Spectator Life

Most people assume that once a blue plaque is installed, it's there to stay. That is not always the case. Around 50 of the over 1,000 official plaques are no longer in situ on their original building – almost always because that building has gone. Now English Heritage, the charity I work for, is asking for help from the public to track down any of the lost plaques that may have survived. In all likelihood, both early Byron plaques are completely lost – potentially somewhere within the foundations of John Lewis In 1867, the Society of Arts inaugurated its new memorial scheme with a plaque to Lord Byron, marking the poet’s supposed birthplace at number 24 Holles Street, near Cavendish Square. A little over 20 years later, number 24 was demolished and the plaque was lost with it.

Foraging has become a sign of status rather than a lack of it and seaweed is perhaps the most abundant wild food of all. The alternative is mushrooms, but I’ve always thought fungus-hunting a bit too wild; the possibility of a first-class risotto being offset by the risk of death or, worse, expanded consciousness. Rotting seaweed is disgusting. My local newspaper in Cornwall regularly publishes complaints from tourists Caroline Davey, who trained as a botanist before becoming a forager, assures me that only three species of seaweed are poisonous and they are found only in deep water. They might conceivably wash up on the shore, but the basic rule of seaweed foraging is to avoid the stuff at the high-water mark – that’s all dead and decomposing.

Euston Station has been in the news again, and that’s never good. After a summer of overcrowding and delays, public anger forced the Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh, to intervene last week, shutting down the monstrous, flashing digital advertising screen that spans the concourse and which has made passengers feel like battery hens trapped in a seizure-inducing neurological experiment. A ‘five-point plan’ of further improvements is promised, but no one believes it’ll work. This is Euston. It’s irredeemable. Everyone – just everyone – hates Euston. This has always been a station with its sleeves rolled up and serious work to do Well, I don’t. I hate what they’ve done to it, sure. I detest the lazy excuses, the neglect, and the tawdry retail outlets.

‘Buglers are operating in this area’ warns the Metropolitan Police sign, heralding the sound of trumpets perhaps. Aggravated burglary is often described as ‘a burglary gone wrong’, the planned effortless removal of domestic goods having met with some kind of ‘unforeseen’ opposition, the fireside poker taken up by the victim perhaps, or an XL Bully. I observed two signs, the first letting one know that this was a ‘Yellow Fever Centre’ and the other that it was advisable to ‘check with your dealer, as some supplies are impure’ Venturing out in London has become a little daunting. I was startled on a recent tube journey to hear over the intercom that one should ‘beware of unforeseen spillages’. What, one wonders, are foreseen spillages?

Béziers, France The most significant application to date of artificial intelligence and unmanned aerial aircraft has been unveiled: the Poopcopter. It does what it says on the tin. It scoops poop. No more plastic bags. No more furtive glances while out walking to see if Fido’s emissions have been observed by truculent neighbours. According to its inventor, the Poopcopter is the ‘world’s first self-guided dog poop removal system, using a drone, and 3D-printed pickup mechanism.’ The drone has real-time computer vision and machine learning algorithms. A cloud-based system receives footage from the drone’s built-in camera, examines it, and looks for any excrement in the surrounding area. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Way back in the noughties, Charles Moore observed that the Conservatives could learn a lot from the Boden story. ‘An individualistic, non-hierarchical, girly, aspirational, southern, 40 per cent internet-based, middle-class business, laid back but hard-headed. Yet, at the same time, it is quite traditional [...] the way of life he is promoting is instinctively conservative’, Moore concluded.

As a Brit who has lived in Spain for almost a decade, I must take issue with Zoe Strimpel’s recent article arguing that it’s the ‘worst country […] in western Europe’, at least as a holiday destination. My four years in Granada and almost five in Malaga have shown me that it’s the best place in western Europe to live – but not because of anything to do with ‘progressive’ politics or a Gen-Z dating trend. I find it hard to imagine what city would appear beautiful and romantic to someone who’s unmoved by Granada, Cordoba, or Seville The ‘buzzing terraces’ that Strimpel praises for distracting customers from horrible tapas aren’t just for tourists – they’re an integral part of the Spanish lifestyle.

