Spectator Life

The news that mourners may have to line up for 35 hours to pay their respects to the late Queen has made headlines – and unsurprisingly so. They say we Brits love queueing, but surely that love affair has its limits.  Elizabeth II's lying-in-state in Westminster Hall is open to the public 24 hours a day, from 5 p.m. today until 6.30 a.m. on Monday. Last night Whitehall released the details of the military-style logistics operation that they hope will see the event run as smoothly as possible – with more than 300,000 mourners expected to form a five-mile human line stretching from SW1 along the South Bank and past HMS Belfast into the borough of Southwark.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?

The first sign that something was awry was what sounded like an electrical crackling noise coming from the corner of our downstairs hallway and growing louder every day. Having ruled out our dodgy wifi (for once), I eventually turned my attention outside, where I found the cause. Wasps – hundreds of them – were swarming into a hole under the wall. My husband suggested we hire an expert to get rid of their nest. I said we should save money and that I was perfectly capable of doing it myself. So I waited until nightfall, armed myself with a wasp-killing foam I’d bought on Amazon and covered up in as many clothes as possible. Tiptoeing to the hole, I squirted foam into it. It was, I thought, a job well done.

The grief is still raw and the news has barely sunk in. I feel quite heartbroken. But I know that many the world over feel the same. The death of Queen Elizabeth II has special resonance here in this country, in the Realms and in the Commonwealth. Yet there is barely a corner of the world that her smile did not touch. There is quote in The Great Gatsby I have always liked, and now it makes me think of her. For she ‘had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour.

Hunter Biden is a great cinematic character: the loser son of an elite career politician who bounces between semi-powerful jobs on the strengths of his contacts and his name while inhaling mountains of drugs and banging prostitutes. How can you make a bad film about that? Well, somehow the creators of My Son Hunter have pulled it off. Produced by filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, directed by Robert Davi, starring British actor cum right-wing commentator and Reclaim party founder Laurence Fox and distributed by Breitbart, the movie will please only people whose politics have compelled them to do so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

On a recent trip from London to New Delhi, I found out that an acquaintance I see once or twice a year had pulled out of her wedding just 24 hours before the ceremony. An almighty row? Infidelity? Good old-fashioned cold feet? No – her family had simply decided they weren’t happy with the groom and decided to pull the plug. Welcome to the world of arranged marriages. As a woman who was born and grew up in India, arranged marriages – those planned and agreed by the families of the couple, rather than due to the romantic inclinations of the couple themselves – have never made sense to me. But they remain the norm in many South Asian communities. In a 2018 survey of more than 160,000 Indian households, 93 per cent of married couples said theirs was an arranged marriage.

A few months back I wrote a Spectator piece about a phenomenal new ‘neural network’ – a subspecies of artificial intelligence – which promises to revolutionise art and how humans interact with art. The network is called Dall-e 2, and it remains a remarkable chunk of not-quite-sentient tech. However, such is the astonishing, accelerating speed of development in AI, Dall-e 2 has already been overtaken. And then some.  Just last week a British company called Stability AI launched an artificial intelligence model which has been richly fed, like a lean greyhound given fillet steak, on several billion images, equipping it to make brand new images when prompted by a linguistic message.

Toyboys are back, apparently. Over the past few months there has been a flurry of middle-aged women crowing about the joy of dating younger men. One author in her mid-forties extolled the virtues of having not one but three lovers half her age. In a piece explaining that ‘younger men are having a cultural moment’, a thirty-something writer described a first date apologising for his scruffy appearance because he’d ‘cycled straight from school’. These women claim it’s liberating, empowering, confidence-boosting and a lot of fun, and even brag about younger men being far better in bed than their older counterparts. And presumably all of this works both ways – so why are we less understanding when men choose younger partners?

