Spectator Life

Last weekend I took a trip down memory lane. I visited the Norfolk village where, back in the 1980s, my husband and I bought a holiday cottage. We’d travel up there from London most weekends with our two young sons. That all ended with our divorce in 1992. Soon afterwards the cottage was sold, and I hadn’t been to the area since. Curious now to see whether the village had changed, I headed for the A11.   During the journey I reflected on those distant days. The cottage hadn’t been my idea.

How do you win the Booker Prize? I have no idea. Get in touch if you do. I’ve been shortlisted and longlisted and served as a Booker judge, and while there are certain perennial features that would tempt you to make a wager on outcomes, there’s enough random wildness to make it interesting. This year’s Booker longlist of 13 titles was described by the chair Mary Beard last week as ‘something for everyone’. Maybe those with a fetish for lesbian boxing dramas set in 1920s San Francisco will feel let down, but it is fair to say this year’s longlist covers a lot of ground. The announcement of the longlist always launches a thousand whines because even if you can manage something for everyone, something isn’t enough for most observers. Too little of this, too much of that.

'No man is a success to himself’ wrote Graham Greene. I am feeling this acutely, as I turn 60 on September 1st and enter the Decade of Reckoning for uncomfortable life truths. As somebody whose literary ambition was only wanting to be a bestselling English social novelist, it’s been creeping up on me that if one hasn't written that Big Novel by one's sixth decade, then perhaps throwing in the quill is the only dignified thing to do.   In a desk drawer in my study, there is a cream envelope, postmarked September 1987. That August, I found myself sitting two tables from the Graham Greene in Chez Feliz, a fish restaurant just inside the walls of the old Antibes port.  He was 82, and lunching with his mistress Yvonne Cloetta.

Meet Camilla Honeyleaf, who runs the ‘Sugar is Poison’ YouTube channel that, she'll proudly tell you, ‘has given thousands of people the eating disorder they so badly need’. An entrepreneur and an activist, Camilla has a calling: to bring health to the masses, or at least the massive. She won't rest until friends and strangers alike discover the joys of a cupcake made entirely from avocado, burnt quinoa husks and a semi-organic sweetener that has definitely not caused tumours in laboratory rats.  Healthy living, she says, is not an option but a calling. She is fond of a pithy bon mot (‘They’re like sentences trimmed of fat!

Like a lot of things, it started with Harold Wilson. This deceptively homely politician was the Queen’s first Labour leader and not reckoned to be quite her speed. Yet she developed a relationship with him which was notable for its warmth, to the extent that they had been known to natter while sharing the washing up after Balmoral barbecues.   But it was Wilson’s lust for taxing the highest earning – ‘squeeze them until the pips squeak’ gloated his chancellor Denis Healey – which brought him into conflict with The Beatles.

Heatwave number four swept through France this week. The temperature hit 42C in some regions, including in the south-west, where firefighters have been trying to save Bordeaux for more than a week. The wildfire, which started about 22 miles west of the city, has claimed the lives of two firefighters, left dozens injured and burned more than 42,000 hectares. It has also led to the evacuation of more than 250,000 people, many of whom were tourists. Among those who have fled are George Clooney and his family, who have left their home in Provence in what the actor described 'as this terrible moment'. At the start of the week the prefecture for the south-west region asked holidaymakers to stay away. The advice has been heeded.

Towards the tail-end of my 20s, I fell in love with a man who (for legal reasons) we’ll simply refer to as J. J had been a good friend since journalism school. Think dark eyes and public school vowels, like south London’s less hacked off answer to Hugh Grant. He told me which football team to support (Spurs, which didn’t age well); I told him which novels to read on holiday. He took me for pizza after I’d had a bad day; I took him for pints after his. He told me to ‘treat men mean to keep ‘em keen’; I told him to just bloody communicate. By the time we discussed becoming ‘something more’ seven years into our friendship, it seemed too When Harry Met Sally to be true.

