Spectator Life

As a city-dweller for 34 years, I am used to the hustle and bustle of other people. Cars, sirens, strangers chatting in the street: it’s the background noise of everyday life, a comforting reminder that you’re never alone. So when I moved to the Suffolk countryside in April last year, I found it a bit of a shock. Pregnant, freelance, with a husband often in London for work, I had a two-year-old for company, few friends and a big empty house overlooking fields, sky – and not much else. It's a 20-minute drive to the nearest town, and there’s nothing but a ramshackle pub in walking distance. We switched to online shopping for convenience, so I didn’t even have the weekly trip to the supermarket to fall back on.

In a corner of St Pancras station, Tracey Emin is always turned on. ‘I want my time with you’, a neon sculpture by the artist, has been on show here since 2018. It was part of the ‘annual’ Terrace Wires public arts programme, in which a new work is commissioned every year to hang from the station’s roof; but the pandemic distended time, and Emin’s words have stayed put. Though a new commission was unveiled yesterday, an installation by Shezad Dawood, that hangs on different wires, elsewhere in the terminus. Assembled from bright pink tubes, and shaped like Emin’s looping script, ‘I want my time with you’ looms over the grand Victorian concourse that sends the Eurostar to the continent.

There on my television screen, in a somewhat surreal sequence, was Boris Johnson contemplating the women in his life. And suddenly before me appeared the famous Wyatt features: first eyes, then a nose and then a mouth, right into camera. Medium-range shot and then a close-up. Ah, we had faces then. And then I looked harder, and my blood turned to Freon. It was just a large photograph of me stuck on a 10ft projector screen. Couldn’t those cheapskates at Sky have got a goddamn actress instead of a Polaroid?  As it turns out, This England, the Kenneth Branagh series about my old friend Boris, is more Psycho than psychodrama. Someone in the make-up department seems to have thought they were remaking What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

The good news – apparently; I haven’t seen it yet so this may just be a false rumour – is that House of the Dragon episode 6 is really exciting, full of incident and drama and intriguing, well-drawn characters. But the bad news, as I can personally testify, is that in order to reach that point you have to wade through five whole hours’ worth of ball-breaking tedium. Admittedly, even the original Game of Thrones used to do this a bit on occasion: episode after episode of characters talking to apparently little purpose, then suddenly the Red Wedding. But the difference was, you never doubted that the story was going somewhere, and that the whole was underpinned by the mighty creative vision of an obsessive world-builder who had mulled over every detail for eons.

Men do not come to see James Bond movies for the sensitive brooding of an ageing spy. They come for the car, the bikini and the volcano. This is apparently lost on some people in Hollywood – the same people who occupy the unfortunate position of actually making James Bond movies. The Daily Telegraph reports: 'The next James Bond films will have bigger roles for women and a more sensitive 007, according to the producers.' Variety quotes producer Barbara Broccoli saying 'Bond is evolving just as men are evolving', adding: 'I don’t know who’s evolving at a faster pace.' I have a difficult time believing that any fan of James Bond ever expressed a desire for the greatest secret agent in the history of film to be more in touch with his feelings.

It's a well-known fact that Michael Palin is a 'national treasure'. Or so you are told just about every single time the travel presenter and writer appears on television or features in a newspaper interview. So it was with grim inevitably that a few days before the first instalment of his latest expedition, Michael Palin: Into Iraq, aired on Channel 5 on Tuesday, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times both felt it imperative to describe him with this phrase. Never mind that he's no doubt utterly sick of this lazy cliché – objectively, it's a misleading misnomer.

For the finale of the #FreeBritney franchise, it seems that the 2000s Queen of Pop is to return to music. Recent reports have claimed that Britney Spears will be collaborating with Elton John on a song titled 'Hold Me Closer'. As exciting as this is, I can’t help but think that – seeing as her conservatorship was ended less than a year ago by a court ruling – she may be biting off more than she can chew. I question if she is truly ready to return to the inevitable pressure that comes with being in the public eye. I’m no therapist, but the treatment that Britney has endured over the past 14 years surely has to have lasting mental effects on the star’s health.

Three episodes in I think I’ve worked out the thing that’s most annoying about The Rings of Power. It isn’t the gratuitously diverse casting. It isn’t the saccharine tweeness of the hobbity Harfoots. It isn’t the ‘You go girl!’ tediousness of the relentless female character heroics. It’s that the entire series appears to have been constructed with all the charm, flair, character, originality and artistry of an Ikea wardrobe. Take the scene where Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) and her fellow shipwreck victim Halbrand arrive – looking ludicrously healthy for a duo who till recently spent days clinging desperately to a raft of the Medusa – in the city state of Numenor.

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.