Notes on...

All things considered, probably the least of George Osborne’s concerns on the occasion of his second marriage was being showered with orange confetti by a woman apparently sympathetic to the Just Stop Oil protestors. Bingo: a whole new form of protest came into being. What is the whole confetti thing about anyway? You used to be able to tell if there’d been a wedding at a church by the amount of pastel-coloured horseshoe and bell shapes ground into the pavement outside. It was sold in boxes decorated with wedding motifs. Nowadays, no eco-chic guest would throw paper confetti; dried flower petals are the way to go, available in tasteful cones and a useful way of recycling dead flowers. (Really, the protestor should just have thrown marigolds.

Upstairs rooms in new houses are likely to be darker because building regulations now demand they should be at least 3ft 6in from the floor. Given the stingy heights of rooms these days, this reduces the glazed area. The regulators are worried about window safety. ‘Is there a plague of people falling out of them?’ asks Nicholas Boys Smith of the Create Streets pressure group. He answers himself: ‘Of course not.’ There are two ideas of a window, if the history of words were to be believed. The English language sides with the notion of a vent: ‘wind-eye’ in origin. It’s not only for Anglo-Saxon sparrows flying into mead-halls; the Spanish call it a ventana, a ventilating aperture.

I’m in Tuscany, where the piazzas glow orange at dusk, not only from the sunsets but also from the profusion of Aperol spritz. The bright orange drink has exploded in popularity in the past five years. Everyone’s drinking it: young women, middle-aged couples, groups of wrinkly tanned men, all sucking from straws sticking out of vast wine glasses loaded with ice cubes that give the illusion that there’s more liquid than there is in the famous 3-2-1 formula: three parts prosecco (equating to just one-tenth of a bottle), two parts Aperol and one part soda water, plus the obligatory orange slice. At the trendiest bar in Lucca I scoured the menu for the two drinks I used most to associate with Italy: Martini Rosso and the bellini. They weren’t there.

The financial crash of 2008 didn’t kill the boozy lunch outright, but it took the wind out of its sails. Ever more Americanised work styles further deflated the tradition, before Covid stamped on it. But the boozy lunch is back. It’s certainly surprising. After all, we are in the middle of a cost-of-living squeeze and a hospitality staffing crisis so severe that it has driven many restaurants to bankruptcy. But try meeting a friend for lunch in Farringdon, Soho or Mayfair and you wouldn’t know it. You must elbow your way in, wait for a harried but upbeat maître’d and thank your lucky stars you have a booking – if you do, that is. If not, there’s always Pret. As a special treat, I met my father recently at the smart Italian restaurant Luca in Clerkenwell.

If you needed more proof that gay men aren’t in control of things any more – at least where the activist set is concerned – look no further than the evolution of the LGBTQ+ Pride flag. If, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, ‘Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months’, then the new Pride flag is somewhere between a prisoner of war and Frankenstein’s monster: a tortured and overburdened horror; a stitched-together crime against nature.  What was wrong with the old rainbow flag? Rainbows are happy and beautiful. Everyone loves a rainbow. And that, precisely, was the problem. You can’t strike fear into the hearts of your enemies with a rainbow. Big Gay needed something more militant.

As a travel writer, I can get blasé about many aspects of travel: the free five-handed massage, the private plunge-pool out the back, those odd bits of overchilled orangey cheddar in an average Biz Class lounge. But one slightly childish thing that always pleases me is stamps in my passport. They should be emotionally meaningless: they are, after all, tiny and potentially annoying examples of frontier bureaucracy, ways and means by which a nation keeps tabs on you. And yet the other day I was going through the airport at Ibiza and getting my Spanish exit stamp – a Brexit benefit or drawback depending on how you feel – and the nice passport lady flicked through my passport, seeking a rare empty page, and said: ‘Wow, you have a lot of stamps.

Since my squatting experience back in the 1980s, the practice has gone somewhat out of fashion. Squatting laws in the UK have become much stricter, and eviction by police and landlords is easier. Spanish squatters have it relatively good at the moment, with criminal gangs targeting second homes in Spain, claiming to be homeless and using their young children to make eviction far more difficult. I recall my time squatting in a large, ramshackle terraced house in Surrey Docks, south London, when I first moved to London from Yorkshire. I was in my early twenties, claiming benefits, doing political activism, with no bank account or savings and I urgently needed somewhere to live. The squat had been advertised in the window of the radical bookstore in Brixton. ‘Lesbian? Feminist?

