Spectator Life

Think how many times you’ve seen the ‘Mona Lisa’. You’ve seen her in movies, in books, in cartoons; you’ve seen her as icon of female beauty, as an emblem of feminine mystique, as a commentary on the male gaze, or an amusing face on which to paint a moustache. But in all that time I bet 94 per cent of you have never noticed: she hasn’t got any eyebrows. It is, however, true – go look again. La Gioconda is eyebrowless. Why? A few ‘Mona Lisa’ truthers claim the brows have gone awol, but the consensus is they were never there. She shaved them off, because that was the quirky beauty standard of the day.

I am bald. Over the past few months, three events have reminded me of this fact. The first was on X (formerly Twitter). I was defending an article I had published in the British Medical Journal, in which I argued that doctors should behave professionally on social media. In response to my post, an irate doctor called me an ‘egghead’. The second was the revelation that my close friend Calvin, 46, had flown to Turkey for a hair transplant. He was not even bald, just thinning. Et tu, Calvin? The third took place only moments ago, and prompted me to write this piece. I was trying to spice up a WhatsApp message with an emoji. As I wanted to thank someone, I tapped into my Japanese heritage and chose the ‘bowing’ figure.

Like many teenage girls, I was a committed boy-sniffer. By which I mean a Lynx-sniffer, since this delightfully cheap but heady deodorant was synonymous with all the raging hormones – and the promise that went with them. Even the geekiest, ugliest, runtiest of the litter could be transformed into an object of mystique and allure by the waft of Lynx – perhaps Apollo or Voodoo, the two late nineties variants I remember best. Even today, I can’t entirely shake my soft spot for male cologne, and I’m embarrassed to say that when it’s plastered on some vulgarian on the Tube sporting a gallon of hair gel and one of those puzzlingly horrid moustaches bleeding into beard, I fail to recoil.

At a recent lunch where I was sitting next to A.N. Wilson I couldn’t help but take a good look at his suit. After all, this was the man often described as the original Young Fogey. He was dressed perfectly well in an austere two-piece, though while I (ever the try-hard) was sporting a pocket square, he was without one. On another occasion, chatting to Charles Moore in the colonial surrounds of the Foreign Office’s Durbar Court, the Lord was indistinguishable in dress from the other mandarins and journalistic bigwigs there. In bygone days, a Young Fogey such as he would have donned a seersucker suit and shantung silk tie for the occasion. The Young Fogeys’ flamboyance of dress evident in their heyday is gone.

Let me tell you a ghost story. I began texting Becky two weeks ago. Soon the messages were flowing. A date was set, a table booked. Friday night. Soho. Here we go. Then, a day before the date, the texts stopped and the lady vanished – leaving me to cancel the restaurant and spend the evening in the company of Wordle. It might be ten years since ‘ghosting’ was added to the dictionary, but the disappearing act has lost none of its sting. It’s also as common as ever: four out of five singletons say they’ve been ghosted. Received wisdom blames the apps. The industrial scale of dating today causes collateral damage. With everyone furiously swiping, matching and texting, there’s not enough time to close every administrative loop.

It is the evening of Monday 23 September 1985. A band called the June Brides are playing a free gig in the bar of Manchester Polytechnic’s Students Union, the Mandela Building (of course) on Oxford Road. I find myself among the audience of freshers’ week first-year undergraduates. I am 18, a small-town boy who’s been living in a big city for just 48 hours.  The place is half empty, the audience awkward. But I am quite taken with the band and the following day go to Piccadilly Records to buy their just-released mini album, There Are Eight Million Stories. The US novelist Dave Eggers would later recall being a teenage Anglophile indie fan in the suburbs of Chicago and cycling 20 miles to get this record that autumn. I could just get the 85 bus from Chorlton.

Have you ever looked after a child that doesn’t nap from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m.? I have. Just to be clear, I’m talking about a 14-hour day with no relief whatsoever from grannies, nannies or DHs, the ghastly acronym that Mumsnet uses for fathers to signify ‘darling husband’. Next question: have you ever looked after a child for the standard 14-hour shift and not turned a screen on? Don’t lie, because no mother on this planet will ever believe you. Seasoned mothers know that the only way to make it to the business end of the day – 5 p.m., give or take – is to fill chunks of the never-ending day with screen time, sometimes quite large chunks since you’re asking.

I’ve never cared about status symbols, because my talent is the only one I need, so of course I wasn’t concerned with mobile phones, which were once tremendous markers of rank. Since then, not having a smartphone (or pretending not to) has become a thing some high-status people boast about now that 95 per cent of the UK adult population (and a great deal of the child population) own them. Ed Sheeran claims to have dumped his in 2015, Elton John describes himself as a Luddite, while Simon Cowell sensibly told the Mail on Sunday way back in 2007: ‘It was actually stopping me from working or living properly, so I just turned it off and I went a month, three months, then a year, then two years, then three years and I love it…it’s absolutely made me happier.

Thousands of years ago, housewives living in what is now Iran would prepare for the spring equinox and Persian New Year by cleaning their homes from top to bottom. Today, ‘cleanfluencers’ on social media earn a living all year round by demonstrating how to keep your home sparkling. That might mean road-testing their new robot vacuum cleaner or going old-school and scrubbing grubby grouting with baking soda (spoiler alert: stain-removing toothpaste works better). Times have changed but the tradition of spring cleaning is alive and kicking.

You first start to notice them in that desultory way you become aware of the floating specks across your vision that signify a migraine is on the way. Perhaps you saw a woman in Waitrose wearing a black one and wondered why she was sporting a giant version of the Umbro football manager’s coat from the 1990s. Then someone pointed out the hot pink camo combo on the sidelines at an under-12s rugby tournament and, looking across the pitches, you realised just how ubiquitous they have become. By the time you spot my own hate-favourite – the Dryrobe Advance Abstract, a limited edition now out of stock which looks like the old Channel 4 test card – you may be experiencing full-on throbbing temples.

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?