Spectator Life

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.

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.