Philip Womack

Perhaps my new-found interest is the result of decades of conditioning by the media When I was a schoolboy, you'd have been unlikely to find the words ‘sporting prowess’ and ‘Philip Womack’ uttered in the same breath. Bar a brief moment aged 13, when, being lankier than my peers, I could win sprints without too much effort, I was always much happier loafing about with my copy of J.K. Huysman’s decadent novel, A Rebours, than I was getting stuck into scrums on the freezing rugby pitches. Always picked last, I would hover by the lines, oblivious to the cries of ‘Catch!’ or whatever else came hurling my way.  My lack of interest in games was certainly not hereditary.

 For decades, I calculated my annual tax return using the same method; as dull and reliable as a shire horse. Over a few consecutive days, mired in files of receipts, I would transcribe all the info into a spreadsheet, which would then whizz off to my accountants (to whom I pay a vast sum for pressing SEND and passing this on to the Tax Man). Sure, this doesn’t count among my most welcome annual events. It’s not even in the top 100. But at least it only happened once a year.  Non-compliance - even anarchy - is looking a better bet than this absolute horror show Now, Making Tax Digital has arrived, a visitor as unwelcome as a Nazgûl. Like many things, the blame for this can be squarely laid at the polished brogues of George Osborne.

There is, says Colin Hughes, who is the head of the exam board AQA, no downside to switching pupils from written exams into a gleaming modern utopia of computerised tests. Students, he says, are baffled by the fact that exams don’t take place on screens. He also seems to think the poor dears won’t be able to type if they don’t take exams on computers, as if they weren’t competent enough to learn how to use a keyboard without them. What’s more, boring old exam papers, it seems, have been causing delays in providing results for schools: doing them on a screen would solve that problem instantly, and, shazaam, Johnny and Jemima can get their C minuses in Raffia Work almost instantly. Sometimes I do wonder why certain people are so bedazzled by technology.

Some time ago, I had a furious conversation with a tech bro, which played out something along these lines: ‘How cool would it be’, said the tech bro, ‘if you could just download a language into your brain, Matrix-style, without having to learn it yourself.’ I spluttered out my gin and tonic and managed to croak: but that’s horrible! What of discernment, taste, style and nuance? What of the exacting but enjoyable pains of memorising words, sparking new connections, and forming your own peculiar store of knowledge? If new knowledge suddenly appeared in your brain, I’d call that creepy, akin to being possessed. ‘But it’s so cool’, came the response.

At the news that Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) will allow members to remove their jackets thanks to soaring temperatures, I wept a tiny tear. That is, one of sadness, not relief, as I imagine some of you may be feeling, because it is the thin end of the sartorial wedge. Before you know it, Prince William will be appearing in flip flops on the Buckingham Palace balcony and the Prime Minister will take questions in Bermudas.  For the British man needs absolutely no encouragement to disrobe. Left to his own devices, most will slob about the house in their most comfortable pants. And the moment the sun appears for more than five seconds, the men are out in the streets, shirts off, shorts on, their horrible feet on show in sliders or even – shock horror – flip flops.

At long last, hardback books, it seems, are finally drifting into, if not obsolescence, then at least abeyance. It turns out that punters are chary of buying hefty tomes, and so publishers are considering putting books out in paperback first. For once, this is a literary development that I will be applauding.  For centuries, hardback books were the only thing you could buy. In the 1920s, it was impossible to stroll along with a paperback of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in your pocket to impress the ladies, since paperbacks of that sort did not exist. They are a relatively new beast on the literary scene. It was Allen Lane who brought the sixpenny paperback into the world in the 1930s, a feat for which he should be lauded, on a par with Alexander Fleming.

The ermines have been mothballed; the coronets stowed away. The United Kingdom has, at last, thrown out the hereditary peers from Parliament. This levelling process, begun by Tony (not yet Lord) Blair, and stymied for decades, has come to an end. It’s as if the lion and the unicorn had been torn from the royal coat of arms, and ordered to find other work. No longer will we gawp at the peers processing at the opening of Parliament, arrayed alongside their glittering spouses, their titles and names a reminder of centuries of history. Our parliament - the most ancient in the world - has lost that lustre for ever, and will increasingly resemble the bland, managerial talking-shops of Europe.

