Monet’s Venetian moment

If you crave art that will envelop you, book a ticket, pronto, to Monet and Venice at the Brooklyn Museum. Enveloppe was the term the French impressionist artist Claude Monet (1840-1926) used to describe the “beauty of the air around” the objects and landscapes he painted. “Other painters paint a bridge, a house, a boat… I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house, and the boat are to be found – the beauty of the air around them, and that is nothing less than the impossible,” he said.

And yet on his 1908 trip to Venice he succeeded in capturing the atmospheric mix of air, water, light and shadow that suffused the floating city of islands known for its distinctive bridges and canals and singular mélange of Byzantine domes, Gothic churches, Moorish-style balconies and Renaissance arches and arcades. Equally significant, the exhibition argues, it was this visit that rescued the 68-year-old artist from the depressive block that took hold of him after his long-time art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel voiced doubts that a market existed for the cycle of water-lily paintings in which he had been so deeply immersed.

With what lame irony Durand-Ruel’s critique resounds today. But the exhibition wisely focuses on the additional masterworks that Monet created in the wake of his impasse. This perspective allows the curators – Lisa Small of the Brooklyn Museum and Melissa Buron of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum – to document the artist’s emotional mindset and creative focus before, during and after his stay in Venice.

The story of how the Venetian sojourn itself came to be also provides a glimpse into the workings of the Monets’ marriage. After Monet angrily vowed to abandon the water-lily project altogether, his glum and listless demeanor so distressed his then-wife Alice Hoschedé that she persuaded him, despite his grumbling, to accept the invitation of the art patron and society hostess Mary Hunter to stay with her in Venice at the exquisitely appointed 15th-century Palazzo Barbaro, situated on the Grand Canal.

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Alice’s plan may have begun as a caring (and perhaps exasperated) gesture to divert her husband’s mood, but her resolute insistence led to his creative restoration. Monet begrudgingly assented to a two-week stay, but the trip eventually sparked his mood so greatly that the journey was extended to a two-month working vacation. During that time, the revitalized Monet produced 37 paintings, some of which were exhibited to acclaim in 1912. Nineteen of those canvases appear here, as do several paintings from the water-lily series.

Those lily-pond paintings benefited greatly from the artist’s journey. “My time in Venice has had the advantage of making me see my canvases with a better eye,” he said. “There’s only one step, there and back, from the water-lily pond to the lagoon where the colorful palaces bloom.” For evidence, look to “Water Lilies” (c. 1914-17), a canvas aglow with pink flowers accompanied by shadows cast by foliage and hints of watery vegetation below.

Monet’s reinvigorated Venetian palette announces itself in the joltingly vivid red brushstrokes of “The Red House” (1908, see p41) It is also seen in the more precise daubs used to capture the dappled waves that transform from blue to green to rose and gold and cream and back again, as the water washes against the stony facades of the distant palazzi. Monet painted these scenes en plein air, as was his custom – but in this case from a floating gondola, an adaptation of the floating “studio boat” he’d once used on the Seine. Édouard Manet depicted this practice of Monet’s in “Claude Monet Painting in His Studio Boat” (1874). The scene endearingly shows Monet accompanied on board by his first wife, Camille. Monet’s attention in this painting is focused not on her but the canvas in progress. We see its finished version “Sailboats on the Seine,” painted the same year, mounted nearby. 

In Venice, as he had in both London and Paris, Monet also captured another element of the open air: smog, produced by the coal-burning engines of the world’s increasingly industrialized cities. The advent of pollution almost certainly contributed to the hazy blend of colors Monet observed and depicted in such paintings as the 1903 canvas shown here, “Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect.” These are the same kinds of atmospheric enveloppes that nearly enshroud in shadow Venetian views such as the alluringly mysterious “The Palazzo Contarini” (1908).

Gallery by gallery, visitors also get to see the storied city as viewed over the centuries through the eyes of myriad artists, photographers and visitors. Seeing historic sights through the differing artistic sensibilities of Canaletto, J.M.W. Turner, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler and Pierre-Auguste Renoir is a discourse itself on creative perception, demonstrating the wide array of angles, styles and personal slants each artist brought along on their travels – and subsequently shared with us.

Unfortunately, as you enter the exhibition – before you see a single Monet or even a postcard – you enter an introductory gallery filled with giant videos of Venice in an immersive montage that may please some but struck me as superfluous.

Far more relevant are the exhibition’s archival reels, recorded by the Lumière brothers and others in the 1890s and early 1900s. These snippets show canals bursting with gondolas and piazzas crowded with tourists. Numerous prints, postcards and other works on view also attest to the sightseeing throngs abroad throughout the city. Canaletto’s precisely rendered scenes similarly capture the commotion of the harbor, where sailors and workmen busily ply their trades. In a subtler vein, Sargent’s series of evocative watercolors from 1903-04 (standouts include “La Riva” and “The Bridge of Sighs”) present scenes that suggest calm and beauty can be found even amid the bustle.

But in contrast to the buzz and the busyness portrayed by others, Monet’s Venice is nearly devoid of human presence. His is a floating world enlivened instead by radiant colors and shimmering brush strokes and yet marked by emptiness. One striking example is his “Palazzo Dario” (1908) in which a darkly shadowed empty gondola rests in place on the rippling water just outside a monumental marble structure.

This emptiness was no accident. When the Monets came home from Venice, they were already hoping to plan a return to the city. It was not to be. Alice became ill and died in 1911. Monet’s grief was great, his melancholy expressed in the motif he returned to several times, seen here as well in “Le Palais da Mula,” of a lone and empty gondola, a poignant commemoration of the loss of the companion with whom he had shared so many days together in his floating studio.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

Portrait of a frontier life

Death falls from the sky in Denis Johnson’s 116-page novella Train Dreams (2011) in the form of “widowmakers,” broken tree limbs that can strike heedless loggers. Death burns through forests and arrests the heart of a young man hauling sacks of cornmeal; it rots through the wounded leg of a pedophile; it takes Robert Grainier in his sleep in November of 1968: “He lay dead in his cabin through the rest of the fall, and through the winter, and was never missed.” But Train Dreams, often hailed as a “miniature masterpiece,” is not a story of defeat: it is an elegiac love letter to the unobserved life of the American frontier worker who, though left behind by the steady march of progress, endures with quiet grace.

Now, director Clint Bentley (Sing Sing, Jockey) has faithfully adapted the novella for the screen. He co-wrote the screenplay with Greg Kwedar.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Grainier, masterfully played by Joel Edgerton, finds work as a railway laborer in the Pacific Northwest, logging 500-year-old trees to make way for the railroad and building bridges. His work keeps him from his home in Fry, Idaho, where his wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones), and young daughter, Kate, live in a cabin in the woods. It is a time of speed and rapid change; the old must make way for the new. A railwayman declares that a new wooden bridge has shaved miles off the old train route. A brief shot, set in the future, shows Grainier looking at the steel highway bridge that will soon make his labor irrelevant. Later in the film, he watches the moon landing on television.

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Grainier meets a quirky cast of characters, the kind that line of work inevitably attracts. But as he grows older and two-man saws are replaced by chainsaws, the work becomes more solitary, the people less chatty. When Grainier runs into a fellow worker he knew years earlier, he realizes the old man has dementia. Their time and their shared memories are slowly being forgotten. Men die often. Boots nailed to a tree are all that’s left to mark the graves of those killed by rogue logs. After the burial, the work must go on.

When Grainier returns home from one of his work stints, the sky is black with smoke. Unable to find his wife and daughter in town, he ventures into the blazing trees. His cabin has been reduced to ash; nothing remains of his family.

Can such relentless change, such tragedy, be endured? As its title suggests, this is a tale of clashing worlds – of metal and smoke, reality and fantasy. Grainier experiences visions of his wife and imagines his daughter has survived and become a wild thing in the forest. He is haunted by the ghost of a Chinese laborer he failed to save from a lynching and fears he has been cursed. But life goes on. He rebuilds his cabin and stays there for the rest of his days.

In the first few minutes of the film, actor Will Patton narrates, in sonorous voiceover, a passage from the novella that amounts to an obituary. Grainier “lived more than 80 years, well into the 1960s. In his time he’d traveled west to within a few dozen miles of the Pacific, though he’d never seen the ocean itself, and as far east as the town of Libby, 40 miles inside of Montana. He’d had one lover – his wife, Gladys – owned one acre of property, two horses, and a wagon… he had no idea who his parents might have been, and he left no heirs behind him.” The narration isn’t overbearing but lends the story of Grainier’s solitary life a sort of mythic quality.

Some things are inevitably lost in the transition from page to screen, things that only the written word can convey; some things are gained. Johnson’s prose is spare but interwoven with bursts of lyricism, much like emerging from a forest into a sunlit clearing. Bentley ups the ante with focused, Terrence Malick-esque shots of the lush green forest; the orange blaze of a campfire; the blushing sky at sunrise and sunset. Wood cracks and groans as trees are felled; birdsong fills the air. We are meant to linger here. “Beautiful, ain’t it?” asks old Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), an eccentric explosives expert, as he and Grainier share a moment of rest in the forest. “What is?” Grainier asks. “All of it,” Peeples says.

It’s a quiet sort of epiphany that coincides with death’s closeness: Peeples has been struck on the head by a widowmaker just moments before – and will die soon after.

