Spectator Life

Many people visit Japan because of its food but few, surely, have pastries in mind. In fact, Japan has no discernible tradition in this culinary realm at all. But that didn’t stop a trio of Japanese bakers from winning the biannual pastry world cup, pushing the fancied host nation France into a chastening second place. Japan won last time too and thus became the first country ever to retain the title, which you might suppose would make this big news here in Tokyo. But the media has hardly mentioned it, probably because this kind of national stereotype-busting triumph is becoming quite normal. For example, Japan, believe it or not, is now one of the best countries in the world for pizza, especially the Neapolitan version.

A few days before Christmas, I was gently woken by my wife telling me that while I’d been sleeping through the night in blissful ignorance, she had been writhing in labour downstairs. At the last moment, she had decided against giving birth at home and now wanted to go to the hospital. I hadn’t known a home birth was even on the cards – clearly, my wife and I need to work on our communication. Moreover, it was a week before the due date, so I had gone to bed thinking there were still days remaining before the great panic. Within minutes, we were in the car and racing to the maternity ward. Racing, but not fast enough. As we arrived at the hospital car park, my wife informed me that she wasn’t able to get out of the car. She was delivering our baby there and then.

It’s 30 years since a website called Match.com opened the Pandora’s box of online dating. Until then, with the tiny exception of the classifieds, meeting a mate had to begin out there and in person. But from 1995, dating retreated to a desktop computer – a virtual shop window of real people. Match.com was launched as a minimum viable product that sold, so said the wags, other minimum viable products. Today, the online dating industry makes more than $9 billion. By 2033, its revenues are expected to double. There are now tons of apps, yet still so many loners. According to one survey, 44 per cent of Londoners are single. If Pandora’s box opened years ago, today it’s surely shattering.

‘I really do think you should think seriously about that operation,’ my urologist told me about a year ago. The plumbing had deteriorated further and, in a calculated gamble for more tranquil twilight years, I eventually capitulated, submitting in early December to a so-called TURP, a transurethral resection of the prostate. Two days later, he sent me home with a reassuring message: ‘It’s settling down nicely, but don’t be alarmed by a little blood in the urine in a few weeks’ time. Expect a sort of “dry rosé” colour when the scabs start to fall off.’ I took that as a green light for a family Christmas in northern Spain, a plan marred only slightly by my Spanish wife Marina’s wrist fracture (she tripped on the stairs) shortly before we set off on Brittany Ferries.

You could be forgiven for thinking you’d walked into Oz: in the past couple of years, the whole world has gone green. Pale green, to be precise. Suddenly, pistachio is everywhere: it's in our pastries, our chocolate, our coffees, our puddings, and even showing up in perfumes, paint charts, scented candles and on our fashion runways. Where has this sudden lust for pistachio come from? In one way, pistachios are old news: they’re an ancient crop that has grown in the Middle East and been used as an ingredient in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cookery for as long as can be remembered.

Entering the New Inn in Llanddewi Brefi in Ceredigion is like stepping back in time. The only pub in the village (since the Foelallt Arms closed down four years ago), The New Inn seems to hail from the 1970s. Its till is a pull-out wooden drawer full of coins and notes. There’s a coal fire in the grate. The bar is littered with eccentric and old-fashioned clutter: a jar of pickled eggs, boxes of Swan Vestas as if smoking in pubs was still the norm, plaques to award the winners of a conker competition long past, sheep farming memorabilia.   The clientele are dressed as if they’ve just got back from marching down Whitehall with Jeremy Clarkson. And, it transpires, these drinkers are waiting to be fed.

For the second weekend in a row, there is plenty of top-class racing to look forward to on both sides of the Irish Sea. The two-day Dublin Racing Festival will be hosting the highest-class fare but Sandown and Musselburgh both offer fascinating cards too. I will start closer to home where Virgin Bet is sponsoring all six races at Sandown, but only one race has attracted double-figure runners. That’s the Virgin Bet Heroes Handicap Hurdle (3.07 p.m.) in which Henri The Second is likely to go off favourite after his course and distance win in December. In fact, this will be the fifth time in a row that Paul Nicholls’ eight-year-old gelding has lined up at Sandown so he could hardly be more of a course specialist.

