Spectator Life

The Old Swan Hotel, a grand old establishment in the centre of Harrogate, was once at the centre of crime writing’s greatest mysteries. This was the place that Agatha Christie chose to escape to when she went missing for 11 days in December 1926. After her husband allegedly revealed that he was in love with another woman, Christie left him and their young daughter in their family home in Berkshire without a word. Her abandoned Morris-Cowley car was soon found in nearby Guildford, but there was no other trace of her. Home secretary William Joynson-Hicks pressured the police to find the renowned author, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even tried to help, albeit in his own odd way. He took one Christie’s gloves to a medium, hoping this might uncover some clues.

I have a new love in my life; Budgie, a miniature dachshund. After collecting our little friend from Kent, she has taken over the house. I am preoccupied with how to keep her entertained. I talk about her as if she were my child. My google search history includes “tips for surviving the first 30 days with a new puppy, bonding with my pooch and how do I know if I’m becoming a dog bore?” We go out to dinner for the first time in months. Our conversation centres around how soft Budgie’s ears are and how many poos she has done that day. The topic changes course when the fastidious looking couple sitting at the next-door table roll their eyes. The lockdown puppy craze has given rise to the latest breed of organised crime.

Jonny Lee Miller is to play John Major in Series Five of the Crown. In the 1990s, when Major was prime minister, Miller got his big break as Sick Boy in Danny Boyle’s iconic film, Trainspotting. So it looks like a counterintuitive piece of casting. The dour and insipid Major will be played by an actor who achieved fame as a jobless heroin-addict. When Major entered Number 10 in November 1990 he seemed like a bank of cold grey fog after the storms and excitements of the Thatcher years. But his image as a boring bean-counter is inaccurate. The real life John Major is attractively masculine. Though not exactly a pin-up, he has a strong jaw and a shapely, symmetrical face. He’s tall and stockily built (he was a sportsman in his youth), and there's a definite twinkle in his eye.

When many people think of films about ‘The Beautiful Game’, a few, (mainly mediocre) movies tend to spring to mind, usually headed by John Huston’s 1981 folie de grandeur Escape to Victory. As you may recall, the film cast Sly Stallone, a noticeably chubby Michael Caine, Max Von Sydow and real-life football legends Pelé, Osvaldo ‘Ozzy’ Ardiles and Bobby Moore in a ‘soccer’ themed homage to The Great Escape (1963). But there are a surprising variety of other motion pictures about the sport and some are well worth checking out. Of course, there are some real stinkers as well, most recently the Sky Cinema Original Final Score (2018), a lame attempt to repurpose Die Hard in the environs of West Ham’s London Stadium.

The moon would be more interesting with Wally Funk on it, and clearly Jeff Bezos agrees: the entrepreneur has just invited the 82-year-old female aerospace pioneer to join him on his inaugural space flight later this month.  In 1961, when she was 22, Wally took the physical tests to become an astronaut. They were grisly - ice-cream was dripped in her ears and she stayed in a floatation tank for almost eleven hours. She performed better than John Glenn - the vainest of the original Mercury 7 astronauts - but the tests were cancelled. No American woman entered space until Sally Ride in 1983. But Funk is too interesting to reduce to a fable about misogyny. Spacemen were sexist - who knew?

I expect there are those among you who are pleased to see their home towns returning to something like normality this summer. Well, not me. Brighton and Hove was bliss during lockdown. Without the endless Southward drift of London chaff – pronounce that word anyway you feel works, hard F or soft – my adopted home regained something of the elegance that had led Noel Coward to include it and its seagulls in a list of things that have style. Now, it has become once again the Brighton that Keith Waterhouse said, had the perpetual air that of a town that is helping the police with their inquiries.

In a watershed moment for modern history, the Pentagon’s long-awaited report on UFOs landed last week. And it will no doubt send parts of the internet into overdrive. Officials who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity said there were 'no clear indications' that the sightings in the report could be linked to non-terrestrial origins but that the data available was not sufficient to form a clear explanation for the various phenomena observed. If you're amongst the millions fascinated by mysterious flying objects, here are eight films you may enjoy: The Phenomenon Amazon - to rent https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Lockdown affects us all in different ways. During New York’s first lockdown renowned art creative Shai Baitel, recently appointed artistic director of Modern Art Museum Shanghai (MAM), felt so starved of creative inspiration that he begged anyone he knew with access to an art gallery near his New York City home to let him visit – just him, socially distanced – just so he could get his artistic fillip. ‘Everything was shut down from mid-March and by mid-May I started calling friends of mine who were owners and directors of galleries, asking them just to open for me so I could go and see the art,’ he says. ‘No-one else was there and I would walk between the artwork and actually sniff the frames. I was so art-deprived I couldn’t believe it.

'Should I pay in actual money, in-person, in the shop itself?' I asked my husband incredulously the other day. Yes, he replied, sounding rather bored. Prior to the pandemic such an exchange would not have taken place. I would have simply gone to the shop with no thought of government restrictions to my personal liberties, unmasked and care-free, and paid in good old-fashioned sovereigns. But this is 2021 and the pandemic has had such a profound effect on our linguistic habits that we are now forced to speak in a tangle of retronyms to get our point across. But what exactly are retronyms? Those expecting the linguistic form of a Hoxton hipster, dressed ironically in 90s clothes may be disappointed because retronyms just aren’t that edgy.

As Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark prepare themselves to fulfil many a little boys dream and become real life astronauts on rocket-ship New Shepard, here's a look at space flight in the movies. No doubt part of the fun for Jeff will be tweaking the noses of fellow space rival billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson. Unless one or both of the pesky duo steal a march on the Brothers Bezos before July 20th that is. I have tried to avoid the obvious choices: Gravity, Interstellar,  Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Passengers and Apollo 13 - all worthy of a watch - and introduce you to lesser known titles.

'Like a sea beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure. I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it […] And then it was that the Muse of Painting came to my rescue – out of charity and out of chivalry.'  So said Churchill in 1915 after the disaster that was Gallipoli. Salvaged by the Muse, Churchill found solace from the pressures of political life in art. Last week, another sea beast emerged from the depths, consoled this time not by a Muse (he does, however, like to paint) but by the Sirens of the sea.