Spectator Life

I didn’t make it down to Valencia, Spain, for the weekend Formula E electric car grand prix. Long trips are more or less out of the question now in my Kona electric car, since Hyundai crippled the range of the battery pack to stop the car from bursting into flames. Not that I missed much. On the first day five teams were disqualified for having consumed too much energy, three cars came to a stop on the track, and others limped to the finish as best they could. Formula E superstar Jean-Éric Vergne completed the last lap at an average speed of just under 20 mph. Slower than my horse. On Sunday, the Grande Finale, most of those who had finally qualified ran out of battery charge without finishing.

The Duke of Edinburgh was carried to his tomb in a modified Land Rover, and this is apt. He walked away from a highspeed collision in Norfolk a few years ago because – and probably only because - he was driving a Land Rover Freelander. The Land Rover, which was intially the off-road Rover, is the original British SUV. It is beloved by farmers, who need them, and dukes, who like them because they are both grand and useful, a metaphor in metal – at least from their perspective - for feudalism itself. Few cars are as evocative of an ancient chariot, or as versatile: motorways do not daunt them, and nor do potholes.

Even before the news of the death of the Duke of Edinburgh was announced, Buckingham Palace had had to suspend ticket sales for visiting its gardens this summer, due to overwhelming demand. With the annual summer opening of the State rooms cancelled for the second year running due to the pandemic, the opportunity to picnic in the grounds of the Queen’s London home has proved irresistible. Even the US networks have carried the story. Tickets, at the time of writing, were not available. But don’t despair.

I bought an electric car and wish I hadn’t. It seemed a good idea at the time, albeit a costly way of proclaiming my environmental virtuousness. The car cost €44,000, less a €6,000 subsidy courtesy of French taxpayers, the overwhelming majority poorer than me. Fellow villagers are driving those 20-year-old diesel vans that look like garden sheds on wheels. I order the car in May 2018. It’s promised in April 2019. ‘No later,’ promises the salesman at the local Hyundai dealer. April comes and goes. No car. I phone the dealership. No explanation. The car finally arrives two months late, with no effort by Hyundai to apologise. But I Iove it. It’s quiet, quick and with the back seats down, practical with plenty of room for the dogs.

A cooker is not just for cooking. That is the starting point to understanding the Aga. It is impractical, environmentally unfriendly, and expensive. Everyone – including the Aga’s most ardent devotees – knows that. And yet the Aga cooker next year will celebrate its centenary. Despite all the modern appliances that should long ago have rendered it obsolete, these enamel-coated cast-iron behemoths continue to soldier on indefatigably. They are one of the twenty first century’s great survivors. The brand has a glorious history. The Aga cooker was invented by a Nobel Prize-winning Swedish physicist.

Before H&M launched their new campaign of loungewear with Hector Bellerin, I confess I hadn’t heard of him. I am not aware of how many goals he has kicked or on behalf of whom. What I had noticed was the fact that the collection was what is more colloquially known as the tracksuit, but fairly passive aggressively referred to as ‘loungewear’ in the industry - a double-edged term suggests that no one should be seen in public wearing it. What is striking about this collaboration is that it is twelve months too late. Though I am sure Señor Bellerin’s vocational cash cow means that he will not live or die on the success of this particular collection, there is still no objective rationale for it.

If you are on social media, you have probably scrolled past a hundred photographs of Harry Styles’ Grammys performance last week. It was eccentric, quirky. And Styles donned his much-touted androgynous swagger.  The media and menswear magazines keep insisting that Styles’ fashion choices are groundbreaking and are setting the tone for a new generation of men. Following the performance, tweets and articles have been shared celebrating Harry’s modish liberation from a sea of monotonous Don Drapers. All because he wore a furry green scarf.  What Harry is doing, said one commentator for a large men’s magazine, is redefining. Redefine. I hate that word… Once you’ve defined something, hopefully you already got it right.

House sales have always been among the things that the major auctioneers do best, especially when those sales involve dispersing collections amassed by 'great' families that have spent generations living in equally 'great' properties. In the halcyon years they happened on site, the viewing days giving the local proleteriat what might have been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to infiltrate 'the big house' in order to discover how the other half lived.