It’s Wednesday, which means my evening is booked up for Slow Horses. The usual protracted regime of children’s tea-bath-bed will be compressed into about 10 minutes (packet of crisps, cursory going-over with a wet wipe, withholding of bedtime story on thoroughly spurious grounds) before my husband and I leap onto the sofa like The Simpsons in the opening credits with a bottle of Malbec and a Charlie Bigham’s curry to watch the new episode on Apple TV+. (Gen Z readers: at the risk of lowering the birth rate even further, this is what fun looks like in your forties after three kids.

Sitting in a gigantic marquee on the green edge of Munich, surrounded by thousands of boozy Germans singing along to a Bavarian oompah band, I wonder how I got talked into coming to another Oktoberfest. Last time I came, ten years ago, I hated it and swore I’d never come again, but this time feels different. Maybe it’s the beer talking, but this year the atmosphere seems less manic, more relaxed. There are lots of couples, old and young, and hardly any stag parties. Amid the endless rows of trestle tables I see numerous families in traditional Bavarian dress (the women so alluring in their dirndls, the men faintly ridiculous in their lederhosen), tucking into huge hearty platters of carnivorous Bavarian grub.

Pull those ripped tartan trews on lads, the Sex Pistols are back! Well, kind of. Lead singer John Joseph Lydon, aka ‘Rotten’, is livid that the other three surviving members have decided to perform a couple of charity gigs without his consent. Really? Punks doing charity gigs? Sid Vicious must be turning in his Pennsylvanian grave. A throng of balding 67-year-olds were pogoing to ‘God Save the King’ while hurling £8 pints of lager at each other The feud goes back to the mid-1970s when Lydon, in typical muso style, vowed to stay true to the music while the other layabouts were more inclined to milk the legacy for all it was worth. More recently, he tried to prevent the band’s music from being used in a TV series directed by Danny Boyle.

When Sven-Göran Eriksson’s coffin was being paraded through the streets of his home town, ahead of his funeral, it was followed by a marching jazz band playing ‘The Bare Necessities’. The song, from Disney’s The Jungle Book, was intended to honour the former England manager’s request that his send-off should be celebratory rather than mournful. But, despite a personal fondness for Sven – which I wrote about here in The Spectator – this choice left a sour note for me. This was because of a perhaps obscure but nevertheless deeply held dislike which I have developed for the fictional character associated with the song: Baloo, the bear. I cannot stand him. He is a classic feckless father figure who, for me, has been wrongly revered by film audiences for decades.

Up and down they go, criss-crossing the country, cars packed full of stuff. Duvets, pillows, vapes, cuddly toys, packs of cheap pasta and rice, Aldi-brand vodka, clothes horses and apprehension. There are around 1.7 million undergraduates and a third of them, the freshers, are most probably leaving home for the first time.  Some are already at university, including my youngest, who I dropped off at the University of York last week after playing ‘spot the student car’ on the A1. She’ll be studying to become an educational psychologist over the next three years, getting an education herself and a high degree of debt – plus expertise in Pot Noodles.

A few weeks ago I felt it was my civic duty to draw attention to the many grammatical mistakes and spelling errors in the National Trust’s pronouncements. The abundance of howlers seemed to constitute something of an educational hazard: ‘How many impressionable schoolchildren will assume that the phrase “It’s [sic] location is unknown”, published by such an august body, must be correct?’ It’s hard to envisage the National Trust managing to reduce ‘unequal access to nature, beauty and history’ if it can’t correct elementary mistakes Since such mistakes can be corrected easily, at no cost and almost immediately, it seemed reasonable to think that they’d soon be gone.

Early in the first episode of Holding, an adaptation of Graham Norton’s novel of the same name, a young, ambitious, foul-tempered detective is called to a village in west Cork where human remains have been found. Before handing the investigation over and returning to the city, she spits out her contempt: ‘I’m not spending weeks down here in the arse end of nowhere.’ Similarly, in the first episode of Bodkin, a Netflix series released last year, a young, ambitious foul-tempered journalist is sent to investigate decades-old disappearances in the same region and forced to team up with an American podcaster and his researcher. ‘I’m stuck consulting on a true-crime podcast in the arse end of nowhere,’ she declares.