Spectator Life

Loelia Lindsay, socialite and former wife of the 2nd Duke of Westminster, is said to have remarked: ‘Anybody seen in a bus over the age of 30 has been a failure in life.’ Well, I’m turning 59 soon and I still use buses. So, by that reckoning, success has so far not only eluded me but given me the widest possible berth.  In my defence, I live in Bristol, which has the worst congestion outside London. Driving here during rush hour is a kind of psychological torture. It’s also a war of attrition between the local council and motorists, with roadworks popping up overnight like molehills. Almost anything is preferable: walking, cycling or the bus. Admittedly, bus travel isn’t glamorous. There’s no bus equivalent of the Orient Express that I’m aware of.

‘If there is one thing I dislike,’ said P.G. Wodehouse, ‘it is the man who tries to air his grievances when I wish to air mine.’ His grievance was conversational, mine is nominative: I pity those with made-up names. There was a time when names came from a modest catalogue: the Bible, aunts and uncles of fond memory, a wider culture that worshipped the royals. Maturity involves a conservative deference to tradition. One learns to presume that norms have more value than drawbacks: dress in an ordinary style, have the manners people expect – and bear a name that connects you to others. Beware any job that requires new clothes, said Thoreau. He meant coats and trousers but it applies to birth certificates, too.

It is almost inconceivable that we used to live in a world where people would ‘go for a drive’. Not to get to a destination, but simply for the pleasure of driving. Sunday afternoons were the time of choice for this activity and would see car owners take to the road simply because it was good fun to be behind the wheel. The idea that driving was anything other than functional now seems absurd.   That world has vanished, partly due to the sheer volume of cars. In 1971 (the year my dad learned to drive), there were roughly 15 million cars on UK roads. Today, on those same roads, there are 34 million.

It’s because I was on my own in Los Angeles, smoking weed on Venice Beach, that I ended up at Coachella Festival with two girls I’d barely met and the DJs Belle and Sebastian. It was because I was on my own in Nashville that I woke up with a Texan soldier and never had to tell anyone. And it’s because I was on my own driving up the west coast of England that I could take a spontaneous detour to Anthony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’ – just for the wonder of seeing those mossy, iron sculptures lapped by the waves.  Hell is other people – especially on holiday. Group trips give me chills. Words like ‘minibus’, ‘group tour’ or ‘kitty’ make me nauseous.

It was the sort of elaborate birthday surprise that Andrew — practical joker and fond of a fart gag — might have arranged to prank a friend. Six unmarked police cars roaring up to the farmhouse where he had been living on the Sandringham estate at the unseemly hour of 8 a.m yesterday. Only these rozzers were real and the ‘ex-UK prince’, as one international news network described him, was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office before being released under caution around 12 hours later. ‘I’m just glad the Queen didn’t see this day,’ wrote one commentator on X. ‘It would have broken her heart.’ Yet the root of Andrew’s downfall lies with the late Queen Elizabeth II — an unlikely early advocate of gentle parenting.

What is it about the left and their fascination with ugliness? Placing Lord Mandelson to one side, you’ve probably noticed that in so many areas of life, radical progressives appear to revel in anything that deviates from traditional notions of beauty whether in art, music, literature or architecture. Punk chose shrill discordance to rail against conservative values while left-leaning directors such as Jude Kelly have taken great pleasure in coarsening the works of Shakespeare to fit a narrow political agenda. Architecture has become a particularly divisive cultural lightning rod. Take the recent kerfuffle around the decision to bestow listed status on London’s Southbank Centre, famously dubbed 'Britain's ugliest building' in a 1967 Daily Mail poll.

Last week I was in a branch of Greggs, in the small market town in north Wiltshire where I live. Behind the sausage rolls, steak bakes, corned beef pasties and trays of vanilla slice was something that almost made me drop my Tesco meal deal in shock. A machine dispensing matcha lattes.  Greggs, the last bastion of brown food in the post-Ottolenghi era is now retailing aspirational green, radioactive TikTok slurry … in Wiltshire. A cheerful, democratic, brute-force provider of cheap calories in culturally legible form has collided with a beverage whose main function is performative wellness. It felt less like innovation than a stitching error. Two incompatible worlds roughly bolted together, animated despite never quite cohering.

