Spectator Life

Throughout my four months in hospitals, I dreamt above all of being home. This isn’t exceptional – it’s a very common desire – though I did meet one woman who complained that she’d find it too ‘quiet’ at home after the clatter of the ward. But for me the situation was extreme. I’m an only child; I live apart from my husband of 30 years because my desire for solitude is more persistent than it has ever been for any drug. I turned down a quarter of a million pounds to go on Celebrity Big Brother because even the idea of sleeping in a roomful of strangers for a few weeks made me feel murderous. In the hospital in Brighton and then in the rehabilitation centre in West Sussex, I wasn’t getting paid a six-figure sum to do the thing I most dreaded.

‘She’s overweight! You should weigh her every week and if she puts on so much as 50g, immediately reduce her diet,’ one commenter said. Another castigated me for not using organic shampoo, and someone else told me off for my poor choice of outdoor coat. Under every post were furious debates, judgements and accusations. I adore Dixie. She is coming up for four years old and I want the best for her. But she is, after all, a standard short-haired dachshund, not a human toddler – and frankly it all seems a bit much. The number dogs being given fluoxetine, the same drug used in Prozac, has increased tenfold over the past decade. Perhaps that’s because more than half of dog owners are now members of some kind of Facebook groups related to pet health and wellbeing.

It’s already known for whittling down waistlines – and now Ozempic looks set to have the same effect on wine consumption. Research recently published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found semaglutide, the weight loss medication also sold under the brand name Wegovy, reduced cravings in people with alcohol use disorder.  The study by California’s USC Institute for Addiction Science divided 48 participants into two groups and found those injected with semaglutide drank less in each sitting than those offered a placebo. It is not the first research to link the jabs – originally designed as a diabetes treatment – to lower incidence of substance abuse.

When I was a girl, around 13 or so, my mum started calling me, half-enviously, half-fondly, ‘The Camel’, due to my ability to retain water. Every Saturday morning we’d go shopping at the Bristol city centre department stores; she’d need the toilet maybe three times, but I wouldn’t need it at all. ‘Have you “been”?’ she’d ask me before we left the house. ‘No!’ I’d snicker, spitefully. When we got home after four hours out, I’d make a point of sprawling on the stairs, chugging Corona cherryade by the gallon and gossiping with a mate for around an hour before I finally ‘made my toilette’. It became part of the war of attrition which is so common between mothers and daughters.

Women’s expectations are off. They want men with advanced degrees, but on university campuses, women outnumber their male counterparts. They want men with above-average incomes, but the gender pay gap has been reversed – young women now out-earn men. They want men who share their politics, but in almost every western country over the past decade or so, women have slid to the left while men have remained centrist. NEW: an ideological divide is emerging between young men and women in many countries around the world.I think this one of the most important social trends unfolding today, and provides the answer to several puzzles. pic.twitter.

‘You need to get yourself tested’, my wife said after yet another of my lapses, ‘you’re fast becoming a marble-free zone.’ I couldn’t disagree. Perhaps the relentless ‘mental ’elf’ craze had alerted me to my own flaws, though groping for names and words is, surely, excusable by 67. But I would often devour a book and, days later, struggle to remember not just title, author and plot but whether or not I’d actually read it. And could I reconstruct last week’s events, even in outline? No, of course I couldn’t. The health insurer confirmed they do indeed ‘provide support for that’, the cost counting against my annual limit. I therefore fixed an appointment with the GP: ‘Very sensible to come in about this.

Love or loathe Danny Dyer, hard-man hooligan of Football Factory, EastEnders bod and breakout Rivals star, but he does talk sense. The kind of straight-up, geezer sense you can only get down the pub, a locale to which he is no stranger. In the promotional press for his latest film, Marching Powder, Dyer, when pressed on the not-so-euphemistic title of the film, had the following to say on cocaine: ‘I’ve got that social butterfly thing where I mix in both circles and believe me, everyone’s fucking at it [...] it’s classless actually, that drug.’ To some of us, this may seem obvious. In my decade of active addiction, I obtained and recreationally ‘enjoyed’ the drug with anyone from builders to baronets.

I bought some pork scratchings the other day, and the packet said it was ‘high in protein’. Gruntled, the brand, is distributed by the Keto Shop and is now being marketed as some type of health food. I had to laugh. Wolfing down a packet of pork scratchings in the pub is now part of the latest health kick? Demand for protein is being driven by health-conscious middle classes, including Gen Zers. According to one national poll, nearly half of adults in the UK have increased their protein intake in the past year, including a whopping two-thirds of those aged 16-to-34-year-olds. This is boosting demand for chicken breasts, lentils and – I can hardly believe I’m writing this sentence – cottage cheese.

