Sam Leith

Elsewhere in England this weekend, grimly sweating middle-aged men were planning Operation Save Big Dog, Operation Red Meat and Operation Decommission Shopping Trolley. In our house, though, the only game in town for grimly sweating middle-aged men was Operation Racing Car. My son Jonah had received his Covid-postponed eighth birthday present from his cousins and it was – retro! – a Meccano set.  'Dad, can you help me build it?' he asked, heteropatriarchonormatively. And of course I gladly forwent my planned afternoon doomscrolling Twitter to see how many new Downing Street parties would be unearthed.

My late grandfather, the editor and columnist John Junor, nurtured fondly throughout his career the conviction that nobody could be sued for asking a question. It was in this spirit that he approached in his weekly column the story of a schoolteacher who had been acquitted for the third time in his career of sexually molesting young boys in his care. He did not for a moment doubt the man’s innocence, JJ wrote, but he wondered: would it not be prudent for this man to take up a line of work ‘that carries a less high risk of false accusation’?

Two stories, side-by-side in the Sunday paper I was looking at online. The first — 'Strip Dame Dopesick of her title' — was a report that the families of victims of opioid addiction were campaigning for Dame Theresa Sackler, whose family profited unimaginably from marketing addictive legal painkillers, to be stripped of her title. The second was the story of how the writer and TV presenter Richard Osman had spoken on BBC Radio Four of struggling with an addiction to crisps, chocolate and biscuits for four decades. He compared his relationship with food to an alcoholic’s with booze: ‘The addiction is identical.

My wife had a brilliant idea for my 12-year-old daughter’s Christmas present: tickets to go and see Sigrid (a pop act, apparently, m’lud) at Wembley. She sent me a link. Quick, quick, I thought: get them while they’re hot. I clicked through and bought three old-fashioned physical tickets. I sucked up the delivery fee because I imagined, sentimentally, my daughter looking back years later on those yellowing stubs and remembering her first ever gig. First mistake: the site I’d clicked on was the resale site Viagogo. I should have checked the venue’s own ticketing site but I was on my phone, I’d clicked on the link my wife had sent me, it looked legit and I was worried these things would sell out instantly. So I was paying double the face price.

The Duchess of Sussex’s legal ding-dong with the Mail on Sunday (which published her private correspondence with her father) has been one of those battles where you regret it’s not possible for both sides to lose. But one side did lose, and it deserved to. Meghan was in the right. I half wish she hadn’t been, if only so we didn’t have to read her statement after the court of appeal found in her favour. It managed the peculiar feat of crowing and simpering at the same time:  ‘This is a victory not just for me, but for anyone who has ever felt scared to stand up for what’s right.

A sparrow falls. The death of Wilbur Smith at the weekend deprives the world of one of the great luminaries of popular fiction of the second half of the last century. He joins Jameses Michener and Clavell, Hammond Innes and Harold Robbins in the great 1970s dad bookshelf in the sky. Kids of today will say: 'Wilbur who?' But I owe that man a debt of gratitude. He was one of the first 'grown-up' novelists I really got stuck into; along, of course, with Stephen King. Like Stephen King, he was grown-up in just the right way to appeal to children — really, a hop and a skip from Willard Price’s Adventure series, except with some real history in them and lashings of rumpty-pumpty. And the titles! The Sound of Thunder. The Angels Weep. Men of Men. The Burning Shore.