Spectator Life

It was about a year ago when my dying father, diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, turned to me and said ‘Sean, can you get me some heroin?’. For a moment – understandably – I wondered if he needed this ultimate painkiller for some fairly ultimate pain, but he didn’t look like he was in agony. And when he followed that up, with a puzzled frown, and the remark: ‘Or maybe some opium, or weed, I’d like to try them,’ I realised that this was nothing to do with analgesics. Dad wanted some psychotropic fun. Dying is not recreation, it’s annihilation.

This year A Christmas Carol is 180 years old, first published in December 1843. It had sold out by Christmas Eve. And it has a lot to answer for, not simply ­­because it ultimately spawned Kelsey Grammer’s Christmas Carol musical, but because it is credited with having popularised the idea of turkey as a festive staple. As you’ll recall, turkey is what Scrooge has sent to his clerk Bob Cratchit once he’s had his Damascene moment – and the idea took off. Within a few short years (1861 in fact), Mrs Beeton had declared that ‘a Christmas dinner, with the middle classes of this empire, would scarcely be a Christmas dinner without its turkey.

At the age when most children are being read The Tailor of Gloucester or ’Twas the Night before Christmas, my father took a very different approach to bedtime stories during Advent, and read me my first M.R. James story. I can’t have been much more than five years old, and he was probably a few sherries to the wind, but I can recall with the utmost clarity the sheer, tingling chill of being exposed to Number 13 at such a formative stage.

Not much of Hong Kong still feels British. There is the odd tube stop – Admiralty, Kennedy Town, Prince Edward – but that’s about it. On the car ride from the airport, I chatted to the driver as we passed under half-built concrete arches covered in green construction cloth. He told me the authorities were building another runway; we’ve been arguing over a third runway for the best part of 30 years, I said, and it still hadn't started. He laughed. ‘We used to be run by England. Now the communists are in charge, it’s much easier.’  I went to Java Road in search of the morgues and black bunting My cheapy British phone contract is allergic to Hong Kong networks and insists on gobbling up around £20 of credit a day. None of my bank cards seem to work either.

Despite only being 30, the students at the school at which I work often make me feel old. They love nothing more than testing my knowledge of their Gen-Z slang: no, I don’t know what you mean when you say Romeo is a ‘simp’ or whether Macbeth’s behaviour is ‘sus’. My average 12-year-old student is far better at IT than I am and yet they’ve never seen an iPod before. The other day, a student asked me where txt speak came from, because they didn’t realise that SMS messages had a character limit. And despite their love of Y2K music and fashion, most of my students have never heard of the millennial rite of passage that was MSN Messenger.

An increasing number of British companies are using personality tests to hire staff. Two of the more popular personality tests are the Big Five and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). There's just one problem and it's a rather big one: both of these tests are utterly scientifically useless. And Brits are being hired (or not hired) based on the results of these dubious tests. Personality tests are a type of zombie falsehood. Despite their lack of scientific validity and numerous papers displaying their many failings, they just won't die Of the two, the MBTI appears to be more popular. The assessment comprises 93 forced-choice questions.

Tel Aviv is the size of Bristol, with about 400,000 residents each. While Bristol has 400 pubs and bars, and just shy of a thousand restaurants, the rough concrete charm of Tel Aviv yields no fewer than 1,750 cafes, bars and clubs and more than 4,000 places to eat. Tel Aviv is a dense, hedonistic city: friendly, creative and edgy without the nasty underbelly of European cities. It is known in Israel as ‘the bubble’, secular and in its own world of sun, sea, late nights and wine, apparently separated from the problems of wider Israel.

This month’s timely trivia includes a canny England footballer, an endangered Lady Astor and a confused Nicholas Parsons. Oh, and we learn how many cups of coffee Steven Spielberg has drunk in his life … 1 December 1919 – Lady Astor becomes the first female MP to take her seat in the House of Commons. One of the regular visitors to her country house Cliveden was Baroness Trumpington, whose young son enjoyed sledging in the snow there. ‘Adam’s other main entertainment,’ wrote Trumpington in her memoirs, ‘was travelling up and down in the lift. He also, to my shame, headbutted Lady Astor.’ 2 December 1697 – St Paul's Cathedral is consecrated.

I never thought it would be possible to feel such emotion about a lump of hot metal but I am in love and like all new passions it’s threatening to become all-consuming. I find reasons to drop it into conversation, I seek out others and join groups on social media that share the same predilection just for the joy of swapping photos and snippets of information. Admirers of the Aga will tell you it’s so much more than just a cooker The object of my adoration is the half-a-tonne of enamelled cast iron that squats at one end of the kitchen in my new house. Nestled firmly into a brick hearth, I call my Aga my green goddess and oh yes, she’s definitely a ‘she’. How do I know? For a start, she’s a consummate multi-tasker.

The big London restaurant opening of the autumn has been The Devonshire in Denman Street, Soho, close to Piccadilly Circus. There was a run on bookings as soon as the reviews appeared. Giles Coren in the Times wrote: ‘What a place. What. A. Place.’ Jimi Famurewa's review in the Evening Standard appeared under the headline: ‘Nothing beats a good pub – and this is as good as it gets’. Because – as well as being an exciting new restaurant – The Devonshire is also very much a pub. What must foreign visitors make of all this confusing disconnection between pub name and location? There’s been a pub on the site since 1793.

So Debrett’s has really got behind the latest technology by issuing a guide to the appropriate use of the mobile phone, or rather, ten commandments. The oldies are warned that young people take fright at an unexpected call – text first to see if it’s convenient – and the young are told that they should give a caller their undivided attention on the basis that it’s perfectly obvious if you’re doing something else and ‘This can be very alienating for the recipient, who feels marginalised and deprioritised’.   The thing about the demise of landlines is that it’s pretty well impossible to get hold of anyone easily without it That’s all very well and bears out the weird ways communication is going.

We’ve all been there, dragged along to the office/company/feminist protest group/a cappella throat-singing-society Christmas meal out. The idea of sitting around a huge table eating bad food with a group of people who either bore you rigid or who you actively dislike doesn’t seem particularly appealing. Why will the food inevitably be terrible, wherever you go? Because ‘tis the season to be scamming – restaurants make a large share of their annual income around Christmas and New Year and the general idea is to part you from as much of your dosh as humanly possible while serving you food that would normally be rejected as staff gruel.