Henry Jeffreys

One programme that still shines out as a beacon of intellectual rigour among the sea of dross on television is University Challenge. As always, teams of four students from Britain’s best universities battle it out for the series championship. Rather than assuming the viewer is an idiot, like most factual programmes, it works on the basis that we have a shared culture. There are always questions on kings and queens of England, Shakespeare and classical music. Even if the viewer doesn’t know the answer — and the questions are often fiendishly hard — the producers expect us to understand the question, except when it’s about quantum physics. The top teams are usually spectacularly good on high culture but struggle with more contemporary arts.

I’m just about old enough to remember when smoked salmon was a rare treat. Then, around 1986 or 1987, suddenly it was everywhere. There were smoked salmon sandwiches at M&S, it was stuffed into lurid-looking canapés with cream cheese, and Christmas became a riot of salty fish. For me, smoked salmon is as emblematic of the 1980s as red Porsches, huge mobile phones and the Pet Shop Boys. But it’s almost always a disappointment, that acrid taste only palatable with lots of lemon juice and butter. I’d much rather have potted shrimp. It’s a far cry from how Scottish smoked salmon is supposed to be. It was first produced, not in Scotland but in London by Jewish immigrants in the late 19th century.

As a wine bore, holidays abroad are a battle with the family to cram in as many vineyard visits as possible when all they want to do is go to the beach. But it’s only recently that I have begun to take advantage of the riches on my doorstep. I wonder how many Londoners realise that half an hour from St Pancras is one of the world’s most dynamic wine regions — Kent. My previous reluctance might have something to do with the weather. As you leave London on the M20, there always seems to be a moment of sunshine that lights up the countryside before it starts to rain again. No matter. While many wine regions can be ugly — the Médoc is a drained swamp — Kent is lovely, even in the drizzle.

On Tuesday morning I was thinking to myself how oddly pleasant social media seemed. Then Theresa May dropped her election bomb. Immediately the posts started appearing: ‘Tory scum’ and ‘Tories launch coup’, then came the memes and I thought: I can’t take another two months of this. I’d only just tentatively returned to Twitter and Facebook following Brexit and Trump; now I find myself wanting to suspend my accounts again. I think back nostalgically to general elections of yesteryear. I vaguely remember some fellow students being pleased about Blair winning in 1997 but most of us were more excited about seeing Teenage Fanclub at Leeds Metropolitan University. The polls of 2001 and 2005 passed by without me noticing.

I still get a hot flush of embarrassment when I recall my first interview. It was for a summer job at Selfridges in London when I was 17. The lady from personnel asked me how my friends would describe me. Maybe it was the heat or nerves but all I could think of was the funeral oration by John Hannah’s character in Four Weddings and a Funeral where he describes his deceased partner, played by Simon Callow, as ‘so very fat and very rude’. So I did something you should never ever do in an interview: I tried to be funny. ‘Rude — my friends would describe me as rude,’ I replied. I didn’t get the job. People from my background are meant to sail through such interviews.

The British are notoriously cheap when it comes to wine; the average bottle price is around £6. On one wine, however, we’re happy to spend five times that: champagne. We love champagne, and champagne producers love us: Britain is their biggest export market and it’s only getting bigger: up by 4.5 per cent last year. In fact, champagne as a dry sparkling wine was created specifically for us. Until the mid-19th century, most production from the Champagne region was still red wine. French connoisseurs thought the fizzy stuff rather vulgar. Bertin du Rocheret, a wine merchant, compared it to ‘beer, chocolate and whipped cream’. It would have been a rich yellow wine fortified with brandy; a sort of sparkling sweet sherry, beloved by Russians in particular.

Last year, I found a pair of trainers in our communal recycling bin: Nike Air Max in black and grey size 10, very smart and hardly worn. I’d been wearing them a week when the teenager who lives in the flat below pointed at them and laughed. He told me that he’d discarded them because they were scuffed. This is where I’ve got to, I thought: wearing trainers that I found in a bin on a council estate. Such foraging isn’t un-usual for us. The sideboard in our kitchen, the bookshelf in the hall and the big mirror in our bedroom were all found on our street. I worry that we might be dropping out of the middle class entirely. Our daughter, who goes to the local primary school, now has a strong south London accent.

On Saturday at Mont St Michel, the 103rd edition of the Tour de France begins, and the favourite to win is again British. As a long-term cycling fan, even typing those words gives me a frisson. When I started watching in the 1980s there were few British riders to cheer on — and none challenging for overall victory. Bradley Wiggins became the first Briton to win in 2012. He was followed by Chris Froome in 2013 and 2015. The French haven’t won since 1985. Britain is now a cycling superpower and cycling has become a popular sport. So why aren’t I celebrating? The problem is the lingering doubt that none of this is real. There’s no reason to question Froome’s performances, except that there are few champions who we can confidently say never took drugs.

Spring is here and the air is alive with the sound of sweaty manmade materials rubbing together, as middle-aged cyclists fill every road, dressed head to toe in Lycra. They whizz along, jumping red lights, weaving in and out of the path of trucks, screaming at pedestrians and taxi drivers; barely evading death three times a morning. Lycra isn’t just a fabric; it’s a state of mind. At work, these often portly, always angry, red-faced individuals might be mild-mannered middle managers who work in marketing. But in their cycling kit they are superheroes who happen to swear a lot. The double Olympic champion Laura Trott was once asked to help with a safety campaign which involved riding around the capital to highlight the dangers cyclists face on the roads.

Last month a friend invited me to lunch at the Garrick Club. As an impoverished writer, I don’t get many offers like this, so the week before, in a state of anticipation, I took my good suit out of the cupboard to check it wasn’t too rumpled. To my horror there were two holes the size of a five-pence piece in the trousers. Moths! I tore through my wardrobe and found web-like trails all over my coats, suits and sweaters. ‘No!’ I cried and shook my fist at the heavens. This year we’ve enjoyed the warmest winter since the 17th century, so you may not have been snuggled up in your woollens. But something else almost certainly has been. Mild weather is perfect for Tineola bisselliella, the clothes moth. Insect experts are warning of an unprecedented epidemic.