Spectator Life

As an arts journalist, you know you’re getting old when you scan the Edinburgh Festival programme, and instead of thinking ‘Wow, look at all this,’ your reaction is ‘Oh Christ, look at all that’. You tell friends that you’re off to cover Edinburgh in August, and instead of lighting up with envy, they suck their teeth in sympathy. Ouch – nasty! And yet there it is, nonetheless: that great immovable cultural blow-out on the shores of the Forth; infinite, monstrous, plastered all over press and media, and defying you to ignore it. Could you design a less suitable host city for a major international arts festival? No, it’s got to be done, and you know what that means. The hell of a Cross Country train.

I’ve never been seduced by the circus. As a motif in children’s literature, particularly taken up by Enid Blyton and Disney. In fact, as an animal-loving child, I think I found it cruel; I wanted Nellie the Elephant to pack her bags and say goodbye to the circus, I longed for her to slip her iron chain. In childless adulthood, I forgot all about it. Until I moved back to Oxfordshire and Giffords Circus appeared on the horizon every summer, its posters slapped on every lamppost from Charlbury to Cheltenham. The posters might have pulled in some punters, but for a certain type of middle-class patron, Giffords needed no advertisement. Everyone knew about it. It was the day out du jour. The young, the old, the child-laden, the childless: all came in their droves.

I’ve lived in Brighton and Hove since 1981. I’ve been surrounded by seagulls for most of my life, but somehow I’ve never really got used to them. There’s something unsettlingly prehistoric about those gnarled beaks and oversized, reptilian feet. While the feet can occasionally lend them a pleasingly comic aspect, the sheer size of the seagull makes its feelings impossible to take lightly. Their cries, so evocative from a safe distance, sound incredibly ugly at close quarters; I once lived near a nest, and it was like being trapped in an early Yoko Ono album. Granted, the place wouldn’t be the same without them – Brighton’s seagulls are its oldest and most recognisable natives.

Family holidays always carry a risk of dismaying revelations. Suddenly you are thrust together, 24/7, over many days, in a way only matched by Christmas (which is equally perilous). And so it was that, after ten days of driving around Provence and Occitanie, from Arles to the Camargue to the mighty Gorges of the Tarn, my older daughter this week suddenly said: ‘Why is Britain so hideous?’   The outburst was clearly prompted by the comparative beauty of France. My daughter is 18 and her only prior experience of France was grey wintry Paris in a boring school trip, so she was probably expecting more of the same dreariness.

Of all the places to witness the circus parade of modern French history, you can do a lot worse than the tiny town of Espalion, in the beautiful department of L’Aveyron, in the south of France. Because there are few destinations more unchanged than L’Aveyron, and this extremely French place is where I saw the opening of the French Olympic Games, in an al fresco brasserie. And this is where I sensed a weird unease. No one booed, no one catcalled, no one mocked. They sat there, sipping cold bière, and at times they vehemently cheered and laughed. Yet they also appeared a touch confused, and, I suspect, this is because they thought – like the rest of the world – ‘this is quite often a load of bollocks’.

I was in S&M relationships from my teenage years to somewhere in my naughty forties. Why did I go in for such strange antics? Damned if I know. Is it because I wanted to be different? Because I didn’t want a calm, cosy, devoted relationship, like my parents had? Because when I thought of romantic and sexual love, I thought of volatility, and that seemed hard to reconcile with vanilla sex? Or did I just conform to the type that also marks out many male masochists – I was ‘powerful’ in my realm, excellent at my job, and was curious to find out what being powerless felt like? (This last one, in the face of what I know now about how many girls and women experience powerlessness throughout the world, makes me feel shame in a way that very few things do.

Few bluesmen have matched the success of John Mayall, ‘the godfather of British blues’, who died on Monday aged 90 at his home in California. In a career spanning more than six decades, he made 50-odd albums with an ever-changing incarnation of his band, the Bluesbreakers. His proselytisation of black American artists like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Otis Rush, gave these legends a new audience this side of the Atlantic. BB King is said to have remarked that, were it not for Mayall, ‘a lot of us black musicians in America would still be catchin’ the hell that we caught long before.’ Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, founded in the early Sixties, was a carousel for some of the world’s most notable blues and rock musicians, many of whom went on to greatness.