On April 23, 1946, Enrico Piaggio filed a patent with the Ministry of Industry and Commerce for 'a motorcycle of a rational complexity of organs and elements combined with a frame with mudguards and a casing covering the whole mechanical part'.In less formal terms, the machine in question was called a Vespa - and this year the marque celebrates an impressive 75 years of unbroken production with close to 20 million having been sold around the world across a range of at least 50 variations on the theme.All can be traced back to the day Piaggio came up with the idea of saving his father Rinaldo's bombed-out aero factories from demolition by converting them into production lines which would churn-out cheap transport for the masses.

The campervan is the ideal vehicle for a British spring (at present there is no foreign spring available). There are two extremes to consider. There is the original VW which looks like a fairy princess with big dewy headlamps for eyes. I was driven to Glastonbury in the old VW by a woman who looked like her campervan. They had the same temperament: metal flowerchild. Both broke down, though only one wrote her testimony in prose. There is also the American Winnebago Class A, which is essentially a full-sized kitchen inside a lorry. It has a face like Judge Dredd, something called 'medical device storage', and it is owned by the sort of person who needs to travel with a full-sized kitchen. The Class A looks like a school bus for perverts. That does not mean I don’t want one.

The Daily Mail has a new target – Pierre Lagrange. The enormously successful hedge funder has found himself in the cross hairs because he claimed money from Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme for some of the staff at Huntsman – the All-Blacks of Savile Row tailors – which Pierre bought in 2013. As hit-jobs go, it is as ill-advised as it is misinformed, so I thought I’d explain why. The clickbait premise by journalist Nick Craven was that Pierre should have paid all the staff out of his own pocket rather than get support from the government.

'I don’t wear a headband. If you want to, you can!' says karate World Champion Jordan Thomas. 'Don’t disillusion me, Jordan!' I bark, perhaps a little aggressively. I’ve watched three seasons of Cobra Kai in a week and I am all about a karate headband / floppy fringe combo. Kick-ass comedy drama Cobra Kai is a spin-off of ’80s classic The Karate Kid. Resurrecting the original actors, it follows underdog Daniel LaRusso (now 'chopping prices' and 'kicking the competition' as the owner of a successful car dealership) and his high school nemesis, sneering country club bully Johnny Lawrence (now knocking back beer for breakfast).

Now, in an anxious time, I have an SUV, and this is apt. There is something very comforting about an SUV if it’s yours (though less so if it isn’t). They are designed to dominate any landscape they can fit inside and, if that is a hollow fantasy of control it doesn’t feel like one from the driving seat. The advertising shows them climbing mountains and navigating deserts and investigating forests and this is truthful: they really can do this. It is also true that they rarely do this – their owners are the urban rich, segueing to late middle-age, and are as likely to be found in St John’s Wood as the Gobi Desert– but they can, and that is the joy in it. Owning a luxury SUV is like having a leg you do not need.

Analog motion, the brand behind the incredibly popular AM1+, are back with their latest model, the AMX Stealth. The company — so I’m told enthusiastically by their CEO — claims to have had a rethink, and wants to now ‘focus on making products that people love’. This surprised me, since their AM1+, reviewed last year, was exactly that: a lightweight, fun, cool and incredible loveable bike (with a loveable price tag). Even more surprising, then, was the news that it wants to depart from this model and focus on higher-value, higher spec — and of course higher cost — models, the first of which is the AMX Stealth.

When’s the last time you wore a tie? Was it yesterday? Are you wearing one now? Somehow I doubt it. After all, why should you, sitting there in your home office or spare bedroom, or sitting room?  Of course there was a time, if you’re a male reader, that you would have worn one every day to work. But ties are rapidly disappearing. Where once half-Windsors wider than 747s straddled the necks of pontificating ex-footballers on Match of the Day, open shirts now rule the roost. When you see a politician out and about on the television, his tie is gone, his sleeves are rolled up – like a vet about to perform a highly intimate procedure – and he’s even jacket-less.

