Alec Marsh

Like a lot of things it began with the cleaners. You may be old enough to remember when there were actual cleaners in offices before they all vanished about 20 years ago. In fact they didn’t disappear, they just got outsourced. That usually meant that nothing much got cleaned especially anymore, but bins were changed at night by unseen hands – the invisible Morlocks in fluorescent bibs, wearing the last person’s name-badge. Now there are plans for us to outsource our offices altogether. In this case it might make sense: after all, if it’s not your core business, why bother? You’re better off leaving it to the experts.

The news that Russia has beaten Tom Cruise and NASA in the latest bout of the space race – by sending actress Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko to the International Space Station to film a movie – almost certainly heralds a pointless new low in cinema. Just like the difference between erotica and pornography, we all know that you don’t need to go in to space to shoot a film about it. In fact, it’s almost certainly better if you don’t. I’m all in favour of method acting ­– whether it’s Timothy Spall sporting a paintbrush for his role in Mr Turner or Adrien Brody getting to grips with Chopin for The Pianist – but propelling actors into space defies the principal purpose of the space movie.

Have you ever wondered what Vladimir Putin thinks when he watches a Bond movie? When the credits roll at the end, does he glance at his mobile phone and wonder if anyone else is listening? Does he stroke his cat and gaze meditatively at the wall-to-ceiling fish tank in his dacha and feel some unease? James Bond is made up – and everyone knows it. But just like The Crown, 007 has a habit of shaping global perceptions for better or worse. Why else did China  censor the Skyfall's Shanghai scenes and cut out references to torture by the Chinese authorities, however fantastical the plot may have been?

What is it about Westerns? They are the Chinese takeaway of film – they’re no one’s first choice, they haven’t been fashionable in living memory, and yet you never have to look too hard to find one. One might also compare Westerns to cockroaches or sharks; pre-Jurassic survivors who have seen off much mightier beasts time and again scuttling from the dark shadows after the latest apocalypse. So here’s a prediction: Hollywood’s finest will be dusting off their chaps and six-shooters in years to come, long after the present glut of comic-book led mega franchises have hung up their CGI leotards for good.

Among the glorious shores of these islands, there is one of the best-kept secrets of sailing. It’s a ragged and rocky coastline that is blessed with the sort of idyllic, empty sandy beaches stretching on for miles that would make Tom Hanks's castaway shake from method acting-induced PTSD. Here the blue waters are scattered with islands rising from the depths with the kind of muscular topography that would have your average geography teacher reaching for their colouring-in pencils. This, my friends, is the west coast of Scotland. Forget the Caribbean, wonderful though the punch, the people and the terribly reliable temperature all are. The untouched beaches of the Western Isles are every bit as beautiful, just permanently 15 degrees Celsius colder.

One of the most striking features of the second Covid summer has been the soaring prices of holiday cottages. How dare the owners of static homes in the vicinity of the coast be charging quite so much for the uneven pleasures of a week in a caravan park? Well, get used to it because as Britain’s population continues to soar – we’re on track to hit 75 million in the next two decades –pressure on property and prices is only going to increase. As Mark Twain remarked: ‘Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.’ All right, you say, we’ll go abroad instead, plus the weather’s better over there. Well good luck with that, too.

The word Powys is not filled with onomatopoeic potential and, to the English ear at least, doesn't conjure up a particular image. And yet the region has a dizzying lineage, one that stretches back to antiquity. In the fifth century, the Romans scarcely off the stage, Powys was ruled one of the last kings of the Britons named Vortigern – that’s according to the Venerable Bede not the comedically venerable Monty Python. Later still Powys was ruled by Brochwel Ysgrithrog (‘the fanged’ or ‘of the tusk’) and did battle with the Saxons before Alfred the Great had even been born – let alone burned his fingers on a cake. It thus qualifies as one of the most ancient place names in Britain – predating the Saxon era.

When Sir Richard Branson blasted off into space on Sunday he broke – or rather established – several important records. While he wasn’t the first billionaire to go into space – the extra-terrestrial ten-digit honours belong to Hungarian-born Microsoft Office software magnate Charles Simonyi, who went up to space on a Russian rocket in 2007 – Branson was the first man (billionaire or no) to go to space in a rocket that he had funded and built himself. For what it’s worth, he’s also the first knight of the realm to go into space, which has a certain anachronistic cachet, like a time-travelling Roman senator.

