Spectator Life

It’s a painful process many of us must go through: culling a big book collection, amassed over a lifetime, before moving home. You know it makes sense, as you’ve struggled to house all your books – thousands of them – and they include quite a few you frankly wouldn’t miss. This chore awaits me at some point in the near future, but I do know that my 20-volume Encyclopedia Americana and its sister publication, the 20-volume children’s encyclopaedia called The Book of Knowledge, will be coming with me. Everything about its concept and design was aimed at fostering curiosity They were published by The Grolier Society of New York in 1957.

Of all the places to witness the circus parade of modern French history, you can do a lot worse than the tiny town of Espalion, in the beautiful department of L’Aveyron, in the south of France. Because there are few destinations more unchanged than L’Aveyron, and this extremely French place is where I saw the opening of the French Olympic Games, in an al fresco brasserie. And this is where I sensed a weird unease. No one booed, no one catcalled, no one mocked. They sat there, sipping cold bière, and at times they vehemently cheered and laughed. Yet they also appeared a touch confused, and, I suspect, this is because they thought – like the rest of the world – ‘this is quite often a load of bollocks’.

I was in S&M relationships from my teenage years to somewhere in my naughty forties. Why did I go in for such strange antics? Damned if I know. Is it because I wanted to be different? Because I didn’t want a calm, cosy, devoted relationship, like my parents had? Because when I thought of romantic and sexual love, I thought of volatility, and that seemed hard to reconcile with vanilla sex? Or did I just conform to the type that also marks out many male masochists – I was ‘powerful’ in my realm, excellent at my job, and was curious to find out what being powerless felt like? (This last one, in the face of what I know now about how many girls and women experience powerlessness throughout the world, makes me feel shame in a way that very few things do.

Few bluesmen have matched the success of John Mayall, ‘the godfather of British blues’, who died on Monday aged 90 at his home in California. In a career spanning more than six decades, he made 50-odd albums with an ever-changing incarnation of his band, the Bluesbreakers. His proselytisation of black American artists like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Otis Rush, gave these legends a new audience this side of the Atlantic. BB King is said to have remarked that, were it not for Mayall, ‘a lot of us black musicians in America would still be catchin’ the hell that we caught long before.’ Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, founded in the early Sixties, was a carousel for some of the world’s most notable blues and rock musicians, many of whom went on to greatness.

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.