Spectator Life

Sabrina Carpenter first emerged in 2014 as a child actress on the Disney Channel. From there, she signed with a record label, becoming yet another entertainer to take advantage of the tween-TV-to-music-charts pipeline (see Miley Cyrus, Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez et al). Ten years and five average albums later, she was known only to a few teenage girls, but over the last few months this has changed. The 25-year-old is now everywhere: music videos, magazine covers, billboards, chat show sofas and, of course, Instagram and TikTok. If you’re under the age of 30, you can’t escape Carpenter.

Steve Coogan confessed in a recent interview on BBC1’s The One Show that he is morphing into his alter ego Alan Partridge. ‘There’s almost a complete overlap in the Venn diagram,’ he admitted, ‘by this time next year I will have completely become Alan.’ Maybe he was joking, but I suspect he kind of meant it. At a recent drinks party, I discovered to my horror that I’d come dressed exactly like every other midlife man in the room The comedian has spent years trying to distance himself from the boss of Pear Tree Productions, firstly by creating ‘other less successful characters’, his words, not mine, and then by retreating to Hollywood.

It is no longer normal to see Hollywood men looking normal anymore. From the empty cheeks of Ozempic face to the puffed-out Brotox foreheads to the eerily-uniform veneers of Turkey teeth, no one seems to be aging, but no one seems to also be quite so attractive. Even Ryan Gosling, once my favourite heart-throb, has overdone the filler, and now looks like he is smuggling a pair of snooker-balls in his cheeks. Boys and young men are being sold a lie The same is true for male bodies; masculinity means muscularity. In our superhero-saturated age, audiences are inundated with images of male physical perfection: torsos like upside down triangles, shoulders that look like boulders, thighs that have their own gravitational pull, abs so shredded that they could grate cheese.

I remember sitting on the bus a few weeks into #MeToo and thinking all the men looked disengaged – buried in their phones or listlessly looking out the window. I imagined them thinking it just wasn’t worth it to look up lest they be accused of making unwanted advances. These days, I spend fewer mornings worrying about the fate of the red-blooded male. Nonetheless, it’s not rocket science to suppose that for a significant swathe of men – those who fear being publicly shamed or sacked – it really isn’t worth showing their appreciation of women.

I’ve had many encounters with Sir Richard Branson over the 40 years since he launched Virgin Atlantic, the smart, stylish British airline that arguably should be this country’s premier national flag carrier. (As it happens, a Spanish-registered airline called British Airways is the dubious claimant to that status.)  The oddest and most revealing meeting took place in 1996 around the time he was planning to re-enter the music market. Five years earlier, Branson had sold Virgin Records to EMI for £550 million. I was living in New York and was looking for financial backing for a musical I’d helped create. I called Branson in London, expecting to be fobbed off. Instead, he told me he was coming to New York imminently and that we should discuss the project over breakfast.

When I was growing up, regional accents were quite firmly delineated. If you came from Birmingham, for example, you spoke Brummie. That is, unless you were posh. In which case, wherever you lived, you spoke the same BBC English – or received pronunciation. Speaking ‘correctly’ was a determiner of class, like a grounding in Latin. If you met someone who spoke RP, you knew they’d probably had a similar education. Even today, when certain people ask, ‘where did you go to school?’ what they really mean is, ‘which public school did you go to?’  I once spent two miserable months working in a housing association, where my accent made me a target for some of my less open-minded colleagues The problem with ‘talking posh’ when I was growing up was that you stuck out.

As any child of the 1980s could tell you, whether your house had a Sky dish had nothing to do with income. The launch of BSkyB in 1989 – when Rishi Sunak was eight and I was 10 – was greeted with horror by our middle-class professional parents, just as with their parent’s generation when that ghastly ITV began broadcasting. Crudely, Sky was common. It was council house – like single parents (still a rarity in my native Suffolk in the 1980s), fish fingers and the Sun. Our route to primary school took us through the council estate where satellite dishes sprouted as quickly as green wellies in the rain in the old part of the village.  None of the pretty period houses in the village were sullied by a Sky dish ‘Why can’t we get one?

In the past I would have been interested in crafting plausible excuses for unforgivable social behaviour such as failing to turn up to events to which you had RSVP’d, missing a netjet or having said something genuinely appalling. One example: circa 1999, the late Rt Hon Alan Clark MP wrote to Dear Mary. He asked how, without losing face, he could apologise to someone he hugely admired, but to whom he had found himself being inexplicably rude at a party. For minor social crimes white lies are acceptable, if by being truthful you will rob another person of their self-confidence We all knew that Alan Clark was temperamental but his target had been Boris so he obviously couldn’t have meant the insults.

The famous Flyfishers’ Club, Britain’s oldest fly-fishing club, is the latest male bastion to have the fair sex banging at the door. Women feel they have been unjustly excluded throughout its 193-year history, and now they want in. Seeing as the Garrick has at last buckled to the demand to admit women, they say the Flyfishers should too. I quit the venerable Society of Authors too, after discovering it isn’t primarily for authors anymore But I, for one, will be making no such demand. And not just because I have zero interest in fishing with flies. The truth is, I am probably the least clubbable person you are likely to meet. Although it’s taken me most of my life to finally recognise this fact.

Michael Prowse, proprietor and auctioneer at Pilton Auctions, is rummaging through boxes at the back of his office – which is in a warehouse, up a wooden ladder and underneath corrugated metal and plastic roofing. ‘I’ve got something horrendous here,’ Michael says, ‘but its on it’s way to the bin.’ I’ve asked him what the strangest item he’s sold at auction is. He’s not sure, but he’s on a mission to find the strangest item he won’t sell. It appeared during one of Pilton Auctions routine house clearances.  I watched a man in his fifties arrive to collect half a dozen world war two German photo albums, which he put into a Finding Nemo bag ‘What is it?’ I ask, not sure I want to know the answer.

