Spectator Life

 For decades, I calculated my annual tax return using the same method; as dull and reliable as a shire horse. Over a few consecutive days, mired in files of receipts, I would transcribe all the info into a spreadsheet, which would then whizz off to my accountants (to whom I pay a vast sum for pressing SEND and passing this on to the Tax Man). Sure, this doesn’t count among my most welcome annual events. It’s not even in the top 100. But at least it only happened once a year.  Non-compliance - even anarchy - is looking a better bet than this absolute horror show Now, Making Tax Digital has arrived, a visitor as unwelcome as a Nazgûl. Like many things, the blame for this can be squarely laid at the polished brogues of George Osborne.

For generations we relied on the good old flat-capped honesty of the onion. It was unpretentious, predictable and perfectly content to hide in a bag at the dark recesses of kitchen cupboards until dragged out, to be chopped into the bottom of a mince or fried into submission as the ‘healthy’ garnish in a bapped burger. Onions knew their place.    But over the last few months, an allium armada has breached our shores. An aggressive amphibious landing has invaded Middle England’s supermarkets and thus the showier parts of my kitchen units. These are shallots: small pink immigrants arriving in vast, unstoppable numbers.

Nobody can deny that Pippa is a campaigner.  Her friends say it, her children complain about it, even her opponents - she tries very hard not to call them her enemies (in public) - say it.  The leaflets with Liberal Democrats on the front say it; the newspapers with Liberal Democrats in tiny letters on the back say it. Curiously, none of them ever mention what she campaigns for, or whether any of these campaigns have ever been successful - but that is really beside the point.  Ten years ago, she was campaigning against Brexit.  (She might have had more of an impact had she campaigned before the referendum, but that is also beside the point.

In the interests of complete candour, I should reveal that Dawn French and I have had ‘beef’ (and how suitable that word is, as we were both beefy at the time) for decades. Since 1994, to be precise, when she made a television documentary on ‘Big Women’. She asked me to appear in it; I refused; she put my name repeatedly on the credits. What a way to celebrate porkers - by calling someone a porker!   I was merely chubby at the time, being a good 5’9 in my prime (I’ve shrunk a bit with age and disability) whereas she was only 5 foot and maybe 19 stone at her ‘peak’.

By rights, the 33-year-old singer-songwriter and actress Ariana Grande should be at the peak of her profession. She won acclaim for her performances in the Wicked films – the first one of which she was Oscar-nominated for – and has consistently released successful albums, including last week’s new record petal. Under normal circumstances she would be looking forward to continuing her world tour, Eternal Sunshine. And next year, she was slated to make her London stage debut opposite her Wicked co-star Jonathan Bailey in Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday In The Park With George. There is, however, one rather significant issue with this, which has been discussed in the media with a mixture of prurience and genuine concern.

How do you win the Booker Prize? I have no idea. Get in touch if you do. I’ve been shortlisted and longlisted and served as a Booker judge, and while there are certain perennial features that would tempt you to make a wager on outcomes, there’s enough random wildness to make it interesting. This year’s Booker longlist of 13 titles was described by the chair Mary Beard last week as ‘something for everyone’. Maybe those with a fetish for lesbian boxing dramas set in 1920s San Francisco will feel let down, but it is fair to say this year’s longlist covers a lot of ground. The announcement of the longlist always launches a thousand whines because even if you can manage something for everyone, something isn’t enough for most observers. Too little of this, too much of that.

'No man is a success to himself’ wrote Graham Greene. I am feeling this acutely, as I turn 60 on September 1st and enter the Decade of Reckoning for uncomfortable life truths. As somebody whose literary ambition was only wanting to be a bestselling English social novelist, it’s been creeping up on me that if one hasn't written that Big Novel by one's sixth decade, then perhaps throwing in the quill is the only dignified thing to do.   In a desk drawer in my study, there is a cream envelope, postmarked September 1987. That August, I found myself sitting two tables from the Graham Greene in Chez Feliz, a fish restaurant just inside the walls of the old Antibes port.  He was 82, and lunching with his mistress Yvonne Cloetta.

