Zoe Strimpel

Can it be anything more than sour grapes when a writer (who has not been asked) gets snarky about Hay Festival? I’d like to think it can. For there is a lot to snark about.  Don’t get me wrong. The one time I was invited to speak at Hay, about a decade ago, it was jolly nice. Benedict Cumberbatch said hi to me in the green room, thinking I was someone he was meant to recognise, while Ian McEwan milled about topping up his coffee. Hay is, of course, a pornographically pretty town amid the rolling sheep-studded fields and quaint little streets with pop-up Eccles cakes shops and independent bookshops.

For most women, the time between your first and last period is defined by things other than the phases of the menstrual cycle. Or at least it used to be. But much has changed in the ontology of modern womanhood from the halcyon era of the 1990s, when women were positively encouraged to get out there and get on with it rather than sit around mooning about how rotten they feel. But here we are. Periods, like so much else that was formerly humdrum, have burst hideously on to the scene; sapping, among other things, a woman’s valuable Right to Ignore. Instead of being seen as a mild inconvenience of only the vaguest interest, menstruation has ascended the feminine ranks to become life-defining, soul-shaping and universe-channelling.

Only the most heartless fantasist would deny the life-saving role that therapy plays in helping people manage mental illness. Some people, of course, find it enjoyable or helpful for their own reasons and fair play to them. ‘You do you, babe,’ as they say.   But in the round, there is more wrong than right with the edifice. What else is one to conclude after Meghan ‘Sussex’ née Markle, one of the luckiest and most spoiled women in the world, posted on Instagram last week that that the ‘hardest seven years’ of her life – those that followed her becoming a duchess, having two healthy children and trading a royal residence for a $29 million mansion in California – had come to an end?

New wars bring new fundraising efforts. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainians who already lived in London or moved here as a result of the war have conducted a subtle but concerted gastronomic campaign on behalf of their country. Somehow, this avoids all shrillness – unlike the dreadful and relentless Cook for ‘Palestine’ movement.  The Ukrainian food scene doesn’t crow about good and evil but it takes a position on those questions anyway – of course. A wartime enterprise can't do anything else. But with front people like the beautiful, tireless Olia Hercules, who has raised millions for her homeland through culinary ‘cultural diplomacy’ missions, it’s an altogether more skilful piece of food politics than other wartime campaigns.

Though I hadn’t lived there since 1998, when I was 16 and Bill Clinton was in power, I’d always defended America. Sure, it had flaws. Big ones. It had gun problems, drug problems, healthcare problems, race problems, problems winning wars. But, by Jove, it was still the end of the rainbow. It still had the highest concentration of good of any country on earth.  Then Donald Trump inaugurated a new era in which the US went weird, and not in a good way. Not only did the problems with opioids, guns, wars and healthcare only get worse, new catastrophic fault lines opened. The bizarre reign of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was hardly a comforting interlude.

The forces of taste, fashion and regard have long colluded in a disconcerting way around Banksy. He is an ‘artist’ that the great and the good of the auction world take as seriously and reverently as your more common or garden fan who gazes upon his grim graffiti and feels they really ought to like it. In a saner world, in which everyone had not colluded on the premise that Banksy is Important and Good, he would be seen mainly as a vandal and a nuisance.  His vandalism is lucrative in part because it is a parade of ‘subversive’ clichés, so saccharine and obvious they hurt. Thus, we have little black stencils depicting policemen kissing, the House of Commons filled with chimpanzees, or a girl reaching after a heart-shaped balloon.

My family skied a lot. We did it home-style, with packed lunches and Mars Bars on the lifts, my brother and me following my expert Milan-raised father down terrifying drops of ice in the twilight. We took our chances on low or no visibility, scraping round mountainous moguls and – my least favourite – careering through the root, stone and tree-stuffed terrain of the arboreal American off-piste. We wore the least trendy gear imaginable: huge foam-rimmed goggles already years old in the Nineties and never any hint of a helmet. Nobody but over-protective, scaredy-cat dorks wore helmets then. This background gave me two things.