Do you remember the first time? Picking them out, not knowing what to expect, but compelled by an attraction you couldn’t quite define; fumbling awkwardly, not entirely sure how to get into it but finding your way; discovering a pleasure you’d never yet known, and were desperate to find again. I am, of course, discussing reading for pleasure – a habit that all of us, one hopes, have long since gotten into. There must have been a point at which Young Billy went from his parents trying to force him to read books about trains and tractors to him doing so of his own volition. Or perhaps the transition is smooth, unthinking.

I have a pickpocket living in my house. The thief is small, agile and remarkably discriminating in her larceny. Not for this pocket dipper the usual array of purses or loose change (though I doubt she’d baulk at the latter). It is my phone, and solely my phone, she’s after. And, like every burglar caught halfway through an open window, this charming crook insists she’s only ‘borrowing’ it. Yes, my ten-year-old daughter is addicted to YouTube and will use whatever means possible to feed the habit.   This, despite my dutifully signing up to every newsletter warning of the great screen invasion of childhood.

In a pleasant but modest one-and-a-half-bedroom flat in Crouch End, the half bedroom-cum-boxroom boasts a bookshelf that indicates eclectic taste on the part of its owner. Amongst its dozen or so volumes are a score-settling memoir by a disgraced royal lady-in-waiting, petulantly entitled I Also Served, You Know; a revisionist history of WWII written by a television weatherman, called I Wish We Were German; and, most remarkably, a collection of homoerotic sonnets in the Petrarchan style that were privately printed at the behest of the former global finance director at Goldman Sachs.

Pity the tufted ducks: Regent’s Park hasn’t been this manic since Donald Trump militarised it in 2018, and his very oedipal Chinooks terrorised the birds. Read about Trump’s father Fred, and you will understand him, and the Chinooks. But Trump left, and the cyclists multiplied.   I don’t live in London, so I don’t see the mission creep. The last time I was in the rose garden in the Inner Circle it was a weekday afternoon in early spring, and it was empty, doing what it is designed for: peace in a howling city. But that was then.

This week I was replaced by AI. I saw it coming, but it didn’t make the news any easier to deal with. To be honest, it terrifies me for the future of our species. If that sounds a bit over the top, hear me out. I am a writer. Not only that, I am a commercially successful one. Although you probably haven’t heard of me, I’ve published more than 300 short stories in women’s magazines over the past 15 years. From ghost stories in Woman’s Weekly to tales of romance in Take a Break Fiction Feast, I write them all. Sorry – wrote.  ‘Dear Geoff,’ the email said. ‘Going forward, our in-house team will be using AI tools to compile future editions, but we thank you for your many contributions to the magazine over the years. Kind regards, Rebecca.

In the regretful days that followed England’s World Cup exit last week, a video was played on repeat on social media. Someone had edited red and white into greyscale over a clip of England’s footballers linking arms and swaying, singing along to Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’.  At this tournament it became a tradition. England won a game, then a few more. The pundits finally fell silent. Ian Wright or Gary Neville whispered: ‘Drink it in.’ That famous guitar started up; the camera panned along the players’ line. We all knew the opening words: ‘Today is gonna be the day…’ No more ‘Sweet Caroline’. ‘Three Lions’ was played but the crowd only cursorily joined in.

Tonight, Lionel Messi will walk out for his third World Cup final at 39 years old. Should Argentina beat Spain, they will be the first side to retain the trophy since Brazil in 1962, and the case for Messi as the greatest player of all time will be closed for good. As a self-respecting Englishman, I will not be cheering for Argentina after Wednesday’s depressing semi-final. I’ll be silently supporting Messi for a very different reason. At 5ft 7in, he represents a victory for the least pitied disadvantaged group: the vertically challenged man.  Back in 2022, TikTok was awash with videos hailing ‘short king spring’: a trend celebrating the rise (no pun intended) of famous men under 5ft 8in.

