Spectator Life

The new year is almost upon us, and it’s time to dust off the taffeta dress and tartan sash and sally forth to the annual reel. No doubt you will have received a lovely stiffy in the post some months ago. Reeling, known to neophytes and the non-U as Scottish country dancing, is, I believe, one of the last indicators of poshness in this country. Unlike skiing, riding or shooting – which you can, of course, learn if you have enough money – reeling is decidedly not about the dosh. There is absolutely nothing flash about reeling.

Anyone without time to read an author’s long works (most of us these days) might want to consider simply going to the top of the tree and reading their table-talk instead. Conversations with Writers, a series of books from the University of Mississippi Press, has hundreds of titles featuring collected interviews with different authors, from Sam Shepard to Graham Swift, Joan Didion to Nabokov, Edna O’Brien to Ken Kesey, nearly all of whom supply insights about writing or life itself on every page. ‘Worse things can happen than to write a novel and not have it published’ In many cases these books, with their reverence for literature and fascination with the creative process, depict a vanished world and remind you of something lost.

This week, in honour of its 70th anniversary, the Feathers Association released photos of youths aged 14 to 16 at its annual Christmas charity ball. Among them, a young David Cameron is pictured poutingly draped around Laura Stanley. The Queen’s son, Tom Parker Bowles, stands with his black tie askew, laughing at the camera with all the exuberance of youth. In private homage to the Feathers Ball, this week I too dug out the picture I have of myself before my first Feathers Ball in 1997. It is categorically not for public consumption. Standing in the Kensington townhouse of a school friend before we left for the ball, I am wearing a mini-dress and platform shoes. My expression is one of awkwardness but also, I think now, of foreboding.

At a recent drinks party in Oxfordshire, I counted five men wearing Nehru waistcoats. Not one of these men looked like he was paying homage to the garment’s namesakes, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Not one looked as if they were genuinely taken with Indian fashion nor remotely bothered that they were wearing the same thing. I detect a hint of smugness in there somewhere, a rather-too-pleased-with-itself appropriation Puzzled, I thought back to other men I’ve seen rocking the Nehru: Imran Khan, obviously; Nicholas Coleridge, probably; Mick Jagger, surely. I’m not sure what all these men have in common, but their take-up of the Nehru waistcoat has neither surprised nor alarmed me.

Let’s face it, there are many reasons not to visit London these days: the crime, the intimidatory protests, the woeful public transport, the eye-popping cost of everything, Sadiq Khan – I could go on. So disillusioned have I become with what was once my favourite place in the world that I fear I may be tiring of it, and thus, perhaps, life. Such thoughts make those assisted dying adverts the mayor has just plastered all over the Tube all the more poignant. We are not talking about fashion here, which I haven’t paid any serious attention to since the zip craze of the early 1990s But there is at least one area where London still excels, and can claim plausibly to be the world’s premier destination, at least for half of the British population: high-quality menswear.

When it comes to adventures in retail, nighttime shopping is where it all happens: the unusual and most interesting people, the prime parking spaces, the lack of queues and, best of all, the absence of germy, screamy, bored, needy, naggy children. Shopping at night is plentiful in the sticks where I live – the sticks being that area between the outer suburbs and Home Counties proper. It is where you can find both stretches of heath and woodland and still get a decent coffee, speciality breads, etc. Retail parks are open until 8, 9, or even 10, and two epic 24-hour superstores are a mere zoom away in my old car.

On hearing that the Groucho Club has been closed after the Metropolitan Police alleged ‘a recent serious criminal offence’, I felt a shiver of something I wasn’t quite sure of – one part sorrow, one part joy, shaken over ice-cold memories and served straight up. To some, the Groucho might have been some poncy private members' club but for me – from 1985 to 1995, between the ages of 25 and 35 – it was where I struck deals and enemies, fell in love with pretty strangers and went off those to whom I had promised to be true. The Groucho is where I became ‘Julie Burchill’, for better or worse.

You would be hard put to find a doughtier defender of British consumerdom than me. I don’t flinch from returning things that don’t work or don’t fit. I have successfully challenged supermarket bills as well as a fine for driving down a poorly signposted low traffic neighbourhood. So I’m no shrinking violet when it comes to consumer rights. Even for me, though, there comes a point where the buyer has to bear some responsibility. And that point is reached with the cash cow of the hour – historical car loans. As of a court judgment last month, the position is this: if you bought a car from a dealer with a loan between 2007 and 2021, you may find a bonus, or even a cancellation of the loan, winging your way in the form of ‘redress’.

