Spectator Life

I have recently returned from a fleeting visit to the City of Light. As usual, Paris itself was a delight. It is an architectural and historic marvel that nevertheless manages to offer the best food and wine in the world at all kinds of prices, and somehow also has a respectable number of quirky and interesting independent shops and boutiques amidst the more anticipated international names. In other words, any trip to the French capital should be an alloyed pleasure. So why, when I arrived back at St Pancras, did I all but sink to my knees in gratitude that I was once back in rainy old Blighty, and that the land of the Belle Époque was a distant memory?

‘If there is one thing I dislike,’ said P.G. Wodehouse, ‘it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.’ His grievance was conversational, mine is nominative: I pity those with made-up names. There was a time when names came from a modest catalogue: the Bible, aunts and uncles of fond memory, a wider culture that worshipped the royals. Maturity involves a conservative deference to tradition. One learns to presume that norms have more value than drawbacks: dress in an ordinary style, have the manners people expect – and bear a name that connects you to others. Beware any job that requires new clothes, said Thoreau. He meant coats and trousers but it applies to birth certificates, too.

It is almost inconceivable that we used to live in a world where people would ‘go for a drive’. Not to get to a destination, but simply for the pleasure of driving. Sunday afternoons were the time of choice for this activity and would see car owners take to the road simply because it was good fun to be behind the wheel. The idea that driving was anything other than functional now seems absurd.   That world has vanished, partly due to the sheer volume of cars. In 1971 (the year my dad learned to drive), there were roughly 15 million cars on UK roads. Today, on those same roads, there are 34 million.

Pick the prince who recently said this: ‘I take a long time trying to understand my emotions and why I feel like I do, and I feel like that’s a really important process to do every now and again, to check in with yourself and work out why you’re feeling like you do.’  Prince Harry, right? The baffled bailer across the water with too much time on his hands, who in the past, while doped up, has confessed to having conversations with both a trash can and a toilet. O, that the alumni of the Algonquin could have been around to join in!  No, it was Prince William. I must admit that I felt a vague foreboding when I heard his comments on BBC Radio 1’s Life Hacks on Wednesday – the Mental Elf strikes again!

It was the sort of elaborate birthday surprise that Andrew — practical joker and fond of a fart gag — might have arranged to prank a friend. Six unmarked police cars roaring up to the farmhouse where he had been living on the Sandringham estate at the unseemly hour of 8 a.m yesterday. Only these rozzers were real and the ‘ex-UK prince’, as one international news network described him, was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office before being released under caution around 12 hours later. ‘I’m just glad the Queen didn’t see this day,’ wrote one commentator on X. ‘It would have broken her heart.’ Yet the root of Andrew’s downfall lies with the late Queen Elizabeth II — an unlikely early advocate of gentle parenting.

When Wuthering Heights (first published in 1847) is splashed across the front page of the Daily Mail as a free offer to readers and sells more than ten thousand copies in a month, you know that this says something significant about our current cultural tastes.  Just as Mr Darcy’s soaking shirt was a pivotal moment for millennial women in the 1990s thanks to the television adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, so another screen version of a 19th century novel written by a woman has captured the imagination of young adults, Gen Z.   It is, however, doubtful just how many of those who buy Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as a book will manage to read over 300 pages.

In recent months, much has been made of ‘Fafo parenting’. Touted as the backlash to ‘gentle parenting’, the philosophy of ‘Fuck Around & Find Out’ seems to be that children should learn the natural consequences of poor decision-making. While gentle parenting advocates empathy and respect, reasoning and explanation, Fafo parenting dictates that rather than going nine rounds with your small person to persuade him or her to go to the loo before going out / to put a raincoat on when it’s coming down in stair rods / not to pull the cat’s tail, you should let them see what happens when they have the temerity to exercise their own free will.

It was reported in the Times last week that Hampshire county council has threatened chef Greg Olerjarka with prosecution if he continues to allow his 14-year-old son, Dexter, to help him in his food truck at the weekends and after school. The boy desperately wants to be a chef and hopes one day to work alongside Marco Pierre White. He’s already an accomplished cook and has undertaken a food hygiene course.  Thirteen- and 14-year-olds, for whom minimum wage laws don’t apply, are allowed to do light work; 12 hours during the week (outside school hours) and five and two hours respectively on Saturdays and Sundays. They can work in retail, admin, hairdressing, stables, agriculture, horticulture, and deliver newspapers.

Did Mariah Carey mime or not when she headlined the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan? That was the main takeaway from last Friday’s jamboree. Organisers have since suggested that the US singer did indeed lip-sync to Domenico Modugno’s ‘Nel Blu, dipinto di Blu’ and the song that followed, her very own, ‘Nothing is Impossible’. ‘The technical, logistical and organisational complexities of an Olympic ceremony are not comparable to a live performance by a single artist,’ said a spokesperson for the organising committee.    Was there also a linguistical complexity in the decision?

