Spectator Life

Ordering things online can be a lottery. You can’t touch, smell or taste the product you’re buying, so it’s hard to know whether you’ll actually want it when it arrives. But we keep clicking anyway because it’s more convenient than trudging to the shops and things are often cheaper. For me, another reason to order online is the dash of childlike joy it brings to my to life when I click ‘buy’ and instantly set up a future treat. In fact, it’s even better than childhood because now I can have a parcel to open any day I want, not just on birthdays and Christmas. But most of all, I shop online because I love tracking my parcel. Anytime I like, I can check in and see where my purchase is in the delivery process.

‘Please call me Mark,’ I’ve always said to the teachers at my son’s school. ‘If you call me “Mr Mason” it makes me feel 85 – and if I call you “Mrs Smith” it makes me feel seven.’ I know their first names, and always use them, in emails, phone calls and in person. A few return the compliment, but most keep it formal. It feels wrong, putting distance between us when we’re having a conversation, often an in-depth and important one, about my only child. The best teachers and staff have taught me fascinating things about how to deal with Barney. I’ve only been a parent once; they’ve encountered thousands of kids. It was the same at his primary school, starting with Sonja, when I was a volunteer helping with the class’s reading.

Though I’m no fan of Donald Trump, time and again I’m delighted by the alternately crazy and sane things he says, and the way he knows the difference; he’s the antithesis of our politicians, who say crazy things they sincerely believe are sane. This week he spoke to the BBC’s Gary O’Donoghue, who asked him about the Pennsylvania assassination attempt. As the BBC reported: When asked if the assassination attempt had changed him, the president conveyed a hint of vulnerability as he said he tries to think about it as little as he can. ‘I don't like dwelling on it because if I did, it would be, you know, might be life-changing, I don't want it to have to be that.’ Elaborating, he said he liked ‘the power of positive thinking, or the power of positive non-thinking’.

The news that the latest Superman picture has been an enormous hit in the United States, but has been received rather more tepidly here, has been taken in many quarters to mean that there is an anti-American mood at large. Maybe this is dictated by America’s choice of president and administration, which means other countries are no longer as enamoured of that quintessentially all-American superhero. Alternatively, it could of course mean, as this magazine’s critic Deborah Ross has suggested, that the film simply isn’t very good and that we should all stick to the 1978 Christopher Reeve picture instead.

Have you ever heard of Duddies’ Branch? Chances are, you haven’t – because, firstly, its brief moment of fame came many years ago and, secondly, Duddies’ Branch does not actually exist. To explain: ‘Duddies’ Branch’ is the politely fake name given by an American anthropologist, Rena Gazaway, to a real and isolated settlement in a hollow of the Appalachian mountains (almost certainly in Kentucky). Herself born into ‘hillbilly’ culture, Gazaway spent many months of the 1960s living with the people of Duddies’ Branch. She later published her findings in a shocking 1969 book called The Longest Mile. What Gazaway encountered in that lost wooded ‘holler’ reads like dystopian fiction, even at a distance of decades. Most of the residents were functionally illiterate.

Two British cities, Dundee and Nottingham, have been chosen as trial sites for a new government scheme to be piloted next year: state-subsidised restaurants. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has put up £1.5 million for the 12-month trial, initiated by the campaign group Nourish Scotland. If the restaurants are successful, they’ll be rolled out across Britain – nourishing us all – with a subsidised meal for £3. Inspired by second world war state-funded canteens, they’re going to be called ‘Public Diners’ – clever branding, with its quasi-American vibe.

The clue is in his appearance. The sandy-haired, blue-eyed, 6ft 2in star Jannik Sinner is the world’s No. 1 tennis champion and has just clinched his – and Italy’s – first win in the world-famous Wimbledon tournament. Sinner, the new hero of tennis after his victory over the previous reigning Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz, may hold an Italian passport, but he doesn’t look or sound like a typical Italian. In fact, Sinner is a member of one of the many ethnic and linguistic minorities who populate the supposedly united countries of the European Union. The 24-year-old was born and brought up in the Alpine province of South Tyrol – known to Italian Italians as the Alto Adige – 70 per cent of whose inhabitants are, like Sinner, German-speaking ethnic Austrians.

Homer is much praised, but I find him unreliable. The Mediterranean cove in which we were swimming, for example, was not in the least wine-dark. We were turning around and swimming back, the sights on display at the nudist end of the beach having startled the spluttering elegance of my head-above-water breast-stroke. ‘I wouldn't mind if it was only young women,’ I said to my wife, as we swam back. Rather than accepting my dispassionate nod toward prevailing cultural aesthetics, she replied she didn’t mind in the slightest, and couldn’t see the harm. An unspoken charge of puritanism hung in the air. ‘It was just a bit too much like an outpatient clinic,’ I said, and good-humoured sympathy swung back in my favour.

My own episode of Long Lost Family doesn’t involve a hug from Davina McCall or a visit from Nicky Campbell, armed with a box of tissues and the kind of tight smile that tells you that you’re about to cry your eyes out. It begins with an unexpected call from my brother who lives in the United States. Had I got a minute? Perhaps I should sit down… We have a sister living in Matlock in Derbyshire, he said. She was born in August 1976 – making her a year and half my junior – and had come to light through the wonders of a genetic match on the family history website Ancestry.com, which my brother had put his DNA on. Was I surprised? Not massively.

In the depths of winter last year, an ice cream and wine bar opened in Islington. The Dreamery serves ice creams and sorbets in silver goblets with tiny vintage spoons. On the ceiling is a glowing mural of happy cows and a sun with a face, resembling a child’s finger-painting (the artist is Lucy Stein, daughter of Rick). Outside, neighbours whisper about a recent Dua Lipa spotting. The Dreamery is inspired by the Parisian ice cream and wine bar Folderol, and makes fairly sophisticated flavours such as salted ricotta blueberry and Greek mountain tea. It is TikTok chic – a gamble, after Folderol unwillingly became a viral sensation and ended up sticking up signs saying: ‘No TikTok. Be here to have fun, not to take pictures.

The Irish problem has existed for centuries, though the nature of that problem is not always easy to define. It used to be political, though relations between English and Irish people on a personal level have usually been harmonious. There are still political problems, because identity – the question of to whom we owe our loyalty – shapes lives and creates communities. But now there is a different problem, and it’s one-sided. Many English people are suddenly keen to present an ersatz Irishness to the world, as a form of civic virtue, to the point of claiming citizenship. Some claim to feel ‘European’, in a vague way. Others feel that being green offers the swiftest route to an ill-defined ‘romanticism’. Ah yes, it’s that old favourite, the Celtic twilight!

Strangely, it was the Sunday Telegraph, not the red tops, that in 2002 coined the acronym Wags after staff in a Dubai hotel used it to describe the wives and girlfriends of England football players. Little did they know that the term would have the traction that it still does nearly 25 years later. Of course, when most people summon core Wags to mind, they think of the glorious bitchiness of the football Wags in their 2006 Baden-Baden Euro glory – all fake tan, Ugg boots, hair and sunglasses like Barbies on speed. Sadly, they don’t make them like that anymore. These days, Wags don’t need the papers to pap them; they are Instagram celebrities before they have even got the GHD hair straighteners out – they’re not trying as hard. But I’m not here for the football Wags.