Arabella Byrne

In Mary McCarthy’s 1954 novel The Group, Mr Andrews describes the contents of a charity shop (or thrift store if you hail from the States) as an 'instructive inventory of the passé'. And indeed, all charity shops are repositories of the recent past - a perfect distillation of expended trends and fashions. Worthy of an anthropologist’s eye, charity shops are living museums; rail after rail of cultural history infused with the faint smell of other people’s washing detergent and mothballs. But Mr Andrews missed one vital point: charity shops are not simply about the past. They are also caverns of possibility, where formerly prized objects become affordable, and where the taste of the customer reins supreme. There is no type of shop quite like it.

In 1983 Cambridge academic W.G. Runciman, reviewing Peter York and Ann Barr’s The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, described the work as an 'anthropological survey' in the mould of such distinguished scholars as Malinowski and Veblen. Veblen’s late-nineteenth century The Theory of the Leisure Class was, Runciman explains, an 'earnest social-Darwinian exercise in the analysis and survival of certain archaic behavioural traits'. By attempting to define the Sloane ranger, York and Barr were Veblen’s disciples he concluded, albeit unintentional ones.  Nearly forty years later, eons from the Harpers & Queen heyday of the Sloanie, driven by Princess Diana and Fergie, we must ask ourselves this: where have they all gone?

To some, the sight of Prince George wearing a suit and tie at Wembley on Sunday night was simply too much. The Mum mob on Twitter roared 'Who dresses a child like that?' presumably hoping that the future King would be wearing a football shirt and shorts like the rest of the child population lined up way past their bedtime on Sunday to watch England lose. For the little Prince to wear the apparel of power and privilege was seen as an act of cruelty, a scheme designed by his parents to set him apart from other children. Let kids be kids, the reasoning goes. Let them wear whatever they like. Far be it from parents to impose any kind of sartorial authority over their offspring.

Yes, we tune in for the tennis on Wimbledon fortnight. But lovers of SW19 also tune in for another kind of spectating on any given day: the sport of the Royal Box. A championship of notoriety and celebrity in its own right. Raised feudally above the Centre Court, the Royal Box has seventy-four Lloyd Loom dark green chairs for its chosen occupants on all thirteen days of play. For nearly a century, since 1922, the Royal Box has welcomed an illustrious rollcall of guests, described by the All England Club as ‘British and overseas Royal Families, heads of government, people from the world of tennis, commercial partners, British armed forces, prominent media organisations, supporters of British tennis and other walks of life.’ And me. Yes, that’s right.

'Should I pay in actual money, in-person, in the shop itself?' I asked my husband incredulously the other day. Yes, he replied, sounding rather bored. Prior to the pandemic such an exchange would not have taken place. I would have simply gone to the shop with no thought of government restrictions to my personal liberties, unmasked and care-free, and paid in good old-fashioned sovereigns. But this is 2021 and the pandemic has had such a profound effect on our linguistic habits that we are now forced to speak in a tangle of retronyms to get our point across. But what exactly are retronyms? Those expecting the linguistic form of a Hoxton hipster, dressed ironically in 90s clothes may be disappointed because retronyms just aren’t that edgy.

'Like a sea beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure. I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it […] And then it was that the Muse of Painting came to my rescue – out of charity and out of chivalry.'  So said Churchill in 1915 after the disaster that was Gallipoli. Salvaged by the Muse, Churchill found solace from the pressures of political life in art. Last week, another sea beast emerged from the depths, consoled this time not by a Muse (he does, however, like to paint) but by the Sirens of the sea.

There was a time when having a nervous breakdown on a tennis court was called a hissy fit. Watch John McEnroe shouting at the umpire during the 1981 Wimbledon Men’s Singles first round match against Tom Gullikson for the masterclass. Strutting over to the umpire like an angry bird, his trademark headband doing anything but containing his mop, McEnroe splutters the immortal 'you cannot be serious' riposte accompanied by fabulously energetic arm movements before returning to the baseline and serving out a double fault. In the gladiatorial arena that is the tennis court, McEnroe knew that repression wouldn’t win him the match. Did he look bonkers? Yes, but he didn’t care. Instead, he channeled his mental anguish to win him the match, and later, the tournament.

