Spectator Life

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) once wrote: ‘[T]he man who feels himself drawn to philosophy must himself seek out its immortal teachers in the quiet sanctuary of their works.’ That’s easier said than done: philosophical classics have a terrible reputation outside ivory towers – as big, boring, difficult books, filled with obtuse theorising about irrelevant problems, their covers featuring ghastly old men staring miserably out at the reader. Books about philosophy are hugely popular today, most of which repackage the thoughts of past thinkers for time-pressed readers – but I suspect not many people transition from these guides to the great works themselves, especially when AI can do all the hard reading for you.

Men who cook Spanish omelettes look a bit gay. Or at least that is how American film executives reacted to Harry Palmer cooking in The Ipcress File. The cable said: ‘Dump Michael Caine’s spectacles and make the girl cook the meal. He is coming across as a homosexual.’ This was 1964, when London was the cultural centre of the Swinging Sixties. In the final cut, Palmer asks what she will report back about him. She replies simply: ‘That you like girls … you also like books, music, cooking.’ The Americans had misread the moment. This was a modern heterosexual man, self-sufficient, urban, and quietly competent, but one whose lifestyle still had to be explained.

‘Oi mister! Will you buy us summit in the shop? I got the money.’ ‘Here we go,’ I think, ‘another grotty 15-year-old making the usual request for a bottle of Dmitri Vodka or 20 Benson & Hedges. Reluctantly, remembering my rebellious teens, I agree. Surprisingly, he hands over £80. ‘Can you get me a Montecristo Linea 1935 Leyenda cigar?’ he asks. ‘Or, if they ain’t got that, a Davidoff Escurio Gran Toro. You can keep the change, mister.’ This event, of course, has never actually happened. But it seems to be within the government’s fervid imagination that it has. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which cleared the House of Commons last year and passed in the House of Lords this month, will make it illegal for anyone born after 1 January 2009 to buy tobacco products.

When you think about Simpson’s in the Strand (never Simpson’s on the Strand), it is impossible to consider the 198-year-old restaurant without remembering its literary antecedents. P.G. Wodehouse praised it as ‘a restful temple of food’ in his 1910 novel Psmith in the City. It has popped up in everything from Sherlock Holmes to Howards End and, when that epitome of thespian Britishness David Niven wished, in the 1961 film The Guns of Navarone, to speak wistfully about a golden idyll to a dying friend, Simpson’s was the idyll he chose.  Yet all good things decline at some point. Before Simpson’s closed in 2020, another victim of the pandemic, it had been weakening.

Nearly one in three British women are now predicted to have no children, compared to around one in 20 in 1970. The assumption is that this is because young women have simply lost interest in becoming parents. But on the contrary, nine out of ten say they hope to become mothers one day, and the desire for a home and a family to call their own remains stubbornly persistent.  Striking new analysis by the Centre for Social Justice published this month found that more than three million women aged 16 to 45 may miss out on having the family they hoped for – 600,000 more than if fertility patterns matched their grandparents’ generation.  Make no mistake, this is one of the forgotten tragedies of our time.

Life is riddled with things that impersonate something in a hideously disappointing way: the regret of Pepsi, the affront of the rail replacement bus and, for runners, the tedium of the treadmill.  They are one of the most tiresome inventions to scar this planet, offering a mind-numbing bastardisation of one of life’s joys. I’m a long-distance runner and I can run blissfully in the open air for hours on end but, on a treadmill, I want to give up after less than a minute. Running in the great outdoors is a blessed experience. The air is fresh and cooling, the scenery keeps changing and nature is all around you. The birds are singing and the time passes in that dreamy, accidental way – like when you’re deep in a brilliant conversation. It’s glorious.

Peter Mandelson — twice-resigned Cabinet minister, architect of New Labour and, until recently, His Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States — went to the University of Oxford from Hendon County Grammar. Mandelson read PPE at St Catherine’s College from 1972 to 1976. Young Mandelson’s impressions of Oxford, as detailed in Donald Macintyre’s Mandelson: The Biography, are mixed at best: Hertford College ‘stank of cabbage’ while St Edmund Hall was ‘sort of thirteenth century’, the Union ‘hoorayish’ and ‘off putting’. With too many Peters in his year, Mandy was known, simply, as ‘Benj’.   Fast forward some 40 years and Mandelson was awarded an honorary fellowship by St Catherine’s College in 2018.

Flitting between runway shows, new collection previews and cocktail receptions under the blaring sound of air raid sirens is now the norm at Ukrainian Fashion Week. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Ukrainian brands travelled abroad to fashion weeks in cities including London, Berlin and Budapest to exhibit collections, before coming home to Kyiv in September 2024.  After covering international fashion weeks for almost a decade, attending the return of Ukraine Fashion Week to Kyiv for British Vogue was naturally unlike any other fashion happening.

Do you remember the Cereal Killer Café? The year was 2014: a time of sleeveless plaid shirts, Mr Pringle moustaches, man buns and undercuts. This was the era of proto vapes and misplaced millennial hope, of the indie band Vampire Weekend and trilby hats mistaken for fedoras. When the Cereal Killer Café opened in Brick Lane that year to sell cereal and milk for stupid prices, it signalled the acme of hyper-gentrification and the ‘peak’ east London aesthetic. Many of us saw its pandemic-related closure in 2020 as a sign that sanity had returned to the capital’s restaurant scene. We were wrong. The Cereal Killer Café might be gone but the public’s credulity for overpriced Instagrammable restaurants is piping hot.

People say that there is nothing as boring as listening to someone tell you about a dream they have had. I think there may now be something even more tedious: someone telling you about their sleep score.  Since my husband bought himself an Apple Watch, he has become a sleep swot. Our morning conversations have become a one-way monologue in which he proudly tells me about his resting heart rate, his time spent in deep slumber, the number of wake ups (with a 16-month-old next door, I am quite aware of the latter already).  Honestly, is there anything less romantic than waking up to a breakdown of your spouse’s biometrics?

The ermines have been mothballed; the coronets stowed away. The United Kingdom has, at last, thrown out the hereditary peers from Parliament. This levelling process, begun by Tony (not yet Lord) Blair, and stymied for decades, has come to an end. It’s as if the lion and the unicorn had been torn from the royal coat of arms, and ordered to find other work. No longer will we gawp at the peers processing at the opening of Parliament, arrayed alongside their glittering spouses, their titles and names a reminder of centuries of history. Our parliament - the most ancient in the world - has lost that lustre for ever, and will increasingly resemble the bland, managerial talking-shops of Europe.

What do you consider the distinguishing marker of wealth in Britain today? Is it privately educating the kids? Is it the £60,000 Tesla parked out front with a black cable running to a gleaming box attached to the wall? Let me tell you what I think signifies real wealth today: it’s eating at Gail’s.  Because you can’t have failed to have notice the conspicuous unaffordability of Britain’s fastest rising bakery – the one that began life in London in 2005 and now has some 170 branches nationwide.   At Gail’s a box of five of their cookies costs £18. You can buy a kettle in Robert Dyas for that — and not a bad one either.