Toby Young

Well, it finally happened. After 25 years of cycling in London, I had an accident. Bizarrely, it occurred right outside Action Bikes, the shop in Shepherd’s Bush where I bought my bicycle. There is a cycle lane running past the shop, but I wasn’t using it at the time because there was a Mercedes parked in it. The driver opened his door just as I was drawing level and sent me hurtling into space. Luckily, I landed on my left knee rather than my head so I was able to turn round and start hurling abuse. It was only when I realised that the driver was a large black man that I cut my tirade short. He turned out to be incredibly charming. After helping me to my feet, he explained that he, too, was a cyclist and in the normal course of events would have checked his wing mirror.

For the past 200 years or so, Englishmen who aren’t faring too well in the home country have had the option of moving to the States. Thanks to their inferiority complex, our American cousins labour under the illusion that we are more intelligent and better educated than them. You only have to deign to notice them and they are pathetically grateful, something particularly true when it comes to the fairer sex. Men who would not attract a second glance in the nightclubs of Mayfair are treated like movie stars across the Atlantic simply by virtue of having a British accent. Unfortunately, it looks as if the well has run dry. In the current issue of Reason, an influential American monthly, there is a ‘rant’ by journalist Michael C.

‘Few shows of such embarrassing, authorial ineptitude can have hit the London stage since the Blitz.’ That was the verdict of Nicholas de Jongh, the Evening Standard drama critic, on the satirical play about the royal family that Lloyd Evans and I wrote in 2006. It wasn’t the only bad review we got, but it was by far the most damning. According to Jongh, A Right Royal Farce was not just your run-of-the-mill damp squib; it was the worst show to appear in London since 1941. You can imagine my glee, therefore, when I learnt that Jongh had written a play himself. ‘Aha’, I thought. ‘The scourge of London’s theatreland is about to get a taste of his own medicine.

I can’t afford to send my children to private school — and I’m relishing the cachet This morning I received a letter from Norland Place, a much sought-after private school on Holland Park Avenue, informing me that my son Ludo had been awarded a place in September 2009. There was a time when this would have been a cause of rejoicing in our household, but not any more. My wife and I applied to the school a couple of years ago, back when we only had one other child. Now that we have three and are about to have another, taking up the place is unthinkable. Sending two children to private school in London is just about affordable, but four is out of the question. Ludo will have to go to the local state primary, just like Sasha, who started there last September.

It’s a boy! This was the news following my wife’s 20-week scan last week. I know it is infra dig to find out the sex of your baby in advance, but Caroline said she needed to be psychologically prepared just in case it was a boy. She wanted another girl, obviously, and she didn’t want to risk bursting into tears in the delivery suite when the midwife held up the little tyke for her inspection. I take the opposite view. I like girls as much as the next man, but what my wife has failed to grasp is that the entire point of having children is to enhance your social standing. In this regard, boys are preferable.

Where is the next generation of Toby Youngs? It’s my turn to dismiss their drivel In 1988, Weidenfeld and Nicolson published a book called The Oxford Myth. Edited by Rachel Johnson and containing essays by a variety of precocious undergraduates, it was the worst reviewed book of the year. ‘A singularly worthless volume,’ wrote Niall Ferguson in the Times. ‘Routine and uninspired,’ said William Boyd in the Sunday Telegraph. As the author of the first essay — on the subject of Class — I was singled out for criticism by almost everyone. Andrew Davies, the celebrated adaptor of literary classics for television, said it made him want to puke. At the time, we comforted ourselves with the thought that this was just part of the hazing process.

As an angry young man in the 1990s, I used to get extremely irritated when I read articles by left-wing intellectuals in the London Review of Books about football. To my jaundiced eye, it was a feeble attempt to shore up their credentials as men of the people. Back in those days, football was still a predominantly working-class sport and, as such, was frequently hijacked by middle-class poseurs in the hope that its ‘authenticity’ — key Nineties word — might rub off on them. How distant that period seems now. Today, if a middle-class novelist wrote about his unswerving devotion to Arsenal — about how he had gone to every match this season, including the Champions League game in Prague — we would instantly suspect him of trying to big himself up.

As a father of three small children, I find myself constantly baffled by what is known in our household as ‘the boredom paradox’. Why is it that my four-year-old daughter considers a trip to Loftus Road to watch QPR battle against relegation ‘boring’, while her enjoyment of the same six episodes of Numberjacks can never be diminished, no matter how many times she watches the DVD? The idea that small children are open-minded and imaginative is completely ridiculous. They resemble nothing so much as members of the provincial, middle-European bourgeoisie — petty little martinets who view any change in their routine as an act of unconscionable aggression. Men may be from Mars and women from Venus, but children are from Belgium.

‘So,’ said the television interviewer, fixing me with an inquisitorial stare, ‘why are you so desperate to be a celebrity?’ This was last week on BBC2, but the question comes up in virtually every television interview I do. I’m beginning to suspect that I’m the only member of the chattering classes foolish enough to admit I want to be a celebrity. Indeed, it’s more or less the sole topic I’m asked to comment on. Whenever it hits the headlines, the 22-year-old researchers employed by news and current affairs programmes flick through the ‘celebrity’ category on their Rolodexes, starting at the top with ‘A-listers’, then gradually work their way down until they get to ‘wannabes’.