Halfway through a downward dog, red-faced and breathing a little too hard, a hen stops about 18 inches from my face. It squats, and lifts its a tail a fraction. There is a brief, unmistakable pause. Something warm and biological drops onto the mat beside me. It is not an egg.  From the front of the class, the instructor’s voice calls out, instructing us to inhale deeply.   To my side, another chicken wanders into the danger zone just as a pose collapses and someone nearly brings an arm down on it. The bird emits a short, offended squawk.   How have I ended up here?

I didn’t breathe a word of my true reaction while filing into the top-floor bar of the Old Vic theatre last week after the three-hour production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was over. It would have been mortifying to be overheard muttering any adverse comments, when swaths of intellectual Stoppard-lovers from all over London and the Home Counties were crowding on to the staircase. Stoppard is a national treasure and to say anything rude about his work, especially in the three months after his death, would be heresy.   It was only on the pavement walking towards Waterloo that I dared to say to my husband: ‘I must say, I wasn’t moved by it.

At first glance, there are few similarities between Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s classic 1945 novel – later adapted into an equally classic ITV series – of prelapsarian bliss in Oxford and Industry, the BBC’s adrenaline-fuelled show that exposes the dark iniquity at the heart of the financial industry. The one is a languid examination of (discreetly portrayed) same-sex love and Catholic guilt, and the other is a profane, sexually charged and palpitation-inducing dive into hedonistic self-indulgence. Brideshead is plover’s eggs and Meursault; Industry class A drugs and group sex. They would seem as distinct from one another as chalk and (Comté) cheese.

Eighty years ago this month, in February 1946, the left-wing Tribune magazine published George Orwell’s essay ‘The Decline of the English Murder’ in which the writer identified a certain class of crime as most appealing to the tabloid-reading British public – and contrasted the ‘cosiness’ of this type of early 20th-century domestic murder with the brutal sadism of killings committed in Britain during the second world war.  Two years previously, in 1944, while war still raged, in another essay entitled ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, Orwell specifically contrasted the ‘hard-boiled’ school of crime fiction with the gentlemanly Raffles stories of E.W. Hornung, featuring a well-mannered upper-crust jewel thief.

In a week in which embarrassing and damaging revelations about past misdemeanours are very much in vogue, let me reveal one of my own. When I was seven years old, I wrote in to Jim’ll Fix It. My request was to play a giant Wurlitzer organ, preferably the one in the Blackpool Empress Ballroom. To my retrospective relief, Savile didn’t respond to my letter. But I did purchase a second-hand, two-tier Hammond organ when I was at university, which I played as part of an acid jazz group. No tapes of our band’s songs or gigs survive I am delighted to state. I was reminded of my rather strange and atavistic early love of organs last week when I read of the death of Nigel Ogden, the presenter of the long-running Radio 2 show The Organist Entertains.

‘Screenagers’, ‘lonely’, ‘boring’ – all words used to describe Gen Z. Born between 1997 and 2012, we are the first generation to grow up with omnipresent technology and are often maligned as phone addicts and loners. But things are changing. Now the first tech-native generation is actively seeking out the most analogue hobby of all: community choir.  Community choirs have boomed across the UK following the pandemic, and the country’s youngest adults are clamouring to get in. Some Voices, a non-audition choir in London which started as six friends singing in 2010, has grown to more than 1,200 members since 2020. Many of these newer members are Gen Z, searching for a connection which is more reliable than the wifi.

Two years ago, I wrote an essay here called ‘In praise of Kemi Badenoch’. To say it was admiring is like saying that Abelard quite fancied Heloise. She sent me a nice message on X; I went mildly berserk one evening when drunk and sent her a poem I’d had ChatGPT write, basically saying that she was going to save the world. Our communication understandably dwindled after that, as she probably came to believe I was a crazy person. To be fair, I also became increasingly taken with Reform; the re-nationalisation plan in particular grabbed me. I wrote about my turncoat ways in the i Paper: ‘When I and millions of other former Labour voters choose Reform at the next general election, it’s not because we’re rabid right-wingers.

‘Do you want to stream something?’ my girlfriend asked me. It was 5 p.m. on a Saturday and I’d had a horrendous week. I’d caught one of those mutant viruses that you learn about in nursery rhymes or at the London Dungeon. The cough was the worst part. It was the sort of cough that evacuates a Tube carriage. It was the sort of cough you hear in a western before the protagonist says: ‘Old Billy Boy got consumption. There ain’t a darn thing we can do ’bout it. Doc says he got weeks. Poor bastard. He ain’t never gon’ make it to Montana.’ In short, I was feeling out of sorts. And as such, I was ready for some mind-numbing television. ‘We can watch something,’ I said. ‘What do you fancy?

If you make your way to the Design Museum, which occupies the horned modernist structure that was once home to the Commonwealth Institute in Kensington, you are in for a surprise. And not just because it’s one of those buildings that is far more inspiring on the inside than its rather Stalinist exterior would have you imagine. No, the biggest surprise is that our national temple to design has decided to dedicate its ground floor to Wes Anderson, the American filmmaker (‘auteur’ is the word film types like to whisper) behind such idiosyncratic gems as The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) or, probably his biggest hit, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), which starred Ralph Fiennes, Adrian Brody, Saoirse Ronan and Willem Dafoe, among many others.