Can an older person like me ever really be friends with a young person? At one time I would have said yes, absolutely. Age has nothing to do with friendship. You either enjoy someone’s company or you don’t. End of story. But now I’m not so sure. My young friends in London are always having parties and I’m chuffed when they invite me. But my friend N takes great delight in teasing me. She says, ‘Don’t take it personally. You’re the token old guy. These days every party has to have at least one.’ It’s always assumed that an older man who has young female friends must be up to no good You might wonder: why would I want to be friends with young people in the first place?

The man in the Post Office was a bit bemused by the three enormous boxes I was trying to send from my home just outside Edinburgh down to London. He’d asked what the value of the packages was. In one sense, they were worthless, I explained. But I really needed to make sure they got to the Chelsea Flower Show on time because in another sense, they were worth their weight in gold. It didn’t help when I explained that the contents were in fact just dead leaves.  The dehydration of the bog myrtle became a proxy for the way the team were feeling These dead leaves have become a total obsession ever since I was offered a place as a volunteer on one of the show garden builds for this year’s Chelsea.

A man takes the stage at the Clapham Grand. His large, histrionic eyes are ringed with kohl. His slim limbs are decked in spandex, open to a furry navel. He throws back his flaxen hair and punches the air. ‘Thunder!’ he yells to the opening salvo of the AC/DC tub-thumper ‘Thunderstruck’. His name is Mac Savage and I used to know him at school.  The set that follows is a greatest hits of the 1980s and 1990s, from Bono to Britney. And there are revelations. Did you ever notice, for instance, how tender the lyrics are to Tina Turner’s ‘The Best’? Or how terrible they are to ‘The Final Countdown’?  And Mac Savage and Rockstar Weekend? They’re the Proms.

The company that makes the world-renowned Swiss Army penknife has decided to introduce a range of penknives that come... wait for it... without knives – citing increased regulations ‘due to the violence in the world’. It isn’t the knives that need changing, but rather the poorly-applied laws The problem is that a Swiss Army penknife without a knife isn’t a penknife, it’s a multi-tool, which is an entirely different kettle of fish (and you couldn’t possibly gut a fish with one of them – unless you’re going to unleash the corkscrew, Phillips screwdriver or tweezers on your trout). It isn’t the knives that need changing, but rather the poorly-applied laws.

In 2020, the year of coronavirus, I came to a fork in the road. I’d just turned 50, a moment of looking back over your life, realising what you’ve failed to achieve, and accepting there’s only a finite number of years left to you. It was clearly a time for making a change of some sort, something fundamental and radical, and I duly made one. I faced reality, took myself in hand, and decided to switch to a new aftershave.  Until then, it had been Dunhill Edition all the way. Launched in 1984, it had caught me in my mid-teens, was my first taste of adult sophistication (Jeremy Irons wore it!) and it hadn’t really occurred to me in the intervening decades to wear anything else.

In the penumbra cast by the light of my phone, I can dimly see the wreckage of a night with a newborn baby: half-drunk bottles of milk, the tangled cord of the monitor, muslins strewn across the bed. It is 3 a.m. and the baby has gone back to sleep. I, however, am wide awake. Or rather, the consumer in me is wide awake. I decide to buy a Dreamland Baby weighted sleep sack costing £79. Its promises are seductive, outrageous even, to my crazed mind: ‘Our mission is to help your baby feel calm, fall asleep faster & stay asleep longer, so your whole family can get the sound sleep they deserve!’ The sleep they deserve. Yes, I think, we are owed sleep and I’m prepared to pay over the odds for it.

I don’t have much in common with Charlotte Church (I support the ancient state of Israel, whereas she supports Narnia; she’s still relatively young and cute, whereas this ancient mariner’s ship has sailed) but something we do share is a lifetime of extreme generosity verging on the profligate, often to people who do not deserve it. As Katie Hind’s headline in the Mail squealed recently: ‘I watched aghast as Charlotte Church's freeloading posse fleeced her in a nightclub when she was just 18 – I'm not surprised she's burned through her £25 million fortune!’  The money I spent always had the air of Monopoly money I never had £25 million, but I earned masses of money for a couple of decades in the 20th century and was a cash millionaire for a few years in the 21st.

It’s the flash that shocks you first. It’s night and you’re driving in the outside lane of the motorway at a speed that isn’t exactly the national limit, but isn’t so wildly in excess that it would raise eyebrows. Suddenly your car floods with the light of a thousand suns. The flash in the rear-view mirror alone is enough to dazzle. It’s not a speed camera – you know from bitter experience that it’s too fast, too furious for that. Has Putin detonated a tactical nuke over the last junction? That would actually feel less threatening. The flash comes again, and as your eyes readjust the mirror shows a pair of headlights roughly ten feet behind your neck. Alarm shades into cold fury: you’re being tailgated.  Because it is usually a BMW, isn’t it?

Researchers at the Humboldt University of Berlin have discovered that we no longer consider ourselves old until we’re 74. What’s more, by the time you reach 74, you think old age begins at 77. Which is something to celebrate – just don’t tell the Department for Work and Pensions or they’ll get more bright ideas about pushing back the state retirement age still further (it’s already due to rise to 68 in the 2040s already, don’t forget). Sexual selection is increasing the prevalence of neoteny – that is the retention of juvenile traits As well as perceptions, of course, the facts about our ageing society speaks for themselves: when I was born in the 1970s the median age in Britain 30. Now it’s just over 40. There are now 15.