Notes on...

Among the many options available for Halloween costumes and decorations these days, from witches to zombies, from mummies to serial killers, there is one traditional Halloween character you are unlikely to see: fairies. But in Irish and Scottish folklore, which provides the basis for modern Halloween traditions, fairies were central to this festival. In Scotland, it was on Halloween night that the ‘fairy rade’ (procession) was said to be seen going through the countryside, bearing the souls of the unbaptised dead or those who were snatched away in life by the fairies. In the ballad of Tam Lin, Janet has to wait until the fairies ride at Halloween to rescue her otherworldly lover from the clutches of the Fairy Queen.

If there’s one thing to bring out your inner Herod, it’s the twee tendency in younger children’s books. It’s at its worst in the depiction of pirates. Ten Little Pirates shows them cute; The Pirates Next Door as rambunctious; Never Mess with a Pirate Princess as egalitarian; Pirates Love Underpants as… oh stop it. It is the latest aspect of our long-standing obsession with pirates, though it’s never been so commodified or so anodyne. Well, there’s going to be a bracing corrective when the National Maritime Museum launches its Pirates exhibition next year. It’s not aimed at rehabilitation.

Sometimes it’s the only word that will do. Every journalist at Max Verstappen’s press conference last month understood him perfectly when he said his car was ‘fucked’, the adjective chosen not to convey mechanical failings but rather Verstappen’s emotions. But the Formula 1 authorities were displeased, and the driver has been punished. Perhaps the FIA should listen to Billy Connolly. The comedian is a fan of the f-word, relishing its harsh consonants. He maintains there simply isn’t a polite equivalent to match it: ‘“Go away” just dissipates.’ Of course you can take it too far. Scattergun swearing is tedious, the words losing their power with each repetition. But sparing, well-timed use of an expletive or two can be hugely effective.

The other day, clearing out boxes, I stumbled on a sheaf of invitations from childhood. Decorated with trains and fairies, they are very similar to those my children still (just about) receive today, except there’s usually a Thelwell pony instead of Elsa from Frozen. The handwritten addresses, the names of the houses and streets (Bluebell Cottage, Leeward Road) plunged me back to 1980s Sussex, sunlit gardens and pass the parcel (where only the winner got a prize, unlike now, when a Haribo lurks in every layer). It was a ritual. There was the pleasure of choosing the invitations (‘Darling, we had spaceships last year’), the thrill of doling them out and the tension of waiting for the RSVPs. It was also, though I knew it not at the time, social preparation.

Earlier this month, the fortunate folk of Frankfurt were entertained by the 11th annual tram-drivers competition, with entries from 26 teams representing 20 countries across Europe. This is as crazy as it sounds, a kind of Olympiad for trams. How do trams compete, given they are not exactly flexible in terms of where they can go and cannot spin round Le Mans-type racetracks? Well, the devisers of this contest have created a series of challenges for the teams of three – two tram drivers, one male and one female, and an assistant. The obvious tests included coming to a halt within a centimetre of a stop along a 300-metre track and rushing out, fire extinguisher in hand, to put out a lineside fire.

For the first 50 years of the corked bottle, there was no easy way to get into it. The combination of cork and a strong glass bottle came together around 1630 but the first mention of a device to open the bloody thing wasn’t until 1681. Cavalier get-togethers must have resembled the teenage parties I attended with everyone desperately trying to open the bottle using keys, pens, knives etc. Or using that technique where you bang the bottle against a wall with the heel of a shoe. Halcyon days. More likely they’d just take the top off cleanly with a swift blow from a sabre and a loud ‘Huzzah!’. Early devices for extracting corks were called ‘bottle screws’. According to Hugh Johnson, the word ‘corkscrew’ was first used in 1720.

I recently estimated that, in my smoking life so far and at the age of 29, I have rolled 87,600 cigarettes. The calculation went as follows. Roughly 30 a day for the past six years, maybe 15 a day for four years before that. I attempted to make a reduction for eight months I spent in China, where the most beautiful straights could be bought for the equivalent of 40p per pack. But my mathematical faculties are almost as weak as my pulmonary ones, so I decided to balance those Chinese cigarettes with the thousands of rollies I’ve been asked to construct for friends, acquaintances and strangers. Apart from that brief and illicit fling with Chinese yen, I’ve been a roll-up man from the start.