Grainier’s own epiphany comes high in the air, as he experiences his first plane ride at a county fair for $4. Bentley fittingly chooses this significant passage from the novella to conclude his film: “The plane began to plummet like a hawk… he saw the moment with his wife and child as they drank Hood’s Sarsaparilla in their little cabin on a summer’s night, then another cabin he’d never remembered before, the places of his hidden childhood, a vast golden wheat field, heat shimmering above a road, arms encircling him, and a woman’s voice crooning, and all the mysteries of this life were answered.”

To adapt the old question: if a man lives a life in a forest, and no one is around to observe it, does it make a mark – an echo? Bentley depicts Grainier’s body being absorbed by moss, his cabin overgrown. And yet, we do not feel grieved for him. Grainier is forgotten. But for a moment, he was a life – someone who loved and mourned. He was there, and then he wasn’t. And that is all; that is everything.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

Why DC loves to hate Partiful

If you’re under 50, you may have noticed that Partiful has quietly annexed the American social calendar over the past year or two. The event-planning app, founded by former Palantir employees, began as another Silicon Valley toy, but it didn’t stay regional for long. Its loud dashboard aesthetic spread quickly through the Bay Area and then achieved escape velocity in Washington, DC. I wouldn’t be surprised if the strong cultural current between tech and defense is what created near-perfect conditions for a social revival in nerd world.

While I understand a bit of snobbery over the aesthetics, I’ve been surprised by the constant performative disdain I’ve observed accompanying its rise. Everywhere I go, I hear people say they “hate” Partiful. I watch otherwise socially adept adults roll their eyes at the indignity of being invited to yet another birthday karaoke or themed dinner through an app, of all things, as if the rest of their lives aren’t already dictated by Outlook and Slack.

Receiving a Partiful link is akin to a minor social injury, a digital affront to imagined analog elegance. This is nothing more than user error, in my view. Partiful’s origins do give it an undeniable tinge of dorkiness, but only the constitutionally weak would let that get in the way of a good time.

Sure, the format is corny. The animated sparkles, the tie-dye backgrounds, the GIFs. But in a society where birth rates are in a nosedive, no one’s heard of sex before and social skills are degrading by the minute, I am more than happy to turn a blind eye to a few lurid colors and kitschy animations in service of prosocial behavior.

Infact, I’d go as far as to say that my social diary has never been busier thanks to the efficient plug-in between Partiful and my iPhone calendar. I know exactly when everything is happening and I am rarely at risk of double-booking myself, which is more than I can say for the pre-Partiful days when RSVPs were a veritable archaeological dig through texts, DMs and half-remembered conversations.

Indeed, it may be the only app that’s as effective at getting people to log off as it is at getting people to use it. For the socially blessed, perhaps the garishness of it all is a true burden – not all of us are well-connected enough to enjoy a constant whisper-network of parties, or handwritten calling cards from a generous host.

For the rest of us, the mere fact that someone went out of their way to invite you to something, even through a candy-colored interface, is hardly an indignity. If being invited to a party is the worst thing that has happened to you this month, I congratulate you on your charmed life.

The main complaint I hear beyond the superficial is that the app feels “too public.” The guest list is visible. The RSVPs are visible. People can see you were invited. They can see you RSVP’d “maybe” and then never updated your status. Knowing who is attending an event supposedly ruins the mystery of running into an exciting stranger or, more thrillingly, an unwelcome ex. But this transparency only offends those who relied on ambiguity to maintain their mystique. Some of us know how to withhold, wherever we go.

Another accusation: the app’s design encourages people to RSVP just to see who else is coming, which allegedly leads to inflated guest lists full of ambiguous spectators. While I’ll admit that this is gauche, it does reflect a fact of human nature. People have always wanted to know who will be at a party before deciding to attend. Partiful simply removed the need for back-channel interrogation and gossip-triangle logistics. Tacky as this may be, millennials have no right to be so snooty about it, given the fact that their long-forgotten Facebook events had the same feature.

If you read between the lines you’ll notice that DC in particular loves Partiful because it flattens status games while simultaneously revealing them. The everyday social life of the city, the informal gatherings of the civil servants and hard-drinking journalists, becomes a semi-public ledger of who’s hosting, who’s being invited and who’s orbiting which micro-scene.

In a city where professional life and social life blur, where a dinner can double as a networking event and a house party can function as a quasi-policy salon, this level of transparency is intoxicating. People here love data, for good or ill, and Partiful gives them plenty of it.

Partiful exploits Washington’s weakness for structure, but in my view, the exploitation is a net positive and benefits all stakeholders. It makes it easier for hosts to gather people, easier for newcomers to break in, and easier for the city’s chronically Type-A residents to remember that fun is a scheduling problem more than a metaphysical one. The app has created a small renaissance in casual hosting: backyard dinners, themed cocktail nights, going-away parties, last-minute potlucks.

I’ve been to five-person movie nights and 500-person galas because of it. It has lowered the barrier to entry for throwing something together. It has reminded people that to enjoy a party, you have to log off and actually attend it.

If some find this embarrassing, so be it. But it’s hard not to admire an app that has done more for community-building than a decade of think-tank happy hours. DC may scoff at Partiful, but it also cannot stop using it. And maybe that’s the clearest sign of all that the app is here to stay.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

The diner test

Some people say you become a real New Yorker when you’ve lived in this city for ten years – when you’ve complained your way through ten Arctic winters, ten swamp-thick summers, ten Halloweens that made you question the human psyche and ten consecutive mornings trapped behind barricades courtesy of Marathon Sunday.

Respectfully, I disagree. In my opinion, you become a real New Yorker when you’ve mastered the delicate, near-mystical art of going to a diner.

I know what you’re thinking: she’s doing that painfully American thing where everything’s hyperbole. Surely it can’t be that hard to slide into the cracked vinyl booth of some generically named establishment; to inhale a plate of eggs and coffee; to pay your check; and then to burst into the bustling streets of Midtown, blinking into the sun-cut smog and wishing you’d had just one more cup of the all-you-can-drink rocket-fuel brew.

But no. Absolutely not. To “diner” properly in New York is to submit to a civic ritual, equal parts choreography, anthropology and spiritual test, the successful execution of which grants you provisional membership of the city’s secret society of the perpetually caffeinated.

The first step is choosing where to go. It must be authentic but not performative. The charm has to be accidental and earned. If somewhere is trying to be a vibe, it’s disqualified. You’re looking for the perfect equilibrium of grime and hygiene – enough oiliness to reassure you that no one will judge your appearance (which might range from “pajamas” to “whatever you were wearing when you fell asleep on the couch”) but not so much patina of yesterday’s steak and fries that you find yourself trying to remember when you last got vaccinated. There are bonus points if it’s close enough to become your regular spot, but not so regular that the waitstaff feel inclined to reveal something deeply personal about your eating habits when your parents visit. That’s unnecessary.

Next, how to order. This is where amateurs reliably falter. Diners are not for the customization class. Assuming you’ve chosen your place wisely, it won’t be the sort of institution in which your dressing might come on the side. Your server won’t smile and nod slowly and sympathetically if you want to sub feta for cheddar – but only if it’s organic. Diners are temples of decisiveness. You must know what you want before you sit down and you must be fluent in the sacred language of egg-ordering.

“Two eggs over easy, whole wheat, hash browns.” That’s it. No dissertations. No negotiations. No hesitations. And for the love of all that is holy, now is not the time to mention your dairy sensitivities. The milk in that coffee has been around longer than your digestive issues.

Finally, the devouring. When your plate arrives, be polite. Don’t be effusive. This isn’t grandma’s house. Request ketchup or hot sauce only when the server is already within your gravitational field – and ask for everything at once. These people have tables to turn, omelettes to flip and a sixth sense for customers who look like they’re high-maintenance. Don’t be that person.

If you’ve had two free coffee refills, the server has asked “Anything else?” twice, and you’re still sitting comfortably, you’ve blown it. You’ve overstayed your welcome. Back to square one for you and your green card application. This is not brunch. This is a transaction. Tip well, in cash if you can. Then leave. And – take it from me – don’t use the bathroom unless you really must.

It took me five years to master all of this. Five years of trial, error, humiliation and trying to pronounce “water” in such a way that Tony from Queens doesn’t look at me as if I were speaking Latin. But now? Now I have a personal roster of three great diners I frequent regularly: Tom’s in Morningside Heights (the Seinfeld place but, astonishingly, not a tourist trap), City Diner on the Upper West Side and the Waverly Diner in Greenwich Village. At each, I know my order. I pay with purpose and, when I remember, with cash. I leave when it’s time and somewhere along the way, I even got my greasy paws on that sacred green card. And I think that’s when it hit me. Maybe being a New Yorker isn’t about longevity at all. Maybe it’s not about the number of months you’ve overpaid rent or scampered all the way to the Upper East Side on Thanksgiving morning because, yes, you’ve forgotten, once again, to pre-order the pumpkin pie. Maybe it’s about learning the rhythms of a place that will never slow down for you, but will always, and miraculously, have a booth open when you need it.

A diner is New York stripped of pretense. It’s fast, it’s flawed, it’s efficient and it’s endlessly alive with the glorious eccentricities of the people who have dwelled here for both generations and mere minutes. Learn to survive in this little microcosm of twisted charm and perhaps you’ve unlocked the secret to surviving the city itself.

Because in a town where everything changes, the diner doesn’t. It’s a gentle glitch in a city in which relentless forward motion is the default. It’s as reliably unfashionable as it is immortal. And if you can find comfort there – even at 3 a.m. under fluorescent lights, when you’re questioning your most irreversible life choices – then congratulations: honey, I think you might just be home.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

Hurricane season in Cuba

A cold front blew in off the Florida Straits, sending waves over Havana’s famous corniche, the Malecón, and announcing what has traditionally been the end of the hurricane season. After 13 named storms, it seems as if the 2025 season finale was Hurricane Melissa, a humdinger. She paused south of Jamaica, getting herself into a lather, before killing 32 on that lovely island and causing at least $7 billion of damage.

