Spectator Life

The season is here and at Ascot last week, rather than worrying about what hat to wear, the real pros were working out what drug to take. After a series of cubicle swabs, newspaper reports left no doubt as to racegoers’ consumption at 'As-ket': the coke consumed in the car parks alone probably financed the construction of at least three Medellin villas. It also explains the success of that ubiquitous pale blue Oliver Brown waistcoat – lined with two perfectly-sized little pockets.  Dealers’ menus, sent by WhatsApp and laden with emojis, reveal the astonishing array of exotic substances on offer to punters. We no longer live in an era of poorly cling-filmed coke (which turned out to be mainly speed) and hash pellets that look like rabbit poo.

France’s summer smash at the cinema is set to be a comedy called The Perfects. It opens next week with an all-star cast that includes Scottish actor Alan Cumming. The Perfects are a family of con-artists who flee France to escape the police and they end up in Scotland where madcap adventures in tartan ensue. It’s further proof that France can’t get enough of Bonnie Scotland. Films, television documentaries, newspaper features and even a puff piece earlier this month on the primetime lunchtime news about a visit to the most isolated pub in Scotland.

The most memorable thing about Keir Starmer's resignation speech yesterday was not the resignation. It was the soundtrack. As the Prime Minister tearfully announced his intention to depart Downing Street, the veteran anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray began blasting Beethoven's ‘Ode to Joy’ across Whitehall.  I was initially mildly surprised that modern broadcast technology proved incapable of filtering out a single protester with a loudspeaker somewhere down the road. As the speech dragged into its second minute, I was no longer entirely certain which audio I most wanted removed.  The great joke of the morning was that ‘Ode to Joy’ is a piece about reconciliation.

For the past 264 days, I have been hounded by a merciless small green owl. If I were to share this with friends, troubled whispers about my mental wellbeing would soon strike up. Disquieted, they might even cart me off to the hellscape of a wellness intervention. And yet this malevolent bird is entirely real. It is there when I unload the dishwasher, lamenting its disappointment in my efforts; and it is there when I put my daughter to bed, warning that it is about to become 'very angry'. Yes, Duolingo is an insidious Jiminy Cricket on modern shoulders – except that it lives in our pockets and, rather than dispensing wisdom, is an emotionally blackmailing shame merchant with rage issues. It wasn’t always this way.

Camilla bought their place in the Burnhams when she discovered she was pregnant with her third child – following a heavy après sesh at La Folie Douce in Megève. Realising they’d never ski again as a family of four, and with memories of the Costa Smeralda fading like an over-exposed Polaroid, she convinced Johnnie that getting a holiday cottage made financial sense. ‘Because they’re virtually giving away buy-to-let mortgages.’ And as Kirsty Allsopp, who went to the same school as Camilla but was at least ten years older, always says, it’s an income stream.

Sir Christopher Wren did it all. 51 City Churches after the Great Fire of London. St Paul’s Cathedral. Hampton Court, Greenwich Hospital, Royal Hospital Chelsea… But he never built an English country church. Or did he? This weekend, I went to an enchanting service at St Mary’s, Ingestre, Staffordshire, to celebrate its 350th anniversary. There is only one document connecting Wren to the church – his design for ‘Mr Chetwynd’s tower’. The Chetwynds built the neighbouring pile, Ingestre Hall. Their descendant, Aaron Chetwynd, lives in the neighbouring stables and kindly asked me to give a talk on Wren at the Ingestre Hall orangery after the church service. Walk inside St Mary’s and it's spine-tinglingly moving.

For a decidedly short London road, little Store Street in Bloomsbury, which connects the scholarly precincts of London University with the furniture stores of Tottenham Court Road, delivers a pleasant hit of history. In 1791, ur-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft lived here, then wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.  In case you didn’t know, I also lived on Store Street in the 1990s, back when it was, to be honest, a slightly shabby sideroad, with a greasy spoon and grubby offices. Arguably quaint, and definitely honest, but not somewhere you’d want to linger.  Now, all is changed, changed utterly. In recent years Store Street has spruced up and become a destination in itself.

There are a handful of obsessive mania-types I can get along with swimmingly. Kleptos, heavy-drinking dipsos and nymphos to name a few. But at monomaniacs, I draw the line. Give me anything, anyone, at a social occasion — but not a one-topic conversation.   Why is it that the fewer interests people have, the more boring they become? One wonders what history’s great Renaissance men would have made of today’s crypto bros or blockchain fanatics. I pick on blockchain because, as with so many problems benighting the world, technology is to blame. I’m no Luddite, but I hereby shame content algorithms in the strongest of biblical terms saying, Verily, ye have spawned dullards.

Some time ago, I had a furious conversation with a tech bro, which played out something along these lines: ‘How cool would it be’, said the tech bro, ‘if you could just download a language into your brain, Matrix-style, without having to learn it yourself.’ I spluttered out my gin and tonic and managed to croak: but that’s horrible! What of discernment, taste, style and nuance? What of the exacting but enjoyable pains of memorising words, sparking new connections, and forming your own peculiar store of knowledge? If new knowledge suddenly appeared in your brain, I’d call that creepy, akin to being possessed. ‘But it’s so cool’, came the response.

