Spectator Life

Che Guevara died 57 years ago this month and yet, even now, he remains the epitome of revolutionary cool. You never know when he is going to pop up. I came across him recently in the lobby of a hotel in Kandy in the highlands of Sri Lanka. There he was with that determined, heroic look under a dashing beret with a red star badge. He was on a poster dominating the wall above the capitalist till where the luxury hotel took payment. Guevara didn’t care. He took out his pistol, held the barrel at the boy’s neck and fired. The boy was almost decapitated The famous photo was taken by a professional photographer, Alberto Korda, during a funeral in Havana in 1960. Thus began the spread of the famous image around the world. Today you have a choice of hundreds of different T-shirts.

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.

Pull those ripped tartan trews on lads, the Sex Pistols are back! Well, kind of. Lead singer John Joseph Lydon, aka ‘Rotten’, is livid that the other three surviving members have decided to perform a couple of charity gigs without his consent. Really? Punks doing charity gigs? Sid Vicious must be turning in his Pennsylvanian grave. A throng of balding 67-year-olds were pogoing to ‘God Save the King’ while hurling £8 pints of lager at each other The feud goes back to the mid-1970s when Lydon, in typical muso style, vowed to stay true to the music while the other layabouts were more inclined to milk the legacy for all it was worth. More recently, he tried to prevent the band’s music from being used in a TV series directed by Danny Boyle.

A few weeks ago I felt it was my civic duty to draw attention to the many grammatical mistakes and spelling errors in the National Trust’s pronouncements. The abundance of howlers seemed to constitute something of an educational hazard: ‘How many impressionable schoolchildren will assume that the phrase “It’s [sic] location is unknown”, published by such an august body, must be correct?’ It’s hard to envisage the National Trust managing to reduce ‘unequal access to nature, beauty and history’ if it can’t correct elementary mistakes Since such mistakes can be corrected easily, at no cost and almost immediately, it seemed reasonable to think that they’d soon be gone.

Why do we decide something is not for us? This is a question I’ve been pondering as I’ve got older, and started to take a liking to various cultural products that I’d previously marked down – in some cases, for decades – as absolutely unpalatable. Is this a sign of a maturing, more tolerant palate? Maybe – but I think it’s mainly because the fans of some (it turns out) very good things that you might well enjoy can really put you off. If you have cultural bugbears, I recommend checking on a few of them, every now and again For decades – even though he was recommended over and over again by friends, and by writers whose work I really liked, and latterly by Amazon algorithms – I avoided the novels of P.G. Wodehouse.

If King Charles wants a ‘slimmed down’, low-calorie royal family, we can thank Queen Victoria for bequeathing us the plus-size version. Responding in horror to the antics of her naughty uncles, who raked about being unsuitable and having mistresses, she set herself and her nine children to public duty and procreation: go forth and multiply, indeed. Her grandson George V envisaged a vast, bemedalled horde, trotting all over the Empire. At one point in the early 20th century, you couldn’t move for minor royals. Oops – mind that equerry! Edinburghs, Waleses, Connaughts, Fifes: you couldn’t visit a hospital without witnessing a royal plaque unveiling. And they were popular, too. My great-great-grandfather named his boat after Princess Patricia.

Do you know what an anachronism is? They’re very clear in cultural terms: Shakespeare’s clocks in Julius Caesar, for example. But in historical terms, it’s a different matter. When His Majesty King Charles III was crowned, the online scoffers were quick to mobilise themselves. One enthusiastic Jacobin tweeted that the enthroned, orbed and sceptred sovereign was ‘insane’, an ‘anachronism’. Out the scoffers troop, reliably, at every State Opening of Parliament. (And quite right too: mockery is a vital part of a successful polity). ‘How Ruritanian!’ they sneer (not quite grasping that the Ruritanians were copying us. And also, er, fictional.) The jeerers usually finish by wondering why we can’t be a grown-up country, like that entirely stable republic, France.

To meet one winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature would be seen by most bookish nerds like me as a real privilege; to meet two as extraordinarily lucky; but to enjoy extended encounters with three is surely very heaven. Such, however, has been my fortunate fate. The Nobel Prize for Literature is the world's most prestigious – and, as it comes with a hefty cash bonus, the second most lucrative – award for fine writing. Inaugurated at the dawn of the 20th century by the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel (to atone for a lifetime manufacturing munitions) the prize is one of five awarded annually every autumn by the Swedish Academy. The others are for physics, chemistry, medicine and – most controversially – peace.

When Black Lives Matter created the figure of the Karen, it was a sign of that movement’s darker, bullying qualities. What exactly was wrong with a white middle-aged woman who asked to speak to the manager when things were unsatisfactory? The answer seemed to be in the white part and the woman part, and perhaps also in the middle-aged part. In short, the Karen was a racist, sexist, ageist construct, and as a middle-aged white woman myself, who makes her dissatisfaction known from time to time, I felt extra defensive. But if that original Karen caricatured the wrong person, then there are some modern female types that deserve closer scrutiny.

Bouncers – or ‘door supervisors’ – are a pillar of the ‘British night out’. They can sneak you into an exclusive club or send your teeth skating across the pavement with their Wreck-It Ralph fists. They can take a selfie with you and call you ‘mate’ or they can hit on your sister and emasculate you on your 19th birthday. We’ve all tried to sneak past them, to argue with them, to convince them that your best friend ‘is like that normally’ and ‘definitely not throwing up in his mouth right now’. We’ve all tried to high-five them. We’ve all been scared of them. We’ve all seen them hit a posh bloke called Hugo for saying ‘My daddy can buy this place.

As I have been driving across England’s green and pleasant land visiting friends and family this summer, I discovered that the UK’s phone signal is really, really terrible. I expected poor connectivity on coastal paths in Cornwall, but everywhere I went I experienced problems: network dropouts as I tried to navigate the M1, recurrent outages as I tried to work remotely from Sussex, endless loading and buffering screens (even though my phone promised me 4G) regardless of whether I was in London or the Lake District. The signal in a friend’s home in south east London is so terrible you would think we were trying to beam through the Great Pyramid of Giza. I have had more reliable phone service on safari in Tanzania than I have on Great Western Rail.