Spectator Life

‘Centrist dad’, a term that has been with us for a decade or so, has never exactly been a compliment. In 2017, even Tony Blair – then still pretty close to being political toxic waste – disavowed the label, declaring: ‘I’m not a centrist dad.’ In that same year a chap named Matt Zarb-Cousin, a spokesman for Jeremy Corbyn – who astonishingly was the leader of the opposition at the time – described centrist dads as ‘middle-aged men who cannot come to terms with the world and politics changing.’ Zarb-Cousin added hubristically: ‘They think they must know better because they are older and wiser.’ (Fortunately the centrist dads did know better, and so did the country, rejecting Corbyn in 2019.

Antique shops are melancholy places. The deep leather armchairs, Anglepoise lamps and bamboo bookshelves. They ask questions: who sat, worked or read using these? Banal questions, possibly, but life is generally banal, and no less poignant for that. It’s not an unpleasant sort of melancholia. Quite the opposite. If I had to create a word to describe the feeling, I’d say it was melanphoria: ‘a state of intense excitement arising from a feeling of deep sadness’. One feels both a nostalgia for the lives of strangers and a sense of life’s possibilities. If this is abnormal, I would ask any amateur psychiatrists to write to The Spectator offices. I am physically unable to go into any antique shop without buying something. It is rarely a grand purchase.

As a girl, and later a woman, prone to barbs and punchy elocutions, I have encountered a great many repercussions for my words. My re-education began in primary school when the mother of a classmate angrily rang my mum to tell her that I had said this or that outrageous thing to her daughter. (A daughter who was herself tough as nails and a crafty little madame; I never picked on those weaker than me.) Over time, the pain of fallouts with school friends became the stress of getting communication wrong in the workplace, which carries its own, more formal and sinister consequences. Now I try to pause and be polite and ‘reasonable’ (one must be ‘reasonable’!) no matter how angry, anxious or upset I feel in the face of blatant foul play, falsity or injustice.

In a small, dark room in the depths of Banshee Labyrinth, a gothic-looking venue just off Cowgate in Edinburgh, 11 people cheer and clap as I thank them profusely for spending the past hour with me. My backdrop is a red and white no-smoking sign and two coffin-shaped blackboards with drinks offers scrawled on them in chalk, and the portcullis-style door offers little soundproofing from inquisitive festivalgoers peering in and wondering aloud whether to take one of the 40 seats – but the setting is perfect for my first ever Edinburgh Fringe show.

Anyone of a certain age is aware of the urban legend that links Marianne Faithfull, a Mars bar and Mick Jagger. But Marianne’s death yesterday at the grand age of 78 (given her lifestyle, how did she get that old?) really does remove one of the last living links with the golden age of rock and roll in its wildest youth. For Marianne embodied every cliche associated with rock excess: the lover of three of the original five members of the Rolling Stones (Mick, Keith Richards and Brian Jones), she also took on David Bowie, but had the good sense or taste to reject the amorous advances of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.  After the affair with Mick ended, Marianne had a lost weekend in the 1970s lasting for five years while she was deep in the throes of heroin addiction.

There are multiple reasons to be fascinated by DeepSeek, the Chinese AI chatbot that debuted last week, knocking Donald Trump off the headlines and $1 trillion off the US stock market. For a start, it represents yet another remarkable leap forward in the race to artificial general intelligence – which looks likely to arrive this decade, maybe this year. Brace. A second reason to gaze with intrigue at DeepSeek is the mysterious way it arrived. Was it really made for a mere six million bucks, as they claim? Or did they cut corners and steal the IP of ChatGPT, as OpenAI is alleging? If they did, it is quite the irony, as OpenAI itself is right now in court for chewing up the entire internet, copyright be damned, to feed its own ravenous bot.

I love Italian food, and I love food writing and TV programmes, so you might think I’d love Stanley Tucci. And yet I find him creepy and his recipes are rubbish. I can’t be the only one. The actor, who I first saw in the brilliant film Big Night, about a Jersey Shore Italian-American restaurant, is probably best known for The Devil Wears Prada, a film I adore. His character in that film did wind me up, but it took a while before Tucci himself got on my nerves. I suppose it began with him coming over all cheffy, like he’s the new Anthony Bourdain. Who cares what Colin Firth eats when he’s round at the Tucci gaff? I kept being told to watch his TV series where he travels around Italy, but the sight of his smug face on my screen turned out to be more than I could bear.