Of all the aspects of dating that make me grateful I came off the market when I did – ghosting, choking, sober socialising, facial hair like Brahms’s beard – it’s the spread of large-scale visible tattoos that makes me feel like I got the last chopper out of ’Nam. Neck tattoos and sleeves were once either indicators of prison gang allegiances or the preserve of thrash metal bands and their fans. Although perhaps the most heavily inked man in rock is Travis Barker, drummer of pop-punk crossover tarts Blink-182. His whole head is tattooed, as is Kerry King’s of Slayer, who also has ‘God Hates Us All’ down his left arm. Among Phil Anselmo of Pantera’s extensive body art is a portrait of himself as a demon with his now ex-wife riding an extending tongue.

The other day, while on my lunchtime walk, I passed a woman on a mobility scooter holding an impressive-looking doobie. Later, on my bus home, a bloke got on having just extinguished a joint, bringing the overpowering stench with him. Some commuters don’t even bother to put them out. All you can do is sit and tut passive-aggressively, hoping they’re only going a few stops. While cannabis use has slowly declined over the past 25 years, it seems that you can’t escape it in public. Perhaps part of the reason is that so few people now smoke at all, even tobacco. It makes weed far more noticeable. The other reason is that the police don’t bother punishing those caught. Most are either let off with a verbal warning or a fine.

Faithful readers will know of my journey through the French health care system. I have not shared these histories because anyone should be particularly interested in my aches and pains, or to complain. If I wanted to moan about a health system on the verge of a nervous breakdown I would return to Britain. No, I drone on because it’s worth repeating the astonishing discovery that it is actually possible to have a health system that isn’t crap. And I have made some other discoveries along the way. In previous episodes, I have covered the remarkable behaviour of French GPs, who actually answer the phone – and will see you the same day if necessary or tomorrow if less immediately urgent.

These are some of the things I worried about this morning. Should I brush my teeth while drawing the curtains, to save time? Should I get out of the bath at 7.40 a.m. or 7.45 a.m. to be fully clothed for the Tesco home delivery between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.? Should I instantly pick up the coat hanger that fell off the door handle as I left my bedroom or wait till I return this evening? These are mind-staggeringly boring things to think about. They’re even more boring to write down. That is the life of the worrier: a new worry dropping into the brain roughly every five seconds. Life is one huge to-do list for us worriers.

Dimly lit bars are great first-date venues for most people: the seductive ambience, the candles, the gentle clink of a martini shaker. But they couldn’t be worse for a visually impaired dater such as myself. I was born with ocular albinism and nystagmus, which renders me blind in one eye and severely partially sighted in the other. Yet, stubborn to the end, I have persevered with sepulchral bars for well over a decade now. The results have been mixed. I’ve sat down next to the wrong woman when returning from the bathroom, got lost on the way to the very same bathroom and, on one occasion, spilt an entire Bloody Mary down the front of my date. Funnily enough, she didn’t want to see me again.

A few days before Christmas, I was gently woken by my wife telling me that while I’d been sleeping through the night in blissful ignorance, she had been writhing in labour downstairs. At the last moment, she had decided against giving birth at home and now wanted to go to the hospital. I hadn’t known a home birth was even on the cards – clearly, my wife and I need to work on our communication. Moreover, it was a week before the due date, so I had gone to bed thinking there were still days remaining before the great panic. Within minutes, we were in the car and racing to the maternity ward. Racing, but not fast enough. As we arrived at the hospital car park, my wife informed me that she wasn’t able to get out of the car. She was delivering our baby there and then.

‘I really do think you should think seriously about that operation,’ my urologist told me about a year ago. The plumbing had deteriorated further and, in a calculated gamble for more tranquil twilight years, I eventually capitulated, submitting in early December to a so-called TURP, a transurethral resection of the prostate. Two days later, he sent me home with a reassuring message: ‘It’s settling down nicely, but don’t be alarmed by a little blood in the urine in a few weeks’ time. Expect a sort of “dry rosé” colour when the scabs start to fall off.’ I took that as a green light for a family Christmas in northern Spain, a plan marred only slightly by my Spanish wife Marina’s wrist fracture (she tripped on the stairs) shortly before we set off on Brittany Ferries.

One of my favourite dad jokes – and, since I became a father, I have many – is to respond to the question ‘How did you sleep?’ with ‘I lay horizontally in a darkened room with my eyes closed’. But it has never been that simple for me. All my life I have suffered from insomnia. Something that should be easy – newborn babies can just about manage it, after all – has become the hardest thing in my life. I’ve lost jobs because of it, and relationships: you feel like you are cut off from society. That’s one of the most annoying parts – most people’s response to the word ‘insomnia’ is to feel an obligation to say: ‘Really? I always fall asleep the moment my head hits the pillow!

