Spectator Life

Easter is almost upon us and with it comes the mouth-watering prospect of roast lamb. It has become increasingly fashionable in recent years to eschew the leg and do a slow-cooked, meltingly tender shoulder of lamb for a Sunday roast. Rightly so, for the shoulder meat is rich and delicious, but when it comes to Easter there is something suitably grand and evocative of the new season about a whole leg brought to the table, pink in the middle and surrounded by spring veg. Rubbing it all over with olive oil, sea salt, garlic and rosemary is a classic preparation – adding some lemon zest too gives a welcome freshness.

Here to separate the good eggs from the great eggs, we’ve tasted the Easter treats from the UKs favourite retailers. The 2022 eggs range from the innovative to the slightly baffling but the good news is there’s great options here for every taste and budget. Autore Milk Chocolate Egg with Pistachios, £19.70 – Delicaro Upper crust food merchant Delicario is selling a selection of eggs made by Campaian cocoa ultras Autore Chocolate. This is the sort of website where you can buy Japanese beef that was pampered to death and special tuna fed exclusively on truffles (probably) so expectations are high. The thick, milk chocolate comes with a generous pebble-dashing of Bronte pistachios, nuts of protected origin grown on the slopes of Mount Etna.

Bringing something golden, sweet and uplifting into your kitchen and life is exactly what is required at this time of year. And it doesn’t get more golden, sweet or uplifting than a syrup sponge. A syrup sponge is a steamed pudding, laced with golden syrup. The pudding itself is made by pouring a cake-style batter into a basin or bowl, sealing it with paper and foil, and then placing it in a half-filled pan of water, where it is gently cooked by the steam, until the sponge is light and risen. Golden syrup is an inverse sugar, which means it is created in the process of refining sugar, or after a sugar solution has been treated with an acid. Its flavour is distinctive: lighter than honey, like the palest of caramels, with a clean sweetness which tastes almost metallic.

Is it the end of the road for the guidebook? Since Mariana Starke wrote Information and Directions for Travellers on the Continent in 1820, with tips on the most ‘tolerable’ inns and how to hire a horse carriage, travellers have been packing a volume of advice alongside their identity documents before setting off for foreign terrain. But last week, one of the world’s most widely read guidebook publishers, Lonely Planet, changed course. It released the first half-dozen of 35 ‘Anti-guidebooks’, declaring that the guidebook is dead. This new series – including Ireland, Portugal, Scotland and Japan – boast the familiar blue spine and two-tone globe logo that has accompanied my trips over decades.

Last week I went to The Hammersmith Apollo to see Ludovico Einaudi perform his new album Underwater. I hadn’t been to a concert since before the pandemic and had forgotten the thrill of live music. Recordings can never match the sensual and social experience of live performance. When listened to collectively,  music unmasks the soul – solitary emotions are suddenly shared – and it connects us to something greater than ourselves. Music is the medium I go to for comfort when life is not quite making sense Underwater is Einaudi’s first solo piano album in two decades, becoming the fastest streamed classical music album in history. High minded critics turn their noses up, calling his music ‘elementary’.

The best recent advert for the bella vita is surely actor Stanley Tucci sampling regional cuisines in CNN’s Searching for Italy exclaiming ‘oh my god’ at least four times an episode as he swoons over risotto Milanese or Sicilian pasta alla Norma. It's these sun-soaked visions of a foodie paradise that persuade scores of Northern Europeans and Americans to buy a home there. Around 30,000 Britons have moved there – mostly to Lombardy, Lazio or Tuscany – but a raft of incentives is helping draw many buyers to southern Italy, where rural properties are more affordable.

‘A sky full of stars and he was staring at her’ is a love poem by a dead Roman but on the London Underground, all a man will find if he looks skyward is a TFL advert warning him if he stares at me in an Attican fashion I’m to call the police. ‘Staring’ (Sadiq Khan’s bright red public safety warning reads – with ominous eyeballs popping out of the ‘a’ and the ‘g’) that may be construed as ‘intense’ and of ‘sexual nature’ is now ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘not tolerated’. Should anyone ‘see it or experience it’ they are to text the British Transport Police or dial an 0800 sexual harassment hotline if they want to remain anonymous.

Blake Shelton’s ‘God’s Country’ plays on the radio as bolts of lightning tear through dark clouds, illuminating the corn fields of the Midwest. ‘Slow down,’ demands Mum, clutching her seat. It’s clear she’s grateful the rental company did not give me the muscle car that I was hoping for. We’re on America’s ‘Mother Road’, otherwise known as Route 66. Or what’s left of it that is. The original highway ran 2,448 miles cross-country from the city of Chicago, Illinois, to the beaches of Santa Monica in California, but was replaced in the 1950s by the Interstate.

The sad news that Bruce Willis is ‘stepping away’ from acting due to an aphasia diagnosis came as a surprise to fans, but the film industry has been rife with rumours about his possible medical problems over recent years. The slew of cheap straight-to-DVD action thrillers (with relatively little screen time) he starred in since 2014 made observers wonder whether Willis was making as much money as he could to ensure both care in his retirement and a decent inheritance for his family. The fact that the famously motor mouthed actor of Moonlighting and his long run of hit movies opted for increasingly taciturn roles led insiders to wonder whether something was wrong.

I’ve recently become betrothed, so naturally I’ve started playing the fantasy house game; scrolling through property sites on my phone, highest price first, before I go to sleep at night. I thought I knew what I was looking for; a Georgian townhouse, solid stone steps leading up to a grand front door, basement kitchen, you know the drill… but then I saw it, my dream house. The main living area is a vast open plan, multi-levelled space with a sweeping wall of windows; white limestone floors contrast against its naked brick body and slatted wooden ceiling; everything is bathed in brilliant natural light, the lines between inside and outside gloriously blurred. In short, it’s a mid-century modern (MCM) masterpiece.

Will Smith’s straight arm slap of Chris Rock at the Oscars was, for my money, the most interesting event ever to have transpired at any awards show in history. It pips even my previous favourite, which was when Jarvis Cocker ran onstage during the 1996 Brits to reveal his buttocks in protest at Michael Jackson’s ludicrously overblown performance of Earth Song. Did Rock ask to be attacked for humiliating Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith, on account of her alopecia? Yes, of course. But that was the point. The joke was predicated entirely on the comic getting away with saying the unsayable – a formulation of words intended to be deeply provocative – and for the audience to experience the attendant risk as electricity.

Now this is a story all about how The Oscars got flipped-turned upside down. And I'd like to take a minute. Just sit right there. I'll tell you how I told told a joke about a chick with no hair... Well, I think we all know what the opening routine of Chris Rock’s next Netflix special is going to be. Say what you want about the Oscars, this year people are certainly talking about them. But not about the movies, about the Fresh Prince himself, Will Smith, slapping comedian Chris Rock on a worldwide broadcast in front of the Hollywood elite. Like every British comedian, after I woke up and read the news, I ran to Twitter to attempt a joke about this bizarre spectacle, only to find out I’d been beaten to the punch, as it were.