It is now 20 years since I left university. Two pints in an evening and I feel groggy the next morning. My oldest child is in his last year at primary school, I regularly wake up with mysterious aches and pains, and we still have a very long way to go on our mortgage. All of which is to say that I am firmly and undeniably middle-aged. As it happens, I am rather enjoying myself at the start of my fifth decade. My midlife crisis takes one of the more benign forms: crafting a 1:76 scale model of an interwar rural branch line in the attic. That almost half of children do not have both parents present is grim But that is clearly not the universal experience.

Time was, a Barbour meant one thing: the classic Beaufort model that stank of wax, wet dog, and had pockets stuffed with cartridges from a shoot. Naturally, the late Queen Elizabeth modelled it best, standing at Balmoral in hers with her trademark neckerchief. There is an apocryphal tale that, like all die-hard Barbour devotees, the Queen refused to buy a new one from the 1970s onwards, instead preferring to have hers re-waxed until it presumably fell apart in one of Prince Philip’s Land Rovers. Such was the genius of the Barbour brand, which acted as a sartorial shorthand for the make-do-and-mend postwar generation, evoking all sorts of British no-nonsense, pull-your-socks-up attitudes ever since its inception in 1894.

Ten years ago, I decided that I should stop smoking. Before this decision, I had never given it a second thought. ‘Want to step outside for another? Yes please.’ Who cared about the wind blowing in from the Urals as we huddled around a lighter? Not I. Had I been ready to quit now, a new directive from the NHS, announced by Health Secretary Wes Streeting yesterday, offers smokers a free pill, varenicline, which notionally works by ‘binding to receptors in the brain to stop people craving or enjoying nicotine’. The decision to offer pills is part of the ‘prevention is better than cure’ narrative also being rolled out to tackle the NHS’s other great funds drain, obesity.   You can still smoke outside pubs, Starmer says, but not outside schools or hospitals.

Rolls-Royce calls the Cullinan Series II, the new version of its 2018 ‘high-sided vehicle’ (read SUV), its ‘most capable’ motorcar. That is an understatement. Rolls-Royces can be understated because they are bespoke and, as such, they are what you want them to be. You are dropping the price of a house on a motorcar, after all – the parallels with sexual longing are obvious, if under-disclosed. For every hot pink, or blush pink, Phantom with an interior ceiling lit up as your late dog’s face or horoscope – they can do this – there is an inky Ghost impersonating Bette Davis’s black silk dress in All About Eve. That’s my Rolls-Royce. Mostly, I like them black and white, like chessboards. But they are infinite. No one can touch you in a Cullinan.

One of the freedoms of later life, if you’re not Keith Richards, is that you no longer have to worry about being cool. Cool, far more than money, is the currency of youth, and as a teenager I knew who had it and who didn’t. But what was cool, all those decades ago? Who possessed it, and why did it matter? Coolness, in my youth, seemed in the DNA, something you either had or didn’t There were various things that defined ‘cool’ when I was a teenager, and most of us in some way fell short. It was the ability not to get too excited about things. To feel enthusiasms but show them obliquely. To wear clothes that hinted at certain trends but never to copy anyone else’s style too slavishly. To hang out with beautiful women but not develop crushes on each of them in turn.

I can’t remember exactly when I had my first cigarette, but I remember roughly how I started. I was probably 13. I picked up one of my mum’s packets of ten Silk Cut, which was about half full. I slipped one out, put it in my pocket, saving it for later. My friends and I walked through the streets of Crouch End until we found a corner that was quiet and away from the prying eyes of our parents. At funerals, everyone wants to smoke. People who gave up 20 years before and go jogging five times a week suddenly have a craving We got our matches out, lit it, and passed it round. When the smoke first hit the back of my throat, I retched a bit and coughed but carried on. I got a head rush, felt dizzy, and within a couple of minutes it was gone. No, it wasn’t good for us.

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear. I’m British, divorced, ginger-haired and I once accidentally called the late Radio 1 DJ Annie Nightingale ‘mum’ during an interview. So there’s very little I can learn about embarrassment. Or so I thought. My perspective changed somewhere around the moment that a male groomer versed in the nascent trend of the ‘boyzilian’ placed hot wax over my most intimate areas and told me, in the nonchalant manner of a butcher asking me how I’d like my sausages bagged, that I should prepare for a certain amount of pain. A certain amount of pain? I have always considered my discomfort threshold to be somewhere between an aged poodle with lumbar ache and a toddler playing with a freshly singed match.

