Ysenda Maxtone Graham

As I digest the news that Kiwi are ceasing the sale of its shoe polish in the UK, due to plummeting demand in the age of trainers, I find myself in mourning chiefly for the tin. What will the ritual of shoe-polishing feel like when it no longer starts with the thumb-against-index-finger rub of the butterfly-twist opener? That was a brilliant invention by Kiwi, and I’m afraid that the shoe polish tin that survives in the British market – Cherry Blossom’s, the same shallow cylindrical shape as Kiwi’s but with a ‘press hard here and the other side pops off’ opening system – doesn’t provide quite the Proustian kick of Sunday evenings in the 20th century: that combination of nausea at the strong smell and at the thought of tomorrow’s history test.

Canapés are one of life’s delights and surprises – surprises because drinks party invitations usually give nothing away. Perhaps because ‘nibbles’ is such a hideous word, or perhaps just because of invitation convention, hosts tend simply to put ‘Drinks, 6.30 to 8.30’ on the Paperless Post card. So you arrive with no idea whether you’re in for two hours of fizz on an empty stomach, or for a culinary treat in a succession of miniatures. Always braced for the worst-case scenario – starvation in high heels – I’m overjoyed to spot a tray of canapés coming towards me through the throng, and am pathetically grateful to the host for this beneficence.

It was on 2 December 2010, when the boys of the global footballing community were still quaintly playing FIFA 11 on PlayStation 3, that the venue was announced for the football World Cup of 2022. Among the crowds in the great hall of the Fifa headquarters in Zurich on that Thursday were David Beckham, Bill Clinton, Roman Abramovich, Sebastian Coe and Boris Johnson.  What a moment of disappointment it was for us. Not only had England got just a paltry two votes in its bid to host the 2018 World Cup, losing out to Russia, but we learned that the 2022 one was going to be held in a tiny, single-city desert state whose football team had never got near to qualifying, and whose summer temperatures were 50°C.

Many of us daydream about escaping into an imaginary parallel universe. The good news is that Britain has its own genuine, and literally parallel, universe that we can escape into at any moment. It’s the National Cycle Network that threads its way quietly and meanderingly over, under and alongside our gridlocked main roads and our daily lives. Once you try it, you’ll fall in love with supposedly ‘broken Britain’ all over again. You’ll be reminded that it’s a country of dog-walkers, rivers, farms and front gardens. And you don’t have to wear Lycra to do this. You just need ordinary clothes, plus KitKats, Thermos and sandwiches, and off you trundle at 8 mph.

The spectrum of ‘bestowing homemade gifts on one’s friends’ ranges from giving to foisting. Pure giving is when you make something by hand especially for a particular person. Foisting is when you don’t let a friend leave your house before pressing a copy of your privately published memoir into their hands. Where does homemade marmalade come on this spectrum? I think it comes nearer the benign ‘giving’ end than homemade jam, which is at the ‘foisting’ end, along with homemade sloe gin and nettle ale. It’s the difference between treasure-giving and glut-giving.

‘Programme starts at 3.45, so the film will start at 4.15, and it’s two hours and 43 minutes long, so we’d be out just before 7 p.m.’ This is the No Time to Die calculation, and I think many of us are doing it and wondering: ‘Can I face it?’ A dark afternoon spent in a state of total surrender to the longueurs imposed on us by a self-indulgent director? Thirsty from too much popcorn, leg muscles seizing up, not allowed to look at your phone, pressure on the bladder, Daniel Craig never smiling and the end nowhere near in sight?