Fortunately for Cuba to the north, Jamaica’s mountains plucked the murder from Melissa’s eye – but she still cut a devastating trail through this bigger island’s eastern reaches a day or so later.

As Cuba’s communist leadership donned military fatigues and began its traditional mobilization for such events, my phone lit up with messages from friends around the world. They had seen images of the vast, spiraling cloud, top-lit by lightning and imagined apocalypse.

But we, unlike many, were fine. Hurricanes are surprisingly localized. You really have to be within 50 miles of the eye to feel the full force and Cuba is huge, the same length as California. And its government is good at the immediate stuff. No fatalities were reported on the island.

But I appreciated the concern. If a Cuban city does take a direct hit, it will be calamitous. Storms that pass 50 miles away from you might be OK, but in the eye of the storm, even in well-prepared countries, the suffering can be terrible.

I’ve been sideswiped a couple of times, which was frightening enough. But pros such as my friend Patrick, who as a CNN correspondent is forever stepping into the path of tempests with names like Beryl or Dorian, says emerging after a direct hit is terrible. “You are greeted by scenes of damage so extensive as to be otherworldly,” he says. “Cars flung into trees, houses cleaved from their foundations, trees stripped of every leaf.”

Cuba’s long-term financial woes mean the island’s beautiful old cities are falling down, even in clement weather. Habaneros tend to walk in the middle of the street because of the danger of falling masonry. Last month, an entire house collapsed in the old town, killing a mother and son.

Any hurricane, let alone one the size of Melissa, would probably annihilate a Cuban city. Which would be a pity. Cuba’s capital has been a storied wonder for five centuries; a recent visitor reminded me that Norman Lewis once called Havana “the most beautiful city of the Americas.” A big storm has the power to bring that story to an end, along with untold lives.

So, we depend on luck. In summer I obsessively watch the National Hurricane Center’s website, tracking storms forming off Cape Verde which grow stronger as they head west. It feels like being a pin in a bowling alley, watching the ball coming down the lane and praying it will miss.

Cubans have developed a whole slew of coping mechanisms. First they turn to the sainted Dr. José Rubiera on the news. For many years the director of the National Forecasting Center, his mustachioed cool acts like a balm as he rationally describes a storm’s possible paths.

If a hurricane begins to get close, the Cuban authorities declare an estado mayor de la defensa civil and show off the advantage of being an authoritarian regime. In Jamaica in October, people refused to flee. One resident of Port Royal was quoted as saying the last time she took to a shelter, “females weren’t safe and to top it off, people stole our stuff.” In Cuba, by contrast, the residents had no choice. Some 735,000 people were moved whether they liked it or not. But they were safer.

Here in Havana, when hurricanes approach, an eerie calm takes over. People sweep their roofs of junk and stones or anything else that might shatter windows. Queues form for bread, often to the last minute. I once ran to the bakery with my brother-in-law as electricity transformers exploded above our heads. “Do we really need a loaf this much?” I remember shouting.

Afterwards, the unafflicted gather aid for the stricken. And then it’s the long road back once everyone has forgotten. My colleague Eileen recently returned with a convoy to the areas affected by Melissa. She tells me of a dam overflowing, washing away houses and livestock, of misery piled on misery.

Without money to rebuild, Cuba now carries the scars of past storms. One of my favorite places on the island is a village called Isabela de Sagua. In 2017, Hurricane Irma passed by, a terrible storm because she never touched land but instead sent the sea inland all along the coast. Isabela was all but washed away. There’s a restaurant there I like where boats arrive under sail (there isn’t a lot of gasoline at the moment) to unload fish, crab, oysters and lobster. The food costs pennies and tastes sublime. It feels like the restaurant at the end of the world.

But putting aside my suspect love for trauma tourism, that’s not great, is it? Such stoic tenacity from residents is not really enough. One day a hurricane is going to prove Cuba’s authorities inadequate. Nonetheless, for now, and until June next year, I will be able to sleep soundly, certain my family is not going to be wiped out by a storm with a silly name.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

The rural reality

I was never a “real” rider. My parents were serious riders. My sister was too – she showed at national level. But by the time I came along, the youngest child by 20 years, no one had the energy for proper lessons, let alone the time it takes to seriously compete. Yet somehow, I’m the one who wound up with the family horse farm in New York’s Hudson Valley.

My family’s involvement with horses goes back almost 80 years. My dad, a Bronx boy raised on Bonanza and Lone Ranger, grew up riding on summer vacation at a Borscht Belt resort. His love of horses shifted him from Jewish cowboy to showjumper and he eventually took over the equestrian center he learned to ride at. For more than 30 years, he bought, sold, boarded and trained horses in every discipline. He even met my mom when she came upstate to buy a horse; naturally, he ripped her off.

The Borscht Belt is long dead and the business shifted and drastically downsized in the 2000s. It was a tough move. As a teenager, I remember rushing to unload dozens of horses as the resort abruptly closed, and we relocated to our 15-horse farm seemingly overnight. Business waned, my parents lost steam, and that would have been that for the family farm – if I hadn’t partied my way through college. I graduated with a low GPA and no job options. I did, however, have a little money saved up and some friends in Belgium with a small farm like ours.

Belgian warmbloods come in a few variations, but all share similar characteristics. Warmbloods are a selectively bred mix between cold- and hot-blooded horses, the former quiet work horses like Clydesdales, the latter spirited breeds like Thoroughbreds. The mix of explosive speed and strength makes them ideal candidates for show jumping at the highest level. And while a green and unpedigreed foal may be quite common in the Belgian countryside, they’re highly sought-after in the US.

If you think going through customs is a pain in the ass, just imagine what it’s like for a horse. International transport requires significant documentation, veterinary work and mandatory mosquito-free quarantine.

Covid, of course, shut most of this down. The political world became my new day job and the business went back to its roots as a small, hands-off boarding operation, with some former clients keeping their horses with me full time. It pays the bills.

More importantly, however, it keeps me rooted in community in a way that most DC transplants don’t understand. Owning any small business keeps one connected to the “real world” – the concerns that politicos discuss, debate and regulate, but often have little connection to or stake in.

But having a rural horse farm that caters to largely upscale (but not ultra-wealthy) clients puts me in a unique position.

On the one hand, I’m embedded in working-class America. The “locals” – staff, neighbors and friends upstate – are at the forefront of a new coalition that’s been the backbone of America First for nearly a decade. On the other hand, my clients – often New Yorkers with successful businesses – root me in a world where the bulk of American wealth still lies. It’s not hedge-fund managers or tech overlords who monopolize American social tastes and spending, but those with unglamorous regional businesses.

For me, it’s easy to flip between the blue-collar worker and the country-home crowd and relate to either. Despite their stark differences, their fates are intrinsically linked.

When the left complains about “white privilege,” it suggests a dismantling of these two distinct US social groups: a working-class, dependent and rudderless, and the destruction of bourgeois wealth reserves in order to pay for it. It’s not so much about redistributing wealth but punishing those who resist this new cultural order. But without these very independent, very American classes, America itself ceases to be.

Many in my generation agree with this sentiment but still have no desire to resist it. It’s not just that they don’t want to go to trade school; no matter the industry, they don’t want anything to do with their parents’ businesses. But is a rootless, rent-poor, corporate life in a luxury Manhattan studio really all that much better? It’s pointless to feel that you’re above your childhood circumstances. While I grew up alienated from the family business, I applied the basic knowledge and familiarity of my upbringing with a little effort and did well. I learned as I went and carved my own path. The great thing about America is that you can, too. You can take over your parents’ farm – or local law firm – and make it your own: reimagine it, tailor it and build a life very much different, even better, than your parents’. And that’s the real spirit of life in the country.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

How to make an unforgettable Christmas dinner

In the early 1970s, celebrity chef Jacques Pépin and his wife bought a dilapidated house in the Catskills so they could go skiing on the weekends. It was a real fixer-upper. Groups of friends would come up from New York City and pitch in on the renovation effort, and Pépin would serve dinner at the end of the day. These weekends were so much fun Pépin decided to memorialize them by hand-lettering and painting special menus.

How Pépin convinced his friends to let him sit in the kitchen sketching petits poissons and heads of broccoli while they slaved away at framing and drywalling his winter getaway is, admittedly, mysterious. Settling in to hand-paint a menu before getting down the pots and cooking a five-star meal doesn’t square well with the image of the DIY weekend warrior leading the charge on home renovations. Clearly, the man was both a culinary genius and a master of persuasion.

And his menus were utterly charming. They grew into a family tradition, where the menu for every special occasion was illustrated, lettered in Pépin’s elegant, curly script and preserved for posterity in the family archives. (They were, eventually, published in book form.) In addition to the list of courses, some had space for les invités, where the guests could sign and leave comments. Sometimes labels from the wine they’d enjoyed would be stuck on as well.

He made menus for outside events too, for instance a Christmas menu for a dinner cooked at Stone Acres Farm in Stonington, Connecticut, in 2016, with the courses listed in black ink and the wines in green. What a feast it was. They began with gougères, goose liver pâté and Stonington scallops. Then they followed soup and grilled Noank oysters with crémant from Savoie and Guy Larmandier Champagne. The pièce de résistance was roast goose with gravy and potatoes in goose fat, accompanied by Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Dessert was an apple tarte tatin paired with Sauternes. Not too shabby.

