Flora Watkins

Last time I filled up, I actually staggered when I looked at the display screen I have an addiction that is increasingly expensive to feed. My poison of choice is an intoxicating chemical compound called Hexadecane. Street name: ‘diesel’. After Marlboro Lights and my husband, it’s the longest committed relationship of my life. It is vital to my well-being. Bouncing around the lanes in my old Discovery 4 makes me happy. Sometimes I will play 'Fuel' by Metallica (‘Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire'). But it comes at a cost.    Diesel prices are now so high (around £2 a litre) that the last time I filled up, I actually staggered when I looked at the display screen. I’d only meant to put in £50 but got distracted doomscrolling.

It’s as good an indicator as you’ll find of this government’s asinine attitude to rural Britain that you’re reading a piece in which a Spectator writer semi-seriously considers the far-right credentials of various dog breeds. How right-wing is your dog? in itself sounds like one of Alan Partridge’s increasingly desperate pitches for a new TV show.    Pity the poor black Lab, for it’s these harmless thickos of the dog world that have aroused Labour’s ire.

Dear fee-paying parents (if I may), Forgive me for addressing you as one large, homogenous group. It sounds terribly pompous, doesn’t it – in the style of one of those endless missives St Paul kept sending to the Corinthians. Frankly, I think he should have put a sock in it after penning number one, giving us the best wedding reading there is and leaving it at that. But I’m getting distracted. Much like the Corinthians, you might well be thinking, ‘Just sod off – you don’t know us’, and you’d be right. Though what I do know, as a former prep-school mother myself, is there are at least as many types of fee-paying parents as there have been education secretaries in the past ten years (also ten, in case you’ve lost count).

As the echoey, descending riff of ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ reverberates around Donington Park, I am shoved abruptly through a Proustian window. It’s the early Nineties, I’m 15 and my best friend Bea and I are sitting on a couple of obliging random guys’ shoulders. I’m passed a very strong spliff as Guns n’ Roses – ‘the most dangerous band in the world’ – take the stage. Our parents have no idea where we are. Some 80,000 people put their hands in the air and go wild. This is the most exciting thing we’ve experienced in our provincial lives.     Someone tugs my sleeve. ‘Mummy I can’t see,’ and I’m jolted back to the present by today’s gig buddy – my ten-year-old son.

It’s Chelsea week - officially the start of the Season - so brace yourself for acres of breathy coverage and All The Tropes from SW3. The Royal Walkabout! Red-coated Chelsea Pensioners being patronised! Glossy influencers who wouldn’t know a peony from a Philip Treacy pillbox hat knocking back champagne! Expect many, many shots of people’s backs as they struggle to see anything for the price of their £122 (or more) ticket.   Oh, and the gardens themselves. Something of a sideshow to the main event of being seen to be there, the format rarely deviates. There’s the ‘Eco’/ 'rewilded'/ 'woo woo'/ ‘hortiwoke’ garden; essentially a curated collection of weeds you could see on any railway embankment.

Cast your minds back, if you can, to 1986. A different era. The nation rejoiced as a jolly redhead married the Queen’s favourite son. Britain had a cast-iron prime minister who looked set to go on and on, with nary a dent to her patent leather handbag. A first-class stamp cost 17 pence; the average family home only a little more. There was a Big Bang in the City and a larger one at Chernobyl. And, in the nascent ready-made drinks market, something similarly seismic happened: Marks & Spencer launched the bevvy that spawned a thousand imitators, the ‘gin in a tin’. This epoch-defining moment passed me by at the time (I still had a few years left at primary school). When I was a 90s teen, it was alcopops that commanded the headlines and moral panic.

In his novel Coming up for Air (1939), George Orwell has his benighted protagonist, George Bowling, bite into a sausage, only to discover that it tastes of something else altogether: ‘...pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish!’  I thought of George Bowling as my disgruntled family sat outside Felbrigg Hall in North Norfolk last week, eyeing me balefully — and I envied him. At least his sausage tasted of something. For I had just spent £43.

In PR terms, it’s a such a well-worn trajectory, it has its own name. ‘Doing a Burberry’ is the term for when something once exclusive and favoured by those in-the-know is appropriated by the hoi polloi and its standing slips inexorably downwards. The Ivy — now a chain of naff provincial cafés — is a notable victim. Marbella, now ‘Marbs’ thanks to the cast of TOWIE is another. So is the name Samantha, once terribly Sloaney, now associated only with a former page 3 girl and some really filthy double entendres on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue on Radio 4.

He’s 12 next month, my eldest son, but he’s rejected the ‘movie night’ party I’ve suggested, and he doesn’t want any of his new friends from senior school to come for a sleepover. And I know why. Our television is a modest one, not the size of one of the screens flanking the main stage at Glastonbury. I recently went to pick up my son, who was at a new friend’s house. They were playing Mario Kart on a screen that took up about half a wall of the living room. Neither looked up when his mum let me in, so I stood in front of them. ‘Hello? Hel-LO?’ ‘It’s so hard when they’re on screens, isn’t it?’ exclaimed the other mum, as her son manoeuvred Luigi around Brain Rot circuit on Bilge Island with slack-jawed expertise.

Another day, another report on how many children have had to leave their private schools, thanks to Labour’s VAT raid on fees. This particular survey, by wealth management firm, Saltus, found that almost one in ten parents have had to take their children out of the independent sector altogether while 65 per cent of those questioned admitted to making ‘significant changes’ to their circumstances to keep their children in private education.    When belts can only be tightened so far, parents need to get creative.

Reports that Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie have been banned from the Royal Ascot carriage procession raise an important question: what is the optimum fighting weight of the Royal Family?  For years now, we’ve been hearing about King Charles’s plans for a ‘slimmed down’ monarchy. Prince William, too, has declared that ‘change is on my agenda’ — which presumably means fewer floppy hats and chests stuck with improbable numbers of medals on the balcony at Buck House.   In the current torrid climate, few would demur that removing titles, cash and crash pads at Kensington Palace for the freeloading grifter elements of this extended family is a bad thing.