Anonymous

Oliver Benchley plays the Dane regularly at The Globe. He should be overjoyed — it's been his dream to front Hamlet since he was but a stripling, after all. Alas, he plays mostly to group tours of baffled Japanese tourists, or class outings filled with glassy-eyed teens who'd rather be vaping and throwing stones at the swans in the Avon. 'Pearls before swine dearie, pearls before swine', he tells his chiropodist at his weekly fungal heel-scrub.  The fungus came after a recent run as Caesar, wearing Roman sandals he knows for a fact the prop master has never washed. He has lost sleep the last few nights, penning a stinging letter to the production team that somehow keeps morphing into a sonnet.

Rosie smiles when her nephew asks her if she’s still swimming in the sea in October.  It is, in fact, when she starts enjoying it again. July and August are all very well, but her spot behind the harbour wall fills up with holidaymakers, annexing the rock where she likes to change, having picnics and jumping into the sea with their children, as if they were swimming for fun. It’s not Cold Water Swimming if the sea feels warm, even to tourists who aren’t swimming mindfully. A few of these incomers stick it out for September but October is what separates the men from the boys. Or the women from the girls, rather. For nine months of the year, Porthemmet Beach is as empty of men as Rosie’s pottery class.

Damien is an architect. Architecture is the second oldest profession, with notable affinities to the first. This morning, he has been on his houseboat, a retired Dutch barge moored in Wandsworth, finishing the text of his important new book Parametric Praxis: tectonics at the end of history. Theoretically speaking, he has been pushing the envelope with this one.   The barge, called Asymptote, is his pied-a-mer (as he likes to put it) when not in his cabanon in the Var. In Provence Damien ejected a grumbling shepherd, cleared out the peasant detritus, inserted a ground-source heat-pump and had the rustic interior coated in blinding white Corian. Naturally, it has been featured in Architectural Digest.

Algie thinks it very remiss of his wife Emma to call him a grouse tart, though he could have sworn she used the word whore. Hasn’t he spent 40 years damn well keeping a (slightly sagging) roof over all their heads, sending their ‘three peas – Poppy, Penny and Pippa – to Cheltenham Ladies and generally keeping the good ship Snodworthy-Ffiennes on an even keel?   So what if he sucked up to that dreadful oik Derek, who made a fortune from office furniture, and now owns three grouse moors? How on earth do you think you get invited to have a crack on one of the world’s greatest shoots? Yes, OK, on reflection, perhaps it was a bit craven to have a cashmere tweed gilet made up for him, complete with mink-lined collar, but it did the trick.

Georgia is always on her phone, and who can blame her when there are just so many messages coming through? Largely it’s her own fault because there is nothing she loves more than setting up a group chat.   Every social occasion, however minor, deserves its own forum. Which is why her WhatsApp is a graveyard of past events: Year 3 Christmas Fair. Padel 4 Hot Mums. Mykonos 2024. Flo’s baby shower. Jilly Cooper Book/TV Club. Name India’s baby. One is simply called Apples and she has no recollection of creating it.   She is forever adding people to groups, or removing them, should she feel the need. Her groups, her rules.

Geoffrey has a merit in Grade 7 piano (taken 52 years ago), a distinction in Grade 1 recorder (59 years ago) and no qualifications whatsoever on the organ. Regardless, this makes him the most talented churchgoing musician under the age of 75 in the parish of Nether Marsham. As such, he has been the village organist for the worse half of the last decade.    It happened quite by accident one Christmas Eve. Geoffrey’s sister-in-law wasn’t the only reason he had spent three hours in the Fox and Hounds before Midnight Mass; it was also his first Yuletide since taking early retirement and he was in a generally ebullient mood.

Luke Wells looks like he has it all. High-ceilinged, late-Georgian chambers overlooking the Walks in Gray’s Inn, now catching the last of the evening light. Tall bookcases crammed with planet-brained case law. Dark grey suit on his back – from a little gem of a Soho tailor who does the best cutting for Savile Row. Wig and gown hanging off his panelled door – handy for the quick sprint to Court Number One at the Old Bailey to rescue that battered glamourpuss, wrongly accused of murdering her lover, currently splashed all over page three of the Telegraph.  Well, that’s what Luke thought he would be doing after reading law at Lincoln College, Oxford, and bar school.

Marcus remembers the exact moment when he knew he was going into politics. He was 14, delicately poised between the arrival of the spots and the dropping of the voice and testicles. He’d always been a Tory; growing up in Great Missenden, there was no real alternative. But he had never known why he was a Tory. His grandfather might get misty-eyed while talking about Mrs T; he might have had a tender fascination with Princess Anne at a young age. Then he read The Blog.   The Blog was magnificent. The Blog explained how Clement Attlee had ruined Britain. The Blog explained why the NHS was an international disgrace and the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 a noose around our necks. Soon, he was hooked.

Andrea ‘Andy’ Campbell was born on 21 February 1960. She liked to say that her parents named her after the Queen’s second-born son, who entered the world two days beforehand. Whether or not this was true, Andy swiftly became not just interested in the family of her near-namesake, but positively obsessed. By the age of five, she was insisting on collecting memorabilia related to the Royal Family while her peers preferred to play with dolls and teddies. One of her prized possessions was Liza Sheridan’s book, A Day With Prince Andrew, which had been published in 1962 and gave a flattering insight into what everyday life was like for the two-year-old prince.  Andy’s own existence on a new-build housing estate on the edge of Basingstoke was rather less glamorous.

