Notes on...

Some detectorists will tell you that the holy grail of metal detecting is a hoard of Roman coins or Anglo-Saxon jewellery. Others will point out – borrowing a line from the TV series Detectorists – that actually the holy grail of metal detecting is the Holy Grail. Since I took up metal detecting, last summer, I have tried to set myself more modest goals. They can be summed up in some wise words spoken to me in a field in Wiltshire after I’d suffered a near-barren day (my only finds having been a musket ball and ‘canslaw’ – a shredded drinks can). ‘A find is a bonus, a good find is a good bonus,’ said my fellow detectorist with a consoling hand on my shoulder.

Over the past year and a half, I have been victimised by my neighbour’s cat. Bollinger the Bengal weighs just seven pounds and has a silly dangly bell around his neck, but he manages to terrorise both me and my two cats. He fights my male cat, George, so viciously that I fear he might kill him. Nothing irks me more than watching people cooing around Bollinger when they see his ocelot-like frame. While some Bengal cats can be wonderful pets, their wild instincts make them territorial and aggressive, as well as horribly effective hunters that can ravage bird populations. This summer, the town of Walldorf in southwest Germany introduced a cat curfew to protect the breeding season of the endangered crested lark.

Butter was not a major part of my childhood. In fact, I don’t remember it ever being in our fridge. My parents were subject to the saturated fat scaremongering of the 1980s, and consequently believed that butter was the enemy. Instead, we had spread: margarine, rebranded as a cholesterol-busting alternative to heart-clogging butter. But spread wasn’t so bad. It lubricated my sandwiches and melted on my toast. Spread was everyday. Butter was for high days and holidays. Otherwise, we were all certain to die young. Butter has always been a bellwether of the British psyche. We want luxury, but only every so often, and only so much – and we don’t want to pay too much for it.

The general flying advice this year, with airports resembling cattle markets and when you can’t be sure if you’re ever going to take off, is: only travel with hand luggage. Packing a fortnight’s holiday into the tiniest of bags has become an art form. Social media is awash with tips on minimalist packing and dedicated websites on travelling light have sprung up, with experts advising what you should, and shouldn’t, pack. It’s depressing. Yes, the lighter the plane the less fuel it uses, which is no bad thing for the environment. But a holiday is meant to be an indulgence, a chance to experiment with new outfits. Instead, the less-is-more principle is being abused to such an extreme that we’re having to do clothes-washing while away on holiday.

In the hot, dry summer of 1976, I was working as a gardening student at Arboretum Kalmthout in Belgium. The temperatures in July were frequently 40°C by lunchtime, so we worked in the early mornings and through the evenings. My job was to drive a tractor pulling a trailer, on to which were placed dustbins full of water drawn from a borehole. These were ferried around the grounds so we could water rare, precious and drought-hating rhododendron and tree species. The owners of the garden were white-faced with apprehension all that month but the stratagem worked and we saved the lot. Something of that anxiety comes back to me, for my garden is at risk of losing plants from drought. We have had a measly 0.

Every few months I take out a box of essential oils and carefully lay them out on my kitchen table, organising them in order from sweet-smelling to musty. On the left will be scents like juniper berry, lime, frankincense and bergamot; in the middle, woodish fragrances such as sandalwood and cedarwood; on the right, the darker stuff of patchouli and pine needle – and occasionally, when I’m feeling brave in my endeavour to make the perfect beard oil, lavender. Next I fill several large vials with a mixture of carrier oils, usually almond, jojoba and argan (and normally with almond making up the bulk as it’s the cheapest). I then begin mixing in various essential oils: a dash here, a dash there.

Many of us daydream about escaping into an imaginary parallel universe. The good news is that Britain has its own genuine, and literally parallel, universe that we can escape into at any moment. It’s the National Cycle Network that threads its way quietly and meanderingly over, under and alongside our gridlocked main roads and our daily lives. Once you try it, you’ll fall in love with supposedly ‘broken Britain’ all over again. You’ll be reminded that it’s a country of dog-walkers, rivers, farms and front gardens. And you don’t have to wear Lycra to do this. You just need ordinary clothes, plus KitKats, Thermos and sandwiches, and off you trundle at 8 mph.