The gardening world is a gentle, friendly place. Rows are rare, with disagreements creeping in softly like moss, not blowing up the way they do in politics. Everyone is quite nice to one another, almost to a fault. Which is why the row over Tom Massey’s AI garden at the Chelsea Flower Show is quite so striking. Since the line-up for the 2025 Royal Horticultural Society version of London Fashion Week was announced last week, gardeners have been absolutely and abnormally furious about the first shoots of AI appearing. Massey's garden promises to be an ‘intelligent’ one, using AI trained on RHS plant data and advice to tell visitors how the plot is doing.

When I was in London recently, I arranged to meet some old university friends at the pub. Now in our late 50s, we’re getting quite decrepit. Hair – if we have any left – is grey or greying; waistlines are expanding. We talked about our deteriorating vision and hearing, high blood pressure, dodgy knees. None of us is retired yet, but it’s a topic that comes up more frequently. Can we afford it? What will we do with all that extra time? Almost no one reaches middle age without life delivering a few sucker punches Once we’d exhausted the gloomy prospects of impending old age, we returned to our favourite topic of conversation – our youth, particularly our university years.

I love driving. When I say ‘driving’, I obviously don’t mean crawling along the North Circular at 2.7 miles per hour, in a state of zombified inertia, mutinously wondering why Keir Starmer’s voice is so weirdly soul-sapping. And when I say I love driving, I don’t want to claim I’m any kind of petrolhead. I have no idea what a carburettor is, and the same goes for crankshaft, torque, drift, and understeer. In fact, I’m not totally sure what a petrolhead is. I wonder if we are overlooking a much smarter solution, which can be found in Phnom Penh No, when I say I love driving, I mean what I am doing now: speeding across majestic British Columbia in a massive great motor, eating up the North American miles on a proper North American road trip.

‘Buglers are operating in this area’ warns the Metropolitan Police sign, heralding the sound of trumpets perhaps. Aggravated burglary is often described as ‘a burglary gone wrong’, the planned effortless removal of domestic goods having met with some kind of ‘unforeseen’ opposition, the fireside poker taken up by the victim perhaps, or an XL Bully. I observed two signs, the first letting one know that this was a ‘Yellow Fever Centre’ and the other that it was advisable to ‘check with your dealer, as some supplies are impure’ Venturing out in London has become a little daunting. I was startled on a recent tube journey to hear over the intercom that one should ‘beware of unforeseen spillages’. What, one wonders, are foreseen spillages?

Ask my friends and family and they’ll tell you: I am an electric car bore. I’m not a gushing enthusiast. I’m more the negative kind of EV dullard. I can’t stop telling people about the horror of driving these wretched things. I'm really not like this about other subjects, or indeed about life. I’m generally pretty positive and optimistic. But I have an EV. I rely on it to get me from A to B, at all hours, in all weather conditions, and perhaps, heaven forbid, even at short notice. You might not be surprised to hear that my electric car is sorely deficient in doing all these things. Let’s start at the dreaded beginning. I came upon my EV through the company car scheme at work.

I am a procrastinator: a time-waster, a faffer-about, an idler, a vacillator. A self-loathing, self-sabotaging masochist grappling with that mad parody of perfectionism, which leads, instead of efficiency, to neglect, apathy, inertia, distraction, and great pain. It is irrational but irresistible. It is to time-keeping the greatest false economy since the finances of the Weimar Republic. Most people procrastinate to an extent, delaying gratification in things that are not professional – paperwork, loading the washing machine, emptying the dishwasher. The only people I have ever known who did not even do that were my parents, both examples of the war generation.

I doubt that Sir Keir Starmer has ever been inside a TK Maxx. I don’t see him, even in his early parliamentary days, hunting and rummaging for designer fashion, or trying on dozens of duds in a bid to find ‘the one’. We know the Prime Minister loves swanky clothes at the lowest possible price – and that’s TK Maxx’s raison d’être. But I don’t think he has the attitude required for shopping there. It's a pity because, with the right approach, TK Maxx can deliver great rewards. It has for me – calming my nerves when my personal life turned frantic and distracting me when the entire world seemed insane. It works as a tonic, I think, because TK Maxx shopping is an all-embracing activity requiring total concentration and commitment.

The NHS uses 130,000 pagers, 10 per cent of the world’s total, and a fraction that slightly increased on 17 September when several thousand of those belonging to Hezbollah exploded. In fact, the NHS, where I work, and Hezbollah share certain problems when it comes to communication infrastructure. A few years ago, I was delighted to see a ward computer with a floppy disk drive – 5.25”, of all things, and be thankful if you’re too young to know the difference between that and 3.5”.