Spectator Life

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.

Not since the then-couple Johnny Depp and Amber Heard released a pained, hostage-style video in 2016 apologising for bringing their dogs into Australia illegally has there been such an awkward public statement by A-list stars. Now is the turn of actors Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher over the weekend. In the minute-long video, they half-apologise for their statements of support for their erstwhile That 70s Show co-star Danny Masterson, who has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after being convicted of raping two women. https://twitter.com/MilaKunisv/status/1700616135408763257?

I first became aware of the London Sperm Bank after seeing an advert on Instagram. ‘Help someone achieve their dream of a family. Become a sper­m donor and get compensated up to £420 a month’. Why not get paid to do something that I was going to do anyway in my spare time? In the past, I’ve donated blood and have looked into giving bone marrow, so sperm donation just seemed like another form of biological socialism: from each according to his ability, to each according to her need. But I also felt I might be hedging an existential bet. If the name of the game is to multiply, then donating my DNA seemed like a rational genetic insurance policy.

The cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason recently expressed a preference for ‘folk tunes’ at the Last Night of the Proms over the singing of Rule Britannia! – and, whatever one may think of jettisoning Thomas Arne’s celebrated anthem of British liberty, Kanneh-Mason’s suggestion raises the question of what exactly English folk music is. England is not the first country that springs to mind when we think of a nation for whom traditional music is central to identity. The importance of folk music to the self-understanding of many countries in Eastern Europe is so prominent that we encounter their traditional melodies and instruments annually in more or less embarrassing entries to the Eurovision Song Contest.

Microdosing, the practice of taking a very small amount of a mood-enhancing drug, has been happening in America for a long time. But in the UK, microdosing was, until recently, a fringe activity. Now everyone – teachers, techies, lawyers, hedge fund managers and hipsters – is doing it. Microdosing is moderation in pursuit of moderation. It’s the perfect leisure activity for our health and safety obsessed times It seems like half of London is stoned on something. You’re having a perfectly normal conversation with someone who seems perfectly normal – and then they mention, in passing, that they’ve been microdosing either mushrooms, ketamine, LSD or some other weird drug.

This month’s dose of trivia and anecdote sees a Yorkshireman insulting an England cricketer, the young Beyoncé training her voice in an unusual way, and Keith Floyd taking revenge on a table of diners who’d made one of his waitresses cry... All three female Prime Ministers of the UK have had the same initials, albeit one of them with the order reversed 1 September 1969 – Muammar Gaddafi seizes power in Libya. He subsequently abolished all military ranks above his own one of Colonel, because he was fearful of people launching a coup against him. 2 September 1666 – The Great Fire of London breaks out. It famously started in a baker’s shop on Pudding Lane, which might lead you to assume that the lane was named after the shop.

The French, according to the enshrined belief system that I grew up with, are work-shy layabouts. They never turn up for a job on time as they’re too busy drinking wine for breakfast. And once they do finally start, they break off almost immediately for a two-hour lunch with more wine before dithering about a bit and then finishing early. If anyone threatens these unproductive practices, they blockade ports or set fire to lorries full of lambs.  We British, by contrast, have work ethic running through our veins. We fill every unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, as Kipling put it. They ridicule us as a nation of shopkeepers, but this is mere jealousy – we are strivers while they are hopelessly lazy shirkers.

When I was a young woman in the 1980s, videotape was the new-fangled entertainment form; on evenings in, my second husband and I liked nothing better than to whack in a VHS and record something off the the telly. We felt like we were in The Jetsons – though seen with a modern eye, we must have looked more like The Flintstones. We were particularly fond of Duran Duran videos – and of a philosophical debate which was first aired in 1986 on the then-sophisticated Channel 4, now most famous for showcasing a transvestite playing the piano with their penis. The debate was part of the Modernity And Its Discontents series, this particular episode being called ‘The Tough And The Tender’ in which Michael Ignatieff interviewed the philosophers Ernest Gellner and Charles Taylor.

It’s generally not hard to find a thoroughly depressing, joyless, plaintive, whiny, doom-laden, monotoned, earnest, life-sucking, soul-less, uninspiring, hapless and gloom-inducing article in the leftier British press. In fact, I sometimes wonder if the editors have sacked all their journalists, installed ChatGPT, and simply sit there, sipping Waitrose crémant, as they punch in evermore negative and melancholy prompts like 'write an article about why something (gardening, cake, quantum engineering) is racist' or 'do a travel piece on the joys of zero emission yurting in Macclesfield'.

