Spectator Life

Sooner or later, Airbnb is going to change its name to Airb, partly because it takes less time to type, and partly because it is becoming a misnomer. Increasingly rarely is there a breakfast to go with your bed. I am walking from John o' Groats to Land's End at the moment, so I have been staying in a different town every night, save for when I have been on the hills in a tent, and not once so far has anyone offered me a fry-up. Only once have I been offered any breakfast at all. Neither, by the way, have I even seen anyone in most of the places I have been staying. All but one have been entirely remote-control operations with key codes and key safes. I am, therefore, getting quite nostalgic for the traditional B&B.

To my mind, there can be few more perfect games than backgammon. Equally at home in an Iraqi teashop or played atop a fur in a plutocrat’s ski chalet, it is a game punctuated with bitter glares, bemused chuckles, and outrageous reversals of fortune. For those not yet initiated, the aim is to race all your men (pieces) to your home section and off the board first, avoiding their being knocked off the board and sent back to the beginning, while delaying your opponent’s men as much as possible. It blends luck and skill, and is at times infuriating, but always fun.  The name we know dates to 1635, but it has been played under other names and variants for at least 1600 years – 5000 if you think The Royal Game of Ur is close enough.

Should you visit your local Waitrose store this week – and hope you don’t witness an altercation between a shoplifter and a member of staff about to be fired for doing his job – you might be surprised by a new range of products. In what the company is calling ‘a vibrant, decadent celebration of pure noshtalgia’, Waitrose has launched a series of 80s-themed foods. These include everything from Scotch egg sandwiches and steak Diane-flavoured crisps to rhubarb and custard ice cream and – horror of horrors – ‘peach melba spritz’, which its blurb describes as ‘a delicious blend of juicy peach and ripe raspberry, lifted with sparkling crisp bubbles for a beautifully balanced summer spritz’.

The Rolling Stones’ resilience is hard to get one’s head around. In a world of fleeting cultural phenomena, they just keep going… and going… and going. Earlier this month, under the pseudonym ‘The Cockroaches’, the band released 1,000 copies of a vinyl-only single (their 124th in their 65th year of rocking) ahead of a new studio album which will come out this summer. The combined age of the three surviving principals Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood is 242. The band are so venerable that even jokes about their age are getting old: their ‘Steel Wheels’ tour was dubbed ‘Steel Wheelchairs’ back in… 1989.  Full disclosure: I’m hardly a Rolling Stones fan.

The Eagle in Farringdon used to be next door to the old Guardian offices. I remember eating there back in the early 1990s, when it was offering something of a new approach to dining. A Portuguese-influenced menu was scrawled on a blackboard, and it was exciting and fresh. Placing your order was always a bit of a pain – you had to jostle your way to the front of the always crowded bar, then struggle to make your order heard over the noise endemic to pubs with no soft furnishings – and the many people intent on prioritising drinking over eating. But The Eagle became an institution and (although I'm not sure this is the case) it is reputed to have been the UK’s very first gastropub.

A farmer in Derbyshire is going to make his cows uglier to try to deter  modern agricultural impostors. These impostors are neither foxes nor badgers but social media influencers who keep showing up to film content with his animals.   They arrive in waves. On one occasion, dozens surrounded Alex Birch’s herd at the edge of a field. Another time, a yoga teacher unfurled her mat and filmed a class beside the cows, as though they were props in a bucolic stage set. Wearied by the intrusion, Birch now speaks of crossbreeding his Highland cows to make them ‘less photogenic’.

We have all become only too used to the surging cost of heating our homes, filling up our cars or doing the weekly shop. But there’s one price increase that hurts me more than all of these combined: the cost of a bottle of wine in a restaurant. Just five years ago, it was rare to find a wine list without at least one bottle under £25; now it’s increasingly common to find one little under £40. We have reached a point where £35 house wine is now normal. Take Maggie Jones in Kensington. I used to eat there regularly in the late 90s and early 00s and recall it being fabulously cheap – a point emphasised by the magnums of house wine on which they’d mark with a pencil how much you had drunk. Often it was quite a lot.

