Spectator Life

Have you heard of National Biscuit Day, a McVities marketing concoction, which came and went last week? Probably not, but in my view, it was as meaningful a prompt to reflect on British culture as any.  There are, of course, both sociologies and histories of the Great British Biscuit, though more as the silent partner in the Great British Tea. In her book Watching the English, Kate Fox makes the good (if obvious) point that tea and all that goes with it is a social lubricant central to English identity and vital for retaining the ability to keep buggering on.

It has become commonplace for pessimistic bibliophiles like me to say that second-hand bookshops are an endangered species. You can pick your reason why – ever-increasing rents; competition from charity bookshops; the near-hilarious misanthropy that some old-school owners demonstrate, which will put all but the most committed punter off their establishment for life – but the reality might be that ever-declining sales of new books are mirrored by their antiquarian and used equivalents. We are constantly told that nobody is reading any more, because of reduced attention spans and the ubiquity of easy-to-digest podcasts. Surely this applies doubly, if not trebly, to mouldy old books, which – horror of horrors – come used, rather than in pristine condition?

A few years ago, asking a junior colleague to make a phone call would not have registered as a particularly daunting task. Now, it seems, many younger staff would be more willing to donate a kidney than call a restaurant to push a booking back an hour. In media, I have been astounded by twentysomethings’ reluctance to pick up the phone. Instead, they’ll embark on a long campaign of avoidance: an initial email, a 'gentle nudge', and then a 'just moving this to the top of your inbox', all while hours drift between the lack of responses.   It’s inefficient and, frankly, a bit sad.

If you google ‘Wedding celebrants, Surrey’, the fourth name to come up is ‘Lynda Bassette: With You for All Life’s Special Moments’. Farnham-based but willing to travel across the UK and abroad, Lynda also does funerals and baby naming ceremonies, so ‘the full wrap-around care’, as she calls it. But weddings are her favourite. Though divorced herself, she’s always been a true romantic at heart. ‘I’m in love with love!’ she tells her couples when they first get in touch.   She’s struggling to get her name more prominent on Google. It’s proving hard in a county where every other woman wanting a life-change seems to be completing the online celebrancy course and setting up as a sole practitioner.

As I’m an OAP, it’s not very often that I see an amusing online game I got into early trending online, so imagine my glee on seeing the following on X this week:  ‘Peter Murrell Meme Turns Follower Counts into Luxury Kitchen Splurges.’ Freelance journalist Jill Foster started the game by pairing a pound sign with her follower count and a kitchen item, sparking replies from a £35,900 cutlery tray (the proud possession of The Spectator’s own Gareth Roberts) to a £394,000 salad dressing bottle. The humour stems from Murrell's real court-listed buys, including a £3,232 Jura coffee machine and Jamie Oliver spoons, all funded by SNP donations from 2010 to 2022.’   To be specific, it had to be the last item in the kitchen that one touched.

Over the course of their lives, Americans have an average carbon footprint of 1,200 tonnes of CO2. Paris Ortiz-Wines, a young woman from San Francisco, has already cancelled hers out. She could hop on a flight every week for the rest of her life, eat ribeyes at every meal and sip almond milk all day long, and still be in the clear. Back in 2021, Ortiz-Wines played a key role in the campaign that stopped the closure of California’s only nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon. This has already saved more than 30 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.  Ortiz-Wines is part of a new generation of women advocating for nuclear energy, even though surveys show most women are sceptics. Call them the Nuclear Power Rangers.

I was robbed in Tokyo recently, an experience as unexpected as it was distressing. Despite long years in London, plus decades of rough and ready globetrotting to some of the sketchiest places on earth, I have never been a victim in any of these notorious crime hotspots (I feel snubbed especially by London), but this was the second such experience in supposedly the safest city in the world.   What are the odds? The first time I dropped my wallet in a branch of the bargain bucket Don Quijote store and later received a phone call from the staff saying they had it, with ID cards intact but 50,000 yen gone. This time there was no phone call, it’s all gone, a similar amount of cash but far more worryingly, my entire suite of credit and ID cards.

Today is Celebration Day when we are asked to remember the people we’ve loved and lost. My first reaction to the idea, was a groan. Really? Who needs another dedicated day? There are already more of them than there are days in the year, so some have to share. I’ve never taken any notice of Mothers’ Day, or Fathers’ Day, (and neither, sadly, have my children), let alone Potato Day, Upcycling (what’s that?) Day, Black Cow Day, or International Pisco Sour Day. There’s even a Love Conquers All Day, for heaven’s sake.   But I’ve come round. When someone important to us, who inspired or helped us, or whom we greatly loved, dies, we mourn them painfully for a period - and then stop talking about them altogether.

Tilly’s children now refuse to tell her when another one bites the dust. Recently, they joke, they have been able to see the whites of her eyes when they say that Ludo or Verity has been pulled out of school because his or her parents have been hit by VAT on school fees. When Tilly quizzes them about the parents’ finances, they roll their eyes and tell her to stop being so nosy.  Standing on the steps of the children’s smart prep schools in Kensington, Tilly partakes in the faux-martyrdom of the other mothers about how they all have to tighten their belts now that school fees have rocketed, but she knows they’re not really suffering: they’ve all just come back from Verbier and are about to load their offspring into sleek black Range Rovers.

