Spectator Life

At a recent drinks party in Oxfordshire, I counted five men wearing Nehru waistcoats. Not one of these men looked like he was paying homage to the garment’s namesakes, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Not one looked as if they were genuinely taken with Indian fashion nor remotely bothered that they were wearing the same thing. I detect a hint of smugness in there somewhere, a rather-too-pleased-with-itself appropriation Puzzled, I thought back to other men I’ve seen rocking the Nehru: Imran Khan, obviously; Nicholas Coleridge, probably; Mick Jagger, surely. I’m not sure what all these men have in common, but their take-up of the Nehru waistcoat has neither surprised nor alarmed me.

A famously elitist members’ club, a 900-year-old meat market, and a traditional old barbershop may not feel like they have much in common. In fact, they didn’t – not until the last week or two, when they all simultaneously closed in their disparate parts of London. The first closure, that of the Groucho Club, has been widely covered in these pages, generally with an overtone of chortling. After all, it is hard to feel sorry for a place that is notoriously exclusive, boasts a world-class art collection, and charges members £1,500 a year for the privilege of eating near a Damien Hirst – or indeed eating near Damien Hirst.

At this time of year, switching on the radio to hear the twinkling harp at the start of ‘The First Nowell’ from Hely-Hutchinson’s Carol Symphony has a profound Proustian effect on an entire generation. It takes us back to our childhood living rooms in 1984, sitting cross-legged in front of a boxy TV with a 14-inch screen, bewitched by the most exciting, terrifying and Christmassy programme we had ever seen. Part of the nostalgia comes from knowing that this wonderful series would probably never be made now As a bookish child who lived largely in my head, I thought the BBC had made The Box of Delights especially for me. So, it seems, did an awful lot of other people.

To call Gregg Wallace a ‘national treasure’, as some did after his fall from grace last week, was inaccurate. Just because he is (or was) very popular on television does not qualify him. To attain national treasure status, a person needs to be older, as well as much nicer. The expression is vastly overused, lavished on too many undeserving celebrities, and it needs to be reined in. As Julie Burchill (sick to death of them last Christmas) wrote, ‘it seems harder to name a public figure who isn’t one’, and that most of them ‘can’t open their cake-holes without mouthing centrist platitudes which we’ve all heard a million times before’. David Attenborough is the yardstick.

When it comes to adventures in retail, nighttime shopping is where it all happens: the unusual and most interesting people, the prime parking spaces, the lack of queues and, best of all, the absence of germy, screamy, bored, needy, naggy children. Shopping at night is plentiful in the sticks where I live – the sticks being that area between the outer suburbs and Home Counties proper. It is where you can find both stretches of heath and woodland and still get a decent coffee, speciality breads, etc. Retail parks are open until 8, 9, or even 10, and two epic 24-hour superstores are a mere zoom away in my old car.

Mark Darcy’s Christmas jumper has come a long way since it repelled the heroine of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) at her mother’s annual New Year’s Day turkey curry buffet. The green turtleneck, festooned with a red-nosed reindeer, sold for £5,670 at auction in November. Colin Firth has protested that he’s been ‘unfairly blamed for subsequent surges in Christmas sweater sales’. He might have a point. Arguably, Sarah Lund’s snowflake sweater in the 2007 Danish TV series The Killing did more to elevate the garment to high fashion. Because nothing quite marks the birth of God like a Nordic noir police procedural.

On hearing that the Groucho Club has been closed after the Metropolitan Police alleged ‘a recent serious criminal offence’, I felt a shiver of something I wasn’t quite sure of – one part sorrow, one part joy, shaken over ice-cold memories and served straight up. To some, the Groucho might have been some poncy private members' club but for me – from 1985 to 1995, between the ages of 25 and 35 – it was where I struck deals and enemies, fell in love with pretty strangers and went off those to whom I had promised to be true. The Groucho is where I became ‘Julie Burchill’, for better or worse.

Stir-up Sunday may be behind us, but it’s not too late to make your Christmas pudding – and do you know what that means? Yep, sourcing decent beef suet. Suet is the king of fats. It adds to the pudding’s keeping quality, texture and flavour. My recipe calls for half a pound of suet (see below for the recipe in full – it was my great-aunt’s) but the good stuff is hard to find. You can get pellets of suet in a packet from supermarkets, but the real thing, grated into light flakes, is another story: much nicer and lighter. Some inferior recipes suggest butter instead, but good as butter is, it just doesn’t cut it for a Christmas pudding. Suet is the hard creamy fat around the beef kidney.

With today’s vote on the assisted dying bill, I am reminded of my mother. Susie was 89, in failing health but of sound mind, when she took me aside at her house in the south of France to tell me she wanted me to kill her. She had no intention, she said, of enduring the humiliation of a decaying memory and a crumbling body, and was determined to avoid the old people’s home, the geriatric ward and the hospice. Some days my mum really wanted to kill herself, and some days she really did not ‘You have to know,’ she said to me, ‘not only when to leave a job, or a party, or a relationship, but more importantly, when to leave life itself.’ Susie told me she needed help with her plan of killing herself, and asked if I would help.