You’d be hard pressed to find a more continuous strand in British culture than the chorister. They’ve been warbling in Westminster Abbey since the 1380s. Every national occasion is marked by choirs, the choristers dazzling in their splendidly anachronistic ruffs and robes, present at moments of collective joy or sadness. Funerals, memorial services, royal weddings, carols from King’s College, Cambridge. They are ornaments to our culture. Oodles of composers, musicians and singers, professional or not, have, over hundreds of years, stood in the choir stalls at dawn, at midnight, and lifted their voices to the vaulting roofs. Some of the most beautiful music in the canon was written for choirs: Gregorian chants, Thomas Tallis.

Chloe Zhao may have co-written and directed Hamnet (a film about William Shakespeare’s son), but she claims that she couldn’t understand Shakespeare’s words and had to rely on the actor Paul Mescal to help her. You might have thought that Zhao, who spent her sixth form years at Brighton College (where, one hopes, she at least sniffed at some form of Shakespeare), could have bestirred herself to read one of the many editions with glossaries, or even to bone up on the CliffsNotes, but no. Instead, she is simply contributing to the enduring, frustrating idea that reading Shakespeare is ‘difficult’, as if it were on a par with analytical philosophy or Judith Butler wanging on about hegemonies.

Growing up, it was made very clear to us that if you RSVPed in the positive to a party, you were absolutely honour-bound to turn up. It was the height of rudeness to chuck. How things have changed. These days, people don’t even bother RSVPing: it’s too difficult. Some are even too lazy to click a thumbs-up on a WhatsApp. More charitably, perhaps they have all suffered collective memory loss, or don’t understand the French. I know what you do when you get an email invitation, or when somebody texts you with the date and time of a party. You think ‘how nice’, and then do absolutely nothing about it until the week before.

At some point during this Advent season and the coming of Christmas, you will log on to your computer, and you will see somebody smugly opining that ‘actually Christmas is a pagan festival’. This person will not know anything about pagans, bar some fuzzy ideas about equinoxes (always with the equinoxes) and sacrifice. The reasons given for this will vary: we put up trees in our houses and decorate them, just like pagans! We light candles! And we give presents, like the Romans did at Saturnalia or the Vikings at Yule or [insert random pagan festival here]. And 25 December is actually the festival of the Roman god Sol Invictus! And it’s near the solstice! And doesn’t it all have something to do with Mithras anyway?

The venerable magazine GQ, or Gentlemen’s Quarterly, has issued some 125 diktats about what it takes to be a gentleman in this world of Zoom calls and equality. GQ is, however, no longer quarterly, and some might say it hasn’t been read by gentlemen for some time. Ought we, then, to listen to it? Many of its ‘expert’ pronouncements are baffling: what is ‘popping a Zyn’? Most of the suggestions are about bringing fancy olive oil or luxury candles to parties. (Note to readers, though you won’t need it: don’t.) It also suggests that gentlemen should beclothe themselves in ‘loungewear’, a word which ought to make anyone shudder. Well, I’m sorry, but unless it’s a silk dressing gown from Jermyn Street, I think not.

Sometimes, when I’m chatting about childhood, at some point it will become clear I went to a boarding school from the age of nine. Reactions can be comical. ‘You poor thing!’ an interlocutor might gasp, gripping my forearm, no doubt picturing cold showers and cruelty. I’ve always responded with bemusement, since my experience largely featured comfort and crumpets. I loved my prep school – Dorset House in West Sussex. It was a world in itself, enclosed and beguiling. In some ways it was unchanging, such as the graffitied Latin primers which were the same our grandparents had used. Yet it could be surprisingly forward-looking, as when it made a satellite link-up to a school in America, many years before the internet.