Spectator Life

It’s no surprise that Britain’s night economy is in dire straight given a quarter of people told pollsters they would like to see nightclubs permanently closed even after the pandemic. Yet nobody embodies modern society’s contempt for club culture quite like Amy Lamé, Sadiq Khan’s embattled ‘Night Czar’. Places that ought to be the capital’s dedicated nightlife districts, such as Soho, are being squeezed to death Yes, as she stressed in a recent op-ed defending her record, she did her stint on the scene herself. But as any investor will tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future returns – and Lamé’s record speaks for itself.

Managing other people’s expectations takes the joy out of pretty much any excursion. Most things are better enjoyed alone. This hit me many years ago when I decided to risk a bullfight in Las Ventas in Madrid. My grandfather wasn’t long dead, and had been a fan of la corrida; I felt that this was something I wanted to do alone, lest whoever I was with think I’m a total sicko. As a naturally highly neurotic mother, it’s liberating not having to worry if one’s uniquely precious offspring I’ve since become less cautious about admitting how much I like going solo. Without the pressure of having to think about whether everyone else is having fun, you can immerse yourself fully in whatever new experience it is, and not be subjected to conversational post mortems either.

One Monday morning about 30 years ago, I drove to work, parked my car in the village car park, and started hauling my bags of files out of the boot. In my new role with a firm of solicitors, the weekend had been a chance to familiarise myself with my pressing caseload. I initially paid little attention to a small group of people in heated animation nearby as I unloaded the car. Then I realised what was in fact going on was an attack; someone was pinned against a van. Seconds later, I heard weak squeals for help. I dropped by bags and bellowed, ‘Stop! Stop that now! I am a solicitor and I’m telling you to stop now!’ I strode to the huddle and continued yelling at them to stop.

It’s 7 in the morning, I’ve got to Milan Linate airport two hours before my plane to Bari, and already things are going horribly wrong. The airline aren’t letting my cats fly with me. I’ve got documents to show they’re microchipped and all their vaccines are in order, but two uniformed men, straight out of Mussolini central casting, are telling me the carry-cage is all wrong. Perhaps I should resent these animals and all the hassle they’ve brought me ‘It should have metal sides,’ they snap. ‘You cannot fly with this cage.’ I tell them honestly that I flew with it from Britain the day before – the very same airline to this very airport – that I always fly with it, but they’re having none of it.

Watching Frank Skinner perform his latest one man show at the Gielgud Theatre reminded me of what it must have been like back in the dying days of variety. By the late 1970s and early 1980s cheeky jokesters and all-round entertainers such as Tarby, Brucie, Doddy and Manning were feeling the heat from a new breed of alternative comedian vehemently opposed to the old guard’s reliance on tedious stereotyping and shallow observation. Now in their mid-fifties (considered ancient back then) many took the hint, hung up their dickey-bows and retired to Bexhill; others struggled on in tatty end-of-the-pier shows in front of dwindling geriatric audiences. Mystifyingly, Sir Bruce Joseph Forsyth-Johnson CBE continued his wearisome nice-to-see-you shtick right up until his death in 2017 aged 89.

Last week marked the 200th anniversary of the most significant evening in the history of palaeontology. On 20 February 1824, the learned gentlemen of the Geological Society gathered at their rooms on Bedford Street in Covent Garden for a meeting that would transform human understanding of prehistoric life. To begin, the clergyman William Conybeare announced and described the Plesiosaurus. A vast marine lizard that Mary Anning had discovered in Dorset, the Plesiosaurus was memorably described as ‘a serpent threaded through the shell of a turtle’; it would later leap from the rocks of Lyme Regis into the fiction of Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle, and into the popular imagination as the Loch Ness monster.

Michael Gove’s restrictions on Airbnb are too late for Mousehole, the next village along. It mirrors Dull-on-Sea in The Pirates Next Door: ‘Too busy in the summer and in winter it shuts down’. Last year there was so much traffic in Mousehole that the bus couldn’t get through, and it dumped trippers at the top of the hill. Down by the harbour, at the bus stop, I saw a Sainsbury’s van instead. And that, to paraphrase Niall Ferguson, is how empires fall. ‘What about my view?’ is their worldview. My husband calls them coffin dodgers Any analysis of the impact of Airbnb on Cornwall must include the question: what happened to staying in hotels? As a child I stayed at the Treyarnon Bay Hotel near Padstow.

The other day I met a young woman wearing a crop top emblazoned with the words Waystar/Royco – the media conglomerate at the heart of Succession, HBO’s cult television drama about the nasty Roy family and their insane attempts at one-upmanship for control of their father’s company. It won Emmy and Golden Globe awards three years running for best drama, plus numerous extra gongs for the cast, making it – in my book – the most overrated piece of entertainment of all time.  Shouldn’t men like Logan Roy, and behaviour like Cox’s, be relegated to a distant era? What I disliked most about Succession, which I finally forced myself to watch this year, was the show’s star patriarch Logan Roy, played by gruff ex-RSC man Brian Cox.

Several years ago, I went for a swim after I’d been for a job interview. I’d just finished my lengths, had my shower, and as I wrestled my knickers back on, a voice from behind me said ‘It’s Ettie, isn’t it?’ Quite how she recognised my bare bottom I don’t know, but the woman who’d interviewed me earlier in the day was certainly keen to continue our conversation, up close, personal and starkers. And for those of you who’ve never tried, I can assure you that trying to juggle one’s bosom into a bra in a flustered hurry when one is still slightly damp to protect what shreds of self-respect remain is inelegant at best.