It’s safe to say that the Ford Escort does not enjoy a straightforward place in the British national consciousness. And it’s not a position, furthermore, that is simplified in any way by being reminded that the Prince of Wales actually bought one of them for Lady Diana Spencer as an engagement present in 1981. I challenge you to think of a less romantic engagement gift – albeit the car did have a frog mascot on the bonnet – for a bride-to-be, especially one due to be joined in holy matrimony to the heir to the throne. (God alone knows what Meghan Markle would have said if Prince Harry had turned up with a Vauxhall Astra to celebrate their engagement.

Back when the dinosaurs still thought they were the bees-knees, another little creature was gently making its way into the big wide world. And now, more than 150 million years later – having withstood at least one planetary-wide annihilation (the one that knocked T-Rex off his perch) – the humble oyster may be on the cusp of making history itself.That’s because this simple bivalve mollusc, cultivated on our shores since Roman times, really could help save the planet, albeit this time from an annihilation of man’s own making.

There comes a point in every metropolitan potentate’s journey from London to Edinburgh, when he or she looks up from their laptop in First Class and gazes from the window of the train. At this point, they suddenly realise that whatever’s been absorbing their interest for the last hour or two, is completely irrelevant. Chances are they are gazing out at some of the 60 or so miles of Northumberland that the doubtlessly ageing LNER rolling-stock is careening through at 100 miles per hour.

So, a question for you. Are you bothered by the fact that you hear the word so, quite so often? Does ‘so’ grate on you? It grates on me. A lot. Every time I hear it I shudder, which makes certain television channels frankly hazardous. In fact, I’ve reached my absolute 'so' saturation point. It happened the other morning when my son, who is just five, walked into the sitting room and announced portentously: ‘So, the question is...’ I didn't catch the question because I was wracking my brain as to where he had come up with that form of words. And then it dawned on me... Over the next half an hour I must have caught myself either saying ‘so’ or very nearly doing so, about half a dozen times.

Admit it, the joy of driving is a myth - in Britain at least. Drivers who talk about the thrill of getting behind the wheel should ask themselves, when was it that they last really enjoyed driving somewhere? Because the grim truth is that unless you are on an isolated country road miles from the nearest speed camera – and certain that no one else is around – you simply can’t let rip anywhere now. The traffic never subsides enough for you to get a decent run up and, if it did, you’d be flashed by speed camera or break the average speed limit before you could even hit fourth gear (let alone hit the near-mythical realm of Fifth Gear).

How do you feel about 17 May, when the next major set of lockdown restrictions are due to be lifted in England? Are you looking forward to going out to dinner with friends inside an actual restaurant, or are you breathless with anticipation at the prospect of hosting your first, legal, dinner party for as long as you care to remember? Quite how you feel about any of the above will relate closely to how strongly you perceive yourself to be either an extrovert or an introvert. If you’re the former, then 17 May, followed by 21 June (when apparently lockdown will be ‘over’), will have you salivating with joy at the prospect of virtually untrammelled social contact. Bring it on. But if you’re an introvert then it’s the opposite story.

Those with a watchful eye might spot something this week (or next)  not seen in a while. And I’m not talking about a freshly poured pint, or the sight of your forehead after three months without a barber’s care. Rather, as England and the whole of the UK, begins to ‘open up’ after the third national lockdown, and as we emerge socially emboldened into the spring sunshine inoculated to the tune of some 32 million first doses of Covid vaccine, there's a chance we might see the handshake make a tentative return. I can't be the only one who has begun to wince slightly every time I see someone on TV shaking hands in a social setting, in a film or programme evidently filmed in the world before Covid robbed us of such basic, everyday civilities.

The office, as we once knew it, is dead. Zoom has killed it; the digital genie is out of the lamp. What most of us didn’t realise before Covid – back in April 2020 – was that the closure of offices was final and that the daily commute may well be confined to the history books. Even when things return to ‘normal’ we won’t be able to uninvent remote working, and companies know it. In fact, many of them knew it before the pandemic struck. As one leading business figure told me back the early summer, Covid – by forcing remote working – allowed companies to activate a decade’s worth of mooted corporate culture change in just three months.

When’s the last time you wore a tie? Was it yesterday? Are you wearing one now? Somehow I doubt it. After all, why should you, sitting there in your home office or spare bedroom, or sitting room?  Of course there was a time, if you’re a male reader, that you would have worn one every day to work. But ties are rapidly disappearing. Where once half-Windsors wider than 747s straddled the necks of pontificating ex-footballers on Match of the Day, open shirts now rule the roost. When you see a politician out and about on the television, his tie is gone, his sleeves are rolled up – like a vet about to perform a highly intimate procedure – and he’s even jacket-less.