News that Apple has updated its emoji range to include pictograms specific to the pandemic may either disgust you or inspire you to send a volley of missives out immediately. As an emojiste, I am in the latter camp. I am delighted that I now have a bandaged heart, a dizzy face with spiral eyes, a face exhaling with exhaustion and, of course, a bloodless syringe in my emoji lexicon. My nearest and dearest WhatsApp interlocutors may groan but I simply don’t care. Far from an erosion of linguistic standards, I see emojis as an exciting semiotic advance. I only wish that Roland Barthes, the grand French semiotician of the last century, were around to decode it all. Emoji, which originated in Japan in the 90s, can be used in different ways.

There is no greater tabula rasa in the public imagination than grief.  Prince Philip’s four children - no strangers to the glare of public interest - now find themselves the target not of global ire, but rather unusually, of collective sympathy. For public figures, the warm light of communal compassion imbues recognition and significance on the lives of lost loved ones; their grief is one that is shared, which must be a consolation. But in today's 24/7 news cycle public grief of this kind comes with its own pressures and expectations. In the annals of Royal public relations, this should be a relatively straightforward chapter. Approval for the Royal family soars amid a public outpouring of hagiography, and all is well.

They came in their droves. Labradors, Alsatians, French bulldogs, Spaniels, Cavapoos, Cockapoos, Labradoodles, Corgis, like a roll of dog poo bags, the list goes on. No sooner had Boris locked us up in the March sunshine last year than the nation rushed to acquire a dog. After years of standing firm, parents finally gave in to their children’s pleas and took the plunge. Those living alone, confronted with the prospect of indefinite confinement, threw caution the wind (and their furniture) and gave in to the idea of a dog. Those who had not owned a dog for years, decided they would once more fling themselves unto the canine breach. I know all of this because when I walk my Pointer, Percy, in the fields and parks around my house I am assailed by people with boisterous puppies.

Asked to defend France’s reputation on the global stage, a French diplomat once told the International Herald Tribune, 'If Germany has Siemens, we have Voltaire.' In this vision lies something very obviously French: a single-minded belief in superiority grounded not in the future but in the glorious intellectual past. Schooled in the tradition of exception culturelle or cultural superiority, the French truly believe that their cultural capital is the finest in the world. Think Diderot, Condorcet, Sartre and Camus and you can see why.

For all the long looks and transatlantic sniping via their courtiers, the Battle of the Dukes – Cambridge vs. Sussex - has been relatively tame thus far. No princely duel has taken place, no swords have been drawn at dawn in the grounds of Windsor Castle and, regrettably, neither Duchess has fainted at the scene. All we can hope for at this point is a proxy battle waged in the arid landscape of digital media, barbed insults poking out among the podcasts and twitter feeds.  Gone are the days of gladiatorial contest offered up to the public in search of absolutism. Those in search of Ducal blood sports must instead content themselves with four seasons of The Crown, an interview with James Corden, or the pronouncements of historian and Netflix advisor Robert Lacey.

Imagine, if you will, that there existed a television interview with Henry VIII. Sprawled in one of his Royal palaces with the interviewer nervously perched amongst the discarded chicken bones and giant dogs, what would he say? Would he be repentant about the beheadings, the adultery, the abject violence? Would he make us believe that his quest for an heir lay rooted in a deep and fervent respect for his bloodline? Definitely not. For the Tudors were monarchy proper; mysterious and shadowy, sheathed in transcendence. Monarchy before the mystery was replaced by the dull sheen of celebrity and its Instagram accounts, television interviews, zoom appearances and podcasts.

Rarely has the public imagination been so injected with the notion of a drug as the way out. AstraZeneca, Pfizer, BioNtech; these names have seeped into our discourse with such ease that it seems hard to imagine the shadowy time before them when vaccines were something routinely administered to children and the elderly. A time before we were bombarded with images of syringes and phials of medicine on conveyor belts, a time before a drug meant liberation.  For addicts living through the pandemic, the idea of a drug as liberation is a well-worn pathway. But there is no vaccine to return them to any sort of freedom or to offset the damage caused by nearly a year of isolation. Because for addicts, to be alone is to suffer.