The Great Wealth Transfer has never felt more under way. Boomers who own more than half of owner-occupied housing in Britain are now grappling with the practicalities of downsizing.  It is estimated that in the next 20 or 30 years, boomers will pass down between £5.5-7 trillion worth of assets and, according to Savills, around £2.9 trillion of that is held in property.    Boomers who are living in houses that they have been in for decades are looking to their millennial children to shoulder some of the burden of their boomer junk, prompting much Swedish death cleaning and decluttering. This seems like a fair trade given that in many cases, these children stand to inherit their fortune; better still for them, this is set to double by 2035.

My family skied a lot. We did it home-style, with packed lunches and Mars Bars on the lifts, my brother and me following my expert Milan-raised father down terrifying drops of ice in the twilight. We took our chances on low or no visibility, scraping round mountainous moguls and – my least favourite – careering through the root, stone and tree-stuffed terrain of the arboreal American off-piste. We wore the least trendy gear imaginable: huge foam-rimmed goggles already years old in the Nineties and never any hint of a helmet. Nobody but over-protective, scaredy-cat dorks wore helmets then. This background gave me two things.

There are relatively few restaurants in London – or anywhere else, for that matter – that have made it to their centenary. There are even fewer that have been threatened with the closure of their premises in the precise year they are going to turn 100. And there are practically none so popular that news of their possible eviction has resulted in a petition with tens of thousands of signatures – which will be sent to the King in the hope he can reverse what would be a heritage-threatening disaster for one of the capital’s most historic establishments.  Such is the recent story of Veeraswamy, the country’s oldest Indian restaurant which was founded in March 1926 and has been a haunt of the beau-monde and demi-monde ever since.

Guinness Zero reminds me of the judge. I heard about him years ago. He was driving home from the golf club, seven G&Ts to the good. Or rather – he realised as he saw the flashing blue lights in his rear-view mirror – to the bad. This is it, he thought in horror, end of career. But he went through the motions, blowing into the breathalyser and, as he waited for the result, miserably contemplating how he was going to break the news to his wife. ‘Well, sir,’ said the policeman after a moment, ‘that all appears to be fine. Have a pleasant evening.’ Dumbstruck, the judge turned his car straight round and drove back to the golf club.

When I recently mentioned to a friend that I clean my fridge every week, she said I was a bit weird. I get what she means. Most fridges get cleaned less frequently or when something spills down from the shelf above. But I do like to keep on top of my sell-by dates. I live with someone less vigilant about such matters, who would not necessarily turn her nose up at something a day or so out of date. As a rule, we rub along very nicely, with me going through the fridge, chucking everything out, and her occasionally rummaging around, muttering: ‘Where is that leftover spring roll?’  When it comes to fridge etiquette, though, I am very precise – and very squeamish. Dirtiness is the cardinal sin, closely followed by ‘small bowling’.

I’ve long clung hold of one small crumb of comfort from my encroaching blindness. Namely that if and when my deteriorating vision (I have albinism and nystagmus) packs up completely, I can become one of those blokes who takes his guide dog to the pub and teaches it to drink beer from an ashtray.   But I won’t be doing that at any branches of J.D. Wetherspoon as things stand. As of this week, flyers alighting at Alicante airport can get a morning pint at the first branch of the chain to open on Spanish soil. Back at home, however, the issue facing the pub concerns hounds, not holidaymakers.

Did Mariah Carey mime or not when she headlined the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan? That was the main takeaway from last Friday’s jamboree. Organisers have since suggested that the US singer did indeed lip-sync to Domenico Modugno’s ‘Nel Blu, dipinto di Blu’ and the song that followed, her very own, ‘Nothing is Impossible’. ‘The technical, logistical and organisational complexities of an Olympic ceremony are not comparable to a live performance by a single artist,’ said a spokesperson for the organising committee.    Was there also a linguistical complexity in the decision?