Spectator Life

Is any tourist attraction on earth really worth enduring a madding crowd to see? My mother, denied international travel for half her life by the Soviet state, made up for this deprivation by becoming the world’s most fanatically rigorous tourist. A major site left unseen or portion of a museum unexamined was, to her, as morally repugnant as leaving food on the plate or abandoning a book half-way through.   I, spoiled frequent flyer that I am, find crowds the ultimate holiday buzz-killer. Nowhere is this more true than in Rome, which clocked a record 52.92 million overnight visitors for the Papal Jubilee year of 2025 and, according to pre-bookings tracked by the local tourist board, is expecting even more tourists this summer.

‘Citrus marmalade?’ Well, that’s a tautology, if ever I’ve heard one. I’ve been making marmalade for a long time and written about it extensively. I wouldn’t quite paint myself as a marmalade obsessive (I’ve met them, and I know that I cannot literally or figuratively compete), but I’m certainly a marmalade fangirl. They line my cupboards and are a breakfast non-negotiable. I seek out unusual citrus fruit, and pore over old preserve cookery books. January is officially marmalade-making season in our house and, for the full month, every window is steamed up, every surface is slightly tacky from over-zealous jarring.

‘It won’t last,’ my schoolfriend Albert told me, as we staggered down Embankment one summer evening in 2018, a few pints into his birthday pub crawl. I wasn’t sure as to what he was referring. The evening twilight? His youthful good looks? Our ability to walk in a straight line? He expanded: ‘Harry and Meghan. She’s not right for him. They’ll be divorced within five years. Just you wait.’ Then he burped. I was surprised by Albert’s comments. I, like tens of millions of other viewers, had been taken in by the royal wedding weeks before. Yes, the presence of Oprah Winfrey and an over-enthusiastic American preacher had been a little gauche.

When I was a child, I always wanted to watch television during supper, but my dad wasn’t keen. He preferred family conversation and as we chatted over a meal he would try to gently steer us towards more pleasant subjects rather than the vulgar or provocative topics I tended to propose. ‘A meal is a sacred thing,’ he’d tell me.  I spent my secondary education at a bizarre school run by a quasi-Vedic cult, where table manners were also important. Before lunch, we chanted a Sanskrit mantra. The organic vegetarian food was to be offered, not grabbed. We sat upright, our backs as straight as any Himalayan yogi. We were told not to eat more than we needed. Naturally, I sneered at much of this as angrily as any teenage Clash fan would.

First things first, as this is an article about toilets, we need to establish if the word ‘toilet’ is an acceptable word. Here at The Spectator, editorial opinion on this crucial point is deeply divided. Some have expressed a preference for ‘bog’. Others opt for 'john', 'jakes', or lavatory.

Over ten years ago years ago, I made the transition from auction house ‘expert’ to antiques dealer. And it came as a rude shock. Nothing like a healthy dose of comeuppance; deference vanished overnight.   Auction houses are open to the public for consultation, even the grander ones in London’s West End; or that is how it was in the early 2000s. Back then, anyone could turn up (without an appointment) and ring a buzzer on the front counter. And, as an auction specialist, you played the part. Keep ‘em waiting for ten minutes, then a star-like descent down to reception, where a forelock-tugging hopeful awaited with Tesco bag and fake Fabergé frog in ‘resin’ — a useful auction house term to describe plastic.

At long last, hardback books, it seems, are finally drifting into, if not obsolescence, then at least abeyance. It turns out that punters are chary of buying hefty tomes, and so publishers are considering putting books out in paperback first. For once, this is a literary development that I will be applauding.  For centuries, hardback books were the only thing you could buy. In the 1920s, it was impossible to stroll along with a paperback of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in your pocket to impress the ladies, since paperbacks of that sort did not exist. They are a relatively new beast on the literary scene. It was Allen Lane who brought the sixpenny paperback into the world in the 1930s, a feat for which he should be lauded, on a par with Alexander Fleming.

Dear old Coutts, the private bank used by the King, now requires clients to have £3 million in the kitty before they deign to allow you to open an account. The £3 million minimum deposit is the biggest single jump of the bank’s wealth test in its illustrious 333-year history, designed to attract ‘ultra-high-net-worth individuals’ apparently. Whoever they are, I am not one of them.   I had an account at Coutts opened for me by my mother when I was 15 at a small, rather cosy little branch it used to have on the corner of Sloane Street and Cadogan Square.  As I went in and out, I got to know the cashiers who greeted me by name, which made me feel I’d really arrived, although where I wasn’t quite sure.

When we think of the Renaissance, our minds naturally drift to figures such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo – and rightly so. These are individuals who transformed our understanding of art, science and human potential. What we tend not to consider, however, is how close we might be to another cultural revolution.  That is the argument now circulating on parts of the internet: that after a prolonged period of digital saturation – defined by algorithms, passive consumption and an overabundance of content – we are approaching a point of correction. Just as the original Renaissance followed a period of stagnation and upheaval, this new phase will be marked by a renewed emphasis on creativity, craft and intellectual depth.

