Anonymous

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.

Milo – born Rupert Myles Baxter-Stuart-Lane – is a self-proclaimed ‘wine wanker’. He is 27 years old, works at a B-Corp production and social content agency, lives in Stoke Newington, and dreams of running a wine bar in Clapton in the hope that Topjaw might someday notice him. His favourite film is Sideways. He watched it for the first time last month. He even has a tattoo to prove it: ‘I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot.’ The tattoo is on his left buttock. After enough biodynamic Zweigelt, he’ll be happy to show it to you.  Milo likes to say that he ‘came to wine late’. This is a complete lie.

If you google ‘Wedding celebrants, Surrey’, the fourth name to come up is ‘Lynda Bassette: With You for All Life’s Special Moments’. Farnham-based but willing to travel across the UK and abroad, Lynda also does funerals and baby naming ceremonies, so ‘the full wrap-around care’, as she calls it. But weddings are her favourite. Though divorced herself, she’s always been a true romantic at heart. ‘I’m in love with love!’ she tells her couples when they first get in touch.   She’s struggling to get her name more prominent on Google. It’s proving hard in a county where every other woman wanting a life-change seems to be completing the online celebrancy course and setting up as a sole practitioner.

Tilly’s children now refuse to tell her when another one bites the dust. Recently, they joke, they have been able to see the whites of her eyes when they say that Ludo or Verity has been pulled out of school because his or her parents have been hit by VAT on school fees. When Tilly quizzes them about the parents’ finances, they roll their eyes and tell her to stop being so nosy.  Standing on the steps of the children’s smart prep schools in Kensington, Tilly partakes in the faux-martyrdom of the other mothers about how they all have to tighten their belts now that school fees have rocketed, but she knows they’re not really suffering: they’ve all just come back from Verbier and are about to load their offspring into sleek black Range Rovers.

Dominic, known since his teens as Dom, enjoys telling people that he’s Catholic, or a ‘left-footer’ as he sometimes modestly describes himself. He feels it a distinction that gives him a bit of mystique in the financial services circles in which he moves. Non-Catholics are often mildly interested in his education by monks, his views of the papacy and whether he goes along with all the ‘rules’. But while Dom has lots to say on the matter, the truth is that the devout Catholicism of his upbringing is receding into distant memory, kept alive by a kind of niggling unease on Sunday mornings when he must decide whether or not to go to church.

If you’re at a high-profile but dreary launch of a political memoir at Daunt Books or find yourself in the Red Lion in Westminster any weeknight after six, Samuel Ordington-Mortimer will almost certainly be there, too. You usually hear him before you see him: a braying, gleefully indiscreet voice regaling his listeners with the latest salacious tidings at top volume.   By the time he hoves into view, a florid figure whose flushed cheeks perfectly match his claret-coloured trousers, you can expect either a cry of ‘dear boy’ or ‘darling girl’, regardless of how well you know him. There then follows a parade of cheek-kissing, occasionally with a ‘friendly’ squeeze on the arm or buttock, depending on how many glasses of wine have been consumed that evening.