Spectator Life

I remember sitting on the bus a few weeks into #MeToo and thinking all the men looked disengaged – buried in their phones or listlessly looking out the window. I imagined them thinking it just wasn’t worth it to look up lest they be accused of making unwanted advances. These days, I spend fewer mornings worrying about the fate of the red-blooded male. Nonetheless, it’s not rocket science to suppose that for a significant swathe of men – those who fear being publicly shamed or sacked – it really isn’t worth showing their appreciation of women.

It was a day typical of this year’s early summer. Raining. Cold. Miserable. I was about to crack and put the heating on when my sister arrived, carrying peonies. Over the coming hours, the rain rained harder, the cold got colder, and the peonies opened, becoming frothy balls of the palest powdery pink, touched by gold at the centre. Their unfurling seemed like an act of unbridled generosity. The arrival of peonies is a wonderful thing. They sit in the supermarkets, clustered near the checkouts; their fat, rounded buds, hinting pinkly of what is to come when you take them home, introduce them to water and prepare to be surprised.

Two days before leaving this country for Italy – where, defeated by southern British house prices, I planned to fight for a long-term visa and buy a home – I finally found the exact flat I’d been dreaming of, here in the UK. True, it wasn’t in East Anglia, where I grew up and most of my family still lives, but Shropshire, a county which intrigued me and which emerged over time as my second choice. Green, landlocked, with endless castles, hills and valleys, Shropshire is about as remote from the capital as you can get. It has Ludlow and Shrewsbury, medieval towns with rivers, courtyards, timbered buildings and a pleasing Shakespearean ring to their names. Nearby is Wales which, since two epic holidays in my youth, has been a kind of Holy Land for me. What’s not to embrace?

I’ve had many encounters with Sir Richard Branson over the 40 years since he launched Virgin Atlantic, the smart, stylish British airline that arguably should be this country’s premier national flag carrier. (As it happens, a Spanish-registered airline called British Airways is the dubious claimant to that status.)  The oddest and most revealing meeting took place in 1996 around the time he was planning to re-enter the music market. Five years earlier, Branson had sold Virgin Records to EMI for £550 million. I was living in New York and was looking for financial backing for a musical I’d helped create. I called Branson in London, expecting to be fobbed off. Instead, he told me he was coming to New York imminently and that we should discuss the project over breakfast.

The son of the celebrity chef Marco Pierre White, imaginatively named Marco Pierre White Jr, has been convicted of theft and sentenced to 41 weeks in prison. The former heroin addict briefly became a reality star after a stint on Celebrity Big Brother, but has since reverted to bad behaviour, being imprisoned in 2018 for stealing from Tesco and racially abusing a security officer.  His conviction this time was for taking £1,760 worth of clothes from a shop in Bath, £72 from a Sports Direct in Bristol, and £250 from the till at a deli in Bath. He was caught because of an unedifying complication as he climbed out of the deli window: his trackie bottoms were pulled down and his hoodie pulled up, so he emerged almost naked, like a peeled sausage.

‘Melt your heart,’ said Simone, the Kiwi sleep therapist, stretching her generous body as elegantly as she was able on the yoga mat. Waves lapped the beach nearby. ‘Glow it violet, then allow the violet to flow up, up, up into your chest, your belly, now your legs and arms…’ Well, I tried, honestly I tried, but my heart stubbornly refused to melt, or even, for that matter, to glow. As sturdy English hearts of oak appeared to be melting all around me, I felt I was rather letting the side down. And as for the violet? Nada. The beginning and end of this ju-ju ordeal was bracketed by bells tinkled around our heads like some vaguely asiatic-version of a Catholic mass Faith is at the heart of the health business, but why does no-one call out the Emperor for his déshabillage?

Snooker is just the latest sport to succumb to the eye-watering sums of money on offer from authoritarian regimes. Saudi Arabia will host its first ranking event in August, with a £2 million prize fund – the highest of any tournament outside the World Championship. It follows the Riyadh Season World Masters of Snooker, held in March, which came complete with a new ‘golden ball’ and a maximum break of 167 – a crass addition to a game that usually takes pride in its traditions. A massive $500,000 jackpot bonus was offered to any player who could pot the golden ball. Steve Dawson, the chairman of the World Snooker Tour, admitted it was: ‘something we have never seen in 150 years since snooker was invented.’ But what price history when there’s big money to be made?

I had always been interested in politics but had not done anything practical until the rise of Nigel Farage’s Ukip. He was proving a thorn in the side of David Cameron in 2013, which attracted my admiring attention, so I decided to try and get involved. Despite having done my bit for European unity by fathering a half-French daughter and a half-Austrian son, I had always been fundamentally hostile to the EU – an artificial and undemocratic structure inimical to British interests and traditions – so it seemed obvious that Ukip was the party for me. A large poster of me was defaced with a Hitler moustache – an episode I found deeply humiliating I was summoned to a hotel in Gillingham, Kent, for a test to see if I was suitable for the approved list of Ukip candidates.

I tend to steer clear of large group meals but the last time I went there was a very awkward moment. When the bill arrived, I saw two individuals tapping away on a calculator app before announcing the exact amount of money they were prepared to put on the table. ‘I didn’t have a starter,’ chimed one. ‘I only had one cocktail,’ said the other tightwad. When the bill came it was divided equally – except that the couple counted themselves as one person We were at an inexpensive Mexican restaurant, with two cocktails for the price of one, yet this pair insisted on working out to the last penny what they had each consumed.