Spectator Life

Armed with a US passport, I fly to New York for just two days to interview John McWhorter, an African American professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is America’s fast-rising star of the anti-woke movement and I am there to talk to him about his brave and funny new book, Woke Racism. I zip over to meet him on one of dozens of daily flights between Heathrow and JFK in advance of America’s reopening on 8 November. The good news is that, after 8 November, the rest of Europe's jet setters can join me. It is strange flying transatlantic in the final days before the US reopens after nearly two years: there are almost as many planes as passengers.

For most little boys of my generation, and several before, the only man who could conceivably have beaten up their father was Superman. Which is why now discovering that Superman is sexually attracted to men is so brilliantly subversive. It’s like discovering Mount Everest is gay. Back in August, DC Comics artist Ethan van Sciver first broke the news that Superman was coming out, although then it sounded as if the plan was for him to be fully gay, and not just bi, during a YouTube livestream. ‘I guess Clark Kent is going bye bye,’ he said. ‘Superman is effectively gay everyone. He is gay.’ Now the first images have been released of the new Superman – Jonathan Kent – deeply French kissing his boyfriend Jay, of all things a journalist.

It's not so long ago that old watches used to turn-up at car boot fairs, charity shops and jumble sales (remember those?), usually in the form of unremarkable models set aside to be 'got rid of' after the grim reaper had called time on their original owners. Back then 'watch collecting' had yet to benefit from the turbo-boost of the internet and remained an esoteric hobby enjoyed by scholarly types who had put the work in to discover the varied histories of all the best brands in the old-fashioned way: by reading books. To everyone else, one second-hand watch was very much like another, regardless of the signature on the dial –unless, of course, it was a Rolex.

Even a few seconds can feel like an eternity when your favourite Spectator TV debate is interrupted by a sweaty bloke in a bedsit flogging digital currency. YouTube understands how painful its ludicrous advertising interludes have become which is presumably why they invented the five-second skip button. Regular ads are bad enough but it's those twenty-minute infomercials that somehow manage to catch us off guard that really grate. How does YouTube know when I am least able to reach for the skip button? It happened again the other day during my morning shower; midway through a favourite song a perky female voice barged in to ask whether it was 'ok to call someone queer'.

Sprawled out across the kerb, exhausted and inebriated as we split boxes of 20 McDonalds chicken nuggets with old friends and new drinking partners, our faces dancing with the coloured florescent lights of the strip and hair streaked with sickly-sweet flecks of alcohol. That’s how I remember my first time in Magaluf, celebrating my A-level results at 18. Almost a decade on, I found myself back there ­– except this time, I was chatting to Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh at a rooftop bar during a literary festival. So far, so highbrow. We were both in Mallorca for the inaugural Festival Literatura Expandida a Magaluf, which took over INNSiDE Calvià Beach by Meliá, an imposing but reasonably-priced hotel on the seafront, over the first weekend in October.

With the recent Netflix release of Jake Gyllenhaal’s nordic-inspired The Guilty, as the nights draw in, what better time for a smorgasbord of films from the land of the midnight sun?  The Guilty is a remake of the 2018 Danish film of the same name about a troubled 911 operator who attempts to come to the rescue of a distressed caller.  Since the literary, TV and movie phenomenon of Nordic Noir first broke out from its Scandinavian confines in the 2000s, the genre has become an established part of UK culture, along with cosy lifestyle cousins hygge, lagom and lykke.

So, is it farewell to the Friends Cat Grooming Car playset with Kitten, and the Disney Princess Ariel, Belle and Cinderella set? And what about Olivia’s Electric Car toy, Eco Education Playset? Or the Ninjago Legacy Fire Dragon Attack? Or the City Great Vehicles Refuse Truck? Lego, you may have gathered, is to eliminate gender stereotypes from its products, including labelling that marks toys for boys or girls. Look up Lego for boys or girls on Argos or similar, and you’ll see the full horror of what that entails. The girls’ stuff has a pink or mauve element plus a kitten or a princess or a castle or a hairdresser (though the Eco Education set has its very own wind turbine).

As soon as he had beaten Deontay Wilder last weekend, Tyson Fury gave thanks “to my Lord and savior Jesus Christ”. He said that he was going to pray for his fallen opponent. He has said that when he was recovering from depression and mental illness he “couldn’t do it on [his] own” and got down on his knees to ask God for help: I went down as a four hundred pound fat guy but when I got up off the floor after praying for like twenty minutes...I felt like the weight of the world was lifted off me shoulders. Most media reports glossed over these (admittedly eccentric) expressions of Christian piety, but the clips of Fury praising Jesus for his victory went viral for good reason.

Getting a takeaway doesn’t quite mean what it used to. The choice used to be between a pizza, ‘an Indian’ or ‘a Chinese’, and was reserved as a Friday night treat, to be eaten out the box while flopped on the sofa watching Cilla Black’s Blind Date. Nowadays one is as likely to order a truffle risotto as a Pizza Hut combo deal. Furthermore, many millennials and Gen Z-ers seem to have no qualms ordering takeaway several times a week, carefully transposing the slow-cooked beef Massaman curry onto bone china so they can pretend (to themselves or their Instagram followers) that it’s home-cooked – honest. But all these new trends give the old-school takeaway options a somewhat nostalgic appeal.

If No Time to Die and the inevitable 007 re-runs on ITV haven’t already sated your appetite for Bond-style espionage thrills, there’s a veritable smorgasbord of spy movies available to assuage your hunger. Some of the actors who portrayed Bond also essayed secret agents of a different stripe, with Sean Connery (The Russia House), Pierce Brosnan (The Tailor of Panama), Daniel Craig (Munich, Archangel) and Timothy Dalton (Permission to Kill, The Rocketeer) all dabbling in non-007 cloak and dagger roles. For such a long-lasting and successful franchise, it’s perhaps odd that the producers (Eon) haven’t yet contrived to release any 007 film spin-offs.

It’s not terribly surprising that the apple Charlotte is often mistakenly attributed to French chef Marie Antoine Carême; the so-called first celebrity chef is credited with inventing everything from the chef’s tall toque hat to the taxonomic arrangement of sauces, via creating an entirely new system of dining and service. Some of these have more credence than others; the Charlotte, however, does not have Carême to thank. The first recipe for an apple Charlotte appears in 1802 in at a time when Carême was still an apprentice, in The Art of Cookery Made Easy and Refined by John Mollard. In fact, the apple charlotte comes from British shores, and it was likely named after George III’s wife, Charlotte.

Every few days some celebrity ninny will call for the scrapping of marijuana laws, saying that it will take the drug out of the hands of criminal gangs. And all kinds of conservative-minded people will gravely nod their heads at the idea. But those looking to condone cannabis use through the law should think about the consequences of such a move. All crime is caused by law. If we had no laws, there would be no need for those expensive police, courts and prisons to enforce them. There would be no crimes. There would be no criminal gangs. But there would still be a lot of people doing stupid, wrong things. Decriminalising cannabis won’t make its impact on society any less potent.