There’s surely not a more despised creature in Britain than the hornet. They have long been viewed as yellow jacketed killers: wasps on steroids with Hannibal Lecter tendencies. Unlike bees, a member of the same insect family, you’d be hard pushed to find a friendly portrayal of a hornet (with the exception, perhaps, of Watford FC’s mascot). Yet hornets are misunderstood villains. Like bees, they are important pollinators. What’s more, the fact that hornets are carnivores (bees are not) means they feed on many of the species of caterpillars and flies that destroy plants and crops. One of their main food sources is the nectar from ivy.

One of the pleasures of the letters from unhappy ministers to the Prime Minister last week (though not, presumably, for the recipient) was the assortment of letterheads from Whitehall departments we saw in the papers. One was from Nadhim Zahawi, on HM Treasury writing paper. It’s a fair bet that most of Mr Z’s communication these days is by email or text or WhatsApp. Yet when it came to calling for Boris Johnson to resign, nothing would do but a letter with the Treasury insignia to indicate that the writer was staying where he was. There are so few opportunities nowadays to show off a letterhead that they have become a special medium.

Pause in a park or field in summer and look out across the grass and you’ll see a multitude of thin, earthy tracks breaking up the swaths of green like shatters in a pane of glass. These are most commonly known as desire paths – although other names include cow paths, desire lines, pirate paths or social trails – and are created when humans (or animals) are drawn in the same direction over and over, flattening the grass and eventually wearing it away. The term ‘desire path’ was coined by French scientist, philosopher and poet Gaston Bachelard in his 1958 book La Poétique de l’Éspace (or ‘The Poetics of Space’).

‘And now the end is here / And so I face the final curtain…’ You said it, Frank. The lights dim, the curtain falls, exeunt all to rapturous applause. Too rapturous, if you ask me. The standing ovation, once the exception, is now the rule. Post-Covid, I got it. After months of empty theatres and keeping the ghost lamps burning, I’d have clapped any man and his dog to the skies. But university revues, pub two-handers, primary-school plays? I feel a scab for sitting when every man jack is on his feet. I did it at Cabaret, The Glass Menagerie and Straight Line Crazy. A sit-in protest. ‘Grinch,’ you’ll say, and fair enough. But I want a standing ovation to mean something. An exclamation mark, not just a standard full-stop.

Five years ago this month I wrote an article in The Spectator denouncing the National Army Museum after its £24 million Heritage Lottery Funded refurbishment. The concept of decolonisation was then in its infancy, and I criticised the museum’s relentless attempts to make visitors ashamed of the British Army’s supposed legacy of imperialism and slavery, when that constituted only a tiny part of its overall glorious story (and it was in the forefront of fighting against the latter). I am thrilled to say that today the museum, which has been under new leadership since 2018, has returned to the aims of its Royal Charter, anchored itself to historical facts rather than contemporary politicised fashions, and thus been totally transformed.

There’s an old saying that English summertime begins when the frothy heads of elderflowers appear in hedgerows – and ends when the black elderberries have ripened. People have been picking these great white ‘plates’, as the flower heads are known, to make drinks since at least Tudor times. In Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) there’s a recipe for elderflower wine. But only in the past 20 years or so have elderflower cordial and pressé become ubiquitous as soft drinks. That expansion has largely been brought about by Peverel Manners of Belvoir Fruit Farms in Leicestershire. ‘Pev’, a cousin of the Duke of Rutland, still uses his mother’s recipe.

Despite claims the property market is on the brink of a crash, one niche seems recession-proof: beach huts, barely bigger than Wendy Houses, have never been more in demand. Rightmove has reported that the average asking price for these glorified sheds has more than doubled since 2019, so on average a beach hut costs an astonishing £50,000. Last year, the UK’s most expensive beach hut sold in Dorset for £500,000. This news is especially galling for me. I bought a beach hut in Clacton-on-Sea for £2,500 in 2011. If I hadn’t sold it, it’d probably be worth ten times that now. The popularity of beach huts comes from the English obsession with prudishness.

