Zoe Strimpel

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.

The Starmers were supposed to have the moral high ground – at least according to Labour eschatology – and yet we read of their grubby relationship mega-donor Waheed Alli. Alli was given a security pass to 10 Downing Street in return for his money. During the election, he lent Team Keir the use of his £18 million Covent Garden home. Lady Starmer, meanwhile, certainly has time and taste for more than NHS occupational health work. Vics was pictured front row at the show of London Fashion Week’s wokest designer, Edeline Lee, dressed head to toe in Lee’s own creation, a polka dot dress (on loan), worth over £1,000. Altogether, Vicky has been clothes-horsed in £5,000 of designer-wear courtesy, once again, of Alli.

When Black Lives Matter created the figure of the Karen, it was a sign of that movement’s darker, bullying qualities. What exactly was wrong with a white middle-aged woman who asked to speak to the manager when things were unsatisfactory? The answer seemed to be in the white part and the woman part, and perhaps also in the middle-aged part. In short, the Karen was a racist, sexist, ageist construct, and as a middle-aged white woman myself, who makes her dissatisfaction known from time to time, I felt extra defensive. But if that original Karen caricatured the wrong person, then there are some modern female types that deserve closer scrutiny.

I was nine. It was Florence, in mid-July. My parents bravely led my younger brother and me through a day of sweaty sight-seeing. We had just been up and down the Duomo and were cooling ourselves with ice cream in an adjacent square when there was a hideous bang. At first, we thought it was an explosion. Then, as we passed the Duomo again a few minutes later, we saw something so grisly I still remember it with a shudder: paramedics trying to get a stretcher covered in a white sheet into the ambulance, and on the ground, a huge splat of what looked like spaghetti sauce. It took a moment for me to get my head around what that must be, and how it related to the bang, and then I couldn’t unwrap my head from it.

Over the years, I have spent a pretty penny on therapy. I have also spent a lot of money in Waitrose, of which there is a big branch that I like to call a ‘flagship’, very close to my flat. Of the two, therapy and Waitrose, it is probably Waitrose that has provided the most mental relief and has certainly been better value overall. Items may cost a bit more than they do at other supermarkets, but it’s free to enter the shop and there is no time limit on browsing, peering closely, or fondling the goods. Waitrose is not a shop that rewards a quick in and out, which is why I struggle to see the point of its Little Waitrose offshoots Waitrose has soothed me over the years in several ways.

I am never allowed to forget that at my fourth birthday party I made clear my expectation to my mother and the gathered guests that I expected to win all the games. The logic was clear and to my mind (still) fair: it was my birthday and so I should win. When this wasn’t passed into law, there was some anger on my part. Why should Kelly and Kate take home the pass-the-parcel first prize, and gain recognition for being fastest at eating donuts hanging from a string? Apparently in my pretty white swirly dress with its pink satin sash, wielding a wooden spoon for a game of blind man’s buff I was destined to lose, I was quite the little despot – though ineffectual.

As far as chefs and food writers go, Yotam Ottolenghi has been pretty influential on my life – a life that revolves quite heavily around food. Choosing it, thinking about it, pathologising it, eating it and sometimes even cooking it. I was one of those who was delighted when supermarkets started stocking pomegranate molasses, rose harissa and Middle Eastern spices like sumac and za’atar, all courtesy of the seismic influence of the Jerusalem-born Ottolenghi and his Palestinian partner in crime, Sami Tamimi. The Ottolenghi deli is a cliché of noughties London food trends I had, like everyone else in 2010s centrist middle-class Britain, got my hands on his recipe books Jerusalem (2012) and Plenty (2011).

As an urban-dwelling, free-spirited 41-year-old with sleep issues and a whimsical trade – writing – having a baby posed many challenges. The chief of which has been having to constantly work with two other people: baby and baby-daddy. I vowed as the due date approached to get kitted up in ways that would feel reassuring, limiting the cannonball splash effect of the new arrival. Would I be able to spend my way out of the bits of ensnarement I feared most? The answer is: sort of. Here are the items that have got me closest to living my best self as a new old mum. Call it Mum and the City.  Sleep For this, there is one main big-ticket buy that can literally make the difference between insanity and misery and… ‘hey, this is kinda fun, even when she screams for three hours!

