Spectator Life

The latest painting to be attacked by an ovine climate protestor is Monet’s Poppies in Paris’s Musee D’Orsay. Thankfully, the initial reports that the painting was not protected by glass were inaccurate, and the alarming red rectangle – which at first glance looked as if the painting had been torn to the underlying canvas – was in fact a large red sticker. How is it helping climate change to throw good food at works of art? Video footage has emerged of a woman covering the surface of the painting then taking off her jacket to display her activist t-shirt. She then stood by the painting as if she was waiting for applause. It’s far from the first time that a famous work of art has been targeted. Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic Mona Lisa was smeared with cake.

Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is the epitome of Hollywood masculinity. His on-screen magnetism and talk show couch affability have endeared him to millions. Now though, the Rock seems to be crumbling.  Johnson first forged his identity in the testosterone-fuelled world of professional wrestling The Rock, who has referred to himself as ‘the hardest worker in the room’, has developed a reputation in the industry for his lateness and lack of professionalism on set. In April, the Hollywood trade publication The Wrap published a exposé, one that cast The Rock in the most unflattering of lights. According to the piece, The Rock used to pee in a bottle during movie shoots, rather than use the restroom – you know, like a respectable, housetrained human being.

I first heard it in the spring of 1999 from a bloke who was sitting behind me at a West Ham game. It concerned David Beckham and Victoria Adams of the Spice Girls, who were then on their way to becoming the UK’s most prominent celebrity couple. They were set to marry that summer – and they particularly wanted to book an Essex country hotel for the event, he told me. But his friend of a friend had long since secured the booking on the day in question for his own wedding. On learning this, Beckham had been so keen on getting the coveted slot himself that he had offered to pay for the friend of a friend’s entire wedding if he moved it to a later date – and, as an extra sweetener, he would pay off his mortgage too.

As predictably as the tides, as welcome as a pebble in your shoe, the bogus question of ‘who actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays?’ is in the news again. Jodi Picoult, the writer, thinks that Emilia Bassano (aka Aemilia Lanier), the daughter of a musician, must have had a hand in them, because, she says, Juliet is 13 in Romeo and Juliet, and Bassano was forced to become a mistress at that exact age. This despite the fact that in the play Juliet isn’t forced to love Romeo, and that Bassano was in her late teens when she became Lord Hunsdon’s mistress. Not convinced? In Othello, Desdemona’s servant is called  – wait for it – Emilia! I don’t know about you, but that clinches it for me.

As we are reaching 100mph, I can hear the muted sirens and see blue lights reflecting on gawping onlookers. I’m neither an officer, nor a criminal but I’m in the back of a police car on my way to an incident that apparently involves two men fighting in the middle of a road. I am a celebrity gossip columnist by trade so the only abusive men I deal with are usually the likes of Jeremy Clarkson (via Twitter) and lecherous millionaires (at 5 Hertford Street). I feel scared of what I’ll see when we arrive at the scene, but I have long been curious about the Met – whose misconduct I feel as though I read about on a near daily basis – and curious too about the people who work there. So, a few months ago, I signed up for a ride-along.

My son and various well-meaning friends have been advising me to abandon writing history books and cash in on the trend for boarding school misery memoirs. On the face of it, as someone who was sent away aged seven and remained in these institutions until I was 18, I am well qualified to add my contribution to what has now become a recognised sub-genre of English literature. My problem, though, is that I quite enjoyed my time at boarding schools and I cannot claim – as so many do – that it adversely affected my life; rather the reverse. In his extended essay ‘Such, such were the joys’, George Orwell recorded his awful schooldays at St Cyprians, a snobbish boys preparatory school in Eastbourne.

In Gerald Weiner’s book The Secrets of Consulting, there is a case study in which a bright MBA graduate tells a giant multinational burger chain to eliminate just three sesame seeds from each bun to save the company $126,000 a year, under the assumption that none of the customers will notice. This works, so the next year they remove five sesame seeds, and, each year or two, they remove some more, until the bun is barely recognisable. Suddenly, nobody buys their burgers anymore. I get the sense that nothing on the internet really works – or at least no longer works for us I would suggest that the same thing has happened to the internet.

Three years ago, I started employing actors, when I had my first play in the Brighton Fringe. I always think they slightly disapprove of me as I’m a fidget and tend to leave rehearsals early (as I remarked to my husband and co-writer of the latest one as we hightailed it off to the pub one day after only an hour of watching our cast run lines: ‘We didn’t ask them to sit in the room and watch us write the ruddy thing, did we?’) but I love to observe them. In fact, I find it almost too affecting an experience, which could explain my reluctance to watch them too much. That and being a booze-hound. I even made up a word, ‘limberessence’ - a fusion of limbo, limbering up and luminescence - which describes that perfect moment between privacy and performance.

One of the things I really regret is that I didn’t spend more time down the British Legion with my dad. I was a bit snooty about it, I suppose. All those ex-squaddies talking about the army and playing darts and having a pint or two.I was an indie-kid, heading to university to read English. I preferred Camden to Greenford. But now I’d choose the Legion any day. And if more us don’t then you might see your local club closing as a result of the cheap pints at a local Wetherspoons. I realise now that the old British Legion clubs and the Legion itself is of such importance that we need a national drive to support it. To get into one of the clubs you need a membership, but that’s not difficult. Everyone is welcome, even with no connection to the military at all.

I must admit to being somewhat taken aback on reading – in a new survey by the Hologic Global Women’s Health Index, whatever that is when it’s at home – that we women of Blighty are sadder and more ‘stressed’ than our sisters on the European mainland. Odd because I’ve always found us a cheerful bunch; after all, we were churning out the Carry On films, graced with Babs Windsor’s lusty chuckle, while French, Italian and Scandinavian film actresses were all looking like they’d lost a fiver and found a euro.

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.