Spectator Life

I thought that maybe being in a wheelchair would stop my louche lunching ways, but somewhat to my own surprise (though not that of my mates, I’d wager), this isn’t the case. ‘You push – I’ll pay!’ has become my battle cry. But as I am wheeled about at this time of year, a pucker of irritation repeatedly flickers across my features. Pumpkin this, pumpkin that – all leading inevitably to the monstrosity that is pumpkin spiced latte. The final straw in my deciding that pumpkin spiced lattes are utterly, well, deplorable was when the ghastly Hillary Clinton described herself as a fan – ‘until I saw how many calories there are in them’. Soz, Hills, but it’ll take more than losing a bit of weight to keep a dog like yours on the porch.

The USA’s Eric Lu has beaten more than 600 other pianists to win the 19th International Chopin Piano Competition. Held every five years in Warsaw around the anniversary of the Polish composer’s death on 17 October, this is one of several piano tournaments that often launch major careers, along with Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition, the Van Cliburn in Texas and the Leeds International. Unlike any of those, however, the Chopin competition requires contestants to perform the music of just one composer. Lu, 27, didn’t exactly need this win. He took first prize at the Leeds International in 2018 and has already released two records on the Warner Classics label. After his victory in Warsaw, he will take home a cash prize of €60,000 (£52,000).

Earlier this year, I wrote here about the arsonist who'd left our neighbourhood looking post-apocalyptic. In the months that followed, the pyromaniac grew ever more reckless. Initially, he'd stuck to torching vehicles on the road, which was bad enough. But then he took it a step further. He set fire to a car on a driveway, which in turn set the house alight. The young family, who were asleep upstairs, escaped with their lives, but their home was destroyed. A collection was started, and we dropped in some cash. The organiser said that in 20 years in the area, he'd never seen things as bad as they were now. He'd installed CCTV after burglars had smashed their way through the bifold doors – now it might come in handy for identifying the pyro.

There’s a certain sort of chap who, when he hears you mention football, gets all earnest and starts talking about flat back fours. You try to stop him, attempting to steer the conversation away from tedious tactics and back on to the important stuff, such as the fact that there’s only one team in the top four English divisions whose name, when spelled in capital letters, contains no curves. He’ll look confused, disorientated, maybe even a little bit angry. Either he’ll persist with his talk of formations, or walk away completely. The correct reaction, of course, is to say: ‘Really? That’s brilliant. Let me try to work it out.’ This is when you know you’ve found a kindred spirit: an unmanly man.

Reading about the break-up of the 19-year marriage of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, I was interested in some comments from our old mate ‘A. Source’ about the possible cause. According to the Sun: ‘Keith put a brave face on Nicole’s raunchy screen roles and all the comments she’d make about her sexuality. But he didn’t react well when people teased him about Nicole getting it on with hunky younger guys, albeit only on camera, and it was a sensitive topic that became a real issue as time wore on.

An upper-middle-class former banker friend recently attended a Reform UK selection meeting for council candidates in a decaying southern coastal town. Although he is a man of the world who once worked on oil rigs and in a shoe shop, my banker friend professed himself ‘shocked’ by the standards of dress and deportment of the other would-be candidates. Naturally all were overweight and tattooed, and all were dressed in shorts, baseball caps and hooded tracksuit tops – the standard everyday uniform of most British men under the age of 60. They were, it is fair to say, an average representation of the male members of what was once called ‘the working class’. The story reminded me of that classic TV sketch from the early 1960s.

There was confusion in Canterbury Cathedral this week as the Dean and Chapter gave permission for this most venerable shrine of world Christendom to be redecorated in the manner of the M4 Chiswick flyover. Photographs appeared of the cathedral’s ancient walls and columns irregularly plastered in jagged and bulbous graffiti, picked out in the sort of gaudy palette you might see in an amusement arcade. Even vice president J.D. Vance has questioned whether this is the right way to treat the house of God, saying the graffiti made a ‘beautiful historical building really ugly’. It soon transpired that this graffiti spattered over the site of Becket’s martyrdom was in fact a temporary art installation.

Elitism has had a bad press in recent years. The concept has, alas, been tainted by its association with the numerous elites who have corrupted it by allowing self-interest and prejudice to become self-perpetuating. It’s been sullied by its association with old school ties and masonic-style handshakes – by closed networks which work to exclude those who happen to fall outside the pre-determined in-group. So no wonder we don’t like it any more. Who would? But its gravest sin of all has been its role in pulling up the drawbridge to protect privilege in general, through a kind of unspoken fish-knife test. If you don’t know what it’s for, you don’t get in. One way people used to storm the castle of privilege was through grammar schools, of course.

When I found out about the death of Dame Jilly Cooper while waiting for a train, I said, out loud, ‘Oh no!’ with such vehemence that several of the commuters around me shuffled away, clearly frightened by their proximity to a madman. Cooper’s death at the age of 88 – a good innings, but also wholly unexpected, occurring after a sudden fall – brings to an end the life of Britain’s pre-eminent romantic novelist, aka ‘the queen of the bonkbuster’. It is testament to her vast popularity that many of her millions of readers felt that they knew her intimately, and those lucky enough to meet her were invariably charmed by her good humour, self-deprecating wit and charm.

As a woman in my early thirties, it is my God-given right – arguably my duty – to have an opinion when Taylor Swift releases an album. And it’s a role that I’ve always performed without compunction. But on this occasion – the release of album 12, The Life of a Showgirl, my ability to get into the weeds (does ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ represent close text analysis of Shakespeare?) was hampered by my shock at one particularly audacious lyric.  Previous albums have had the the odd raunchy moment. So when, on this new album, she sang ‘His love was the key that opened my thighs’ in a song titled ‘Wood’, I was unmoved.