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You might be tempted to dismiss Pépin’s handmade menus as a charming but irrelevant hobby, a sort of chef’s journal. But this would be to overlook the man’s genius. His menus are infused with perhaps the most important ingredient of all, something without which Christmas dinner is doomed: a sense of occasion. Like a wedding, Christmas is a milestone of sorts. Like a wedding, the very concept of Christmas dinner is burdened with expectations, fears and emotions. It demands ceremony and tradition, but also liveliness and warmth. How can this occasion, this time in history, this particular guest list, this family and this place be woven into one unforgettable evening – hopefully without burning down the house?

Handmade menus alone won’t do it, though they’ll help. It takes a master strategy, and the one I propose is straight from the wedding handbook: your outfit (or in this case your dinner), should include something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.

Something old – that’s easy. Christmas is all about time-honored culinary traditions: stuffed birds, roast boar (as I had once at a beautiful Christmas in Germany), tourtière in Québec, oysters on the half shell gulped down by the French, figgy pudding served up à l’Escoffier in a blaze of brandified glory. Something old puts you in touch with all ages past through the shadowy line-up of ancestors and ever-so-greats, all celebrating Christmas after Christmas, handing it on all the way to us.

But Christmas isn’t only about generations past. It’s also about the future: a fresh start, the birth of the baby Jesus, here to take on the world, live, die and reign forever. So the second element of a good Christmas menu is something new, adventurous and exciting. Time for crown roast of lamb, a terrifying cheese that looks like a brain, roasted brussels sprouts on a giant stalk which you can stand up on a platter in the likeness of a Christmas tree (or piece of medieval weaponry), trays of rich little sea urchins, the foie gras of the ocean.

Thirdly, something borrowed. When it comes to weddings, you borrow your grandmother’s necklace, your best friend’s hair clip or your sister’s shoes (if your sister lets you borrow her shoes, she doesn’t actually want them back, does she? Asking for a friend). It’s the same at Christmas: serve your grandmother’s shortbread, your best friend’s Caesar salad and shamelessly steal your sister’s recipe for mistletoe martinis.

Last but not least: something blue. It needn’t be food (though Stilton is always an option); it can be in the decor, a trick of light, a mood. Christmas isn’t all red and gold and green. Just ask Elvis: “I’ll have a blue, blue, blue, blue Christmas.” Poignancy is part of the day, so they knew in medieval times; their carols were happy, but sometimes startlingly sad: “In sorrow endeth every love but thine, at the last.” Like salt, a pinch of Christmas sadness rounds and deepens the flavors of the day, counteracting the bitter and elevating the sweet.

Blue doesn’t only stand for sorrow. It also represents the precious and the good. When a bride wears “something blue,” it is supposed to mean purity and love. In medieval times, blue pigment from the lapis lazuli stone was the rarest and most expensive color – which is why it was used for depictions of the Mother of God.

So when you settle down this festive season in a corner of your hectic, wrapping-paper-strewn home, like Pépin mid-construction, to paint little watercolor fish and garlands on to your festive dinner menu, don’t forget to work some blue into the pattern. Without the lady in blue, there is no Christmas; without Christmas, there is no Christianity – and without Christianity, it’s a cold, lonely night, with nothing between you and the wolves.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

Four Twenty Five’s wine list is better than most

I was recently invited by friends to a small birthday fête at Four Twenty Five, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s latest New York restaurant at (wouldn’t you know it) 425 Park Avenue. It was, as Bertie Wooster might have put it, oojah-cum-spiff, a worthy companion to the Terrace and Nougatine, those other famed New York refectories by Jean-Georges.

I won’t bore you with the victuals, which were so far from boring themselves that it would take more than a column just to enumerate those toothsome morsels. Instead, let me mention a couple of the wines we enjoyed, noting for posterity that the wine list at Four Twenty Five is one of the most extensive and thoughtfully selected in New York City. I hope to have occasion to make a thorough study in the years to come.

We started with a 2023 Alzinger Grüner Veltliner “Federspiel” from the Ried Mühlpoint vineyard, one of Alzinger’s best spots. It is a dry, light-bodied wine of about 11.5-12 percent alcohol. The year afforded a bright, sunny growing season and this is a bright and sunny wine, sophisticated but not fussy. Incidentally, the term “Federspiel” comes from falconry and refers to the bait used to lure the bird homeward. The vineyard lies on the clay and gneiss-bedded slope of the Steinertal in Wachau, Austria.

Readers with long memories will know that the Austrian wine industry almost disappeared in the decade following the 1985 diethylene glycol scandal. Attentive quality control analysts discovered that several Austrian wineries were lacing their potations with what amounted to anti-freeze, which made the wines taste sweeter and rounder. The juice found its way to the German market and some was illegally blended with German wine. The discovery of the adulteration cratered the Austrian wine industry for a decade, but now it is back in a big way.

Indeed, grüner veltliner, the most widely planted grape in Austria, has for some years been one of the trendier whites, and for good reason. It is notably food-friendly, complex, subtly aromatic but clean, its distinctive spiciness coming from rotundone, the peppery tasting chemical compound that is also present in syrah. I have no idea how much Jean-Georges is charging for a bottle of this grüner from the Alzinger winery since I was in the happy position of being a guest on this occasion. Out in the wild, two Andrew Jacksons ought to snag you one.

For our main course we moved on to a wine from the Arbois appellation in Jura, the wine growing region between Burgundy and Switzerland. “Very distinctive and unusual wines”: that’s how every description of wine from the Jura begins, and rightly so. The most famous are vins jaune, fermented, as is sherry, under a flor of yeast.

We had a 2020 Savagnin “Amphore” from Bénédicte and Stéphane Tissot (about $100 retail). The Tissots age this wine for five months in clay amphora, a process similar to that used in the production of Georgian wine, and then in large wooden casks called demi-muid. The result is a bright orange, cloudy wine that is reticulated with hints of stone fruit, black tea and cider. It is, as one commentator noted, “powerful stuff,” and not just because of its high acidity and 14.5 percent alcohol. Distinctive. Delicious. Delightful. I did not know at the time, but it turns out that DNA analysis recently revealed that grüner veltliner is a natural crossing of the savagnin grape and an obscure Austrian variety from the Burgenland region of eastern Austria, so our evening’s wine consumption had hidden interconnections.

Grüner veltliner. Savagnin. Here’s another grape you will be hearing more about: clairette blanc. It’s prominent in many Provençal whites (you’ll also find it in wines from the Rhône and Languedoc). We’ve had occasion to sample the rosé from Domaine du Bagnol before. The white from this storied vineyard from around the ancient fishing village of Cassis is a blend of clairette blanc, ugni blanc (also called trebbiano), and roussanne. It sells for about $30. Like its Cassis neighbor Clos Sainte Magdeleine, another winner, it is a subtle, quietly aromatic wine that grows and blossoms on the palate. Cassis has been home to the vine since Greek sailors from Phocaea arrived in the 6th century BC. The wine writer and importer Kermit Lynch calls it “an earthly paradise.” When you book a trip, let me know if you require an unpaid travel companion.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

Why winter is the best time for a barbecue

Summer is usually associated with outdoor cooking which is a perfectly reasonable association. But standing over a hot grill or smoker when the mercury is rising is not the most pleasant of activities. Whatever you are cooking becomes seasoned with droplets of sweat.

Another oft-overlooked issue, particularly when it comes to smoking meats, is that temperature regulation of the cooking apparatus can be difficult when the ambient heat surrounding it is working in synergy with the heat inside it. While I have a friend who does competition cooking and isn’t a stranger to winning (he pushes his smoker up to 300°F) most of us lack the requisite skill for smoking a pork shoulder or brisket at that heat and pulling out a tender product at the end. Summer is absolutely the wrong time to get out the smoker. Winter is absolutely the right one.

It is true that the ambient temperature works in the opposite direction in winter, sometimes making it slightly more difficult to bring the smoker up to the desirable temperature of 225°F. But simply add some extra fuel and, voilà, problem solved. There is also very little likelihood of you adding sweat to the seasoning blend.

When it comes to what you smoke and how you season it, that’s a matter of personal preference. While debates over regional styles are fun, the beauty of smoked meat is its versatility. Season it with just salt and pepper. Season with salt, pepper and garlic. Go for a rub with sugar, cumin, chili powder and various other candidates from the spice cabinet. Use a mustard binder. Try a sriracha one. Don’t use a binder at all. Whatever route you choose, you will find people willing to engage in friendly dialogue about your technique.

These are great guidelines, but they are not written in stone. The US government tells us to cook our chicken to 165, but more experienced pitmasters know that 175-185 is better for dark cuts as it gives things more time to soften and render into the meat, making it succulent and tender. For shoulders and briskets, 204 degrees or so is the magic number, but what you’re really looking for is probe tender. This is not something that words can describe: it can only be learned from experience. In short, though, it’s not exactly what the screen on the digital thermometer reads, it’s how much resistance you feel while inserting it.

This result is also much easier to achieve when your smoker and the sun aren’t working in sinister harmony. In cooler weather, the heat from the smoker even gives the chef a bit of warmth during the process – useful when the cooking can stretch on for many hours, especially if you hit “the stall.” For those unfamiliar with the stall, it’s the point at which moisture evaporating from the meat begins to counteract the smoker’s heat, causing the internal temperature to hover stubbornly around 175 degrees. And sometimes it stays there for hours.

