Spectator Life

Once upon a time, post was delivered by a postman or postwoman. Over the past two centuries, this quaint initiative augmented a sense of community and invested early mornings with at least fleeting human contact. These days, decades after the slow demise of letter writing, a postman is now a rather recherché figure and, thanks to Royal Mail price hikes, a symbol of luxury, despite the downgrading of his once resplendent red and blue woollen frockcoat for a synthetic combo including all-weather shorts.

Westminster is filled not just with politicians, journalists and unemployed protestors, but with tourists. The data would suggest they are mainly Americans, French and Italians who come to see the monuments of central London, visit friends and family, and see how we’re faring after Brexit. They’re probably pretty worried when they see Westminster Bridge.   The amount of foot traffic on the bridge can be overwhelming; sometimes it’s impossible to cross it uninterrupted. People block your path and get in the way of each other, distracted by their phones. They wander blindly into the bike lanes, trying to carry out impromptu Instagram photoshoots, while aiming for the best angle of the famous clock tower.

It’s that time of year when the cards landing on the doormat compete for the title of most fatuous. Will it be a reindeer spouting an obscenity, or a painterly robin perched on a frosted gatepost in snowy landscapes? Might it be a sanitised cartoon of a coach and four outside a snow-encrusted inn, bright yellow lights glowing from within, a kind of Pickwickian fantasy of Victorian yuletide? Or will it be a trio of children around a scarfed snowman, or a Christmas tree, perhaps? Most likely it will be a sclerotic Father Christmas, or a bright Santa (that’s with a silent ‘t’) as he’s now increasingly known, dominating the foreground or flying through the air on his sledge over a snowy landscape, even though it never snows any more.

It is estimated that, sometime in the past few months, the content on the internet produced by AI finally overtook content produced by the human mind. In other words, if you go online these days – from YouTube to X, from Facebook to TikTok to can-that-really-be-a-fetish.com – you are more likely than not to be looking through, gasping about, or getting horribly enraged at something created by a silent machine. And I am afraid to say The Spectator, at least in this article, is not going to be an exception. What I am about to tell you, or show you, is partly written by AI – in this case GPT5. However – of course, there is a however – I have a good reason for dousing you with ‘AI slop’. I want to prove that it isn’t always slop, certainly not when it comes to antiques.

Where else would you see anyone wandering around with a plate heaped with such incongruous ingredients as bacon, olives, blueberry waffles and a side order of yoghurt and prunes? Nowhere but at a hotel breakfast, of course. More often than not, the food is inedible, and nothing works properly. The coffee machines always seem to be faulty, although even this is preferable to being served from a silver coffee jug filled with tepid, muddy brown, tasteless water that leaves you hankering after service-station machine coffee. Then there is the room: inevitably, it is dark and windowless, usually in a basement that smells vaguely of damp underneath the stench of cheap cooking oil. Beware the hotel that serves dinner and then drags out the leftovers for breakfast.

If Christmas is a time for giving then it seems the message isn’t getting through to nearly enough office managers. For the umpteenth year running, I’m getting the annual stream of resigned-sounding complaints from friends who have office-based careers. Office life has its perks, of course; unlike my mostly-bed-and-airport-based freelance life, you actually know what you’re going to be paid at the end of each month. But my decision to accept the Faustian pact of being a sole trader never feels more validated than when my pals tell me about the plan for their office Christmas party – and the demand that they pay for it themselves.

Winston Churchill and his arch enemy Adolf Hitler didn’t have a lot in common, but one passion they did share was painting: both the heroic wartime prime minister and the genocidal Nazi dictator were keen amateur artists. While auction houses are reluctant to handle or sell Hitler’s landscapes for obvious reasons, Churchill’s pictures have vastly increased in value since his death. One study of a Moroccan mosque, which the great man painted after the Casablanca conference in 1943, was acquired by actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt when they married. After they divorced, Jolie sold the picture in 2021 for £7 million.

Last week a Radiohead-head friend offered me a ticket for the last of their run of shows at London’s O2 Arena. The poor, deluded fool had paid several hundred quid and was looking to recoup. I politely declined, saying I would rather suffer from decompression sickness. My friend was not amused – but then that’s Radiohead fans for you; liking the band is a serious business. The band is currently on a mega tour of Europe and the reviews have been mixed. Some fans complain about the relentless flashing imagery, while others have pointed out that hanging gauze curtains around a circular stage might not be the best way to feel close to your heroes. Not that they’d be missing much. I mean, you’d hardly describe Radiohead as flamboyant showmen.

My friend Allan Lamb calls me a ‘cricket tragic’, a back-handed compliment from a former English international cricketer. So the prospect of flying out to Australia and watching the first Ashes Test in Perth was too seductive to ignore. I knew pretty early on that the cost was going to be exorbitant. A gruelling 24-hour flight – and therefore serious jet lag – meant that either a premium economy or a business-class airfare was necessary. But as this was a bucket-list moment I indulged in the latter. Then hotel prices during an Ashes Test were inevitably ramped up and six nights at an ordinary inner-city hotel ended up costing twice as much as the norm.