Spectator Life

I remember it quite clearly, that moment I first clocked that fat models were now advertising clothing – fitness clothing no less. I was in America and, left with time to kill in a shopping centre, I went into an outlet of the trendy athleisure store Athleta (owned by Gap), which I had pillaged on previous visits for its generous yet clingy apparel. I stepped in, looked up and noticed the walls were covered in big proud pictures of silky-skinned but decidedly chunky women. They were sporting leggings and tops, even sports bras, with rolls of fat undulating out from under their chests, jiggling on the thighs, wobbling on enormous bums.

Next month is the 30th anniversary of the death of the American ethologist John B. Calhoun. In the early 1960s, he created an series of experiments to discover the causes of social dysfunction. His most famous work involved a so-called ‘rat utopia’ in which rodents were provided comfortable living quarters with unlimited food, water and warmth, and protection from predators. In this cosy environment, the only bar to ratty heaven was that space was limited. Nonetheless, the happy rats bred prodigiously until their quarters became uncomfortably overcrowded. This lack of space meant they were unable to control with whom or how often they came into social contact.

‘Sit up straight, heels down, lean forward, lean back, tighten the reins, loosen the reins.’ Joe's instructions replay in my head as I scan the canyon floor for rattlesnakes. I gently push my heels into the sides of my horse, Rio, and he sets off across the rocky terrain. Joe is my guide and a real-life cowboy. Guiding tourists like me through Arizona’s Sonoran Desert is his side hustle. I've signed up for a two-hour sunset trail ride, but Joe tells me he often takes groups into the desert for days. They sleep under the stars, catch fish for supper and eat fruit from barrel cacti. Joe can tell I'm anxious. I'm pretty sure Rio can too. I've been unusually stressed for a while, and no amount of London wellness treatments seem to help. I needed something more radical.

In Isaac Asimov’s 1956 short story ‘The Last Question’, characters ask a series of questions to the supercomputer Multivac about whether entropy – the universe’s tendency towards disorder, and the second law of thermodynamics – can be reversed. Multivac repeatedly responds ‘INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER’, until the ending, which I won’t spoil here. If I were to put the same question into ChatGPT, it would be a very different story. I’d likely get some fawning pleasantries, some ooh-ing and aah-ing about how deep and wise my enquiry is, before a long, neatly bulleted summary, rounded off by a request for further engagement (‘Let me know if you want to go deeper into any of these cases!’).

If ever there was a symbol of the decline of the European car industry it is my wife’s Citroen. For the past two months it has sat out on the driveway, inert. We can’t drive it, we can’t sell it and we cannot get it fixed. It is a waste of space, but one that we must continue to tax and insure. The little C3 – which I used to think of as a pleasant vehicle without too much of the electronic junk fitted to most new cars – is one of 120,000 Citroens subject to a ‘stop notice’ following the death of a French motorist in June. The cause of her death turned out to be a faulty airbag which exploded, peppering her with metal shards. Every vehicle fitted with these kinds of airbags has been officially grounded.

Just a glance at the cast list tells you everything you need to know. Netflix’s adaptation of Richard Osman’s cosy crime sensation The Thursday Murder Club stars Dame Helen Mirren, former James Bond Pierce Brosnan (as well as a former Bond villain Sir Jonathan Pryce), the Oscar-winning Sir Ben Kingsley and the gold-plated national treasure Celia Imrie, alongside a supporting line-up which includes David Tennant and Richard E. Grant. Released today in selected cinemas before landing on the streaming service on Thursday, the film has an awful lot of talent for what appears at first glance to be a mash-up of One Foot in the Grave and Hetty Wainthropp Investigates.

The best pint you’ll ever have is whatever you can find at 5 p.m. on a Friday. But close behind, and available wherever there’s a willing bartender, is whatever your local brewery has a fresh keg of. That, at least, is what I’ll tell anyone who can’t make a speedy exit. I am a craft beer bore. Dismissed as an early cause of the male midlife crisis, craft breweries have revolutionised beers. Where once you were trapped between mass-produced European lager and lukewarm old man ale, British craft beer has proved more flavourful than anything that came before it – and only occasionally in a bad way. You can imagine my sadness, then, in reporting the decline of the Gipsy Hill Brewing Company, my own local.

Back in July 2009, at my baby shower, someone kindly gave me a little book on the benefits of having twins. Apart from the swollen ankles and the enormous bump I was carrying, I already felt pretty blessed that, at 35, I was only going to have to do the whole pregnancy thing once. I like efficiency and this route to procreation was right up my street – not to mention the fact that I only had to give up cigarettes, Brie de Meaux, gin and chardonnay for a single period of nine months. But I hoped there would be some other benefits as I was starting to realise that, with two newborns to prepare for and no hand-me-downs coming our way, twins came with challenges of their own. I quickly scanned through the book; it was very short. Three things stood out.

Picture the scene: you’re on a sun-drenched tropical island surrounded by azure waters and dazzling white sand. A lone palm tree casts shadows across your lover’s bronzed skin as you sip an ice-cold Campari Spritz. It’s a scene pictured a million times a day on Instagram feeds and the biggest holiday cliché of them all. But does the reality of an exotic island paradise live up to the fantasy peddled by popular TV shows such as White Lotus? T.S. Eliot wrote that ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’. I would argue that humankind cannot bear very much fantasy either. Yes, turquoise oceans, sugar-white sand and tropical flora are all pleasing to the eye, but are they enough to sustain one’s interest for an entire week, let alone two?

Re-reading Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced this week (it’s the summer holidays! I can relax like anyone else!), I was struck by one of Miss Marple’s wise pronouncements: And that’s really the particular way the world has changed since the war. Take this place, Chipping Cleghorn, for instance. It’s very much like St Mary Mead where I live. Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house – and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys… They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them.

Match of the Day is back and, for the first time in a quarter of a century, without Gary Lineker. That’s the good news. Saturday night’s anchorman, Mark Chapman, is so much better than his smug, virtue-signalling predecessor. Perhaps it’s because he’s a professional broadcaster rather than an ex-player. This means he asks questions that fans want to hear answers to, rather than sharing some anecdote about when he was playing the game. However, not even this could save MotD’s return from being car crash TV. No matter how good Chapman is as a host, there remains a problem: Wayne Rooney. Now carrying even more timber than he did in his playing days, he sat rigidly in his seat like a man facing a firing squad.

As a good left-wing lad raised by Guardian-reading parents who didn’t drive, I knew Jeremy Clarkson was tasteless and unpleasant. In my first year as a junior doctor, my surgical ward had one of his articles pinned to the office wall. It was off-putting to see his shabby name and a piece from a tabloid, but one day I read it all the same. As I recall, he’d had some minor scrape and written a column mocking the paramedics who showed up to help. He didn’t want two tinkerers who weren’t medically trained, he sneered. No, he wanted Michael Schumacher to drive him to hospital and a supermodel, sitting scantily clad in the back of the ambulance, giving him the will to live until he arrived.