Spectator Life

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.

After a while you forget: was I up for Portillo, or had I gone to bed? I think I’d gone to bed. Abbott, Boateng and Bernie Grant, in bed, I definitely remember that. And Powell, accordingly, out. Was that – what? – ’87? What even was that? 1997: where the hell was I? 2010? That was the one that landed us with Cameron and Clegg, yeah? Am I right? But the 1992 general election – I definitely remember that one. That was unforgettable. I remember getting the first Tube home and listening to the Today programme before getting a couple of hours sleep I was in my twenties. Short of cash, as always, I managed to get a job as a polling clerk and as a counting assistant – double bubble.

Anyone visiting the small Westphalian city of Münster in north-west Germany may notice three man-sized cages hanging from the handsome St Lambert’s Roman Catholic Church in the city’s main square, the Prinzipalmarkt, and wonder about their provenance. The cages are one of the last visible relics of an episode in which society took leave of its collective senses and went quite mad. It is my impression that the western world is currently undergoing just such a convulsion.

Steve Cotten is standing to be an MP in this week’s general election. He has also been called ‘Britain’s grumpiest pub landlord’ by the Daily Mail, the Mirror and the New York Post. In truth, Steve, 64, isn’t grumpy. Not often, anyway. He’s eccentric, certainly, but kind, generous and good humoured, and dedicated to his rural community and his pub’s clientele – many of whom are almost as mad as he is. He’s also met Rishi Sunak. ‘His handlers got upset that I kept calling him Ricky’ I discovered Exmoor’s Poltimore Arms five years ago, and have now made it my local despite living four-and-a-half hours away in London. The ‘Polti’, as regulars call it, has no address, only GPS coordinates.

I live north of the river in London and my parents live south of it, in the Tunbridge Wells. I have long been a registered user of the Dartford Crossing for fear of forgetting to pay to cross – and thus incurring an automatic fine. This means that the cameras at the bridge and tunnel recognise my car number plate and immediately deduct £2.50 from my bank account when they see it going over or under the Thames. I found myself in an automated telephone queuing system. I was caller number 73 Or it did mean this until something went wrong. After my usual crossing in April, I started to get text messages from ‘Dart Charge’ to say my account was ‘dormant’ and I needed to ‘re–register my card details’.

Over five decades, I have been lucky enough to witness some of the great rock concerts of our time. Bob Dylan at Blackbushe in the late 1970s, The Everly Brothers Reunion Concert at the Albert Hall in the early 1980s, The Rolling Stones at New York’s Shea Stadium in the 1990s and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in Paris a few years after that.  If that sounds overheated and inappropriately ecstatic I refuse to apologise There are many others but those are the first to light up my memory bank. Now add Taylor Swift’s Eras concerts at Wembley stadium to that list. Three nights last weekend and another five nights to come in August, this is one of the great events in modern popular music.

Prius owners are always demanding more legislation against drink driving, but an advantage of living in America is that if you are too trashed to drive home, your 15-year-old kid can pick you up from the bar. The only problem with this is that we Americans love reckless driving too much to let anyone else take the wheel. Drink driving is one of our great illegal freedoms. Actually, it’s called ‘buzzed’ driving in the States, and as we like to say, ‘it’s only illegal if you get caught.’  Driving while intoxicated is about the rights enshrined in the Constitution Justin Timberlake was caught indeed in the early hours of Tuesday morning after a policeman in the Hamptons saw him swerve between lanes and blow through a stop sign.

The son of the celebrity chef Marco Pierre White, imaginatively named Marco Pierre White Jr, has been convicted of theft and sentenced to 41 weeks in prison. The former heroin addict briefly became a reality star after a stint on Celebrity Big Brother, but has since reverted to bad behaviour, being imprisoned in 2018 for stealing from Tesco and racially abusing a security officer.  His conviction this time was for taking £1,760 worth of clothes from a shop in Bath, £72 from a Sports Direct in Bristol, and £250 from the till at a deli in Bath. He was caught because of an unedifying complication as he climbed out of the deli window: his trackie bottoms were pulled down and his hoodie pulled up, so he emerged almost naked, like a peeled sausage.

I had always been interested in politics but had not done anything practical until the rise of Nigel Farage’s Ukip. He was proving a thorn in the side of David Cameron in 2013, which attracted my admiring attention, so I decided to try and get involved. Despite having done my bit for European unity by fathering a half-French daughter and a half-Austrian son, I had always been fundamentally hostile to the EU – an artificial and undemocratic structure inimical to British interests and traditions – so it seemed obvious that Ukip was the party for me. A large poster of me was defaced with a Hitler moustache – an episode I found deeply humiliating I was summoned to a hotel in Gillingham, Kent, for a test to see if I was suitable for the approved list of Ukip candidates.

Keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman once described progressive rock as the ‘porn of the music industry; you bought an album under the counter in a brown paper bag’. He was no doubt referring to the genre’s mid-1970s nadir when punk burst onto the scene and nicked all the cool kids, leaving the nerds to their embarrassing flares and concept albums. Fast forward 50 years and it’s the nerds who prevail. Anyone out there still listening to Sham 69? These are the marginalised, workaday Brits you rarely get to see on television anymore Yes, the proggiest of the 1970s rock behemoths, is on tour again with an album of new material in the pipeline. Wakeman quit the band years ago leaving 77-year-old guitar maestro Steve Howe as the only remaining member from the classic line up.

I recently had an encounter with Oliver Cromwell’s hat which, these days, rests on a bespoke hat-rest in the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon. It’s an astonishing piece of craftsmanship being far wider than any normal hat at nearly three feet across. The perfectly horizontal brim is constructed from thick black felt and the central head-holding part is a cylinder that rises sharp and perpendicular, like a chimney pot from a roof.  What is absent from small museums like this, mercifully, is the over-bearing hand of a committee of arts graduates What a sight he must have been, wearing this extraordinary hat, at the dissolution of the Rump Parliament in 1653, railing at the politicians: Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government.

When Rishi Sunak proposed national service for 18-year-olds as the first big idea of his election campaign, my initial thought was: absolutely, bring it on. But then I had a second thought, which was that if Sunak was trying to boost the Conservative vote, rather than the nation’s preparedness, his big idea probably wasn’t going to fly. Younger voters would recall their 18-year-old selves and reject the whole prospect out of hand – as would parents, concerned that their now not so little Harrys (and Hannahs) might be sent off to fight in Ukraine. Meanwhile, all those older people agreeing that the nation’s youth could do with some toughening up will probably be voting Tory anyway.