I’d all but forgotten about David Cameron when he returned as foreign secretary under the last government, and the first thing I remembered about him, when he returned, was his chin. By which I mean its prim absence and how, combined with those thin lips and tiny mouth, more like a fish’s than a person’s, I have always found the man deeply unhandsome in a very Tory way. Starmer is the first prime minister since Tony Blair (sorry) with whom I would happily consider a saucy affair Now we have new leadership, and with it, a new paradigm of attractiveness. David Lammy, the new Foreign Secretary, is even less handsome than Dave but for different and therefore revitalising reasons.

I remember sitting on the bus a few weeks into #MeToo and thinking all the men looked disengaged – buried in their phones or listlessly looking out the window. I imagined them thinking it just wasn’t worth it to look up lest they be accused of making unwanted advances. These days, I spend fewer mornings worrying about the fate of the red-blooded male. Nonetheless, it’s not rocket science to suppose that for a significant swathe of men – those who fear being publicly shamed or sacked – it really isn’t worth showing their appreciation of women.

Bridgerton is an American fantasy of ye olde England – right down to the absurd if enjoyably playful not-quite colour blind casting and its insinuation that Regency London was peopled with an equal number of Bame and white aristocrats. Even the casting of Queen Charlotte, played by half-Guyanese actress Golda Rosheuvel, is an allusion to the dubious speculation that the real Queen Charlotte had African heritage and was in fact a woman of colour.  So the unspoken final frontier of oppression is also the most debilitating: not being hot Bridgerton’s beloved first season saw an explosively sexy performance from its male lead, an antisocial Duke played by the gorgeous British-Zimbabwean actor Regé-Jean Page.

I went to quite a few May balls in my three years as an undergraduate at Cambridge. As an editor at the student newspaper I blagged my way into the top ones – Magdalene, Trinity and John’s – since they were stupidly expensive and even as a 20-year-old student I had the sense to feel it should be many years before anything to do with enjoyment was worth more than £20, let alone £100-plus. The university now packages its student experience, from the academic to the social, in the neurotic, righteous language of ‘safety’ and ‘inclusion’ The price certainly ensured a very high degree of pretentiousness – even by Cambridge standards – but it was impossible not to marvel at the splendour of the famous acts (Dizzee Rascal, Amy Winehouse) and the food and drink.

My annus horribilis was 1992. I was in fifth grade (aged ten) and had impulsively cut my hair short over the summer. I turned up to school with auburn ringlets billowing out and up from my head in a wavy sphere. Boy did it get the boys going: constant insults, including ‘Ronald McDonald’ (McDonalds’ clown mascot, known for his garish red hair), and heckling with the curiously racist insult ‘electric Afro woman’, shortened to ‘Zofro’. There was no laughing this off: it was a barrage, which came with volleys of burrs thrown at my hair and other projectiles. Only physical violence, months in, quietened it down: I had to kick a shrimpy but tenacious tormenter to the floor of the school bus. Have I ever brushed my hair? Ever washed it?

Our age of mental hypochondriasis has some surreal, even comic, aspects. I recently met some Gen-Zedders who were actually competing over bagging psychological diagnoses. Unsurprisingly, ADHD was the gateway pathology for these young folk – prescription rates for hyperactivity have jumped a fifth in the last year to 230,000, with doctors claiming to be overwhelmed by adults demanding such labels be medically rubber-stamped.  Is my anxiety something I would want to lead with, as a core pillar of my identity? Between my Gen Zedders, the triumphant wielding of the ADHD diagnosis was swiftly followed by even more spirited claims to autism round the group, of which there has been a ninefold increase in diagnoses since 2015.