Notes on...

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.

Floor to ceiling, sandwiches are piled high. Not just sandwiches: pastas, wraps, baguettes, sushi. Brown bread, white tortillas, bacon, chicken, vegan chicken, tuna, cucumber, falafel. Smoothies and energy drinks crowd on one side, while yoghurts, crisps and cakes are heaped on the other.  The meal-deal section of a supermarket is a thing of beauty. The variety of combinations covers almost all cravings, preferences and dietary requirements, at roughly the price of a standard London coffee. I don’t understand colleagues who waste their evenings making up a large quantity of the same dish for lunch the next day. The smugness of stringent meal-preppers must turn into gloom when, by Friday, they’re faced with the prospect of defrosting the fifth frozen chilli of the week.

Male killer whales are all mummy’s boys. That’s not a revelation; their curious and intense social lives have been studied for decades, but the extent to which a male orca depends on his mother has been revealed by new research, which shows that mothers routinely sacrifice their food and their energies for their enormous male offspring, compromising their own health and their ability to produce more young. Orcas or killer whales – the former name is used more often these days – are not whales but big dolphins, up to eight metres long. They’re fierce enough under any name, but curiously selective in their ferocity. And that’s all about culture. Not ours: theirs. The cultural life of orcas is a subject of scientific debate, and its implications are extensive.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust is all very well, but nowadays the melancholy business of disposing of human remains can be expedited with caustic soda. I only know this because the Church of England’s General Synod has been asked to consider the burial alternative of water cremation, or resomation, which uses a bath of hot water and potassium or sodium hydroxide to dissolve flesh and bones. The family ends up with the ashes from the bones, and the biofluid from the process is disposed of in the sewers. This is legal in the UK, but so far water companies have been reluctant to embrace human remains.

Who does not love a snowdrop? The pure white of their pendulous petals may be chilly, but who cares when they flower in the chilliest months, often on their own, or accompanied only by hellebores and aconites. I grow a number of snowdrop species and cultivated varieties, as well as unnamed seedlings that seem to appear out of nowhere, since these bulbs are relentlessly promiscuous. They pop up especially in shady borders under deciduous shrubs or among evergreen and herbaceous perennials, and they are the best sight to greet me on my daily garden walks in January and February.  The word ‘galanthophile’ does not quite convey the fanaticism of the true snowdrop lover.

Some of us still have stashes of traditional stamps which we were told would become redundant after 31 January. Royal Mail (whose CEO Simon Thompson is on £753,000 per annum) promised old ones could be exchanged for new, but the system has struggled to keep up with demand. Now a chaotic Royal Mail says there will be a ‘grace period’, allowing us to use traditional stamps until 31 July – after which we will have no choice but to go with the barcoded versions they have rolled out. Barcodes have been spoiling the look of products, especially books, for 20 years and are now set to spoil envelopes. Worse, the barcodes, boasts Royal Mail, will soon be scannable, enabling us to watch and share ‘digital extras’ such as Shaun the Sheep videos.

As I digest the news that Kiwi are ceasing the sale of its shoe polish in the UK, due to plummeting demand in the age of trainers, I find myself in mourning chiefly for the tin. What will the ritual of shoe-polishing feel like when it no longer starts with the thumb-against-index-finger rub of the butterfly-twist opener? That was a brilliant invention by Kiwi, and I’m afraid that the shoe polish tin that survives in the British market – Cherry Blossom’s, the same shallow cylindrical shape as Kiwi’s but with a ‘press hard here and the other side pops off’ opening system – doesn’t provide quite the Proustian kick of Sunday evenings in the 20th century: that combination of nausea at the strong smell and at the thought of tomorrow’s history test.

This week we get to Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, when the wise men finally make it to baby Jesus in Bethlehem. Properly, the feast starts the night before, so Twelfth Night is the evening of the 5th, which in some parts of Europe is the climax of the Christmas season. And, as with every good thing, it’s an occasion for cake – king cake to be precise. There are several variants from different parts of Europe. The best-known here is the galette des rois, which features in French patisseries: a lovely almond paste encased in puff pastry, and, in shops, surmounted with a cardboard golden crown for whoever gets the bean on the inside. I make it in a version by Joël Robuchon with slices of pineapple. Delicious.