The suggestion that the Prince Charles cinema in London’s West End could be closed down was the least surprising news of the week. This sort of thing, fuelled by soaring property values, has been happening in Soho and its periphery for three decades now and shows no sign of relenting. The Prince Charles isn’t strictly in Soho, being just south of Shaftesbury Avenue, but it has always felt like it belonged there, with the other left field, misfit and seedy enterprises that gave the place its character and reputation. It was built in 1962 but, on the edge of Chinatown, was just too far off the main drag of Leicester Square to ever really thrive. By the 1970s the Prince Charles was mostly screening soft porn: Emmanuelle and later Caligula.

I can’t remember the exact date of my departure from university. It was sometime in the summer of 2021. My flatmates and I packed up our things, had a sombre pint at the pub, hugged, and then went our separate ways. I boarded the train at Bristol Temple Meads with a degree in English and Philosophy and no feasible job prospects. I was also broke. Three years had come to a precipitous end, and it was time to move back home. I was worried about my future. The thought of becoming a bum terrified me: the sort of graduate who day drinks, listens to Limp Bizkit, starts a true crime podcast from his bedroom, and screams at his mother for not washing his pants. But I returned home in spite of my fears, largely for one reason: I couldn’t bear the thought of becoming a university hanger-on.

At the start of the new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Dylan’s protest-singer mentor Pete Seeger implores him not to swap his trusty acoustic for a newfangled Fender Stratocaster electric. ‘A good song can get the job done without the frills,’ says Seeger – who, for all his progressive views, wasn’t very hip to the new sound of rock ’n’ roll. ‘Yeah, but sometimes they sound really good,’ retorts Dylan. It’s a brief exchange, but it shows how the times were indeed a-changin’ – and Dylan’s own music with them. Comercially, abandonment of his folkie roots in search of his inner Rolling Stone was to prove an astute decision. His debut electric single, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, became his first single to chart in the US.

I love Italian food, and I love food writing and TV programmes, so you might think I’d love Stanley Tucci. And yet I find him creepy and his recipes are rubbish. I can’t be the only one. The actor, who I first saw in the brilliant film Big Night, about a Jersey Shore Italian-American restaurant, is probably best known for The Devil Wears Prada, a film I adore. His character in that film did wind me up, but it took a while before Tucci himself got on my nerves. I suppose it began with him coming over all cheffy, like he’s the new Anthony Bourdain. Who cares what Colin Firth eats when he’s round at the Tucci gaff? I kept being told to watch his TV series where he travels around Italy, but the sight of his smug face on my screen turned out to be more than I could bear.

Monopoli, Puglia Monopoli is an elegant little seaside town in Puglia, the heel of the Italian boot, and in summer it’s unbearable. Tourists flock from everywhere. Squares you could normally zip through in a few seconds take ten minutes to cross, and the queues for Bella Blu, the ice cream parlour in Piazza Garibaldi, remind you of the Ryanair check-in desk. That struggling little pizzeria you patronised loyally throughout the autumn and winter now asks you to come back in an hour’s time and still can’t find you a table when you do. Monopoli, which seemed to be begging for it on every previous visit, suddenly has options. It’s offhand with you, looks at its watch and plays hard to get.

How many people under 40 in Britain today do you think have read H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines? Five, six… 50? It’s hard to know. If you’re lucky – or unlucky, depending on your point of view – you might have bumped into the 1985 film version with Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone and Herbert Lom in the unloved crevices of the TV schedule when only insomniacs or household spiders are deemed to be a risk. I ask the question because this year marks 100 years since the death of Sir Henry Rider Haggard as he was then, having been knighted in 1919, apparently for services to the British Empire – and things have obviously moved on a bit since then. Except, of course, they haven’t changed in his famous tale of adventure and lost treasure in Africa.

It's only January, but I’m ready to declare my 2025 word of the year. Creep. It’s everywhere (though true to form you may not immediately spot it). The online world is no longer merely parallel. It intersects, subsumes and fuels our real world. Siri, Alexa et al lurk. The internet, email and, above all, apps skulk silently but persistently, stealing away our ‘free’ time. We are never off duty. Social media has crept in as our number one and sometimes only friend (though of course the parasocial relationships delude us into thinking we have many more). AI is stealthily permeating every aspect of our lives, often with huge benefits, but the imperceptibility of its advance is unnerving.