Disney’s latest remake of The Little Mermaid, out this week, has, it seems, a message for the royal family. When the prince wants to know the name of the mermaid, played by Halle Bailey, he tries to guess. ‘Diana?’ Nope. ‘Catherine?’ She pulls a face. Cue royal watchers identifying a snub of Kate, the Princess of Wales. Disney’s 1990 take on The Little Mermaid wasn’t quite the story that Hans Christian Andersen wrote – not having much to say about the mermaid’s quest for an immortal soul – but it did find one fan. As Meghan Markle observed in her interview with Oprah Winfrey: ‘Who as an adult really watches The Little Mermaid? But it came on… and I went “Oh my God, she falls in love with the prince and because of that loses her voice.”’ If only.

The night before I moved a pet lobster into my flat, I ate agnolotti all’ aragosta for dinner. It was possible that my soon-to-be companion, Snips McGee – who I inherited from a friend – would outlive me (the oldest lobster on record was estimated to be 140 years old) and I wanted one last plate of lobster ravioli, hold the moral hang-ups. The French author Gérard de Nerval also owned a pet lobster, which he took for walks on a blue silk leash. ‘They are peaceful, serious creatures,’ he said. ‘They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gnaw upon one’s monadic privacy like dogs do.’ How I wish that were true. My Snips didn’t bark, but it was hard to find monadic or any other kind of privacy with an infant-sized cockroach by my bed.

I n the ranks of unloved animals, rats are  surely king – so reviled that other pest species are often referred to as variations of the rat archetype: pigeons are ‘rats with wings’, grey squirrels are ‘tree rats’. There was also a recent flurry of stories about Britain facing an ‘invasion’ of ‘300 million monstrous super-rats capable of gnawing on steel and chewing through concrete’. Yet how reliable were these stories? The 300 million figure is from Steven Belmain, a Greenwich University professor, who was simply giving his estimate of the rat population. (Probably an underestimate, he says, but there has never been a proper survey.) Nor is there any evidence that our rats are changing in size or nature.

A spoon may seem too homely for grand ceremony. It might even, in this sceptical and utilitarian age, seem slightly ridiculous. This prompts the question of how, or whether, we value ancient traditions and ceremonies whose original meanings and power are largely lost to us. And if we do value them, why? This particular spoon, undeniably, is a very special one: doubtless the world’s most important spoon, and certainly one of the most beautiful examples of that humble genus: silver-gilt, finely engraved with acanthus scrolls, decorated with pearls, and with its bowl strangely divided into two. It dates from the 12th century, and may have been used ever since Richard the Lionheart. It is the oldest piece of the coronation regalia.

In the wake of new research by New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, scientists think a treatment for stopping our hair going grey – and even reversing it – may soon be possible. Their optimism is based on early positive experiments with mice, which is great news if you’re a mouse, but what if you’re a man over 60 and totally grey like me? Yes, women go grey too – but it’s different for them. The ones I know don’t make a big existential drama out of it the way men like me do. Women simply dye their hair or just let it go grey. Men panic and turn to desperate measures like concealing highlights, expensive anti-grey shampoos, exotic toners and total dye jobs. And usually with tragic results.

Two years ago I watched a red squirrel climbing a pine tree at my home in Northumberland. I fear it may be the last time I have that thrill. Twenty years ago they were everywhere in our woods and regular visitors to my bird table. Then in 2003 we saw the first grey squirrel. Almost at once the reds became scarcer and today there are few left. Volunteers work hard to cull the greys, killing around 600 a year, and occasionally this works well enough for a brief revival of the reds. But we are losing the war.  It’s a strange fact of biogeography that Europe has only one species of true tree-climbing squirrel. There are others in the Caucasus and Siberia, and there are several ground squirrels, but the exquisite Nutkin is our continent’s unique tree squirrel.

