Craig Brown has narrated this article for you to listen to.
The most irritating word of the year was ‘unwind’. ‘Unwind with one of our artisan cocktails in the curated ambience of…’ and so on. For most of us, the call to ‘unwind’ promotes the very stress it purports to alleviate. Radio 3 is currently the station most fretful about unwinding, beseeching us to ‘ease into your day with welcoming harmonies’ and ‘focus for the morning with stress-busting music’. Its new ‘24/7 stream’ is called ‘Classical Unwind’. Is this a wind-up? If you’re still feeling anxious by the evening, Classic FM offers ‘Calm Classics’ at 10 p.m.: ‘The perfect soothing soundtrack to help you wind down at the end of the day.’ Oddly enough, the contemporary composer most often picked to help us unwind is Philip Glass, whose repetitive work sounds like a migraine set to music.
For the past 11 years, two rock star neighbours in Holland Park have been finding it desperately hard to unwind. Things kicked off back in 2013, when Jimmy Page, then aged 69, first complained of plans for a 3,600 square foot ‘basement complex’ submitted to the council by his new neighbour, Robbie Williams, then 38. Their neighbourly dispute has rattled on ever since. In 2019, Williams was finally granted permission to start digging, but Page then won a counter-ruling that meant Williams’s builders could only employ hand-held tools. So it went on. In 2016, Williams accused Page of spying on him (‘It’s like a mental illness’), a claim he was later obliged to withdraw. In May 2022, Williams was refused permission to cut back an 80ft robinia tree; the following year, he withdrew an application for a two-storey fence around his property.
Time marches on. Jimmy Page is now 80 years old and Williams is 50 (eight years older than Robert Jenrick, by the way), but neither shows any inclination to let bygones be bygones. Last month, Williams asked permission to cut down another tree, and a neighbour – unnamed, but possibly you-know-who – is resisting it. Irritation breeds irritation. Online readers of the Times have rushed to support one side or the other. ‘A tree that is too big or is in the wrong place is just a big weed,’ writes Nicholas Leech. ‘Vandal!’ concludes Elizabeth Swift. ‘Leave our trees alone, you spoilt brat,’ writes Anthony Crawford. ‘His property. His decision,’ opines Thomas Dolan. ‘Who cares?’ asks Bryan McNaught. ‘Well you do, apparently, enough to make a comment,’ replies J.D. Rowe. The days when rock musicians were the fount of peace, love and understanding are, it seems, long over.
With the benefit of hindsight, should the Angry Young Men of the 1950s be rebranded? Irritable Young Men might be closer to the mark. This year marked the 70th anniversary of the publication of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, a novel that raised irritability to an art form. Amis’s first wife, Hilly, noticed his appetite for irritation when they first met, in 1946, when Kingsley was just 24. Indeed, she was irritated by his irritability, which might well have been his aim. She recalled him issuing ‘endless complaints about what seemed to me harmless things like apparently ordinary, nice people going through the swing-door at Elliston’s restaurant. He’d start muttering, “Look at those fools, look at that idiot of a man,” and so on. If doors got stuck, or he was held up by some elderly person getting off a bus, or the wind blew his hair all over the place, he would snarl and grimace in the most irritating fashion’. Lucky Jim’s anti-hero, Jim Dixon, bristles with irritation. At a dance, ‘he was hot, his socks seemed to have been sprayed with fine adhesive sand, and his arms ached like those of a boxer keeping his guard up after 14 rounds’. Amis’s subsequent novels expand on his one great theme. ‘It was no wonder that people were so horrible,’ observes the protagonist of One Fat Englishman, ‘when they started life as children.’
It’s what we do best. Our late Queen was adept at concealing irritation, though not immune from feeling it. On YouTube, you can watch her growing testy with the Queen Mother. They are at Epsom in 1991. The Queen’s horse Enharmonic, the 5/1 favourite, finishes fourth. The Queen is clearly disappointed, and wipes her eyes. The wind, she explains, is to blame for her tears. Her mother, standing just behind her, offers one of her pitying smiles and chuckles, irritatingly: ‘It’s the emotion perhaps! Hur! Hur!’ ‘No, Mummy!’ protests the Queen, her voice rising in exasperation, ‘It’s if you look into a WIND like that!’ The Queen Mother says ‘Ye-es’, but in an if-you-insist tone, and then bumbles away, having enjoyed the last word.
The Queen could also be irritated by unsavoury guests, and who could blame her? She told a friend of mine that she thought Donald Trump ‘very rude’. I put this in my new book, A Voyage Around the Queen. To my surprise, it became headline news. An irritated Trump was asked about it on camera. Never one to beat around the bush, the US President-elect called me a sleazebag and a phoney. In this season of peace and goodwill, I’ll offer him the last word, and leave others to judge which of us is telling the truth. ‘I heard I was her favorite president. She said it to a lot of people, she said it to friends of mine: “President Trump was my favorite president.”’
Craig Brown’s A Voyage Around the Queen is out now.
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