Spectator Life

I’m in Provence for my annual jaunt to the land of bulls, Pernod and lavender. All over our small French village, fever for the Jeux Olympiques ‘24 builds: the Olympic rings hang in the window of the Pharmacie and the Papeterie, in the Cafe du Commerce on the Rue General de Galle the television blares all day with adverts for the opening ceremony set to Celine Dion’s I’m Alive, the Mistral blows the Olympic buntinghung over the Mairie high into the cloudless sky. So far, so normale.   One thing, however, seems rather off. Snoop Dogg, the American rapper and notorious connoisseur of large joints, will be carrying the Olympic torch through the streets of Seine Saint Denis on Friday ahead of the grand opening ceremony that evening. Sorry, what?

If ever a mental health diagnosis can be called ‘fashionable’, it’s ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The mere mention of it can trigger moans that it's nothing but the latest ‘woke’ way to pathologise fidgeting, lack of self-discipline and bad parenting. So if you’re in that camp who rolls their eyes everytime you hear the term, prepare to be irritated. I’m going to argue this so-called ‘new’ condition is responsible for nothing less than changing the course of British history. ADHD is real, and it’s had consequences throughout history: few more surprising than the qualities it bestowed upon Winston Churchill.

Ucas, the organisation in charge of university admissions, has announced that it’s bidding bye-bye to a crucial teen rite of passage. It is killing the personal statement. No longer will admissions tutors beetle their brows over flowing paragraphs about when you built an orphanage in Malawi using only a spoon, or how really, really passionate you are about late medieval poetry. Instead, it has decreed that wannabe grads must now answer three dour questions. This move is designed to help those from disadvantaged backgrounds, who do not, in the eyes of a Ucas spokesperson, have access to teachers and family members able to help: and who could argue with that? Well, I think it’s not only a shame, but another sign of the creeping hand of cold and normalising bureaucracy.

When you live abroad for long periods of time, you get accustomed to certain foods which, returning home, you can’t find anywhere, and the sense of a habit unwillingly broken is acute. If the foreign country is Thailand or Italy, you stand a good chance of finding dishes approximate to those you’ve left behind in a local restaurant. But if your working life has been spent in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and you live well outside London, you must learn to make them for yourself or do without. In the warm hotel restaurant, after freshly brewed black coffee, I was given a glass of heated honey vodka The first foreign country I lived in was Estonia.

Trainer David O’Meara loves heading down from his North Yorkshire stables to plunder some of the big summer handicaps with his best horses. At the top of his list of aims are the most valuable contests at Glorious Goodwood and he doesn’t mind running three or four of his string in the same race to increase his chances of landing a nice prize. O’Meara has won two of the last four runnings of the Coral Golden Mile and, with a first prize of more than £77,000 this year, there is no doubt the handler will be targeting the race again in two weeks’ time. My strong fancy for this contest on 2 August is BLUE FOR YOU who returned to form last Saturday when he won the John Smith Racing Handicap at York for the second year running.

It’s 1 a.m. in our small cathedral city and car horns are honking in jubilation. From down the street comes the sound of smashing bottles, and a deep bellowing roar, growing louder as the ‘whooahs’ and the chants echo off Georgian terraces. Well, it’s a country town on a Saturday night; a certain amount of lairiness is priced in. But God, this lot seem loud. Football? Rugby? I’m sure I read somewhere that an Olympics is due. One thing is clear, though: the sports people are doing sports stuff again and no power on earth will stop them. All you can do about it – all you’ve been able to do about it for your entire adult life – is tug the duvet about your head and wait for it to go away.

In 1987, when I was 19, I started at my first ‘proper’ adult job. This was as a lowly civil service clerk, or administrative officer – filing, basically. It was a post within the Lord Chancellor’s Department – as it was known then – but which today is called the Ministry of Justice, which doesn’t sound totalitarian or sinister at all. It was an epochal life stage, and a winter that was full of scents and sensations, the way winters are in the summer of one’s years. How would we deal with a hypothetical situation where somebody – identity unknown – had dry-boiled the office kettle? Part of the process of this new job was an order to attend, along with other similar junior newcomers across the civil service, an induction day at a central London office.

I fell in love with London when I arrived here as a teenager at the start of the 1970s. Straight out of an American suburban high school, I’d dreamed of the great metropolis of Shakespeare and Dickens, and I vowed never to leave. Why would I, when, as Dr Samuel Johnson famously declared, ‘He who is tired of London is tired of life’? If I am to depart this city which no longer feels entirely like home, where to go? Half a century on, I regret to say that leaving the capital is the very step I’m now considering. I’m not sure I love it anymore and, to be frank, I am rather tired of it. I’m a lifelong aficionado of big, bustling cities and for a long time London was the best. Countless corners of it hold memories for me.