Andrew Watts

Last week, Carl Elsener of Victorinox, makers of the Swiss Army knife (all other manufacturers must refer to their products as ‘Swiss-style knives’), announced that the company is working to develop a knife without any blades in anticipation of modern legislation and safety-conscious consumers. A cutting-edge Swiss Army knife will no longer have a cutting edge. I’m glad this proposal didn’t come out before Christmas: 2023 was the year my wife finally agreed our son could have a knife of his own. She has friends who won’t let their children wash up knives in case they injure themselves, but let them watch YouTube unsupervised.

I miss kippers. My wife won’t let me eat them at home, and they have become a rarity in restaurants. I stayed in a luxury hotel last month, and the manager was telling me that if I wanted anything – valet parking, room service, breakfast after 10.30 a.m. – I had only to ask. When I enquired if kippers were on the menu, he went as white as unsmoked cod and mumbled that the head of housekeeping had forbidden them because of the luxury soft furnishings. But I have medical science on my side: a report in the British Medical Journal last week said that fish such as herring could save lives, and the planet.

The Office for National Statistics has been publishing interesting insights from the last census – perhaps to counter the bad press that censuses get at this time of year, forcing pregnant Jewish women to travel to municipalities in the West Bank – and its latest release shows that 18.1 per cent of people in Cornwall identify as ‘Cornish’.  Whether as their national identity, ethnic group or, in a tiny fraction of cases, their main language, this is an increase from 13.8 per cent in the last census, in 2011. All of these were write-in responses – despite a campaign by councillors and local MPs in Cornwall, there was no Cornish tick-box – and I suspect the percentage would be much higher if it was.

Next year, Exeter University will offer an MA in Magic and Occult Science: the first of its kind in a British university. The new course has led to newspaper headlines about a ‘real-life Hogwarts’ and questions as to whether magic is as worth studying as say, economics. The course director, Professor Emily Selove, refused my request for an interview – with polite apologies, although one could hardly expect the convenor of Exeter’s Centre for Magic and Esotericism to be anything but esoteric. A similar tension, it turns out, is at the heart of the debate about the degree. For all the media snideness, the most serious objections come from Britain’s growing magical community.

In the final series of the Netflix programme The Crown, Princess Diana will appear as a ghost. We are told that her apparitions will be ‘thoughtful and sensitive’ – which is rather disappointing for anyone hoping for her to have a recurring role, like Marty Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), perhaps wearing that white dress she wore to the British Fashion Awards. Yet this has not stopped the ‘friends of the King’ from saying that the programme has lost all the credibility it had in its earlier years. It is true that, in the first series, The Crown was more like Shakespeare than soap opera, with actors trained at the RSC delivering grand speeches about the nature of monarchy. But what could be more Shakespearean than a ghost?

Last month, a trailer for the new Exorcist film – the scariest trailer ever, apparently – was released. The Exorcist: Believer isn’t out until Friday 13 October – just in time for Halloween – but Hollywood movies about demons are legion. This one follows The Pope’s Exorcist (released on Good Friday), in which Russell Crowe is a maverick exorcist who doesn’t play by the book, but gets results – despite the pen-pushers at (Vatican) City Hall. The Reverend Canon Dr Jason Bray, the Bishop of St Asaph’s ‘deliverance minister’, will not be watching either film.

The line of trees beside the road into Tenbury Wells are bare of leaves at the beginning of December. But on their spindly branches are huge clumps of mistletoe, weighing them down like muffs on the skinny arms of dowagers. Most of the country’s mistletoe grows in a small area of England – Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, the counties around the Malvern Hills – but no one is quite sure why; it may be the number of orchards (mistletoe grows well on apple trees) or the climate of cold winters and warm summers.

I had been cross enough about having to go to Sennen Cove. Aside from the fact that I don’t care for the place — what is the point of a Cornish beach if the sand is too coarse-grained for sandcastles? — I resented the fact that I would not even be able to park near the place I hated. The car park on the beach is full from nine in the morning; I would have to drive up to the town — which is so far away that some of the houses aren’t even second homes — and walk. Furiously I bought a ticket, chucked it in the car and marched down the cliff to the beach. When I returned to find a parking fine on the windscreen, I was, I admit, not in the holiday spirit. I assumed that sending a scan of the ticket to Armtrac, the parking company, would resolve matters.

You can’t (and probably shouldn’t) design a treehouse. Treehouses should grow organically, in every sense: they must be made of wood, obviously — one definition of a treehouse is that it is a tree holding its dead friend — and the footings for the platform must be the knots or branches that are footholds when climbing the tree. Besides, it is only when you are halfway through building that you can work out where you need to fit round branches and add noggins — unless you build it between the trunks of two separate trees, or use some sort of 3D mapping software, both of which sound very much like cheating. So there wasn’t any masterplan behind my son’s treehouse.