Spectator Life

An increasing number of young Brits are single. Many of these people don’t want to be single. They want to be in a relationship. But, for some reason or other, they’re having no luck. Why? What’s holding them back? A recent study shed light on the factors that contribute to involuntary singlehood in Britain and beyond. The researchers, two psychologists based in Cyprus, explored the impact of sexual functioning, body weight, and whether or not an individual had children from a previous relationship, and how all three affect a person’s relationship status. The findings were published in Evolutionary Psychological Science.

The digital world, I’m realising, is a bit of a racket. Recently most of my iTunes library disappeared from my iPhone, and I just don’t know if I can be bothered to go through all the different hoops, portals, queueing systems and long forgotten passwords to get them back again. I’ve also had the repeated experience of trying to view a film I’ve downloaded on Amazon, only to get that little square in the middle of the screen telling me that the player’s having issues at the moment, and would I, could I try again later? Meanwhile, the CDs and DVDs reproach me from my shelves like an abandoned spouse. ‘We were once your rock,’ they remind me, ‘And you traded us for tech-tinsel, a piece of cyber-skirt. How are you feeling now?

This month’s crop of trivia includes a secret about the Tube map, the US state that’s named after Elizabeth I and something Jimi Hendrix had in common with Winston Churchill…  1 November 1947 – birth of Nick Owen. The television presenter and Luton Town fan has a lounge named after him at the club’s ground – to which he was once refused entry. ‘You can’t go in,’ said a steward. ‘It’s packed.’ Not being a ‘don’t you know who I am?’ type, Owen simply walked away. He heard someone say to the steward: ‘Don’t you know who that is?’ ‘Haven’t a clue,’ came the reply. ‘His name,’ the steward was told, ‘is in bloody great capitals above your head.’ 2 November 1889 – North and South Dakota are granted statehood in the US.

This isn’t easy for me. In fact, it is perhaps the most difficult public admission I’ve ever made. I’m worried about how people will react, how friends and colleagues might reconsider their opinion of me after reading this. But I can’t keep it locked up secretly inside me any longer. I have to admit it. I’m starting to quite like Phil Collins. This isn’t a fully fledged commitment – it’s not something I’d die on a hill for. But I’m unmistakably starting to warm to the chirpy, balding balladeer. This is particularly shocking because for at least a decade, from the early eighties to early nineties, he was, for me, the personification of everything that was wrong with the world.

Some see Bryan Johnson as a human guinea pig with the charisma of ChatGPT. Others, meanwhile, see him as a man on a very important mission. He’s not just in it for himself, they say, he’s in it for the betterment of humanity. For the uninitiated, Johnson is officially the world’s most measured human. As per the 46-year-old’s YouTube channel, which boasts 548,000 subscribers, ‘Johnson has achieved metabolic health equal to the top 1.5 per cent of 18 year olds, inflammation 66 per cent lower than the average 10 year old, and reduced his speed of aging by the equivalent of 31 years.’ Worth an estimated $400 million, Johnson is, by his own admission, an odd individual. Every morning, without fail, he rises at the ungodly hour of 4.30am.

Undressing. Getting one’s kit off, whether for the lads or the ladies, depending on one’s bent. Disrobing, divesting, denuding. Slipping into something more comfortable. Giving one an eyeful. Getting ‘em off. Once we put away childish things and cease frolicking as nature intended, stripping off becomes a whole new ballgame. In our newly found state of youthful beauty, we may discover that flashing a bit of what one’s momma gave one can evoke a level of interest in others which one’s callow utterances cannot quite manage. If big-bodied nobodies are stripping off for strangers, how could we expect entertainers to keep their kit on? But equally, it’s important to know when one has reached an age – or a weight – when one should put it away. Cover it up.

Matthew Perry, who died yesterday, was the funniest of the Friends – and the saddest. 'What must it be like to not be crippled by fear and self-loathing?' his character, Chandler Bing, asked. It seems Perry never quite figured out the answer. Chandler was a brilliant comic creation – and Perry, a melancholic clown, perfectly suited to the part. Perry stood out among his Friends castmates with his impeccable comic timing and the unique cadence with which he delivered his lines.  To most of the world, he will always be Chandler – the brilliant, charming, sad-funny clown But he was insecure and addictive. Perry once said that, when the live studio audience of Friends didn’t laugh at one of his jokes 'I felt like I was gonna die'.

