Spectator Life

At last month’s Bafta ceremony, David Tennant attempted to make a joke about the state of Donald Trump’s hair, but it barely raised a chuckle. Not surprising, perhaps, when you consider the dramatic vibe-shift sweeping the western world. In a desperate attempt to stay relevant many on the progressive left are suddenly choosing to distance themselves from the luxury beliefs they once held as sacrosanct. But this has led to confusion, especially when it comes to comedy. For progressives, laughing at the right jokes became an indicator of moral virtue and political allegiance, so it was highly amusing to see all those nervous thesps wondering which segments of the ceremony they should be finding funny.

Why are women still allowed to do housework? The question used to bother me during the years of my marriage when housework became a running sore between us. Perhaps the friction was inevitable. I was born in revolutionary times, the 1960s, and my mother taught me and my siblings to cook, clean and wash up for ourselves. We turned out as independent, self-sufficient adults. I would never ask a woman to make me a cup of coffee any more than I’d ask a bumblebee to build me a lighthouse. And doing jobs around the house suits my life as a writer. During the day I take frequent mini-breaks and do chores while my mind empties itself of clutter and my batteries recharge. Then I return to my laptop, renewed and refreshed. It’s like meditation – but with concrete results. Clean carpets.

I’m a broke pensioner – quite a jolly one – not like those people Age Concern show wrapped in blankets, the caption informing viewers that she daren’t put the heating on. I’m not like those pathetic old people, I tell myself (untruthfully). I do put the heating on but, like the poor old dears in shabby armchairs, I worry about how I’m going to pay my heating bill – especially now Labour has taken away my wonderful winter fuel allowance. Being broke at 68 is humiliating. But it is also only to be expected, given how little money I’ve managed to make in my quite long life. Sometimes I get resentful and start to do a Cleopatra’s Nose on my life: what if I’d stayed married to the father of my children?

Of all the aspects of dating that make me grateful I came off the market when I did – ghosting, choking, sober socialising, facial hair like Brahms’s beard – it’s the spread of large-scale visible tattoos that makes me feel like I got the last chopper out of ’Nam. Neck tattoos and sleeves were once either indicators of prison gang allegiances or the preserve of thrash metal bands and their fans. Although perhaps the most heavily inked man in rock is Travis Barker, drummer of pop-punk crossover tarts Blink-182. His whole head is tattooed, as is Kerry King’s of Slayer, who also has ‘God Hates Us All’ down his left arm. Among Phil Anselmo of Pantera’s extensive body art is a portrait of himself as a demon with his now ex-wife riding an extending tongue.

Anyone who attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst will never look at a shaving razor in the same way. Ever since my officer training days, when you had to shave on exercise at 4 a.m. in a cold, wet forest, unable to feel your fingers, shaving has been an important topic. Having escaped those dank woods, I’ve tried to embrace shaving at its most comfortable and alluring: using a stylish cut-throat razor, aided by rose-scented shaving cream whipped into a lather by a badger-hair brush. That doesn’t cut it in airport security, where even a lone razor blade could get you pinned down on the floor. So I have tried to find a happy medium, reverting to the type of Gillette razor I used at Sandhurst. But good luck trying to find a two-bladed Gillette Excel blade.

I have always marvelled at the attitude of cat owners who point to bloodied arms or dramatic scratches and explain – with docile, almost apologetic acceptance – that Jasper or Bella just got a bit annoyed. It was all the human’s fault for patting them in the first place. Violent animals are a form of domestic abuser and should be treated as such. Why would anyone allow something to attack them – or their children – rather than simply removing the animal from their home? Sure, they are unlikely to maul you to death, unlike the technically banned XL Bullys, but it’s a different story for wildlife. Domestic cats, the wily rotters, are thought to kill around 270 million birds, mammals and reptiles per year across the UK. They’re the nukes of the animal kingdom.

It's 4 a.m. and my German shorthaired pointer, Percy, is lying on top of me. This isn’t a giant infraction on his part. Percy and I have long shared a bed. We start the early evening as we always do – me reading and he beside me at my invitation, the light on his side of the bed is on too, in case he wants to read as well; something German perhaps, like Thomas Mann. Later, when I decide to go to sleep, I turn out both of our lights and we glide off – his paw often in my hand – into the great unconscious. At some point during the night, he leaves his designated strip and inches towards me, which is probably why my dreams always seem to orbit around being strangled with a velvet ribbon.

