Zoe Strimpel

I have always marvelled at the attitude of cat owners who point to bloodied arms or dramatic scratches and explain – with docile, almost apologetic acceptance – that Jasper or Bella just got a bit annoyed. It was all the human’s fault for patting them in the first place. Violent animals are a form of domestic abuser and should be treated as such. Why would anyone allow something to attack them – or their children – rather than simply removing the animal from their home? Sure, they are unlikely to maul you to death, unlike the technically banned XL Bullys, but it’s a different story for wildlife. Domestic cats, the wily rotters, are thought to kill around 270 million birds, mammals and reptiles per year across the UK. They’re the nukes of the animal kingdom.

As a girl, and later a woman, prone to barbs and punchy elocutions, I have encountered a great many repercussions for my words. My re-education began in primary school when the mother of a classmate angrily rang my mum to tell her that I had said this or that outrageous thing to her daughter. (A daughter who was herself tough as nails and a crafty little madame; I never picked on those weaker than me.) Over time, the pain of fallouts with school friends became the stress of getting communication wrong in the workplace, which carries its own, more formal and sinister consequences. Now I try to pause and be polite and ‘reasonable’ (one must be ‘reasonable’!) no matter how angry, anxious or upset I feel in the face of blatant foul play, falsity or injustice.

A few months ago in Primrose Hill, I overheard a woman from the Camden New Journal, the local paper, asking in a café about rumours of a Gail’s opening in the famously anti-chain neighbourhood. Just a few weeks previously, there had been uproar in Walthamstow about a new branch – an unpleasant alliance of the anti-gentrification brigade, anti-business and anti-Brexit types who protested at investor Luke Johnson’s politics, and anti-Israel fanatics who objected to the fact that the bakery chain was founded by two Israelis. The latter element was what caught my attention, given the extent of anti-Zionist nastiness since 7 October. If Primrose Hill were to join in the anti-Gail’s protest, the sense of sinister anti-Israel sentiment would grow stronger.

James Joyce called Guinness ‘the wine of Ireland’. Now it feels a bit more like the Coca-Cola of alcohol – as much brash branding as beer. Once, it merely had an ugly logo and the rowdy promise of Emerald Isle hedonism which – I confess I have often thought – is crafted to appeal to simple people. For who, other than simple people, chooses Guinness in this day and age when faced with the proliferation of ales, IPAs, helles, sessions, Belgian beers and porters? The sorts of people who find the Irish pub in a Mediterranean town and hit it hard. Guinness is taking on a strange new life But now, Guinness is taking on a strange new life.

For the kind of people who think London ought to be all Farrow and Ball-coated quaintness and whiffs of Dickensianism, Canary Wharf is a rude assault, an obnoxious jungle of the anti-quaint. It is also, to many, an embarrassing paean to a moment that only the 1980s could have produced: one of gauche capitalistic, deregulatory optimism soused in international finance. One Canada Square, the frontispiece of the development and once Britain’s tallest skyscraper, is named in honour of the Toronto-based property developer who bought the project in 1988 (and a few years later went bankrupt).

Old or young, fat or thin, body-positive or body-embarrassed, man or woman, everyone with money seems to be on a weight-loss drug: Wegovy, Mounjaro or Ozempic (which although a diabetes drug, is so often used off label for weight loss that there have been supply shortages). In the past couple of weeks alone, two freewheeling 60+ titans of journalism – my Spectator colleague Julie Burchill and my Telegraph colleague Allison Pearson – have written about how Mounjaro has curbed their hedonism (the former) and unhealthy, ancient patterns around cake (the latter). If these life-loving ladies have taken the plunge, I thought, maybe similarly life-loving 42-year-old me should be considering it?

Sunday lunch is a bit like the Edinburgh festival. People make a big thing of it, it’s considered a British treasure, and I am meant to book it, go to it, and like it. But I don’t. If Edinburgh is forever associated in my mind with glowering edifices of grim dark stone, hostile chilly sun between spells of overcast cold skies, the worst comedy and theatre I have ever seen, and paying a king’s ransom for a nasty little room a 20-minute taxi ride out of town, then Sunday lunch is, for me, forever intertwined with desperately wishing to be somewhere, anywhere else. Maybe even the Edinburgh festival. Sunday lunch is what people traditionally do when they don’t much like each other, or at least don’t know how to talk to each other.

Spain is busy with an image update. Thanks to a host of savvy media stories, we’re now supposed to think of Spain not just in terms of package holidays, sangria, and Catholicism but also as chic, romantic, stylishly left-wing – the macho anti-fascism of Hemingway’s Spain updated for the #MeToo age – and devastatingly cutesy. Take the recent viral trend among Spain’s youth: a supermarket pineapple gimmick that’s gone global. A TikTok video has Gen Z storming the Mercadona chain between 7 and 8 p.m., under the notion that placing an upside-down pineapple in their shopping trolley signals romantic availability. ‘Spanish singles found a new dating strategy. It’s in the fruit aisle,’ crooned the Washington Post. How utterly adorable.