Notes on...

Never make a drunken bet. At about 3 a.m. one fateful morning, pre-pandemic and several bottles down, a friend and I made a wager on the outcome of the 2020 US election – he for Joe Biden, I for Donald Trump (who, at the time, looked like a sure thing). Then came lockdown, spiralling inflation and unemployment – and the rest is history. This wasn’t a bet for money. Instead, it was stipulated that whoever lost would legally assume a new middle name. Being gamers of a certain vintage, we drew from the Nintendo canon. If my friend had lost, he’d have become James Edward Bowser Price. Should I lose, I would take on the middle name Waluigi. For the uninitiated, Waluigi is a decidedly second- or even third-tier baddie from Mario Kart, who wears dark blue dungarees and a purple hat.

Worse for drink, and lonely in his Hollywood apartment, F. Scott Fitzgerald sat down to write a postcard. He began, ‘How are you?’, an important question as he was planning to send the postcard to himself.  Although he never sent it, perhaps he understood the magical ability of the postcard to cheer us up. They’ve been doing that since the first ones – plain cards bearing a pre-printed stamp – were introduced into Britain in 1870. It took time for the current format as we know it to develop: picture on one side and, on the other, a space for the address and some words. By the Edwardian period, 800 million cards were being sent a year.

‘You asshole,’ was my friend’s cheery greeting when we met in Ludlow. I’d mucked up the time. Reconciled, we walked to his place and on the door was a note he’d left me, scrawled on a card with an image of him mimicking Philip Larkin proudly sitting on a border stone: ‘Just a note that you are an asshole. Call.’ Stuart, a collector of manuscripts, showed me a recent acquisition, a note by Sir Edward Elgar, graced with a self-portrait featuring, my friend is sure, an immodestly large penis. I think it’s his coat tail. We debated the iconography while listening to ‘Nimrod’. Notes are often discarded – who hasn’t inherited, in the bottom of a trolley, a forlorn shopping list? But they have a long history.

I once heard an American complain that, being married to an Englishwoman, he was regularly baffled by the contents of his kitchen cupboards – salad cream, Ambrosia custard and Robinsons barley water. It was ‘like industrial processed food but from the Shire’. It is probably this quality of baffling foreigners that allegedly enabled drug runners to use sachets of Angel Delight – the ultimate English ultra-processed food, surely to be found on many a table in Hobbiton, if only for second dinner – to smuggle cocaine into Indonesia. What could be more natural than an Englishman carrying real artificial flavours in his luggage so he didn’t have to make do with nasi goreng and chicken satay? (When I went to Japan for a year, my luggage was filled with proper tea bags.

Published in Britain for at least 330 years, lonely hearts ads are now a rare sight – driven to the brink of extinction by the rise of dating apps. This is a pity. ‘The personals’ were a voyeuristic delight. Even if you weren’t looking for love, you still read them. They could be tragic, comic, or both – like this one placed in an 1832 edition of the Dorset County Chronicle: ‘My wife has been dead 12 months ago, last Shroton Fair. I want a good steady woman for a wife. I do not want a second family. I want a woman to look after the pigs while I am out at work.’ His was a straightforward request, clearly stated. But quite often the ads were keyholes through which whole melodramas might be glimpsed.

I felt a mixture of annoyance and relief when I bought my first non-disposable Elf Bar last weekend, ahead of the disposable vape ban. Relieved, because to all intents and purposes, the new vape is identical to the old one. It looks the same, tastes the same and costs the same. The only difference is that when you give it a tug, a ‘reusable’ pod slides out. Annoyed, because after all the fuss over the ban over the past few years – panicked headlines, furious parents, relentless lobbying – vaping is effectively unchanged. What a waste of time and energy. In the next few days, a third emotion started to creep in: fear. I can’t be the only one to have noticed that the new vapes are just as delicious and, in practice, as disposable as the old ones.

When heading to China on a business trip, I was somewhat bemused to be warned about the banquets I would be attending. Do not sit next to the host, I was told. I was to find out why. Learning the rituals of banquets is an essential part of doing business in China. I was treated to at least one every day on a ten-day trip around the country – and sometimes two or three. There is no such thing as a casual business lunch. Any meal will turn into a semi-formal event held in a private room and hosted by the most senior person in the organisation. The meal starts slowly, with a few rather unappealing cold dishes laid out on a spinner that sits on a round table, though initially no one sits down.