Of course, you can combat this with the Texas Crutch – wrapping your meat in butcher paper or foil when it hits 175 and then getting it up to probe tender. That does sometimes over-moisten the crust that forms, known as the bark. So while the Texas Crutch is not as controversial as spice rubs and binders, using one will create more opportunity to engage in friendly debate with fellow enthusiasts. But the point is that it works. And since it’s your meat, you do you. Just make sure to let the meat rest before serving.

A final point to make is that when smoking during the summer, you will need a hot shower afterwards to get the smell of the smoke bath off you. A hot shower during the summer just doesn’t hit the way it does when it’s cold outside, baby. Summer is not your friend, not your primetime, not the season in which you can totally shine.

So my advice is this: do not be afraid to reserve summer for steaks seared in a cast iron pan in the comfort of your air-conditioned kitchen. Save the serious outdoor sessions for a time when you need a coat – and the condensation of your breath in the air matches the gentle whisps wafting from the smoker.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

When it comes to bourbon, provenance matters

My wife Amber and I returned home, to the heart of where it all began for me – the Bluegrass. A day at the races at Keeneland felt like stepping into a painting: the autumn sun catching the coats of the Thoroughbreds, the crowd humming with excitement. The next night, we watched on as the Kentucky Wildcats nearly toppled Texas under the lights at Kroger Field, the air electric with hope.

But it was afterward, on the backroads, that Kentucky spoke loudest. Horses grazed behind old stone fences; the sweet, yeasty scent of mash rolled out of the distilleries that dot the countryside. In those quiet miles, I remembered how deeply I love this place and how fiercely I’ll defend her bounty, both her people and her goods.

I was moved to write a kind of manifesto: my brief guide to enjoying bourbon and to honoring the hands and heritage that make it worthy of its name.

The distillers and distributors must be Kentucky-based and preferably family-owned and operated. The true keepers of bourbon’s soul are Heaven Hill, Willett Distillery, Buffalo Trace and Brown-Forman.

Heaven Hill deserves special distinction. Founded in 1935 by the Shapira family, it remains the largest independent, family-owned distillery in Kentucky, a rarity in an industry now dominated by global corporations. Heaven Hill’s portfolio stands as proof that family stewardship still produces greatness: Elijah Craig, Henry McKenna, Evan Williams, Old Fitzgerald and their old-line cousins J.T.S. Brown, J.W. Dant and T.W. Samuels. These are bourbons tied not to marketing departments, but to lineage, craftsmanship and the families who built Kentucky’s bourbon tradition.

Willett Distillery, another Bardstown treasure, continues to bottle authenticity through generations of the Willett family and its labels such as Johnny Drum, Willett Reserve, Noah’s Mill and Rowan Creek testify to an unbroken commitment to small-batch excellence.

Buffalo Trace, owned by the New Orleans-based Sazerac Company, bridges Kentucky’s bluegrass roots with Louisiana’s river heritage – it was Kentucky bourbon’s first export market after all. Its masterpieces are Colonel E.H. Taylor, Eagle Rare, Blanton’s, Weller and the revered Pappy Van Winkle line.

They remind us of the deep cultural kinship between Kentucky and New Orleans: two regions bound by history, hospitality and whiskey. Few partnerships capture that spirit better than Buffalo Trace and the Van Winkle family, whose shared devotion to time, patience and provenance makes their bourbon nearly mythic.

Brown-Forman, though publicly traded, remains a family-controlled Kentucky institution. Through Woodford Reserve, Old Forester and their variants, the Brown family continues to guard a century-old tradition that still bears their name.

And finally, a note of caution. Never drink from Beam Suntory. Though some of its labels may once have been personal favorites, its Japanese ownership and Chicago headquarters place it far from the hills, people and heritage that define true bourbon.

However hard the sacrifice, one must forgo Basil Hayden, Maker’s Mark, Baker’s, Booker’s and Knob Creek in favor of the families and distilleries who remain faithful to Kentucky’s soil, culture and craft.

In bourbon, as in life, provenance matters. Drink from those who still make it, not those who merely market it.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

Inside the gruesome world of the ‘human safari’

“People don’t actually do that, right?” my publisher asked nervously. “No one actually goes on a human safari, do they?”

Eight years ago, I didn’t know for sure. There had certainly been rumors for years that wealthy foreigners were traveling to conflict zones to kill civilians at random. Gradually I had concluded that some people were indeed heading off to complete their bucket list of horrors.

In my novel To The Lions, I placed the “human safari” in a fictional refugee camp in southern Libya. Concrete proof, however, was almost impossible to find.

Several times during my years as an investigative journalist, I heard stories about nightmarish things going on in places where law and order had collapsed. As part of my job, I visited refugee camps close to the Syrian border and in southern Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees have fled over years of conflict.

Anyone who has spent time in refugee camps knows that human trafficking is almost routine. If someone isn’t worried about trafficking a preteen girl into a brothel, it’s not an enormous leap to assume that they might be open to enabling other forms of abuse. Slowly, depressingly, I started to realize that if you really wanted to – and, importantly, you had the cash – human safaris were indeed possible.

And now evidence is finally starting to emerge. Prosecutors in Milan have just opened an investigation into Italians who allegedly visited Sarajevo during the Bosnian war in the 1990s to shoot at people trapped in the besieged city. Early on in that war, the main street running into Sarajevo became known as “Sniper Alley.” Thousands of people were killed there over a four-year period. Now prosecutors believe some of these deaths occurred because rich foreigners allegedly paid members of the Bosnian Serb army to escort them to the hills above Sarajevo to shoot and kill citizens.

The prosecution in Milan doesn’t surprise me. When societies collapse, some people will go out and do exactly what they want. While I was reporting in Libya shortly before Muammar Gaddafi was killed in 2011, I watched excitable young men drive very expensive cars extremely fast along the seafront. They’d always wanted to do it, they said cheerfully, and now they could. A few days later they all ran out of gasoline and that was that.

But what would you do if there was no risk of being caught? Some people want to kill. And in our globalized world, I believe that some of those people jump on a plane and head off to those collapsed societies in order to embark on the worst sort of tourism.

The rumors were almost impossible to prove. The people who went on human safaris weren’t going to talk. Those in their sights – some of the most vulnerable people in the world – had no way of knowing what was going on until it was too late. Even if they had their suspicions, they had no one to tell. The rumors continued to emerge in odd places. While I was chasing Somali pirates around the Indian Ocean with the British Navy, the Royal Marines took several captives. It hadn’t been the most equal battle – a US Navy ship on one side of the tiny pirate ship, a British ship on the other and a Lynx helicopter firing rows of bullets straight over the pirate ship’s bow – but the pirates themselves were heavily armed with guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

In the aftermath of the arrests, I went out to the tiny pirate ship with the Marines and spoke to the captives. Most of them were uncommunicative. One pirate – who memorably had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot – was rather more chatty. He soon realized I was a journalist and attempted to spark up conversation with me first in fluent Italian and then in fluent German. He couldn’t speak English, but we eventually established that we could both speak French.

After we had discussed the pirate’s cousin (who lived in Manchester), and he had suggested that we get married – a proposal I had to turn down – we moved on to stories he had heard about Russians prowling around the Red Sea attacking Somali pirates. These people, he insisted, were not Russian armed forces. They weren’t mercenaries hired by shipping magnates, either. These were people on expensive, glamorous yachts who wanted to kill someone – anyone. They were there for fun, the pirate said, and it was clear that no expense had been spared.

As my would-be fiancé pointed out, absolutely no one was going to care if a Somali pirate was killed. Out on the high seas, no one would ever even know. And if anyone did find out, they might conclude that the pirate had got what he deserved.

It is this gray area – where people manage to convince themselves that they’re meting out “justice” – that I suspect drives some “human safaris.” It is easy to find videos on social media of vigilantes claiming to have gunned down illegal immigrants who are attempting to cross the US/Mexico border. Heavily armed groups of civilians routinely patrol the border areas.

“We were going out huntin’,” Bryan C. Perry, of Clarksville, Tennessee, announced on TikTok as he set out his plans to head down to the border in 2022. And he was going to “shoot to kill.” If you’re off to kill someone and you’re clearly going to enjoy it, where exactly is the line? Perry is now serving several life sentences.

The late critic A.A. Gill faced a storm of complaints after he admitted that he had shot a baboon to “get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger.” He was open in his curiosity, at least. Some people are fascinated by the idea of killing. They want to know how it feels to kill a man, a woman or a child. And in some parts of the world, they can satisfy that urge – and absolutely no one will stop them.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

Down with exclamation points!

Punctuation is a gendered thing. I’ve been trying to stop myself overusing exclamation points and it’s been difficult. Exclamation points are girly because they’re a way of taking the sting out of what you say; they make any pronouncement seem more tentative, less serious. They’re the equivalent of a disarming smile, a marker that says: “No offense!” You add them to the end of a sentence to prevent anyone thinking you’re being bossy or critical. They’re an economical form of non-confrontation.

Women use them far more than men. Almost 20 years ago, a study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication found that women used nearly three-quarters of the exclamation marks in electronic messages, but it identified the tic as “markers of friendly interaction.” As far as I can work out, nothing has changed since. Reviewing, gloomily, my own record of “Hope that helps!” or “Yes please!” I find this is less to do with enthusiasm than with a desire to please, or at least a desire not to seem pushy. I’ve just sent someone a message saying, “Get ahead of the herd” (I meant, “Just get on with it”) and I’ve had to stop myself putting in an exclamation mark to take the sting out of being bossy. Now he probably does think I’m bossy. Then I ask myself whether the silverback males I know use punctuation the same way and the answer is: nope.

