Spectator Life

Ask a foreigner to name the fruit that above all others epitomises their image of Britain, and it will surely be the strawberry. It is less a fruit than an icon. Redolent of royalty: not just for its role jam sandwiching together a Victoria Sponge but for its colour too, as patriotically red as the tunics of The Queen’s Guards. To eat bowls of strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. To partake of a punnet on a park picnic. These things are as quintessentially British as tea and queuing. What is it that is so evocative about strawberries? They are of course synonymous with summer, and they have about them something of the match tea, of outdoor eating and of holidays. There is nostalgia too: growing up without strawberry jam sandwiches was surely no childhood at all.

Turville Grange has many of the expected hallmarks of the top-end English country houses and estates on the market this spring. First comes its punchy price tag – in this case £18.75m – and lusted after location, the upmarket riverside town of Henley-on-Thames, in Oxfordshire. Then there are its classic good looks: built in Queen Anne style in the 1880s, the Grade II listed three-storey house sprawls across 8,000 sq ft of space, has five main bedrooms, five staff bedrooms, two guest bedrooms and five reception rooms. There’s even a scratch or two of graffiti as proof of the requisite royal visitors – Princess Victoria, younger sister of King George V, etched the dates 1915, 1917 and 1918 into a first- floor window with a diamond ring.

We seem to need little excuse for a party here in the UK, and HRH Queen Elizabeth II’s 70-year shift on the throne is set to be no exception. Whether you’ll be raising a lunchtime gin and Dubonnet to our sovereign’s stamina or simply making the most of the bonus day away from your desk, the Jubilee is the perfect pretext for baking. While you’ve left it a little late to enter Fortnum & Mason’s rather fabulous sounding Platinum Pudding Competition, I urge you not to be deterred from donning your aprons and dusting off your cake tins.

During last year’s European Championship, England football fans switched, for some reason, from ‘Three Lions’ to ‘Sweet Caroline’ by Neil Diamond (‘so good, so good, so good’). If anything can make them switch back it’s the Football Association, who this week said they were thinking of dropping the Baddiel and Skinner anthem as England’s official song, because it could be seen as ‘arrogant’. Football fans are like children, and as any parent could have told the F.A., if you want to make sure someone does something then just tell them not to do it. The F.A. quickly had to issue a statement confirming there were no plans to change. David Baddiel himself feels the F.A. have long disliked the song.

‘Was that Will Smith?’  This was Chris Rock’s characteristically quick and hilarious reaction when his friend, comedian Dave Chappelle, was tackled by an audience member on Tuesday night at the Hollywood Bowl. Comedy venues need to be a sacred space, free from the threat of violence We don’t yet know the motive, we don’t yet know the man’s name, but this is the second high-profile attack on a comedian in two months. Luckily for Dave, he has great security, including Django himself, Jamie Foxx, who helped subdue the attacker, who some reported as being armed with a gun and a knife.  Video footage of the man being loaded into an ambulance has already started circulating on social media.

There are moments in life that serve as a wake-up call to adulthood. Perhaps, the first was sitting in the beige office of a mortgage broker, wondering how my soon-to-be-husband and I had made the leap from meeting on a sweaty Durham dance floor to this airless room in Holborn. More recently, it was looking around a primary school for our four-year-old-son. Mindlessly staring at wall displays of woodland animals, you’re racking your brains as to how you will finish work at 3pm for pick up come September and scramble enough childcare for a six-week summer holiday. Goodbye 52-week-a year nursery.  But book yourself enough tours at enough schools, and you swiftly find yourself in the swing of things.

You don’t see Waldorf salad so much nowadays. It’s a simple dish: raw celery, apple, grapes and walnuts, tossed in a mayonnaise-based dressing. Although you might still find it packaged in the bigger supermarkets, it’s fallen off dinner tables and restaurant menus alike. We wrinkle our noses at the prospect of combining fresh fruit and mayonnaise: the combination always makes me mentally place the Waldorf salad in the 70s, alongside big platters of dressed salmon, covered in wafer-thin cucumber scales, and a host of other mayonnaise-coated, tricky-to-identify bowls purporting to be salads, possibly involving tinned mandarin oranges.

Is Steve Coogan a one trick pony? It's a question that has dogged the Mancunian actor's career ever since his preening Partridge flapped into the nation's affections over thirty years ago. Since then, with a couple of notable exceptions (his turn as Stan Laurel was a triumph), Coogan's projects have been little more than variations on a theme but without the genius of the source material. No matter how hard the actor tries to shake off his past with glossy Hollywood fodder, his polyester-pullovered alter-ego is never far from the surface.