Spectator Life

Before the Sussexes – before the Grabdication was a twinkle in Meghan’s crocodile eye – there was Sarah, Duchess of York; greedy, grasping, grubby Fergie. Some see Diana as when the stiff upper lip of heritage royalty became the trembling lower lip of the new breed. But the Princess of Wales was a teenage virgin with a headful of dreams lured into a marriage in which she was a breeding machine with a man who was still in love with his ex; this would have made any woman with spirit react. No, Diana was a hard worker with an attractive dash of spite – that revenge dress, that three-in-this-marriage quip – which stopped her from presenting herself as an all-round victim.

With the recent news that Kindle and other e-readers are automatically updating Roald Dahl’s books to sanitised versions, an entire era has come to an end for readers like me. Who in future will feel safe buying an electronic copy of anything? Publishers’ plans here may be modest, but the point about the puritan is that their work is never done. Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, George Orwell, Charles Dickens – any one of them feels vulnerable now. If in copyright, the author and their estate can be strong-armed by the publishers; if out of copyright, laying your hands on the right edition will be a minefield. Nor does it seem clear that publishers’ revisions are being done by skilled writers.

Three weeks after that South Park episode and the memes just keep on coming. Despite years of highly articulate fulminating against the preposterous pair by essayists like myself, there’s a feeling that the satirical cartoon was the conclusive blow to the Sussexes' reputation – no well-turned phrase will ever better the glorious awfulness of ‘The Worldwide Privacy Tour’. One of the things that the woke hate most about our lot is the fact that we’re far more amusing. Their natural mode of address is to scold – and scolding and wit are polar opposites. I daresay some clown somewhere has stated that punchlines are probably imperialist.

This, we are told, is a very bad time to be a woman. When young, we're warned that we are sexual prey, privy to a misogynistic ordeal both on the streets and in the sheets, courtesy of the jungle of app-mediated romance. Despite being slaves to the gym and learning to pole dance, we still can’t win. We are locked in a never-ending hell spiral that sees droves of us as young as 18 racing to the plastic surgeon, desperate to fill our faces with Botox and hyaluronic acid in a bid to look sexier, younger, hotter, fitter, less tired and more like the stars of reality TV. Did I mention younger?  And now a new book, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women by Victoria Smith, has arrived.

In May 1962, I was recuperating from a nasty broken leg – the result of a traffic accident in Paris – at my husband’s aunt Margot and uncle Brian’s enchanting cottage about an hour outside of London in Hertfordshire. The Dulantys' cottage, called The Fisheries, was built in the 1820s in the village of Chorleywood, in a Constable-like setting on the bank of the River Chess. I spent the first couple of days mostly on a sofa in the living room, overlooking the painterly scene, enhanced by Brian's peacocks. The three pairs strutted around the property, displaying their gorgeous plumage and screeching as if they were the rightful owners. But on the third day, boredom set in.

Whoever it was that said a picture is worth a thousand words clearly hasn’t read the Daily Telegraph’s ‘Lockdown Files’. After journalist Isabel Oakeshott gave the newspaper access to 2.3 million words worth of WhatsApp messages sent by Matt Hancock during the pandemic, the revelations dominated the news agenda for much of yesterday – with more information set to emerge in the coming days.  The former health secretary gave Oakeshott access to the messages while she ghost-wrote his book about the pandemic. But unluckily for Hancock, if a journalist who disagreed with you on your lockdown policies says she’ll write your Covid memoirs for free, there’s a risk she might not keep all the information you handed over to herself. Who knew!

Sensitivity readers have been busy lately, first rewriting the works of Roald Dahl, and then trimming Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, ostensibly making them less offensive to modern readers. So what will they edit next – and how might they bring it into line with modern mores? Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. MilneA honey-loving bear goes on a macrobiotic diet, and his best friend Eeyore is prescribed anti-depressants. Christopher Robin receives anti-psychotic medication to alleviate the delusion that animals are talking to him.Othello by William ShakespeareA black military commander is tricked into believing that his wife Desdemona has been unfaithful, so they both enter couples' counselling, and he undergoes anger management training.

