Spectator Life

More than one in five people in the UK is out of work at the moment. As lockdowns lifted, many people developed anxiety and depression – most of which can be alleviated by companionship, routine and having your own cash. What I can’t understand is young, fit people not working. From the age of 13, I stood in a cake shop every Sunday, boxing pâtisserie for affluent customers. The old lady who owned the shop would mutter for us to hurry up as there was a queue. It was a knackering job, being on my feet all day, and the owner didn’t trust her charges to work the till. So we had to hand the money to her, she would hand us the change, which we would then pass on to the customer.

I share little in common with the royal family, but like certain members of that beleaguered group, 2024 turned out to be a particular annus horribilis for me. With sorrows coming at me, not as single spies but in bloody great battalions (I won’t bore you with the details), I decided to take action by spending a week at a specialist clinic in Austria being pickled, pricked, pummelled and poked. It’s been 50 years since the eccentric German entrepreneur Rolf Deyhle founded a permanent centre for what became known as the ‘FX Mayr Cure’. He bought the impressive property from a golf club and a former student of Franz Mayr, an Austrian gastroenterologist who focused on the regeneration of the intestines.

Faithful readers will know of my journey through the French health care system. I have not shared these histories because anyone should be particularly interested in my aches and pains, or to complain. If I wanted to moan about a health system on the verge of a nervous breakdown I would return to Britain. No, I drone on because it’s worth repeating the astonishing discovery that it is actually possible to have a health system that isn’t crap. And I have made some other discoveries along the way. In previous episodes, I have covered the remarkable behaviour of French GPs, who actually answer the phone – and will see you the same day if necessary or tomorrow if less immediately urgent.

Anyone who attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst will never look at a shaving razor in the same way. Ever since my officer training days, when you had to shave on exercise at 4 a.m. in a cold, wet forest, unable to feel your fingers, shaving has been an important topic. Having escaped those dank woods, I’ve tried to embrace shaving at its most comfortable and alluring: using a stylish cut-throat razor, aided by rose-scented shaving cream whipped into a lather by a badger-hair brush. That doesn’t cut it in airport security, where even a lone razor blade could get you pinned down on the floor. So I have tried to find a happy medium, reverting to the type of Gillette razor I used at Sandhurst. But good luck trying to find a two-bladed Gillette Excel blade.

He’s the best-known Briton ever to have boldly gone into space: the first to board the International Space Station, the first to carry out a space walk. Major Tim Peake even ran a marathon while in orbit. So why do I wince every time I hear his name?  When I was growing up, shortly after the Apollo moon landing, the portentous language of that mission – ‘The Eagle has landed’, ‘One small step’ etc – had permeated global consciousness. So when space travel was depicted in popular culture, in music and film, it was often with the atmosphere of an existential psychodrama – in Space Odyssey (Kubrick), Space Oddity (Bowie), ‘Rocket Man’ (Elton).

During the course of last year, Alex Greaves and his wife Sarah seriously considered moving out of London. The couple, who live in Southfields in the south-west of the city with their sons aged two and five, were tempted the idea of a new life in the country – inspired largely by friends’ idyllic tales of moving to the sticks and into a home far grander than anything they could possibly afford in the capital. In the end, though, Alex and Sarah decided to stay put. And they are not alone. In the past year the number of Londoners leaving the city has dwindled dramatically. Research by estate agent Hamptons found that during 2024, Londoners purchased just 5.7 per cent of all homes sold beyond the city limits. This is a decade-long low, and down from a peak of 8.

It’s half-term and instead of the Baftas and Anmer Hall in Norfolk, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decamped en famille to Mustique. Old pictures of Kate and Wills walking along the Caribbean seafront hand in hand and a young Prince George in a green polo shirt are accompanied by newspaper commentary detailing how Kate deserves a rest in what is thought to be her favourite place. So far, so very lovely.   Mustique itself, though, has always struck me as a rather sinister place.

My local gastropub, which is very popular, serves a hot, freshly made and runny-yolked scotch egg. It's billed as a ‘Cackleberry Farm Scotch Egg with Maldonado Salt’ because part of hospitality is marketing. If you just chalk up ‘scotch egg’ on a board, it doesn’t entice the appetite in quite the same way. But call it ‘œuf écossais enrobés de chair à saucisse’ and serve it on a cracked slate tile – you’ve got yourself a stampede. A couple who live in the village visited the pub and ordered two of them. Shortly after being served, the husband of the couple returned the plates to the bar and asked the staff to reheat their partially eaten scotch eggs. The landlord explained that he could not reheat them once they had been partially eaten.

It was when the peasant didn’t move for the second hour that I became suspicious. I was in an ultra-expensive hotel in southern Thailand. It was built to resemble a sequence of exquisite villas from some ancient Thai dynasty, arranged around tropical gardens and meadows. I was staying in my very own, beautiful, teak-and-mahogany mini-palace, which came with a grand piano and butler – all the usual things I’d come to expect as a luxury travel correspondent. Yawn. The only thing really unique about this five-star hotel (they tend to blur, eventually) was the fact my own villa, the best of the best, the jewel in the crown, came with its own paddy field. And in that paddy field was a singular peasant in a charming conical hat, next to an ox.

We have a pied-à-terre in Soho, which is convenient when I am in London, even if the street outside our tiny house is sometimes a little raucous at night. The neighbourhood is lively and fun, but my visits come with the difficulty that, in Soho, so far as I can tell, there is nowhere to dispose of your rubbish. I saw recently that Bristol City Council wants to limit collection of its wheelie bins to once a month. In much of Britain, it is already fortnightly. But at least they have wheelie bins. Westminster doesn’t allow wheelie bins in Soho; the pavements are too narrow. I assume this is the case also in other constrained neighbourhoods. Our shiny new Labour-controlled Westminster City Council seems to have given up collecting rubbish.

It's 4 a.m. and my German shorthaired pointer, Percy, is lying on top of me. This isn’t a giant infraction on his part. Percy and I have long shared a bed. We start the early evening as we always do – me reading and he beside me at my invitation, the light on his side of the bed is on too, in case he wants to read as well; something German perhaps, like Thomas Mann. Later, when I decide to go to sleep, I turn out both of our lights and we glide off – his paw often in my hand – into the great unconscious. At some point during the night, he leaves his designated strip and inches towards me, which is probably why my dreams always seem to orbit around being strangled with a velvet ribbon.

Values. Whenever some poor soul gets cancelled, sacked, scalped etc., there’s almost always a bland, impersonal statement from the institution carrying out the scalping. In third-person corporatese, from the moral high ground, such pronouncements will conclude with the sentence: ‘The comments of Person X do not align with the values of Institution Y.’ Where do these mysterious values originate? From which particular pile of decomposing matter were the spores of these holy secular values spontaneously generated? Frankly, for a lot of this, I blame Star Trek. It seemed so innocent back in the day, this story of the crew of a massive space warship in the 23rd century.