Spectator Life

It was 10.45pm and our film had just finished. I checked my phone and saw a friend claiming he had just seen the northern lights — in Wembley. It had been trailed as a possibility, but I hadn't given it much credence. Not with the light pollution inside the M25, surely. You’d need to head up to the Chilterns at least, and even then be incredibly lucky.   But I dashed to the back garden anyway. The night sky certainly had an unusual clarity, almost shimmering, and you could clearly make out the whole of the moon behind the shining crescent. But no colours. My Wembley pal must have mistaken the glow of an all-night garage for the celestial cosmos.  I went back inside and poured another glass of wine.

Perhaps it was the anachronistic use of the term ‘gentlemen’ that finally put paid to the idea of the gentlemen’s club. If only these illustrious institutions had thought to rename themselves ‘cis-male inner-city safe spaces’, we probably wouldn’t be looking on aghast as another centuries old tradition is summarily flushed down the memory hole.

Among the many appreciations of C.J. Sansom, the author of bestselling historical mysteries who died last week aged 71, one of the most eloquent came from Rear Admiral John Lippiett. A friend since Sansom first researched the sinking of Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose (Lippiett headed the Mary Rose Trust in Portsmouth after he retired), the admiral recalled ‘a very remarkable man, private and modest, fascinating in his conversations, caring about individuals, generous in the issues that moved him’. Sansom, he acknowledged, was a ‘card-carrying socialist’ who wobbled during the Corbyn years but ‘remained true to Labour’s overall policies’.

Harry and Meghan are at it again – launching themselves into another rebrand – this time embarking on a faux-royal tour to Nigeria, hiring new PR staff in the UK, promoting strawberry jam on Instagram and – good grief! – touting Netflix shows about friendship and polo. There’s a certain sadness about this latest effort, since the Sussexes’s entire past year has been spent branding and rebranding themselves with practically no effect, and the whiff of desperation now hovers over them. You’d feel sorry for the couple if they responded to their misfortune with some degree of humility Their annus horribilis of branding mishaps and misfortunes kicked off last April when Meghan signed up with the glitziest of the Hollywood PR giants – William Morris Endeavor.

Russell Brand was baptised on Sunday, he says – in the River Thames, despite his tongue-in-cheek fear of catching a virus – and he’s thrilled about it. He thanked those who embraced his decision, while expressing understanding of those who are cynical. He’s not perfect, he explains; he knows he’s going to make mistakes, but ‘this is my path now,’ he says. ‘I’m so grateful to be surrendered in Christ.’ Speaking as a Catholic, this writer can’t but consider the advantages of baptism in church: waters freed from viruses and demons through exorcism, holy oils, and proper storage, might have been preferable.

Everything is trauma. From Barbie’s Oscars snub (very traumatic) to Taylor Swift’s new album (also deeply traumatic), profound emotional distress appears to be everywhere. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), trauma requires ‘actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence’. A horrific car crash, a terrorist attack, an armed robbery, these all fit the bill. An Oscar snub does not. Why, then, do so many people appear to think of themselves as traumatised? It’s certainly a clickbaity concept, but it's not a scientific one This raging fire of self pity is being fuelled by unqualified influencers who call themselves ‘trauma coaches’.

I gave Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department (which I need to stop calling The Dead Poets Society) a cursory listen on Friday morning, a few hours after it was released. Maybe it was because I listened to half of the self-indulgent songs while walking my dog through a moody forest before I’d had any human contact that day, but for an hour and five minutes (I haven’t made it through the extended Anthology yet, which adds 15 extra songs), I was entranced. Tortured Poets poignantly captures the collective one-third-life crisis we millennials are experiencing together. What Swift doesn’t acknowledge though, is what we all really need: it isn’t more romance, but religion. Taylor Swift needs Jesus. I was prepared not to like the album.

Not everyone likes The Beatles. That said, trashing cultural icons is a modern phenomenon amplified by social media and done, largely, to attract attention. Yet whether you hate them or love them (yeah, yeah, yeah), their influence on pretty much everything pop music has offered since is, surely, undeniable. Sixty years ago they left an indelible imprint on both music and film that continues to this day. In April 1964, John Lennon and Paul McCartney sat down in a hotel room and wrote a song to accompany the title of the band’s first (and best) feature film, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. The song itself is typical of their early output. A sugary song about love, less than three minutes long yet its significance cannot be underestimated.

