Spectator Life

I love aphorisms. As a kid I used to pore over my parents’ book of quotations, relishing its gems and treasures like the defiant wit of Palmerston. ‘Die my dear doctor? That’s the last thing I shall do.’ ‘Sweater: garment worn by a child when its mother is feeling chilly’ The beauty of these sayings lies in their blend of adroitness, concision and wordplay. Here’s Tom Stoppard at his best: ‘what free love is free of is love.’ George Bernard Shaw’s remark, ‘we learn from history that we learn nothing from history’, contains a trivial insight: humans are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors. But he turns it into a timeless motto by using two related but subtly different meanings of ‘to learn.

‘She’s the kind of girl you wish lived next door, but she’s never going to,’ said the photographer David Bailey, speaking about the supermodel Kate Moss, who turned 50 this week. Moss has for three decades been a magnet for tabloid gossip and a muse to culturally influential people.Marc Quinn made sculptures out of her in 18-carat gold and she often sat for Lucian Freud. Even when flagrantly selling out – see for instance, her recent campaign for Diet Coke – she somehow manages to keep her cool Envied by some and lusted after by many, Moss was throughout her modelling career a rebel with a single cause: to have a good time. ‘I remember my mum telling me that you can’t have fun all the time, and I still hold my answer true today when I told her, “But, why not?”.

Funny to think what our taxes go on. I wouldn’t have had ‘the invention of a deity’ on my 2024 government expenditure bingo card, but here we are. The National Maritime Museum, which last year received £20 million from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, has unveiled a statue of a ‘god-like protector of all migrants’ to sit next to a bust of Horatio Nelson. The pair will engage in a pre-recorded conversation in which the gender-neutral god praises the ‘resilience’ of those ‘escaping war’ while moaning about our national hero’s ‘fancy medals and uniform’.  We find a sort of syncretic religion in the National Maritime Museum’s migrant god  There’s plenty to laugh at in this commission.

In our celebrity-obsessed culture, the EGOT establishes someone as an all-out legend. Achieving an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and a Tony is the Hollywood-Broadway equivalent of a quadrathlon. Only 19 people have ever won all four awards and the feat is usually accomplished over several decades. Articles run every award season advising punters of the stars who are ‘nearly there’ – Elton John has finally made it, receiving an Emmy for a streaming performance of his farewell concert. The most efficient route to an EGOT is to write a beloved stage musical which is then turned into a film There is some contrast, however, between the public perception of the EGOT and what it takes to actually win. For example, you might assume that the inclusion of the Grammy implies musical acumen.

Can I have a Legend of Aviation award please? I deserve it for the time I flew Aeroflot and lived to tell the tale. Then there was the time I flew from Denmark to Amsterdam, taking off from a snowbound runway in a twin-propped plane which looked like something out of Biggles; that was pretty hairy, too. But alas, I guess there wasn’t enough room on the list of this year’s honours, to be presented in a Beverley Hills ceremony compered by John Travolta. Prince Harry made the cut, along with Buzz Aldrin, but it seems I’ll have to wait until next year. Harry and Meghan have achieved something useful: they have exposed once and for all the sheer vacuity of the awards industry Yes, Prince Harry really is on the list – much to my puzzlement.

Shropshire was named this week as an unlikely entrant in the top ten global dream travel destinations for 2024 – alongside more predictable contenders like Mauritius. This news received extensive media coverage, most of which featured serene, summery images of Ironbridge, the Georgian engineering marvel that is the county’s most recognisable attraction. There was something wonderfully British about the fact that, at the very moment this story appeared, Ironbridge itself was at the centre of flood defence efforts to stop the swollen River Severn bursting its banks.

Hooray, I thought. There’s a new season of The Tourist. I remember liking that, I thought. It was that thing with the bloke in Australia, wasn’t it? And I was all set to settle down for a good binge, when I realised that I had almost literally no idea what had happened in the first season. This is a personal grumble, but I’d bet dollars to donuts I’m not the only one in this position.  One thing I knew is, it was confusing. There was a bloke in, yes, Australia, who had had a bump on the head and didn’t know who he was, except he was Jamie Dornan. I remember there was a bit with some LSD, and recalling the plot was quite like that too. Someone was trying to blow him up (or maybe he was trying to blow someone else up).

I’ve always admired Israeli women. Though I didn’t see any in the flesh before my first trip to the Promised Land 20 years ago, at Sunday School I far preferred the complex women of the Old Testament – Deborah the judge, Yael the assassin, Ruth the first philo-Semite – to the repenting hookers and grieving mothers of the New. The book of Exodus revolves around the actions of five women; the Talmud teaches that ‘the Jewish people were redeemed from Egypt because of the merit of the righteous women of that generation’.

She was an unlikely contender for fame from the outset, with a pub singer voice and a nose so  prominent she would later have it surgically reduced. But, with her Scouser-next-door persona and trademark cropped hair, Cilla Black was in the right place at the right time: she rode the popular wave created by Beatlemania and its attendant appetite for all things Liverpudlian. This led to national stardom as a singer. Then, when her pop career waned, instead of disappearing into obscurity, Cilla managed to relaunch herself into a spectacular second career as one of the biggest names at the lighter end of TV light entertainment. Now, some nine years after her death, Cilla has achieved her most unlikely success yet – by becoming a household name among gen Z.

