Spectator Life

Lindt has opened a ‘first of its kind’ flagship store at Piccadilly Circus. Roger Federer was wheeled out to cut the ribbon. It features the UK’s largest Lindt truffle pick ’n’ mix counter (a snip at £6.50/100g), a ‘barista-style’ hot chocolate bar and an ice cream station. There’s even jars of chocolate spread for those who consider Nutella lowbrow. Lindt’s CEO for UK and Ireland, in that PR corporatese that sounds like guff to everyone except his marketing department, said: ‘With 2025 marking Lindt & Sprungli’s 180th anniversary, what better way to celebrate this journey and enduring passion for captivating chocolate lovers worldwide.’ It’s enough to make me crave Quality Street. It’s fairly obvious what’s inspired them.

The weather is going to have a big bearing on the result of the BoyleSports Irish Grand National on Easter Monday. There is plenty of rain forecast between now and the off, and if that prediction is correct, the ground is going to be “soft”, or even “heavy”, by the off. I am loathe to desert Haiti Couleurs after he did this column a favour winning at the Cheltenham Festival: put up at 8-1, Rebecca Curtis’s game gelding won the Princess Royal National Hunt Challenge Cup Novices' Handicap Chase at 7-2 by a comfortable four and a half lengths. Haiti Couleurs is a magnificent, precise jumper and seems to go on all ground conditions but he must race off a 6 lbs higher official mark at Fairyhouse on Monday (5 p.m.).

For the first half of the 2010s, any teenage girl in her room had a chance of amassing more political influence than a junior Spad. She could define political terms and concepts, blacklist undesirable elements, and argue for a different kind of society. Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of other teenage girls would be following her, reading and engaging. These were the days of Tumblr, a youth blogging website that functioned like a dysfunctional think tank. I first found out about Tumblr in 2012, when I was in Year 7; a girl in my year group started a blog about her depression and anxiety and linked it from her public Facebook. I wanted in on her mental anguish – the posts she shared would ring safeguarding alarm bells today, but they seemed impossibly grown-up at the time.

‘She’s overweight! You should weigh her every week and if she puts on so much as 50g, immediately reduce her diet,’ one commenter said. Another castigated me for not using organic shampoo, and someone else told me off for my poor choice of outdoor coat. Under every post were furious debates, judgements and accusations. I adore Dixie. She is coming up for four years old and I want the best for her. But she is, after all, a standard short-haired dachshund, not a human toddler – and frankly it all seems a bit much. The number dogs being given fluoxetine, the same drug used in Prozac, has increased tenfold over the past decade. Perhaps that’s because more than half of dog owners are now members of some kind of Facebook groups related to pet health and wellbeing.

Employing a marksman to shoot pigeons inside our wedding barn on the morning of a ceremony was not something included in the venue-owner’s manual. For the animal-loving bride, blood-splattered dead birds were preferable to her guests being splattered later that day – an understandable moral sacrifice on her behalf. The birds had sneaked in via an open owl hole window in the roof, something we hadn’t spotted until the unwelcome visitors caused a flap. It was one of the many challenges we faced owning and running a rural wedding venue, a high-pressure business where expectations are enormous and responsibilities seemingly endless.

The drift began with the Anglicised version of tapas – a word meaning ‘to cover’, or ‘lid’, that originally described the small pieces of food used to cover and protect drinks. But ‘small plates’, now a mainstay of those fashionable, overpriced restaurants that pride themselves on being the antidote to stuffy and formal, have dominated the restaurant world for more than two decades. In Venice once, in the early 1990s, I ended up in a backstreet bacari, which is a booze and snack joint, as I couldn’t afford the restaurants in the centre. It was full of working men, and cheap as chips. Huge platters of cold mussels, cured ham, anchovies and crispy gnocchi sat behind a glass counter. Perched above the bar were a barrel of red, and one of white.

Boris Johnson didn't like Adolescence. In his Daily Mail column last week he acknowledged the fine acting of the most talked-about television programme of the year, but still concluded that it was ‘tosh’. The problem, he felt, was that it wasn't based on a real-life crime, which somehow lessens its worth as a lesson for our times in the eyes of the former Prime Minister. I'm not sure his logic fully holds up to scrutiny (nor, for that matter, does Keir Starmer's plan to show Adolescence in schools). But if it is real-life drama that Boris wants then Netflix, with impeccable timing, this week released another one of those sports documentaries at which they have become rather adept.

Tomorrow’s Coral Scottish Grand National (3.35 p.m.) has attracted a field of 23 runners with a pot of more than £112,000 to the connections of the winner. Irish trainer Willie Mullins, fresh from his stunning achievements at Aintree last weekend, has six runners in the race as he tries to become champion trainer in Britain for a second successive year. It's impossible to rule out another Mullins victory but the bookies are running scared of his horses and the forecast favourite, Chosen Witness, looks to be particularly poor value. I have put up two horses for the race with mixed fortunes so far. Magna Sam, suggested each way at 50-1, is running and is now a top-priced 20-1.

Like many teenage girls, I was a committed boy-sniffer. By which I mean a Lynx-sniffer, since this delightfully cheap but heady deodorant was synonymous with all the raging hormones – and the promise that went with them. Even the geekiest, ugliest, runtiest of the litter could be transformed into an object of mystique and allure by the waft of Lynx – perhaps Apollo or Voodoo, the two late nineties variants I remember best. Even today, I can’t entirely shake my soft spot for male cologne, and I’m embarrassed to say that when it’s plastered on some vulgarian on the Tube sporting a gallon of hair gel and one of those puzzlingly horrid moustaches bleeding into beard, I fail to recoil.

The second passport used to be a backdoor: a legal hack for the well-advised, well-connected or well-heeled. You could acquire nationality in a country you’d hardly visited, without necessarily even speaking the language, and still find yourself welcomed with open arms – or at least waved through the fast-track lane at immigration. But that game is ending. More and more governments are closing the door on tenuous ancestral claims and pay-to-play citizenship. Whether through lineage or liquid assets, the old tricks to get a second passport no longer work. Nationality is being redefined – not as a loophole, but as a bond. The appeal of a second passport has always been practical. For Britons, Brexit turned the post-Brexit navy passport into a travel straitjacket.