Spectator Life

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.

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live with someone less vigilant about such matters, who would not necessarily turn her nose up at something a day or so out of date.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’.

For me, discovering dating apps was like happening upon crack cocaine. The starting pistol for my ‘dating’ was the decree absolute. I guessed it from the envelope. Still, it was stark seeing it on paper. For so long it had been pencilled, now it was in ink: ‘The marriage solemnised on…  has legally ended.’   My first instinct was to crack open a six-pack. Of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. I ripped off the foil, bit open the chocolate shell and licked out the fondant. My second response was even more gluttonous: setting up a dating app profile.

A Rolls-Royce press trip is like being taken by Mary Poppins – Mary of the novel, not the film, she is more savage and interesting – and shown a thing you would not otherwise know. When you arrive at the destination – it is Provence today, but it could be California or Ibiza tomorrow – you find the cars at the airport, laid out in blue and lilac and grey. Among them stand smiling men, whose job it is to help you drive the car: during the self-drive part they stand at roadsides smiling at you, though I think they have had weapons training. If you know this is a Rolls-Royce press trip, fair enough.

I saw a chap walking down the road the other day looking, unusually for my part of town, the very quintessence of sartorial elegance: polished brogues, tailored pin-striped suit, rolled umbrella. He was a modern-day Beau Brummell. But what really topped off his ensemble – literally and figuratively – was a bowler hat. I haven't seen anyone wearing one of those for decades. In fact, the last time was about 35 years ago when a girl arrived at a party in one. Cruelly, I pointed and said: 'Ha! Charlie Chaplin!' The awkward silence that followed shamed me rather than embarrassed her.  Since the bottom dropped out of the officewear market during Covid, making an effort with daytime dress is unusual enough.

The nicest thing anyone has said to me recently is: ‘But surely you’re far too young to remember cassettes?’ Sadly, I had to break it to my new neighbour that, as a child of the 1980s and a 1990s teen, I’m not – which is why I’m bemused to learn that tapes are the latest piece of retro tech to make a comeback.  Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Charli XCX are among artists who’ve released new music on cassette, fuelled by Gen Z’s apparently insatiable appetite for nostalgia and clunky devices long since sent to landfill.

‘Grannycore’, the latest TikTok trend beloved of Gen Z, seems to be about a nostalgic aesthetic centred on the comforting style and hobbies of a ‘traditional’ grandmother. In real life, however, things could hardly be more different for us Boomer grannies.  Yes, we cook and possibly do needlework if we feel like it. We might even knit. But if you’re expecting a storybook grandmother – a stooped, doughy figure with a wispy white bun held in place by kirby grips, clad in a twinset and pearls and wearing sensible shoes – then you’re definitely barking up the wrong tree. As a Boomer granny born in 1956, my early life was profoundly influenced by the 1960s – when sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll first appeared on the scene.

Four decades ago, a man took lots of photos of some working-class people having a day out at the seaside. The resort was New Brighton on Merseyside, and the photos showed that the sun shone, the ice creams were runny and lots of people fell asleep in their deckchairs, resulting in their faces turning fire-engine red. What ‘The Last Resort’ – the most famous photography project by Martin Parr, who died last month at the age of 73 – also showed, and continues to show, is that there is nothing that the liberal-artistic-media-elite loathe more than seeing ordinary people having a good time and not giving a hoot what anyone else might think of them.

New Year’s resolutions are a cruel and demoralising prank. Don’t start any personal alterations until April. Spring is the real beginning of the year, as the Romans once knew and the taxman still does. Attempting to remodel yourself as a fountain of self-improvement in the bleak midwinter is just silly. But in the spirit of the many tip sheets and handy hints lists that pop up everywhere at the beginning of January, here’s mine: 26 for 2026. Don’t bother to watch any film or television series made after 2010. It only encourages them. (If the TV series began before 2010, perhaps, but that is the only exception.

‘What time are morning prayers tomorrow?’ I asked the monk who, after meeting me at the monastery entrance, was taking me to my room. He checked a noticeboard listing the various Offices of the Day, the routine of prayers monks carry out each day of their lives. I followed his finger along the listings. Oh bloody hell, I thought. Lauds on Friday morning was at 5.30 a.m., and I had arrived at the Abbey of St Matthias late Thursday afternoon. Winter darkness was descending on the German city of Trier and I had trudged nearly 40km of the Jakobsweg, Germany’s Camino. Fortunately, the monk – like the rest of his Benedictine order – was a practical man and could see my bedraggled state. He shook his head: ‘That’s far too early, don’t worry – you need to rest.

