Gus Carter

I’m owed around $680 billion. Some 77 acres of downtown Manhattan belong to the Carter family, according to a letter written in 1894. Wall Street, Broadway and One World Trade Center – they all sit on a plot that is, by rights, mine. Yet here I am, grumbling about what ought to be in the pages of The Spectator. What went wrong? The story goes something like this. Shortly before independence, a pirate called Robert Edwards was licensed by the British to hunt down Spanish ships. He was so successful that the Crown gave him a slice of Manhattan as a reward. Edwards leased the land for 99 years to two brothers and subsequently died, lost at sea. That lease expired in 1877 and was supposed to be apportioned off to Edwards’s heirs. But that never happened.

Sometimes a small detail in a news story tells you more than a months-long investigation splashed across the front page. ‘Starmer appears to realise that he needs to do more to connect with his party and has begun a new charm offensive,’ the Sunday Times reported. Some MPs have been invited for breakfast and ‘No. 10 has apparently purchased a new toaster to cater for the demand.’ There we have it, ladies and gentlemen. Keir Starmer’s secret weapon in his war against British decline: a few slices of Hovis and an awkward offer of jam. ‘Aerrr, are you planning to, um, support our Borders Bill? Oh, so sorry, we’ve got some Utterly Butterly somewhere. Morgan, would you mind looking in the kitchen?

What could be more fun for a 14-year-old boy than messing about in the woods with a gun? My school’s Combined Cadet Force offered precisely that, marching us through the Brecon Beacons and organising mock skirmishes with SA80 rifles (albeit using blanks). When we weren’t trying to shoot each other, we were fighting over OS maps and compasses, trying to find which bit of woodland we were supposed to be sleeping in. One group found a dead body on the side of a Welsh mountain. Another spent an evening drinking vodka and smoking cigarettes with a strange man in a caravan. At some point in the small hours, he got a little too handsy and they all ran back to their bivvies. I was hugely envious when they told us this as we ate powdered eggs, cooked in a mess tin over burning hexamine tablets.

Just before my father died, he visited Mannina in Florence to have his feet measured for a pair of shoes. I’d found the handwritten receipt in his desk on thin yellow paper, stapled with samples of leather. Online pictures of Mannina showed a glass-fronted shop of lacquered wood and brass, the name in beveled gold across the door. So after months without a holiday, I booked a cheap short haul flight from London to Italy, determined to track down these missing shoes.  My father had been a tailor for much of his life, the third man in Pakeman Catto & Carter, an established men’s clothing shop in the Gloucestershire town of Cirencester. ‘At one point he’d dressed half the gentlemen of England,’ my uncle said at his funeral, which is probably not far from the truth.