With the exception of turkeys and geese, turtle doves are perhaps the birds most associated with this time of year. They are, of course, the second gift in The 12 Days of Christmas and they also feature in the nativity story – in the Gospel of Luke, a pair of turtle doves are sacrificed at the temple at Jesus’s circumcision. From Roman mythology through to Vaughan Williams, turtle doves have long been symbols of love and devotion in western culture. According to Shakespeare, ‘a pair of loving turtle doves… could not live asunder day or night’. Yet sadly the chances of seeing a pair today are dwindling. Since 1966, Britain’s turtle dove population has dropped from 140,000 pairs to just 2,100.

Canapés are one of life’s delights and surprises – surprises because drinks party invitations usually give nothing away. Perhaps because ‘nibbles’ is such a hideous word, or perhaps just because of invitation convention, hosts tend simply to put ‘Drinks, 6.30 to 8.30’ on the Paperless Post card. So you arrive with no idea whether you’re in for two hours of fizz on an empty stomach, or for a culinary treat in a succession of miniatures. Always braced for the worst-case scenario – starvation in high heels – I’m overjoyed to spot a tray of canapés coming towards me through the throng, and am pathetically grateful to the host for this beneficence.

The extraordinarily brave anti-CCP protestors have been striking up ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’ from Les Misérables in the streets of many cities. A song written in 1980 for a musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel has become an unlikely rallying cry in present-day China.  Like all the most effective protest songs, ‘Do You Hear…?’ has transcended its origins. In 2014, it was picked up during the Maidan revolution in Ukraine. There are now several ad hoc translations in Cantonese and Taiwanese.

Turn down an alley off St James’s Street (the east side), lined with old painted panelling, and you are in Pickering Place, which pub quizzers say is London’s smallest public square. It is certainly charming, with stone paving, wrought iron railings, Georgian windows and a sundial on a pedestal. A gaslight on a wall bracket used to glow sympathetically in the space. Now Westminster Council has replaced it with an LED. It had threatened to do the same for all its 299 gaslights still under council control, but a rearguard action has halted its plans. The beauty of gaslights may depend on your starting point. They were, at a crucial moment of his life, anathema to John Ruskin.

It’s that time when publishers flood bookshops with celebrity memoirs. We all know a sleb autobiography is rarely the work of the celebrity, but the ghostwriter is not the only anonymous voice at work – an indexer can play a quietly subversive part too. One of my favourite index moments is in Shaun Ryder’s autobiography (Twisting My Melon – of course!), towards the end of the S’s: ‘sinus problems, 2; splitting up with Denise, 63; splitting up with Felicia, 320; splitting up with Oriole, 295; splitting up with Trish, 246-7; sunburnt in Valencia, 141-2; teeth, 327-8; thyroid problem, 320, 326; UFOs seen, 33-4.’ Teeth, UFOs, hypochondria, and failed relationships on a doomed, never-learn loop.

This Sunday, in my village of Etchingham, East Sussex, we will gather around our war memorial. It is a fine monument, designed by Sir Herbert Baker, with the names of the dead inscribed around an octagonal base. There are no famous names upon it: indeed, there is only one commissioned officer, a Second Lieutenant (who had once been a commercial clerk, working from the age of 14). The rest were mostly young farm labourers: the oldest, aged 44, had been a ‘domestic chauffeur’. The rural working classes leave little in the way of records. These men left no ‘voices of the Great War’. But though mute, they are not inglorious; and one of the most eloquent writers of the era spoke on their behalf.

According to excerpts from Out of the Blue, the cursed biography of Liz Truss by Harry Cole and The Spectator’s James Heale, Truss is dependent on two things for comfort: Instagram and espresso. On a trade delegation to New Zealand, she’d ‘had so much coffee and just wasn’t interested in meeting the ambassador’. Coffee is from Ethiopia. Its origins as a foodstuff are murky, but the best legend is about a goatherd called Kaldi who in the mid-9th century noticed that his goats ate black beans and became manic and sleepless: essentially, they started dancing. From there, coffee spread to Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Persia. But when coffee met Christianity there was the moral panic that reliably comes when a powerful new stimulant is found.

Under the sink. That’s where most of us will be keeping a stash of candles in case the lights go out this winter on account of an erratic electricity supply. There’s nothing worse than finding yourself in darkness and not remembering where you’ve left the candles and the matches. Be prepared. We’ve got out of the habit of using candles except for dinner parties, so we’ve lost touch with our inner chandler. Not many children go to sleep looking at night (tea) lights because they’re afraid of the dark. So I sought out the founder of Candle Maker Supplies off the Shepherd’s Bush Road in London, David Constable, who remembers the 1970s when blackouts meant everyone using candles. His tip: chill your candles before using them; that way, they last longer.