Zoe Strimpel

We have finally arrived in the roaring 20s and the urge to drink ­­– after the year and a half we’ve been through – is strong. Lockdown provided ample opportunity to neck wine in the monotonous comfort of one’s own home, so the mood now is firmly for tipples in luxurious, and crucially, public indoor settings. What is required, of course, are cocktails. London is packed full of ebullient options, but as a cocktail snob – they need to be good, or one might as well drink wine – I set out to find the very best. I looked for interesting, creative concoctions that weren’t so zany they ended up being horrible, served in the kind of glamorous, buzzy settings we so sorely missed during lockdown.

Armed with a US passport, I fly to New York for just two days to interview John McWhorter, an African American professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is America’s fast-rising star of the anti-woke movement and I am there to talk to him about his brave and funny new book, Woke Racism. I zip over to meet him on one of dozens of daily flights between Heathrow and JFK in advance of America’s reopening on 8 November. The good news is that, after 8 November, the rest of Europe's jet setters can join me. It is strange flying transatlantic in the final days before the US reopens after nearly two years: there are almost as many planes as passengers.

Hackney’s rise in the 2000s from dangerous and affordable to cool, cooler and coolest eventually made it a kind of Chelsea of east London, with the expensive housing – house prices have grown 281 per cent between 2001 – and glamorous dining establishments to match. It may have become a magnet for Fullham exiles but Hackney never quite lost its aura of cool, and its transformation into one of the priciest areas of London has come not with a dumbing down but with the refinement of a distinctive, creative dazzle. The payoff? A proliferation of yummy, interesting restaurants.

Italy's relaxation of its travel restrictions for double-vaccinated Brits has many of us eyeing up the options for an autumn getaway. And why not? Come September, cities like Venice are no longer tourist traps (Dolce & Gabbana fashion shows aside) and yet the balmy weather remains. Many visitors head to Italy for Venice alone but they miss a trick by foregoing the beautiful nearby port town of Trieste – beloved by Italian holiday makers and yet untouched by Brits. With the Venetian authorities rumoured to be considering turnstiles on the periphery of Venice, Italy's most iconic city increasingly feels like a museum. And so, for those left hankering for a slice of living, breathing Italian culture, Trieste is the perfect tonic.

One of the great sorrows of the pandemic has been India. Its own harrowing experience of the virus has been dreadful to see. And less importantly but still poignantly, India’s disappearance from the list of possible destinations for travel for the foreseeable future has created a sense of morose yearning among those itching to get back. So long as we’re barred from going, London is perhaps the best city on earth to recreate some of the finest ambience, tastes and smells of the subcontinent and with that in mind I set out to experience the best of India through a clutch of sophisticated restaurants only a Tube ride away.

I am always irritated by film versions of classic novels, especially when I’ve recently read them. I needn’t have worried about Death on the Nile. Kenneth Branagh's Agatha Christie adaptation, already subject to no fewer than six delays, has been pushed back yet again to the first quarter of 2022. By the time it comes out – if it does – I’ll have forgotten the original. With that airless sense of ‘here we go again’, Nile’s delay has been caused because its leading man, Armie Hammer, has been accused of sexual assault, including rape, and sundry other unsavoury forms of sexual conduct - allegations which he denies.

In 1965, a trio of Harvard undergraduates launched Operation Match, a computer dating service for horny undergraduates at New England’s single-sex colleges. A journalist for Look Magazine came to cover the sensation. ‘Call it dating, call it mating, it flashed out of the minds of …Harvard undergraduates who plotted Operation Match, the dig-it dating system that ties up college couples with magnetic tape,’ he wrote. Dig-it, it may have been, but Operation Match didn’t last out the decade. Dateline, Britain’s premier computer dating service, was soon launched using the same technology, feeding customer questionnaires into a large mainframe computer which would spit out half a dozen matches for a fee.

The first thing you notice about Bridgerton, Netflix’s big winter blockbuster set in Regency England, is how bad it is: an expensive assemblage of clichés that smacks of the American’s-eye view of Britain’s aristocratic past. The dialogue is execrable, the ladies’ pouts infuriating. But bad things can be good, especially when it comes to sexy period romps. Bridgerton is no different. The story follows the elder children of the Bridgerton family as they look for love in a utopian sprawl of courtly landscape and sociality.