Spectator Life

It’s an interesting and unusual word, agentic. For a start, some language enthusiasts dislike it as a mulish crossbreed of Latin and Greek. Also, its etymology is obscure. It appears to derive from 20th-century psychology: one of its first usages can be found in a study of the infamous 1960s Milgram experiments at Yale University, when volunteers were persuaded to electrocute, with increasing and horrible severity, innocent ‘learners’ (actually actors). The experiment revealed that most of us would administer a lethal shock of electricity to an innocent human being, if only told to do so by a man in a white coat with a clipboard.

It’s not just that the lunatics – sorry, ‘neuro-diverse’ – have taken over the asylum. They’ve taken over the asylum and started walking on their hands, and they’re determined to make us do the same or feel ashamed for staying the right way up. That is what I thought, anyway, when I read that children as young as nine are being cautioned by the police for calling each other names in the playground. Half a century later, at 65, I have extremely high self-esteem The correct way to counter name-calling is either to hurl them back or ignore them. As a teenager, I was occasionally called a ‘witch’ by schoolmates because of my big nose. Sometimes I simply stuck my massive beak in the air and flounced past, sometimes I retorted with an observation about my accuser.

When I lived in LA in the 1990s, there was one golden rule of the film industry: Hollywood should follow and never lead. This mantra was, predictably, ignored in the wake of the election. Variety splashed with the headline ‘Hollywood on Edge After Trump’s Devastating Victory’. One actor was quoted bemoaning the ‘unimaginable cruelty that’s going to be unleashed on women, immigrants and the LGBTQ community’. Another said they had called LA pharmacies to ‘hoard birth control pills’. ‘I know lots of agents and producers who voted Republican’ Yet this fractious relationship is about to see a surprising plot twist.

On Sunday, I was in deepest Wales, listening to birdsong, braying donkeys and a demented cockerel, but instead of getting away from it all I was staring at three different laptops all clicked to the same link: the Glastonbury ticket sale countdown clock. This was the fifth year in which my daughter has sought tickets and, determined not to fail once again, she had arranged a military-style operation, recruiting a small army of volunteers, including me, to be online on the stroke of 9 a.m. in the hope that one of us would get lucky. The other five people she was planning to go with had all done the same. There must have been 50 people trying for the the tickets. My daughter had arranged a military-style operation, recruiting a small army of volunteers At first it was fun.

‘We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.’ Bob Dylan took his leave of our shores last week at the Royal Albert Hall, with 5,000 people cheering him on a victory lap. Dylan is 83 and too frail to stand unsupported for long. He occasionally needs notes for his lyrics, but he will never surrender. I’m a performer, he seemed to say throughout every minute of the hour and 40 minutes he was on stage, and performers perform. I’m a performer, he seemed to say throughout every minute of the hour and 40 minutes he was on stage, and performers perform It's fairly clear we won’t see him again. The three nights at the Kensington Bowl ended the British leg of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, which seems to have been going on since the relief of Mafeking.

Next year, I will be 65. At 65, one leaves the plateau of middle age and enters the foothills of senescence. For some, it’s an uneventful milestone marked by tidying up some herbaceous borders or experimenting with pesto; others yield to mortal panic and max out their credit card on something wildly impractical. On reaching this jubilee, an acquaintance of mine dyed his hair jet black. This is inadvisable because rather than restoring the appearance of youth and vigour, one emerges from the bathroom looking haunted, like a persecuted homosexual solicitor in a Dirk Bogarde film. .

Those casting their eye over the candidate list for the chancellorship of Oxford University might be forgiven for believing that social mobility has drastically reduced, returning to Trollopean quantities of languid toffs taking part in public life. Competing for the honour are Lord Peter Mandelson and Lord William Hague, both, you might think, the younger sons of Dukes; alongside them is Baroness Jan Royall, who I presume is the unmarried daughter of a European aristo. Lady Eilish Angiolini, remarkably, is correctly so, as she is a Lady of the Thistle, though not an Earl’s daughter: this usage, like haggis, is an anomaly of the Scots. The only commoner on the list is the Rt Hon. Dominic Grieve. Well done him for pulling himself up by his bootstraps.

‘What sort of book might Satan write?’ ‘Why do people watch horror films?’ ‘Should we give up hope?’ These were three of the questions faced earlier this year by candidates seeking admission to All Souls College, Oxford, Britain’s most elite academic institution. Founded by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele, and King Henry VI in 1438, the college takes its name from All Souls’ Day on 2 November, the occasion on which Christians around the world pray for the faithful departed (in Mexico it’s called Día de Muertos, or the Day of the Dead).

Were The Duke and Duchess of Sussex to leave their mansion in Montecito, California, and head a couple of miles across town, to Toro Canyon, they would soon find themselves at the one-time home of a woman whose story they would find rather relatable. Because the former occupant once drove a wedge between the Prince of Wales and his younger brother, Prince Harry. Sound familiar? That former Montecito resident was Beryl Markham, a woman whose destructive involvement with the two English princes decades before Meghan was born bears one or two rather strange similarities with the Sussexes’s own story. The fact that Harry and Meghan chose to make their new home just around the corner from where Markham established herself after her own flight to America really is an extraordinary coincidence.