Gerald’s just back from Florence. Two-and-a-half-thousand miles in the old Aston, thunderous straight six booming all over the Alps. ‘Took the Gothard Pass out of Switzerland. Bloody marvellous. You could hear us coming three valleys away! The old girl almost boiled over at seven thousand feet. The Aston was pretty, hot too, hahaha, wasn’t she, Lucinda?’  Long-suffering Lucinda, who has been married to Gerald for 48 challenging years, has heard all the stories before and only winces inwardly.

Show me the money. Show it to me in the dedicated pages of national newspapers, in documentaries and TV series and on social media, where influencers make their money by showing me the money. Let me revel in all the clichés we’re offered – the poorer man’s idea of wealth, defined by supercars and mega-yachts, houses pent and country, dinky handbags and preposterous watches, fat cigars, deep tans, Tic Tac teeth and honed abs, for even the body is performative of money these days. Tom Wolfe would be slack-jawed.  Forty years ago he coined the sadly forgotten term ‘plutography’, to capture the then prevailing trend for the publishing business to offer readers a monthly dose of full-colour insight into how the other half lived.

‘Work 1’ of the 258th Summer Exhibition greets you before you have even passed through the portals of the Royal Academy. Rainbow-striped letters arranged in an arc, the words ‘THE SONG IS YOU’ are displayed on four grey metal rods in the courtyard of Burlington House. By exhibitor Ugo Rondinone, the price for the installation is ‘on application’, for which read: not for the likes of you. No matter, I’ll save my pennies, thank you very much. Not being able to work out WHICH SONG I AM, I carried on regardless, conscious that I had 1,850 exhibits still to view.

The UK has a Neet epidemic: those aged 16 to 24 classed as not in employment, education, or training. At various times in my life, I have counted myself among their number. It’s an easy status to fall into, yet it’s not the land of sunshine and roses one sometimes imagines jobless youth to be. The numbers grow year by year, and many of those entering the status fall further into Neetdom, whether it be by a conspicuous gap on the CV that leaves them even more behind, the realisation that you can live just as well on benefits or mere feelings of hopelessness after hundreds of failed job applications.   The truth is, it’s bloody tough out there getting a job.

I wrote recently about my delight that an excellent second-hand bookshop has opened in my home city of Oxford. Well, karma has come around. In the upmarket district of Jericho, it’s recently been announced that Britain’s first ‘romantasy bookshop’, Bad Girl Books, will open next month. The shop is run by an American expatriate named Starlin Marot and is the permanent manifestation of a series of pop-up events she ran in London that have attracted thousands of readers.  Marot told the Oxford Mail: ‘The reason I like the romantasy genre so much is because it is so inclusive and empowering. It can be empowering to celebrate stories written by women, which feature women's voices and desires. I'm really looking forward to meeting lots of new customers.

Deep in the honeycombed limestone caves of Slovenia, Croatia, and Friulian Italy, there is a fantastical creature called ‘the olm’, also known as ‘the baby dragon’. It was once an ordinary salamander, which probably fell down into the karstic caverns - where it has evolved into an eerie pink creature that lives for a century, eats once a decade, possesses eyes without sight, lives permanently in a larval condition – called ‘neoteny’ by zoologists – and has been recorded sitting in the exact same place for seven years, without moving.  Why do I mention the olm? Because, as I travel the world, I’m increasingly wondering if we humans, Homo sapiens - have turned into a peculiar higher primate version of the olm.

Milo – born Rupert Myles Baxter-Stuart-Lane – is a self-proclaimed ‘wine wanker’. He is 27 years old, works at a B-Corp production and social content agency, lives in Stoke Newington, and dreams of running a wine bar in Clapton in the hope that Topjaw might someday notice him. His favourite film is Sideways. He watched it for the first time last month. He even has a tattoo to prove it: ‘I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot.’ The tattoo is on his left buttock. After enough biodynamic Zweigelt, he’ll be happy to show it to you.  Milo likes to say that he ‘came to wine late’. This is a complete lie.

France versus Albion is always good sport. The latest instalment of the rivalry was settled conclusively with PSG’s recent victory over Arsenal. As for the wider comparisons, strewn with titanic clashes – the Hundred Years’ War, the Battle of Trafalgar, Liquorice Allsorts versus Carambar – I’m no expert but I did live in Paris for a couple of years and was intoxicated by it from the very first evening there, a January Saturday in foul weather with the normally placid Seine a broiling mess. But after moving back home I hadn’t returned until this year. Inevitably, the first thing you do upon rolling off the Dover to Calais ferry is start declaiming how much better the French do things than us.

John Wilkes, the eighteenth-century radical, rake and uglybug, claimed that it only took him half an hour with any woman to talk away his face. Tinder gives you five hundred characters. It’s not enough. I am not saying that I am, like the old libertine, a shocking dog to look at, who ought not to be exposed to pregnant women’s view - Tinder hasn’t, yet, destroyed my self-esteem quite that much - but I think I probably need slightly longer to talk away my photos than the length of this paragraph.  I had hoped that I had dodged dating on the apps - I was married the year before Tinder was launched in Britain - but that optimism lasted no longer than the marriage.

I write speeches and help people deliver them. I love the work; it is its own reward. And post-speech client feedback gives me the smug hot-water bottle in the gut feeling you get from a well-cut hedge, a maiden over, or watching your grandchild take his or her first steps.   What happens is this: someone gets in touch because they’re due to give a speech at a wedding, charity event, school speech day, that sort of thing. I call them ‘Important Personal Speeches’. Their first question is, ‘Can we keep this between us?’ Discretion is key to my work, which is why I am writing about it here.