Even though my career has been almost entirely in front of the camera, rather than behind it, I’ve long been obsessed with film equipment. How, then, can I resist a party in LA for Cine Gear, a trade show for new film kit? It’s a good place for the ‘creatives’ to meet the technical guys. The director Dan Trachtenberg is there, and we handle the latest Cooke glass. Cooke has been making lenses in Leicester since 1893, and they are still the best cine lenses in the world. I bought my set of Cooke Speed Panchros in the 1980s, when nobody wanted them because they were ‘slow’, but now they are back in fashion. They have a warmth and softness that modern lenses strive to emulate because their coatings involved radio-active elements that are not permitted in manufacture now.

Picture the scene: it’s midsummer, a bucolic wedding is mid-flow, the bride is radiant, the groom pristine. They stand above their guests in a doorway while caterers ascend the stone staircase carrying the ceremonial wedding cake. But wait! One of the caterers is wobbling! The cake is slipping! The caterer reaches for it but it falls from his hands and tumbles to the ground: splat. A dog appears from nowhere and begins to eat the crumbs. And all of it, every excruciating moment, is captured on camera. Is this one of my night terrors? Well, yes, but it was also the wedding of Anna Boden – the eldest daughter of Boden clothing founder Johnnie – to her now husband Oliver last week.

Generally speaking, I’m against moving major artworks from galleries in large cities to the provinces, where there are fewer people to see them. But there are exceptions. This summer bears witness to one such exception – the decision by the National Gallery to loan John Constable’s ‘The Hay Wain’ to Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich as part of an exhibition celebrating the 250th anniversary of the artist’s birth.  Because whatever you think you know of ‘The Hay Wain’ – one of Britain’s best known and beloved oil paintings – you’ll have never seen it like this before.

On the back of my copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1869 novel The Idiot, there’s a quote from A.C. Grayling that tells you what to think of it. ‘One of the most excoriating, compelling and remarkable books ever written,’ it reads, ‘and without question one of the greatest.’ That ‘without question’ bothered me. Why assume that every classic deserves its reputation? We should make up our own minds after having read one, as we do with any other book.   That wasn’t the only reason why I treated Grayling’s claims with scepticism as I edged my way into this gargantuan novel (I can’t remember exactly when that was, but I know I was a much younger man at the time).

Is it possible, or even acceptable, to feel the same grief for the loss of a favourite place – or holiday location – than for a person? I’d say yes, because people divide pretty much equally into two camps when it comes to the summer hols. There are those who love trying out new and different places, and then there are bores like myself, and my wife, who like returning to the same place every year. Same beach. Same menus. Same ice creams. Same pale rosé. Same owners. Same crowd.    In my case, I’m talking about Paloma Beach in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat on the French Riviera.

I am always suspicious when the word ‘aristocrat’ finds its way into the press. Usually, the person in question is not an aristocrat at all, but a common-or-garden public school boy with a tenuous link to a baronet’s sister-in-law. But with last week’s exposé of Nigel Farage’s convicted fraudster adviser George Cottrell, we have a proper one. Cottrell is the grandson of a peer, Rupert Watson, 3rd Baron Manton, and the nephew of two others, the former Tory treasurer turned Ukipper Alexander Fermor-Hesketh, 3rd Baron Hesketh, and the former Life Guards officer Milo Watson, 4th Baron Manton. His mother was briefly romantically involved with the then-Prince Charles.

My sister and her friends were watching the conclusion of Arthur Fery’s third round tiebreaker with Aperol-laced bated breath. Curiously enough, the match had already finished. Finally Fery began to speak: ‘oh thank God, he’s posh’, exclaimed one friend. Fery is this summer’s heartthrob, and a major coup for those who thought the posh boy had had their day. There’s been requisite time between the Hugh Grant heyday that it’s become novel and cool again; Leo Woodall laid some strong groundwork in 2024’s One Day, but it took Wimbledon’s Centre Court to cement the return.  I think the heatwave has a lot to do with it.