‘Old soldiers…’ they used to say, ‘never die. They simply fade away.’ What a shame that the same can’t be said of old rock stars. The old codgers can’t be cajoled, shamed or otherwise persuaded to kindly leave the stages they have profitably adorned for half a century or more. My lifelong rock hero, Jim Morrison of the Doors, had the good taste to die at 27 This unworthy thought came to me the other day as I watched 75-year-old Bruce Springsteen creakily strutting his stuff at a campaign rally for cackling Kamala. I have been a fan of the Boss since the 1970s when the perceptive critic Jon Landau dubbed him ‘the future of rock and roll’.

It was the early evening of 31 October and I was three years old, sitting in the living room with Mum, on the brink of bedtime, when I turned to the corner and a decorative wicker armchair. (It was the 1980s.) ‘Mum,’ I enquired sweetly, ‘who’s that man sitting there?’ Mum, suitably unnerved, asked me for details about the invisible guest, whereupon I outlined a farmer resembling every description Mum had heard of her great-grandfather. Her great-grandfather was a 19th-century ploughman who worked the fields where our home would later be built. My parents had never spoken of him in my presence.

‘The wines were too various: it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture.’ This is the meet-cute at the beginning of Brideshead Revisited. Lord Sebastian Flyte chunders through the window into the ground floor quarters of Charles Ryder. Seduced by these smart shenanigans, Charles proceeds to dump his dull middle-class muckers in order to ‘drown in honey’ (also champagne, Catholicism and plover’s eggs) with Sebastian and his rich Oxford set. By the time I arrived at university at the turn of the century, debauchery had long been democratised.

Realising that I was one of only two non-Polish women while partying with the youngsters from my local Pizza Express – my home-from-home for a decade now – I had to laugh at myself. How I love my waitress mates; Marta, Polina and Camila have become almost like family, showing up self-funded and shoutily supportive at my theatrical endeavours over the past couple of years. Now one of them has left to return home, I felt a sense of loss. How odd to see the likes of the Guardian favouring such red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism And to think I used to believe that Poles coming here was a bad idea.

Such an awful lot of stuff is happening right now, even the keenest observer of social trends could be forgiven for missing a statistical milestone passed earlier this month. So here it is: at the beginning of October, it was revealed that, for the first time since the 1970s baby bust, deaths outnumbered births in the UK – meaning, in effect, that all of our population growth (about 680,000 for this year) came from immigration. The reason why is obvious. The boomers – i.e. people born during the great baby boom of 1945-1965 – are dying out, and they are not being properly replaced, thanks to a low total fertility rate (TFR, which equals ‘births per woman’). In England and Wales, TFR fell to just 1.49, far below the accepted replacement rate of 2.1.

‘I love serial killers,’ explained Megan, 29, from Kent. ‘People think I’m weird; my sister thinks I’m going to kill someone.’ She travelled to London for the weekend for CrimeCon, a convention dedicated to true-crime lovers. Here, for the eye-watering price of £700 for the two days, strangers can come together to meet the survivors of the UK’s most disturbing crimes, delve into unsolved cases with psychologists, criminologists, police detectives, and speak to victims’ families. At 9 a.m., within 30 seconds of arriving, I was in a talk on blood spatter analysis. People in hazmat suits stood in front of a 10 ft photographic banner depicting a kitchen covered in blood.

As the author of eight non-fiction books, I am most often asked why did I chose to write a particular title. The answer is that my books are usually written out of obsession: to slake my personal thirst for knowledge on the subject in question – almost irrespective of whether the topic would interest anyone else. Fortunately, most have. I started early, writing my first title, The War Walk: A Journey Along the Western Front, when I was in my twenties. This, my most personal book, was a homage to my late father, Frank Jones, a very elderly dad who had been in his sixties when I was born.

And so ends another Frieze, where art lovers from across the globe gather to admire each other’s horn-rimmed spectacles, regulation black attire and wacky hairdos. Like so many creative events held in the capital, Frieze isn’t so much about looking at interesting artwork as being seen to be looking at interesting artwork. The fair is held annually at a temporary hangar in Regent’s Park and is essentially a spectator sport where leggy blondes eye up wealthy collectors on the make. Don’t even attempt to crash the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge. When will contemporary artists get it into their diamond-encrusted skulls that the public are immune to their shock values?

Benjamin Franklin famously said that there are only two certainties in life: death, and taxes. It turns out there is a third: Royal Mail not delivering post on time. I live in East Oxford, where Royal Mail has not met its target of delivering 91.5 per cent of all first-class mail by the next working day in over five years. The reality is much worse than that: my OX4 postcode seems to only receive letters somewhere between once every two weeks and once a month. This can be a minor inconvenience (it is a bit surreal receiving birthday cards in June when your birthday is in May), or it can be an administrative headache, like the time we received notification that our resident parking permit was about to expire weeks after it actually had.