Spectator Life

Naples is dirty, noisy, haphazard, and full of kamikaze scooter drivers. It is also sensual, liberating, and jolly. But that doesn’t seem to appeal to many people today, who prefer everything to be ordered, measured; all uncertainty removed. In city form, it’s known as Singapore: unlike Naples, everything there is clean, tidy, and works. It’s also a sterile, soulless, mini dictatorship. Everyone looks a little sticky, ruffled; no one cares about a sweat patch breaking out – shock horror J.G. Farrell’s wonderful book The Singapore Grip describes the fall of Singapore during the second world war. There are many parallels between the city back then and Naples now: the elegant decay and human vitality.

Europe is revolting against the tourist invasion. This summer, Venice has started charging a tourist tax to keep visitors at bay. Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera have just set up inter-island protests under the slogan, ‘Let’s change course – let’s set limits to tourism’. Barcelona is planning to ban Airbnb. In the Cinque Terre, on the Italian Riviera, some of the coastline is now one-way, to restrict tourist traffic. On another bit of the Ligurian coast, plans are afoot to charge walkers. You can see why – the famous cities and resorts of Europe have become one vast Queueworld, where tourists gather in great numbers, intense heat – and, increasingly, intense misery.

I am sitting in a little bar overlooking the jaunty marina of Trinité-sur-Mer, on the opulent south-east coast of Brittany. My Kir Breton is cold, fizzy, sweet and rubescent. Everyone around me is swigging Sancerre and cidre as the sun slowly nods below the green, southerly Celtic hills. The water glitters, the pretty people parade, the douceur de vivre is palpable. If you look at what has happened to Paris and Marseille, you can see how this can easily go wrong, how France’s good fortune can be squandered I've been here in Brittany five days, having got the ferry over from Portsmouth. And, quite frankly, the difference in life quality has been stark.

Stuttering England aside, it’s been a great Euros so far: the comedy of Scotland, the tragedy of Croatia, the miracle of Georgia. Now that the knockout rounds are upon us, I intend to see every remaining game live in full. This is when the memorable moments will begin in earnest, in these win-or-go-home games: last minute twists, astonishing upsets, penalty shoot-outs. I can’t wait. There’s just one little problem with this plan to saturate myself in football for the next fortnight: Steve and Katrina’s wedding today (Saturday). They are former colleagues of my wife who went on to become good friends and we’ve had the invite stuck by magnet to our fridge door since last summer – since before the Euros qualifying stages had even been completed.

Unless I am being kept in the dark, Spectator Life has no intention of following the lead of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in scrapping their regular racing tips. That said, those sacked are usually the last to know – even when they are paid to predict the future. Kelvin MacKenzie, the legendary former editor of the Sun newspaper, once dismissed his astrologer with the words, ‘As you will no doubt have foreseen… you’re fired.’  Without getting overconfident on the safety of my position, I will continue as normal until told otherwise. Newcastle’s JenningsBet Northumberland Plate card tomorrow is the one and only time each year that I bet on the all-weather surface and that’s because this is a really classy card with some competitive racing.

Steve Coogan confessed in a recent interview on BBC1’s The One Show that he is morphing into his alter ego Alan Partridge. ‘There’s almost a complete overlap in the Venn diagram,’ he admitted, ‘by this time next year I will have completely become Alan.’ Maybe he was joking, but I suspect he kind of meant it. At a recent drinks party, I discovered to my horror that I’d come dressed exactly like every other midlife man in the room The comedian has spent years trying to distance himself from the boss of Pear Tree Productions, firstly by creating ‘other less successful characters’, his words, not mine, and then by retreating to Hollywood.

The day after the Serbia vs England match, while sunbathing on my balcony, I espied an interesting vignette taking place on the lawns beneath my apartment block. A little boy was playing football with a man I took to be his father, who looked like a hipster of the kind you can see by the score in Brighton and Hove; goatee, vintage t-shirt, Converse sneakers and a facial expression strongly implying that he’d been to places which made Planet Earth look like a one-horse town.  You’ve got to really love something naturally, in your bones, to hate a song about a robin The little lad was having the time of his life, kicking the ball at his dad. He was totally living in the moment. The dad? Not so much. In one hand he held a mobile phone which made him a poor goalie.

It is no longer normal to see Hollywood men looking normal anymore. From the empty cheeks of Ozempic face to the puffed-out Brotox foreheads to the eerily-uniform veneers of Turkey teeth, no one seems to be aging, but no one seems to also be quite so attractive. Even Ryan Gosling, once my favourite heart-throb, has overdone the filler, and now looks like he is smuggling a pair of snooker-balls in his cheeks. Boys and young men are being sold a lie The same is true for male bodies; masculinity means muscularity. In our superhero-saturated age, audiences are inundated with images of male physical perfection: torsos like upside down triangles, shoulders that look like boulders, thighs that have their own gravitational pull, abs so shredded that they could grate cheese.

Lambourn trainer Jonny Portman is a splendid ambassador for horse racing: he is talented, charming and witty. Television presenters and newspaper journalists love interviewing him because his dry sense of humour invariably comes to the fore. Addressing some challenging times for his stable in 2022, he told a racing journalist, ‘I’ve had four owners die this year and I know two more are planning on it. So I do worry.’ Portman invariably gets the best out of his horses – he currently has 45 in training – and, if he had a couple of big-spending owners, he would undoubtedly be competing for the sport’s top prizes more often. Two Tempting is this season’s star for the yard, winning four of his five races and picking up some £120,000 in prize money along the way.

Perhaps Gareth Southgate’s greatest achievement at the England helm has been to inculcate a sense of togetherness in his squads. This had been noticeably absent in teams under those who preceded him: at one point, for example, the first-choice central defence partnership, Rio Ferdinand and John Terry, refused to even talk to each other, while the two best midfielders, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, seemed unable to play together.  Strangely, this change was symbolised by some inflatable unicorns. The players were photographed laughing and messing about in a swimming pool during Southgate’s first tournament, the 2018 World Cup, at which he took his team further than any England outfit had in decades.