Pity the ad man of 2022. Jokes about men and women and the differences between them are so very tempting, but can easily get a brand into trouble. Until not so long ago, the safest way to poke fun at family dynamics was through the figure of the incompetent dad. A 2012 American ad for Huggies nappies challenged five dads to ‘the toughest test imaginable’: looking after their babies solo. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, given that the useless dad appears in almost every sitcom of the past half century. But Huggies was forced to pull the campaign after complaints from insulted fathers and, ten years on, my guess is that no other brand would attempt anything similar.

I’m pretty certain that what I’m about to say is essentially unsayable. So here goes: we need to have a frank conversation about boobs. Bare boobs. Because on my recent holiday to Majorca, I have to confess to being a little astonished to see quite so many topless women on the beach. But what a simple joy it was; old, young, lithe, voluminous, ponderous – there they were in all their glory, glistening or wilting in the sun, or simply splashing about in the sparkling water. Boobs. I know, I know… as a straight, white, privately educated man in the raw good health of middle age this is not territory that I’m completely comfortable venturing into. And perhaps I shouldn’t. But I feel this needs to be said.

For sale in the village shop last week: punnets of locally-grown strawberries, multicoloured bucket-and-spade sets, postcards featuring British beach scenes… and no fewer than 14 varieties of Christmas bauble. Down the street at the Post Office, you can buy Christmas cards, tinsel – in green, red or sparkly silver – and wrapping paper festooned with candy canes. The garden centre, meanwhile, is doing a roaring trade in tins of festive shortbread (expiry date: 26 October). Christmas, so the saying goes, comes but once a year. And this year, it seems to have come during a baking hot August. Before you suggest I live in a sort of Yuletide wormhole, it’s happening nationwide.

‘Ah,’ says my husband at the top of the cliff path at Overstrand, ‘it’s just like a Shirley Hughes illustration.’ There are sandcastles, wooden groynes, children and dogs running in and out of the waves. Then his eye falls on the first land grab of the day. Three generations of the same family are hard at work constructing their citadel: popping up polyester tents to form a wide arc, shovelling shingle into the flaps to secure them, unfurling windbreaks across either end to mark the outer limits of their encampment. We – like the family in a favourite Hughes picture book from my childhood, Lucy and Tom at the Seaside (1976) – have travelled with just ‘the picnic things and bathing bags and buckets and spades’.

‘Who are these people and why should we care about them?' This is the most important question any screenwriter must ask before committing pen to paper. Sadly it's a question I failed to come anywhere near answering during the interminable 'realism' of the BBC’s much discussed (and much praised) Marriage. Sean Bean and Nicola Walker play Ian and Emma, an uptight midlife couple caught in the tedium of marital graft after 27 years together. The four-part 'drama' has been widely commended for showing the profound inanity of ordinary people's domestic lives. While I consider myself to be pretty ordinary, I failed to recognise either of these dullards as anything other than famous actors trying to appear real and failing miserably.

British tennis fans famously only acknowledge the sport exists for a couple of weeks in the middle of summer in SW19. But they ought to think about changing the habit of a lifetime over the next couple of weeks, as Emma Raducanu prepares to defend her US Open title at Flushing Meadows. It’s been a dizzying year for Bromley’s best. Her journey from star-struck ingenue when she went to New York a year ago to her arrival back there this week as the champion and the face of a thousand magazine covers must have felt like a rocket ride to the Milky Way. But now she has to prove herself all over again. Since winning the US Open a year ago at just 18, she has failed to win another singles title and has won just 12 matches out of 28 on the WTA tour.

Meghan Markle, if she was minded to, could easily corner the erotic ASMR market – that weird bit of the internet in which women breathily relate fictitious experiences with their mouths too close to the microphone for the gratification of lonely nerds everywhere.It’s impossible to listen to her latest self-glorifying venture into podcasting, Archetypes (get it?), without understanding this is something of which the Duchess herself is keenly aware.At the outset of the first episode, released on Tuesday, she explains with a deliberately pleasing huskiness how the podcast would be concerned with exploring a ‘dirty, dirty word’.