Spectator Life

It turns out that this summer’s cinematic hero is not Spiderman or even Odysseus, but the French wartime leader Charles de Gaulle who has knocked both Marvel and Homer into a kepi (the French military hat he favoured).   De Gaulle, a two-part, six-hour epic directed by Antonin Baudry has been a surprising hit in France and is in demand from all the major international markets, including those of Latin America, India and China. The buzz is remarkable for a foreign-language film starring a person who, although a national hero in his homeland, is not a global household name.

‘You can never be too rich or too thin’: so said Wallis Simpson. Or perhaps Dorothy Parker. Or perhaps Joan Rivers. No one really knows. But whoever said it, Japan appears to have had it engraved on its national escutcheon. Japan is officially the world’s thinnest rich country, with an obesity rate of just 4.3 per cent of the population. By comparison, it’s 28 per cent in the UK and 40 per cent in the USA. A close comparison to Japan is Bangladesh, where the rate is 4.5 per cent - but where one in ten people is dangerously undernourished. These are extraordinary statistics. What on earth is going on?  The most reached-for reason is diet. Japanese food, so it is thought, is healthy and lean.

 Charles turned 18 during the Winter of Discontent, the detritus from his birthday party lying uncollected on the mean streets of London SW6 throughout Christmas and New Year. Since then, he has been eligible to vote in 12 general elections, 16 local elections and nine European Parliamentary elections. He has confidently voted Conservative in all 37 of them, the very antithesis of a ‘shy Tory’.  Charles’s parents had a weak spot for Jeremy Thorpe, the dog-murdering Liberal, but studying Economics A-level from 1976-1978 turned their son into a lifelong Tory. Labour’s IMF bailout; Labour’s inability to tame the unions; Labour’s swingeing taxes on wealth creation – the socialists simply couldn’t be trusted with the economy.

About ten years ago, I realised I had largely forgotten how to write longhand. After decades of Amstrads, PCs, laptops, smartphones, writing more than a few sentences by hand had become genuinely difficult: the muscles had lost the memory, and my signature had decayed into an embarrassed squiggle. A few years later I was obliged to write out an entire cheque, and I found the task so strange and taxing I might as well have been asked to illuminate a medieval manuscript.  Now I suspect the same thing is happening to me with reading, especially the reading of books. This is an awkward confession from a man who has spent his whole adult life writing books.

Like any freelance writer I’ve taken on some tough gigs. I wrote a book about Paris Hilton. I interviewed the hardman footballer Julian Dicks, surrounded by his panting English Bull Terriers. Even more dangerously, I’ve argued for veganism in the pages of The Spectator. But I recently got the most challenging commission of all: my Dad asked me to write a eulogy for my Mum, who has passed away.  Naturally, I was honoured. The speech gave shape to my grief and, when I delivered it at the funeral, I felt like I was speaking directly to her.

When people ask Matt what he does for a living, he sometimes replies that he’s a historian. Oh, they say, feigning mild interest, might I have read anything that you’ve written. At which point he has to admit it’s unlikely, unless they have a particular interest in Year 9 reports.  To be frank, Matt fell into being a history teacher. In three years at Durham, he became a master at speed-reading the introductions to books and writing semi-plagiarised essays while still mildly drunk at 4am. Despite his father’s hopes that he might cash in his unexpected First, a punishing summer internship at an American bank persuaded Matt to stay in academia a little longer.

We longstanding residents of Oxfordshire have had a lot to put up with in recent years. First, there were the Beckhams with their faux flat-cap invasion of honey stone Great Tew and queasy talk of 'Golden Beez' honey. Then came Hollywood proper in the form of Ellen de Generes in her quest for ‘Engerland’: a Frankenstein vision of romcom The Holiday and indeterminate fantasies about the Old World. Last, came Maga as American Vice President J.D. Vance’s motorcade howled through the village lanes of Dean last summer. But frankly, we ‘aint seen nothing yet.

This summer’s news that the charity shop retail bubble has begun to burst should, in a normal civilized society, elicit solemn sympathy. Yet, I’m struggling to shed a single tear. In fact, across the country, I bet a collective, cynical cheer is rising from the cobblestones. Recently, Cancer Research announced plans to shut 200 shops, while disability charity Scope warned that over half of its high-street estate is at risk. Sombre charity sector spokespeople complain shops are buckling under rising costs.   Well, for the last three decades, I’ve watched their hostile, tax-sheltered colonization of our town centres. Are they now cracking under the weight of their own bloated administrative overheads?

These wildfires are terrifying. We had a billowing blaze in the barley field next to us in Kent only a couple of days ago. Within moments it was yards away from our ancient tumbledown cottage. Mercifully, the wind abruptly switched direction and the flames and smoke moved away, finally beaten down by the local farmer and fire crew. It was soberingly close call.  Those folk in Stourbridge, West Midlands, last week were less lucky, with 19 houses destroyed, and 18 badly damaged. Looking at the photos of the stark, smouldering wrecks, I can almost smell the awfulness. The reek of a burned out, water-and foam-soaked building never leaves you.

Bandwidth is troubling, because it’s just one of many phrases that assume we are mere cogs in the machine Allow me to totter onto my rickety soapbox for a second, and say: business jargon has gone too far. Buzzwords have become so entrenched into working life that they have, in effect, become a second language. One that, like a much-needed laxative, we are forced to digest to keep daily operations running smoothly. If you don’t use (or at least nod energetically along with) phrases like ‘low-hanging fruit’ or suggest that someone ‘circle back’ so that you can ‘create synergy’, and instead choose to communicate like an unlobotomised person, you’ll find yourself a virtual pariah.

You won’t find Charlie Thompson amongst the pages of Debrett’s Peerage, unless you look especially hard. Thanks to ChatGPT, though, inquisitive researchers can stumble on his name (though inconspicuous enough) bracketed with illustrious, even aristocratic families. His ancestry is not his fault, as he frequently tells himself. Just because a great-grandmother was an Earl's daughter doesn't make him a toff. Even so, he lives in perpetual anxiety of being found out.   His colleagues at the large media firm, where he’s worked for 20 years, spend more time bashing ‘posh twats’ and ‘nepo babies’ than he’s entirely comfortable with.

Eclipse chasing is a bizarre hobby, since there is no mystery regarding the whereabouts of the quarry. The date, time, and place for the one this week has been known about for centuries. That didn’t stop busloads of self-pronounced eclipse chasers descending on the small Spanish resort of Peniscola, however. As the day approached, the overriding emotion was relief that we all weren’t in Iceland, (with Spain, the other main site for totality), which was predicted to have a particularly poor day, weatherwise. Clouds are a fatal impediment for a total eclipse.   ‘Look at the forecast for Reykjavik,’ said Steve Moss with unalloyed schadenfreude.