Harry Mount

If you wanted a little more excitement in this year’s Olympic marathon, you could do worse than imitate the race in 1908 — the first time the Games were held in ­London. Competitors, running from Windsor Castle to Shepherd’s Bush in the boiling heat,  were given hot and cold Oxo, rice pudding and milk, but no water. Still, there was free eau de cologne and champagne — that’s what did for the South African leading at the halfway mark. He suffered stomach cramps after a glass of champagne, surrendering the lead to a plucky little Italian confectioner, Dorando Pietri. Just short of the finishing line, Pietri collapsed.

In the constant light of summer, Tromsø is an extraordinarily civilised place from which to visit the wilderness, discovers Harry Mount  ‘Why do the British look so ill?’ I was asked by a 23-year-old woman at a dinner party in the Arctic Norwegian city of Tromsø. ‘Is it because they have chips for breakfast?’ She seemed to have steered clear of the chips herself; her skin looked like it had been put on fresh that morning. ‘Why do Norwegians look so good,’ I asked back, ‘when they drink even more than we do?’ The answer lay on the plates in front of us: reindeer sashimi followed by grilled whale, then seal, moose, cod and herring — all straight from the fjords and the frozen tundra.

Ian Fleming understood the attractions of an English summer. At the end of Dr No, James Bond is in Jamaica, his arch enemy dead, his knockout girlfriend, Honey Rider, about to leap into their double sleeping bag. And yet, despite being in paradise, Bond longs for ‘the douce weather of England — the soft airs, the “heat” waves, the cold spells — the only country where you can take a walk every day of the year.’ It used to be just eccentric Englishmen who acquired this peculiar taste for the changeable English summer. But no longer. Quietly, but decisively, the English summer and social calendar have been globalised and commercialised.

The United States is almost as segregated under Obama as it was in the time of Martin Luther King As I arrived in New Orleans this summer, there was a juicy racism row blazing across the airwaves and the blogosphere. Like lots of the juiciest rows, it was over a little thing. The question was, do black people use the social networking site Twitter differently from white people? According to Farhad Manjoo, Slate magazine’s technology correspondent, the answer is yes. He’d noticed that a group of black Twitter users in America were much more likely to react to particular topics. Some of them were race-based, such as ‘If Santa was black …’; answers included ‘He wouldn’t say ho-ho-ho, he would say yo-yo-yo’.

You might not have been to Freshwater West, on the remote western shores of Pembrokeshire, but you’ve probably seen it before — on the big screen. Because the bay is so untouched by man, it can stand in for pretty much any period in history. It’s just starred as the medieval beach in Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood, and as the seaside home to the shell house in the latest Harry Potter film. These days, it couldn’t stand in for much, except perhaps a Welsh version of Baywatch — Boyowatch, perhaps? Because, as of this year, between 26 June and 5 September, the beach has been destroyed by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Every day this summer, the RNLI has erected a beach hut — the only man-made structure on the beach. Every day, between 10 a.m.

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the continental midday sun. But at least the mad dogs don’t dress in vests, belly-hugging T-shirts or those cut-off trousers that make short men shorter and fat men fatter. Why do they do it? How has it happened that you can spot Holidaymakerus britannicus in an instant, from the other side of the piazza — from the far end of the tapas bar? The romantic legend that the British provide a model of good dress still lingers on. The British invented the modern suit, so the myth goes, Savile Row stands for the best tailoring in the world, so those sartorial standards must be written into our dressing DNA. Well, it just goes to show how difficult it is to dislodge a national stereotype.

Harry Mount watches Nick Griffin try to win round the disgruntled former Labour voters of Dagenham and Barking — if he wasn’t so ridiculous, he might be dangerous As always, P.G. Wodehouse got it right. Far-right groups are unlikely to take off in Britain because, for all their nastiness, they always come across as just a little too ridiculous. That’s certainly the impression I got after spending last Saturday in Barking, east London, at the BNP campaign launch. In The Code of the Woosters (1938), Wodehouse neatly took care of Sir Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts, by casting him as Sir Roderick Spode in his black shorts; by the time Spode had set up his fascist group, there were no shirts left, according to Gussie Fink-Nottle.