The Platinum Jubilee celebrations look like boom time for the drinks industry, with various whisky, gin and port brands all releasing special commemorative bottles. But there’s one curious omission: Dubonnet, a liqueur that is said to be the Queen’s favourite. According to a spokesman from parent company Pernod Ricard, there’s nothing planned to celebrate 70 years on the throne of its most famous fan. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a flurry of activity. I picture the Dubonnet promotional department as two old Frenchmen asleep by a telex machine in the back of a dusty café in Béziers. But then again, who needs le marketing when you’ve got the Queen?

‘Sides to middle’, that’s the cry. When your foot goes through the flat sheet in the night, there’s only one thing for it: scissors down the centre, then sew it edge to edge. Good as new – for as long as your stitches hold up. If you’ve paid for Egyptian cotton, you cannot cut your linen into dusters the minute the thread count wears thin. Besides, call it eco-activism, call it penny--pinching, mending things is fun. From time to time, when my husband is washing up, a plate will crumble like a biscuit in his hands. Seeing his ‘it wasn’t me’ expression, I’ll tell him that the plate, glued and glued again, was beyond salvation. Then I’ll glue it together again.

Bowls has a reputation as a sedate pastime, but it can be as fiercely competitive as any other sport. It can even get rowdy. At the Edinburgh cup final in 2012, a young player, angry at losing the match, stripped down to his boxers in protest. When committee members from his team tried to restrain him, he headbutted the club secretary. Bowls players have always taken the sport very seriously. According to popular legend, Sir Francis Drake was playing bowls at Plymouth Hoe when the Spanish Armada came into view off the headland. He insisted on finishing the game. Battle could wait, bowls couldn’t. The object of the game is simple: get your bowls closer to the ‘jack’ than your opponent. That said, the sport is more sophisticated than the French variation, boules.

Buffalo are now living in the fens of Kent. Why – have we slipped into the metaverse of Lewis Carroll? ‘He thought he saw a buffalo/ Upon the chimney-piece.’ But these are not African buffalo, those fierce beasts that recently charged but narrowly missed killing my wife at home in Kenya. No, these are the more docile water buffalo and so this story isn’t nonsense. ‘He looked again, and found it was/ His Sister’s Husband’s Niece.’ Clever scientists on sabbatical from modelling pandemics and climate change have introduced four water buffalo to the Ham Fen nature reserve, near Sandwich. These wetlands become clogged with silt, causing floods, and the idea is that the buffalo, with their huge bodies, will bulldoze channels through the mud.

Iranians adore a picnic. During the country’s most ancient festival, Nowruz, the Persian new year, they brandish baskets of food as they swarm into parks and gardens to celebrate Sizdah-bedar, the 13th and final day of the Nowruz celebrations and the coming of spring. In Britain, it’s only just getting warm enough to enjoy a khoresht stew or doogh, a yoghurt drink that tastes a little like Indian lassi. But venture out to Hyde Park and you’ll see groups of young and old Iranians sitting in the pale springtime sun. The Persian picnic is generally a family affair. Pretty much every Iranian has fond memories of Nowruz meals; eating fragrant rice and meats with kindly aunts.

Fringes have in recent years been considered attractive – Bettie Page, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Birkin, Kate Moss – so it is easy to forget the period we have been living through is something of an aberration. For most of history, cutting a fringe has tended to mark a woman out as odd, mad or suspicious. In the 1600s, conservative churches thought a fringe indicated you were on your way to committing a mortal sin. This was true even as late as the 1920s, which is why the fringe was key to the rebellious flapper bob. There are stories of parents suing hairdressers for giving their daughter this haircut in case it damaged her chances of marriage. Those old fringe politics are back. Having a fringe nowadays says one of three things: break-up, breakdown or mutiny.