My colleague seemed surprised that I replied ‘no’ when asked if I was sad at the news that G-A-Y bar – a staple of Soho for decades – was closing. A more intelligent answer would be that the closure of any ‘gay space’ is sad, but the truth is this is not somewhere that many in ‘the community’ will mourn. I tried to think about the last time I went to G-A-Y and I can’t remember. I texted a dozen friends and they can’t remember either. I guess that speaks to part of the problem. Jeremy Joseph, the owner of the bar, announced the closure on social media on Wednesday. But the speed of its closure this weekend, just days after the announcement, is surprising. Joseph says that ‘Old Compton Street has lost [its] LGBT identity’.

For a long time it was handy dinner party fact that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One (2010) briefly filmed at my late grandparents’ house, and appeared as Hermione Granger’s house in the film. Even this required extensive exposure of my grandparents to Warner Brothers’ lawyers, the film crew and, of course, to young Emma Watson herself. Neither of my grandparents had heard of Harry Potter before they were approached, and throughout filming, they failed entirely to notice her, though there was some vague recollection of ‘that rather mousy girl’ from my grandpa, who was far more taken with Susan, the 60-something woman in charge of props. This description stayed with me as Watson’s star rose and rose, plateaued, and turned gender political.

It’s relatively common, I find, when opening a newly purchased second-hand book for the first time, for something to fall from its pages. Most likely this will be a branded bookmark or printed stocklisting paper from the dealer who sold it. But it’s not unusual to find something more interesting, something belonging to the book’s previous owner. Apparently the singer Nick Cave donated 2,000 books to an Oxfam in Hove this summer, and new owners of his paperbacks discovered old plane tickets and Post-it notes tucked inside. We serial readers of actual physical books are constantly in need of bookmarks and will grab at anything to hand to use as one.

Early in 2020, inquiries for our speech-writing services were arriving in their droves. From Westminster to Washington, weddings to wine tastings, people needed our help. We cancelled our weekends and prepared for life without a mortgage. Covid gave us our weekends back. And all the other days. Yet when parties and events returned, a significant chunk of our clients did not. It was weird. But this wasn’t a vaccine complication, just a new player in the market. Previously we’d only had to win business against other humans. Suddenly, we were faced with a competitor able to provide speeches for any occasion in seconds. ChatGPT was doing to us what PornHub had done to the top shelf in the local newsagent. We weren’t the only ones.

‘Prizes are for little boys,’ said Charles Ives, the American composer, ‘and I’m a grown-up.’ It’s a pretty sound rule of thumb. The prizes worth having are usually those which reflect a body of work, not a single achievement. Cary Grant, the greatest leading man in the history of cinema, never won an Academy Award. Neither did Alfred Hitchcock, who made a few half-decent films. They received ‘lifetime awards’ from the red-faced academicians, but those gestures merely endorsed William Goldman’s view that, in Hollywood, nobody knows anything. As Billy Wilder told the producer who asked what he had been up to: ‘You first.’ Nobody takes much notice of the Grammys, which were designed to reward commercial success.

‘I was born to play Lady Bracknell,’ Stephen Fry swanked recently, in an interview to mark a new production of The Importance of Being Earnest, running until January. I can’t be the only one to greet the idea of another round of Fry interviews with a desire to go to bed and not come out till it’s all over. But that would be a long hibernation. For Stephen Fry pronouncements are like professional tennis; it’s always open season. You can’t get away from the clown, particularly when he’s lecturing women on how they should feel about having great hairy men in mascara sharing their private spaces. Magnificently, J.K.

Most of our politicians themselves are not obedient, kindly and loyal. Similarities between candidates and their faithful cat or dog are few – but as trolls now deter supportive spouses and photogenic children from saccharine election leaflet photos, pets are increasingly becoming familial proxies. When Nigel Farage does a TikTok about his dogs Pebble and Baxter, thousands comment approvingly. But finding a family photo of the Reform UK leader is nearly impossible. And that, says Farage and many like him, is entirely deliberate. Political animals are not new. Caligula threatened to make his horse, Incitatus, a consul. Cardinal Wolsey’s cat is immortalised in a bronze statue in Ipswich.

There’s was so much to loathe and laugh at in Peter Mandelson’s contribution to Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘birthday book’ (which inadvertently has turned into more of a ‘burn book’). But the words ‘yum yum’ were, for me, in a league of their own. Whatever they were referring to – it could have been the peachy posterior of a pool-boy or a particularly perfect profiterole – they identified Mandelson as a practitioner of verbal infantilisation. For this alone, he deserved to be sent packing. I spent five months in hospital during last winter and spring, and though the nursing staff were generally excellent, we were oft spoken to like children in preschool.

Miriam Margolyes is on the road, bringing joy to every corner of the kingdom, and aren’t we the lucky ones? It’s a kingdom she no longer has much time for, if she ever did, however hard the coiners of trite phrases try to dress her in the garb of a ‘national treasure’. When the tour is over she’s off quick-smart to a new life in Tuscany, where British folk who dislike their native land have always found a bed. There’s a book out as well, so there is no excuse for not paying attention. As dozens of chat shows have tried to persuade us, she is a bona fide ‘character’, fitting into the English pageant somewhere between Lady Godiva and a bearded lady. Have your tummy tickled as she farts merrily along the rolling English road.