Once mainly associated with portly, middle-aged men of a certain social standing, cigars - along with single malt whisky, fine wine, decent watches and interesting cars - have become part of the arsenal of interests that anyone who aspires to be a 21st century gentleman is almost required to hold dear.  But the current enthusiasm for cigar smoking is merely the latest stage in a slow burn of popularity that can be traced back to the so-called 'loadsamoney economy' of the late 1980s, when flash city boys saw a top quality Cuban as just another hedonist's accessory on which to splash a large amount of cash.

First things first, I should issue a disclaimer: I’m not a fan of bikes that have apps. It’s always struck me as odd that a lot of electric bike manufacturers make a big deal about making bikes more friendly for riders – and yet so many insist on adding additional tech that your average cyclist neither wants nor needs. But perhaps the Cowboy 3 can convince me that an app can be more than just an add-on. The Cowboy 3 is unquestionably the best looking electric bike on the market right now in its price class (£1,990). It’s the third generation of e-bike from the Belgian startup – and is a definite sign of the business reaching its maturity; prioritising safety above all else (although clearly still maintaining an incredibly strong design ethic).

Wild swimming has become almost tediously fashionable recently, and no heatwave is really complete without a flood of articles on how it feels to take a dip in the outdoors (and even more tedious ones about how ‘in my day, we just called it swimming’ from people fortunate enough not to have grown up with chlorine and floating plasters as their introduction to the water. But the strange thing is that as the weather chills, so does the trendy interest, even though winter swimming is far more fun - and even better for you - than its summer equivalent. Only recently we’ve seen more research suggesting there is a ‘cold-shock’ protein found in regular winter swimmers which could slow the onset of dementia.

Anyone who has recently tried to buy a second-hand van will know that they have become difficult to find at sensible money – so much so, in fact, that a leading British broadsheet recently felt moved to report on the boom in sales, citing one of the major ‘drivers’ being the increase in people turning to courier work after being laid-off from their previous jobs due to the economic downturn caused by Coronavirus.

If you’re trying to determine someone’s class and the accent is hard to place, you could do worse than check the brand of their pans. Le Creuset has been a staple of upper-middle class British kitchens for years – the sort of Eurocentric brand that contains just a hint of francophile exoticism whilst conjuring up the British comfort food of old: casseroles, stews and soups. And, if Instagram is anything to go by, Millennials are also cottoning onto the appeal. With the rise of #cottagecore and the boom in home cooking that came about over lockdown, Le Creuset doesn’t seem to be disappearing any time soon.

It wasn’t the easiest news to have to break, but he delivered it with the kindness and compassion of a favourite uncle explaining to his nephew that his hamster has passed away. Afterwards, we were left thinking, “Well, what is a 20.4 per cent slump in the economy between friends, anyway?” Even the announcement that the UK is in the deepest recession of any G7 nation hasn’t taken the shine off Rishi Sunak’s approval rating, which remains light years ahead of other members of the government. When the Chancellor declares “we’ll do whatever it takes”, we believe him.

With her marriage to property developer Edoardo ‘Edo’ Mapelli Mozzi, Princess Beatrice – the Queen’s fifth eldest grandchild – becomes part of one of Italy’s oldest aristocratic families. As well as becoming a ‘Contessa’ (a purely symbolic title in post-war Italy) Her Royal Highness’s husband will also inherit the family’s grand residence – a large neoclassical palazzo widely regarded as one of the finest in Italy. The palace sits in Ponte San Pietro, a small town in the province of Bergamo. Around an hour’s drive from Lake Como, it has reportedly been part of the family estate since the 13th century.

If you’re a coffee lover and can’t comprehend mornings without a strong cup, now might be the perfect time to invest in a machine that will stand the test of time. After all, it’s going to be a while before we can rely on a barista to whip us up a cup on the way to work. Bean to Cup Machines These machines take roasted coffee beans and grind them for you, pouring water through the ground beans and into a drip pot or a cup below. Often the more expensive coffee machines, as they have more moving parts and automate some of the process for you. Filter Coffee Machines You will be familiar with these kinds of machines and will have probably comes across them in one way or another in the past, either in the home or office.