John Sturgis

A rare penny piece goes on sale this month for 20 million times its face value – quite the mark up. But it’s the backstory to the coin’s creation that is arguably the most interesting aspect of the sale – because of the insight it gives into the frosty relationship between George VI and Edward, whose sudden abdication put his brother on the throne. The story begins in 1936 with a dispute over the small matter of a hairstyle. While plunging the government towards a constitutional crisis through his relationship with the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, the notoriously vain Edward was also concerned about how he might look as loose change.

The paperback’s cover showed a woman and man walking down Ludgate Hill towards Fleet Street with St Paul’s behind them and a red double decker passing to their right, dressed in the office fashions of the post war years. It looked like a still from an Ealing Comedy. A friend posted the image on his social media because he liked the look of the Fontana edition which he had found on his father’s shelves. It was a copy of London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins. Most people seeing this would immediately start thinking of the fifties but for me it had rather different associations, triggering intense memories of the 1990s. This was because I had spent many hours over several years of that decade trying to find a copy of this very book.

My name is John Sturgis and I am a Wordle addict. It’s not quite heroin or crack cocaine but it did have me hooked within minutes of trying it. And I have been chasing the high that those first hits gave me ever since. Or at least, I was a Wordle addict. Just two weeks ago I was confidently predicting that this was a hobby that I would keep up on a daily basis until I went to the grave. I was completely sold. Today that seems a much less likely scenario. I hear of people who find it so easy they are now attempting it in French or Spanish Wordle was invented by a British geek, Josh Wardle, working in the US tech sector, the game’s name a wordplay, natch, on his surname. He launched it for family and friends last summer and went public in the autumn.

England's rugby match against Australia at Twickenham last Saturday was my first visit to the home of English rugby in 42 years. During my school days, football was not only third best after rugby and cricket but frowned upon. I quickly rebelled, rejecting what I saw as the establishment sport and falling for the illicit populism of the round ball. Since that day I estimate I have been to something like 700 football matches, principally at West Ham where I’ve had season tickets for most of the last 30 seasons. So what is it like to be a football fan at the rugby? First off, Twickenham’s transport links make Wembley look like Piccadilly Circus.

It’s a kind of alchemy, transforming worthless clutter into pleasing and valuable collectors’ items, a slow but gratifying process all but forgotten in the modern age. I first learned it from the woman who ran a second-hand record store in my hometown, Tunbridge Wells, from the late seventies to the early nineties, where I misspent much of my youth and most of my pocket money. Fiona, a hangover from the hippie era, with her whispered husky voice and the endless extraordinarily-thin hand-rolled cigarettes that perhaps explained it, first imparted this lesson in around 1982. I speak of the lost art of fixing warped records.

Leg of lamb à la ficelle: 'First, inherit an ancient stone farmhouse lost somewhere in the hills of the Luberon, then string up a leg of young lamb over a smoky wood fire...' As I chuckled over this sardonic intro to a recipe in one of my favourite cookery books of recent years, Sardine by Alex Jackson, my laughter quickly died as I realised that not only will I never inherit such a farmhouse — but I’ll also never again go to the restaurant that launched the book. Sardine was one of my best-loved London restaurants of the last decade, tucked away in an unlikely and not especially salubrious corner behind a drive-thru McDonald’s in the unfashionable hinterland between Old Street and Angel.

There was a palpable feeling of freedom in Henham Park, Suffolk over the weekend - as masks disappeared and social distancing was replaced by dancing. For a blissful 72 hours, Covid was all but forgotten as Latitude became the first major festival to return in nearly two years. And even if the cost of that freedom was £6.00 for a pint of not-quite-cold Carlsberg in a plastic cup, it still felt worth paying for this three day party in a field. As Katherine Ryan put it: 'I feel so free! The only way I could feel freer was if I was Britney Spears and I just heard my Dad had died.

Before she became associated more with tragedy than comedy, there was a joke which went: ‘What’s Amy Winehouse’s favourite tube station?..High Barnet’. Not the best joke admittedly and one that required a degree of knowledge of rhyming slang - but it did anchor the beehived chanteuse and the borough she came from together in the popular imagination. I should be clear from the outset that I’m a fan. For me she was the last great pop star. Back to Black is one of the best albums of all time and she isn’t remotely out of her depth in that dead-at-27 club alongside Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin et al. Even if she was out of her depth in life.

This week saw the unveiling of the latest English Heritage blue plaque. It marks one Caroline Norton, a 19th century writer celebrated for her pioneering legal battles against her drunk and violent wastrel of a husband which resulted in some of the first legislation to enshrine women’s rights. The plaque is at Chesterfield Street, Mayfair, where, in 1877, the always-unlucky-in-love Norton died just three months after marrying again. It’s a riveting story that deserves to be told yet, relatively, Mayfair doesn’t really need any more plaques - like Chelsea, Bloomsbury, Hampstead and the like, it’s already dotted with them. You can go on blue plaque walks there.  But Southgate, where I live, has none.

It should be the basis for new playlists, exciting discoveries, the leftfield, the overlooked, the forgotten gem. But too often these days listening to Desert Island Discs is akin to being stuck in a minicab with the radio locked to Golden Greats FM, where the hits just keep on coming. It’s not so much that many guests have bad taste but that they have no discernible taste at all, their choices plucked almost exclusively from the canon of the bleeding obvious. It’s Exile on Mainstream Street.

It seems at first an unlikely ingredient for global domination - particularly if, like me, you first encountered it as an unappetising squidge at the centre of a badly-made seventies moussaka. While the actual aubergine - the palpable purple signature ingredient from said retro Greek bake - remains a relatively minor player in the western larder at least, its visual representation, the aubergine in emoji form, has broken out of the virtual veg box.

The pandemic has hit the film industry for six - but there’s a precedent to suggest that it can come back stronger. Because that’s what Hollywood did after the devastation of the Spanish Flu a century ago. As that killer virus was still ravaging post-WWI America, a great auteur was at work on a project that would change everything.  This week sees the centenary of the result - the first ever movie blockbuster. 21 January 1921, was the US release date of Charlie Chaplin's first feature film, The Kid. Never mind the endless present-day stress about if and when anyone will ever get to see the 25th Bond film; it’s small beer compared to the significance of The Kid to the 1920s and their subsequent roaring.

‘What’s that earthy flavour in the sauce?’ ‘It’s a black Himalayan moss which monkeys find an aphrodisiac.’ If 2020 has been the weirdest year the modern world has known, that was well and truly reflected in Masterchef, The Professionals. Because this year's series, the 13th annual, dispensed with its own unwritten rules. For years the received wisdom had been just to cook some meat or fish in a modern European style with traditional pairings. If you wanted to be dangerous you might put a square of dark chocolate in the sauce for your venison but even this was usually considered de trop; if you wanted to be playful use popcorn.