You set off on a spring morning, windows down, full of hope. Sunglasses, flasks of tea and a picnic rug are packed. You are ready to experience the freedom of the road, leave your worries in the rear-view mirror, put pedal to the metal (and every other optimistic road trip cliché). Follow the brown signs to the Pembrokeshire Coast 200, South West 660, Wales Way, Antrim Coast Road or any of the other curated, promoted and hash-tagged routes now crisscrossing the UK.

After three years of theatrical um-ing and ah-ing, the Prince and Princess of Wales have seemingly acceded to the obvious: Prince George is apparently going to Eton. Despite their perennial posturing at being a ‘modern’ royal family (is there such a thing?) there was really only one option. Eton is after all – somewhat paradoxically – the only place capable of offering any semblance of a normal adolescence for George, as well as mentally preparing him for kingship. To an outsider, this sounds ridiculous. How can prancing around in tailcoats while speaking unique slang (teachers are ‘beaks’; Year 9 is ‘F Block’) have any bearing on normalcy? Yet normal is relative. One of the first things you realise at Eton is that the exceptional is unexceptional.

Last week I dreamt I was a cowboy. My name was Billy ‘Toothpick’ Pickett, and I was the fastest pistolero east of Whiskey Row. I dreamt of robbing stagecoaches. I dreamt of playing three-card monte with Toothless Dan down by Granite Creek. I dreamt of owning a Smith & Wesson and shooting buffalo. I dreamt of riding a buckskin stallion named Tex. I dreamt of vintage Americana. And then I woke up.  This was the third cowboy dream in a fortnight. Once again, I had fallen asleep watching videos of cowboys on Instagram and paid the price. For months, my algorithm has been inundated with visions of a neo-Wild West. Videos of Monument Valley and the sandstone rocks of Utah. Young men with mullets camping in the Sierra Nevada.

One of the funniest - and in my opinion, falsest - things women have long said is ‘I’m doing it for myself - not for men’ about improving the way they look. Men have rarely said the same about women, which reflects that men have never been principally valued for their looks, historically, as they generally earned far more money than women. Women had to look as pretty as possible in order for a man to pick them and support them financially, thus my brilliant line ‘Men are judged as the sum of their parts; women are judged as some of their parts.

In all the recent hoo-ha about banknotes and who or what to put on them, one name has been curiously absent – that of John Constable. Born 250 years ago this year, he was the son of a prosperous Essex miller and merchant who would rise to become probably the greatest proponent of landscape painting in history.  Where his contemporary Turner – who got the £20 note, of course – had an expressive style that took landscapes towards ethereal impressionism, Constable took nature itself to his heart and somehow made it even better – not unlike a portrait painter flattering his subject. If we weren’t British, we would probably have a major gallery in his name.

In his novel Coming up for Air (1939), George Orwell has his benighted protagonist, George Bowling, bite into a sausage, only to discover that it tastes of something else altogether: ‘...pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish!’  I thought of George Bowling as my disgruntled family sat outside Felbrigg Hall in North Norfolk last week, eyeing me balefully — and I envied him. At least his sausage tasted of something. For I had just spent £43.

When most readers think of the late novelist David Lodge, it is his peerlessly funny and incisive campus novels, such as Changing Places and Small World, that immediately come to mind. While his satires on progressive academia are indeed some of his finest achievements, this is down to Lodge’s Catholicism, which was not merely a religious faith but a central guiding principle of his writing – if you were being pretentious, you might say ‘a calling’ – and his life. He may have called himself ‘an agnostic Catholic’, and from a religious perspective, this may have been true, but it remained a vital part of his literary career.

It’s a funny thing, being a feminist surrounded by women on weight-loss drugs. As someone who recognises the health risks of being clinically obese, I’ve never been a fat liberationist – but pretty much all of us used to be against prescribed beauty standards. In practice this meant we would critique the harmful impacts of the ‘size zero’ or ‘heroin chic’ trends rather than obsess over having gained a few pounds over Christmas. Yet, with the rise of weight-loss jabs, skinniness has become a norm rather than a feminist discussion. And twee ideas about ‘being good’ or ‘cheating’ have been replaced by – well – feeling too nauseous to cheat at all.  Which is why Easter is a fascinating holiday in this era of weight-loss jabs.

When you have children, it’s incumbent upon you to develop a variety of new skills – paramount amongst which is the ability to ignore unsolicited advice. From the moment you share a grainy black ultrasound with the world, it rolls in. Birth, breastfeeding, sleep, diet, teething, clothing, tantrums... everyone’s got ideas about how to do it right. If your choices diverge from their wisdom, you immediately become tenants of different camps. The only sensible approach is to put your hands over your ears and go ‘La la la la’ until your children are emotionally well-regulated, financially independent adults with a 2.1 from a Russell Group university.