Kisses, or Xs, serve something of the same purpose, with the difference that women mostly use them with other women. Xs are another marker of non-aggression. They say: friend, I come in peace, even though I may be complaining or telling you what to do. It’s a bit like how younger people use the Australian uplift at the end of sentences, turning every statement into a question. It’s a way of avoiding seeming dogmatic or assertive – but that’s generational rather than gendered.

One friend has beaten me to austere punctuation. “Nowadays when I write to men,” she says, “I am brief, unapologetic and focused on the message. This is a recent thing. I realized that for as long as I have been writing to other people, I had thought I needed to charm them. I thought this was what everyone wanted. They don’t, particularly men.” She’s now binary in her communications: entirely dispassionate or psychotically overnuanced.

There is a place for charm in written social intercourse in which punctuation plays a role, but part of the problem of contemporary interaction is that our categories are now blurred. We write to our bank manager (if we’ve got one) with the same easy informality as to a close friend. We’ve gone from “Dear Madam” to “Hi Melanie” (a very tetchy message to me from a police press office began that way), and we sign off with “Cheers” in both contexts, which means we use with colleagues or superiors the same sort of formula we’d use socially. It’s the democratization of communication, and it’s confusing. Perhaps we should stop being ingratiating – exclamation points and kisses are just that – and go for plainness if that’s what’s needed. “Please” and “thank you” work well – though again, it’s all about nuance.

As for the other trick to ensure you don’t sound dogmatic, ellipses, I wonder if they’re gendered too. These are deep waters…

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

What’s so fresh about ‘fresh hell?’

“What fresh hell can this be?” Dorothy Parker would ask if the doorbell rang. Now fresh hell has been freshly added to the Oxford English Dictionary. But was Parker the onlie begetter of the phrase?

The hunt has been on to find earlier examples. The OED quotes a ghostly story within The Pickwick Papers (1837) for a parallel: “He started on the entrance of the stranger, and rose feebly to his feet. ‘What now, what now?’ said the old man – “What fresh misery is this? What do you want here?’”

I’ve been doing what counts, for me, as research. In The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens uses fresh twice as frequently as he does in Great Expectations 24 years later. In Pickwick, fresh is used three to one in the sense of “new” – a fresh bottle of wine or a fresh pipe of tobacco. To use new would have been less unambiguous, for the wine was not new and nor was the pipe; it was another helping of the same thing.

In Great Expectations, fresh is used predominantly in the “fresh air” sense, with the exception of fresh bandages and with the terror fresh upon me (where it is an adverb). But the old man in Pickwick didn’t think of fresh misery as a set phrase. Nor did the author of a sentence in an American newspaper in 1873 when he wrote: “Such a course in Rapides will simply organize a fresh hell here.”

The dictionary rightly expresses caution when considering early uses of gold star, for example, in the sense of a thing “awarded as a prize or in recognition of an achievement, especially good work or behavior by a young schoolchild.” This it finds from 1886, but it discounts a citation from 1661, “a snowy Mantle which gold Stars did deck,” because that does not represent a fixed collocation.

I’m not convinced that the OED needed a new entry for fresh hell. It may most often be used now as an echo of Parker, but a dictionary of English is not a dictionary of quotations.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

What’s so fresh about ‘fresh hell?’

“What fresh hell can this be?” Dorothy Parker would ask if the doorbell rang. Now fresh hell has been freshly added to the Oxford English Dictionary. But was Parker the onlie begetter of the phrase?

The hunt has been on to find earlier examples. The OED quotes a ghostly story within The Pickwick Papers (1837) for a parallel: “He started on the entrance of the stranger, and rose feebly to his feet. ‘What now, what now?’ said the old man – “What fresh misery is this? What do you want here?’”

I’ve been doing what counts, for me, as research. In The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens uses fresh twice as frequently as he does in Great Expectations 24 years later. In Pickwick, fresh is used three to one in the sense of “new” – a fresh bottle of wine or a fresh pipe of tobacco. To use new would have been less unambiguous, for the wine was not new and nor was the pipe; it was another helping of the same thing.

In Great Expectations, fresh is used predominantly in the “fresh air” sense, with the exception of fresh bandages and with the terror fresh upon me (where it is an adverb). But the old man in Pickwick didn’t think of fresh misery as a set phrase. Nor did the author of a sentence in an American newspaper in 1873 when he wrote: “Such a course in Rapides will simply organize a fresh hell here.”

The dictionary rightly expresses caution when considering early uses of gold star, for example, in the sense of a thing “awarded as a prize or in recognition of an achievement, especially good work or behavior by a young schoolchild.” This it finds from 1886, but it discounts a citation from 1661, “a snowy Mantle which gold Stars did deck,” because that does not represent a fixed collocation.

I’m not convinced that the OED needed a new entry for fresh hell. It may most often be used now as an echo of Parker, but a dictionary of English is not a dictionary of quotations.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

Why are hotel breakfasts so bad?

Where else would you see anyone wandering around with a plate heaped with such incongruous ingredients as bacon, olives, blueberry waffles and a side order of yoghurt and prunes? Nowhere but at a hotel breakfast, of course. More often than not, the food is inedible, and nothing works properly. The coffee machines always seem to be faulty, although even this is preferable to being served from a silver coffee jug filled with tepid, muddy brown, tasteless water that leaves you hankering after service-station machine coffee.

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Then there is the room: inevitably, it is dark and windowless, usually in a basement that smells vaguely of damp underneath the stench of cheap cooking oil. Beware the hotel that serves dinner and then drags out the leftovers for breakfast. I’ve seen the lot: chicken chow mein, schnitzels, even moussaka, on the breakfast buffet. It’s just not right.

The staff are invariably overworked and understandably bad-tempered. And there is something off-putting about having to queue at the various sections, clutching your plate as you stand behind strangers wearing complimentary slippers, their bed hair indicating that they have not yet showered.

That said, I recently had a wonderful breakfast experience in Cadiz, Spain. The room overlooked the ocean and breakfast was served until 11.30 a.m., due to the Spanish habit of eating dinner so late.

The bread was delicious, and there was an abject failure to comply with the first rule of Hotel Breakfast Club – which is that the bread either has to endure the toaster at least three times before it starts turning brown, or it pretty much catches fire the first time around. In addition to the glorious little jars of tomato pulp that allowed me to make my own pan con tomate, there was olive oil on each table and an actual coffee machine that ground the beans (rather than those awful pod things). Also in evidence were heaving plates of Iberico ham, an omelette station, fresh fruit that actually tasted of fruit, real yoghurt, proper honey (complete with honeycomb) and freshly squeezed orange juice. I was in heaven. I sat for an hour just grazing on delightful morsels, and it was a perfect start to the day.

However, when I was in the middle of nowhere in Perthshire recently, it was the usual horror story. Breakfast was included in the cost of the room, so it would’ve been rude not to at least give it a go. It was an expensive hotel, and my breakfast expectations were high; I was hoping for something a bit special. But sadly, it turned out to be the same old same old. Eggs hardening under heat lamps, bacon half raw on one side and burnt on the other, sloppy baked beans and cardboard hash browns. The croissants were cheap and freshly defrosted, and everything looked sad – including me at the end of the meal.

My absolute worst-ever breakfast experience was in Nigeria, where hot plates were piled high with gristly beef stew on the bone, hard, sweet loaves of bread and green bananas. Don’t even ask about the coffee. The best was in Mumbai. I was in town working on a grim piece of research, but my start to the day stood me in good stead. There were potato and cauliflower-stuffed parathas, fluffy bhatura (deep-fried flatbread) with a spicy chickpea curry, and an assortment of homemade pickles, chutneys and yoghurt. Then there were crispy dosas served with sambar (lentil stew) and coconut chutney.

Back in Blighty, I recently had the pleasure of breakfast at the Ritz Hotel, Mayfair. It was perfect. I was meeting an overseas visitor who was lucky enough to be staying there. When he invited me to join him for breakfast, I jumped at the chance. The coffee was perfect, the pastries fresh out of the oven and delicious, and the bacon top quality. Cumberland sausage, vine tomatoes and field mushrooms were cooked exactly as they should be – clearly they were all strangers to the heat lamp. Of course this breakfast costs an absolute fortune – but as I wasn’t paying, I simply sat back and watched the rich and famous going about their business. If only every breakfast could be as perfect as that one.

The horror of the festive period

I was driving my daughter to school recently when we tuned into Heart Breakfast. A caller was attempting to answer five Christmas-related questions that, if successful, would mean that the countdown to the big day could ‘officially begin’. They weren’t hard but when the questions were answered correctly, there was pandemonium in the Heart studios. Everyone gushed with excitement and wished each other a Merry Christmas, co-host Amanda Holden cried, and the first of very many broadcasts of Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas’ began. It was 10 November – more than six weeks before Christmas Day. It was so unseasonably warm that people were still in shorts. The mind boggles.

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As I’ve aged, I’ve grown more curmudgeonly about Christmas. The run-up starts slowly: Xmas decs appear in the shops, and retailers seem to say, ‘Yeah, we know people are still having barbecues, but we’ve got to make a living, right?’ But once Halloween and Guy Fawkes are out of the way, any irony disappears, and the juggernaut becomes unstoppable. We have entered the inoffensive period known to commercial types as ‘the festive period’.