Is any tourist attraction on earth really worth enduring a madding crowd to see? My mother, denied international travel for half her life by the Soviet state, made up for this deprivation by becoming the world’s most fanatically rigorous tourist. A major site left unseen or portion of a museum unexamined was, to her, as morally repugnant as leaving food on the plate or abandoning a book half-way through.   I, spoiled frequent flyer that I am, find crowds the ultimate holiday buzz-killer. Nowhere is this more true than in Rome, which clocked a record 52.92 million overnight visitors for the Papal Jubilee year of 2025 and, according to pre-bookings tracked by the local tourist board, is expecting even more tourists this summer.

Of all the inappropriate presents I've bought my godson over the years, the nadir was the Swiss Army knife I sent for his 11th birthday. I was pretty pleased when I ordered it: a genuine Victorinox, none of those Chinese knockoffs. He'll be removing stones from horses' hooves in no time, I thought to myself. But a week later he sent me a thank you note in unusually shaky handwriting saying the knife had been confiscated by his mother after he'd had it for only a day because he cut his hands to pieces. Had I ruined his chances of being a violinist or a heart surgeon?  It all started promisingly when I was asked to be a godfather in 2008.

For decades, the idea of the country house hotel – a uniquely British phenomenon – has held a seductive sway for those who would never dream, unlike Hyacinth Bucket’s sister Violet, of having their own mansion ‘with the Mercedes, swimming pool and room for a pony’. There is something wonderfully appealing about turning up at a vast estate that could double as a National Trust property, to be greeted by charming domestic staff who could have stepped out of Downton Abbey, and of abandoning all one’s worldly cares and concerns for a weekend of pampering and history alike.

It is 2089. My grandson tugs at the hem of my musty corduroy trousers. ‘Pop-pop,’ he says. ‘Were you alive during the Great Pret Pickle Shortage of 2026?’ There is an almighty crash of thunder. A gust of wind throws open a window. A scream can be heard from outside. I look down at my hands, which are visibly shaking, and compose myself. ‘I was there,’ I whisper. ‘I was there when Pret lost the jambon beurre. Man and sandwich were never the same again.’ I’m being facetious, of course. I couldn’t care less about Pret A Manger’s ham, pickle and butter roll going MIA. The coffee giant claims the sandwich has gone missing due to a temporary cornichon (pickle) shortage – much to the dismay, we’re told, of its loyal, city banker target market.

Contrary to what we redheads have been led to believe, we are not disappearing. Our numbers have increased in the past 10,000 years, according to a recent Harvard study. What’s more, researchers found, being ginger may actually be desirable as far as natural selection is concerned because ‘having red hair was beneficial 4,000 years ago’. The reason why has yet to be discovered. But it’s good news for the class bully, producers of sunscreen and those – like me – who’ve had a love-hate relationship with the variants in their MC1R gene which leads to red hair and pale skin. I was an extreme redhead as a child; not one of the beautiful ones with long, auburn curls and green eyes.

I was a beady, birdy child. I had binoculars, made lists and sewed a Young Ornithologist’s Club (YOC) patch on my M&S jeans. Every spring, our YOC leader, a cheery ex-Army man ‘Binks’ Williams would drive a minibus at 6 a.m. to Wimbledon Common, for us to experience the Dawn Chorus. This was more exciting in principle than reality, as unless I could see a bird through my bins, it didn’t really exist. I was hopeless at identifying birds through song alone.

The 1990s were great years. The economy was humming, the West could duff up any Middle Eastern dictator it wanted, and the arrival of Oasis and Blur meant the music press could convince us we were cool again. Parents didn’t think to question the idea that for their kids, things could only get better.  30 years later, I also don’t question it. My countrymen are now poorer than the average hick from Alabama, as well as every other state. Climate change is working its way through all four horsemen of the apocalypse. And while AI probably isn’t going to destroy humanity, your employer will replace you with a robot that has been programmed to spend half its time on acid.