Spectator Life

I grew up in the America of the 1960s, an era renowned for its kaftan-wearing hippies, its ethos of free love and hallucinogens, and demos against the Vietnam War. This was something that caught the imagination of my two London-born, English sons, once they were old enough to have acquired some knowledge of recent social history. And they naturally assumed I’d been part of that whole scene, with flowers in my hair and love beads around my neck, smoking pot and blasting out Jimi Hendrix records from a bedroom hung with Che Guevara posters. They took it as read that I was at the legendary Woodstock music festival and danced all night in a muddy field. This image of their youthful mum appealed to them, so they convinced themselves it was real.

I try to head for cooler climes year-round but particularly during the summer, as anything over 20 degrees has me sweating like a pervert and swearing like a docker. But this year I was persuaded to join friends in Corfu, and so with my younger daughter in tow, I braced myself for the inevitable perimenopausal response to savage heat. 10-year-old Ottilie, of course, loved it instantly. Reflecting, as she basked in the balmy waters of Corfu Old Town, that while she’d loved our holiday in Iceland a few weeks previously, and while she agreed that Norway is a peerless destination, she could now understand why some of her friends like a Mediterranean jaunt. Indeed, a war of attrition for a return visit next summer commenced pretty much immediately.

They came straight off the back of a lorry and were placed carefully – top to tail - in three cat carriers, two hens in each. Broken feathers stuck from the air vents, bright, suspicious, amber eyes peered out. We drove them home, listening out for any squawks of distress, but they were silent. Bemused, exhausted, probably wearily resigned to whatever fate awaited them next. These former battery hens, who’d spent the entirety of their short lives living in metal cages no bigger than a sheet of A4, should have been on their way to slaughter These former battery hens, who’d spent the entirety of their short lives living in metal cages no bigger than a sheet of A4, should have been on their way to slaughter.

While ambling along a quiet beach with my husband near our home, our attention was caught by a water skier in the distance. As we stood watching him zip at high speed across the bay, we were interrupted by a gentle nuzzling at our legs. My husband and I were being greeted by a youngish black Labrador who then stood stock still, gazing up at us. Although we recognise many dogs in our area, we hadn’t seen this fine-looking companion before. Given his keenness to make our acquaintance, we said hello and patted him, trying to discern his message, before a woman arrived and apologised. No need, we said. The woman explained that the dog had – er – prematurely left Guide Dogs’ puppy school due to his – um – free spirit. We couldn’t help but laugh.

My first brush with Artificial Intelligence was the Furby – that hideous speaking Gonk with eyes that blinked. You could hear the cogs turning. It felt basic, even for the 2000s. My techie ex got it for me as a birthday present. Like babies, this infant technology responded to clapping. It was weird and dull. Having exhausted its repertoire, I discarded it beside the sofa. One night, weeks later, we were sitting together and heard the whirr of its eyes opening, and it just said, the once, clearly in its strange little voice, ‘Boring’. We laughed. That was as good as it got. Alexa is not sexy like my old satnav, who sounded like Joanna Lumley as a bored dominatrix Alexa, though, is the real deal: my android in a can, my useful housemate. I consult her often.

For most parents whose teenage years pre-dated Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, few things are as terrifying as the social media use of their children. What might seem like harmless fun, such as posting memes, sharing photos, or venting frustrations, can have life-changing consequences. As a barrister who represents students, I have seen how a single ill-judged post can ruin a young person’s future. In one memorable case, a pupil was expelled from secondary school for using the phrase ‘deez nuts’ with a classmate In one memorable case, a pupil was expelled from secondary school for using the phrase ‘deez nuts’ with a classmate. The male pupil had meant it as a joke, but the female pupil found it offensive and reported it to the headmaster.