If ever a mental health diagnosis can be called ‘fashionable’, it’s ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The mere mention of it can trigger moans that it's nothing but the latest ‘woke’ way to pathologise fidgeting, lack of self-discipline and bad parenting. So if you’re in that camp who rolls their eyes everytime you hear the term, prepare to be irritated. I’m going to argue this so-called ‘new’ condition is responsible for nothing less than changing the course of British history. ADHD is real, and it’s had consequences throughout history: few more surprising than the qualities it bestowed upon Winston Churchill.

No matter how much you love music, going to a piano recital can be an uncomfortable experience. A sombre-faced pianist plays in an atmosphere of hushed reverence, perhaps swaying and grimacing to simulate profundity. If a sonata is performed, outbreaks of guilty coughing will occur throughout the audience between movements. It’s an unwritten rule that clapping’s only permissible at the end. When the concert’s over, the pianist walks off stage after a couple of stiff bows, without ever having said a word, and everyone can finally breathe again.   The annual series of summer piano recitals performed in Oxford by British pianist Jack Gibbons is nothing like that.

I suppose you could say that I’m an ‘amateur’ artist, that art is my ‘hobby’. In fact no, I take that back. I’m no amateur hobbyist dabbler. I’m an artist. I’m a bloody artist. If you take something seriously, the hobby label grates. And I take art seriously. I might not be on track to making it in the art world (but who knows?), but I have gradually decided that it is a key part of my creative life, subtly joined to the other stuff. Six years ago I went back to college, part-time, for a year, to study fine art I am having this moment of soul-searching because I’m moving out of a studio space I’ve been using for a few years. But I didn’t use it all that much, to be honest: inspiration waxed and waned.

The pop star Sam Smith appears not only to have a magic mirror which affirms that he’s stunning and brave, but also that he’s a lovely little thinker. During lockdown, self-isolating in his £12 million home, he filmed himself weeping because he was already bored with his own company. ‘I hate reading,’ he cried, suggesting that if you have no life of the mind, you’ll always be a bad companion to yourself – even if you do refer to yourself in the plural. Having said this, he then had the nerve to say: ‘When people mess up a pronoun or something... It kind of ruins conversations. It’s going to take time. We’re changing a language here.

The Japanese singer, actor and heartthrob Matsumoto Jun, who I’ve always thought of as an Oriental David Cassidy (thus showing my age), will make his UK acting debut later this year when he appears in acclaimed playwright Hideki Noda’s very loose adaptation of the Brothers Karamazof at Sadler’s Wells. Jun is, not to sell him short, a superstar in Japan. It should be quite an event. In many ways, Japan (and South Korea’s) talent factory is like a throwback to the Hollywood star system of the 1920s to 1960s If you can’t get your head round the David Cassidy analogy, perhaps Harry Styles would be more meaningful, though even the former One Direction star would struggle to attract the kind of devotion inspired by Jun (it really is more like Cassidy – look him up).

I fell in love with London when I arrived here as a teenager at the start of the 1970s. Straight out of an American suburban high school, I’d dreamed of the great metropolis of Shakespeare and Dickens, and I vowed never to leave. Why would I, when, as Dr Samuel Johnson famously declared, ‘He who is tired of London is tired of life’? If I am to depart this city which no longer feels entirely like home, where to go? Half a century on, I regret to say that leaving the capital is the very step I’m now considering. I’m not sure I love it anymore and, to be frank, I am rather tired of it. I’m a lifelong aficionado of big, bustling cities and for a long time London was the best. Countless corners of it hold memories for me.

Anne Hathaway’s latest film, The Idea of You, has become Amazon’s most-streamed rom com, causing me to reflect that Hollywood's young man/older woman scenario has changed for the better since The Graduate. Though everyone was mad for it at the time, was there ever a grimmer film about relationships? We’re meant to empathise with the over-privileged, over-grown, over-thinking spoilt brat of a hero – especially when he becomes the ‘prey’ of the much older Mrs Robinson – but that the toy boy is played by the 29-year-old Dustin Hoffman and the cougar by the 35-year-old (and far more attractive) Anne Bancroft merely highlights the misogyny of the enterprise.

Last Monday, a group of 20 French rappers released a video entitled ‘No Pasarán’. Evoking the Republican resistance against Franco in the Spanish civil war and before that, the resistance of the French against the Germans during the Great War, the phrase called for people to resist Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. If last night’s second round election results in France were anything to go by – with the Rassemblement National finishing third – the rap did the trick.