Spectator Life

The 1990s comedy series the Royle Family includes a perfect scene in which Barbara says she won’t bother getting a turkey the following year, as nobody actually likes it. Everyone looks horrified. But she’s right. Advocaat, mince pies, Christmas pudding, Christmas cake (especially the marzipan) cranberry sauce, and balls of sausage meat made into stuffing – there is a very good reason why we tend only to eat and drink certain things at Christmas. Never buy a cheese selection, because among the mediocre bits and pieces, there is bound to be some abomination That said, I am aware that certain ingredients are staples in some households. Boiled carrots and sprouts, for example, which – for some unknown reason – appear on Sunday lunch menus week in, week out.

Those who still make a habit of the Sunday roast are faced with a challenge come Christmas: how to make sure the big meal doesn’t disappoint. What if the turkey is a let-down given everyone so loves the topside of beef? It would take a real Grinch to sniff at the festive spread – we serve it not because turkey would be anyone’s death row meal but because, as I have written before, there is virtue in tradition for its own sake. And truth be told, there is little reason to fear disappointment when pigs in blankets are close at hand. But there is one other trick up the Christmas dinner host’s sleeve – something that if served at any other occasion of the year would prompt raised eyebrows and being led away gently on suspicion of imbibing too much red wine.

Dual-purpose trainer Hughie Morrison usually has one of two jumping stars to supplement his talented flat horses at his Berkshire stables. In recent years, Not So Sleepy has been the flag-bearer for the yard over the winter months but he was retired, aged 12, after winning on the level at Newbury in September. If Morrison has a successor to Not So Sleepy, it could come in the form of SECRET SQUIRREL and the five-year-old gelding looks nicely weighted off an official mark of just 126 in tomorrow’s Ladbrokes Handicap Hurdle at Ascot (3.35 p.m.). It’s a competitive event over the minimum trip in which Be Aware and Dysart Enos are at the head of the market on the back of their second and third respectively in the Unibet Greatwood Hurdle at Cheltenham last month.

For a spell in the late 1970s there were two pop groups which dominated the UK singles charts – both, coincidentally, vocal quartets from continental northern Europe. But while one, Abba, have since become a billion-pound industry with an apparently permanent hologram-shaped presence on the London concert scene, their then rivals for pop supremacy, Boney M, have almost completely disappeared from public consciousness. And this is a shame because Boney M remain uniquely noteworthy in one field in particular: weirdness.  There are other contenders: Little Richard, the Sweet, Village People, the KLF.

James Joyce called Guinness ‘the wine of Ireland’. Now it feels a bit more like the Coca-Cola of alcohol – as much brash branding as beer. Once, it merely had an ugly logo and the rowdy promise of Emerald Isle hedonism which – I confess I have often thought – is crafted to appeal to simple people. For who, other than simple people, chooses Guinness in this day and age when faced with the proliferation of ales, IPAs, helles, sessions, Belgian beers and porters? The sorts of people who find the Irish pub in a Mediterranean town and hit it hard. Guinness is taking on a strange new life But now, Guinness is taking on a strange new life.

In the pantheon of memorable pop songs, Chappell Roan’s ‘HOT TO GO!’ is right up there. A breezy, unpretentious electropop effort, it has quite a forgettable verse, but that soon gives way to a shouty, cheerleader-style chorus in which Ms Roan repeatedly informs us that she is, indeed, ‘hot to go’. Somehow I recently heard it twice in one day, and that was all it took for ‘HOT TO GO!’ to get stuck on repeat in my mind’s ear for three whole days. Of course, I’ve had earworms before, but never for longer than a few hours; this was something else, worming on an epic scale. It became the soundtrack to every moment of my waking life, the unofficial theme tune of every person I saw.

GABORIOT was my fancy for last weekend’s Boylesports Becher Chase until the weather intervened and the Aintree meeting was cancelled. Joint trainers Oliver Greenall and Josh Guerriero have, however, wasted little time in finding their eight-year-old gelding a new target in the form of a big handicap tomorrow. I am going to stay loyal to Gaboriot when he contests the bet365 Handicap Chase (Doncaster, 2.05 p.m.) over three miles because I think he remains leniently treated off an official mark of 128. I was impressed with his seasonal debut when third in the BoyleSports Grand Sefton Chase over Aintree’s Grand National fences.

A young woman called Lily Phillips, known to certain users of the internet, has recently spoken about a cunning stunt she performed earlier this year. She had sex with 101 men in a single day. As I see it, there are three possible responses to this story. Or maybe four (phwoar!). The first is to suggest that Ms Phillips’s behaviour is not entirely ladylike. Or, less pompously, that she is a slut and a whore and so on. This is the traditional response. It is, to almost all cultures known to history, common sense. Most of these cultures had, and have, stern penalties for such behaviour. The modern West gradually decided that exclusion from polite society was punishment enough, but it has become hard to say whether we still have a polite society from which to exclude people.

I sometimes wonder if a property lawyer dreamt up the idea that an Englishman’s home is his castle. Over the years, it’s certainly been a lucrative concept for the legal profession, especially when said castle is worth a few bob. Barely a week goes on when one of the posher papers doesn’t feature an expensive spat in an equally expensive neighbourhood. The latest feud I’ve seen involves a brook that runs through two properties – one owned by an artisan potter, the other a part-time painter – in the bucolic Leicestershire village of Thrussington. The row over who owns the right to this peaceful babbling has so far cost the rival parties a nerve-jangling £300,000 after it was heard by three judges in the Court of Appeal last month.

Middle-aged men might be feeling persecuted at the moment. But we bring so much of the opprobrium upon ourselves. The MasterChef host Gregg Wallace has, it should be remembered, not been charged with any crime. But the allegations of his inappropriate, predatory and downright cringe-worthy behaviour towards women have inspired the kind of reaction among my male colleagues and friends that I haven’t heard the likes of since the arrival of David Brent and The Office some 20-plus years ago. Nobody finds your Tommy Cooper impression funny because the only other person old enough to remember Tommy Cooper is outside hectoring a stranger about the smoking ban ‘You don’t understand, Rob,’ said the editor of the magazine I worked for at the time.