The final straw was seeing Jeremy Hunt wearing one shortly before the summer recess – and not just when riding his bicycle. He was actually walking down the street with the thing strapped to his back. Yes, of course, it is practical, but the now ubiquitous mini-backpack is so hideous that it belongs in the same category of naffness as men who wear flip-flops outside their own home or when not staying in a rented villa on the Costas. Once the preserve of hippies in the 1960s or gap-year students in the 1980s, these far smaller versions of backpacks (or what used to be known as rucksacks) have infiltrated modern Britain with hardly a nod in direction of style or decorum.

The tasting menu has fallen from fashion, and this is good. They are a curio – a window to the chef’s soul – and they have always incited more pity in me than awe. They draw the chef’s subconscious on the plate, and it isn’t always palatable; or, rather, it is too complex for joy. In their own words, they are unhappy. In The Devil in the Kitchen, Marco Pierre White writes that he was haunted by the loss of his mother, and his kitchen was an attempt to recover her. ‘I suppose,’ he wrote, ‘I was trying to kill myself but sacrificing your health for your career was all the rage.’ Bernard Loiseau (three Michelin stars) killed himself in 2003. Anthony Bourdain killed himself in 2018.

We’d been told it would be a ‘brat’ summer, characterised by its inventor, the singer Charli XCX, as ‘a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra’. It hasn’t worked out like that for me, so I was glad to discover a counter-culture valuing matches over throwaway lighters. Young people, so the Wall Street Journal tells us, are collecting matchbooks and matchboxes and sharing their collecting habit on TikTok. I suppose it’s better than swapping pictures of their burgers. Once things are collected (as anything can be), exclusive rules put half the world in the wrong. To the ‘phillumenists’ of the British Matchbox Label and Bookmatch Society (founded 1945) a great crime is ‘Neighbouring a skillet’.

At the former Chiswick Works in west London, I recently celebrated the Routemaster’s 70th birthday. I owe my existence to this majestic mode of transport. My mum was a conductress on a Routemaster – the No. 16 – which cut a merry swathe from Cricklewood to Victoria, right through the centre of London. My dad, like a lot of young Irishmen, had arrived in London in the 1950s to help rebuild a city still recovering from the second world war. Every morning, he’d catch the first bus from his digs off the Edgware Road to various building sites. One morning he got chatting to the young clippie, and married her a few months later. ‘Open the front door,’ he’d say to me years later, ‘and the whole world’s outside.

White, lacy cow parsley frothing along the roadside is a familiar sight during the British summer. But 2024 is the first year I can remember when it’s been superseded by the retina-scorching yellow of ragwort. Whether you consider common ragwort (Senecio jacobaea) the ‘yellow peril’ or a precious wildflower crucial to biodiversity depends on whether you’re in the horse owner/farmer camp or a conservationist. ‘It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,’ I keep hearing from farmers and fellow horse-owners. For the first time I’ve had to pull it up from our small acreage; enough to fill a feed sack. In Appleshaw in Hampshire, villagers organised a community ragwort pull, getting an entire trailer’s worth in just over an hour.

‘I just love Venn diagrams,’ Kamala Harris said in 2022. ‘It’s just something about those three circles, the analysis about where there is the intersection, right?’ Venn diagrams have graduated from school textbooks to a genre of internet meme. After Joe Biden announced he wouldn’t seek a second presidential term, Harris’s team tweeted a picture of some circles, labelled ‘Biden HQ’ and ‘Harris HQ’, overlapping to ‘hold Trump accountable’. Harris’s love of Venn diagrams might seem odd until you realise that they’re the perfect tool for a politician: they make complex issues look simple. They are often found in educational materials for young children, elucidating similarities and differences between things like animals or fruit.

