Spectator Life

‘Bungalows are almost perfect,’ as the old gag goes. ‘They only have one floor.’ But these once unfashionable properties are rapidly becoming anything but a joke. While the mortgage crisis is cooling most sectors of the housing market, demand for bungalows is growing. Estate agents report the properties receiving dozens of offers, selling for tens of thousands over the asking price or being snapped up before officially going on the market. The usual breed of downsizers and retirees looking to replace large family homes with something all on one level are facing stiff competition from budget-conscious purchasers seeking to renovate single-storey homes – and often turn them into family homes with stairs.

It would be an insult to call rice the staple food of Japan. For centuries it has been so much more than that. In Japan, rice has long been treated with a respect that borders on reverence. The emperor blesses the rice crop each year and in Shinto culture rice and rice-based sake are two of the most common ceremonial offerings to the gods. Rice has supernatural power: the red glutinous variety will protect you from evil and bring good luck. And it must be handled with great care: the worst thing you can do during a Japanese meal is plant your chopsticks in the rice – a symbol, if not harbinger, of death. Rice, prepared and served in the correct manner, has been called the essence of Japan. For purists, occidental curiosities, such as instant rice and rice pudding, are abominations.

‘You really ought to read more books – you know, those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side.’ Perhaps F. Scott Fitzgerald was aiming for a motivational tone – literature was his livelihood, after all. He was also a seminal figure in the writers' movement that began in 1920s New York and, over the following decades, took root in hotels across the city. Hot on the heels of Spectator Life's guide to London's literary hotels, here are five New York hotels with their own tales to tell. The Algonquin Hotel [iStock] The Algonquin’s association with the infamous Round Table of the 1920s has provided it with more connections to literature and the arts than perhaps any other hotel in New York.

It is an unusual compliment to say of what will undoubtedly be the year’s best action film that the experience of watching it is rather like being punched in the face for the better part of three hours. But Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which arrived in UK cinemas on Monday, is a bruising, visceral and wholly exciting ride that’s about as close as you can imagine to being put in a boxing ring with its star Tom Cruise. If the viewer is pummelled and bludgeoned into an ecstatic state of submission, then that’s the price you pay for this exceptional slice of filmmaking: a thriller that doesn’t just thrill, but exhilarates and wholly dominates its audience in the process.

There is a point on the dreaded A12 – a road so soulless it makes the M4 looks like Shangri La – when you reach the end of Essex. If you’re driving from London it takes you a surprisingly long time; there’s a lot of noisy beige concrete to go over – about 60 miles’ worth – with roadside highlights including a large, sad-looking ‘adult shop’ that was clearly a Happy Eater or Little Chef in more innocent times, and dejected-looking service stations with alarming short slip-roads. Then of course there are lorries galore thundering along, laden with shipping containers bound for Felixstowe, Britain’s happiest sounding port. Heading east you’ll pass signs for places like Basildon, Billericay, Brentwood, Chelmsford, Clacton and Southend-on-Sea.

Our national conversation is overwhelmed by tittle-tattle, rumour and gossip. Last week, a salacious email listing George Osborne’s alleged improprieties was circulated among the Westminster bubble. Inevitably, it was then circulated to everybody else, too. Meanwhile, the internet is aflutter with rumours about the identity of a BBC journalist who’s alleged to have paid a teenager tens of thousands of pounds for sordid pictures – and this isn’t even the first sex scandal involving a broadcaster this year.  Foreign visitors were amazed at this insatiable desire to ridicule the private follies and foibles of high society Some might think our modern obsession with grubby tales shows a lack of seriousness. But a love of gossip is nothing new among the English.

In 1939 George Orwell took aim at burgeoning British suburbia and its population of lower middle class lackeys in his novel Coming Up for Air, memorably describing the new homes being built on the fringes of cities as ‘semi-detached torture chambers where the poor little five-to-ten pound a-weekers quake and shiver'. More than eight decades on and the Office for National Statistics reports that one in three of us lives in a semi-detached home, an architectural style with a far longer and more interesting history than Orwell may have been aware of. They are also – officially - the hottest property type on the market. Analysis of more than 100,000 house sales over the past year by sales firm Property Solvers found that semis took an average of 150 days to sell.

British media wouldn’t be British media without endless stories of possible health risks in food and drink. The news cycle turns and we land on whether butter is good or bad, or whether having a glass of red wine in the evening is toxic or therapeutic. Another long-running, oft-studied and frequently-discussed topic of debate is aspartame, the artificial sweetener found in the likes of Diet Coke and Coke Zero. The latter is a favourite drink of mine.  Aspartame has suffered its fair share of derision in the past, but it is now being officially declared a ‘possible’ cancer risk by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a World Health Organisation body.