Meet Camilla Honeyleaf, who runs the ‘Sugar is Poison’ YouTube channel that, she'll proudly tell you, ‘has given thousands of people the eating disorder they so badly need’. An entrepreneur and an activist, Camilla has a calling: to bring health to the masses, or at least the massive. She won't rest until friends and strangers alike discover the joys of a cupcake made entirely from avocado, burnt quinoa husks and a semi-organic sweetener that has definitely not caused tumours in laboratory rats.  Healthy living, she says, is not an option but a calling. She is fond of a pithy bon mot (‘They’re like sentences trimmed of fat!

Like a lot of things, it started with Harold Wilson. This deceptively homely politician was the Queen’s first Labour leader and not reckoned to be quite her speed. Yet she developed a relationship with him which was notable for its warmth, to the extent that they had been known to natter while sharing the washing up after Balmoral barbecues.   But it was Wilson’s lust for taxing the highest earning – ‘squeeze them until the pips squeak’ gloated his chancellor Denis Healey – which brought him into conflict with The Beatles.

Heatwave number four swept through France this week. The temperature hit 42C in some regions, including in the south-west, where firefighters have been trying to save Bordeaux for more than a week. The wildfire, which started about 22 miles west of the city, has claimed the lives of two firefighters, left dozens injured and burned more than 42,000 hectares. It has also led to the evacuation of more than 250,000 people, many of whom were tourists. Among those who have fled are George Clooney and his family, who have left their home in Provence in what the actor described 'as this terrible moment'. At the start of the week the prefecture for the south-west region asked holidaymakers to stay away. The advice has been heeded.

Towards the tail-end of my 20s, I fell in love with a man who (for legal reasons) we’ll simply refer to as J. J had been a good friend since journalism school. Think dark eyes and public school vowels, like south London’s less hacked off answer to Hugh Grant. He told me which football team to support (Spurs, which didn’t age well); I told him which novels to read on holiday. He took me for pizza after I’d had a bad day; I took him for pints after his. He told me to ‘treat men mean to keep ‘em keen’; I told him to just bloody communicate. By the time we discussed becoming ‘something more’ seven years into our friendship, it seemed too When Harry Met Sally to be true.

Do you remember the first time? Picking them out, not knowing what to expect, but compelled by an attraction you couldn’t quite define; fumbling awkwardly, not entirely sure how to get into it but finding your way; discovering a pleasure you’d never yet known, and were desperate to find again. I am, of course, discussing reading for pleasure – a habit that all of us, one hopes, have long since gotten into. There must have been a point at which Young Billy went from his parents trying to force him to read books about trains and tractors to him doing so of his own volition. Or perhaps the transition is smooth, unthinking.

I have a pickpocket living in my house. The thief is small, agile and remarkably discriminating in her larceny. Not for this pocket dipper the usual array of purses or loose change (though I doubt she’d baulk at the latter). It is my phone, and solely my phone, she’s after. And, like every burglar caught halfway through an open window, this charming crook insists she’s only ‘borrowing’ it. Yes, my ten-year-old daughter is addicted to YouTube and will use whatever means possible to feed the habit.   This, despite my dutifully signing up to every newsletter warning of the great screen invasion of childhood.

In a pleasant but modest one-and-a-half-bedroom flat in Crouch End, the half bedroom-cum-boxroom boasts a bookshelf that indicates eclectic taste on the part of its owner. Amongst its dozen or so volumes are a score-settling memoir by a disgraced royal lady-in-waiting, petulantly entitled I Also Served, You Know; a revisionist history of WWII written by a television weatherman, called I Wish We Were German; and, most remarkably, a collection of homoerotic sonnets in the Petrarchan style that were privately printed at the behest of the former global finance director at Goldman Sachs.