Spectator Life

I recently had the pleasure of spending some time with my two teenage grandsons, who live in Dorset – 16-year-old Dylan and Isaac, who is 14. Listening to them chatting with their friends, I slowly realised that, half the time, I hadn’t a clue what they were on about. Peculiar words I’d never heard before peppered their ‘convos’. What, I wondered, could be the definitions of ‘leng’ and ‘peng’? What was the meaning behind the mysterious expression ‘SN’? And why did they sometimes exclaim: ‘That’s beg!’ As is the way of the world, a whole new slang vocabulary has been created by their Gen Z. Ah, the groovy bygone days so fondly remembered by us hip Baby Boomers This was, of course, a case of history repeating itself.

Defeat stares me in the face every time I walk down my north London street. Decorating the knocker of a house a few doors along is a blue rosette announcing it’s home to the winners of the street dog show. Whenever I go past with my cockapoo Honey, she is nonchalant, barely bothering to stop for a sniff of the doorstep. I, on the other hand, am still seething – because until that sunny day almost two years ago, Honey had been undefeated. She was a champion, if not at Crufts, at least on the local dog show circuit where she has racked up certificates, rosettes and vast supplies of free dog chews, in everywhere from Hampstead Heath to Crouch End. Honey had seen off countless rivals, from cavapoos to bichon frisés, huskies to sausage dogs.

Before I went to medical school I had a hip alternative life. In the 1980s, as a 17 year-old schoolgirl, I wrote for the New Musical Express. My friends assume I had a great time with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, but the truth is I was such a cautious Carla that I didn’t touch the former two at all, and I scurried off home to be in bed immediately after each gig I reviewed. Each time they gave me a rolled up bank note and left me to snort in private, I blew Part of the reason was because I had strict parents. My dad was a benevolent patriarch who was older than many dads and had spent his youth as a cultured Persian immigrant in London, going to classical concerts and philosophy lectures.

On visits to the continent as a child, what struck me was the strangeness of other European countries. Going to France or Italy, pre-internet, you cut off your connections to the outside world, and even got the British news a day or two late. People ate horse meat, tortellini in brodo or croque monsieurs, and the kids drank Orangina and watered down wine. The smell of black tobacco smoke – dignified and with a kind of ancient wisdom to it – seemed to permeate every public building. But what you also noticed was the cars – Renault 4s on the Riviera, Citroen DS-23s in Paris, and in Italy, overwhelmingly, the tiny, toy-like Fiat 500, a design classic thrumming with character and a part of postwar history.

Every year, the world’s greatest watch companies and their biggest fans head to Geneva for an orgy of horological spectacle: Watches & Wonders. Here, companies pull out their latest, newest, most impressive goods, showing off the main products they intend to launch and the fans salivate and loosen their already pummelled wallets. It’s not a cheap hobby to be a watch lover.  The whole industry is in an odd place – and this was reflected in the watches displayed. In 2020 and 2021, the crypto and stock rush birthed lots of new-money millionaires who were eager to burn it all quickly, and Rolex, Patek and Audemars were happy to do the honours. Daytonas were sold out long before they made it to shelves and soon resold for many multiples of their RRP, with waitlists lasting years.

April is nesting season and with it comes egg collectors, an illegal band of very specialised and, in some ways, very British of criminals. Many would consider themselves wildlife enthusiasts. Most see their crime as a hobby, ignoring the effects of stealing a clutch of eggs and thus accelerating the species decline in a particular location. The thieves are certainly expert birders; they are able to recognise the nests of particular birds and know when to attempt their raids and where best to launch their raids. Older egg snatchers know not to exhibit their collections But though knowledgeable, they are despised across the birding community. The thieves themselves are not just ornithological anoraks.

When an au pair or nanny writes ‘I was wondering if I could talk to you this evening,’ it is rarely good news. At best, it is to ask for a pay rise; at worst, to give notice of a departure. ‘I’d like to go to Madrid,’ said our beloved au pair one evening, confirming our worst fears, and so began the quest for a new live-in nanny. We decided not to confront her with this discovery, and she proved a superb au pair Finding a good au pair or nanny is so fraught with peril that specialist agencies exist to reduce the burden, with some charging thousands of pounds for the service. Even with an agency, the family will need to meet the prospective recruit for an interview. Sometimes, a character flaw is obvious from the outset.

