Spectator Life

You can change practically anything about yourself these days, from your appearance through to your gender. But one thing remains practically immutable: your birthday. And here some of us are markedly less fortunate than others, as those of us who made our entry into the world in early January well know. Having a birthday at this time of year means that, in birthday terms at least, you have drawn a very short straw (and it probably won’t have a cocktail attached).  We early January babies already face quite enough dampers on our celebrations without the addition of a prohibition clause The first difficulty is simply party fatigue. This was less of a problem when I was growing up than it is now.

The bin system in Taiwan is strange. There is no single bin day. A citizen retains responsibility for their rubbish until the moment the bin lorry arrives on their road, at which point they must take it upon themselves to put it into the appropriate receptacle or shredder. In my bit of Taipei, where my university sent me for a year to study Mandarin, the lorries came almost every evening. Each neighbourhood had two slots – mine were at 18.30 and 21.20. Before the lorries left, they would play loud warning jingles. Sometimes this was Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’, and sometimes it was ‘A Maiden’s Prayer’, a Polish piano piece also heard on Taipei city buses.

I am writing this from Nashville, Tennessee, where British Airways was supposed to have flown me and a planeload of Boeing 787 customers on a direct service from Heathrow. However, the night before our intended departure I received a terse message from the airline saying that the flight had been cancelled. A later email informed me that I would be flying on their code-share partner American Airlines (AA) to Charlotte, North Carolina. Then after a layover I would eventually be deposited at my destination. There is mounting frustration at what they say is BA’s ‘unreliability and general low standards’ Not surprisingly the American Airlines flight was rammed with passengers, many similarly bumped BA customers.

Hooray, I thought. There’s a new season of The Tourist. I remember liking that, I thought. It was that thing with the bloke in Australia, wasn’t it? And I was all set to settle down for a good binge, when I realised that I had almost literally no idea what had happened in the first season. This is a personal grumble, but I’d bet dollars to donuts I’m not the only one in this position.  One thing I knew is, it was confusing. There was a bloke in, yes, Australia, who had had a bump on the head and didn’t know who he was, except he was Jamie Dornan. I remember there was a bit with some LSD, and recalling the plot was quite like that too. Someone was trying to blow him up (or maybe he was trying to blow someone else up).

At 8 a.m. this morning, my column was done, the ‘i’s were dotted, the ‘t’s crossed. I had even suggested a headline, ‘Three mudlarks for Sandown tomorrow’.  Within half an hour, I would be pressing the send button on my weekly email to my friends at Spectator Life. Sadly, just 20 minutes later, the whole column was redundant. My three fancies that loved heavy ground would not have the chance to lark around in the mud: tomorrow’s Sandown card, the highlight of which was due to be the final of the Unibet Veterans’ Handicap Chase, was abandoned due to waterlogging.

In 1973, everyone loved David Bowie. Album buyers had put Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Hunky Dory high in the charts, while singles buyers had bought similar success for ‘Drive In Saturday’, ‘Life on Mars’ and ‘Sorrow’. Then right in the middle of this, he released ‘The Laughing Gnome’. In truth, he probably didn’t. It was a twee little novelty song recorded six years earlier, featuring Bowie duetting with the eponymous gnome. Nobody could believe that Bowie had recorded it – less still that he’d written it – but the more you know about him, the less surprising it seems. In fact, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ says more about David Bowie than anything else he did. It was early evidence that he would do anything to be famous.

It’s hard to believe that only five years ago the word/acronym AI was barely seen outside the science pages, and even then solely in the most speculative way: as something that might happen, in a few decades, maybe, if you’re the dreamy type. But also maybe not. Now there literally isn’t a day that goes by without some new AI revelation/epiphany/scare story.