I’ve been in hospital, bed-bound, for six weeks; because I can write it’s not so bad, but between deadlines time passes slowly, so landmarks in the day come to mean a lot. Most of all, I look forward to my husband visiting at 3 p.m.; secondly, the meds trolley trundling towards me like a dear old open-handed friend at 9 a.m. – but a close third must be the bell which announces the arrival of meals: breakfast at 7 a.m., lunch at 12 p.m., dinner at 5 p.m. In the first bay I stayed in, I always made my ward-mates laugh by squealing with genuine glee when I heard it.

I used to think that one of the few things that men had over women was their lack of manifest vanity. Not that men weren’t vain, but apart from turning their chests into Doritos at the gym or dyeing their greying locks that unnatural shade of black, there were very few ways for them to enact these impulses. That was, until hair transplants. One of the men in my local corner shop was proudly peacocking the follicles sprouting from his forehead As it turns out, hair transplants aren’t actually a new thing. According to my research (Google), modern hair transplant techniques were pioneered in Japan in the 1930s. Despite being nearly 100 years old, the operation has surged in popularity in recent years. Why?

What is prison for? I’ve wondered that a lot, these past five years. In February 2020, just a few days after the UK left the European Union, and as scientists worked to agree an official name for the ‘new coronavirus’, I was sentenced to 45 months in prison for a fraud I’d committed in 2014. During my time inside I discovered a system that did almost everything badly and didn’t seem to know its own purpose. Meanwhile our jails remain a mystery to those who haven’t been there. Since my release I’ve written and spoken to help people understand our prison system. I believe there is a better way of doing things, which would protect the public, provide value for money, reduce crime and help people who’ve committed crimes turn their lives around.

I’ve always liked the old Winston Churchill maxim ‘Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down’. After a month lying down in hospital, contemplating life without the use of my legs, I now utter a laugh which I hope is suitably hollow. O, my lovely legs! By the time I was 14, they were the longest in my class; by the time I was 17 they had embarked on the merry dance that has been my ‘journey’, propelling me forever onwards towards enough fun, love and money for nine lifetimes. Now I feel like a mermaid – without the sexiness – and my shameless gams are but a floppy old mono-thing.

As 2025 gets under way, I’m going to guess that one of your hopes for the coming year is ‘to be happy’. I’m also going to take a punt that you’re likely to spend a considerable amount of time, effort and money doing things you hope will make you feel that way. But considering that happiness is the number one goal of most people living in the western world, here lies the unspoken paradox at the heart of this tireless quest. Most of us can reel off a list of things that we believe will make us feel good – a great holiday, a delicious dinner, a promotion at work, fabulous sex. Yet many still don’t have a clue about how the feeling of pleasure is made in our brains in the first place. And knowing would be an incredibly useful way to work out how get more of it in 2025.

A young woman called Lily Phillips, known to certain users of the internet, has recently spoken about a cunning stunt she performed earlier this year. She had sex with 101 men in a single day. As I see it, there are three possible responses to this story. Or maybe four (phwoar!). The first is to suggest that Ms Phillips’s behaviour is not entirely ladylike. Or, less pompously, that she is a slut and a whore and so on. This is the traditional response. It is, to almost all cultures known to history, common sense. Most of these cultures had, and have, stern penalties for such behaviour. The modern West gradually decided that exclusion from polite society was punishment enough, but it has become hard to say whether we still have a polite society from which to exclude people.

With today’s vote on the assisted dying bill, I am reminded of my mother. Susie was 89, in failing health but of sound mind, when she took me aside at her house in the south of France to tell me she wanted me to kill her. She had no intention, she said, of enduring the humiliation of a decaying memory and a crumbling body, and was determined to avoid the old people’s home, the geriatric ward and the hospice. Some days my mum really wanted to kill herself, and some days she really did not ‘You have to know,’ she said to me, ‘not only when to leave a job, or a party, or a relationship, but more importantly, when to leave life itself.’ Susie told me she needed help with her plan of killing herself, and asked if I would help.

Just over a year ago, I gave birth to my daughter. Labour was surprisingly smooth, unlike my previous emergency c-section. Once I started pushing, my daughter came quickly. I heard the reassuring sound of a newborn crying, and I felt the most indescribable sense of relief. Then, I started haemorrhaging. Before I knew it, I was under general anaesthetic in the operating room. When I came to my senses a few hours later, my first thought was the hospital’s policy: no visitors after 8 p.m. I had 12 hours before being left alone overnight with my daughter in a room full of equally badly injured mothers. A sense of panic set in. The countdown had begun.