield and Norah Jones completing the top five. The bestselling single of 2003 was the Black Eyed Peas’ ‘Where is the Love?’, followed by ‘Spirit in the Sky’ by Gareth Gates and the Kumars, R. Kelly’s ‘Ignition’ (Remix)’, ‘Mad World’ by Gary Jules and ‘Leave Right Now’ by Will Young.