Afriend of mine was once delighted to get a job at the Radio Times, where he ‘corrected’ a golfing picture caption to ‘Steve Ballesteros’. Typos, literals or misprints are often committed in an effort to expunge them. Pity the poor subeditor who blanked out the wrong half of the word that is conventionally printed as mother*****r. The harder you try to whack the moles, the faster they come. The other rule is: the bigger, the easier to miss. In 96pt type the front-page headline in the Guardian on 5 November 1980 was: ‘Landside makes it President Reagan.’ That is what optimistic journalists call a ‘self-correcting literal’ – one that readers miss. But there’s the danger.

There are few phrases more terrifying than ‘men’s fashion’. It reminds me of yuppies in salmon-coloured jorts on their way to play padel; Hackney mullets; white polo shirts worn by blokes who bathe in Joop!; Olly Murs and the era of the trilby; the Peaky Blinders aesthetic. Men’s fashion has now brought us another monstrosity, the gentleman’s pearl necklace. And no, I’m not talking about the sexual act – get your mind out of the gutter. Timothée Chalamet recently became the first solo man to appear on the front cover of Vogue, where he wore a pearl choker. A pearled-up Harry Styles attended the 2019 Met Gala in what can only be described as a crossover between Sir Walter Raleigh and a divorcée from Croydon.

Ringo Starr is mostly known as the second or third best drummer in the Beatles. But for me – as for many children of the past four decades – he will forever be the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine.  This week marks 80 years since the publication of The Three Railway Engines, the first book in the Revd Wilbert Awdry’s Railway Series. The series is based on stories Awdry told to cheer up his son Christopher, who was recovering from measles. More than 40 books followed, alongside the television programme, films, theme parks and toys. Together, the franchise has been valued at more than £1.2 billion. Despite its success, Awdry’s world has been condemned as authoritarian and reactionary.

‘What’s the capital of Albania?’ The correct answer is, of course: ‘Who cares?’ If you’re at a quiz and this is one of the questions, find another quiz. Either you know it’s Tirana or you don’t, and in neither case is there any satisfaction. A really good quiz question is one you can work out. For instance: ‘Which major UK retailer has the same name as Odysseus’s dog in Greek mythology?’ Even if you don’t know your Classics, you can take a mental trip up and down the high street until you arrive at Argos. Or, in the case of one team I encountered, FatFace. A good quizmaster should also avoid themed rounds. Saying ‘and now – geography’ will produce a groan from at least a quarter of the crowd.

Four days ago I was so bored that I considered starting a terrorist groupuscule. I had no demands, no ideology, no manifesto. I just wanted directionless chaos. I even got as far as ChatGPTing ‘How to start a violent movement’ before realising all movements require meetings. And meetings are dull. You may think I’m exaggerating. But the truth is, I have a lifelong fear of boredom. To put it another way, I can handle peril, I can handle regret, I can handle doing lines of Californian coke so long they risk a heart attack. What I can’t handle is monotony. For example, in my early thirties I visited a warzone in southern Lebanon to escape the tedium of an otherwise routine travel assignment.

Every Easter, the Creme Egg dominates supermarket shelves. It is, Cadbury’s marketing department loves to remind us, ‘the nation’s favourite Easter egg’. Its popularity sometimes verges on cultlike. In 2016, when Cadbury opened a pop-up café in Soho called Crème de la Creme Egg Café, people queued down the street to eat something they could have bought at any old corner shop. In 2019, a mega-fan from Liverpool had a Creme Egg tattooed on her hip. I have never understood the love for something so mediocre. Creme Eggs are a cheerless chocolate. What I find perplexing is why anyone would find a confectionary that resembles the albumen and yolk of a soft-boiled egg appealing.

