Arabella Byrne

Many were the jibes when Boris Johnson announced that he was ‘thrilled’ to be back on the tennis court in 2021 as lockdown restrictions eased. ‘Bloody posho poncing about on a tennis court’ or ‘how typical’ were probably some of them. Sir Keir, naturally, made sure that he was photographed on a football pitch on the same day. But here’s the thing: these days, playing tennis isn’t posh. Yes, chins love to watch it and play it – helped by tennis courts of their own – but the playing of tennis has become democratised. Reports of next-gen community tennis clubs springing up all over the country have become widespread, according to the Financial Times. And yet tennis has always had a class problem.

Today, I go to Ascot. The last time I darkened the turf of the Royal Enclosure was in 2017, when I was heavily pregnant with my first daughter. In the photograph of my husband and me that day, I resemble a whale with a plate attached to its head, while my husband looks as if he might at any moment burst into flames from wearing tails and top hat in a heatwave. As you can imagine, we both look rather cross. Curiously, though, on the edge of the photo, there appears to be another couple posing for the camera who look to be having a brilliant time. The gentleman is wearing a cravat of some sort, no tails or topper, while his lady love sports a pink minidress.

Look, if you will, at Kate Middleton on the Isle of Mull for her wedding anniversary. There she was in skinny jeans, tucked-in blue shirt and tweed blazer, shod in what looked like sensible walking boots. It’s a look I like to call Royal Prep School Mummy, and she’s been at it for years: on school runs, at charity netball matches, and Anmer Hall photoshoots. It works, as it always has done, by combining registers. The tweed blazer nods to all sorts of Balmoral-ish, elitist accents – but we forget all about that because of the blue shirt and skinny jeans, items we might well own ourselves. Hilary Mantel may have famously called Kate a ‘shop window mannequin’, but I want to know which one. Joules, Boden or Cath Kidston? https://twitter.

Many years ago, long before Covid and when Donald Trump was still a property magnate-cum-reality TV star, I crossed the pond to study for my PhD at Penn. Not Penn State, which everyone seems to have heard of because of some obscure sex scandal; not Princeton, basking in its Michelle Obama afterglow; but Penn. It’s in the Ivy League, before you crinkle your nose: it has Gothic Revival buildings, frat houses, jocks, and Americans talk endlessly about how old it is. Some call it the Jewish Ivy, thanks to its high proportion of JAPs – Jewish American Princesses – who went there after a Gossip Girl existence at private school in New York. I wasn’t sure what to call it, but I was young, impressionable and ready to wear the Penn merch and Nikes at the drop of a baseball cap.

It was when I nearly reversed into two brand new Land Rover Defenders in the car park at my daughter’s prep school that I realised something was going on. Of course, I had seen them before. I live in Oxfordshire where the A-roads are one long parade of Land Rover Discoveries, Range Rovers and Volvo SUVs from one junction to the next. But recently Defenders seem to be the ‘it’ car on the block. Land Rovers used to connote a certain kind of rarified upper-class masculinity – think Prince Philip, think chins hanging out of them on a shoot – but the new Defender, puffed-up and boxy like a fat peacock, unintentionally parodies what marketeers might pompously call its ‘brand heritage’.

Have you ever looked after a child that doesn’t nap from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m.? I have. Just to be clear, I’m talking about a 14-hour day with no relief whatsoever from grannies, nannies or DHs, the ghastly acronym that Mumsnet uses for fathers to signify ‘darling husband’. Next question: have you ever looked after a child for the standard 14-hour shift and not turned a screen on? Don’t lie, because no mother on this planet will ever believe you. Seasoned mothers know that the only way to make it to the business end of the day – 5 p.m., give or take – is to fill chunks of the never-ending day with screen time, sometimes quite large chunks since you’re asking.

Love or loathe Danny Dyer, hard-man hooligan of Football Factory, EastEnders bod and breakout Rivals star, but he does talk sense. The kind of straight-up, geezer sense you can only get down the pub, a locale to which he is no stranger. In the promotional press for his latest film, Marching Powder, Dyer, when pressed on the not-so-euphemistic title of the film, had the following to say on cocaine: ‘I’ve got that social butterfly thing where I mix in both circles and believe me, everyone’s fucking at it [...] it’s classless actually, that drug.’ To some of us, this may seem obvious. In my decade of active addiction, I obtained and recreationally ‘enjoyed’ the drug with anyone from builders to baronets.

It’s half-term and instead of the Baftas and Anmer Hall in Norfolk, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decamped en famille to Mustique. Old pictures of Kate and Wills walking along the Caribbean seafront hand in hand and a young Prince George in a green polo shirt are accompanied by newspaper commentary detailing how Kate deserves a rest in what is thought to be her favourite place. So far, so very lovely.   Mustique itself, though, has always struck me as a rather sinister place.