All hail our pagan King! The time has come to lay down your crosses and take up the bough of oak. Britain is to return to the old ways – at least if you are to believe the conspiracy theorists, who were distressed to see, on the bottom of the coronation invitation sent out last week, the face of a green man staring back at them. His eyes are bright, his mouth exudes fronds of ivy – the green man calls to us. Depending on your particular view of the world, his inclusion is either an affront to Christian decency or a jolly salute to our monarch’s peculiarities. The green man is a playfully sinister envoy of the otherworldly. His face, either made entirely of leaves or a fleshy human screaming forth foliage, is carved into hundreds of parish churches.

The Easter lily, or Lilium longiflorum, grows from a bulb buried underground to bear white, trumpeting flowers which face outwards and smell divine. One doesn’t need to be an expert in semiotics to see why it came to be associated with the resurrection. In Christian tradition, lilies were said to have grown in the garden of Gethsemane at the spot where Jesus prayed on the eve of his crucifixion. The Easter lily is sometimes known as ‘the white-robed apostle of hope’.  A few stems of lilies tied with ribbon are  always a lovely present whatever the occasion, but it is true that some associate these flowers more with death than life. In depictions of the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel sometimes arrives clutching a spray of lilies.

It’s a fabulous combination: travelling by train and sleeping. And the good news is that the concept of sleeper trains is being revived. The bad news is that, like trams and trolleybuses, a wonderful form of travel was allowed to decline in the first place. The first sleeper carriages – as opposed to trains you happened to fall asleep on – were introduced in the US in the late 1830s, but these provided little more than hard wooden benches. It was George Pullman who built the first luxury sleeper coaches when he founded his eponymous company in 1867. America, with its vast expanses and a newly opened transcontinental line, was fertile territory, and Pullman coaches were soon being attached to long-distance trains.

Things are hotting up at Highgate Cemetery. Or they’ll need to if the grander tombs are to survive. During one cold spell last year, the huge mausoleum to Victorian banker Julius Beer froze on the inside as well as the outside, breaking some of the glass tiles. Lead lettering is another weak point – water gets into cracks, expands as it turns to ice, and forces letters off. So electric heating is being considered. The charity that looks after the cemetery admits this seems bizarre, ‘but it could save us a lot of money’. The cemetery dates from 1839, one of London’s ‘Magnificent Seven’, which were opened to cope with the city’s expanding population.

To some, the phrase ‘table for one, please’ is among the saddest in the English language. Perhaps this isn’t a surprise; the concept of social dining for pleasure dates back to Ancient Greece. There, meals would be served at all-male gatherings on low tables so the guests could recline while eating (a recipe for heartburn, but luxurious nonetheless). Then would come the symposium, the section of the evening dedicated to drinking. Although we mix the two a little more fluidly now, the concept is much the same: sharing a meal and drinks with others is an enjoyable thing to do, so people do it. As such, eating alone has long held a kind of stigma. But I relish the time with my own thoughts, especially in a city as relentless as London.

There’s a scene in the recent film Corsage in which Vicky Krieps, playing the melancholy anorexic Empress Elisabeth of Austria, has a strop with her maid. As part of the arduous process of getting dressed, she must be encased in an impossibly small corset (the real Empress reportedly had a waist of 16 inches). Krieps snaps at the maid who cannot lace her tightly enough and demands someone else pull the strings to impose such waspish proportions.  Watching the scene, you’d be forgiven for thinking that such restrictive undergarments were normal for high-class women in the 18th and 19th centuries – and therefore expected for any female actor in a period drama. The myths of women swooning from lack of oxygen have taken on a whole history of their own.

The problem with being a film collector is that the technology on which films are preserved keeps changing. I’m not talking about abandoning my DVD library – although I’ll come to that – but my collection of LaserDiscs. LaserDiscs were a forerunner of DVDs. They were the same size as LPs and you often needed two to capture a long film like Spartacus. The quality was significantly better than VHS and I held screening parties at my flat in Shepherd’s Bush for films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I thought the fact that hardly anyone else had the technology was part of its appeal. But the failure of the format to take off in Europe meant it was quickly killed by the more affordable DVDs when they went on sale 25 years ago this month.