There’s a joke that does the rounds about a Pakistani couple who get a divorce. After their union is dissolved, one of them says to the other: ‘Well, at least we’re still cousins!’ I feel slightly guilty whenever I laugh, yet there is some truth to it. I remember at my secondary school how Pakistani girls would, shortly after they’d completed their GCSEs, find themselves married off to a cousin from ‘back home’ just so their husbands could get a British passport and send money back to their families.  I was relieved my family never brought up the subject with me at that age. And then one day, to my horror, they did. I would have been 19 or 20, when my mother told me it was my late grandmother’s wish for me to marry her nephew (my second cousin) in Kashmir.

One of my favourite scenes in Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino’s black comedy martial arts film, is the meeting of Beatrix ‘the Bride’ Kiddo, played by Uma Thurman, with sword-maker Hattori Hanzo at his scruffy sushi bar in Okinawa. Hanzo: What do you want with Hattori Hanzo? Kiddo: I need Japanese steel. Hanzo: Why do you need Japanese steel? Kiddo: I have vermin to kill. Hanzo: You must have big rats, to need Hattori Hanzo’s steel. Tarantino filched his sword-maker’s name from history. Hattori Hanzo was a real ninja (or rather, the historically correct word shinobi). Born in 1542, he spent his life in the service of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu and compiled the manual Shinobi Hiden (Legends of Ninja Secrets).

Lewis Carroll used to travel with purses divided into separate compartments, each containing the exact number of coins he’d need for a particular transaction (train fare, porter, newspaper and so on). These days we have one bank card which gets tapped everywhere. The coinless society might be more convenient – but it’s also more boring. Coins are beautiful and fascinating. For centuries they were the only way most people knew what their monarch looked like. Henry VIII was nicknamed ‘Coppernose’ because of the way the silver coating on copper coins rubbed away, starting with his nose. Even Oliver Cromwell put himself on the currency (as a Roman emperor wearing a laurel wreath). Since Charles II, monarchs have alternated the way they face.

For several years, a debate has raged (mainly on Twitter, now X) over whether animal fats are actually better for you than industrially processed ‘seed oils’. The debate has become more mainstream thanks to the efforts of the new US Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr, who wants to Make America Healthy Again. His strategy involves a back-to-the-land style embrace of animal fats, particularly beef dripping. The anti-seed oil community use technical-sounding terms like ‘linoleic acids’ to firm up their side of the debate but fundamentally their point is that our bodies have evolved to process animal fats rather than overly processed stuff. J.D.

Do you Boom Boom? Or are you just Booming? Can Boomers Boom Boom or is it just for Zoomers? Can you Boom Doom? Hear me out: I’m getting to grips with the new vibe shift. In December, Sean Monahan, an American trend analyst, announced the arrival of the ‘Boom Boom’ aesthetic, which he described as a ‘pure expression of excess’ or ‘an Eighties archival look that is maximalist in its appetites’. He apparently came up with the term as he sat in London’s low-lit Decimo restaurant. Monahan is taken fairly seriously when it comes to predicting cultural trends. In 2013 he coined the term ‘normcore’, which is defined by a conspicuous, intentional blankness; it is the converse of Boom Boom. Think trainers at work and blanket athleisure wear.

In 1990, an exotic Swiss-Canadian teenager of purportedly Habsburgian lineage descended on Cambridge in a cloud of cashmere. His wardrobe was unfeasibly organised, shelf after shelf of cashmere arrayed in all the hues of the rainbow. We regarded him as a thing of wonder. In those days most of us British undergraduates were deeply unsophisticated, many of us impoverished. We were just about graduating from high-street polyester to Scottish lambswool. Cashmere was unheard of. Life moves on, and who today hasn’t indulged in a spot of cashmere? My wife is addicted to the stuff – jumpers, cardigans, polo necks, gloves, scarves – good God, the scarves. These days cashmere is everywhere. Even Uniqlo regularly knocks it out at sub-£100 prices.

In some countries Shrove Tuesday (the day of merrymaking before the rigours of Lent) developed into a ‘carnival’ that lasted several days, but in England it was only ever a half-day holiday, since it was not an official Church feast day. Apprentices and schoolchildren claimed the right to an afternoon of ‘sport’, and from at least the 15th century the most popular Shrove Tuesday recreation was ‘throwing at cocks’. This was a cruel custom that involved immobilising a cockerel, either by tying its foot to a stake or half burying it in the ground, while bystanders took turns throwing stones, tools and bricks at the cockerel in an attempt to kill it.