Spectator Life

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’.

Tim Dillon is a comedian who not so long ago worked as a New York tour bus guide and subprime mortgage salesman. He started a podcast from his porch in 2016 and used it to talk about world events, what he and his lowlife friends were up to, and, frequently, to complain about how broke he was.  ‘I understand fighting in Ukraine is tough. But have you ever defended Vladimir Putin at a dinner party in Malibu?’ Today, each episode of The Tim Dillon Show is downloaded more than a million times and subscriptions generate income in excess of $175,000 a month. In early April, he will perform at the Royal Albert Hall. He’s also considering a run for governor of California.

With Owen Jones very huffily leaving the Labour party, I was moved to examine the state of The Flounce in public life de nos jours. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it thus: 1. To move with exaggerated jerky or bouncy motions (‘flounced about the room, jerking her shoulders, gesticulating’ – Agatha Christie)2. To move so as to draw attention to oneself (‘flounced into the lobby’)3. To go with sudden determination (‘flounced out in a huff’) Are we are past the glory days of flouncing?

One of China’s most famous poems was penned by a teenager with a killer hangover. ‘Heavy sleep can’t get rid of the dregs of alcohol,’ she grumbles, sequestered in her darkened room after a night of boozing and bad weather. She has to ask a maid to open her curtains. Here comes one of the quintessential images of classical Chinese poetry: a crab-apple tree stands in the drenched earth, wrecked by the storm. Her maid, who hasn’t been drinking, sees nothing wrong. The poet is full of sorrow. Spring has faded. To her, drunkenness was always beautiful, even when it led to disaster Li Qingzhao grew up in 12th-century Shandong, an eastern province around four hours from Beijing.

Few things sum up the chasm between childhood and adolescence more poignantly than our changing relationship with music. One minute life is all familial cuddles and nursery rhymes – the next it’s all parental alienation and rock’n’roll. One year I was eagerly buying the records of Pinky & Perky, the next those of Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Tich – and the next, the records of the Velvet Underground and Nico. Nico had finally found the family’s piano and was pumping away on it as if her life depended on it My relationship with Nico – the fantasy and the reality – is one of the funniest never-meet-your-heroes experience I’ve ever had.

‘PUNK’S NOT DEAD!’ I will sometimes write as a sign-off on emails to mates when I’ve said something particularly ‘bad’. It’s something of a joke with me; although I was around the scene early on (1976) and started my career off as a 17-year-old writing about punk, I didn’t much like it. I liked black music – disco, Motown, soul; I thought that most white music was just a nasty old racket. The establishment has moved from right to left but remains sexist, snobbish and racist But I do like the phrase, implying as it does a refusal to bow down to the establishment. Although we had a Labour government from 1974, it’s fair to say that the establishment of the 1970s was a fusty right-wing thing, sexist and racist and snobbish.

Do you remember those far off misty days of yore, when shocking, startling, amazing, disquieting revelations from the world of Artificial Intelligence only arrived every year or two, or even longer? It was about, ooh, a fortnight ago: a wistful, innocent time of smiling boy scouts, and honey for tea, and vicars in bicycle clips, and all we had to worry about was this funny new thing called GPT3. For about an hour after making that ditty I had that chorus ‘You can’t even hijack planes’ spinning in my mind Since then, things have, to say the least, accelerated.

Podcast fever continues to dominate the political airwaves. The rewards for success are enormous and popular podcasters are able to fill concert halls around the county by delivering a couple of hours of chitchat to willing punters. Since the running costs are minimal, the profits are vast. This explains the gold-rush of media darlings and former politicians thronging into the digital space. Often the shows are billed as acrimonious punch-ups between sworn enemies like George Osborne and Ed Balls or Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell. But the presence of a microphone seems to sweeten the mood and to turn animosity into peace and harmony. Listeners are likely to feel cheated.

Desert Island Discs is 80 years old and to celebrate this milestone the BBC has planned an event unprecedented in the show’s long history. It is also one that will surely have its creator and original presenter, Roy Plomley, spinning in his grave. Desert Island Discs Live will take place at London’s Palladium over three nights later this month with host Lauren Lavern in conversation with celebrity guests Russell T. Davies, Katherine Ryan, Lemn Sissay, Ellie Simmonds, Dara Ó Briain, Sue Perkins ‘and more to be announced’. The whole charm of the show, and the reason for its longevity, is its intimacy If this sounds like your sort of thing then it’s not too late to book – there is, at the time of writing, a whole raft of tickets still available from between £44 and £92.

It’s difficult to remember a time before climate change – a time when our daily discourse, our newspaper front pages, endless movies and TV documentaries, and Al Gore, Greta Thunberg and Sir David Attenborough (Peace Be Upon Him), were not lecturing us, sternly and constantly, about the threat to our planet from the ‘climate emergency’, the melting of the ice caps, the levelling of the Amazon jungle, the failure of the Gulf Stream, the desertification of Spain, and the complete and total cessation of snowfall in Great Britain, apart from the regular occasions when it snows.  In fact, if you are under 30 you may not even be aware that there was a time when we didn’t vex about Anthropogenic Global Warming.