Growing up, it was made very clear to us that if you RSVPed in the positive to a party, you were absolutely honour-bound to turn up. It was the height of rudeness to chuck. How things have changed. These days, people don’t even bother RSVPing: it’s too difficult. Some are even too lazy to click a thumbs-up on a WhatsApp. More charitably, perhaps they have all suffered collective memory loss, or don’t understand the French. I know what you do when you get an email invitation, or when somebody texts you with the date and time of a party. You think ‘how nice’, and then do absolutely nothing about it until the week before.

I have been scouring the internet for a Christmas bauble for my mother-in-law. I have fond memories of the blown glass baubles of my childhood – the little wooden cabin in the trees, covered in powdery snow; the half papaya, its orange cocoon concealing bright purple seeds inside. Last year I bought myself a glass bauble of Big Ben which, though perhaps not traditional, is still charming. We have a red post box too, which occasionally disappears and turns up in my son’s Lego set.  This year, though, I ventured to Etsy for a bauble and was shocked by what I found. The first one that caught my eye was a cartoon-like depiction of the nativity, with a speech bubble pointing to the babe in the manger and saying: ‘Spoilers: he dies.

The algorithm got me in the end. It began with recipe content, and once I was hooked on food influencer videos, I began to be pummelled with adverts for attractive pots and pans, then clothes, and from there an ever-widening vista of objets and objects by turns pretty or useful and occasionally both. The result, apart from frittering away a certain amount of money on non-essential cardigans and kitchen gadgets, has been the development of a ruthless taste and approach to e-commerce. I want to have, and want to give, nice things, and increasingly I know where to get them. I am also hopelessly disorganised, a snob and far from awash in cash. If you’re anything like me and have yet to get your gifts sorted out, read on.

The demoralising decline in the office dress code is long established. Nowadays, stockbrokers and estate agents are the only workers reliably in a suit and tie. For everyone else it’s chinos and knitwear – on a good day. But welcome news is afoot: among a growing legion of men, especially young men, there’s a revival of interest in dressing smartly. Inevitably, the driving force is social media. Instagram accounts such as @askokeyig, @ignoreatyourperil, @tfchamberlin and many others are extolling the virtues of a sharp silhouette and the perils of collar gap. Most famously, ‘the menswear guy’ (@dieworkwear) has become something of an international name on X by blasting the (usually dire) sartorial standards of politicians and others. He has plenty of targets.

‘Do you have any more shoes? I need as many as you can find for my daughters.’ I had just made my first sale on the second-hand marketplace Vinted and, already, here was a message from a new customer wanting more. Delighted, I scrambled around and managed to locate more than a dozen pairs of no-longer-wanted, muddy old shoes. ‘Don’t worry about cleaning them,’ came the reply from ‘Mariella’ when I told her the good news. ‘They’re just for the garden.’ Slightly odd, I thought, but my customer seemed harmless enough: a part-time cleaner with young children who, she told me rather quaintly, was married to a cobbler.  It was only when I had to ship the huge black bin liner of shoes that I realised I had been duped.

Every few years, an obituary for the Sloane Ranger appears. In 2015, the Telegraph proclaimed their death. In 2022, Peter York himself, co-author of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, wrote a devastating piece in the Oldie on the ‘End of the Sloane Age’. In it, he cast existential doubt on the species altogether: ‘By 2021, there seemed to be every possible shade of Sloane around in London. But were they really Sloanes at all? It looked as if the only way for a Sloane to succeed was to UnSloane themselves.’  You might think that if York himself had called time, then the death knell must have well and truly sounded. But no.

The premium on a good tradesman remains extremely high. Is AI going to come and paint your walls or hang your pictures? No, and the unsung heroes of the AI age are still those who are good with their hands. Indeed OpenAI, the US industry giant, has urgently called for a massive ramping up in skilled labour. It declared: ‘The country will need many more electricians, mechanics, metal and ironworkers, carpenters, plumbers, and other construction trade workers than we currently have.’ Sounds good to me. Meanwhile Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, said America needs for 500,000 electricians. Yes please! No doubt Britain is going to need just as many if we’re to join the AI revolution.

If you’re fortunate enough to have been well-lunched at an establishment like the Ritz or 5 Hertford Street, your host may ask if you fancy a cigar. You would be forgiven for declining the opportunity to step out into the December chill. Say as much and a proud gleam may then enter your host’s eyes as he tells you that there is no need to shiver on a wintry terrace or, even worse, stand in the street. There are two dozen premises, mostly around St James’s Street in the centre of London, that managed to evade the vagaries of the smoking ban in 2007 and continue to offer their patrons the chance to smoke expensive cigars in comfort on their premises.

A few weeks ago, I was driving four of my children to school in my tinny, battered Toyota. We were running late – as per usual – and were speeding – or, rather, chuntering – down a particularly treacherous road. Of all the questionable surfaces in my area of rural Essex, this one is notorious: marked by a huge pothole the size of Snoopy the dog’s head, which bleeds into a smaller, gloopier crater. As I was trying to navigate it, however, a large shadow zoomed into sight in my rear-view mirror. With a jolt and a tremendous bang, it pushed me, my family and my poor, beaten-up Toyota into the crater. Who would be so sadistic as to do such a thing, you may wonder? Was it a vengeful ex? A drunk driver? Another parent running late and pushed from road rage to road insanity?

