Spectator Life

Algie thinks it very remiss of his wife Emma to call him a grouse tart, though he could have sworn she used the word whore. Hasn’t he spent 40 years damn well keeping a (slightly sagging) roof over all their heads, sending their ‘three peas – Poppy, Penny and Pippa – to Cheltenham Ladies and generally keeping the good ship Snodworthy-Ffiennes on an even keel?   So what if he sucked up to that dreadful oik Derek, who made a fortune from office furniture, and now owns three grouse moors? How on earth do you think you get invited to have a crack on one of the world’s greatest shoots? Yes, OK, on reflection, perhaps it was a bit craven to have a cashmere tweed gilet made up for him, complete with mink-lined collar, but it did the trick.

Your last impression, as the sages tell us, is your lasting impression. Nowhere is this truer than the digital world, where email signatures — the little phrases or miscellanea that sit under each message proper — leave a particular taste in the mouth. You can file these flavours under the good, the bad and the baffling. (And the deadly; but we’ll get to that.) Let’s start with the good. One of my semi-regular contacts ends their missives by highlighting the book they’re currently reading. That’s a touch a rampant bibliophile can get behind. It allows me to coo ‘Aha, that looks like something I should add to the to-be-read pile’, or sneer at their taste as midwit piffle.

Over 20 years ago, my life was painfully turned upside down as I began to navigate the ruthless and costly world of high-stakes divorce as depicted in Sky Atlantic/HBO’s new legal A-list divorce drama, War about the expensive split between a caddish tech billionaire, Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) and his high-maintenance and scheming actress-model wife, Carla Duval (Sienna Miller). After entrapping her husband with ‘selfie’ evidence (that would not, in fact, be admissible in court), her instructions to her lawyers are: ‘You take this photo, you take this case, and you take him for every f**ing penny he has - and he's got quite a few’.

At the Conservative party conference in Birmingham, the Tories have mounted an 88-foot, AI-assisted parody of the Bayeux Tapestry, accompanied by a mock museum display of political relics. Among them are a pair of spectacles purporting to belong to Keir Starmer and a set of handcuffs labelled for Peter Mandelson. Vision and restraint are not qualities one usually associates with a party conference, but here they are at last, displayed together. I should probably admit that I have not seen it in person. This does not seem to put me at much of a disadvantage. Jeremy Clarkson observed that the conference audience had come disguised as empty chairs, and I have reconstructed the tapestry from photographs, reports and the testimony of those who did make it into the room.

One sweltering summer many moons ago, I spent a deliriously drunken day on Brighton Pier with my new, young, posh friend down from London for the weekend. I woke up the next morning, stretched happily at the thought of another day of doing nothing much in the sun - and shrieked in horror as I saw my friend’s name tattooed in what looked like - to add insult to injury - Comic Sans font across my knuckles.   My shriek brought my mate rushing in - and we were now united in woe, as it appeared that she had done the same with my name. We went out to my swimming pool to wash away our sorrows - and were delighted when, on drying off, the ‘tattoos’ faded to barely nothing. They were temporary!

It is a tale as old as time. A museum is slightly disappointed in its visitor numbers. Curators get together and conclude that the problem is a lack of young people. A large reorganisation takes place, usually driven by the hand of a consultancy firm, to seduce the elusive Gen Z visitor into their hallowed halls. The result is a far less interesting museum, no new young visitors, and those that loved and patronised the museum feel left behind and gradually stop going as well. This is the long march through the institutions for the twenty-first century.  Previously, we have seen Kew Gardens, the Mary Rose and the National Maritime Museum all transformed by it.

Georgia is always on her phone, and who can blame her when there are just so many messages coming through? Largely it’s her own fault because there is nothing she loves more than setting up a group chat.   Every social occasion, however minor, deserves its own forum. Which is why her WhatsApp is a graveyard of past events: Year 3 Christmas Fair. Padel 4 Hot Mums. Mykonos 2024. Flo’s baby shower. Jilly Cooper Book/TV Club. Name India’s baby. One is simply called Apples and she has no recollection of creating it.   She is forever adding people to groups, or removing them, should she feel the need. Her groups, her rules.

It’s as good an indicator as you’ll find of this government’s asinine attitude to rural Britain that you’re reading a piece in which a Spectator writer semi-seriously considers the far-right credentials of various dog breeds. How right-wing is your dog? in itself sounds like one of Alan Partridge’s increasingly desperate pitches for a new TV show.    Pity the poor black Lab, for it’s these harmless thickos of the dog world that have aroused Labour’s ire.

A report in GQ recently suggests that British men are now having testosterone injected directly into their vocal folds in an attempt to lower the pitch and increase the resonance of their speech. This is the latest frontier of ‘T-maxxing’ – a movement built around optimising male biology through an obsessive regimen of blood tests, supplements and prescription hormones.  The treatment is being offered by Chadwan Al Yaghchi, a consultant ENT surgeon at the London Voice and Swallowing Clinic, who says that earlier this year he became the first doctor in the UK to perform the procedure on an otherwise healthy man.

Harry Potter, the poor little orphan, can’t afford Hogwarts these days, now he has to pay VAT. James Bond, another orphan, can’t manage Eton’s £65,000 school fees. And he won’t join MI6, either – no civil servant, licensed to kill or not, can afford to live in central London any more. Now only the super-rich can afford them, private schools have become little more than gilt-edged finishing schools, with parents determined for their children to become their mini-clones as hedge-funders and private-equity tycoons.   In the last 30 years, as school fees have rocketed, so the nature of private schools and their pupils has changed for good.

Geoffrey has a merit in Grade 7 piano (taken 52 years ago), a distinction in Grade 1 recorder (59 years ago) and no qualifications whatsoever on the organ. Regardless, this makes him the most talented churchgoing musician under the age of 75 in the parish of Nether Marsham. As such, he has been the village organist for the worse half of the last decade.    It happened quite by accident one Christmas Eve. Geoffrey’s sister-in-law wasn’t the only reason he had spent three hours in the Fox and Hounds before Midnight Mass; it was also his first Yuletide since taking early retirement and he was in a generally ebullient mood.

There is no denying the wonders of the Bayeux tapestry. Seeing the Norman Propaganda in the flesh, rather than on a smartboard in a history lesson, is an arresting experience. You notice, perhaps for the first time, the fables and strange beasts of the lower margins giving way to a brutal carpet of dead bodies – decapitated bodies, severed limbs and blood – as the Normans win at Hastings.  Unfortunately, the British Museum appears to be doing everything in its power to prevent the public from actually looking at it. Most art critics and journalists will have first visited the embroidery at a press evening or media breakfast. Consequently, most reviewers have successfully traversed the ‘Bayeux Tapestry Experience’ without incident.

Earlier this year, I did one of the most adult things possible within my financial grasp: I renewed my passport. Murderous-looking photo aside, the renewal was notable because I did not really feel the £102 when it left my bank account. And for that, I have Vinted to thank.  This is a technology that has turned the contents of our wardrobes into a vast, national marketplace: we can sell things we no longer want, buy things we do, haggle with strangers, find bargains that would never have existed on our local high street and turn a pile of unwanted clothes into cold hard cash.   No wonder we are flocking to it. An estimated 17.4 million Britons use Vinted, making it the country’s third-largest fashion retailer, behind only Primark and Next.