Spectator Life

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.

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.

Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, this wasn’t – at least not yet – and it probably passed much of the country by, especially given the rival distractions of recent weeks. It was nonetheless a lawsuit that will have been followed in compulsive detail by at least two groups of people: those who own their own flats – who are technically leaseholders but prefer to think of themselves as owner-occupiers – and the freeholders and managers of their blocks. Oh, and never forget the lawyers.

Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat – a tale of three hapless, hypochondriac London clerks who take a trip along the River Thames in the hope of curing their ailments – became an instant bestseller when it was published in 1889, and hasn’t been out of print since. Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson all owe it to Jerome.  The book’s success meant that in 1895, Walsall-born Jerome (then in his mid thirties) could make a move to a rambling Oxfordshire house, built in the 1820s on the site of an ancient monastery.  Although he clearly had a fondness for the Thames, the home he chose wasn’t quite on the waterfront. It was, however, in a glorious rural spot in the village of Ewelme, part of what is now the Chiltern Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

For centuries, the English country house has provided the setting for some of the most terrifying fiction in our history. These isolated buildings, with their many empty corridors, secret backstairs, shut-up attic rooms and dark corners, their inherent eeriness has made them iconic settings for chilling encounters. But which real country houses inspired their fictional counterparts? Menabilly House, Cornwall Daphne Du Maurier’s mysterious Manderley was inspired by two country houses. The exterior was based on Menabilly House in Cornwall, an estate which Du Maurier would eventually rent from the Rashleigh family five years after Rebecca’s release, while the interior was inspired by Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire.

It isn’t just the Paris Metro. Even the very best hotels are not immune from bed bugs. I was blissfully unaware of this fact until a trip to New York a few years ago when a nightmare struck. We had booked a really top place, but within days of getting home, we discovered little red bites on our legs. Little did I know that this was just the beginning.  There are perfectly rational people who have been reduced to smothering their bodies in Vaseline at night to stop the bites Bed bugs are little blighters. They can lay dormant and spring to life months after arriving. They lay their eggs in clothes, in drawers, in carpets, on television remotes and, of course, in beds. They can live in walls.

It used to be that an ‘artist's impression’ of a proposed building development was just that; an architectural drawing designed to give planners an idea of what to expect. Then along came CGI and a new era of photorealistic visualisations. On the surface, these glossy new artist's impressions are anything but impressionistic. Indeed the renderings are so lifelike it's virtually impossible to tell if they are actual photographs. Ironically, as we are now discovering with AI, hyperrealism is rarely as real as it purports to be.

Every writer needs a bolt hole. Novelist John le Carré’s was particularly picturesque, perched high above the waves on one of south Cornwall’s most glorious coastal stretches, between Lamorna and Porthcurno.  Tregiffian Cottage, made up of a trio of former fishermen’s homes, was where Le Carré conceived and wrote some of his most famous novels, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Constant Gardener. ‘I love it here, particularly out of season,’ Le Carré, real name David Cornwell, who died in 2020, told a local newspaper. ‘The empty landscape, walking on the cliff, and the light, which of course everyone always mentions... but it seems that I can think well here.

A few years ago, James Delingpole and I were two-fifths of ‘The Manalysts’ a clique of agony uncles employed by a women’s magazine. The idea was to provide five answers to each problem from five disparate standpoints. James was the trenchant intellectual, I was (supposedly) the metrosexual adman and the other three were a practising psychotherapist, a blokey builder from Essex and a gloriously camp hairdresser. The great fallacy about untidy people is that we’re always losing things A fair few of our correspondents were, unsurprisingly, complaining about a boyfriend or husband’s untidiness but I remember being struck by how many wrote in to bemoan the very opposite – the strain of living with someone tyrannically tidy.

Roger Saul founded Mulberry in 1971. He created their now iconic range of bags, belts and purses, but was ousted from the designer label’s board in the early Noughties. Undeterred, he reinvented himself as the purveyor of organic spelt cereal and flour brand, Sharpham Park. His range of products is de rigueur on every health-conscious Waitrose shopper’s weekly list. There have been some intriguing historical discoveries over the past 45 years Saul, now 73, can put many of his triumphs in both fashion and food down to Abbots Sharpham, his 268-acre Somerset estate, just outside Glastonbury, made up of a Grade II* Listed 15th-century eight-bedroom main house, two cottages, a deer park, indoor swimming pool – and field upon field of spelt.