If you’ve bought a card for your partner this Valentine’s Day, I would guess you’re more likely to be a man. This is because men are generally more romantic than women, which is something that’s widely known but seldom acknowledged. It’s actually quite a serious issue. According to a female counsellor I once interviewed, one of the most frequent causes of marital discord – and sometimes divorce – is unromantic women. Not convinced? Think of heterosexual couples you know. Who would you say is the more romantic of the two? Now think of your favourite romantic songs. The vast majority will be paeans of love for a woman, written and sung by a man.

My mother hated Motherland, storming out after five minutes, saying Julia’s frantic school drop-off was too much like real life. She’d have loathed Amanda, the self-styled ‘alpha mum’. But I loved it – and was happy with the spin-off Amandaland, where Dame Joanna Lumley plays Amanda’s mother with gleeful froideur. When interviewed alongside her screen daughter, Lucy Punch, Lumley commented that one of the reasons for their characters’ taut relationship is how ageing women are resentful of their pretty daughters. Maternal envy, being rather destructive for all concerned, has provoked much debate in the papers (and no doubt consternation at dinner parties across Middle England).

There are two types of people: the hoarders and those who are always chucking things out because they hate clutter. I fall into the latter category. In my view, a well-ordered environment makes for a well-ordered mind. So you’ll not see my desk buried beneath the usual office detritus, nor my car strewn with apple cores, empty crisp packets, and scrunched-up receipts. In moments of boredom, I enjoy going through a drawer or cupboard to weed out items no longer required. However, my long-standing urge to jettison useless stuff has led to trouble. One episode still haunts me. I was in the kitchen with my mother, who was cooking an elaborate meal.

The news that WHSmith is facing closure seemed inevitable. Good stationery may be one of the pleasures of life, but is anyone actually buying much any more? Of course, people will always need pens, string, bubble wrap and so on, yet the heyday of stationery has definitely passed. There was a time, when people still wrote letters to each other or used writing implements as a matter of course, that it was a large part of our shopping, especially if you were a school kid. We wrote in pen and ink (no biros), and for a child of the 1970s or 1980s, this usually meant the choice between a Sheaffer No Nonsense pen, chunky and with a screw-on top, or a Parker 25, stainless steel and, with its ‘stepped down’ barrel, faintly futuristic.

Unless your Wi-Fi has been down this week, you’ll be aware that David Beckham has got his kit off again. He’s back in his underwear for a ‘steamy’ (Daily Mail) ‘full frontal’ (Daily Mail again, though it really isn’t – and I had to watch it, dispassionately I stress, three times for the purposes of this article in order to be sure) campaign for Hugo Boss which, in that hackneyed and usually inaccurate phrase, ‘broke the internet’. Did you have problems putting your Ocado order through? Me neither.

The signet ring is back. Perhaps, like King Charles, who has worn his since the 1970s, you think it never went away, but I can confirm that it did – sometime around the time of the New Labour government, when being seen as a raging toff was bad for business. Now, thanks in part to the Instagram account Signet Ring Social and posh television and film dramas such as Saltburn, the signet ring, or ‘siggie’ as it is referred to by Gen Z devotees, is making a comeback. Perhaps, instead of the hemline index, used as an indicator of bull or bear economic markets, we may consult the signet ring index as a guide to prosperity. Do you see more or fewer ‘siggies’ in a recession, and what exactly does that tell us?

I can’t remember the exact date of my departure from university. It was sometime in the summer of 2021. My flatmates and I packed up our things, had a sombre pint at the pub, hugged, and then went our separate ways. I boarded the train at Bristol Temple Meads with a degree in English and Philosophy and no feasible job prospects. I was also broke. Three years had come to a precipitous end, and it was time to move back home. I was worried about my future. The thought of becoming a bum terrified me: the sort of graduate who day drinks, listens to Limp Bizkit, starts a true crime podcast from his bedroom, and screams at his mother for not washing his pants. But I returned home in spite of my fears, largely for one reason: I couldn’t bear the thought of becoming a university hanger-on.