Yummy mummies everywhere, put your Veja trainers and frill-collar shirts away, because last week the Times issued a stinging broadside. Being labelled a ‘yummy mummy’ is apparently now so derogatory as to be an ‘almost cancellable offence’. The Yummy is dead, the headline declared, while my phone blew up like the fourth reactor at Chernobyl as Yummies far and wide forwarded me the article. ‘We are not dead!’ many fulminated, while others were more concise: ‘That’s just bollocks; I’ve never worn barrel jeans in my life.

Gone are the days when I always had a pen in my pocket. Gone are the days when I needed a pen to go to work. The NHS does not now always require a pen, and the NHS is not quick to abandon old technology. Ten years ago I worked in a hospital where a ward computer still had a floppy disk drive. Older readers will understand – and wince – when I say it wasn’t three-and-a-half inches but five-and-a-quarter. I remember writing my university finals with a pen, and I remember it because I recall how it felt. The pressure of time and the pressure of the pen made the ache in my writing hand memorable. I rewrote each sentence several times, and sometimes the whole paragraph, before it reached the paper.

The headline smacked me between the eyes. ‘I can’t afford to turn my Aga on this winter,’ a nice writer called Flora Watkins whinged in the Telegraph last weekend (she once wrote a Spectator piece about the sublime awfulness of cockapoos that I wished I’d written myself). The sub-head continued: ‘Our writer’s once cosy Norfolk home is feeling the chill as energy bills rise – how will she and her family cope?’ There was a fetching picture of our tragic protagonist in cardi and layers clutching a mug in front of her Aga and an impressive batterie de cuisine. Watkins had also swathed her pretty neck in the Diana-sheep-jersey scarf (white sheep on red, and one dear little black sheep).

I have a distant cousin in Australia whom I have never met. This lady – her name is Moya – has a hobby researching our family’s history, and our paths first crossed virtually via Ancestry.com. This week, Moya told me an astonishing story she had uncovered about my late father’s second marriage to a dying woman convicted of murdering her own, beloved daughter. It is a truly tragic tale of Dickensian pathos and misery, but one that amazingly my dad never mentioned to me. I only learned the brutal facts from Moya thanks to the wonders of the internet. My father was in his sixties when I was born in the 1950s and died when I was 19.

Now that the autumn term is well underway at universities and freshers’ week has removed its leering, spotty face from the calendar for another year, may I talk about how ghastly it is? Impressionable young people who believe they are completely mature adults but still have another decade or so of brain remodelling to go arrive at an unfamiliar place for the first time. Once any relatives who lugged their bulging suitcases packed with stuff to make them seem grown-up have disgorged the final single sock from the family car and driven off, hiding their tears, the young person is on their own. I remember being 19 and arriving at Edinburgh University. I took the train up from London and hauled my suitcase to the taxi line at Waverley.

I’m not usually in favour of money-grasping councils, but I will make one exception: I’m afraid I am not on the side of the SUV drivers of Cardiff who are bleating about having to pay higher parking charges. Under new rules introduced by the Labour-run council – and likely to be copied elsewhere – drivers of vehicles which weigh more than 2.4 tonnes will have to pay extra for a parking permit, and drivers of cars weighing more than 3.6 tonnes will be refused parking permits altogether. How much extra has yet to be decided – the council has so far voted in favour of the principle of charging more – but the cost of a parking permit in Cardiff is currently just £35 a year. Compared with the cost of renting somewhere to live, that is a ludicrously good deal.

Turning 24 came with more than just cake and candles. Alongside the celebrations came a barrage of life-determining questions: when are you getting married? Where do you see yourself living? When will your job become a career? With a single step into my mid-twenties, I felt suddenly catapulted into a new world of adult expectations. And nothing captured this shift more than my birthday presents. I love my new pilates ring and am curious to see what collagen will do to my complexion, but there was something unnerving about receiving an entire haul of health-inspired gifts. When my friends arrived that evening to celebrate my ‘achievement’ of turning 24 – still unemployed and still at home – the wellness theme continued.

I first wore a beret for a fancy dress competition at my infant school summer fete in June 1975. My mother had entered me in the ‘topical’ category and tapped into the media furore around the nationwide referendum a week earlier over whether or not the UK should join what would become the EU – an issue that has managed to remain topical. My costume consisted of said beret (borrowed) paired with a stripy top, an extravagant moustache drawn on with charcoal from a burned cork and a string of onions hung around my neck. And I was pushing a bicycle.