Spectator 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.

There has always been something really rather magnificent about Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s beloved country home in the Weald of Kent. Sure, it’s no Blenheim or Chatsworth; in fact – say it quietly – from certain vantage points this redbrick Tudor house is verging on unremarkable. It’s even, at a pinch, conceivably the sort of place that Kirsty or Phil might claim lacks kerb appeal. But they, just as any visitor does, would immediately recognise that the true appeal of Chartwell is not in its architecture (although all those walls Churchill built when he modernised it are handsome). No, it’s in the property’s connection to its former owner, and the view – over a seemingly unspoiled Kent arcadia which stretches for as far as the eye can see for some 40 miles.

Please, make it stop. No sooner had I dug out my Barbour for the wet and windy winter months than I saw another of the brand’s distressing collaborations, this time with fashion designer Sir Paul Smith. Sir Paul, luvvie fashion grandee and founder of the eponymous line that began as a Nottingham-based shirt outfit in the 1970s, has teamed up with Barbour to distil ‘the wit and character’ of both brands. But I don’t need Sir Paul’s ‘signature stripe trims, colour pops and patchwork’ to be persuaded to wear a Barbour. And I’m pretty sure most people who live in the country would say the same. I like my 12-year-old Bedale Barbour as it is: pretty bashed up, in need of a re-wax, the pockets stuffed with bits of rope, chocolate buttons, dog poo bags and lighters.

Most of the time cheating is frowned upon, but a quarter of all driving tests in Britain are now taken in automatic cars and apparently that’s fine. The trend is only set to continue, too, as more and more people pretend to care about the environment to take advantage of this loophole and obtain a driving licence without the slightest concept of clutch control. It’s absolutely outrageous, not to mention completely unfair. I spent hundreds of pounds being taught to drive properly, in a manual, only passing on my second attempt, because mastering a gearstick is hard. Copping out and taking your test in a glorified fairground dodgem isn’t just shameful, it’s basically fraud. No matter what it says on your certificate, you can’t drive, you can just steer and brake.

I was at a party recently where a self-important woman looked disdainfully at my proffered hand before limply shaking it as if it were a wet dishcloth crawling with E. coli. After briefly touching my fingers, her lip curled as she demanded to know who I was and what I did for a living. It felt like an audience with a medieval monarch – the hauteur was extraordinary. As a youngster, such imperious behaviour would have crushed me. But my older self was amused by the Lady Bracknell schtick. Some people, regardless of their exalted position in life, manage to be effortlessly down-to-earth, putting you instantly at your ease. The difference, in my experience, is that the latter don’t take themselves too seriously.

I used to think I wasn’t attractive enough to drive a Ferrari. I still think that, but you reach an age, like Lester Burnham in American Beauty, when you don’t care any more, and in that despair you can pull off anything. I am now exactly that age: the same age as the man driving the nervous-breakdown orange Lamborghini on the prom in Penzance. When I see him, I have to stop myself screaming the betrayed wife’s words to her adulterous husband in Moonstruck: ‘Cosmo, I just want you to know, no matter what you do, you’re gonna die. Just like everybody else.’ (‘Thank you, Rose.’ ‘You’re welcome.

As coats go, it was very nice. A dark blue cashmere Loro Piana number that reeked of quiet luxury. But for a man who once identified as a communist, it was laughable. It was 2016 and I was standing in the atrium of the newly remodelled Design Museum on Kensington High Street. As assistant to the museum’s director, I was engaged in a normal day on the job: as Peter Mandelson’s coat bearer. Other humdrum days at the coalface involved talking to Terence Conran about his dogs, making sure Alexandra Shulman had a hard hat on and holding then culture secretary Matt Hancock’s champagne glass while he posed for pictures. Mandelson, soon to be announced as the chairman of the museum’s trustees, was in the museum for a state visit.

I was 20, and in the recovery room of my local hospital, coming round from general anaesthetic after minor surgery. My mind was lost wherever our minds go in such conditions, steering itself gently back into its familiar harbour. But then, suddenly – or as suddenly as anything can be when you’re in that numbed nirvana – I became aware that someone in the next pallet along was addressing me. He was staring at me from his own fugue state, and slurring the words, ‘You’re that copper. You are. You’re that copper.’ Now, talk to any nurse, and they’ll tell you the very peculiar and often entertainingly uninhibited things that people come out with as they drool back into consciousness.

The Duchess of Sussex has achieved something quite remarkable. After the brickbats hurled at the first season of her Netflix show With Love, Meghan – the furious pro-monarchy outrage, the eye-rolling from critics, the memes that lampooned her syrupy anecdotes – many TV personalities would have flinched. They would have called consultants, tweaked the format, apologised by going in a ‘new direction’. Meghan Markle (or should I say Sussex) has done the opposite. Season two arrived last month: unchanged, unrepentant and every bit as twee as the first.  Like her homemade ‘jam’, that’s not to say it’s gone down well. ‘Painfully contrived’, ‘irrelevant meets intolerable’ and ‘tone-deaf’ were just some of the newspaper reviews.

