London life

In 1908, the iconoclast writer Lytton Strachey – the bad boy of the Bloomsbury set – pointed a long finger at a stain on artist Vanessa Bell’s dress and asked, “Semen?” Later, Bell’s sister Virginia Woolf wrote: “With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down… It was, I think, a great advance in civilization.” Americans tend to think that the English are sexually repressed and too refined and cultured for such talk I was recently in a bar in Bloomsbury – one that actually serves a “Virginia Woolf hamburger” – when talk among the young women at my table turned to men they knew who were, how should I put this, well-endowed. Of course, I’ve heard such talk before, but not in a long time and not in such anatomical detail.

London Everyone has at least one friend that none of their other friends can stand, someone you love but everyone else loathes. Mine is called Toby Young. For around thirty years people have asked me: are you still friends with that awful Toby Young? And with a bit of hesitation I say, well... yes. And they shake their heads or roll their eyes in disbelief and disapproval. They don’t like his politics — he’s a right-wing conservative and founder of the Free Speech Union, which defends victims of woke ideology. And they don’t like Toby the person because of a series of sophomoric and “sexist” tweets that came to public light in 2018. It was national news and it cost Toby his career in public life.

This is a tale of two London parties. They say something about London society, status, power, fame and fun — but I’m not sure what exactly. Party one was what I call a Power Party. It was full of famous faces from the upper echelons of British politics and media. I spotted chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves talking to the former Tory chancellor George Osborne and the former foreign secretary David Miliband. Party two was what I call a Pulchritude Party — a dazzling array of beautiful women and handsome men. There was a mix of young writers, journalists, lawyers, filmmakers and artists. It did not have the high social wattage of name recognition that the Power Party had — but it had beauty and youth on its side.

What in twenty-first-century Britain is it better to be: posh or cool? Of course the correct answer is: it’s best to be posh and cool. But posh people, on the whole, tend not to be cool and really cool people aren’t usually posh. But the tribes have a lot in common. They share a certain insouciance, which is a posh word for total indifference to the feelings and thoughts of other people. They are both anti-democratic and anti-meritocratic in spirit and practice. No matter how hard you try and how much money you have, you can’t join the posh or be cool. Like sex appeal, you’ve either got or you ain’t. Defining either group is not easy, but you know when you see it — or in the case of the posh, hear it.

London When an old friend says to you, “we must meet up for lunch sometime,” you can be sure of one thing: you will never meet for lunch. Why? Because your friendship is over. The clue is in the word “sometime.” It’s a rain check that never gets cashed. It’s what friends say to each other when they feel obliged to see a friend they don’t really want to see — but they don’t want to dump either. We all have friends like these: I call them the Undead friends, when the friendship is neither fully alive nor totally dead. You don’t delete them from your contact list — just your social life. This will lead to the odd spasm of guilt but don’t worry; we all do it. And it gets done to us too. There are people you think of as your great friends.

I had just left Tate Britain and was heading toward the Pimlico underground station when I noticed an attractive woman coming toward me. I smiled at her and she smiled at me. And then she stopped and said, “Are you Cosmo Landesman?” There are writers and journalists who get public recognition like this all the time. Alas, I’m not one. But I was married to one of them, and it’s a real drag having a famous partner. You have to stand there at the supermarket checkout line with a big fake smile on your face as your loved one laps up all the love from some adoring fan. Imagine how poor John Gregory Dunne must have felt being married to the very recognizable Joan Didion. Having a famous writer friend is also a bummer. Socially, you will always be in their shadow.

This Letter from London is coming from Kardamyli, a small town by the sea in the southeast of Greece. I’m on holiday. Readers who are now rolling their eyes at the thought of yet another account of someone’s “amazing” holiday experience have my sympathy. I feel your pain; there’s nothing worse than the “my amazing holiday” bore. In the 1970s people who subjected friends to long and tedious slideshows of their holiday snapshots appeared in British sitcoms as the bores next door. Now we don’t project our pics onto our living room walls; we post them on social media. And friends feel obliged to post comments like, “Wow! That looks amazing!” and, “I’m so envious!” But what they’re really thinking is: what a terrible show-off you are.

There’s a form of social anxiety that a lot of people suffer from — FOMO, Fear of Missing Out. “Fear” suggests something imaginary, that isn’t really happening. Not so. I don’t fear missing out, because I know I am. Friends are always asking me: are you appearing at the Hay Literary festival? No! Am I speaking at the Idler festival? No! Am I reading extracts from my book at the Cambridge Literary festival? No! “What?!” they exclaim in mock disbelief — and then ask why I’m not appearing at some small, obscure, local village literary fête, somewhere in the rectum of rural England. I’ve gotten used to the seasonal snub from the lit-festival establishment. And there are literary events all over London that I haven’t been invited to as well. OK, I’ll live.

When my girlfriend suggested we go away to a tantric retreat for the weekend in the English countryside, I couldn’t believe my luck — and neither could my male friends. Suddenly I was no longer the guy with the weird-wokey-woman, but the luckiest man alive. And all because of that one little word: tantric. Say it and people instantly think: Sting and sex marathons. Strange esoteric erotic practices that produce cosmic orgasms. Now add “tantric” to “retreat” and it conjures up visions of couples doing it, throuples doing it, everyone doing it together in one great fireball of fornication! And all in the name of spiritual growth, of course. If only!

London  At London parties you can find plenty of smart beautiful women and handsome charming men. You can find a cornucopia of drugs and drink. And you can find someone who will sleep with you, marry you, publish you and best of all, flatter you. But what’s hard to find is someone to have a really good conversation with. Think about it. When was the last time you went to a social event and had a really interesting conversation with a stranger? You meet someone and suddenly you click: they get you, you get them. There’s no secret agenda — sexual or otherwise — just the pure pleasure of talking. And now that I don’t drink, take drugs or look for love, all that London parties have left to offer me is good conversation.

