Spectator Life

As a kid growing up in the Bronx and afterwards in the suburbs to the north, I loved New York. To me it was like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz – vast, glittering and full of promise. It was where my family settled after escaping the nightmare of communist dictatorship, in the aftermath of the crushed 1956 Hungarian revolution. It was where we found freedom, democracy – what they used to call the American Dream. In later life, after I had left America and come to London, I made occasional return visits to New York and noted the changes wrought by time – mostly for the worse. But my affection for it never wavered because it held so many fond memories.

My younger daughter finished prep school last week. These years are often billed as the best of one’s life. Indeed, I know the most charming 18-year-old whose pleasingly unfashionable dream is to teach at his old prep school – such were the halcyon times he enjoyed there. At my daughter’s leavers’ assembly, I shed a few tears – as did she, since she’s been exceptionally happy there since she was two years old. There hasn’t been a single day when she hasn’t wanted to go in. She’s had some inspirational teachers, and the occasionally eccentric nature of the educational offering has really suited her. (Another reason I cried was because I’m a sucker for anything remotely mawkish, so a group of kids warbling the chorus of ‘Time to Say Goodbye’ is catnip.

Like millions of others, I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Salt Path, an account of how a penniless and homeless middle-aged couple found their souls by walking the entire length of the rugged 630-mile South West Coastal Path around the Cornish peninsula. I also enjoyed watching the recent film of the book starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, as we all like feel-good stories about plucky people battling against the odds and winning.

We Jews make up 0.2 per cent of the world’s population but have won 22 per cent of all the Nobel prizes ever awarded. And we have not done this with a tailwind. Mark Twain thought the reason Jews tended to do so well in business was above-average honesty. Jewish success has been so extravagantly out of proportion to their population that their finest gentile supporters have long sought reasons. Clive James, wondering about our influence in the arts, felt exclusion may have had its benefits. ‘Whole generations of Jewish literati were denied the opportunity of wasting their energies on compiling abstruse doctoral theses. They were driven instead to journalism, plain speech, direct observation and the necessity to entertain.

Ávila, Spain At school I wasn’t much good at anything – until, that is, I had the good fortune to land in Mr Hodges’s French set. It wasn’t just the ten words of vocabulary and the irregular verb we learnt every day, it was the whole structured Hodges approach which gave me confidence, showing how the apparently unmanageable job of learning a language could be broken down into small, achievable tasks. Since Mr H also taught Spanish O-level, when the time came I opted for that rather than German. The scenes of Spanish life in the textbook fascinated me; they were only black and white line drawings but they promised something romantic that I knew I’d never find in cold, wet 1970s Birmingham. I pored over those pictures.

Tashkent, Uzbekistan I am in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. I am standing in a historic complex of madrasas and mosques, courtyards and dusty roses, and I am staring at the ‘oldest Quran in the world’. It is a strange and enormous thing: written in bold Kufic script on deerskin parchment; it was supposedly compiled by Uthman ibn Affan, the third Caliph of Islam, who was murdered while reading it. And so it is, as I linger here and reverently regard the Book, while scrolling my phone for more fascinating info, that I discover the world’s oldest Quran is actually in Birmingham. Yes, that’s right, Birmingham, England. It’s probably in some obscure library, lodged between a dissertation on post-colonial emojis and a flyer for Falafel Night.

I  am pretty sure that MINSTREL KNIGHT is a well-handicapped horse off an official rating of 87. However, there is no doubt that he is a better horse with cut in the ground: he won at Haydock on heavy ground and at York on soft ground at the end of last season. With very little rain over the spring and early summer resulting in predominantly quick ground up and down the country, Minstrel Knight has only run once to date this season, when he was fourth on good to soft ground in a modest handicap at Hamilton. That was almost certainly a prep run for a bigger target. The problem with backing this horse at Haydock tomorrow for the Old Newton Cup (3.15 p.m.) is that the ground is currently described as ‘good, good to firm in places’.

Those of us of a certain vintage will remember the National Record of Achievement, a brown, crummy-looking folder, sent (personally, I like to think) by Tony Blair to every schoolchild in the country. We were encouraged to keep our certificates within its corporate leaves, from Swimming Level 1 Goldfish to Duke of Edinburgh. Presumably, before the government had this idea, people didn’t know what to do with certificates. Perhaps they were used as kindling, or eaten. Receiving a certificate was a moment of fulfilment. If it came in the post, anticipation was part of the process. Being awarded one in person had extra frisson. Some certificates were better than others. The Associated Board of Royal Schools of Music (how the name hums with authority!

Every afternoon, I witness the unedifying spectacle of teenagers waddling out of the comprehensive school on my street in south London. Many of the 14- and 15-year-olds appear to weigh the same as their age. Few manage to make it past the chicken shop without buying a box of deep-fried nuggets to share between them. It crossed my mind that teenagers, cruel as they are, can no longer call a kid ‘Fatty’ (or ‘Tubs’ if they’re in private school). Shouting that in a playground would cause a Spartacus-esque reaction. In my school in the mid-1990s, being overweight was an oddity suffered by a maximum of two children in every year group. These days, it’s the skinny kids who are the exception. I blame the parents.

Aston Martins are sin, personified: everyone disapproves of them, but everyone wants one. That is why James Bond, a sex-addicted fictional civil servant, is suited to them – at least until he died in No Time to Die (clearly it was). Of course he died. He became emotionally available. If Bond isn’t ripping the knickers off death-stalked maidens, what is the point of him? Why is he feeding a child mango? Next! If you don’t want an Aston Martin, you are either dead like him or – more likely – you have never driven one. Recite the technical specifications by all means and pretend this is why you bought it: numbers. That’s just the denial of the captured. We know why you want the car. For the British, there is no hotter marque – and there never will be.

Jeff Bezos has brought much tat into the world, along with the undoubted convenience of Amazon’s services. But in at least one respect, he is a man of good taste. In choosing Venice to plight his troth with his lovely bride Lauren Sanchez at the weekend, Bezos picked the best possible location: La Serenissima is indeed a veritable miracle. It is a logic-defying wonder, and despite my frequent visits, I still don’t understand the physics of its construction. How can a city of hundreds of heavy palaces and churches, resting on petrified wooden piles driven into mud, continue to exist centuries after the Venetian lagoon was first settled by terrified refugees?

We are told being non-judgemental is a virtue, that discrimination is a vice, and that the avoidance of prejudice is not merely possible but laudable. Perhaps the quickest way to give the lie to these statements is to reveal to you that I am a 53-year-old man who regularly goes to the gym. What are we to make of someone of advanced middle age who nevertheless spends some of his few remaining hours lifting bits of metal up and putting them down again? Prejudice, I fear, suggests the worst. In the gyms I attend, the mirrors show a mix of the youthful and good-looking, the muscled and toned. Then there are the very fat, with their looks of wild hope or sinking doubt, the smattering of the ordinary and eccentric.