London on Monday night was mad and hilarious. At the Hyde Park Corner crossing, the number of people on Lime bikes must have been approaching 100. Invariably described as menaces, murderers and leg-breakers, these Lime bikes and their riders waited for the traffic light to turn green. When it did, battalions of these 35-kilo machines toppled and wobbled around each other, as the same number came in the other direction, green and white overwhelming the eyes. Yet no knees were crunched, no one fell off and those brave enough managed to render the tube strikes a minor inconvenience. If you believe in the state as protector, nanny and moraliser, and the world as a perfectible place where hazard can be eliminated, they should be banned It was good to see.

I realised that the whole thing had become absurd when I was squeezed in by a female vicar for photos around the font of an Anglican church. There we were, all six godparents grinning back at the camera as the baby was held aloft (screaming) by its proud parents. But out of the six godparents assembled, only two of us had been baptised and confirmed in the Christian faith, leaving four godparents out. Not really godparents at all, then. Witnesses or mentors perhaps, but not godparents. In our increasingly secular age, the distinction bears recognising. If you don’t believe in God, this isn’t going to work.

I remember it quite clearly, that moment I first clocked that fat models were now advertising clothing – fitness clothing no less. I was in America and, left with time to kill in a shopping centre, I went into an outlet of the trendy athleisure store Athleta (owned by Gap), which I had pillaged on previous visits for its generous yet clingy apparel. I stepped in, looked up and noticed the walls were covered in big proud pictures of silky-skinned but decidedly chunky women. They were sporting leggings and tops, even sports bras, with rolls of fat undulating out from under their chests, jiggling on the thighs, wobbling on enormous bums.

If ever there was a symbol of the decline of the European car industry it is my wife’s Citroen. For the past two months it has sat out on the driveway, inert. We can’t drive it, we can’t sell it and we cannot get it fixed. It is a waste of space, but one that we must continue to tax and insure. The little C3 – which I used to think of as a pleasant vehicle without too much of the electronic junk fitted to most new cars – is one of 120,000 Citroens subject to a ‘stop notice’ following the death of a French motorist in June. The cause of her death turned out to be a faulty airbag which exploded, peppering her with metal shards. Every vehicle fitted with these kinds of airbags has been officially grounded.

Bonnie Blue is an It Girl. But she’s not an It Girl in the way we used to recognise them. Bonnie Blue is an It Girl because she’s written about as a thing, not a person. She’s an object, everything that’s bad about women, sex, modern life. She’s not really considered to be a human being, with hopes and fears and desires; her pronoun is It. But I can’t help liking her. I’m not lying, and I’m not trying to be controversial; I’m just really keen on honesty, and so few people are really honest, even – especially – when they identify as honest.

First, there was the bizarre tale of the poor unfortunate man who, after dropping his trousers on the District line near Upton Park, was set upon by an outraged gang, beaten and then forcibly expelled from the Tube. And then, just a day or so before, the perpetually beleaguered Gregg Wallace caused a similar degree of opprobrium when he put out a video in which he addressed allegations of bad behaviour involving a lack of trousers. What on earth is going on? On Instagram, Wallace announced, with a touch of the Beowulf poet: ‘Would you like the truth about the stories regarding me taking my trousers down, listen! There are no findings in the investigation that I took my trousers down in front of anybody.

Over the years, I’ve made a lot of trips up and down the highway connecting the small Massachusetts town in which I grew up to a strip mall about ten miles away. In this strip mall is a branch of Trader Joe’s, the mid-range American supermarket chain known for its serviceable range of food, decent prices and workaday packaging. I do not drive, and nor do I live in America any more. But when I am staying with my parents, I like to accompany them on their shopping trips as I find American supermarkets fascinating, if freezing. Trader Joe’s is an OK option for my parents; not great, but fine. For good meat, my mother would go elsewhere, and the same goes for fish.

Just before my father died, he visited Mannina in Florence to have his feet measured for a pair of shoes. I’d found the handwritten receipt in his desk on thin yellow paper, stapled with samples of leather. Online pictures of Mannina showed a glass-fronted shop of lacquered wood and brass, the name in beveled gold across the door. So after months without a holiday, I booked a cheap short haul flight from London to Italy, determined to track down these missing shoes.  My father had been a tailor for much of his life, the third man in Pakeman Catto & Carter, an established men’s clothing shop in the Gloucestershire town of Cirencester. ‘At one point he’d dressed half the gentlemen of England,’ my uncle said at his funeral, which is probably not far from the truth.