Spectator Life

Brace yourself for the unmistakable sound of a tennis ball thwacking away in the background of your living room for two weeks - Wimbledon is finally upon us. As skilled as the players on the court are, it's the delightful spectacle of my family's amateur commentary that I enjoy the most. 'Who on earth is that?' my grandmother used to ask, unfailingly, when anyone unseeded dared to play against her beloved Steffi Graff. 'The Spaniard is touching his bum again' is the refrain in our house when Nadal prepares to serve. For the casual spectator, it's our lack of true tennis expertise that makes the tournament such a delight to watch: we like to gaze at its alchemy, without knowing too much about how the magic comes about.

As this year’s Wimbledon Championships will demonstrate, tennis has moved on a bit in the past half-century: rackets are no longer wooden, ‘Hawkeye’ settles the ‘You cannot be serious’ moments and the winner of the ‘gentlemen’s singles’ competition will trouser £1.7m (compared with the measly £5,000 Stan Smith took home in 1972). But what happened to those great outfits from the days of Smith, Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors? The striped shirts, the short shorts, the groovy track tops. Where did all the style go? The answer dates back to the late 1990s when the organising committee tightened-up the dress code, side-lining the previous protocol requiring clothing worn on court to be ‘predominantly white’ in favour of a ’90 per cent’ rule.

For anyone with any interest in the story of Mumbai, or the modern history of Indian food in the UK, Britannia & Co. is a worthy lunch destination when on the subcontinent. An institution in the city, it is one of a clutch of surviving Irani cafes that once filled Bombay. Their fame has peaked in recent years, in no small part because they were the inspiration behind one of London’s biggest restaurant successes of the last decade –Dishoom. These Irani cafes were places where sweaty taxiwallahs mingled with suited and booted business execs, while eating eggs akuri or lamb keema, under wooden fans whirling overhead. The proprietor of Britannia & Co, Mr Kohinoor, tells me the restaurant was before him run by his grandfather and then his father until the age of 95.

One could get used to this. I come from seafaring stock, albeit distant. ‘Anderson’ suggests Viking antecedents, especially as my forebears came from the Shetland Islands. Yet there must have been something wrong with the first Anderson. Other Vikings reached Normandy, Sicily, even Byzantium. At the very least, they found the odd monastery to plunder. Later, their Norman descendants compensated for cultural destruction with cultural creation. But to endure the rigours of crossing from Norway and then disembark on Shetland? Was my remote ancestor seasick, or mutinous, or did he rape the cabin boy? We will never know. A millennium or so later, life at sea was rather different. We were on a yacht, cruising between Sardinia and Corsica.

You’re in a bar, on a date and it’s Saturday night. The lighting is low, the music is good and the drinks are flowing. Your opposite number is everything you thought they would be: intelligent, interesting and attractive. The conversation is easy and the evening looks promising. You start to think this one might be special.  But then you hear their laugh for the first time - it’s a grating string of huh-huh-huh’s - and it's all over. The attraction flips to disgust and, try as you might, you can’t look at them in the same way. It’s the moment you anticipate but never hope for…It’s the ick. Last week Keir Starmer cracked a cringeworthy Love Island joke in the Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, the new film starring Emma Thompson, doesn’t know what sex is. It portrays a brief liaison between a widow (Nancy, played by Thompson) and a male prostitute as liberating for her, a blessed introduction to the world of sexual pleasure. The marital sex she knew was functional, orgasm-free (for her). Maybe religion’s to blame; she was an RE teacher. I don’t know if the film specifies whether she has a religious background, but it’s at least implied. And in an interview Emma Thompson blames religion for the shame that has denied so many people sexual pleasure. Back to my opening claim. Such a plot entails a two-dimensional view of sex.

The spot where Forrest Gump gets offered a seat is pretty well where the shower is now. I’m spending the night at a campsite in Suffolk, sleeping aboard ‘Texas’, the first converted vehicle offered by American School Bus Glamping. Until this time last year the bus was transporting students to and from school in the Lone Star state. Now it sleeps up to six (double bed, two bunks and a sofa bed, all John Lewis linen provided), has a funky little kitchen (oven, hob, high-end crockery, plus a barbeque outside) and that (exceedingly decent) shower. Unlike some glamping companies, this one fully recognises that the first syllable denotes ‘glamorous’. My favourite touch is the fridge – its front is disguised as a Marshall guitar amp.

