Notes on...

‘In the distance a dog barks.’ When I read that sentence recently, in Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo, it gave me pause for thought. Hadn’t I encountered variations on that phrase countless times before? My leisure reading tends towards undemanding thrillers, with high body counts and maverick crime-fighters unmasking unlikely serial killers. Which is possibly why the phrase seemed familiar – some hapless character in these novels is always setting off alone into the forest or down some mean street, usually in a swirling mist or at the dead of night, when somewhere in the distance, a dog barks. It never ends well. Once you notice distant barking dogs you realise they are everywhere.

Pity the poor lumpfish. It’s lumbered with an unflattering name, or its equally unattractive moniker: ‘Sucker fish.’ It also looks unappealing. The blighters are endowed with a stubby nose and knobbly, spotty, tubercular skin that gives them their lumpy look. With a carbuncled, ridged back, bulging eyes and a suction disc so it can attach itself to rocks, it hardly cuts the sexiest figure. But God bless the lumpfish, it does deliver poor man’s caviar in spades. It couldn’t look more different from the king of caviar, the sturgeon, which is the most elegant fish in the ocean. Long, sleek, silver, the sturgeon flows effortlessly through the water like Concorde flying through the sky. It has handsome stitching along its body.

Last week, aged 26, I bought myself my first pair of shoes. Before now, I have relied on the Magic Shoe Fairy to deliver a pair of brogues or boots at Christmas. I get through shoes at an alarming rate, based on a shambling gait inexplicable to science, and an unfortunate habit of treading down the backs rather than putting them on properly. But glancing down at my last pair on my way into work, I snapped. I realised that the size of the holes, the copious scuffing and the ominous looks from fellow passengers was making my shoes indistinguishable from those worn by the tramps and crackheads outside Victoria Station. I made a beeline for M&S. But as pleased as I was with my grown-up purchase, they brought a familiar and horrible rubbing.

‘How long have they been here?’ ‘Three generations.’ ‘Ah, just grockles, then.’ Exchanges such as this must have taken place in countless Devon villages. A ‘grockle’ is a Devonshire term for a tourist or incomer. I suppose it could be offensive. But being called a grockle is not usually a term of abuse and in general the word is spoken with a half-smile rather than a grimace. Not least because, in Devon at least, ceasing to be a grockle and becoming its opposite – the local lad or girl – is a generational endeavour. I am definitely a grockle. I moved to Devon from Huntingdonshire when I was 20 to work on a dairy farm near East Worlington.

I was looking at a photo of my great-grandfather the other day and admiring his beard. A magnificent spade-shaped affair, it reached halfway down his chest. He was a Victorian, of course, and his era was, above all, the century of the beard. All the eminent Victorian males, such as Darwin, Dickens, the Earl of Salisbury and Prince Albert, wore them. Gladstone and Disraeli may have been political rivals, but they were united in both being devoted pogonophiles. When President Trump and Pete Hegseth decreed recently that all US military men should be clean shaven, it struck me that, had that rule been around in the 1860s, the American Civil War would never have been fought, since all the leading generals on both sides were endowed with substantial forests of facial hair.

It is a great family disappointment that I could never get into golf. My late grandfather would become so engrossed watching the Masters that he used to light one cigarette off the other. But it was always unfathomable to me. Attempts to play at school were less a good walk spoiled and more a Friday afternoon wasted. Yet my antipathy has a glorious exception: there are few things in life I enjoy more than a round of crazy golf. For years I have toured the nation’s courses, putting past plastic dinosaurs and animatronic windmills, Slush Puppy and scorecard in hand. ‘Proper’ golf is difficult. Crazy golf reduces it to the essentials: hole, putter and Newtonian physics, the odd stegosaurus notwithstanding.

Monstera deliciosa, otherwise known as the Swiss cheese plant, is perhaps the most popular houseplant of them all, probably because it’s so easy to care for. In normal circumstances, you almost have to try to mess it up. A heatwave, however, akin to those we’ve become used to this summer, can put a monstera under stress. Subject one to anything more than 30°C for too long and you’ll find its poor leaves scorched, its roots damaged and its stems desperately dehydrated. For this reason, there might be the temptation to turn to a shockingly popular alternative: the plastic plant. It should be resisted at all costs. A potted history takes us back to the 1950s, when a postwar manufacturing boom saw the mass production of cheap polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene.

Some years ago, I managed to get an invitation to a very exclusive party. One of the guests was Prince Philip and some way into the evening he drifted over in my direction. He used the classic royal conversation opener: ‘Hello, what’s been keeping you busy?’ ‘I work in marketing,’ I replied. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. He turned away and went to find someone more interesting. I was officially boring. That’s fine, because I have made it my lifetime’s work to seek out the boring at parties. Those who drone on, those who tell the same story over and over, and those with that odd nasal monotone that makes most people desperate to escape their company. I am not alone in this. C.S. Lewis did the same thing.

You could attempt to interest your kids in the World Cup by introducing them to Panini stickers. Or you may consider it more affordable in the longer term to introduce them to crack cocaine instead. Because these football-themed collectables are not just habit-forming but positively addictive, which can be financially ruinous for those paying. The Italian brand first launched here ahead of the World Cup in Argentina in 1978 when only Scotland of the Home Nations were among the 16 teams to qualify. Fast forward 48 years and the World Cup has trebled in size to 48 teams. So this year’s corresponding Panini collection is bigger, brighter – and more expensive – than ever before.