Working in retail at this time of year is spirit-sapping. I was once a sales assistant in a department store. You see the worst of humanity from behind a till: harassed people frantically buying overpriced stuff that most recipients neither need nor want. Cheque books were still in use then and a gorilla in a suit nearly lifted me over the counter when I suggested the signatures on his cheque and bank card didn’t exactly match. It’s also a kind of sensory torture: harsh lighting, overcrowding, heat, airlessness – and the god-awful Christmas music on a continuous loop. Even now, listening to Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ or Wizzard’s ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’ triggers a kind of shell shock.

It’s also the season for office parties. I was in the pub with a couple of old school friends recently who are fortunate enough to have retired early, and they cited the work Christmas bash as one of the things they’d miss least. Events that were once bacchanalian – people dancing on tables with their trousers on their head, photocopying their backsides, or locked in an embrace with someone they’d been hankering after all year – have become sedate affairs where alcohol, if drunk at all, is consumed in moderation.

There’s usually a meal with substandard food and polite conversation, perhaps preceded by a wholesome group activity like an escape room. The chances of anyone being bundled paralytic into a cab at 3 a.m., or telling colleagues what they really think of them, are now close to zero. Having to spend an evening – or, if you’re really unlucky, an entire day – with people you’d much rather avoid is frankly purgatory. And the stats suggest I’m not alone. In a recent survey, only 10.6 per cent of respondents said they wanted a Christmas party. Some 53.8 per cent said they’d rather have a cash bonus. Hear, hear.

Christmas jumper day and Secret Santa have also become staples of the workplace. I grudgingly join in so as not to be seen as a complete killjoy. Still, when I open my gift – wearing an ill-fitting, uncomfortable and frankly ludicrous sweater with reindeer on the front – and see how little thought went into it, I can’t help feeling insulted. Even with a budget as low as five quid, you can find something that looks like you’ve vaguely thought about it. But many people seem not to worry about how their offering will be perceived. One year, my wife received a bottle of Aldi’s ‘Luxury room spray’. It smelled all right, but the message was unmistakable: ‘I couldn’t really be bothered to look for anything better.’

One of the best things about Christmas Day used to be sitting down with the family in the evening to watch telly, turkey sandwich in hand. With so few channels, the likes of Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies, Blackadder and Only Fools and Horses were much anticipated. Now, unlimited choice – not to mention the kids’ multi-screening – means the chances of watching terrestrial television together are remote. Besides, the quality is variable to say the least, and we haven’t even got Gavin and Stacey to look forward to this year.

As Bah Humbug as I’ve become, my heart isn’t completely glacial. There are parts of Christmas that still move me profoundly. Although not especially religious, I’m touched by some of the music – Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s sublime Christmas Oratorio in particular. And some carols get me every time. When ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ reaches: ‘Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light’, I start welling up.

The day itself, marked by excess and simmering family tensions, has its moments of light relief – often when an elderly relative says something spectacularly un-PC. But the magic for me now lies in suspending disbelief, letting go of minor irritations and giving myself over to the mystery of it all (while any remains).

I really don’t wish it could be Christmas every day. I can tolerate it once a year, although it comes round far too quickly for my liking and yet the run-up feels interminable. Even as an agnostic, I yearn for the Christian approach to Advent, a season traditionally for fasting and penitence. However, I don’t imagine I’ll ever experience an epiphany, given all the sugary pop music and comedy jumpers. How different this time before Christmas now feels.

2025 has been a fantastic year for music

Norman Lebrecht, who attends concerts as frequently as falcons swoop over St John’s Wood, has declared 2025 to be a terrible year for music. We are at the mercy of political activists, he thinks, and he has a point. Zealots, particularly those who pursue pro-Palestinian causes, are relentless troublemakers for whom an undefended concert hall or opera house offers an easy target for protest.

But for this concert-goer, 2025 was a wonderful year, in terms of quality and variety. So far the inventory reads 43 concerts and nine operas. Not the grandest of totals, and nowhere near a personal best, but a decent tally – with power to add, too. December is full of plums, including a first-ever Messiah. Yes, pop-pickers, it is the only acknowledged masterpiece that has resisted capture in five decades of regular attendance.

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In every egg a bird. January brought Jenufa at Covent Garden, conducted by Jakub Hrůša, the Royal Opera’s new music director. One of the great operas, Jenufa, and Hrůša is uncommonly gifted. The month also gave us a Benny Goodman tribute at Cadogan Hall, when a spirited band of British jazzers recreated the clarinettist’s famous 1938 Carnegie Hall concert.

David Briggs, organist and artist-in-residence at St John the Divine in Manhattan, banished the February fog at my old school chapel, improvising a 90-minute accompaniment to the silent-movie classic Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Cree-py! Paul Lewis, performing Schubert in Liverpool, and Andrew Manze conducting the Hallé in Vaughan Williams, topped and tailed the gloomiest of months. Lucky Mancunians. The Hallé are playing better than ever.

March was a corker. On successive days it was possible to catch Bach’s St John Passion at St Paul’s Knightsbridge, the Sitkovetsky Trio in Ravel and Shostakovich at Wigmore Hall, and the Sex Pistols at the Albert Hall. If you put a few bob on that trifecta, you’d never need to work again.

In April Ed Gardner conducted the London Philharmonic in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, as dancers cavorted across the stage of the Festival Hall – unnecessary and distracting. Daphnis requires no ‘enhancement’. Berlin in May meant the Berliner Philharmoniker in Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, conducted by Sakari Oramo, and the Ninth Symphony, directed by Kirill Petrenko. It was my 31st Mahler 9, disturbed by a solitary boo – a horrible sound anywhere and not far off a hanging offence in the Philharmonie. At Chipping Campden, which holds one of England’s most handsome annual festivals, Steven Isserlis played the Dvořák cello concerto.

It was back to Wigmore in June for the Belcea Quartet in late Beethoven. The Belceas used to be cheeky new bugs. Now they’re veterans. Up to Ilkley in July for a flamenco evening. Samuel Moore, an English student of Juan Martín, the Spanish master, supplied a viva on Iberian culture between strums.

The Proms occupied August and September. All hail the glorious Budapest Festival Orchestra and their founder Iván Fischer, who brought Beethoven and Bartók – Bluebeard’s Castle, no less. Mark Elder conducted an odd work, A Mass of Life, by Delius, which gets an outing when the moon is blue.

Berlin once more in October for a Ring Cycle at the Staatsoper, superbly played and sung. Daniel Barenboim, desperately ill, conducted Schubert and Beethoven. Music is keeping him alive. Back in London, at Wigmore, Mitsuko Uchida played Beethoven’s last three sonatas and everyone present felt a little bit closer to God.

Trick or treat in November. Simon Rattle brought the mighty Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra to the Phil, the hall where, in 1970, the 15-year-old Rattle heard them with Rafael Kubelík and vowed: ‘That is what I want to do with my life.’ What a life it has been, and he has finally reached the best part.

Now we approach the final furlong, with a visit to the Barbican of Arcadi Volodos, one of those formidable Russian pianists we hear but seldom, as well as that first Messiah.

Concert of the year: the Takács Quartet and Adrian Brendel in Schubert’s C major Quintet at – where else? – Wigmore. The greatest ensemble playing the greatest work. Discovery: Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio. Rediscovery: Kind of Blue, a record acquired 40 years ago and now understood. Its recreation by those jazz stalwarts provided another happy evening at Cadogan Hall. Unexpected highlight: Paul Cook – ‘Cookie’ from Shepherd’s Bush – joining his mates for the Sex Pistols’ ‘frolic in the dorm’. The crowd was older than the one at Glyndebourne for Parsifal. The drummer is my pal, and friendship trumps even music. Naturally, I donned the Garrick tie for the occasion. So, as Sinatra used to sing as he wound down, ‘it was a very good year’. To get the most out of music, though, you really have to leave the house.

Mamdani hires author of defund the police bible

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has debuted the transition team intended to prepare New York City Hall for its 111th mayor. The team is filled with the types of leftie loonies expected from Mamdani: a trans, anti-zionist rabbi from Brooklyn as well as a gun-control advocate dubiously associated with Nation of Islam-founder Louis Farrakhan. And then there’s Alex Vitale – a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College whose views on policing are not only disproven, they’re downright dangerous.

Vitale is one of a handful of transition team members tasked with overseeing community safety issues. Public safety, policing and crime reduction have become flashpoints for the new Mayor, who established his political career promising to end law enforcement as we know it. Time after time, Mamdani has committed to “abolishing the police” – a phrase that gained nationwide traction following the death of Eric Garner and the #BlackLivesMatter-led race-reckoning back in 2020.

In June, Mamdani walked back much of his “defund” rhetoric following a mass office shooting in Midtown Manhattan. “I am not defunding the police; I am not running to defund the police,” Mamdani told reporters at the time. “I’ve been very clear about my view of public safety and the critical role that the police have in creating that public safety.”

Enter Professor Vitale.

If there is any doubt Mayor-elect Mamdani remains committed to defunding the police it’s his choice of Vitale for his transition team’s 26-member Committee on Community Safety. Vitale literally wrote the book on the topic, The End of Policing, back in 2017. “The bestselling bible of the movement to defund the police, in an updated edition,” is how Vitale’s publisher describes the book on its homepage. “The problem is policing itself,” writes Vitale in the book itself.

Mamdani-watchers had been hopeful that his previous anti-law enforcement policies would be blunted by his decision to retain high-profile, tough-on-crime Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. But the selection of Vitale this week suggests that New York may be picking up, where “defund” disasters in other big cities left off. And the New Yorkers Mamdani campaigned as most championing – the poor, and black and brown – will be hit hardest if the Mamdani-administration embraces the anti-law and order policies he’s espoused for years.

