Spectator Life

If there is one good thing to come out of this godawful pandemic, please can it be an end to the practice of air kissing? You might have spent the past year longing to give your friends a bear hug, or hold your grand children, but how many of us have really missed one of the most bizarre formal greetings during social distancing? I certainly haven't. In fact, I am desperate for building back better to involve dispensing with this stupid affectation.  The beauty of a handshake is there is only really one way of doing it, and therefore much less room for things to go wrong.

Say cheese. Now, say 'British Cheese' and what comes to mind? A nice bit of Cheddar? A wedge of Stilton? Fair enough; but would you be surprised to know there are now no fewer than 800 British and Irish cheeses, many of them new? There has been an upsurge in cheesemaking in Britain. Some of the new cheeses are novelties in conception and technique, others are Continental European in style but there has also been a welcome return of at least some old fashioned and excellent county cheeses, like Cheshire (once the aristocrat of cheeses), Gloucester, Leicester and Caerphilly. It's been an astonishing phenomenon and it has happened over quite a short time, in the last two or three decades, while most of us weren’t looking.

We can enter restaurants on Monday, and I wondered if I should tell you where to eat if you want the most fantastical or expensive or original food in London, or where I will eat in the early days of re-opening. What have you missed? A ball of ice on wheels containing champagne bottles at angles, trundling along like a mad hedgehog? (This was in Monaco). Foam? Hamburgers amid velvets at Louie, a newish supper-club near the Ivy named for Louis Armstrong and Louis XIV both? (Sometimes in life you have to choose, but not in Louie). Balthazar in the over-polished wasteland of Covent Garden, the latest central London district to be ruined by depopulation and money? Anything with Gordon Ramsay’s name falling off it, like Humpty-Dumpty and dust?

Boris Johnson has announced that the government will permit hugging from Monday 17 May. In subsequent weeks, it is expected that permission will be granted for people to hold hands, kiss and, perhaps, engage in even more intimate acts of mutual appreciation. However, the authorities remain cautious about mutant variants and their ability to spread through rampant hugging.  Former SAGE expert and BBC commentator, Neil Ferguson, has played a key role in government policy throughout the pandemic. Initially responsible for producing forecasts that led to social distancing policies, Ferguson is also rumoured to have performed a series of covert, close contact experiments with his married girlfriend.

So, a question for you. Are you bothered by the fact that you hear the word so, quite so often? Does ‘so’ grate on you? It grates on me. A lot. Every time I hear it I shudder, which makes certain television channels frankly hazardous. In fact, I’ve reached my absolute 'so' saturation point. It happened the other morning when my son, who is just five, walked into the sitting room and announced portentously: ‘So, the question is...’ I didn't catch the question because I was wracking my brain as to where he had come up with that form of words. And then it dawned on me... Over the next half an hour I must have caught myself either saying ‘so’ or very nearly doing so, about half a dozen times.

One of my favourite Alan Partridge moments — and there have been many — is the now infamous scene from I'm Alan Partridge, where north Norfolk's most beloved DJ — Alan's words not mine — is chased down a remote country track by a psychotic stalker. On reaching a dead end our hero leaps over a fence and lands in one of those awkward forward lunges where in order to avoid tripping over you have to run to catch up with yourself.  This brief but beautifully realised moment encapsulates everything that made this particular incarnation of Alan Partridge such an excruciating but enjoyable watch. Here we see the cowardly little man desperately trying to maintain a modicum of dignity as his world collapses around him.

Following the news that Portugal, including Madeira and the Azores, has a place on the UK’s green list, many of us are writing off other destinations and eyeing up its travel potential for the first time. There's more to Portugal than the Algarve: whether you’re in search of vines, hiking trails or secluded shores, it's possible to pull off an extremely varied break here.  The Coast As popular as Portugal is for its beaches, its long Atlantic coastline and wealth of islands means there’s plenty of coastal seclusion to be found. The Serra da Arrábida Natural Park near Lisbon covers more than 100 square kilometres and is the setting for several sandy stretches and smaller coves including Praia de Galapinhos.

We all know it’s going to be another bumper year for the UK’s tourism sector. With confidence in international travel still not yet fully in-place, and staycation options booked out, camping is a fantastic alternative, giving you the flexibility to follow the weather and families the ability to meet again in a socially distant way with the backdrop of some of the UK’s most stunning landscapes. We’ve put together this list of some of the best campsites in the UK to book this summer, with a focus on wild spaces and access to coast paths and hill walks. Here are eight recommendations for the best campsites to book this summer.

As national irritation continues to simmer over what many viewers felt was the disappointing denouement to BBC1’s hit police drama Line of Duty, here's a look at ten shows that bowed out on a more satisfying note. A good ending is comparatively rare, as the tendency in TV is to squeeze every last drop out of a hit series until audiences are in terminal decline; witness AMC’s The Walking Dead, which continues to limp on. In contrast to shows that drag on beyond their natural lives, many felt that Game of Thrones’ final 8th season was a rush job, prompted by the desire of showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss to cash-in with deals for Star Wars movies and their own series.

Is there any television programme as cruel as Grand Designs? At least Jeux Sans Frontieres only offered 15 minutes of humiliation at a time. Grand Designs, by contrast, offers a lifetime’s worth, often with bankruptcy and divorce thrown in. But none have come quite such a cropper as Edward Short who, in 2008, paid £1 million for a building plot on the North Devon coast and has spent the past 13 years – as well as a further £6 million – trying to turn it into a lighthouse-inspired luxury home with infinity pool, home cinema and sauna. What stands there at the moment, however, looks more like the remains of Chernobyl nuclear power station.

I’d always wanted to work in the media but had no idea how to get there. I would spend hours during sixth form trawling the pages of impressive journalists on Wikipedia, desperately trying to get some sense of what was required. My conclusion? An Oxbridge education tied most of them together. Inspired, I applied to various top universities. After getting a handful of offers, I picked a politics course at a leading institution, the University of Warwick. In the meantime, I started getting as much work experience as possible. The more I did, however, the more I realised that there were actually alternative paths into the industry. So many of the young journos I met weren’t graduates. Their route had been the government’s apprenticeship scheme.