Spectator Life

I recently had an encounter with Oliver Cromwell’s hat which, these days, rests on a bespoke hat-rest in the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon. It’s an astonishing piece of craftsmanship being far wider than any normal hat at nearly three feet across. The perfectly horizontal brim is constructed from thick black felt and the central head-holding part is a cylinder that rises sharp and perpendicular, like a chimney pot from a roof.  What is absent from small museums like this, mercifully, is the over-bearing hand of a committee of arts graduates What a sight he must have been, wearing this extraordinary hat, at the dissolution of the Rump Parliament in 1653, railing at the politicians: Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government.

Over the last decade, I have offered legal advice to thousands of students accused of cheating in their assessments. In university jargon, the term for cheating is ‘academic misconduct’. Although many assessments remain online after Covid, some have returned to the exam hall. There are still instances, therefore, of cheating à l’ancienne, with students writing notes on various limbs or smuggling in scraps of paper with minute writing.  I have had clients whose former partners have tipped off their ex’s university about historical episodes of cheating At times, the cheat is caught by an invigilator spotting a nervous glance towards an annotated palm. In other cases, the crib sheet falls out of a pocket or protrudes from its hiding place.

Sometimes, it’s not just bombs, viruses and elections that make you worry about the future of humanity. A recent survey, commissioned by the National Literacy Trust, reveals that fewer than one third of eight-to-18-year-olds enjoys writing as a hobby. If you’re thinking that I’m being wistful about fountain pens (‘whatever happened to ink blots?’) you’re flat wrong: this also includes writing with computers. A mere ten years ago, 50 per cent of children delighted in writing. You can’t help but feel that since then something’s gone terribly awry. If the young’uns are not writing for their own amusement, then they are missing out on a fundamental tenet of humanity.

I’ve always loved Porto and need little excuse to visit. Not uncoincidentally, I’ve always loved port and need little excuse to drink it and so, invited to stay in this fine city and road-test its latest attraction, the ambitiously-monikered World of Wine, who was I to resist? There’s been a mixed reception to Wow locally. One person told me that it was garish and vulgar Porto is really two cities, Porto itself and Vila Nova de Gaia, separated by the mighty Douro River, along the banks of which lie the precipitous vineyards responsible for the finest of all fortified wines and some increasingly tasty red and white wines too. I was billeted in the swanky Yeatman Hotel.

Like any bunch of ageing ex-hacks, those of us in the ‘Former Evening Standard Employees’ Facebook group are fond of reminiscing about the past. Occasionally, it’s at boozy reunions, when we recreate afternoon epics in the Elephant pub near the old Kensington office. More often, it’s when posting online RIPs to old colleagues who’ve passed to that great newsroom in the sky – sometimes, sadly, well ahead of deadline. The last few days, though, a Facebook page often dedicated to mourning bygone scribes and sub-editors has suffered a rather wider bereavement. Last week, it was announced that the Standard would cease its daily newspaper altogether, ending two centuries of print-runs in the capital.

The latest painting to be attacked by an ovine climate protestor is Monet’s Poppies in Paris’s Musee D’Orsay. Thankfully, the initial reports that the painting was not protected by glass were inaccurate, and the alarming red rectangle – which at first glance looked as if the painting had been torn to the underlying canvas – was in fact a large red sticker. How is it helping climate change to throw good food at works of art? Video footage has emerged of a woman covering the surface of the painting then taking off her jacket to display her activist t-shirt. She then stood by the painting as if she was waiting for applause. It’s far from the first time that a famous work of art has been targeted. Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic Mona Lisa was smeared with cake.

The famous Flyfishers’ Club, Britain’s oldest fly-fishing club, is the latest male bastion to have the fair sex banging at the door. Women feel they have been unjustly excluded throughout its 193-year history, and now they want in. Seeing as the Garrick has at last buckled to the demand to admit women, they say the Flyfishers should too. I quit the venerable Society of Authors too, after discovering it isn’t primarily for authors anymore But I, for one, will be making no such demand. And not just because I have zero interest in fishing with flies. The truth is, I am probably the least clubbable person you are likely to meet. Although it’s taken me most of my life to finally recognise this fact.

‘I don’t know how you do it with three.’ I am at a child’s birthday party, working out how many Wotsits it is acceptable for me, an adult, to take. It is 10.13 a.m. and these Wotsits will be my breakfast. Something had to give in the morning routine to get my son here on time, and as usual it was daddy’s breakfast. I say my son – this one is my older son. Back at home is his four year old sister, and his new, two-week old baby brother. It’s bad form to discuss Chinese expansionism while nibbling a Quaver ‘Pardon?’ I say. ‘Three kids, man,’ says the Other Dad, ‘we find one enough to handle’. I feign a chuckle, say that we’re doing pretty well for the first couple of weeks, and ask which of the children in the heaving birthday mass is his.

I am Cornish. Indeed I am so Cornish my sister lives about three miles from where my echt Cornish ancestors lived in the 13th century (near Falmouth), and my mum makes working-class Cornish recipes so obscurely Cornish most of the Cornish have barely heard of them (‘date and lemon pie’). As such, I am pretty fond of the place, and I like to go back as much as I can. Except in summer, when it’s crowded. And increasingly May. Or September. Or October. Or the rest of autumn. And Christmas, And Easter. And New Year. And any weekend at any time, ever.

As predictably as the tides, as welcome as a pebble in your shoe, the bogus question of ‘who actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays?’ is in the news again. Jodi Picoult, the writer, thinks that Emilia Bassano (aka Aemilia Lanier), the daughter of a musician, must have had a hand in them, because, she says, Juliet is 13 in Romeo and Juliet, and Bassano was forced to become a mistress at that exact age. This despite the fact that in the play Juliet isn’t forced to love Romeo, and that Bassano was in her late teens when she became Lord Hunsdon’s mistress. Not convinced? In Othello, Desdemona’s servant is called  – wait for it – Emilia! I don’t know about you, but that clinches it for me.