Spectator Life

President Trump swerved in his ‘Liberation Day’ event last week, speaking on an issue that has preoccupied America for months: the price of eggs. Trump said: ‘The first week I was blamed for eggs, I said, “I just got here”. The price on eggs now is down 55 per cent and will keep going down. They were saying that for Easter, “Please don’t use eggs. Could you use plastic eggs?” I say, we don’t want to do that.’ Like him or not, Trump has a way of understanding the zeitgeist. The egg crisis is threatening to become global. It has displaced even Marine Le Pen as a subject of discussion at my village café. There was not a single carton of eggs on sale yesterday when I did my shopping at the Super U. How will I make my bacon and eggs?

At a recent lunch where I was sitting next to A.N. Wilson I couldn’t help but take a good look at his suit. After all, this was the man often described as the original Young Fogey. He was dressed perfectly well in an austere two-piece, though while I (ever the try-hard) was sporting a pocket square, he was without one. On another occasion, chatting to Charles Moore in the colonial surrounds of the Foreign Office’s Durbar Court, the Lord was indistinguishable in dress from the other mandarins and journalistic bigwigs there. In bygone days, a Young Fogey such as he would have donned a seersucker suit and shantung silk tie for the occasion. The Young Fogeys’ flamboyance of dress evident in their heyday is gone.

Almost 50 years ago, in a hotel bar in central Paris, French wine faced a reckoning. Steven Spurrier, a British wine merchant, decided California deserved a spell in the sun: at the time French wine was the dominant force in Europe, with bottles from the New World – Australia, New Zealand, the US and the like – considered their poor cousin. Spurrier came up with the idea to pit the very best French Bordeaux against Californian cabernet sauvignons and chardonnays against white Burgundies, and have a panel of experts – all French – rank them in a blind tasting that came to be known as the Judgment of Paris. California won both categories. Odette Khan, a well-known critic, reportedly demanded her scorecard back so news of her grave error wouldn’t reach the papers.

Sometimes it seemed to me as a young hack that writing obituaries must be the best job in newspapers. You can’t get sued – though people tend not to take the gloves off out of ‘respect’ and use ancient phrases like ‘bon viveur’ and ‘did not suffer fools gladly’ when everyone knows you mean ‘well-connected drunk’ and ‘ill-tempered’. It’s only once in a blue moon that someone really says what they think, like when the ‘social influencer’ Jameela Jamil barely waited until the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld was cold in his casket before X-ing that the capering clown – widely being celebrated as a ‘genius’ – was in fact ‘a racist, misogynistic, fat-phobic rape apologist who shouldn’t be posted all over the internet as a saint gone-too-soon’.

Tomorrow’s Randox Grand National (4 p.m.), the world’s most famous horse race, is the highlight of an excellent card at Aintree and I think the bookies have got it right with the horses they have put at the top of the market. Stumptown, who could yet go off as favourite, is the best weighted horse in the race given that he would be given several pounds more if the handicapper was allowed to take his recent Cheltenham Festival win into consideration. His victory by seven lengths in the Glenfarclas Cross Country Chase came, however, after the weights were published and this is a race in which there are no winning penalties.

My home city of Oxford has been ravaged by shop closures over the past decade but there is still one outstanding second-hand bookshop (the estimable antiquarian department at Blackwell’s apart) and it’s the Oxfam bookshop on St Giles. Thanks to a regular donations from dons and writers, there are invariably high-quality and interesting items on its shelves, priced sensibly and reasonably. In the past, I reckon I’ve spent a decent three-figure sum there most months, which I persuaded myself was going to developing countries and their good work, rather than growing my unreasonably large collection. Yet I’ve rather fallen out of love with the Oxfam St Giles ever since it did something unexpected a couple of months ago: it stopped me buying books.

Women’s expectations are off. They want men with advanced degrees, but on university campuses, women outnumber their male counterparts. They want men with above-average incomes, but the gender pay gap has been reversed – young women now out-earn men. They want men who share their politics, but in almost every western country over the past decade or so, women have slid to the left while men have remained centrist. NEW: an ideological divide is emerging between young men and women in many countries around the world.I think this one of the most important social trends unfolding today, and provides the answer to several puzzles. pic.twitter.

How do you walk away from greatness? How do you vacate the position of being literally the best person in the world at something? Most of us never have to face this challenge, but at some point Ronnie O’Sullivan will. In Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry he has contrasting examples of how to tackle it. I’d argue that Davis’s approach is by far the better – and indeed teaches all of us about life and the way it should be lived. ‘If he plays his best, he wins. It’s as simple as that.’ There aren’t many who disagree with Hendry’s verdict on O’Sullivan, his successor as the king of snooker and the greatest player, by common consent, ever to pick up a cue.

It is the evening of Monday 23 September 1985. A band called the June Brides are playing a free gig in the bar of Manchester Polytechnic’s Students Union, the Mandela Building (of course) on Oxford Road. I find myself among the audience of freshers’ week first-year undergraduates. I am 18, a small-town boy who’s been living in a big city for just 48 hours.  The place is half empty, the audience awkward. But I am quite taken with the band and the following day go to Piccadilly Records to buy their just-released mini album, There Are Eight Million Stories. The US novelist Dave Eggers would later recall being a teenage Anglophile indie fan in the suburbs of Chicago and cycling 20 miles to get this record that autumn. I could just get the 85 bus from Chorlton.

I like to think of myself as good at making friends. I tend to rank them. There are kindred spirits (rare), very good friends (perhaps five at the most), and good (ten or more). Friendships, like plants, need looking after; they require time and attention. One rank below friends are acquaintances. Acquaintances add warmth and comfort to life but are not essential. You can abandon an acquaintance without much compunction. But good friends nurture the heart and soul and are therefore vital. Kindred spirits? By them you know you’re not alone, not mad, not a terrible person and, amazingly, that you’re loved. I think back to childhood when the need for a best friend was absolutely paramount. I suppose it’s an early version of wanting a mate.

A small but perfectly formed training outfit from Gloucestershire has quietly been making ripples, bordering on waves, with its horses in recent weeks – and there is plenty to look forward to for the rest of the season too. David Killahena and Graeme McPherson, who hold a joint licence to train at Stow-on-the Wold, sent just one horse to the Cheltenham Festival earlier this month and Yellow Car ran a cracker to finish fourth in the Grade 1, 20-runner Albert Bartlett Novices’ Hurdle over three miles. ‘I bought him as a cheap and cheerful three-year-old to have a bit of fun with and for two years he showed nothing at home,’ McPherson told me. ‘But then I ran him in a point to point and the jockey got off and said, “He’s all right”.