I was interested to read that the next Joker film has the subtitle ‘Folie à Deux’ – a lovely phrase not used enough these days. When shrinks talk about folie à deux (also known as Lasègue-Falret Syndrome, after the 19th-century French psychiatrists who discovered it) they mean a ‘shared delusional disorder’ in which symptoms of an irrational belief are transmitted from one individual to another – including folie en famille or folie à plusieurs ('madness of several’), sometimes leading to violence and even murder.

'As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a TikTok sensation.' This is not – blessedly – how Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis begins. But almost exactly a century after his death, the Bohemian writer would be astonished to find that not only had his friend and literary executor Max Brod disobeyed his instructions and published works of his that included The Trial and The Castle, but that he had become, of all things, a social media sensation. It was reported recently that Kafka has become the unlikeliest of sex symbols.

Not since the pursuit of Peter Rabbit around Mr McGregor’s garden has rural drama been writ so large. From behind the wheel of his Lamborghini tractor, Jeremy Clarkson’s face crumples as the nine-ton machine rolls back over a field mouse – only to erupt into joy as the mouse emerges unscathed from beneath the wheel. A decade ago, the Top Gear host was fending off outrage after sharing on Twitter an image of a rodent squashed by the show’s film crew. Today, the petrolhead is a man transformed, his compassion for nature and enthusiasm for rural life lighting up our screens in Clarkson’s Farm, the Amazon Prime series documenting his attempts to run a 1,000-acre farm in the Cotswolds.

It happens a couple of times a week: in parks, usually; sometimes outside shops, on Tube trains or in pubs. ‘What kind of dog is he?’ they’ll ask. I answer: ‘Bearded collie crossed with a greyhound which comes out looking like a deerhound but is actually a lurcher.’ But this is pointedly preceded by: ‘She’s a…’ I don’t like to be rude when strangers are being interested and congenial, but I feel compelled to quietly make the point that the dog they’re expressing interest in is not a he but a she.  News emerged this month that God might be becoming gender neutral.

Harry and Meghan have yet to publicly speak about last week’s episode of South Park, presumably because they don’t have the staff left to formulate a press release. But California sources claim that Meghan has spent the past few days 'upset and overwhelmed' about how she was portrayed. If you’ve read anything about Harry and Meghan over the past three years, you’d think the pair would be delighted with how South Park parodied them. The entire episode, titled 'The Worldwide Privacy Tour', gives them enough fodder to moan for a few more books… or Netflix documentaries… or Spotify podcasts. Meghan can cry about how she is a victim of misogyny and Harry can claim that this was all a narrative concocted by the big, bad press.

New experiences are always good. Meeting new people is always good. This is what I tell myself when my friend Rae invites me to go speed dating. At the age of 42. ‘Am I not too old?’ I ask her. She reassures me that I am not, but I have my doubts. A woman old enough to remember landlines is surely not who the eligible young gentlemen of Kent are looking to meet on a night out in a bar. But Rae is running the event as a fundraiser, so if I spend my night talking to a series of youngsters who think Miley Cyrus was the first to sing ‘Like A Prayer’, it's all in a good cause. On the train there, I suddenly realise that this isn't actually the worst thing that could happen. I might bump into someone I know.

The other day, in a bar in London frequented by students of the infamously ‘woke’ Goldsmiths University, I met a young white cis-male who said that the English were to blame for his inherited trauma because of their historic oppression of the Irish. The only problem was, he wasn’t Irish – he was American and so were his parents and probably grandparents. ‘Pain lasts a long time,’ he assured me. What struck me about this encounter was not that it was typical of my Gen Z generation but that it was so obviously cringe-inducing – a sort of hackneyed pick-up line. Another student at the same bar – sporting an orange mullet and a thong as a T-shirt – tried to convince me my age was a social construct.

