Family

This is not happening, I thought, as I jabbed at my phone to magic up a hybrid to convey me noiselessly to a central London studio. But my Uber app had vanished and wouldn’t reinstall, and was then ‘locked’. Meanwhile, no black cabs were plying their licensed trade on Upper Tooting Road, where I was soaking up the vibrant multicultural scenery when this tech glitch occurred, outside a store called Niqaab and opposite Daily Fresh Naan. I never keep drivers waiting. I almost always tip. I even sometimes make small talk over the beat of Heart FM I moved fast to resolve the problem, i.e. I channelled Andrew Neil whenever British Airways fails to remember that he’s its most important client. I sent a stiff tweet to @UberUK, informing it that my account was disabled.

Lake Como It doesn’t take long for me to fall in love. A young Adonis with a six-pack bounced on a trampoline, his dark curls flapping like spaniels’ ears. Waiters flitted about with drinks. Ridiculously attractive couples, all with perfect bodies, lounged on the beach in front of us, rosé on ice to hand. We’d arrived by water, fetched by a barefoot beauty in an Albergo Aurora-branded white polo and batty riders, who helped our party of five out of our little launch and onto the Albergo’s riva as if not only our lives depended on it, but her job too.

My youngest son, Oliver, has asked me to make a speech at his wedding. I am very flattered even to be invited as, given the Beckham family meltdown over the Brooklyn nuptials, you can’t take anything for granted these days. I’ve undertaken not to wear a slip dress of my own design, or dance ‘on’ Oliver to any of ‘our songs’, or speak for more than five minutes. I’ve worked out that this gives me up to 750 words to praise him and his lovely bride Lily; express what he means to me; convey my joy at his marriage to the incredible blonde bombshell who has been the apple of his eye since they first met at Manchester University; tell funny stories about his childhood and school days; and generally bring the house down without blubbing. For comparison, this column is 850 words.

My beef with the columnist Bruce Anderson began, as beefs do, at the Spectator summer party. Not this year’s – we will come to that – but at another brilliant edition of the annual gold-plater some years ago. On that occasion, after arrival I’d gone to my usual peg outdoors by the stairs up into the garden, a liminal position from where I can bag the famous and important and am unlikely to be bed-blocked by bores. Bruce, aka ‘Brute Anderson’ – a baggy, shaggy bruiser of whom P.G. Wodehouse would doubtless have written that he looked as though he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when’ – loomed. ‘Lassie,’ the Scot boomed. I mounted a step to be closer to him in height.

We were driving to the V&A summer party, windows down, scent of jasmine floating on the liquid June air, prospect of petal-strewn cocktails and pretty girls posing in their zaniest dresses with Grayson Perry ahead. My iPhone in my bag connected to Ivo’s car radio and – bear with me – started playing. We were in Kensington Church Street and it was the Radio 4 Media Show. ‘In a minute the head of BBC news on cuts announced today and former World Tonight presenter Ritula Shah on the Radio 4 programmes being axed,’ said Katie Razzall, introducing the acting bean-counter, a Mr Jonathan Munro, who explained that he had to cut 10 per cent costs, that 550 jobs were being binned to save half a billion quid, and that there was much more pain to come.

It would have been my mother’s 84th birthday on 29 May. I thought about her as I clattered down the corkscrew stairs at Holland Park Underground Station, past the prissy sign warning travellers not to attempt the stairs because there were 93 of them, instead of encouraging people to use them as I would if I were in charge around here. On the platform, in the soupy tunnel, I took out my iPhone to play my little game, which is to do the Wordle before the next train arrives, which – thanks to the Central Line’s rapid peristalsis – is usually only a couple of minutes. Mission accomplished, I got onto a standing-room-only carriage. My mother died in 2021, aged 79. It was her time.

Nothing can prepare you for the death of your father because, by definition, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event. You have these ideas in your head about how it’s going to be: the children gathered at the bedside saying all the moving, important things that hitherto they’d held back; the fond paternal benison. But the reality, in my experience, is unlike the scenes in literature. My dad couldn’t wait to get rid of us. He was far too preoccupied with the intimate, difficult and very personal business of dying to indulge our let’s-pretend-everything’s-normal chit-chat. His last words to me – perhaps to anyone – were: ‘I’m feeling really buggered. Call me a nurse.

The plumber was shouting hysterically at me down the phone because I had asked him to install a heated towel rail. ‘Towel rail? Towel rail! Armageddon is coming! Did you fill your oil tank up? It’s tripling in price by Christmas! I’ve got 40 jobs piled up! Forty jobs!’ ‘So are you saying I can’t have a heated towel rail?’ I said. I know the plumber only too well. Many a time he has sat at my kitchen table chain-smoking while rambling about the devil, and how the world is coming to an end. If that is his default setting, you can imagine how he reacts to things going very badly on a global scale. He lives on his nerves at the best of times. Major world events are apt to put him in a particularly nihilistic mood.

The oil delivery man had way too much swagger and, as he waved his nozzle about, I realised that he might be expecting a little something. Oh dear, I thought, as he pushed the nozzle into my oil tank, pressed the button on his lorry and spent less than ten seconds giving me the amount of oil I could afford. Oh dear, what if the oil crisis is now at such fever pitch that desperate housewives in remote places are offering a little something on the side to get more oil? Ten seconds’ worth of oil did feel like the end of the world. Usually, I can afford to let the lorry fill the entire tank and it comes to about a grand.

‘I want to learn Iranian,’ said my father, resolutely, as he watched the bombing on the television. ‘Farsi,’ I said, thinking I would talk to him about that very happily on the basis it was better than helping him contact the Ukrainian government so he can fight the Russians. ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Farsi,’ I repeated. ‘Parcel?’ he said. But it was pointless trying to explain, for he was up and looking out of the window and telling me to look in the parcel box. We were waiting for the special food I had ordered for the new cat someone irresponsibly rehomed to my parents and which already has a stress condition from living with two dementia sufferers.

Doing the rounds on social media is the most disturbing advert I’ve ever seen. And I’m telling you about it because you need to be forewarned, just in case this Christmas a child or a grandchild happens to mention that it might be an idea to record a video for posterity, and opens the 2wai app. 2wai is the company responsible for the ad, and the service it offers is the creation of AI versions of family members so that relatives can talk to them after they’re dead. Catch ’em while they’re still alive, says 2wai; film a three-minute interview and Bob’s your AI uncle. ‘Loved ones we’ve lost can be part of our future.’ That’s its catchphrase. The 2wai advert is about ‘Baby Charlie’, and it goes like this.