If you were born after 1970 and don’t remember punk, you’ve almost certainly been misled by people who do. You’ve probably been told – through countless paean-to-punk retrospectives, documentaries and newspaper culture pages ­– that it was a glorious, anarchic revolution that swept all before it. I can tell you first-hand that it wasn’t. Punk was as middle-class as a Labrador in a Volvo. It was invariably the posher kids who abandoned Pink Floyd, Genesis and Yes Far from being hugely influential, punk was a passing fad that made little impression on the charts and left the lasting legacy of a spent firework.

Robbie Robertson, the revered songwriter who died last week aged 80, was an immensely important composer. Over six decades in the entertainment business, Robertson worked alongside a small galaxy of musicians and singers, most famously Bob Dylan, who probably spoke for many when he said the Toronto-born artist’s death came as ‘shocking news’ for those of them still left. When he died, Robertson had just completed his fourteenth film composition for Scorsese America’s ‘traditions, tragedies and joys’ were Robertson’s lyrical trade, according to his most frequent collaborator of the past 45 years, the film director Martin Scorsese. In a long conversation I had with Robertson in 1988, he told me that he thought of his recordings less as music and more as literature.

‘It’s like the Olympics of performing’ says Los Angeles-based comedian Greta Titelman on the Fringe’s reputation over the pond. ‘It’s a big honour – but you will likely have a mental breakdown at some point during your run.’ Like over 350 US-based acts this year, Greta has opted to spend August in Scotland’s capital at the largest arts festival in the world. With just over 3,500 shows in total at this year’s Fringe, Americans are well over-represented. But appeals to them about the Fringe? ‘My show is about sex, and luckily, you people have sex too’ ‘I have been working on my hour for years and I feel finally mentally and emotionally prepared to absolutely stun the masses of Edinburgh’ says Greta.

Let’s play a game of word association. I’ll start: ‘skinhead’. Hmm. I think I can guess which words instantly occurred to you: ‘thug’ perhaps, ‘hooligan’ probably and possibly even ‘racist’? Yet for anyone who remembers the original incarnation of skinheads, another word will always spring to mind: ‘reggae’. If you believe that Britain’s love affair with reggae began in the late 1970s with Bob Marley, I’m afraid you’re out by several years and several million record sales. It began in the late 1960s with a happy confluence of Caribbean immigrants, Trojan Records and skinheads.

Dordogne, France Down here in southwest France, the ripple effect of the war in Ukraine has become oddly visible. Normally the fields around our house are planted with sunflowers and maize – but not this year. Wheat and barley stretch to the horizon. As you drive around, the roadside fields all bear witness to the marked change. The faltering supply of grain from Ukraine has made French farmers wake up. Grains are the new cash crops and for this summer, at least, the Dordogne will look subtly different. The great summer rite of passage here is the répas des chasseurs – the hunters’ lunch The awful news of the death of Martin Amis in May prompted a rush of memories for me. Extraordinarily, I first met him when I was 17, in Paris, in 1969.

It started with That Song on the World Service in the early hours, the one I’ve always loathed; for me it symbolises the start of the state we’re in now whereby perfectly good toe-tappers are routinely strung out in slo-mo by interpreters for whom misery passes as creativity. OK, the Prince original wasn’t exactly a laugh a minute, but it wasn’t anywhere near as dragged out as the Sinéad O’Connor cover. So when I heard that the singer had died at the age of 56, my first thought was, selfishly ‘Oh no – they’ll be playing That Song all day!

It must have been late 1993. She was at the height of her fame and I was in the earliest days of my journalism career. I was working for a small press agency in Clerkenwell whose stock in trade was day work for newspapers: court cases, press conferences and particularly door knocks and door steps. As a rookie, I did an awful lot of these. With my cover story now established, I went back to bed on that sofa Away from work I was in my twenties in London and had quite the party lifestyle – clubbing every weekend. The club of choice was Subterranea in Ladbroke Grove and I’d go most Saturday nights. But on this occasion, I was the rota reporter on the following Sunday, due in at 9 a.m., so when midnight came around I made moves to go home to bed.

For the past week Hollywood’s film and television actors have been on strike, plunging Los Angeles’s most famous industry into chaos. Performers joined screenwriters (who have been striking since May) on the picket line after talks broke down in what has become the first simultaneous strike in more than 60 years. The strikes have attracted plenty of headlines, not least when the cast of Oppenheimer walked out of its UK premiere last week. But do we really care if studios have to shelve Fast and Furious 15, or if the latest superhero movie fails to take flight – or indeed if the entire cocaine-encrusted edifice crumbles into the Pacific Ocean?