Spectator Life

Modern dating is a mess: it's a shallow world of filters, FaceTune and superficial swiping. Across the internet, Gen Z complain that daters flake, catfish, scam, and – most objectionably of all – ghost. A new dating app, Snack, proposes a solution. Snack is described as ‘Tinder meets TikTok': a place where Gen Zs can film themselves flirting, create content with fun video prompts, and enjoy a ‘more authentic video-first dating experience’. Snack also enables its users to punish those who ‘ghost’ them by leaving them negative reviews. ‘Ghosting’ is rejection without the closure – you’re talking to someone and, suddenly, they stop responding and disappear.

Offering a choice of three stunning coastlines, historic villages and dozens of wine-making regions France has long been one of our favourite places to buy a holiday home. Queen Victoria loved Nice, Noel Coward adored Cap Ferrat and the ‘old’ French Riviera between Toulon and Hyères features in the new Downtown Abbey film out next month, with Dame Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess enjoying a Belle Epoque holiday home there. Our nearest neighbour has remained a popular choice during the pandemic because it’s really the only feasible place to drive to, and Brittany, Normandy and the Loire have seen an uptick in demand from British buyers less keen on flying.

In British cooking we have traditionally had a complicated relationship with garlic. Let the french use it to their hearts’ content: fine in a Toulouse but no thank you in a Cumberland. Suggestive of this wariness is wild garlic’s many names – ‘devil's garlic’, ‘gypsy's onions’ and ‘stinking Jenny’ amongst others. But in recent years British cooks have taken to wild garlic with unabashed relish (and indeed it makes rather a good one, as seen here). Food always tastes better having foraged or hunted for it yourself and so it is with wild garlic. The leaves appear in March and you will find them throughout spring but they are best picked early in the season.

What’s the next step for a macho gangland drama that’s already built a fanbase in some 183 countries worldwide? That’s right: a collaboration with one of the highest regarded companies in UK contemporary dance. When it opens in September at Birmingham’s Hippodrome theatre, The Redemption of Thomas Shelby – a 20-strong dance production from the South Bank’s Rambert Dance Company – will mark yet another cultural milestone for Peaky Blinders: the BBC’s historic drama about a gang of Brummie ruffians who ran parts of the city between the two world wars.

With Shrove Tuesday upon us, I am forced to face my annual pancake day gripe. It is, inevitably, the cook’s gripe: standard crèpe-like pancakes should be eaten as soon as they are cooked, each doled out to waiting mouths as soon as it’s ready. Yes, recipes tell you you can keep them warm in a low oven, but doing that tends them towards the rubbery and luke-warm. This means that the cook is standing at the stove ladling batter while everyone else eats. As a greedy cook, I resent this. But there is a pancake solution: the Dutch baby. The name does not point to a Holland heritage: instead, the dish is named after the Pennsylvanian Dutch, a group of German-speaking immigrants to America.

As Sigmund Freud once told me in a YouTube video: ‘Who lacks sex – speaks about sex, hungry talks about food, a person who has no money – about money, and our oligarchs and bankers talk about morality.’ So beware anyone who starts preaching ‘self-love’ at you. Chances are they hate themselves quite as much as you do – if not more so – and have been duped by the latest fad into revealing their deeply narcissistic behaviour patterns.

That Essex County Council is spending £300,000 on an advertising campaign to rehabilitate its reputation can’t come as a surprise. The only surprise is that it didn’t think to do it before – or that somehow they believe £300,000 is enough to turn the tide. As far as I can tell, £300,000 won’t touch the sides. And in a strange way, I'm glad. Because Essex, as Britain's most underrated county, is something of an undiscovered haven for ex Londoners like me. Don’t believe me? Let’s do a test: if I say the word ‘Essex’ to you, what images come to mind? The cast of Birds of a Feather, perhaps? The boy band Bros, a Mark III Ford Escort and perhaps Sir Alan Sugar?

The poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote of South American waterfalls that spill over the sides of mountaintops ‘in soft slow motion’, and I was reminded of her lines on the Colombian Pacific coast where seemingly every bay has a wonderful waterfall tumbling down into it. As there are no roads to speak of, the only way to see something of the jungle is to advance up streams from the sea until you reach one of these waterfalls – with the great advantage that there is usually a rock pool to swim in when you get there.

The paperback’s cover showed a woman and man walking down Ludgate Hill towards Fleet Street with St Paul’s behind them and a red double decker passing to their right, dressed in the office fashions of the post war years. It looked like a still from an Ealing Comedy. A friend posted the image on his social media because he liked the look of the Fontana edition which he had found on his father’s shelves. It was a copy of London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins. Most people seeing this would immediately start thinking of the fifties but for me it had rather different associations, triggering intense memories of the 1990s. This was because I had spent many hours over several years of that decade trying to find a copy of this very book.

Our countryside is one of the wonders of the world – a great patchwork quilt of green fields, hedgerows, and rolling hills. But our sad little secret is that England ranks among the most nature-depleted countries in the world. Countless species have vanished altogether, and others cling on in isolated patches of remnant nature. While most of us are dimly aware of nature’s decline – car windscreens no longer splattered with insects after a summer car journey; a countryside strangely silent in springtime – few realise the full extent of the catastrophe that is unfolding around us. Accounts from earlier centuries describe meadows riotous with colour, hedgerows thronged with songbirds.

Novak Djokovic’s readiness to walk away from tennis on a point of principle is an act of sporting heroism on a par with Muhammad Ali’s refusal to fight in the Vietnam war. Like Ali was when he said he had ‘no quarrel with them Viet Cong’, Djokovic is widely accepted to be the greatest master of his sport of all time. Ali, then at the height of his powers, was banned from boxing for three years for his stance. For refusing to take a Covid vaccination — a matter of conscience — we don’t yet know for how long Djokovic will be prevented from playing tennis at the highest level.

On Monday supermodel Naomi Campbell was pictured posing with her new baby daughter for the first time on the cover of British Vogue. Having become a mother in her 50s, she described having a child as 'the biggest joy I could ever imagine.' And yet it's a 'joy' few members of the younger generation want to share. New statistics reveal that half of women in England and Wales are now childless by their 30th birthday. In 1971, just 18 per cent of 30-year-olds had no children – now that figure has risen to a record 50 per cent. This phenomenon is by no means unique to Britain; fertility rates are collapsing across the developed world.