In 1979, I was 11 years old, and I had a quite remarkable teacher. Don’t worry, though – this isn’t going to be one of those anodyne paeans to an inspirational educator that the Department for Education use in their ads to lure people into teaching. In fact, if the lady I’ll refer to here as Mrs G were somehow to be reincarnated and placed in front of a Year 6 classroom of today, Ofsted would have her frogmarched out after about 20 minutes.  She once sent me to the local parade of shops to buy a box of Tampax  Mrs G was a fearsome sight – in her late 40s, as broad as she was tall, squeezed into shirt and slacks, with closely shorn curls. I have no photographic evidence, so I’m relying on memory here. She seemed enormous, but then so does everything to a child.

Becoming proficient in a so-called ‘easy’ language (for English speakers, French is relatively easy) often takes hundreds of hours; a difficult language (Mandarin anyone?) takes several thousand. That’s good for language teachers, but not so good for the learners.  Language teaching today is where medicine was in the 18th century Even after putting in all those hours of following an expensive course, many people never become proficient. How can so much time and effort amount to such little progress? Language learning happens inside the brain, making the processes involved difficult to observe and understand – that’s why language teaching today is where medicine was in the 18th century, and why, all too often, language lessons are associated with failure.

At 1.17 p.m. on 1 February 2019, a daytime bolide exploded over Vinales, Cuba, showering down meteorites on the local villagers. Seasoned meteor hunters flew the stones back to the Tuscon Gem Show in a now-defunct Inn Suites where, from my display room, I watched enviously as they broke the stones apart with a hammer and began to sell them for $100 per gram. The hunters staved off competition by inventing wild stories about how the army had taken over, confiscating the meteorites and jailing hunters trying to take meteorites out of Cuba. But a few days later, a Russian hunting team brought 50kg to the show, selling them at $10 per gram. Soon after that, the locals flooded the market, flying the meteorites from Cuba to Panama to Florida, selling 20kg lots for as cheap as $1 per gram.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes (a third cousin of Ralph, since you ask) has written a book about Lawrence of Arabia. He feels an affinity with him: he too has led Arabs in fighting, in Sir Ranulph’s case, for the Sultan of Oman. ‘I’d been in Arabia, leading Arabs against the Marxist rebels. In Lawrence’s day, the British were fighting the Germans and the Turks’.   ‘It’s my DNA. My ancestors did lots of travel in new places’ The circumstances differed. ‘Lawrence had camels and was dealing with a huge body of men; I had six open-topped Land Rovers with two machine guns and I led 30 men; a mixture of Belushis and Oman Arabs and Zanzibars. I felt about the men as a family.’ What does he make of Lawrence’s extraordinary career? ‘It mystified me’, he says.

‘Excuse me please, would you mind moving your bag so I can sit down?’ I asked. He took a slug from his can of lager, looked me in the eye and said no. Picture the scene: the London Underground, steaming hot, a crowded carriage, a long day spent in heels, and a spot of sciatica. Before me was a muscular, able-bodied man, probably in his twenties. I didn’t ask for his seat – I politely asked for his suitcase’s seat. I thought he was joking. But he looked at me, unsmiling. ‘What, really?’ I asked. ‘This is a priority seat for luggage,’ he told me. He was on a priority seat for inconsiderate oafs. ‘This is a priority seat for luggage,’ he told me. He was on a priority seat for inconsiderate oafs.

In the early 1980s, I was a young teenager being drawn into the small music scene of a provincial town. The moment was post-punk – bands like Joy Division, The Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen were driving my interest – but I was also fascinated by the punk movement that had immediately preceded it. One of the enduring origin-story legends of punk, frequently mentioned in the music press articles I was then devouring, was that it had been kickstarted when Lenny Kaye, later the guitarist in the Patti Smith Group, curated (as we’d say now) a compilation album of lo-fi 1960s American garage bands called Nuggets.

Happy Birthday, Disney. A hundred years ago today, Walt and his brother Roy formed the Disney Brothers’ Studio to produce a series of short films based on Alice in Wonderland, a successor to Walt’s original Laugh-O-Gram studio. It helped shape the American imagination and transformed the art of animation. If you meet anyone who actually saw the original Snow White in the cinema – as the late Stewart Steven told me – you’ll find they recall being scared out of their wits by the scene where Snow White runs through the forest with eyes and groping hands following her. Actually, there’s an awful lot to scare the viewer in Snow White. And no one has ever bettered ‘Hi Ho, Hi Ho’, as an animation melody.