How many people under 40 in Britain today do you think have read H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines? Five, six… 50? It’s hard to know. If you’re lucky – or unlucky, depending on your point of view – you might have bumped into the 1985 film version with Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone and Herbert Lom in the unloved crevices of the TV schedule when only insomniacs or household spiders are deemed to be a risk. I ask the question because this year marks 100 years since the death of Sir Henry Rider Haggard as he was then, having been knighted in 1919, apparently for services to the British Empire – and things have obviously moved on a bit since then. Except, of course, they haven’t changed in his famous tale of adventure and lost treasure in Africa.

When Herbert von Karajan was at his celestial height in the 1960s, juggling conducting duties at the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival, his musicians liked to tell a joke. ‘Karajan gets in a taxi, and the driver asks, “Where to?” Karajan says, “It doesn’t matter, they want me everywhere.”’ Not bad for a German joke. You want to dump on Trump? Send for Schama! A fresh look at Rembrandt? There’s a professor at Columbia who knows everything! Who is the Karajan of our day, hopping from gig to gig with the assurance of the born maestro? It must be Simon Schama, historian supreme, and transatlantic darling of the telly. You want to dump on Trump? Send for Schama! A fresh look at Rembrandt?

Shortly before midnight on the evening of Friday 24 January 1975, at Cologne Opera House on the banks of the Rhine, a wiry 29-year-old from Pennsylvania walked onto the stage in front of a crowd of 1,400 people and began to play the piano, alone. The 50th anniversary of what followed is being celebrated with a number of events and documentaries across the world this week. A recording of Keith Jarrett’s performance that night, released on 30 November 1975, went on to become the best-selling solo piano record of all time. The record was produced by ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music), a prog jazz label that was at its peak in the mid-1970s, with The Köln Concert its crowning achievement.

What is prison for? I’ve wondered that a lot, these past five years. In February 2020, just a few days after the UK left the European Union, and as scientists worked to agree an official name for the ‘new coronavirus’, I was sentenced to 45 months in prison for a fraud I’d committed in 2014. During my time inside I discovered a system that did almost everything badly and didn’t seem to know its own purpose. Meanwhile our jails remain a mystery to those who haven’t been there. Since my release I’ve written and spoken to help people understand our prison system. I believe there is a better way of doing things, which would protect the public, provide value for money, reduce crime and help people who’ve committed crimes turn their lives around.

If you fancy watching a live performance of Fleetwood Mac's hits, there’s plenty of choice in tribute band land: Fleetwood Shack or Fleetwood Bac, McFleetwood or Rumours of Fleetwood Mac – or perhaps Tusk, Tell Me Lies, Fleetwood Macrame or Gypsy Dreams. Or you could wait to see if the real Fleetwood Mac tour again, minus keyboard player Christine McVie who died two years ago and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham who is currently ostracised from the band in true Fleetwood Mac falling-out tradition. Ultimately… you can go your own way.  But are tribute acts – no matter how good or authentic – ‘real’ music, or are they cheating? Are they a harmless piece of nostalgia, or clogging up small- to medium-sized venues and preventing the new acts of tomorrow from performing today?

When Rachel Reeves was the shadow chancellor, she would round up the spare pastries at the end of meetings and save them for later. No wastage! Her intentions were surely good, but she would have known that there were witnesses, and she knows how political gossip works. Now, as chancellor of the exchequer, she has just told the BBC’s Nick Robinson that she brings in her own home-cooked lunches in Tupperware. Of course, every part of her personality must scream fiscal responsibility. She has a favourite chess move (the Sicilian defence), that conveniently works as an allegory for her approach to politics. She claims to enjoy freezing cold open-water swimming late at night. A half-eaten croissant sparks rage in her. Do you get the message?