The cult economist Adam Tooze generally discusses matters far beyond my understanding on his podcast Ones and Tooze. While roasting in my flat over the heatwave, however, I found myself gripped by a segment he did on the economics of beach recreation. Did you know that 50 per cent of Americans going on holiday regard getting a tan as more important than the actual holiday? This correlates with the rise of the ‘tanfluencer’ and ‘tanmaxxing’ among Gen Z and the revival of the full-on, George Hamilton-style tan. As a bit of an old tanorexic myself (remember, fellow boomers, the smell of Bergasol?), I’m quietly thrilled. First, because if this is a competition I will almost certainly win it (spot the brownest white person in the room: that’s me!).

‘Feeling a bit stressed or anxious? Want to practise more mindfulness? Looking for good vibes and your best mellow and chill?’ This is not an advert for a life coach but the official sales pitch for NeeDohs, the much-coveted new children’s toys. These are not mere playthings, you see. Thanks to the ADHD-ification of childhood, they are ‘sensory fidgets’. NeeDohs are produced by American manufacturer Schylling. They are ‘the original sensory squish toy’, but others have appeared on the market, such as squishy ‘original viral dumplings’, produced by RMS International. Squishies are the latest craze – brightly coloured blobs of plastic to squash, squeeze, stretch and supposedly help children who have trouble focusing. Squishy, stretchy toys aren’t really new.

It’s no secret that the royals struggle with relatability. But every so often, they stumble upon a PR masterstroke, almost always by accident – think Queen Camilla’s not-so-secret fag habit, for example. Last week, a carton of Vita Coco coconut water (£2.60 from Tesco or, more likely, £3 from Waitrose) was spotted in the door of the Princess of Wales’s Audi as she dismounted to attend the wedding of Harriet Sperling to Peter Phillips. Not a warm, squashed bottle of garage water that may have been sitting in the footwell of the car with a dog, but coconut water. Water, maxxed; life, hacked. Naturally, theories proliferate as to why the future queen would be glugging from what is widely known to be a hangover cure. Sorry, an ‘electrolyte-infused feel-good sports drink’.

All my life I have been obsessed by black and white birds. Magpies are my tormentors, my morning omens of whether my day will be worthwhile or miserable. Penguins are my salvation. When I’m a little melancholy, I pop along to London Zoo to read them poetry. In my experience, they enjoy The Wasteland. There is another black and white bird that I have long found appealing: the puffin. My attempts to spot them, however, have been in vain. On a school geography field trip to the far north, I managed to see Iceland’s ugliest dog but no puffins. There seemed to be a family curse. My uncle was once booked a birthday trip to Puffin Island, off Anglesey, only to discover they’d all flown away. But then I blagged a trip to Shetland.

‘Tequila, it makes me happy,/ Con Tequila it feels fine’ goes the student anthem by Terrorvision. It is midnight, somewhere around the turn of the new millennium, and we are on the sticky dancefloor of a grotty union bar in Edinburgh, but it could be Bristol, Cambridge or Newcastle. You get the picture. The song is greeted by whoops and an influx of revellers throwing drunken shapes. Meanwhile, some bastard in your friendship group who’s feeling flush is already elbowing his way to the bar to spank part of the student loan that’s just hit his account on a bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila, shot glasses, lemon and salt. Slammers all round! Bleurrggghhhhh.

Geoff Capes, two-time winner of The World’s Strongest Man competition, weighing in at 27 stone, was a budgie fancier. He kept them, bred them and was even president of the Budgerigar Society in 2008. The fascination started for him when he was a copper in the 1960s and came across a budgie in the house of someone he arrested. The villain entrusted Capes with six of the birds. Capes was smitten. We don’t know what happened to the criminal. In our modern world of cockapoos and designer dogs, the budgie – which was wildly popular in the 1950s and 1960s – could do with a comeback. Our lives would be better with them. They hark back to a simpler time when pets were pets and not designer accessories. Budgies are native to the grasslands of Australia.

There comes a time when every man must choose how to tackle an impending midlife crisis. A Maserati? A marathon? A mistress? Lacking the wealth, stamina or sheer Italian-ness for any of the above, I’ve plumped for that most gentile of sports to feel alive again: tennis. The problem with a new hobby, of course, is that you immediately feel more infantile than raffishly young. Picking up fresh skills means relearning how to learn, decades after university, when you actually had the appetite for self-improvement. Sure, tennis is, as studies have found, one of the most effective activities for staying healthy. It’s also infuriatingly finicky. Technique-wise, I can fire off a decent groundstroke (forehand and backhand), thanks to lessons as a mopey teen.

Ireturned from a recent holiday to Morocco with three mementos: a bright red pair of swimming trunks (teenager-sized; the largest the supermarket had), a bright red nose (thanks to my unscientific aversion to sun cream) and a bright red fez.  I’ve always wanted to own a fez and since purchasing it in a Marrakesh souk – ‘For you, sir, special price’ – I have been besotted with it. I’ve worn it on the Tube, to a pub quiz and around the Spectator offices, to variable enthusiasm from colleagues. As far as practicality goes, it is a useless hat. It  doesn’t keep the sun off. Its finest Moroccan cardboard will wilt in its first brush with the rain. But that won’t keep it off my head.

Let’s dispense with the obvious question first. Are they common? While there’s a clear temptation to consult Nicky Haslam on such matters, I don’t think I can be bothered. Not least because first, I am a Prusso-Italian immigrant, second, I was born in Essex and third, I adore fridge magnets. We should be honest and admit that, like everything in life, they are signifiers. The aim is to show our friends how cultured, travelled, well-read, ironic and amusing we are. They are our lives writ in ceramic. Where to begin? One of my favourite magnets, designed to strike fear and dread into any intruder, dates back to Iraq circa 2004: ‘Caution Stay 100 metres back or you will be shot.’ No punctuation, not even an exclamation mark!