As a typically cynical son of Blackpool, I'm often one of the first to stick the boot in when the town hits the headlines. And who can blame me? In a top trumps of misery and woe, the seaside resort is declared the victor time and again. Once dubbed the 'most unhealthy place in England', life expectancy languishes at the foot of any table. Three years ago, a government poverty report found the town was home to the most deprived ward in England out of a total of 32,844. Unemployment? It runs at just 6 per cent — not bad. Though, as The Spectator has previously reported, another 26 per cent are out of work and not even looking for a job so don't count towards the unemployment figure — again, the worst in the country.

Oisin Murphy is seen as a bad boy of flat racing. He’s one of the best riders in the world but he keeps getting into trouble. He’s been banned from racing for 14 months for breaching coronovirus protocols by going to Mykonos and he failed two alcohol tests last year.  Oisin is now taking some time, as he puts it, to reflect. This year he’s at Royal Ascot without his riding boots for the first time in his career.  I find him in the Parade Ring. A horse obsessive, he immediately starts talking me through the details as the jockeys begin to mount.

Not long after being diagnosed with cancer, David Bowie reportedly made a secret trip to London to say his farewells. One of his stops was No. 4 Plaistow Grove, a modest terraced house in the heart of suburbia where he grew up, having moved there in 1955. I knew the house well. It was five minutes down the road from our home, which stood in a private lane alongside the golf course, in the village of Sundridge Park. Here, Davy lived with his mum Peggy and dad John. Back in the early sixties, heady rock and rolls days even in Bromley, it was clear that Bowie – or Davy Jones, as he was then – was hell-bent on stardom.

Ave Mario looks like Clown Town, a soft-play centre in Finchley with a ball pit so large you could drown in it and lie undiscovered for years. Apart from the crucifixes on the walls, of course, which are specific to Avo Maria. (I have yet to find a soft-play centre that looks like St Peter’s.) We need joy now that Al ‘Boris’ Johnson, our human ball pit masquerading as someone who does not have narcissistic personality disorder, endures to fudge another day with his cabinet of ghouls and his stupid hair. I have always underestimated him as a hack: no more. Now I think he could edit the Daily Mail, and I have no higher praise for any hustler who ever learned to write his name than that.

Another day, another diva disrobes. If it’s not Madonna (63) being ‘outraged’ after being banned from Instagram Live (after continually breaking the app’s rules with her nude posts) for ‘digital depictions of her vagina’ it’s Emma Thompson (also 63) getting her kit off for her new film, in which she plays a widow who hires a sex worker. And like a bleak backbeat, we have the sad spectre of Britney Spears, a young woman used as an ATM machine by her immediate family and as fantasy fodder by strangers since she was old enough to wear a school uniform ironically.

Hollywood can appear self-satisfied and insular at the best of times, but it's been a rough few months even by Tinseltown standards. Judging by the slew of trailers that have dropped in recent weeks, this season in cinema land will centre on only one thing: biopics. From Madonna and Marilyn Monroe to Elvis (and even Hillary Rodham Clinton) it’s time for a barrage of films in which big stars play bigger stars – in return for your adoration.  Hollywood’s fixation on global fame might not be entirely new – Ben Kingsley’s turn in Gandhi is about to reach its 40th birthday, incidentally – but there’s no getting away from the fact that it has stepped up a gear in recent years.

Once upon a time, when the fingerprints on the Wimbledon trophy were more or less exclusively British, you could win in SW19 whilst wearing trousers. Even a tie if you go back far enough. But then, back in those days, tennis was a no-sweat sport. Well, perhaps a drop or two, but essentially there was much less of it around than today, when sweatbands, perspiration and frequent towelling off are part of a fetishised display of effort and strain – one that’s often accompanied by verbal ejaculations of sometimes rather alarming severity. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been forced to mute Wimbledon at times because of the repetitive baseline grunting. But it wasn’t always this way.