Spectator Life

It was Barbara Amiel, whose copy I used to edit at the Sunday Times, who first alerted me to the important point that one private jet isn’t enough. One jet is always in the wrong place. Or having heavy maintenance. Two was the minimum, she said. Plenty of others appear to live by the same maxim. Roman Abramovich has five jets, including a Boeing 787 Dreamliner worth $350 million. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos et al. are not short of a jet or two either. But soon all these symbols of tycoonery may be made obsolete by the world’s first supersonic business jet, announced by a start-up unfortunately named Boom Supersonic (presumably after the noise its aircraft will make when it passes overhead).

In a 1965 issue of Playboy magazine, the late Sean Connery said: 'Bond is the invincible figure every man would like to be.' If you’re such a man (or woman) you’ve probably left it too late to step into the Crockett & Jones chukka boots worn by outgoing Bond Daniel Craig in No Time to Die – but you could buy his Barton Perreira sunglasses from the film, or even that grey Tom Ford suit he made such a mess of during the motorbike and train chase sequences. Both are up for grabs in a forthcoming charity auction organised by Christie’s and EON Productions that could prove to be the highest-grossing sale of Bond memorabilia ever staged.

Stanley, Falkland Islands I’m not saying the Falklands is a tiny place, but last month, over the course of just a few hours, I had my hair cut by one international athlete and then my passport processed by another. Soon-to-be international athletes, anyway. They’re both part of the Islands’ team for this year’s Commonwealth Games, which is taking place in Birmingham this week. The Falklands has despatched 16 competitors across four sports: badminton, table tennis, cycling and bowls. For many participants, this is their first Commonwealth Games. For some, thanks largely to Covid, it will be their debut international appearance.

We’re in the elegant 1820s parlour of a five-star, Grade II-listed hotel. There’s music playing softly, and opposite us, one particularly well-groomed guest is wearing a bowtie.  A three-tier cake stand is brought to the table. On the top tier sits a selection of homemade biscuits and a fluffy cupcake finished with a swirl of yellow icing. Beneath that is a thick wedge of cake with what looks like pink and white buttercream oozing from the middle. And on the bottom tier is a finely decorated China bowl, piled high with… mashed-up meat?

A five-minute taxi journey costs €50, a single drink can set you back more than €20 – and if you want to avoid shelling out €60 for a plate of pasta, you might struggle to find a supermarket. But the Costa Smeralda offers one luxury that's hard to put a price on at the peak of the summer holiday season – a surprising lack of crowds. Back in the 1960s, this 20km stretch of beaches and pine forest on Sardinia's northern coastline was uninhabited and deemed of little value to the country's farmers. But the Aga Khan spotted a business opportunity. He purchased the land and began the process of turning it into a tourist destination for the upper classes, establishing a consortium to ensure all future development remained tightly controlled.

The rise of hybrid working has meant buyers are willing to endure a longer commute so they can have a bigger house. London’s newly expanded commuter belt now includes many locations within a 90-minute ride, which have become hot spots in the ‘race for space’. But access to the capital is still important for part-time commuters - so which areas tick both boxes? For the hybrid workforce, being able to drive 10-15 minutes to a station with regular trains into the capital is key, along with easy access to a motorway or trunk road.

Great TV shows have a knack for immortalising their locations. Think what Fargo did for the otherwise unloved Dakotas, or Vince Gilligan turning New Mexico into the heart of the 21st century’s greatest neo-Western with Breaking Bad. While the Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things might have secured its place on the podium of brilliant box-sets, could it also inspire your next US getaway? Admittedly, a show revolving around a terrifying alternate dimension might not seem a natural candidate for inspiring wanderlust.

At Ivana Trump’s funeral yesterday, her children paid tribute to their ‘trailblazing’ mother. She was the ‘embodiment of the American dream’ they said. They were right, she was focused and driven, but she was also surprisingly generous with her advice. I sat next to Ivana Trump at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, and was struck by her good manners. We were at a dala dinner, in a Belle Époque hall, packed with stars and starlets, money men and courtiers – the delusional and desperate who mainline on the heroin of Cannes. I don’t think I was the placement Ivana was expecting: ‘Has it come to this? Stuck on the media table, with Charlotte Eagar and Nick Foulkes?’ she must have thought.

Ask a Spaniard where they vacation, and you may get a touch of the Matador effect in response. The chest lifts, the head is tilted up with the bottom lip pushed out accompanied by the reply: 'España! My country.' For like the Greeks, when you have so many domestic splendours to choose from, why would you go anywhere else? It’s estimated that about two out of three vacationing Spaniards remain in country for the holidays. But where do the Spanish go? It’s a bit of a mystery—perhaps intentionally so. With swarms of Brits inundating their land, you can’t blame the Spanish for wanting to safeguard a few vacation refuges. Recently I’ve been encountering Spaniards on the move for their holidays.

What makes a kebab a kebab and why do we like eating things on sticks? That is the important question I have been mulling as we hit the steamy barbecue season. The debate was inspired not by kebabs, in fact, but by yakitori, the typically refined Japanese version of kebabs that essentially involve cooking every body part of a chicken on small skewers, and which also seems to be London’s most recent Japanese love affair following sushi, ramen, udon, and so on.  Yakitori though is really the extreme of food on stick eating. Take the menu of Junsei in Marylebone (excellent, by the way), which breaks the chicken down into ten elements ranging from gizzard to wings and cooks them to dripping succulence on half size kebab sticks.

For a woman whose life was all about ascent, there is a cruel irony to the fact that Ivana Trump was found dead at the age of 73 at the bottom of the stairs of her Upper East Side apartment last Thursday. Born in 1949 in Communist Czechoslovakia, the girl whose father was an electrical engineer made her name on the basis of dizzying verticals: first as a professional skier and then as billionaire’s wife and manager of her second husband Donald Trump’s eye-bending skyscrapers in New York and Atlantic City. After her acrimonious tabloid divorce from Donald in 1991 following his affair with chorus-girl Marla Maples, Ivana made her name from surviving - and exposing - the indignities of her marriage’s collapse.

That’s another prime minister the Rolling Stones have outlasted. When the band first plugged in under that name at London’s Marquee Club on July 12, 1962, Harold Macmillan was in No. 10 dealing with the ‘little local difficulty’ of sacking a third of his cabinet. Then came Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, Wilson again, Jim Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May and now the soon-to-depart Boris Johnson. Thirteen administrations, an even dozen US presidents and six popes. And through it all the Stones themselves have just kept rolling along. Not bad for a band of misfits that everyone, including them, thought would last a year or two at most.

You may have noticed it’s been a bit warm this week. There are few things the poorly insulated and generally un-airconditioned nation of Britain is less prepared for than the mercury screaming past the 30-degree mark. So really, the only sensible thing to do is park yourself in the shade with a big jug of water, some good company, and a cold cocktail. The following drinks are specially designed to beat the heat without being too much hassle to put together. They’re easy-going, refreshing, and none of them require a cocktail shaker – because, honestly, who can be bothered with that sort of thing just now? Cheers. Elderflower Rebujito In its native Andalusia, the Rebujito is the answer to the Spritz or the Mojito.