Spectator Life

‘He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden’. So goes the famous Horace Walpole quote about William Kent, the 18th-century landscape designer who saw the garden and its surrounding views as single and unified. Were he alive today, Kent might very soon leap over the ha-ha he designed at the Grade I-listed Rousham House in Oxfordshire and tumble head-first into one of Labour’s new eco-town developments. His breeches rumpled, Kent might observe with some sadness that the coherence of his design is no more. Built in 1635 by Sir Robert Dormer, Rousham continues to be occupied by his descendants Charles and Angela Cottrell-Dormer.

I contemplated this piece over a bowl of porridge; not a ready-mix concoction but the raw stuff: porridge oats mixed with milk and water and eaten without any adornment whatsoever. That will win me brownie points among many nutritionists and policymakers because I was not eating an ‘ultra-processed food’ (UPF). I have a gut feeling that raw porridge is more nutritious and less full of nasty stuff. It is also much cheaper. A few years ago, while I was on a walking holiday with my son, I pointed out to him – not least because he was about to go off to university and could do with a bit of guidance on living frugally – that while my porridge for the week had cost about £1.50, his prepared breakfast cereals had cost him – or rather me – upwards of a tenner.

When a survey of 10,000 teachers revealed this month that Britain’s primary school pupils are increasingly relying on Americanisms (the Times front page declared ‘Trash-talking children are sounding like Americans’) I realised immediately what we needed. Rex Harrison. And if not Rex Harrison himself, then a dose of arguably his greatest role – that of Henry Higgins, the cantankerous professor of phonetics who first burst into the national consciousness in 1914 with the London premiere of Pygmalion.

There’s a saying – the kind seen on ‘inspirational’ posters on the walls of HR departments – that claims: ‘It’s about the journey, not the destination.’ Clearly it was dreamed up by someone who has never flown from Stansted and found themselves jostling through crowds of stag and hen parties, newly arrived Polish workers (there’s even been an Essex-based Polish taxi service to pick them up) and the hordes descending on Burger King as soon as they come through arrivals like John Mills and co. supping their first lagers after trekking through the desert in Ice Cold In Alex. It’s not just Stansted, of course. Gatwick – or ‘Chavwick’, as I’ve heard it called – is just as bad.

A few weeks ago, I was driving four of my children to school in my tinny, battered Toyota. We were running late – as per usual – and were speeding – or, rather, chuntering – down a particularly treacherous road. Of all the questionable surfaces in my area of rural Essex, this one is notorious: marked by a huge pothole the size of Snoopy the dog’s head, which bleeds into a smaller, gloopier crater. As I was trying to navigate it, however, a large shadow zoomed into sight in my rear-view mirror. With a jolt and a tremendous bang, it pushed me, my family and my poor, beaten-up Toyota into the crater. Who would be so sadistic as to do such a thing, you may wonder? Was it a vengeful ex? A drunk driver? Another parent running late and pushed from road rage to road insanity?

Herefordshire trainer Tom Symonds has his string in fine form with four winners from his last eight runners for a strike rate of 50 per cent over the past fortnight. Even his supposed no-hoper Gaelic Saint comfortably outran her odds at Warwick yesterday when second at 50-1 in a mares’ novices’ hurdle. Tomorrow one of Symonds’s stable stars NAVAJO INDY will try to keep up the good work for the yard at Haydock when he contests the Betfair Stayers’ Handicap Hurdle (2.25 p.m.) in search of a first prize to winning connections of nearly £57,000.

There are few culinary experiences like the first bite of a Domino’s pizza. The finest N25 caviar or a perfectly seared lobe of foie gras surely can’t compare to the ecstasy that comes from that mouth-cutting cornmeal that they sprinkle all over the base, or that sweet, cloying ‘cheese’, or those tart, dancing cups of pepperoni. In these moments, resistance is futile. It’s not a question of whether this is the best takeaway pizza there is, or even the best food there is. It’s a question of whether this is the best thing there is. Of course, we know how it ends. Fifteen minutes later, caked in sweat, parched, filling yourself up like a swimming pool. And then, if you’re unlucky, an awakening in the middle of the night. You wheeze against the table.

People always divine themselves through material goods: hence the obsession with the Aga, recently detailed by my friend Rachel Johnson in these pages. Rachel loves her Aga – well, her Agas, she has two – because it needs to be defended from bourgeois socialists who don’t have Agas: they just want them, because self-deception is the defining characteristic of the bourgeois socialist. Me, I hate mine. I used to love her because she made me feel upper middle-class, which I’m not, and now I know I’m not, and I’m glad I’m not, please take her. Of course, Agas are class signifiers. An Aga is like the last vestige of the country estate left after the fire sale. As in: ‘We lost the Titian but kept the Aga’.

The past few weeks has seen the pleasing spectacle of beautiful female film stars (Sydney Sweeney, Keira Knightley – even the previous Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Jennifer Lawrence, who once said that an orange victory would be ‘the end of the world’) refusing to toe the accepted Hollywood line on politics, be it by not kowtowing to trans activists or not accepting that everything is racist. Lawrence actually said: ‘Election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for’ – or as I wrote here in the spring: ‘How dim would a political party need to be to understand that not only do celeb endorsements not work, but have an actual repelling effect?

Nobody Wants This, the Netflix romcom that brought us the ‘hot rabbi’, recently returned for its second season. For the uninitiated, the first series introduced us to sex and relationships podcaster Joanne, played by Kristen Bell, who meets Noah, played by Adam Brody (of The O.C. millennial crush fame), a reform rabbi who has just broken up with his long-term girlfriend. The premise felt fresh and original: a romcom that dared talk about religion and even made it the key part of the plot. It’s undoubtedly a hit, with season two racking up more than eight million views in its first four days of streaming, taking it to the number one spot on Netflix’s chart.

I’m owed around $680 billion. Some 77 acres of downtown Manhattan belong to the Carter family, according to a letter written in 1894. Wall Street, Broadway and One World Trade Center – they all sit on a plot that is, by rights, mine. Yet here I am, grumbling about what ought to be in the pages of The Spectator. What went wrong? The story goes something like this. Shortly before independence, a pirate called Robert Edwards was licensed by the British to hunt down Spanish ships. He was so successful that the Crown gave him a slice of Manhattan as a reward. Edwards leased the land for 99 years to two brothers and subsequently died, lost at sea. That lease expired in 1877 and was supposed to be apportioned off to Edwards’s heirs. But that never happened.

Fairly heavy rain fell at Cheltenham overnight and there is a lot more to come today. If there is anything near the predicted 30mm of the wet stuff over 24 hours, the ground could easily turn to heavy which, whether racing is over jumps or the flat, tends to make the results something of a lottery. Of course, punters have to concentrate on horses that have won or run well in very soft conditions but it is not always as simple as that. Today’s Grade 2 Schloer Chase (2.55 p.m.) is an intriguing contest and sees the return of Jonbon, who is trying to win this race for the third year running. Nicky Henderson’s admirable chaser will not mind the soft ground but he has never been his best at Cheltenham.