The secret of any great sitcom is the delicate balance of sit and com. Mess the 'sit' bit up and you lose the 'com'. Del Boy without Nelson Mandela House is as unthinkable as Alan Partridge without his 'grief hole' (aka the Linton Travel Tavern), which is why both of these characters eventually came unstuck. Sending the Grace Brothers' employees on holiday to Costa Plonka in the 1977 Are You Being Served? feature-length comedy fell flat because, devoid of petty department store politics, the characters had no reason to exist – thus audiences felt cheated.  Remove tightly written characters from their uncomfortable surroundings and viewers stop caring.

Hearing about the death of Burt Bacharach at the age of 94, I thought of one word: maestro. The word is variously defined as ‘a master, usually in an art’ (Merriam-Webster) or ‘a man who is very skilled at playing or conducting’ (Cambridge), but my favourite is the beautiful simplicity of the Longman definition: ‘Someone who can do something very well.’ The good (Brian Wilson: ‘He was a hero of mine and very influential on my work… he was a giant’), the bad (Billy Corgan: ‘A titan of beautiful and effortless song’) and the ugly (Mick Hucknall: ‘Farewell, genius’) of the music business spoke as one on this loss, with my favourite post coming from Noel Gallagher: ‘RIP Maestro. It was a pleasure to have known you.

It was announced today that Lilt, the drink with the ‘totally tropical taste’, is being discontinued three years before its 50th anniversary. The drink will be rebranded as part of the ‘Fanta family’. A senior representative from Coca Cola, the parent company, has sought to ‘reassure Lilt’s loyal fanbase that absolutely nothing has changed when it comes to the iconic taste of the drink they know and love’. Well, we aren’t reassured. How can these people expect us loyal Lilt drinkers to trust them when they didn’t even have the decency to give us advanced warning of their plans and time to come to terms with this shock – and, more importantly, stockpile? Lilt matters.

After Prince Harry’s first date with the future Duchess of Sussex, he repaired to a friend’s house off the King’s Road. ‘Out came the tequila,’ he recalls in his much-discussed autobiography, Spare. ‘Out came the weed. We drank and smoked and watched… Inside Out.’ Meghan, however, interrupted his stoned reverie by Facetiming him, and immediately asked: ‘Are you watching cartoons?’ Harry replied: ‘No. I mean, yeah. It’s… Inside Out.’ It was, he recalls, ‘good weed, dude’. The quality of the Disney film, he doesn’t mention – though his pointed double use of ellipses around its title suggests it perhaps has some significance in relation to this new girlfriend.

A transgender woman and a non-binary person dressed as Satan walk into a bar. That’s not the beginning of a bad joke, but the defining performance of the 65th Grammy awards, held in Los Angeles on Sunday.  You may have seen the clips. The singer Sam Smith wore what appeared to be a terrible Halloween costume: red high heels and a red hat with devil horns. He clomped around the stage performing 'Unholy' with Kim Petras, who was in a cage surrounded by flames and whip-wielding dominatrices.

Field sex is, I believe, an experience that unites those from all walks of life. Whether it was a drunken fumble, a discreet teenage quickie hidden from your parents or a planned act to inject some spice into your waning marriage, plenty of us have felt the vulnerability of walking to the car with a muddy back, anxiously wondering if we’d been spotted by a dog walker.  Admittedly, field sex etiquette isn’t something that I’ve put much thought into. But after Prince Harry’s older woman (two years older to be exact) laid bare her five-minute rendezvous with the adolescent royal, it got me thinking about the right way to do it.  The California-based prince is getting a bit of stick over this story.

The hashtag 'gym creep' now has more than 37.3 million views on TikTok. Honestly, I’ve watched hundreds of these videos and the only weird behaviour I can spot in any of the clips is from the women recording the unsuspecting men while they work out. 'Watch this creep,' the lady will say as a confused male just happens to glance at the camera that’s been shoved in front of him. Scandalous! Gina Love is one of these women. The TikTokker, whose feed mainly consists of her trying on different shades of lipgloss, went viral after posting a video of her doing deadlifts, supposedly catching out one of these so-called #gymcreeps. 'Watch this creep come over to my personal bubble while doing Romanian deadlifts,' Love wrote.