Zoe Strimpel

There is much to bemoan about the NHS, from the cruel entitlement of its junior doctors to its zest for hiring diversity and inclusion staff when many people can’t even see a GP. I have been a harsh and consistent critic for years. I don’t like the cultish, Big Brother vibes, the gawping black hole for funds that seem mismanaged, and I don’t like the socialism.  I had a caesarian section less than a fortnight ago. I’d have one again just for fun I still don’t like those things, but I have now seen the charm of the rackety NHS. Having a baby, I discovered the it’s generosity. I had a caesarian section less than a fortnight ago at UCLH in central London. I’d have one again just for fun.

The other day I met a young woman wearing a crop top emblazoned with the words Waystar/Royco – the media conglomerate at the heart of Succession, HBO’s cult television drama about the nasty Roy family and their insane attempts at one-upmanship for control of their father’s company. It won Emmy and Golden Globe awards three years running for best drama, plus numerous extra gongs for the cast, making it – in my book – the most overrated piece of entertainment of all time.  Shouldn’t men like Logan Roy, and behaviour like Cox’s, be relegated to a distant era? What I disliked most about Succession, which I finally forced myself to watch this year, was the show’s star patriarch Logan Roy, played by gruff ex-RSC man Brian Cox.

Years ago, in the midst of a dating spree that involved numerous encounters with erratic and callous young men, I often consulted my cousin. She’s a cool, emotionally controlled New Yorker who seemed to have an innate knowledge of how to seize and maintain power in sexual or would-be sexual entanglements. She often advised me to nix the wordy message I had planned, especially in response to an outrageous slight, like a last-minute cancellation with a crap excuse and an insincere apology, and send a single yellow thumbs up instead. This was the craftier, nastier update on the cumbrous and obscene big blue thumb from Facebook messenger. For those of us who panic at blankness, the thumb is psychological botulism Her advice was clever.

If I had to pick a king of women I’d call a draw between Vermeer, the 17th century painter, and Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet. Both had an outstanding capacity to take women’s interior lives seriously, to see individual women as distinct, intense and complex, and far from corresponding to any feminine stereotype. Whether it’s Vermeer’s young woman with a pearl necklace, Eustacia Venn in Hardy’s The Woodlanders or his mournful poems about his wife Emma’s death, these are moving, emotionally astute portraits. The pick-up artist movement, which began in the early 2000s, created its own breed of Hardys But while Vermeer seems to have been a decent husband, Hardy was not.

While perusing bins on the John Lewis website, having heard great things about the Brabantia 60-litre, I noticed my stress levels rise – and it wasn’t just because the lid-up height meant the bin wouldn’t fit in my new cabinet. It was because for my whole shopping session there had been a dribble of information about how many other customers had put the items I was looking at in their basket in the last 24 hours, how many had bought them and how fast the stock supply was dwindling. Over on the M&S website, a mattress topper flashed a banner: ‘In demand! Sold 43 times in the last 48 hours’. My heart rate climbed and I felt my wellbeing plummet as a generalised, half-conscious sense of missing out for being too slow – a lifelong fear – crept over me.

Tel Aviv is the size of Bristol, with about 400,000 residents each. While Bristol has 400 pubs and bars, and just shy of a thousand restaurants, the rough concrete charm of Tel Aviv yields no fewer than 1,750 cafes, bars and clubs and more than 4,000 places to eat. Tel Aviv is a dense, hedonistic city: friendly, creative and edgy without the nasty underbelly of European cities. It is known in Israel as ‘the bubble’, secular and in its own world of sun, sea, late nights and wine, apparently separated from the problems of wider Israel.

Anybody who has been a teenage girl will know how dark and swampy the sexual imagination of that demographic can be. At 14 and 15, after watching Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet (1996), and then James Cameron's Titanic (1997), I became so obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio that I’d lie for hours on my bed hatching feverish plans for going to New York and meeting him; comparing fictional fling Kate Winslet to me (similar body type, I told myself) and broodingly calculating my chances. It wasn’t a funny light-hearted thing, but deadly serious, awash in life or death longing. The same quality applied to Will, Pete, Travis, Chris, and the other boys at school on whom I developed all-consuming crushes.

England is a mystical place, and its epicentre is Glastonbury, known by its pagan residents as Avalon, the mythical island of the Arthurian legend. It has sacred springs, the supposed tomb of King Arthur, the Tor and ruined tower, proximity to Stonehenge and now a thriving, sprawling community of pagans, with dozens of denominations from druid to water-witch. Once dismissible as mere woo-woo fringe, paganism has become a religious force that demands serious consideration for the simple fact that it is the fastest-growing religion in Britain. In the 2021 Census, 74,000 people in the UK referred to themselves as pagans, up from 57,000 in 2011, with a further 13,000 people calling themselves Wicca.

The roads around Monmouth are quiet but have their attractions; they cut through valleys and woods, past castles and churches. My host, soignee interior designer Neil McLachlan, explains that this part of the world is a well-kept secret, popular with minor gentry and Londoners in the know but protected from the crowds that flush in and out of the Cotswolds.