Look no further than Minneapolis, where Garner was killed by police in June 2020, to witness the failure of defund-the-police firsthand. Even before Garner’s death, progressive city activists had been working hard to reduce law enforcement. As the New York Times reported, activists confronted Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey at his home during the height of the post-Garner riots and demanded “We don’t want people with guns toting around in our community.”

But people “toting guns” is what Minneapolis got as city officials became mired in appeasing the local activist class. Shooting victims surged by 90 percent in the year following Floyd’s death, as arrests dropped by a third. The following year, shootings rose by 101 percent – with some 83 percent of the victims (and 89 percent of the shooters) African-American, according to City of Minneapolis data.

Similar stats were tallied in other “pro-defund” cities including Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Portland, according to a 2002 report by the Heritage Foundation.

This vision of the future has already arrived in New York City – and Mamdani has yet to take office. Like in Minneapolis, the vast majority of violent crime in New York is committed by ethnic minorities against ethnic minorities in just a handful of crime-ridden neighborhoods. In 2022, for instance, black New Yorkers constituted 74 percent of all NYC shooting victims, despite comprising just 24 percent of the city’s population. By 2023, black New Yorkers were 18 times more likely to die from gun violence than their white counterparts, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Although violent crime rates have declined to record levels under current Mayor Eric Adams and Commissioner Tisch, minority communities remain outliers. Last year blacks and Hispanics comprised nearly 90 percent of shooting victims citywide, with virtually all of the shooters black and Hispanic. Meanwhile, the NYPD — which is nearly 65 percent non-white — has lost over 15,000 police officers over the past five years, and hundreds more continue to depart monthly.

What’s most telling about the “defund” debate has been the number of minority community leaders vocally opposed to it. As early as August 2020 – just two months after BLM protests clogged city streets – high-profile black and Latino officials were blasting plans to cut $1 billion in NYPD funding. Same in Minneapolis and Philadelphia and most big cities decimated by gun violence. Most crucially, the majority of big city residents never wanted their police departments defunded, either. In fact, one year after Garner’s death, the percentage of Americans seeking an increase in police funding actually rose by 16 percent.

With the Mamdani inauguration still more than a month away, it’s too soon to gauge whether he will fulfill his long-held belief in trading seasoned police officers for a new-fangled “Department of Community Safety” filled with social workers to tackle many public safety issues. But either way, the appointment of Vitale to his transition team suggests Mamdani has yet to fully step-back from his long-held anti-policing views. Should he not, violent crime and gun deaths will be the inevitable consequences – with white New Yorkers like Professor Vitale mostly insulated from the carnage.

The day net zero died

Quietly this afternoon, the government’s last remaining hope of achieving net zero by 2050 drained away. BP has abandoned its project to develop a ‘blue’ hydrogen plant on Teesside which was supposed to produce the gas at a rate of 1.2 GW. It is not just a defeat for net zero ambitions but for Ed Miliband personally, given that he had fought hard in cabinet to advance the project while Keir Starmer and business secretary Peter Kyle had favoured using the site for a rival data centre. The data centre is now likely to proceed – an energy-hungry project in place of a green energy one.

You can build all the wind turbines and solar panels you like, but the world is never going to reach net zero unless it also deals with the process emissions from steel-making, cement and fertiliser manufacture. These are emissions produced not from the source of energy but from the chemical processes involved. They are far from minimal. Steel-making currently accounts for around 7 per cent of global emissions, cement 6 per cent and fertiliser 5 per cent. Hydrogen offers a possible route for decarbonising steel and fertiliser. Moreover, hydrogen is a potential solution for large and heavy vehicles which are not suitable for electrification. JCB has already engineered a range of hydrogen-powered diggers which can deliver the punch which electric machines would struggle to replicate. Hydrogen also offers a possible drop-in solution for replacing gas boilers in homes which are not suitable for heat pumps.

The only trouble is that almost all the world’s hydrogen production currently is produced from fossil fuels, and itself emits large quantities of carbon dioxide as a by-product. If you want to decarbonise all the above you need to use either ‘green’ hydrogen, produced via electrolysis of water, or ‘blue’ hydrogen (as at Teesside) produced using natural gas but with carbon capture and storage (CCS) to remove the carbon dioxide from the waste gases.

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That is why the previous Conservative government launched a ‘hydrogen strategy’ in 2021 proposing that the country develop 5 GW of low-carbon hydrogen production capacity by 2030 – of which Teesside was supposed to be to single largest and important part. BP has not so far given a reason why it has withdrawn from the project – whether it is political or economic – but, in common with other oil companies, BP has steadily been retreating on green projects in recent months as it tries to rebuild its profitability. It has, however, said that it will proceed with another carbon capture project nearby – this one attached to a gas-fired power station. Gas backed up with CCS is just about Miliband’s only hope of achieving his dream of decarbonising the grid – although virtually no one now believes he could achieve it by 2030.

Green hydrogen, by the way, is struggling, too. Stegra, a demonstration plant in Sweden which was supposed to produce green steel with the aid of green hydrogen produced on site, had to be bailed out with a grant from the Swedish government last week after failing to raise enough capital to proceed with the project. It still needs further funding.

Someone who will be pleased with BP’s withdrawal from the blue hydrogen plant is Conservative mayor for the Tees Valley, Ben Houchen, who has also championed the AI data centre. The only trouble now is where is the energy going to come from to power that and all the other data centres which will be needed to achieve the government’s AI ambitions? Britain’s data centres are already consuming around 2.5 per cent of all energy consumed in Britain. But years of building wind and solar while decommissioning fossil fuel and nuclear power stations has given us energy infrastructure which is not capable of satisfying domestic demand for energy, even before further investment in data centres.

Even on a windy afternoon like today’s, Britain has been importing 14 per cent of its energy from the continent via subsea connectors. Britain’s hydrogen strategy may now be in tatters, but so too is our native electricity supply.

Prisoners playing video games with their guards is no bad thing

Another week. Another video from within a prison. More words of outrage. This time it’s a video showing a prison officer inside a crowded cell, playing Fifa with a prisoner. Is this a problem? Is prison more of a holiday camp than a punishment? Is this another example of prison officer misconduct, just like the cases of female staff having sex with inmates?

Having been in jail I would say not. Prisons are strange environments. They function – or don’t – depending on whether staff and prisoners work together. Every prison in the country relies on inmates to cook and distribute food, laundry, property and post. For this to happen, there have to be good, appropriate and boundaried relationships between prisoners and staff. Those good relationships can also be a source of helpful intelligence. The Ministry of Justice has said that:

Prison officers can participate in video games with prisoners under some circumstances as it helps to build positive relationships and trust between staff and prisoners, which ultimately helps to tackle violence in prisons.

Based on my own experience as an inmate, I agree. When I was a prisoner at HMP Wandsworth we had an issues with a man on the wing. He was behaving erratically and aggressively. On one occasion the man came to my cell during ‘association’ and told me he would kill me if I walked near him again. I stood, stared him down and told him that I had my own business to deal with and wasn’t bothered about him. After a long moment, he left.

I conferred with friends on the wing. He’d been threatening other inmates at random, and had even pushed an old man over in the exercise yard. We had a quiet word with a good officer who we trusted, and the dangerous man was moved. As a result he didn’t assault any of us. This is just one example of how good relationships between staff and prisoners help jails function.

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It’s important to understand the officer playing Fifa in this context. An officer taking a few moments to play a video game with prisoners is absolutely nothing like having a sexual relationship with an inmate. Building a healthy, professional relationship via kicking a ball about, even virtually, is an absolutely appropriate way for a prison officer to behave.

Should prisoners be playing video games? A properly functioning, rehabilitative prison system would have them doing purposeful activity all day. We don’t offer that. Most inmates spend 22 hours a day in their cells. It shouldn’t be like this. The reality is that most people, if they were locked in a box the size of a parking space all day, would need a distraction. Many prisoners turn to drugs, drink, self-harm or violence against others. In that context, inmates who amuse themselves by playing on old models of consoles, only available at high cost via the ‘catalogue’ within jails, are very much choosing the least bad option.

I experienced this myself. I was jailed during the Covid lockdown, meaning that for many months I spent 23 or even 24 hours a day in my cell. What kept me sane was reading, writing, and a 20-year old Xbox console, along with a copy of Skyrim, the immersive, open world roleplaying game. The sensation of being able to explore a vast, open wilderness was particularly helpful to my sanity during those months of confinement.

Many people might say ‘so what?’ and insist that prisoners should suffer during their sentences. But the purpose of jail should not be to do harm. Breaking people so that they leave jail with worse mental health, and often with new addictions, makes them more likely to commit further crime and us all less safe.

The purpose of prison should be to reduce crime, and ideally this should involve making every inmate get out of their cell all day to work or study. But if we are going to lock prisoners in their cells all day, then allowing those men to play a video game is a perfectly reasonable pastime. It’s also very sensible that prison officers are using it as an opportunity to build appropriate relationships. It’s nothing like the appalling breach of the law and ethics seen in cases where officers have had sexual relationships with inmates or smuggled contraband into jails.

The real issue here, of course, is that this particular event was surreptitiously filmed by a prisoner using a contraband phone. That man has done something very wrong and has demonstrated yet again that our jails are utterly insecure. Don’t be distracted by the footage. The real problem is that British prisons are awash with contraband – phones, drugs and even weapons. In that context, some staff and inmates playing Fifa is a total distraction from the real issues.