In the newspaper business there’s a name for a story that makes your jaw hit the floor and your eyes pop out of your skull: ‘a marmalade dropper’. For instance, the disclosure that HM Revenue and Customs had misplaced the personal records of 25 million people was ‘a marmalade dropper’, as was the revelation that Lembit Opik was going out with one of the Cheeky Girls. However, I have always thought of this as a figure of speech rather than a literal description of the effect a particular piece of news produces. Until now, that is. ‘Darling,’ said my wife as I sat at the breakfast table munching a piece of toast. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.’ ‘Oh yes?

More bad news for the ‘Hons’. According to a sociological survey funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, class doesn’t necessarily guarantee status. On the contrary, the two are barely even connected in today’s Britain. So the fact that my father was ennobled for, among other things, founding the Economic and Social Research Council has no bearing on my status. An unemployed ‘Hon’, such as myself, may possess class, but when it comes to my ranking in society I score lower than a ‘works manager’ (whatever that is). Much though I’d like to dismiss this, I suspect it is true.

When a person does something to remind you of their superior status, I often wonder whether he or she is fully in control of what they’re doing. Name-droppers, for instance, often seem to be acting compulsively, as if they’re suffering from a mild personality disorder. Once the impulse to drop the name has been triggered — usually by some circuitous route that only makes sense to the name-dropper — these people can’t stop themselves. The name pops out in spite of the fact that they know it’s gauche. (That’s my excuse, anyway.) The same is true of Christmas cards. Normally, members of the British aristocracy are fairly reserved when it comes to advertising their privileged status.

When the letter arrived last April I thought it was a joke. ‘Dear Sir,’ it began. ‘On behalf of the publishers A & C Black, I am very pleased to invite you to compile an entry for the forthcoming edition of Who’s Who . . .’ Was this a cruel prank being perpetrated by the editors of the Guardian’s G2 section? In a couple of weeks’ time, the ‘entry’ I had submitted would appear alongside those of other ‘luminaries’ they had gulled into playing along such as Jordan and Vernon Kay. This unforgivable act of vanity would then haunt me for years to come, with my father-in-law producing the article every Christmas Day and reading out the ‘entry’ to my extended family.

Actors claim that the hardest thing about their profession is the ever-present possibility of rejection, but they have it easy compared to authors. First we have to find favour with an agent, then a publisher, then an editor, then the critics — on and on it goes. Rejection hangs over us like the Sword of Damocles, ready to fall at any second. Of the tens of thousands of authors working in the UK, the number who actually make a living from writing books — that is, earn enough to give up their day jobs — is probably no more than a dozen. Even those few authors who are lucky enough to write bestsellers don’t escape the spectre of rejection. On the contrary, success in the book business simply means that you risk failing on a greater scale.

For the past five years or so, my best friends and I have been getting together for a Christmas lunch. Because I’m a food critic — or was, until recently — they have always left it to me to make the booking on the understanding that I’ll be able to secure a better table than they would. More often than not, this assumption proved to be correct and we have enjoyed memorable meals at some of the country’s finest restaurants. Now that I no longer have a restaurant column, this year is shaping up to be very different. I had forgotten just how hard it is for a mere ‘civilian’ to get a reservation at a decent restaurant over the Christmas period.

I cannot remember when I became a wine bore. It could have been when Majestic opened a branch in Shepherd’s Bush — or it might stem from the first time I saw Sideways. Perhaps it is just a sign of growing old, like the realisation that you can no longer get away with wearing Converse. But there’s no getting around it: I have become a howling wine snob. Take the birthday dinner I attended last week. The host had very kindly agreed to pay for everyone and, as you would expect, he had chosen the wine in advance. Unfortunately, it was Sauvignon Blanc. What to do? I stole a glance at the wine list and discovered a perfectly respectable Chablis. The trouble was, it was £15 more expensive than the vin de table.

I experienced what the American self-help guru Dr Phil calls a ‘defining moment’ the other day. I’d just taken stock of my life and, frankly, things didn’t look good. The house I’ve bought in Acton — and which I can’t possibly afford — is already worth less than I paid for it. My wife has expressed a desire to have a fourth child. And I’ve recently been ‘let go’ as the Evening Standard’s restaurant critic. It was time to act. I would no longer be carried along by events — I would shape my own destiny. In the words of Dr Phil, I would move my ‘self-concept away from a world-defined, fictional self towards a self-defined, authentic self’. I decided to sell the family silver.

What are the two words guaranteed to fill any parents of young children with terror? School fees? Chicken Pox? Gina Ford? The answer, I’m afraid, is half term. My daughter, Sasha, only started going to ‘big school’ in September so I wasn’t anticipating too many problems. What I hadn’t factored in is that my wife gave birth to a third child this year, which meant she already had her hands full with a three-month-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old. The fact that our au pair resigned a couple of months ago didn’t help, either. How could I cope? The answer, said my wife, was to cram in as many activities as possible. In this way, she assured me, the time would pass quite quickly.