Spectator Life

The Duchess of Sussex has achieved something quite remarkable. After the brickbats hurled at the first season of her Netflix show With Love, Meghan – the furious pro-monarchy outrage, the eye-rolling from critics, the memes that lampooned her syrupy anecdotes – many TV personalities would have flinched. They would have called consultants, tweaked the format, apologised by going in a ‘new direction’. Meghan Markle (or should I say Sussex) has done the opposite. Season two arrived last month: unchanged, unrepentant and every bit as twee as the first.  Like her homemade ‘jam’, that’s not to say it’s gone down well. ‘Painfully contrived’, ‘irrelevant meets intolerable’ and ‘tone-deaf’ were just some of the newspaper reviews.

Whenever Europeans feel inadequate in relation to America, and have a yearning to console themselves, there is one subject that always comes up: the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, i.e. gun law. Yes, the Yanks may be richer than us. Yes, a dockworker in Delaware can earn more than a British cabinet minister. Yes, America has a dynamic economy and the world’s most powerful military, with a huge lead in science, tech and finance. But remember: ‘in Europe we don’t have mass shootings.’ ‘British children aren’t taught how to dodge bullets.’ ‘You may have Silicon Valley, but we don’t have lunatics wandering around Tesco with AR-15s.’ This feels even truer right now, as America reels from a horrific assassination, by a shooter on a roof with a rifle.

Britain is to get a new ‘super university’, an enormous centre of higher learning that will, from the next academic year, under a single vice-chancellor, educate some 50,000 students. Under the cumbersome name the ‘London and South East Universities Group’, the new university is a merger of the existing University of Greenwich and the cash-strapped University of Kent with its campus at Canterbury. A vital part of the new university’s campus will be the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich, one of Sir Christopher Wren’s architectural masterpieces, and a World Heritage Site described as being ‘the finest and most dramatically sited landscape ensemble in the country’.

It is the last of the five British classic races tomorrow – the Group 1 Betfred St Leger at Doncaster (3.40 p.m.) over one mile and six furlongs. The race has attracted a line-up of only seven runners, which normally means just two places on offer from bookmakers. If this had been the case tomorrow, it would have made each way betting unattractive and I would have given the race a miss from a betting point of view. However, at least three bookmakers are offering three places for each-way thieves like me which means there might be some value to be found. Irish maestro Aidan O’Brien is responsible for three of the four runners at the top of the market: Scandinavia, Lambourn and STAY TRUE.

As I write, a copy of The Hallmarked Man sits beside me. Not being on holiday, spending the morning reading a new detective novel would seem as louche as a pre-brunch martini. Not being David Niven, I’m making the book wait until at least after lunch. J.K. Rowling’s new book, under her pen name of Robert Galbraith, comes in at around 900 pages. I expect to rip through it smartly. I am not an ideal reader of detective fiction, nor the thrillers and mysteries that have a whodunit at the core of their tightly planned plots. My ability to figure out the murderer – even my interest in trying – is vestigial.

London on Monday night was mad and hilarious. At the Hyde Park Corner crossing, the number of people on Lime bikes must have been approaching 100. Invariably described as menaces, murderers and leg-breakers, these Lime bikes and their riders waited for the traffic light to turn green. When it did, battalions of these 35-kilo machines toppled and wobbled around each other, as the same number came in the other direction, green and white overwhelming the eyes. Yet no knees were crunched, no one fell off and those brave enough managed to render the tube strikes a minor inconvenience. If you believe in the state as protector, nanny and moraliser, and the world as a perfectible place where hazard can be eliminated, they should be banned It was good to see.

Fifty years ago today, a literary masterwork of the 20th century reached its conclusion with the publication of Hearing Secret Harmonies, the final volume in Anthony Powell’s 12-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. Inspired by the painting of the same name by the 17th-century French artist Nicolas Poussin (which you, like Powell, can see at the Wallace Collection), the series began with A Question of Upbringing, published a quarter of a century earlier in 1951. This introduced us to the English narrator of the whole endeavour, Nicholas Jenkins (uncoincidentally he shares the Christian name of the painter, albeit with an Anglicised aitch), who attends a boarding school – unnamed but modelled on Powell’s time at Eton.

‘Never join a queue.’ It’s not a bad motto. It keeps me away from tourist-choked hotspots. It means I don’t visit venues that offer free admission for children, advertise fast-track entry or are just one stop on ‘a multi-attraction sight-seeing experience’. My advice? If they want you to book a time slot, don’t go. As Bertrand Russell points out in The Conquest of Happiness: ‘Noise and the constant presence of strangers cause fatigue.’ It’s certainly difficult to appreciate great art or admire magnificent architecture in such circumstances. And when I’m studying the text explaining the significance of the Rosetta Stone, I don’t want someone leaning over my shoulder trying to read it at the same time. Especially when they’re chewing strawberry-flavoured gum.

The flat in Hove which Angela Rayner infamously purchased is literally two streets and five minutes’ walk from my place, if I could walk. When I was planning to buy an apartment shortly into the new century, I looked at one in that street and thought: ‘Whoah – that’s a bit steep!’ I’d just sold my gaff to a developer for £1.5 million, so that gives one some perspective on how expensive my ’hood has become, having once been a boring outpost of Brighton. In the end, I decided I preferred Art Deco to Regency – but Mrs Rayner is obviously far classier than me. It’s telling that Ange has moved here to ‘Hove, Actually’ rather than Brighton.

As I trudge up to Marlborough’s observatory, near the top of the playing fields, I’m transported back to my time as a pupil here. I studied astronomy for GCSE, which meant spending many evenings at the observatory, gazing at the night sky. The Blackett Observatory, which houses a superb Cooke 10in refractor telescope, celebrates its 90th anniversary this month. I’ve been invited back by my tutor Jonathan Genton, former head of science and teacher of the GCSE astronomy course, and Gavin James, director of the observatory, who oversees the astronomy programme. ‘Everybody should study astronomy,’ says James. ‘It’s the original science.