Can it be anything more than sour grapes when a writer (who has not been asked) gets snarky about Hay Festival? I’d like to think it can. For there is a lot to snark about.  Don’t get me wrong. The one time I was invited to speak at Hay, about a decade ago, it was jolly nice. Benedict Cumberbatch said hi to me in the green room, thinking I was someone he was meant to recognise, while Ian McEwan milled about topping up his coffee. Hay is, of course, a pornographically pretty town amid the rolling sheep-studded fields and quaint little streets with pop-up Eccles cakes shops and independent bookshops.

It's that time of year again. The giddy middle of May. When millions across the English-speaking world gather to find out who has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.  This year's shortlist, drawn - as ever - from a diverse selection of not-European, not-male authors, is particularly enriching and profound. As the committee itself puts it, the stories ‘bring compelling characters to life in sharply drawn settings, exploring themes of power, family tension, resistance and unheard voices, alongside courage and unexpected connection. Among them are a keenly observant domestic worker, a young woman whose henna art enables silenced women to speak, and a resourceful young sheep farmer’.

It’s Chelsea week - officially the start of the Season - so brace yourself for acres of breathy coverage and All The Tropes from SW3. The Royal Walkabout! Red-coated Chelsea Pensioners being patronised! Glossy influencers who wouldn’t know a peony from a Philip Treacy pillbox hat knocking back champagne! Expect many, many shots of people’s backs as they struggle to see anything for the price of their £122 (or more) ticket.   Oh, and the gardens themselves. Something of a sideshow to the main event of being seen to be there, the format rarely deviates. There’s the ‘Eco’/ 'rewilded'/ 'woo woo'/ ‘hortiwoke’ garden; essentially a curated collection of weeds you could see on any railway embankment.

Dominic, known since his teens as Dom, enjoys telling people that he’s Catholic, or a ‘left-footer’ as he sometimes modestly describes himself. He feels it a distinction that gives him a bit of mystique in the financial services circles in which he moves. Non-Catholics are often mildly interested in his education by monks, his views of the papacy and whether he goes along with all the ‘rules’. But while Dom has lots to say on the matter, the truth is that the devout Catholicism of his upbringing is receding into distant memory, kept alive by a kind of niggling unease on Sunday mornings when he must decide whether or not to go to church.

When I was in my teens and twenties, older people told me that they were exhausted just watching how I lived my life. I careered through my youth in a fog of football matches, protest marches, pubs, clubs and raves. I treated sleep as an inconvenience and I’d increasingly arrive home at daylight, not quite sure how the evening ended or where that bruise came from.  ‘Wait until you’re our age,’ oldies would say. ‘You’ll slow down too. Then it’ll be your turn to look at the young with bewilderment.’  Well, I did the slowing down part. After we were all locked down in 2020, I never fully unlocked again.

‘Congratulations! We’re delighted to inform you that you’ve made it through to the fifth stage.’ At this point, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. I’d done the HR screening call; completed the written task; got through the first-stage interview and then repeated myself in the second. So what, exactly, was left? A PowerPoint presentation? A half-marathon? Solving a Rubik’s cube underwater?   Experiences like this became a common feature of my life after I was made redundant from my job at a technology magazine in 2024. While I was fortunate enough to secure regular freelance and contract work, the lack of a fixed salary quickly created friction elsewhere.

For centuries, as a dinner party guest you ate what you were served. Nobody dreamed of calling up their host in advance demanding what they would like on the menu. This is one reason why the dinner party somehow made it through the 1980s era of Tom Wolfe’s ‘Social X Rays’ – Mid-Atlantic society-types who ate nothing and resembled skeletons. Previous threats to the dinner party included the first drink driving laws, which Bron Waugh claimed ruined country social life. Then came the cocaine diet guest (no food touched), who has been spiritually succeeded by the equally annoying Ozempic-jabber, bragging to their hostess about how ‘unhungry’ they feel.

If you’re at a high-profile but dreary launch of a political memoir at Daunt Books or find yourself in the Red Lion in Westminster any weeknight after six, Samuel Ordington-Mortimer will almost certainly be there, too. You usually hear him before you see him: a braying, gleefully indiscreet voice regaling his listeners with the latest salacious tidings at top volume.   By the time he hoves into view, a florid figure whose flushed cheeks perfectly match his claret-coloured trousers, you can expect either a cry of ‘dear boy’ or ‘darling girl’, regardless of how well you know him. There then follows a parade of cheek-kissing, occasionally with a ‘friendly’ squeeze on the arm or buttock, depending on how many glasses of wine have been consumed that evening.

Before I had ever been to a funeral, I imagined what it would be like: a grim, depressing affair. The sky would be leaden and there would be rain. There would be deeply sorrowful music – Adagio in G minor by Albinoni, a verbose elegy, stiff hymns, muffled sobbing, regulatory prayers and afterwards egg sandwiches, polite chatter and weak cups of tea. But this version of a funeral has changed in recent years and has become more relaxed and celebratory, perhaps in line with declining church attendance. A recent Co-op Funeralcare study found that 68 per cent of people agreed that funerals should be more of a celebration of life, up from 58 per cent in 2019.

As the results are being announced for this year’s local elections, I am reminded of where I was almost exactly a year ago: standing in Carn Brea Leisure Centre in Redruth, Cornwall waiting to hear my neighbours’ verdict on me and the Conservative party.  The Count stalks my memory like I’m Mina Harker.   To be fair, it wasn’t the worst six hours I have spent in a provincial sports hall - it ranks somewhere between a team-building five-a-side football tournament and my GCSEs - and I’m glad I didn’t take the Liz Truss option of waiting in the McDonalds across the street.  I had never been to a count, and so didn’t know how much of what we watch on election night is pure theatre.