Fifteen years ago there was no such thing as a social media influencer, but fast forward to 2023 and there are now an estimated 50 million full-time ‘creators’ worldwide. It isn’t hard to understand the appeal; no nine-to-five, no domineering boss, no skills, experience or talent necessary. Little input for potentially incredibly high returns, especially if you successfully find a niche.  I cannot think of anything less appealing than broadcasting images of where I sleep to the world A cleanfluencer from Northern England went from working at M&S to sharing her cleaning tips full time which led to a book deal with Penguin; Live, Laugh, Laundry (I kid you not).

It’s not crazy to worry about getting home. It’s not crazy to lock your doors at night and check that the alarm is set. It’s not crazy to avoid the man who keeps gurning at you on the bus every time you look his way. It’s not crazy to worry. But is spending £50,000 to £500,000 on a bespoke panic room a little… crazy? Probably. But who am I to judge? I still find it hard to answer the phone to a withheld number.    What if your poor cat sitter was feeding your tabby just as your panic room decided to spray chlorine gas all over the place? I could only find one advert from a panic room installation company in the UK. The video shared on the firm’s website is set in London and has a B-movie feel to it.

With its golden sand sweeping along the bay towards Lyme Regis, the young river bubbling into the surf and the weathered limestone cliffs rising and falling along the Jurassic coast, there are few more picturesque beaches in the country than the one at Charmouth. And it was, of course, that view that Allan and Ali fell in love with. Ali, who works as an advisor on catastrophic injury awards, and Allan, a retired KC who had spent most of his working life travelling around the north of England dealing with criminal cases, just happened to be passing an estate agents and saw a picture in the window. It wasn’t just love, it was love at first sight. 'We weren’t even looking for a house,' Allan says. All the rooms except two have cathedral ceilings.

Crete has a long and illustrious history: birthplace of Zeus, king of the Greek gods, and the seat of the Minoan ruler King Minos who is said to have ruled from a palace of 1,000 rooms.  The largest Greek Island, and nearly the one nearest to Africa (bar it’s tiny neighbour Gavdos) it’s also the best for year-round living, with its mild winters allowing the odd December dip in the sea. Thankfully it has not had any of the forest fires that Rhodes and Corfu are experiencing and its busy beaches and restaurants this week suggest it might be a beneficiary, according to local news.

Inflation has finally dipped a little but is still riding high, and mortgage rates may still rise further: Britain’s households are suffering a pay squeeze. But what are home-owners still spending their money on – and what has fallen out of favour? Here is Spectator Life's guide to the winners and losers in the property market this year so far... The winners... Solar panels High energy bills have kickstarted British householders into going green. During the first half of this year, sales of solar panels were up 82 per cent on the same period last year, according to MCS, the standards body. The hot spots of solar installations? Cornwall, Wiltshire and Aberdeenshire. Home-buyers are also keen on them, says Surrey buying agent Richard Winter.

For most of us the main ingredients of outdoor cooking are a smouldering barbecue grill, slabs of alternately under- and over-cooked meat and a light sprinkling of frustration. But these days, it seems, there is another option on the menu. Ever since the pandemic, more and more homeowners have been investing in lavish outdoor kitchens – keeping up with the Joneses with garden wine fridges, rotisserie grills, pizza ovens and professional-quality prep areas so they can cook and eat outside in comfort. The concept has been enthusiastically adopted by the likes of David and Victoria Beckham, who are reportedly awaiting a verdict on a planning application for an all-singing, all-dancing outdoor kitchen at their Cotswolds barn.

‘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.

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.

There are three things that occur to you when you travel the length of Japan: that kimonos are surprisingly good for any occasion; that the country’s reputation for cruelty may partly derive from breakfasts comprising tea porridge and prawn soufflé; and that the hordes of camera-wielding Japanese tourists taking thousands of snaps – a comic trope in the 1980s, at least – were really just ahead of their time and the rest of us are only now catching up thanks to our iPhones.