I read recently that this month marks 40 years since Britain’s first mobile phone call was made. It was in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1985 in Parliament Square, when one Michael Harrison rang his Vodafone chairman father, Sir Ernest Harrison. It would, of course, take many years – and much hankering and hysteria – before I got my own mobile A few years later, one sunny Saturday morning, my father took delivery of his first company car. I must have been about ten years old and can recall the sheer thrill of seeing something outside our house that wasn’t one of my mother’s seemingly endless succession of Volvos.

I was a late starter at everything. After drifting through my youth, and numerous false starts in life and work, I only found a committed relationship in my thirties and married in my forties. Even my second career as a writer waited until my fifties. So, too, did my unexpected third career, as a parent. For years, my significantly younger wife and I ached for a child. When it didn’t happen naturally, we embarked on a long, uncertain, painful and stressful IVF journey to fulfil our longing. When we accepted that we had reached the end of that road – or rather our endurance of its rockiness was exhausted – to our amazement and joy, a precious embryo decided to stay, and our daughter was born after a smooth and trouble-free pregnancy.

Partridges, purveyor of ‘nice things for the larder’ to the well-heeled, will close the doors of its Chelsea shop for the last time next month. After 53 years of serving SW3 delights such as ox tongue, macadamia nuts and glace cherries, the shop, run by the Shepherd family and in possession of a royal warrant, will soon carve its last slice of wafer-thin mortadella. Its landlord, the Cadogan Estate, has thanked Partridges for helping to ‘make Chelsea so special’. What Cadogan Estates omits to say of course, is that a branch of Whole Foods, that artisan behemoth beloved of American bankers and vegan, coeliac Gen Z-ers, is soon to take its place down the road.

Why do the cool die young? I don’t mean famous, cool people like Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison. They are members of the 27 Club – the pop stars who died at 27. I mean the schoolboy gods of my youth, the marvellous-looking, self-assured ones, effortlessly going out with the prettiest girls. And now seven of them – friends and contemporaries from school and university – are dead by the age of 50, either by their own hand or thanks to drink or drugs. The majority of my wild contemporaries have transformed into sober professionals None of the femmes fatales I know have died. Why is it only the cool men who’ve gone? As the cliché has it, they had it all. Take Alex Mosley, who died of a heroin overdose in 2009, aged 39.

I do not want to dwell on the circumstances, except to say that my phone was stolen and that London is becoming a reeking cesspool of criminality. Perhaps, also, that anyone caught cycling a Lime Bike without a clean criminal record should have the book thrown at them. The result of all this has been a lot of ugly self pity to the tune of ‘why me?’ The worst part was that at the time of snatching, my phone was unlocked, and therefore wide open for fraudulent activity. I disabled all online banking in time, but that didn’t stop the cretin from ordering himself a couple of Ubers and very nearly a PS5. In a brainwave that was pure Conan Doyle, I looked at the addresses these were ordered to, and they were all to the same flat – a clue.

The jigsaw is having a moment. Ditto other puzzles, games and brain teasers. Couples engage in post-coital sudoku (apparently). Wordle was played 4.8 billion times in 2023 (the lockdown invention of a young Welsh lad, Josh Wardle). Board game cafes have sprung up in cities. This recent resurgence in the popularity of puzzles is partly a hangover from the Covid pandemic. Sales of jigsaws and board games soared 240 per cent during the first week of lockdown, with more puzzles being bought for adults than children. There are also wider reasons: the so-called ‘homebody economy’ and Scandi-inspired hygge lifestyle craze (think being wrapped up in blankets with a log-burning stove while your mates are on a night out).

Eleanor Roosevelt said that the role of the First Lady was not a job but rather a circumstance. For Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, it is even more oblique. She is neither the former First Lady – since Canada does not endow the prime ministerial spouse with ‘première dame’ status – nor is she wife to Justin Trudeau, since their separation in 2023. In the wake of his resignation this week, she inhabits a curious predicament. As Canada’s Liberal first couple, they incarnated the kind of hip grandiosity of the Obamas without, of course, being black How better to occupy that quandary than to amplify her self-styled role as a wellness guru, mental-health expert and relationship healer?