T.S. Eliot was wrong. April is not the cruelest month — January is. It’s cold and bleak and days end in premature darkness. And worst of all, it’s the month when friends start to dump you. OK, maybe not you, but definitely me. Here was my January dump tally: two ex-girlfriends, one lover, five friends (three I thought were close friends) and one person I never wanted to be friends with in the first place. And get this: I do what’s called “befriending” for a local charity. It involves calling people who feel lonely and isolated on the phone and talking with them. The woman I’d been befriending for over two years suddenly said to me, “Please don’t call me anymore. This relationship isn’t working for me,” and just hung up. There were no thanks. No goodbye.

Not long ago this month’s column would have been one long gripe about how the party — as a forum of fun — was finished. Partygoers, I would have moaned, had become more interested in big names and networking than in actually talking to strangers and having fun and blah... blah... blah. But something unexpected has recently been happening in London: people are throwing great parties again, and they are actually fun. I know, fun is one of those words that are so insipid and infantile I feel embarrassed using it. And yet the absence of fun from adult social life is a source of sadness. Even an old grump like me has been having a good time. I went to a party full of young, pretty, clever posh girls in Chelsea and they loved me — and I loved them!

My friend Evie complains that I never want to go out and have fun anymore. “You’ve become a boring old stick-in-the-mud.” And I’m left wondering: is she right? My Woke Woman invited me to go with her to her Free-Love-Eco-Marxist commune and I said no. “Come on,” she pleaded, “it will be fun!” And now Evie wants me to go with her to the Torture Garden, which is Europe’s biggest fetish and body-art event. “Come on, it will be fun,” she says. “There will be dancing and wild scary women!” It’s not the wild scary women that worry me — it’s the fat bald bearded guys in pink latex tutus with nipple clamps that wag their tongues at you that scare me. Friends always want me to have fun.

The other day I saw something you don’t often see these days on the streets of London: a truly stylish man. He was a tall, skinny black dude, with a velvet top hat that tilted on his head in a jaunty way that defied gravity. He wore a brightly-embroidered paisley jacket, a waistcoat, tight black trousers and shiny, pointed black shoes — and he carried a pearl-handled walking stick. He looked like a cross between Beau Brummel and James Brown. So I was surprised when I saw this elegant man start to collect cigarette butts from the ground. Here was a dandy in the gutter — but one so cool, he stooped with style. I went up to him and said, “Hey man, I dig your look!” And I meant it.

Last week I got an interesting offer: would I like to leave London and go live in “Marxist free-love commune” in France? The offer came from the woke woman in mylife— I call her WW— the one I wrote about when I suggested we could end the culture war if we just poke the woke. Well, believe it or not, we’re still poking. And she wasn’t joking about the free-love Marxist commune. She’d recently been there for two weeks and had seen the future: our future. “It’s the most amazing place. You’ve got to come with me. We can pick olives, dance under the stars, write poetry do yoga — and have lots of sex!” “What? With other people?” “If you want,” she said. “They don’t believe sex should be exclusive or full of fear and repression.

Whenever I’m at a dinner party with very clever people, I always feel like I’m the dumbest person in the room — and that’s because I am the dumbest person in the room. I should point out that I’m not really dumb dumb — well, most of the time. But by every test of intelligence I am: I have a low IQ, I failed to get into a university, I don’t understand Google maps and I don’t get how the twenty-four-hour clock works. I speak no other languages. In terms of cognitive capital, I’m broke. Everyone in my circle wants to be the smartest person in the room. Smart is sexy. Clever women like clever men. They never have sex with dumb guys like me. Is it a breeding thing or a reading thing?

Recently, a famous American novelist came to stay at my place in London. In her later Substack post she described me as “an older gentleman.” It’s an accurate description — I’m sixty-eight! — but why does it make me feel so uneasy? Older is fine. And so too is gentleman. But put them together and the phrase “older gentleman” brings to mind — at least my mind — a Prufrock-like figure. A rotund old guy who wears a bright cravat and a brave smile and potters through his pointless days, softly whistling half-remembered showtunes from the Golden Age of Broadway. A life punctuated with sighs and resuscitated with cups of tea. Reader, I’m not that man — yet. No, I don’t have a problem with growing older; I have a problem with growing up.

This is the season when literary festivals start to happen all over the UK. From the highlands of Scotland to the South London lowlands of Deptford, there are book festivals for every taste and tribe. Festivals devoted to crime fiction, women writers, LGBTQ writers and young novelists. Even old Marxists are having their own summer festival. I’m thinking of starting a literary festival for neglected and bitter writers like me who don’t get invited to literary festivals. I ask myself: why should I care? But I do. I spend long nights of self-torment scrolling through the lists of people appearing at various festivals and shouting at my laptop screen: who the fuck is he? What has she written? Why is Bono there and not me? For heaven’s sake, who invited Minnie Driver?!

As I write this the coronation of King Charles hasn’t happened yet, but I’m having great fun watching the procession of those who have been royally snubbed by royalty. Only a thousand people have been invited to the King’s coronation in Westminster Abbey and a lot of other people — dukes, earls, A-list celebs, actors, society figures — are pissed they didn’t make the cut. The British press reports daily on the latest person to be “snubbed.” So far the snub scorecard is as follows: Prince William is snubbing his brother Harry. Harry is snubbing everyone. His wife Meghan is snubbing Charles and President Biden is snubbing Britain.