Spectator Life

The elegant, serpentine word ‘lesbian’ had a place in the sun only briefly. In the first real novel about lesbianism, 1928’s The Well Of Loneliness, the protagonists are gloomily and somewhat puzzlingly called ‘inverts’, conjuring up an image of some sad Sapphic wondering why she was condemned to spend her life upside-down. Amazingly, Christopher Hawtree, writing in the Telegraph in 2008, noted that the word ‘lesbian’ did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1976: During the four decades it took to create the 12-volume Oxford English Dictionary, completed in 1928, Lesbian appeared only in reference to the island.

It’s a painful process many of us must go through: culling a big book collection, amassed over a lifetime, before moving home. You know it makes sense, as you’ve struggled to house all your books – thousands of them – and they include quite a few you frankly wouldn’t miss. This chore awaits me at some point in the near future, but I do know that my 20-volume Encyclopedia Americana and its sister publication, the 20-volume children’s encyclopaedia called The Book of Knowledge, will be coming with me. Everything about its concept and design was aimed at fostering curiosity They were published by The Grolier Society of New York in 1957.

It’s 7.54 a.m. and we are waiting for the doors of the Intermarché St Remy de Provence to open. A vast sense of excitement is building within our group that spans the ages of nine months to 68 years. My mother wants espadrilles, my husband wants wine, my brother-in-law wants cheese, the children want toys, et moi? Just the experience, the delicious joy of the French supermarché. And possibly some soap.

My wife and I have only ever dated by accident. After our third date a decade ago (well, what I thought was our third date) that she texted me asking, ‘So was that just dinner and theatre, or was it “dinner and theatre?”’ To this day, she insists that she had no idea what was going on (despite my sudden interest in her after two years of just being acquaintances, the Skype calls, the hand-painted postcards… actually, I’d better not start). A few years later, early on in our marriage, when we were still childless, young professional Londoners, we thought we’d wildly treat ourselves to dinner out on a Thursday.

‘Do I really sound like that?’ is how people invariably respond when they hear a recording of their own voice. Or they used to, anyway. Your own voice was something you heard a lot but never actually heard from the outside. But in the age of voice memos, podcasts and TikToks, we are much more likely to have to hear our voices. It was eerie to hear my voice reading words I would have sworn I hadn’t said from just a minute before I recently read the audiobook of my new book, Gay Shame – all eight and a half hours of it – so I was confronted with vocal reality on a grand scale. I still sound fresh and flush in my own mind, so the obvious – that I sound old now, because I am old now – came as a surprise.

As far as chefs and food writers go, Yotam Ottolenghi has been pretty influential on my life – a life that revolves quite heavily around food. Choosing it, thinking about it, pathologising it, eating it and sometimes even cooking it. I was one of those who was delighted when supermarkets started stocking pomegranate molasses, rose harissa and Middle Eastern spices like sumac and za’atar, all courtesy of the seismic influence of the Jerusalem-born Ottolenghi and his Palestinian partner in crime, Sami Tamimi. The Ottolenghi deli is a cliché of noughties London food trends I had, like everyone else in 2010s centrist middle-class Britain, got my hands on his recipe books Jerusalem (2012) and Plenty (2011).

I was in S&M relationships from my teenage years to somewhere in my naughty forties. Why did I go in for such strange antics? Damned if I know. Is it because I wanted to be different? Because I didn’t want a calm, cosy, devoted relationship, like my parents had? Because when I thought of romantic and sexual love, I thought of volatility, and that seemed hard to reconcile with vanilla sex? Or did I just conform to the type that also marks out many male masochists – I was ‘powerful’ in my realm, excellent at my job, and was curious to find out what being powerless felt like? (This last one, in the face of what I know now about how many girls and women experience powerlessness throughout the world, makes me feel shame in a way that very few things do.

Have you heard the one about the robot who walks into a bar? No? Well, maybe that’s because artificial intelligence hasn't quite nailed stand-up comedy yet. While AI can beat us at chess, drive cars, and even compose music, making us laugh seems to be its final frontier. I asked ChatGPT to write us a few jokes to show you examples: Me: Write me a funny joke.ChatGPT: Why don't scientists trust atoms anymore?... Because they make up everything! Me: Write me a funny joke but with dark humour.ChatGPT: Why don't graveyards ever get crowded?... Because people are dying to get in! Me: Write me a funny joke but it’s absurd humour.ChatGPT: Why did the scarecrow become a successful neurosurgeon?... Because he was outstanding in his field but needed a change of scenery!

Few bluesmen have matched the success of John Mayall, ‘the godfather of British blues’, who died on Monday aged 90 at his home in California. In a career spanning more than six decades, he made 50-odd albums with an ever-changing incarnation of his band, the Bluesbreakers. His proselytisation of black American artists like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Otis Rush, gave these legends a new audience this side of the Atlantic. BB King is said to have remarked that, were it not for Mayall, ‘a lot of us black musicians in America would still be catchin’ the hell that we caught long before.’ Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, founded in the early Sixties, was a carousel for some of the world’s most notable blues and rock musicians, many of whom went on to greatness.

What’s the biggest division in life? Between clever people and stupid people? Between the good-looking and the ugly? No. The fundamental difference is between the ones who do things quickly and the ones who do them slowly.  You know that friend who emails you back the moment you email them for a favour? Or the builder who comes round the morning you ring him? These are the modern saints – the hyper-efficient deities who put to shame that other friend who only ever rings when they want something out of you; or the plumber you have to ring three times and only ever rings back to say he isn’t coming after all.