The perfect, unpretentious, well-constructed party bag was given to guests leaving a recent Hatchards party. It contained a wedge of farmhouse cheddar and box of cheese biscuits from Paxton & Whitfield, a bottle of good white wine and an elegant hardback copy of Lucky Jim. The next evening, I tucked into all of these simultaneously, feeling spoilt, and meditating on how much nicer they were than some of the tat my children used to bring home from birthday parties in white polythene bags: a slice of synthetic birthday cake oozing its jam on to tadpole-sized balloons (which wouldn’t inflate, however hard you blew) and a polystyrene aeroplane whose wing broke off on assembly. To come home from a children’s birthday party without a party bag these days is almost unthinkable.

Liberal Democrat activists were reportedly told to ‘get out the Gail’s vote’, targeting people who visit the over-priced artisanal cafés. There are 131 Gail’s in the UK and around half are in Lib Dem marginals. If you’ve never come across one, think spinach, feta and filo pastry for £6, sold by a stressed Spanish girl in Twickenham. As I squirted more special sauce on to my plate, I witnessed the true meaning of Wimpy (est. 1954) I mentioned the Lib Dems’ Gail’s strategy to a Reform adviser. He laughed. ‘Oh, we tended to go after places with a Wimpy Bar at the election.’ I can confirm that Nigel Farage’s seat of Clacton-on-Sea has a Wimpy on the same road as his campaign HQ and there is another in Thurrock.

The water bottle is no longer just a water bottle. It is a status symbol. It is an extension of oneself. It is the source of good skin. It can hold 2.2 litres of water and keep it cool for 11 hours. It can be personalised, stylised and bastardised. It is Gen Z’s version of a purse dog, only heavier and less likely to destroy your handbag. Everyone has a reusable water bottle: 79 per cent of Gen Z carry one. Jordan Pickford used one as a cheat sheet in England’s game against Switzerland on Saturday, which is the most functional use of a water bottle I’ve seen in recent years. Only anti-environmentalists and people whose urine is the colour of a sailor’s tooth are yet to buy one – at least that’s what TikTok keeps telling me.

I’m writing this in my car, laptop on knees and a delicious can of Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla gin and tonic in the drinks holder, while my sons are at cricket practice. It’s an inclement evening, but were it a sunny summer’s day, the Yummy Mummies would be sprawled around the boundary in their Veja trainers and prairie dresses, pastel-coloured tins in hand, cackling and catching up like some Gen X version of Hogarth’s ‘Gin Lane’. Gins in tins are the acceptable form of ‘mother’s ruin’. First came Gordon’s G&T in a tin, followed by its pink gin, and now the chiller aisle contains more temptation than the Haribo shelves do for my children. Bombay Sapphire, Tanqueray, Sipsmith and multiple artisan brands have got in on the act.

Boris Johnson has three lifesize, carved wooden elephants in his garden, given to him by his wife for his 60th birthday. But here’s a warning for them both, for when they return from Sardinia to join their elephants again: garden sculptures are horribly addictive. Once you have one, you want more – and most of the good ones are ridiculously expensive unless, like my husband and me, you improvise. My husband John, who used to be a fashion designer and manufacturer, has taken to making iron sculptures, although he’s too modest to call himself a sculptor. I draw stuff, he says, and Sked (Malcolm Sked, the local blacksmith) makes them.

Four years ago, Madrí didn’t exist. Today, the faux Spanish lager is sold in a quarter of British pubs, which makes it one of the fastest-growing beers of all time. ‘Madrí’ is the historic name for Madrid, which is peculiar for a beer brewed in Tadcaster – or Tada as the Anglo-Saxon mead-drinkers called it. Madrí has never been brewed in Spain, let alone Madrid. Yet it shares the same sanguine-red label of the real Spanish lagers, such as Estrella Galicia, Mahou (pronounced Mao) and Estrella Damm, which allows it to blend in with them on pub bars and supermarket shelves. ‘People think they are drinking a Spanish beer but it’s not,’ says Aitor de Artaza, international head of Estrella Galicia. He accuses Madrí of ‘lacking transparency’.