 Charles turned 18 during the Winter of Discontent, the detritus from his birthday party lying uncollected on the mean streets of London SW6 throughout Christmas and New Year. Since then, he has been eligible to vote in 12 general elections, 16 local elections and nine European Parliamentary elections. He has confidently voted Conservative in all 37 of them, the very antithesis of a ‘shy Tory’.  Charles’s parents had a weak spot for Jeremy Thorpe, the dog-murdering Liberal, but studying Economics A-level from 1976-1978 turned their son into a lifelong Tory. Labour’s IMF bailout; Labour’s inability to tame the unions; Labour’s swingeing taxes on wealth creation – the socialists simply couldn’t be trusted with the economy.

When people ask Matt what he does for a living, he sometimes replies that he’s a historian. Oh, they say, feigning mild interest, might I have read anything that you’ve written. At which point he has to admit it’s unlikely, unless they have a particular interest in Year 9 reports.  To be frank, Matt fell into being a history teacher. In three years at Durham, he became a master at speed-reading the introductions to books and writing semi-plagiarised essays while still mildly drunk at 4am. Despite his father’s hopes that he might cash in his unexpected First, a punishing summer internship at an American bank persuaded Matt to stay in academia a little longer.

You won’t find Charlie Thompson amongst the pages of Debrett’s Peerage, unless you look especially hard. Thanks to ChatGPT, though, inquisitive researchers can stumble on his name (though inconspicuous enough) bracketed with illustrious, even aristocratic families. His ancestry is not his fault, as he frequently tells himself. Just because a great-grandmother was an Earl's daughter doesn't make him a toff. Even so, he lives in perpetual anxiety of being found out.   His colleagues at the large media firm, where he’s worked for 20 years, spend more time bashing ‘posh twats’ and ‘nepo babies’ than he’s entirely comfortable with.

Nobody can deny that Pippa is a campaigner.  Her friends say it, her children complain about it, even her opponents - she tries very hard not to call them her enemies (in public) - say it.  The leaflets with Liberal Democrats on the front say it; the newspapers with Liberal Democrats in tiny letters on the back say it. Curiously, none of them ever mention what she campaigns for, or whether any of these campaigns have ever been successful - but that is really beside the point.  Ten years ago, she was campaigning against Brexit.  (She might have had more of an impact had she campaigned before the referendum, but that is also beside the point.

Meet Camilla Honeyleaf, who runs the ‘Sugar is Poison’ YouTube channel that, she'll proudly tell you, ‘has given thousands of people the eating disorder they so badly need’. An entrepreneur and an activist, Camilla has a calling: to bring health to the masses, or at least the massive. She won't rest until friends and strangers alike discover the joys of a cupcake made entirely from avocado, burnt quinoa husks and a semi-organic sweetener that has definitely not caused tumours in laboratory rats.  Healthy living, she says, is not an option but a calling. She is fond of a pithy bon mot (‘They’re like sentences trimmed of fat!

In a pleasant but modest one-and-a-half-bedroom flat in Crouch End, the half bedroom-cum-boxroom boasts a bookshelf that indicates eclectic taste on the part of its owner. Amongst its dozen or so volumes are a score-settling memoir by a disgraced royal lady-in-waiting, petulantly entitled I Also Served, You Know; a revisionist history of WWII written by a television weatherman, called I Wish We Were German; and, most remarkably, a collection of homoerotic sonnets in the Petrarchan style that were privately printed at the behest of the former global finance director at Goldman Sachs.

Kay and Derek’s ‘radicalisation’, as their daughter calls it, became impossible to ignore when they named their dachshund’s latest litter. Six males and two girls and of course they were named Nigel, Richard, Danny, Lee, Robert, Zia, Sarah and Suella. (Kay is secretly rather pleased the runt didn’t make it – she didn’t have to think about whether she would name him Rupert.) Previously their puppies had been given strictly non-political names – like Chips or Monty or Winston – and Kay had renamed Nelson when a neighbour got the wrong idea. There’s a saying about giving a dog a bad name, and you can’t call them something you can’t shout across a field without embarrassment.  That was the point when their daughter Meg stopped talking to them.

Camilla bought their place in the Burnhams when she discovered she was pregnant with her third child – following a heavy après sesh at La Folie Douce in Megève. Realising they’d never ski again as a family of four, and with memories of the Costa Smeralda fading like an over-exposed Polaroid, she convinced Johnnie that getting a holiday cottage made financial sense. ‘Because they’re virtually giving away buy-to-let mortgages.’ And as Kirsty Allsopp, who went to the same school as Camilla but was at least ten years older, always says, it’s an income stream.

Gerald’s just back from Florence. Two-and-a-half-thousand miles in the old Aston, thunderous straight six booming all over the Alps. ‘Took the Gothard Pass out of Switzerland. Bloody marvellous. You could hear us coming three valleys away! The old girl almost boiled over at seven thousand feet. The Aston was pretty, hot too, hahaha, wasn’t she, Lucinda?’  Long-suffering Lucinda, who has been married to Gerald for 48 challenging years, has heard all the stories before and only winces inwardly.