Watching the Cure’s live-streamed performance of their first album in 16 years, it was hard not to notice the toll time has taken on Robert Smith. At 65, his black spiky hair has long turned into a bedhead of fag-ash grey – a reminder to those of us who have grown up with him that none of us are as young as we used to be. As the slow waltz of the first track of Songs of a Lost World kicked in, and Smith wailed ‘Where did it go?’, it was starting to look like a very gloomy evening indeed – even by the standards of a band hardly known for its cheeriness. I’ll admit that as I started to watch the Troxy gig live from my sofa, even I, as a long-time Cure fan, worried how dark it was going to get.

I’ve been to a talk by two very clever and talented men: the American novelist and critic Jonathan Lethem and the English documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. They were talking about Lethem’s book about his art collection, Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture. Never have I left a talk with such a warm glow of schadenfreude. Here were two gifted men who had nothing interesting to say about their chosen subject. It was an evening full of ArtSpeak and hot air, a facsimile of intelligent ‘cultural discourse’, as they say in the art world. The interesting Lethem and the brilliant Curtis had done the unthinkable: they’d become boring. Oh, what a joy it was to witness!

As 2025 gets under way, I’m going to guess that one of your hopes for the coming year is ‘to be happy’. I’m also going to take a punt that you’re likely to spend a considerable amount of time, effort and money doing things you hope will make you feel that way. But considering that happiness is the number one goal of most people living in the western world, here lies the unspoken paradox at the heart of this tireless quest. Most of us can reel off a list of things that we believe will make us feel good – a great holiday, a delicious dinner, a promotion at work, fabulous sex. Yet many still don’t have a clue about how the feeling of pleasure is made in our brains in the first place. And knowing would be an incredibly useful way to work out how get more of it in 2025.

I awoke in the early afternoon of 31 December 1995 face down on the carpeted floor of a mansion house flat in Notting Hill with the worst hangover I have ever had.  It is customary when writing about hangovers to quote the best description of the condition – by Kingsley Amis: ‘A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.’ And there’s also, of course, P.G.

Any moment now it will begin – and then it won’t stop for a month. Because as we enter the new year, the twin horsemen of the joyless apocalypse – the anti-booze and anti-meat lobby – pounce upon the January blues like a starved dog on the Christmas leftovers. And they are merciless. Give up drinking for the month, they’ll shout – that’ll really help you through the darkest days of the year. Or, better still, become a vegan for 30 days – oh, the horror of ‘Veganuary’ – and forgo meat, fish and dairy products at precisely the same time as almost nothing is growing out of the wintry, fallow soil in our hemisphere. Yes, that makes sense. About as much sense as asking Prince Andrew for a lecture on integrity.

There comes a time right after the new year when the retail sector decides it’s done with fairy lights and sparkles. Out goes the party food, the bao buns with Santa hats, the mixed platters of prosciutto and cheese, the gift sets of flavoured olive oil and the festive cheeseboards. On the discount rails there are scarlet jumpers with diamante and slinky party frocks, looking less and less inviting by the day. Back comes the sleek minimalism of the retail sector in its most pared down aspect as it flogs low-carb, low-calorie ready meals and fitness gear in time for the great 'new year, new you' personal transformation.

Rod Liddle The angels in Jim Crace's Eden are tetchy and petty authoritarians, apart from one who can't fly properly. This dissertation on freedom and mortality is rather wonderful – published two years ago but I caught up with it only this year. The best non-fiction book of the year is David Goodhart's The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality, which has the temerity to suggest that divorce rates and broken families might just have something to do with our epidemic of mental illness. How dare he? Lionel Shriver I’d recommend the novel Havoc by Christopher Bollen, set in an Egyptian hotel to which westerners have fled to avoid the tyrannies of Covid regulations.

Come on in, take a seat, drink deep by the roaring hearth and don’t worry about the time – there’s bound to be a lock-in. Such is the Christmas Eve pub scenario of our fantasies. It’s been a long trek back to our home town, most likely thanks to a ‘cow on the line’ or some such nonsense announced by Avanti somewhere between Milton Keynes and Rugby. But you’re finally home so what could be finer than heading down to your old local for a festive pint or three? Well, quite a lot, actually. Like staying in and sticking hot pins into your retina. Yet out we go regardless, already drunk on the spirit of Christmas. But who will you be sharing bar space with this evening?