Harry Mount

Why do the cool die young? I don’t mean famous, cool people like Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison. They are members of the 27 Club – the pop stars who died at 27. I mean the schoolboy gods of my youth, the marvellous-looking, self-assured ones, effortlessly going out with the prettiest girls. And now seven of them – friends and contemporaries from school and university – are dead by the age of 50, either by their own hand or thanks to drink or drugs. The majority of my wild contemporaries have transformed into sober professionals None of the femmes fatales I know have died. Why is it only the cool men who’ve gone? As the cliché has it, they had it all. Take Alex Mosley, who died of a heroin overdose in 2009, aged 39.

Scylla and Charybdis are said to have sat off the Sicilian coast, where Mike Lynch’s boat foundered, and where 3,200 years before, Odysseus navigated between the monster and the whirlpool. Many think of the Med as a gentle sea, more like an oversized eternity pool, unbothered by the killer storms and cliff-high waves that rage beyond Gibraltar. The howling wind had ripped along the coast, whisking the beach away overnight I thought that, too, before I was bashed up by wild tempests in the two years I criss-crossed the Mediterranean in Odysseus’s wake. One morning, I turned up at a hotel on Mykonos. As I made my way to the breakfast table, the agitated maître d’ shimmered up and said, ‘I’m so sorry, sir, the beach has been washed away overnight.

What’s the biggest division in life? Between clever people and stupid people? Between the good-looking and the ugly? No. The fundamental difference is between the ones who do things quickly and the ones who do them slowly.  You know that friend who emails you back the moment you email them for a favour? Or the builder who comes round the morning you ring him? These are the modern saints – the hyper-efficient deities who put to shame that other friend who only ever rings when they want something out of you; or the plumber you have to ring three times and only ever rings back to say he isn’t coming after all.

Europe is revolting against the tourist invasion. This summer, Venice has started charging a tourist tax to keep visitors at bay. Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera have just set up inter-island protests under the slogan, ‘Let’s change course – let’s set limits to tourism’. Barcelona is planning to ban Airbnb. In the Cinque Terre, on the Italian Riviera, some of the coastline is now one-way, to restrict tourist traffic. On another bit of the Ligurian coast, plans are afoot to charge walkers. You can see why – the famous cities and resorts of Europe have become one vast Queueworld, where tourists gather in great numbers, intense heat – and, increasingly, intense misery.

Street robbery has become an epidemic. Horrible thugs are stealing luxury watches and jewellery in broad daylight. The number of luxury watches stolen almost doubled in England and Wales between 2015 and 2022 – with 25,802 stolen in 2022. The problem is particularly bad in London, where the Metropolitan Police have set up a special unit to tackle the problem. Even the greediest thief isn’t about to strip your suit off your back It's an unforgivable crime. Lock the muggers up and throw away the key. Of course people should be free to walk the streets, decked in gold and silver. Oh for the legendary days of medieval England when you could supposedly leave a bag of coins nailed to a tree for a year and no one would steal it.

It’s the most beautiful restaurant in London – and the oldest. Built in 1573, Middle Temple Hall is celebrating its 450th anniversary. It’s also where Shakespeare held the premiere of his Christmas play, Twelfth Night, in 1602. How strange that hardly anyone knows about the best Elizabethan hall in London. It’s mostly used by barristers but the public can eat there too, as long as you book ahead.  I looked up to high table to see a purple-faced bencher, glaring down at me The food is lovely, substantial, marvellously unponcey fare and fantastically good value for such a staggering spot – on the western edge of the City, on the banks of the Thames. When I was there this month, I had cream of mushroom and tarragon soup (£4.