Many years ago I wrote a book called Dreams and Doorways, a collection of interviews with well-known people – writers, actors, politicians, sports personalities – about their childhood. I wanted to find out how their early experiences helped to turn them into the high-achieving adults they later became. And in almost every case, some kind of deprivation or anguish or obstacle was a key factor; they’d been motivated by a determination to overcome adversity. My days were a little less happy. My mother didn’t believe in the permissive child-rearing policy of liberal American moms For boxing champ Henry Cooper, it was extreme, ‘bread-and-dripping’ poverty in South London.

Two photos from the youth of Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance have recently surfaced and are filling his opponents with glee. In one of them, he’s dressed as a woman, with shoulder-length golden hair, a look of yet-to-be-plucked wistfulness, and three days of teenage stubble. The other shows him loitering in a men’s bathroom, a faint aura of The Munsters about him, as three smiling young women (fellow members of his Ohio school’s student government) pretend to relieve themselves standing up into a row of urinals.

Balanced rakishly on my late grandmother’s china parrot is a MAGA hat bought in 2016 when it seemed highly improbable that Trump would beat the walking pantsuit, Hillary. Much like my Vote Leave badge, I bought it as a piece of provocative fast-fashion and my ever-expanding archive of political merchandise from the last decade. I also own a ‘Forward’ Obama cap from his 2012 campaign, purchased when I lived in the States, but it didn’t make the parrot. The MAGA hat’s genius lies in its simplicity: it does exactly what it says on the brim Fast forward eight years and Granny’s parrot is still a cap-wearing Trump supporter.

I’ve never been seduced by the circus. As a motif in children’s literature, particularly taken up by Enid Blyton and Disney. In fact, as an animal-loving child, I think I found it cruel; I wanted Nellie the Elephant to pack her bags and say goodbye to the circus, I longed for her to slip her iron chain. In childless adulthood, I forgot all about it. Until I moved back to Oxfordshire and Giffords Circus appeared on the horizon every summer, its posters slapped on every lamppost from Charlbury to Cheltenham. The posters might have pulled in some punters, but for a certain type of middle-class patron, Giffords needed no advertisement. Everyone knew about it. It was the day out du jour. The young, the old, the child-laden, the childless: all came in their droves.

My wife and I have only ever dated by accident. After our third date a decade ago (well, what I thought was our third date) that she texted me asking, ‘So was that just dinner and theatre, or was it “dinner and theatre?”’ To this day, she insists that she had no idea what was going on (despite my sudden interest in her after two years of just being acquaintances, the Skype calls, the hand-painted postcards… actually, I’d better not start). A few years later, early on in our marriage, when we were still childless, young professional Londoners, we thought we’d wildly treat ourselves to dinner out on a Thursday.

I am never allowed to forget that at my fourth birthday party I made clear my expectation to my mother and the gathered guests that I expected to win all the games. The logic was clear and to my mind (still) fair: it was my birthday and so I should win. When this wasn’t passed into law, there was some anger on my part. Why should Kelly and Kate take home the pass-the-parcel first prize, and gain recognition for being fastest at eating donuts hanging from a string? Apparently in my pretty white swirly dress with its pink satin sash, wielding a wooden spoon for a game of blind man’s buff I was destined to lose, I was quite the little despot – though ineffectual.

The Cotswolds used to be a wonderfully bucolic fantasy of English villages; red telephone boxes, gilded honey-stone hamlets with verdant greens where the vicar would umpire cricket matches, and pubs where poachers and gamekeepers would mix. Then it became fashionable and now it’s been Farrow & Balled to within an inch of its life. The Cotswolds is not the country. It is an extension of Notting Hill You could blame the King for purchasing Highgrove House in Tetbury in the 1980s. Suddenly, wannabe poshos began buying Cotswold cottages in the hope some royalty would rub off on them (real poshos would never consider doing something so outré, and prefer Norfolk anyway). Now it’s experiencing the ‘Bamford effect’ thanks to the Daylesford farm shop.

