Spectator Life

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.

There's a little fact about Frank Skinner that you might have heard before. That before his big television break, the future comic and Three Lions scribe had a rather different vocation: as an English teacher in an FE college. Throughout his time in the spotlight, it's been one of those things that gets brought up every now and then as trivia. An interesting titbit on an otherwise familiar CV. Then, at the beginning of last year, Skinner decided to go back to his educational roots: and launch a poetry podcast. Okay, it isn’t quite a full return to the classroom. But it isn’t far off either - at least not in the way Skinner does it. Who else, other than English teachers, spends their time gently working through poetry, patiently explaining the concepts and imagery?