There is something inherently embarrassing about watching Bridgerton in Britain. It is so palpably, monstrously, uninhibitedly woke; an American fever dream of England in which an all-English (and the odd Australian) cast cavort as members of the ‘ton’ for money they’d probably never get from the BBC. In front of the great Bridgerton mood board scrawled with such words as ‘Downton Abbey’, ‘Jane Austen’, ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ and – of course – the most Shondaland touch of all, ‘Diversity!’, the likes of Adjoa Andoh and Lorraine Ashbourne do their thing while (one imagines) the suits at Shondaland clap with pleasure. Shondaland is the woman (Shonda Rhimes) and production company behind Netflix’s adaptation of the Julia Quinn novels.

I was born in London in 1982 and my parents were neither hippies nor part of the Women’s Liberation Movement. As a result, frank talk about body parts, functions and sexual development was generally non-existent. The arrival of my period was not something I remember having any feelings about whatsoever, and it certainly wasn’t something the womenfolk in my family celebrated. Hormones were rarely invoked in the culture more widely apart from in a general 'raging' way to explain the wildness of teens. Flash forward 40 years and the cultural tides have turned in quite a startling way. Now it often feels like women talk about nothing but their periods, or the dwindling thereof.

About a week into an open-ended early pandemic stay in Ortigia, the antique, tourist-beloved spit off Siracusa on Sicily’s eastern coast, I had an epiphany. I hated the food. I’d just had a few bites of a clammy aubergine parmigiana, and a plate of oily tuna steak dressed with a bit of lemon was on its way to me. I felt sick and couldn't face another bite – and yet, supposedly, I was right in the heartlands of the finest continental gastronomy. This, at least, is the orthodoxy of the world, of tourists low- and high-end and home cooks everywhere – and especially in Italy itself.

On more than one occasion, I have found myself being lectured by non-Jews (always men) about why I am incorrect in my Jewishness. Judaism is a religion and I can’t be Jewish if I am an atheist, some say. The ones that accept the atheism then feel compelled to categorise me as a ‘cultural’ Jew whose identity is defined by rituals and customs passed down over the centuries. And then there’s the stern mystification about the relatively minor role that Hanukkah plays in the spiritual calendar for Jews. It is hard for some to realise that while it involves lights and wintry nights, Hanukkah is not remotely the equivalent of Christmas. Nothing in Judaism is.

The algorithm got me in the end. It began with recipe content, and once I was hooked on food influencer videos, I began to be pummelled with adverts for attractive pots and pans, then clothes, and from there an ever-widening vista of objets and objects by turns pretty or useful and occasionally both. The result, apart from frittering away a certain amount of money on non-essential cardigans and kitchen gadgets, has been the development of a ruthless taste and approach to e-commerce. I want to have, and want to give, nice things, and increasingly I know where to get them. I am also hopelessly disorganised, a snob and far from awash in cash. If you’re anything like me and have yet to get your gifts sorted out, read on.

The premium on a good tradesman remains extremely high. Is AI going to come and paint your walls or hang your pictures? No, and the unsung heroes of the AI age are still those who are good with their hands. Indeed OpenAI, the US industry giant, has urgently called for a massive ramping up in skilled labour. It declared: ‘The country will need many more electricians, mechanics, metal and ironworkers, carpenters, plumbers, and other construction trade workers than we currently have.’ Sounds good to me. Meanwhile Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, said America needs for 500,000 electricians. Yes please! No doubt Britain is going to need just as many if we’re to join the AI revolution.

I became sick of bakeries when I lived in Berlin. I alternated between a few of them, doing most of my work in a café-bakery in the then-trendy Neukölln district amid other somewhat directionless snackers and typers. After a while, I felt that commercial premises hawking cakes, pastries and cookies were no place for the would-be scholar, as I then was. I began to feel grossed out by other people’s crumbs under my laptop, depressed by the pressure, partly caused by my own boredom, to keep ordering and paying for cake and coffees. Eating cake began to seem antithetical to serious work, not its handmaiden. Eventually I discovered the charms of the Berlin State Library, where my then-boyfriend always stationed himself, and never looked back.