In 1973, everyone loved David Bowie. Album buyers had put Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Hunky Dory high in the charts, while singles buyers had bought similar success for ‘Drive In Saturday’, ‘Life on Mars’ and ‘Sorrow’. Then right in the middle of this, he released ‘The Laughing Gnome’. In truth, he probably didn’t. It was a twee little novelty song recorded six years earlier, featuring Bowie duetting with the eponymous gnome. Nobody could believe that Bowie had recorded it – less still that he’d written it – but the more you know about him, the less surprising it seems. In fact, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ says more about David Bowie than anything else he did. It was early evidence that he would do anything to be famous.

It’s hard to believe that only five years ago the word/acronym AI was barely seen outside the science pages, and even then solely in the most speculative way: as something that might happen, in a few decades, maybe, if you’re the dreamy type. But also maybe not. Now there literally isn’t a day that goes by without some new AI revelation/epiphany/scare story.

Christmas, we are often told, is rich in traditions invented by the Victorians (or even later), and it was a rather austere affair before Charles Dickens. But while it is true that the Victorians gave us many of our Christmas traditions in their current form, English Christmas traditions before the Victorian era were simply different, not non-existent – and they were every bit as exuberant as what came after, if not more so. One of those long-lost pre-Victorian traditions of Christmas is mumming; something which was as synonymous with Christmas 200 years ago as a fat man in a red suit with a proclivity for housebreaking is today.

I’ve never been keen on pagans. They strike me as attention seekers with no actual merits to boast of except saying that they don’t believe in organised religion – something most of us got over at 15. Claiming to be a pagan is also a way of hinting that you’re having better sex than everybody else, whereas the reality is rather like that of those alleged ‘witches’ who oft appeared in the News of the World when I was a child. Middle-aged suburban swingers sporting pendulous breasts and maternal thighs, posing coyly inside a pentagram – and the women were just as bad.

It can’t be any fun to have lung cancer as Dame Esther Rantzen does; I watched my father die from mesothelioma over the best part of a decade, and in the last couple of years this once tall, handsome, athletic man was more or less a tumour on legs. But I recall the zest with which he greeted each day, and the pleasure he took in seeing the seasons change. Once I said to him, in a fit of drunken sentiment, ‘Dad, if it ever gets too much… you do have a lot of pills, don’t you?’ He looked at me, shocked, then called to my mum while winking at me, ‘Get in ‘ere quick, Bette – our daughter wants to kill me!

Shane MacGowan spent much of his life in pubs, working in them, drinking in them, performing in them – even living in a couple. He would have turned 66 on Christmas Day, state retirement age, so he was only three and a half weeks short of reaching a finishing line of sorts when he died at the end of November.  Perhaps if he’d just stuck to pints, he might have made it. Guinness is, after all, good for you. But there were also spirits. I can’t imagine quite how many shots he drank over seven decades. And it was seven: MacGowan claimed to have had his first Guinness aged four, his first whisky at eight. Drugs soon followed. And then, later, everyone wanted to buy him a drink.

Come on, it’s 6 o’clock and time for bed my mother said, there is a lot still to do before Christmas Day. Now, hang up your stocking at the end of your bed, put out biscuits on the edge of the bath for the reindeer while I ask daddy to leave a glass of warming whisky for Santa Claus, don’t forget the letter that you have written to him too. So the trap was set and off to sleep I went dreaming of toy trains, Meccano and even a penknife The long run-up to Christmas always seemed to start at the end of October with the clocks going back an hour. The two remaining months before Christmas were an extremely busy time for a small boy; presents had to be made for one’s mother and father plus any relations coming to stay for the festive period, not forgetting decorations.

Lord Lebedev, the proprietor of The Evening Standard, has been using the paper to wage his own 'major inquiry' into free speech. ‘I’ve donned my body armour and I am ready,’ he wrote in an article launching the campaign. One of Lebedev’s free-speech interviewees was Azealia Banks, the ranty singer. According to Lord Leb, Banks occupies ‘an increasingly rarefied place in the pop pantheon: that of a woman who says it like it is.’  She certainly made good on that claim. In a post-interview social media tirade she called Lebedev by turns ‘a homosexual,’ ‘a Gay Party Boy,’ ‘Evegghead cornball’ and a ‘wannabe James Bond but really serving nothing more than Austin Powers.

My family is from Canning Town in London’s East End. One thing’s for sure, we never curated Christmas, never had it with bells on and we looked forward to the next one the moment it was over. There were essential elements: winkles on Christmas Eve, with my dad rather solemnly getting out the winkle pins. Strange little molluscs, Winkles. You go through all that work ‘winkling’ them out of their shells, add some vinegar and pepper and then they’re gone, barely touching the side of your mouth. Christmas Eve was the focus of the party. Front door open, everyone welcome Of course, there was always the traditional knees-up.

At the age when most children are being read The Tailor of Gloucester or ’Twas the Night before Christmas, my father took a very different approach to bedtime stories during Advent, and read me my first M.R. James story. I can’t have been much more than five years old, and he was probably a few sherries to the wind, but I can recall with the utmost clarity the sheer, tingling chill of being exposed to Number 13 at such a formative stage.

The flamboyant, ridiculous mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor is considering a run for the Irish presidency. ‘Potential competition if I run,’ he tweeted yesterday, along with a picture of Gerry Adams, Bertie Ahern and Enda Kenny, the three septuagenarian current favourites for the job. ‘Each with unbreakable ties to their individual parties politics... Or me, 35. Young, active, passionate, fresh skin in the game. I listen. I support. I adapt. I have no affiliation/bias/favoritism toward any party. They would genuinely be held to account regarding the current sway of public feeling. I’d even put it all to vote. There’d be votes every week to make sure. I can fund. It would not be me in power as President, people of Ireland. It would be me and you.