Spectator Life

What is it about men and miniskirts? A few months ago, I read with horror – but sadly not surprise – about a school that was considering banning girls from wearing skirts. Apparently, residents in Whitstable, Kent, were so alarmed at the ‘inappropriate skirt lengths’ spotted around town they had complained to the local school. Headteacher Alex Holmes (you guessed it – a man) immediately dashed off a letter informing parents that all pupils could be forced to wear trousers as part of a new ‘gender neutral uniform’ in response. The miniskirt is a symbol of women’s liberation – not sexual servitude I’m sorry, what? Are we talking about a pretty seaside town in Kent or downtown Tehran?

What’s the most hazardous occupation? Deep sea fisherman? Uranium miner? Tail-end Charlie in a Lancaster bomber (not a career currently available)? I challenge anyone to find a speedier way to meet one’s end than becoming an influencer. The sad death of 28-year-old University of Salford student Maria Eftimova, who tumbled off Tryfan, a 1,000ft mountain in Snowdonia during a hike organised on Facebook, is one of those all-too-regular headlines: an influencer who meets their end in their twenties, leaving tens of thousands of followers distraught. Policymakers fret over children falling under bad influences online – we have had an entire Online Safety Act to try to address the problem.

I love having friends over for dinner, and like to think I’m rather good at hosting. And while I always strive for a relaxed atmosphere and dislike formality, there are a few hard rules that my guests should adhere to if they want a repeat invitation. Let’s start at the beginning. When checking on any foods you don’t eat, I am asking if you are vegetarian or coeliac, or if you have an actual allergy; what I don’t want is a list of your preferences. One person I invited replied telling me all about how, although she quite likes fresh tomatoes, she can’t eat them cooked, adding that she’d rather the food wasn’t flavoured with cumin or oregano. I felt like telling her to stay home and order from Deliveroo.

Pop music criticism, said Frank Zappa, was the work of people who can’t write, about people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read. Half a century later and he’s still right. Although pop is essentially a juvenile art form – its clearest strength and most obvious weakness – that doesn’t stop reviewers pumping up performers as though Johann Sebastian Bach had decided to form an all-star band with Beethoven and Brahms. The Three Bs! Sign ’em up! The current pop reviewers for the Times and the Telegraph, Will Hodgkinson and Neil McCormick, clearly think they bear witness to giants. Like Pinky and Perky, these mature teenagers can trill ‘we belong together’, batting balls over the net in a contest of perfumed superlatives.

One advantage to being born in the 1970s was the sheer abundance of good kids’ TV on offer. This was the golden age between clunky black and white offerings like Muffin the Mule, and the creeping vapidity of later shows like Teletubbies or The Care Bears. It gave us Camberwick Green, The Magic Roundabout, Captain Pugwash, Mister Benn (and the Mister Men), The Clangers, Playaway, Hector’s House, Fingerbobs, Tiswas, The Muppet Show, Ivor the Engine, and Basil Brush – not forgetting the holy trinity of Mary, Mungo and Midge. Did we hit the jackpot, or what? As my daughter, aged 11, prepares to leave her own childhood, I’ve been rewatching a few of them.

I am in the most EU-ish bedroom in the EU. That is to say, I am lying in a refurbished room in the handsome 14th-century Chateau de Schengen, in the little village of Schengen, Luxembourg. From my casements, opened wide onto the sunny Saarland afternoon, I can see the exact stretch of the river Moselle where, on a boat floating between Germany, France and Luxembourg, the Schengen Agreement was signed in 1985. This was the agreement that sealed Free Movement as Europe’s defining ideal – one whose consequences are still unfolding. I’ve been in Luxembourg for a week, on assignment, and this week has given me an insight into why the nations of the EU undertook their bold, remarkable experiment of no more borders. The first and obvious motivator was war.

The pinned post at the top of the r/ChronicPain subreddit is ‘how to get doctors to take you seriously’. The subreddit has 131,000 subscribers, and is a tricky community for outsiders to understand. People talk in acronyms (chronic lower back pain – CLBP, myalgic encephalomyelitis – ME, acceptance and commitment therapy – ACT) and have their own vocabulary (‘spoonies’ and ‘zebras’). There are flippant memes about muscle relaxants next to horrific stories of medical negligence. People report their condition being so bad that they’ve dropped out of school or are even unable to care for their children. We can imagine the feelings of grief – and, of course, the sheer physical suffering – that come with chronic pain conditions. Or at least, we can try to.

If a man runs through a forest but doesn’t post it on Strava, it didn’t happen. I won’t believe it, anyway: the athletic tracker app is my new addiction. The name is borrowed from the Swedish word meaning ‘to strive’. Users document their sporting activities – walking, kayaking, surfing, skiing – and share their adventures with their followers. Founded in 2009 by two Harvard graduates who met on the rowing team, the app has 150 million users. That’s small fry compared to Facebook’s three billion or TikTok’s 1.3 billion. But Strava is on the up, acquiring Runna, another fitness app, in mid-April. Strava syncs to your smartwatch, if you have one. As well as mapping your distance and tracking your time, it lets you add photos and captions to your posts.

‘Another pint of bitter, love, when you’re ready.’ To those of a certain age the request slips off the tongue like the opening line of a sonnet. A pint of bitter is as English as the first cuckoo of spring or the last rose of summer. It brings to mind a pub, the people in it, and that social phenomenon which binds us to those we trust – the round. And, of course, one pint may lead to another. Television adverts used to be full of jolly pint-swillers. Whitbread ‘Big Head’ Trophy Bitter was ‘the pint that thinks it’s a qua-art’. Tetley of Leeds, a big player in those days, introduced viewers to their ‘Bittermen’, with the declaration: ‘You can’t beat ’em.

My nephew Cole is either highly intelligent with a wicked but not easily discernible sense of humour – or he’s ridiculously thick. He’s not really my nephew, but I can’t help wishing he was. I always refer to him as a member of the family because he’s arguably the most interesting sportsman in the world right now – and one of the most naturally gifted footballers this country has ever produced. Cole Palmer is 23 and comes from Wythenshawe, Manchester. He’s mixed race in that his paternal grandfather, Sterry Cole, came from the Caribbean island of St Kitts and Nevis and emigrated to Britain in 1960 as part of the Windrush generation. His father, Jermaine, is a dental engineer, and his mother, Marie, is a dyslexia assessor. He has two older sisters.

I’m afraid that when I read that the posh glamping provider for wealthy Glastonbury fans was going into liquidation, I smirked. The company offered yurts that only look luxurious if you compare them with tents – with a beds, a sofa, a loo and a shower, as well as meals. Pretty basic, biatch. The only exclusive thing about it is that guests can access the hospitality area behind the Pyramid tent, like ageing groupies. The company organising the liquidation sent emails to clients who had already paid for this year’s Glastonbury to say that no tickets had been bought so, oops, sorry. Wealthy customers complained vociferously to the media. One woman said that her father had paid £40,000 this year for three yurts and six hospitality tickets.

There’s a joint in east London that describes itself as a ‘family-run osteria’ and posts about the ‘Italian tradition of generous hospitality and simple, beautiful food’. The menu is a combination of several Italian dishes with Japanese ingredients, and I can’t think of anything more inappropriate. One of the dishes described as dolce (meaning ‘sweet’) is a cheese panna cotta with herring caviar. This restaurant has soy sauce nudging the balsamic. Is there no end to the revolting madness that is fusion food? I can understand why young chefs – those tattooed to within an inch of their lives – think they are a cross between Anthony Bourdain and Marco Pierre White and love the idea of mixing miso and chocolate pudding. It has all gone too far.