María Branyas Morera, aged 117, is the oldest person in the world. She was born in California on 4 March 1907 to Spanish parents who decided to return home in 1915. The voyage was an early lesson in adversity: her father died and María lost the hearing in one ear after she fell from the upper deck. The family settled in Catalonia and María worked as a nurse during the Spanish Civil War. After contracting pneumonia in 1993, she moved into a nursing home in Olot, some 70 miles north of Barcelona. There she played the piano until she was 108 and recovered from Covid-19 in 2020. A resilient, pragmatic approach to adversity and rapidly changing circumstances also helps María is one of about 20,000 centenarians in Spain.

Last week, an old acquaintance went viral. Charles Withers had, according to his pregnant wife, disappeared around a year ago, leaving her to bring up one young child alone with another on the way. The pretty Massachusetts blonde posted a plea for information on Facebook. It was, she wrote, surprisingly difficult to divorce someone who refused to return your calls.  In an age of near-constant surveillance, how does it feel when the choice to disappear is taken from you? Not long after the story surfaced, I received a message from a friend. ‘Do you remember Charlie Withers?’ he asked. I did. He had been part of our wider social circle, one of the boys at the neighbouring school.

In the dog days of 2021, I spent a grey Sunday afternoon driving around a part of London with a view to an eventual flat move. Why take the car? Because the bus routes didn’t match where I planned to go, I wanted to stay over ground, and I would be able to cover more territory than on foot. It seemed an innocent enough way of spending my time, and the traffic was blissfully light.  So I was surprised to receive – with remarkable speed – a Penalty Charge Notice for using what was called a prohibited road. The notice was supported by two photos of my car, which I am happy to report was perfectly positioned on said road, not encroaching by so much as a millimetre into the bus lane.

What do we talk about when we talk about Marilyn Monroe? Sex, death and everything in between. Unlike other legendary film stars from Garbo to Bardot, Monroe has become (to use that awful and over-popular word) ‘iconic’ – which is ‘problematic’ in itself. Being recognisable as a hank of blonde hair and a white dress failing to preserve her dignity dehumanises Marilyn – and we know that being treated as a ‘thing’ contributed towards her terminal sorrow. We want to have our cheesecake and eat it, without adding the heavy weight of posthumous complicity in the death of this likeable young woman – which is what Monroe was, beneath all the glamour and the pain.

Jimmy Donaldson, more commonly known as MrBeast, is the world’s most successful YouTuber. More than 250 million people follow his channel. His videos are mostly absurd challenges involving obscene amounts of cash generated from his YouTube advertising revenue. In one video, he eats $100,000 worth of gold leaf ice cream; in another, he pays a participant $10,000 a day to see how long they’re willing to live in a supermarket. His most popular video, a remake of the Korean survival horror TV show Squid Game, has over half a billion views.

The Peaceable Kingdom probably isn’t the first place you would have looked for Kurt Cobain. Of all the ironies and confusions of his brief life, perhaps none was as pointed as his choosing to kill himself in a room overlooking that sign, announcing Seattle’s upscale Leschi neighbourhood, with its views of Lake Washington and the snow-capped mountains beyond. It was here that, one morning in April 1994, Cobain – then in the third year of his marriage to his fellow musician Courtney Love – first injected himself with heroin and then took a shotgun and blew his brains out.

The old should envy the young; it’s part of the natural order of things. When I was young, I was gloriously aware that old people (anyone over 30) envied me; though I was a virgin until I went to That London at 17, my mum and her mates thought I was up to all sorts – and as soon as I was able to escape from my poor-but-honest home for the fleshpots of the capital, I was. Two poems by Philip Larkin sum up how old people used to feel about the younger generation.

Recently, I was walking down a London street when on the pavement I spotted a worm. It was so motionless I wasn’t sure if it was alive or dead. Normally, I would have passed the worm by without a second thought. But I’d just been to my local park to do stretches, meditation, breathing exercises and to hug my favourite tree. Yes, I have become a tree hugger. I actually put my arms around the tree trunk – or as much as I can manage. I squeeze tight, pressing my body against it to absorb its life-giving energy – and I get wood. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist that joke.) There was a time in my life when I would have said if you ever catch me hugging a tree, shoot me before I turn into Sting. Hugging trees is not what we hip, deracinated, self-loathing modern men do.

It’s not easy being a Leaver, right now. For a start, the government that actually delivered Brexit – the present Tory government – is facing a one-sided electoral hammering which will make the Anglo-Zanzibar war of 1896 (duration: 38 minutes) look like a tense, nail-biting score draw. In the same vein, polls consistently show high levels of Bregret and Bremorse, with a hefty majority actively wishing to Rejoin.  If you are reading this and you are in the EU, you might find it trickier In that depressing light – for Brexiteers – let me introduce the ray of sunshine that is ‘Claude’.