Spectator Life

There was a time, not so very long ago, when the skyline of London was dominated by the work of one architect: not Sir Christopher Wren, but Colonel Richard Seifert. But while Wren is universally admired, Seifert has been reviled. Architects hated his success; the public his uncompromising brutalist aesthetic. Yet now, more than two decades after his death, that appears to be changing. Seifert – who did a spell in the Royal Engineers during the second world war and then insisted on being addressed by his military rank throughout his life – was often said to have had more of an impact on the capital than anyone bar the creator of St Paul’s.

It is now 20 years since I left university. Two pints in an evening and I feel groggy the next morning. My oldest child is in his last year at primary school, I regularly wake up with mysterious aches and pains, and we still have a very long way to go on our mortgage. All of which is to say that I am firmly and undeniably middle-aged. As it happens, I am rather enjoying myself at the start of my fifth decade. My midlife crisis takes one of the more benign forms: crafting a 1:76 scale model of an interwar rural branch line in the attic. That almost half of children do not have both parents present is grim But that is clearly not the universal experience.

Just over a year ago, I gave birth to my daughter. Labour was surprisingly smooth, unlike my previous emergency c-section. Once I started pushing, my daughter came quickly. I heard the reassuring sound of a newborn crying, and I felt the most indescribable sense of relief. Then, I started haemorrhaging. Before I knew it, I was under general anaesthetic in the operating room. When I came to my senses a few hours later, my first thought was the hospital’s policy: no visitors after 8 p.m. I had 12 hours before being left alone overnight with my daughter in a room full of equally badly injured mothers. A sense of panic set in. The countdown had begun.

You might think that, as a country, we have had our fair share of food security wobbles over the last few years: first with pre-Brexit panic, and the hoarding that went along with it, and then the empty supermarket shelves that few of us will forget during the height of the pandemic. But this time, the call is coming from inside the house: British farmers are threatening to stop supplying supermarkets in protest against the government’s plans to apply inheritance tax to family farms. What we might be able to cook in a few weeks is as expansive as ‘almost anything’ or as limited as ‘almost nothing’ What does that mean for the average person doing the weekly shop? Are we returning to the days of rationed eggs and powdered milk? Not quite.

Arriving in Blackpool by train is just as I’d always dreamed. At the Pleasure Beach station, I disembarked right by the roller coasters, which rear up like Welsh hills beside you and, with the seagulls, welcome you with shrieking riders and clattering wheels. There are vast coasters in wood and metal weaving in and out of each other. Curvaceous and sprawling, they’re Gina Lollobrigida in steel. I’ve wanted to visit Blackpool for years. Spending my early childhood near Clacton-on-Sea, I got used to the delights of a tacky seaside town, and Blackpool is surely the mother of them all – even if it’s a mother with too much blusher and mascara on, who looks as though she’d scratch your eyes out if provoked.

My brother went to Japan recently, and I asked him to buy me a knife. As anyone who has entered the bowels of a restaurant knows, Japanese blades are highly sought after. I had to decide between an 18cm utility knife or a metre-long Maguro bōchō. The carbon steel of the latter can fillet a 500-pound tuna in a single cut. In Japan, it is wielded by two highly skilled fish butchers, and it usually comes with a wooden scabbard as protection for the blade – and anyone standing near it. The Maguro bōchō was created purely in a culinary capacity, not as a weapon of war Boringly, I opted for the utility knife. I reasoned that I could always buy a razor-sharp, 24-inch blade online at a later date. However, my hopes have been dashed.

The NHS has warned of a staggering 55 per cent rise in strokes among healthy middle-aged people in the last two decades. Sir Stephen Powis, medical director of the NHS, offered no explanation for what he calls an ‘alarming’ increase, beyond the standard advice to take more exercise, eat carefully, and avoid smoking and excessive alcohol consumption. The figures on which Sir Stephen bases his alert are truly startling: 12,533 people in their 50s suffered strokes in Britain last year, up from just 8,033 in 2005, while 19,421 people in their 60s were stricken – compared to just 13,650 in 2005. I have a personal interest in these statistics.

You could say the British were to blame. The dramatic rise and subsequent fall of Beaujolais has its roots in the early 1970s, when Sunday Times wine correspondent Allan Hall laid down a challenge for his readers. The first to go to Beaujolais, in eastern France, and bring him back a bottle of that year’s just-pressed wine (known as Beaujolais nouveau) would win a bottle of champagne.  Readers rose to the challenge, enlisting cars, trucks, private jets and even parachutes and an elephant as they rushed to be first. The Beaujolais Run became an annual institution, and local vignerons frantically planted new vines to meet demand.

‘We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.’ Bob Dylan took his leave of our shores last week at the Royal Albert Hall, with 5,000 people cheering him on a victory lap. Dylan is 83 and too frail to stand unsupported for long. He occasionally needs notes for his lyrics, but he will never surrender. I’m a performer, he seemed to say throughout every minute of the hour and 40 minutes he was on stage, and performers perform. I’m a performer, he seemed to say throughout every minute of the hour and 40 minutes he was on stage, and performers perform It's fairly clear we won’t see him again. The three nights at the Kensington Bowl ended the British leg of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, which seems to have been going on since the relief of Mafeking.