As the recent heatwave simmered on, tempura oysters were being washed down with chilled rosé on the beachfront tables at Little Rock, an offshoot of Folkestone’s Michelin starred Rocksalt restaurant. Looking from the shipping container that houses it past a handful of palm trees down the long shingle beach, a huge crane punctuated the clear blue sky above the bright white curves of the town’s biggest new development. The Folkestone Harbour and Seafront Development Company is hoping to woo a wave of home-buyers to the Kent Channel town’s seafront, with the first phase of 1,000 new homes planned along the beach. The seaside resort and port, in the same vein as Margate and Hastings, has been trying to rebrand itself as a thriving arts centre.

It has been ten years since work began in earnest on the regeneration of one of the few surviving sections of old-school central London. While the rest of Zone 1 seemingly saw wall-to-wall gentrification, Elephant and Castle remained an outpost of stubborn, scruffy ordinariness, an oasis of discount stores, greasy spoons and traditional boozers. Over the past decade, billions of pounds have been lavished on sprucing up the Elephant. But while the old place certainly looks quite different – a cluster of new towers, thousands of new homes, a gaping hole where the 1960s shopping centre once stood – this is a regeneration that has had its fair share of troubles.

Once I thought nothing could make residential Britain look uglier than pebble-dashing, PVC windows and satellite dishes. I was wrong. As if the country had not been brutally homogenised enough by the fact that every high street has the same shops, now every residential road is reduced to being an identical backdrop for a very persistent invader: the wheelie bin. Lined up like Daleks, they are breeding in my North London neighbourhood, blocking front gardens and pavements. Outside houses split into flats, where each has its own set, there are actual crowds of these 4.5ft graceless plastic buckets, which come in multiple colours for different sorts of rubbish. When wheelie bins first started infiltrating our streets just over a decade ago, we valiantly tried to fight back.

With its perfectly soaring Jacobean-style architecture, leaded windows and enchanting walled garden, all set within 17-plus acres of East Sussex countryside, Grade II* Listed Possingworth Manor is the rural idyll of an English country house.   Despite its tranquil appearance, however, the 11-bedroom, 8,500 sq ft manor near Uckfield has had a disproportionate share of drama over the years, as the site of some legendary lovers’ tiffs, and with links to royalty past and present, literary and artistic icons and wartime heroes, to boot.

When I was younger, I dreamed of being a Jane Austen heroine. Nearly two decades on, in my late twenties, I am living in the guest room of a married older cousin in a leafy suburb of London, house-hunting in the middle of a housing crisis, waiting on a security clearance for a public-sector job, and wending my way through a dizzying array of balls, dinners, and public talks while I wait, observing a long-decaying society in the fullest bloom of its collapse. The 1990s dream of single professional womanhood, complete with uptown apartment, financial independence, and unlimited opportunity has been unmasked as an illusion, while the underlying realities of the world remain as they always were. Doing things alone is difficult.

House hunters nearly always have to make a compromise to suit their budget – the size of the garden, say, or those dated avocado bathroom suites, or the slightly inconvenient distance from the station. You might think that being a multi-millionaire would exonerate you from such stresses, making finding your dream home trouble-free.   Not so, according to Mike Jatania, the British Asian cosmetics tycoon who reportedly sold personal care brand Lornamead to Li & Fung Ltd for $200 million a decade ago and who regularly tops charts of Britain’s richest Asian people.

They are expensive to maintain, plagued by tourists and influences seeking picture-postcard holiday snaps and cost more per square foot than houses in some of London’s most affluent neighbourhoods – despite lacking basic amenities such as running water. And yet such is the allure of the traditional seaside beach hut that, amid an otherwise shaky housing market, prices for these modest timber shacks just keep rising.  According to research by Moverly, which provides digital home information packs, the average asking price of a beach hut in England stands at £49,290 – up 43 per cent in the past year. In Dorset prices are up 101 per cent to more than £120,000.