You might remember that short period during the pandemic when eggs were unavailable. I was very annoyed that the one period when I had time to cook breakfast in the mornings there was no breakfast to cook. However, I was finally able to persuade my wife that we needed to keep chickens. Purely for logistical purposes, you understand: we had to guarantee our supply chain. During the pandemic, otherwise sensible people bought into that kind of logic. My wife had never been keen on the idea previously. Like most Jewish women, she thinks of the natural world as that greenish blur between the taxi and the front door; and, while I’d managed to persuade her to move to a cottage in the country with roses round the door, keeping livestock was a Step Too Far.

I have been fond of vests ever since those plain white cotton ones we wore for primary school athletics in the long ago and mythically hot summers of the mid-1970s. No other garment in the male warm weather wardrobe is quite the same. A T-shirt isn’t as breathable, while a loose linen shirt even half unbuttoned doesn’t allow the cooling air to play around the shoulders in the same way. And neither allow you to catch the sun on your skin so pleasingly. They only really come into play in high summer: you wouldn’t attempt one in May or September. But for July and August, when, in a good year, the temperature consistently gets into the thirties, if paired with cotton shorts and flip flops or sliders, they are about as stripped back as the male wardrobe gets away from a beach.

In 1987, when I was 19, I started at my first ‘proper’ adult job. This was as a lowly civil service clerk, or administrative officer – filing, basically. It was a post within the Lord Chancellor’s Department – as it was known then – but which today is called the Ministry of Justice, which doesn’t sound totalitarian or sinister at all. It was an epochal life stage, and a winter that was full of scents and sensations, the way winters are in the summer of one’s years. How would we deal with a hypothetical situation where somebody – identity unknown – had dry-boiled the office kettle? Part of the process of this new job was an order to attend, along with other similar junior newcomers across the civil service, an induction day at a central London office.

I recently went to a conference on the impact of artificial intelligence on the wine industry. It was not immediately obvious why this would have any relevance to my life. I know nothing about AI, having decided not to bother experimenting with it after being reassured by my delightful first cousin once removed that as it still can’t generate convincing Petrarchan sonnets, mankind has nothing to fear. (Yes, he is at Oxford.) And it’s perhaps more shameful that – despite being married to a master of wine – I know so little about booze; I can’t even claim to know what I like, but mercifully he does.

We are having a glorious July where I live in Poland. There have been pleasantly warm days. The birds are singing. The beer is cool. So, why does a sense of melancholy keep snaking around my consciousness? Well, for various reasons. I can’t claim to be the world’s most cheerful man. But one reason is that we have passed the summer solstice – the longest day of the year. I find myself wondering how on Earth it is July when March feels so recent However warm and bright it is, the days will soon grow colder and darker. The best is behind us. The worst lies ahead. Today we are enjoying the sunshine in our shorts but tomorrow we will be shivering in the dark at 5 p.m. Irrational? Of course. We should enjoy the time we have instead of feeling gloomy about the times to come.

I’d all but forgotten about David Cameron when he returned as foreign secretary under the last government, and the first thing I remembered about him, when he returned, was his chin. By which I mean its prim absence and how, combined with those thin lips and tiny mouth, more like a fish’s than a person’s, I have always found the man deeply unhandsome in a very Tory way. Starmer is the first prime minister since Tony Blair (sorry) with whom I would happily consider a saucy affair Now we have new leadership, and with it, a new paradigm of attractiveness. David Lammy, the new Foreign Secretary, is even less handsome than Dave but for different and therefore revitalising reasons.

Rishi Sunak devoted part of the last day of his doomed premiership to meeting Becky Holt, Britain’s most tattooed mother, on ITV’s This Morning show. Ms Holt was clad in a bikini which revealed much of the 95 per cent of her body surface that is covered in tattoos. After the brief encounter, she told OK magazine that the PM had been ‘really, really polite’ and had merely inquired how much her tattoos had cost. I once had a close encounter with a woman who had her last lover’s birth sign tattooed in a very intimate spot During the 20th century and earlier, British tattoos were largely confined to sailors who had acquired them in foreign ports.