Amelia ‘Milly’ Gentleman, the Guardian’s fearless investigative reporter, has ‘exclusively’ revealed some of the Garrick Club’s filthy secrets. It’s ‘the final gasps’ of ‘a declining patriarchal elite’, she writes. ‘A lonely slice of an England that forgot to modernise’. All over the country, fair-minded folk must be thinking ‘woo, when can I join?’   Clubmen tend to talk about the subject that occupies people wherever they gather: the crooked timber of humanity What is the club’s original sin? To be an all-male enclave deep within the Establishment, which draws its members from the Inns of Court, Whitehall, Westminster, the City, and the West End. What? Judges, senior civil servants, bankers, and famous mummers quaffing and scoffing at the Garrick!

A year or two ago I got my first expensive watch, a Longines Conquest Heritage. It wasn’t quite my dream timepiece – that was a 1960s Omega Seamaster automatic (think Bond films at the Sean Connery stage) but these are priced off the scale and need plenty of specialist upkeep. The Longines Conquest, very much out of the same retro stable (it’s a copy of a 1954 model) was selling at a discount before they upped the prices and released a new model in a much bigger size, and as I have wrists more or less the width of fettucine, it was clearly time to act.

As so often, Hello! magazine had the scoop. Carrie and Boris Johnson are expecting again. This time it is ducks. For her 36th birthday Mrs Johnson was presented with an incubator and some duck eggs. Any day now there will be a splintering of shell and a chorus of incipient, high-pitched quacks as another waddling brood fights its way into the world. Yet more young beaks for Boris to feed, and all the little darlings topped by fluffy, yellow fur. Those Johnson genes! There is another sense in which baby ducks resemble MPs: they do not always last terribly long Duck incubators are fashionable in Chelsea-tractor circles. You need enough room near the Aga to accommodate a cage where the new arrivals can be kept warm and safe from clumsy-oaf feet.

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted a steam engine. When I was five my parents promised that I could have one when I was 12: I think they thought I’d forget. I didn’t, and seven Christmases later I unwrapped a model traction engine made by the Birmingham firm of Mamod. It was chunky and basic, and its bright green and red paint gave it a toy-like appearance. But its brass valves and copper pipes were unquestionably the real thing. Out in the garden, Dad and I lit it up. The engine grew warm, it hissed; its flywheel whirred into life. And a glorious aroma filled the morning air: a blend of hot metal, WD40 and the sweet, chemical fragrance of burning fuel tablets. One breath and I was hooked.

As a young man I sought out the company of much older people in the arts, feeling they had some secret to life, often the same one in different guises, which I wanted, needed to discover. In the let-it-all-hang-out youth culture of the 1990s I felt awash, and the elderly (which to a 20-year-old meant anyone over 60) were also kinder, less threatening, more generous with their time. Two people who influenced me most were Daniel Farson – roistering Soho writer and broadcaster, a kind of modern-day Toby Belch – and Karin Jonzen, a septuagenarian Swedish sculptress with a studio off the King’s Road. It was all pure gold, a kind of heightened life you swore you’d always strive for Dan I met by design.

In its primary Sunday morning slot, Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 finishes at noon. This is the cue for radio cognoscenti to turn the digital dial a single notch – to BBC Radio 3. Because as Desert Island Discs ends, Private Passions, its lesser known twin, is about to begin. I wrote here recently about the celebrations around DID’s 80th anniversary. And many of the comments from Spectator readers were along the lines of ‘yes, but it’s no Private Passions’. And that sentiment, which I partly share, comes, I think, from the fact that PP feels the more serious, the more grown-up of two otherwise very similarly formatted shows.  ‘The big difference is that on Desert Island Discs people do not necessarily have to be passionate about music.

After spending over $10 billion, screwing over corporate partners, hiring and firing talent and a decade of work trying to develop a flagship product for a new, massive market, Apple has killed what could have been its most ambitious product yet: an electric car. The failure of the electric vehicle project singularly reflects the culture and hubris of Apple Its death comes with no announcement, for Apple never officially acknowledged ‘Project Titan’ existed, but Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reported last week that its 2,000-person team had been shifted to other projects. Its demise is surprising because Apple rarely gives up on big projects, and because of just how much time and money had been spent on it.

Managing other people’s expectations takes the joy out of pretty much any excursion. Most things are better enjoyed alone. This hit me many years ago when I decided to risk a bullfight in Las Ventas in Madrid. My grandfather wasn’t long dead, and had been a fan of la corrida; I felt that this was something I wanted to do alone, lest whoever I was with think I’m a total sicko. As a naturally highly neurotic mother, it’s liberating not having to worry if one’s uniquely precious offspring I’ve since become less cautious about admitting how much I like going solo. Without the pressure of having to think about whether everyone else is having fun, you can immerse yourself fully in whatever new experience it is, and not be subjected to conversational post mortems either.