Sometimes, the amazing crassness of television can still take your breath away, even from the longest-in-the-tooth viewer. Sky News has a correspondent reporting live from Jerusalem, in the midst of the worst pogrom since the second world war. On Tuesday evening he broke off from bringing details of the mass murder of babies in a kibbutz and the slaughter of ravers. ‘Let’s get some news away from here now and it is breaking news… that the presenter Holly Willoughby has told ITV that she will not return to host This Morning’. BREAKING: Holly Willoughby says she will not return to This Morning. In a social media post making the announcement the presenter says “I now feel I have to make this decision for me and my family”.👉 https://t.

A lonely microphone. A sound system that would have been impressive in the late 1990s. The smell of athlete’s foot and the contents of a Nobby’s Nuts packet. A deranged dog. Three privately educated members of a punk band call ‘SKiN FuK!’ arguing with the bartender. The stale atmosphere of regret and faded dreams mixed in with hope for a brighter tomorrow. It can only be one thing: Tuesday open mic night. ‘This is a scene I wrote a few weeks ago. It’s from the perspective of a baby being born I’ve been to more open mic nights than I’ve had pleasant dreams. They just seem to happen to me. And they can happen anywhere. I’ll be sitting in a knackered pub, minding my business, when the clipboard comes out.

There’s nothing new about Rishi Sunak’s reported proposals to phase out smoking in Britain. His plan has been borrowed from New Zealand’s former leader Jacinda Ardern, whose shamefully illiberal legacy includes the complete illegalisation of tobacco sales to those born after 1 January 2009.    There’s nothing progressive about it, either. The Anglosphere’s elite war on tobacco is at least 400 years old. It can be traced back to James I in 1604, and his A Counterblaste to Tobacco, a sanctimonious treatise in which he denounced the new-world leaf ‘blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.

Summer is now officially over and who laments its passing? Some may rhapsodise about the period between June and September, but for many of us, it is a hiatus and trial, the period of the year we most dread. It’s the bill for autumn and winter, the season we’d live better without.   The pavements of cities seem to fizz and reek, your feet balloon in work shoes, the underground turns into a cattle truck I cannot understand why so many people like summer. It unites some truly awful things: nocturnally whining mosquitoes, hot, sleepless nights, oozing sweat, high blood pressure, and above all, bright, unforgiving light, so you feel you’re constantly being observed in some bizarre lab experiment by hostile scientists.

Before the accusations of being a Bad Feminist start, can I say that I am inclined to believe the women who claim to have been sexually assaulted and raped by Russell Brand. Nevertheless, I found another of the complaints about him featured in the Dispatches documentary – that sexual partners would telephone Brand's employees ‘in tears’ after being ‘treated poorly’ – somewhat trivialising of a serious situation. Insult is never the same as injury, especially in the arena of sex. The problem with shagging culture is that young women in particular find that casual sex is rarely casual and that catching feelings is common Look at Brand. He’s vile. You can tell he smells.

In case you were under the apprehension that ‘Karen’ is simply an attractive name popularly given to girl babies in the early 1960s (my best friend as a child was called Karen, and there were three more in our year at my sink-school comprehensive) I’ve got news for you. To quote dictionary.com: Karen is a pejorative slang term for an obnoxious, angry, entitled, and often racist middle-aged white woman who uses her privilege to get her way or police other people’s behaviours. As featured in memes, Karen is generally stereotyped as having a blonde bob haircut, asking to speak to retail and restaurant managers to voice complaints or make demands.

On one of summer’s rare dry days, I spent an evening watching The Rakes Progress at Glyndebourne’s Festival Opera. I’m a big opera fan and have travelled to Italy, Spain and Germany to see some fantastic performances but had never felt the urge to go to Glyndebourne. I am not sure why. I guess the idea of all that pomp and dressing up, instead of just listening and enjoying the performance, felt a bit up itself and initially put me off. Plus, this performance was in English, and I always assumed Italian and German operas would flow more easily in song. It was, as it turned out, completely worth dusting off my black tie. It was an outstanding performance and an English aria is just as thrilling as any in Italian or German.