Ysenda Maxtone Graham

‘Is there ever a holiday so heavenly that one is not counting down the days?’ a friend texted me last summer, homesick in the Loire valley. Another French friend messaged me last week from Montreal on day five of a holiday which, she was now regretting, she’d booked to last for nine days. She too was counting down. Having recently returned from a fortnight in Cambodia with four extra days in Hanoi tacked on at the end, I counted down in sympathy. Those final four days, from Saturday morning till her flight back home on Tuesday night, seemed to drag on for ever, over a desolate weekend – and I wasn’t even there in the characterless Airbnb flat among the skyscrapers and crack addicts. ‘I’m longing to see that tray of food in the plane,’ she texted.

There’s a distinctive glow of virtue that emanates from people recharging their electric cars in public places. I call it the Light of the Charge Brigade. In the run-up to Easter, I spent two hours observing the phenomenon at Fleet Services on the M3. It was mostly men doing the charging. They’ve cracked the EV way of life, and are very pleased with themselves. A sparklingly fulfilled man called Paul was driving from Colchester to Seaton in Devon in his Skoda Enyaq with a carload of friends. He’d planned this stop for a first charge and Pret elevenses. Later he was planning to stop at Montacute House in Somerset for a late lunch and a second charge on one of the National Trust’s chargers.

No one likes a blatant boaster. So, as adults, we learn that if we want to boast, we must be subtle about it. The way to show off without being loathed is to drop small details about your life into your conversation and your prose, to signal your taste, education, career achievements and social status. Doing this is tricky enough for right-wing people, who need to come up with subtle ways of letting others know, for example, that they can afford private school fees, went to Oxbridge, shop at Waitrose, own at least one home and go on holiday in Provence or Tuscany. Words and phrases such as ‘exeat’, ‘scraped through my Prelims’, ‘perfectly ripe avocados’, ‘basement kitchen’ and ‘bumping up through the olive grove’ do the work.

It came to pass in 2020 that a decree went out from the General Synod that all the Church of England must be carbon net-zero by 2030. And this ruling was first made when Justin Welby was Archbishop of Canterbury. And all went to have a good hard look at their church heating systems, every one into his own vestry cupboard… How easy it is to issue a decree from on high; and how hard it is for the people on the ground to have to deal with its consequences.

A new drinks-party-shirking method has taken hold in British society. I call it ‘Lastminute.non’. Previously, the way of not going to someone’s party was to write a polite message of refusal at least a week in advance, giving the host or hostess ample time to absorb the sad but inevitable fact that various friends would not be able to attend – usually for copper-bottomed reasons, such as that they had other plans for the evening or would be away on holiday. The new trend seems to be to accept an invitation, and then, mere hours before, to duck out of it. This means that from breakfast time onwards throughout the day of the party, the host will receive a steady stream of apologetic messages.

Twenty per cent of last year’s funerals in Britain were direct cremations – up from 14 per cent in 2020. Numbers are continuing to rise, fast, for this most affordable, clinical form of body disposal: cremations with no ceremony and no attendees. Daytime advertising campaigns put out by corporate firms such as Pure Cremation promote the peace of mind of sprightly 75-year-olds at their laptops, or in their conservatories with mugs of tea, who have just pre-paid for the direct cremation package. In the adverts they gush about the future family knees-up, with cupcakes and balloons, that their relatives will splash out on with the money saved by not paying for an attended funeral.