No one seems to be talking about how the faces of most of the female population appear to have frozen. I increasingly find myself gazing admiringly at groups of young men – like some sort of proud avuncular patriarch – who seem the only people left capable of smiling. Like knights of old, they are protectors of an arcane tradition that is dying out. Women form the bedrock of civilisation: without them on side, things ultimately go awry for any society The so-called ‘bitch face’ look is chic at the moment. Look at billboards and none of the models are smiling. It’s all very Bret Easton Ellis.

My nemesis is a student at another university. She has not always been my nemesis. We were friends until I realised that she was not who she purported to be. Her interests had been systematically poached from the people around her. Talking to her always felt like an interrogation from a particularly insecure detective. Real feminists know that empowerment comes from defining the breadth of your own animus She mined me constantly for pointers on speed-reading and language-learning. Rarely did she actually follow my advice, especially when it required resourcefulness and hard graft. The final straw came when my nemesis inquired, out of nowhere, about my career plans. ‘Thanks,’ she said when she’d finally managed to file them down to a single job title. ‘I’ll look into that.

Years ago, in the midst of a dating spree that involved numerous encounters with erratic and callous young men, I often consulted my cousin. She’s a cool, emotionally controlled New Yorker who seemed to have an innate knowledge of how to seize and maintain power in sexual or would-be sexual entanglements. She often advised me to nix the wordy message I had planned, especially in response to an outrageous slight, like a last-minute cancellation with a crap excuse and an insincere apology, and send a single yellow thumbs up instead. This was the craftier, nastier update on the cumbrous and obscene big blue thumb from Facebook messenger. For those of us who panic at blankness, the thumb is psychological botulism Her advice was clever.

Well, for the Waitrose classes, it seems you can get all the accessories for middle class eroticism at John Lewis. The store has started selling sex merchandise and the good news is that there’s been a restock this week for Valentine’s Day, which used to be sacred to roses, Charbonnel et Walker chocolates and scent – though excitingly, I was sent an offer of 30 per cent off a subscription to the Economist, billed as the perfect Valentine’s gift (funny people at that magazine). Ann Summers is entering a partnership with Deliveroo: can you think of anything more grim?

Abstinence doesn’t typically come to mind when one thinks of Valentine’s Day. But this year it coincides with Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, when we traditionally give something up. (Bear in mind that Christianity recognises a very gruesome torture and death as the ultimate gesture of love. For us, a little bit of suffering seems perfectly in order on a day celebrating love.) White-knuckled sex positivity isn’t serving women’s spiritual needs I was still in Catholic school in Virginia the last time the two days collided. We were, like all teenagers, obsessed with love and fixated on our own nascent desires, although this obsession manifested in strange ways.

I’ve been carrying with me a little black silk purse with a tortoise shell closing since my mother died 11 years ago. I suppose it’s one of the last things left from my beloved, stylish mother. To help me pick out a replacement, I enlisted my seven-year-old granddaughter, Maélle, a fashionista like me and her great grandmother The little black purse has been sitting in the bottom of my bigger purses; let’s call them handbags, although ‘handbag’ seems so old fashioned a word. I only use ‘handbag’ now to remember my French licence plate – EY 107 HB, ‘every year I buy 107 handbags’ – having moved here following my husband’s sudden death a year ago.

While perusing bins on the John Lewis website, having heard great things about the Brabantia 60-litre, I noticed my stress levels rise – and it wasn’t just because the lid-up height meant the bin wouldn’t fit in my new cabinet. It was because for my whole shopping session there had been a dribble of information about how many other customers had put the items I was looking at in their basket in the last 24 hours, how many had bought them and how fast the stock supply was dwindling. Over on the M&S website, a mattress topper flashed a banner: ‘In demand! Sold 43 times in the last 48 hours’. My heart rate climbed and I felt my wellbeing plummet as a generalised, half-conscious sense of missing out for being too slow – a lifelong fear – crept over me.

Like most clever people, I’m not over-fussed about clothing; there have been numerous studies showing that successful types – unless they’re in entertainment, showbiz or fashion itself, obvs – tend to wear the same thing every day. Whenever I hear the phrase ‘I like to express myself through what I wear’ I know we’re dealing with a dim bulb – how about expressing yourself through, I don’t know, your words and your actions? Fran Lebowitz once said ‘If people don’t want to talk to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your clothes?’ and though she was referring specifically to slogan T-shirts, I often think of it when I see people dressed in an ‘interesting’ manner.