Zoe Strimpel

Some of the ways the rich can amuse and refresh themselves today include spas in the Maldives with glass floors offering views of brightly coloured fish during treatment, private retreats in the mountains of St Lucia costing thousands per night, and fabulous overnight trains through Rajasthan. But the last word in luxury is still to be found in the heartlands of European civilisation – France – and it almost always involves the creative, bordering on unbelievable co-option of heritage, only possible through the most fabulous contacts, patience and expense.

Some years ago, on a trip up America’s Pacific Northwest, I spent a night in Portland in a hotel that was depressing in the way that not-quite-posh, not-quite-cool hotels can be. As part of its attempt to inject a sense of pizzazz into my cavernous room, there was a welcome pack whose starring feature was a can of Pinot Noir – the size and shape of a Diet Coke can, with a joke on the side about this being ‘soccer mom’ wine. The reference to hassled housewives ferrying their progeny about to games, desperate for surreptitious booze, depressed me further and I added ‘wine in tins’ to the list of vulgar American inventions I’d forever resist.

As the pandemic roared through India, I wondered when tourists like me would be able to return to a country so central to the traveller’s imagination. When we did return, would it show the scars of the hideous death toll and extreme burden of suffering? Would we feel safe? Finally, nearly three years since I first wondered this, I went to find out. I flew not long after India relaxed all Covid paperwork late last year. A sadistically bureaucratic nation at the best of times, India had scrapped British e-Visas in retaliation for something that no one can quite work out, making the visa application process somewhat Kafka-esque. The e-Visa has, thankfully, since returned.

In June last year, King’s College Cambridge made more than £1 million from an auction of just 41 lots from its wine cellar. Not bad for a college that until just a few years ago had a hammer and sickle flag hanging in its student bar. But the Marxist sympathies of some of its legendary fellows and students stand little chance against the viticultural genius of the cellar’s buyer: Peter de Bolla, a scholar of 18th century literature and aesthetics. Included in the bonanza sale were 12 bottles of 1999 Echezeaux, an apparently legendary grand cru from Henri Jayer, for which someone bid £100,000. De Bolla had bought them on release and, to give some indication of the return on his investment, when he bought the 1996 vintage he had paid £31.11 per bottle.

This, we are told, is a very bad time to be a woman. When young, we're warned that we are sexual prey, privy to a misogynistic ordeal both on the streets and in the sheets, courtesy of the jungle of app-mediated romance. Despite being slaves to the gym and learning to pole dance, we still can’t win. We are locked in a never-ending hell spiral that sees droves of us as young as 18 racing to the plastic surgeon, desperate to fill our faces with Botox and hyaluronic acid in a bid to look sexier, younger, hotter, fitter, less tired and more like the stars of reality TV. Did I mention younger?  And now a new book, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women by Victoria Smith, has arrived.

I recently had a call with my accountant, a miniskirt-wearing, swashbuckling bon vivant and wine connoisseur. To soothe myself before we rang off – tax is always depressing – I brought up Waitrose, saying by way of apology for my erratic finances that most of my money went in the supermarket, a large branch of which is between my nearest Tube station and my flat. She hemmed knowingly down the phone. We both agreed it was a good use of funds. Life’s short – or might be. If one can, surely one ought to eat what one wants? And if that means a pair of smoked salmon, pea and lovage terrines or five types of mackerel pate on a Monday, or a medley of pre-chopped mango and strawberry with own-brand coconut and lime ice cream, then so be it.

The Menu is a horror film about fine dining that revolves around a psychotic head chef (Ralph Fiennes) who runs a destination restaurant on an American island. The island is uninhabited apart from the chef and his staff, who pluck it for the most refined marine treats to serve the obnoxious clientele on a nightly surprise menu. As I sat in the cinema watching it recently, I felt delighted, then sick, then scared – and then enlightened. Enlightened because I finally understood that fine dining – once the summit of high living and my own former obsession as a greedy twenty-something working in lifestyle journalism – is over. It is not just that in this era of obsessive authenticity and sentimentality fine dining feels passé.

‘Some personal news! Delighted to announce I’ll be joining [insert major company] as the new [insert extremely impressive-sounding, well-paid, prestigious job title] this week! It’s been great working at [insert other major, if slightly less gleaming company] but I’m so [insert word denoting excitement or thrill, including "excited" and "thrilled"] at what the future holds! You can find me at [new prestigious institutional email address].’ It is no exaggeration to say that over the past week, half of my Twitter feed has been composed of alerts that follow this exact script. As the trickle thickened to a deluge, I wondered if there was some secret spoof going on. Were they all in on a new year joke?

Being in possession of a well-kept secret is every wine-buyer’s goal, not least because uncorking an unusual find impresses even the snootiest of guests. English wine-makers have long been trying to break up any residual secrecy about the worthiness of their wines. Not quite new world, not quite old world, English wine was always going to fill an odd space in the market.  Confession: I never buy wine from the British isles. Almost anything else has always struck me as both better value and nicer to drink. And then I met Matt Hodgson. Hodgson runs Grape Britannia, a modest but expert shop and bar in Cambridge that sells only English wine (plus some Welsh and one from the Scottish borders).

On Christmas Day 1942, the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst, along with five destroyers, left its Norwegian base and headed for a series of Arctic convoys, the British fleets transporting material and support to the Soviets. The townclass cruiser HMS Belfast, used to escort the convoys through some of the most dangerous seas in the world, played a vital role in the Royal Navy’s clever game of bait-and-blast that resulted in the destruction of the Scharnhorst, a monster that had already sunk a British carrier and two destroyers. Belfast, the most powerful cruiser in the Navy at her relaunch in 1942 (she hit a mine in 1939 and needed three years of repairs), now sits in the Thames by City Hall, a visitor attraction operated by Imperial War Museums.