Society

In London for the first time in 18 months, I was as excited as a child on a birthday outing. We were desperate for a dose of up-close culture after months of Zoom, so we crammed in three exhibitions, two plays and a couple of first-class meals that I didn’t have to cook. Glorious. It helped that we had two of the few blue-sky days of this otherwise wretched summer and that I’d deliberately fallen off the wagon. My husband John says that I’m much nicer when I’m drinking. Apparently, when giving my kidneys a holiday, I’m altogether less joyful. We stayed at the Chelsea Arts Club in Old Church

Two years ago, Lauren Goode, a senior writer at Wired magazine, cancelled her wedding and it was awkward. These things always are, but you get over it because the brain slowly learns how to skip over painful memories. Or it did, before social media. Goode has made a career out of wittily stripping away the pretensions of consumer tech, and when her wedding plans blew up consumer tech had its revenge. She ended her eight-year relationship in 2019 — but the internet didn’t get the message and kept confronting her with ‘a cyborg version of me, a digital ghost, that is still getting married’. As she wrote in Wired, at

In Competition No. 3214, you were invited to choose a well-known painted portrait and let the subject speak for itself, in poetry or prose. Among those who seized the opportunity to have their say were pre-Raphaelite poster girl Lizzie Siddal, who fell dangerously ill while spending several months floating in a tin bath for Millais’s 1852 ‘Ophelia’; David Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark (and their cat Percy); Franz Hals’s ‘Laughing Cavalier’; and ‘Weeping Woman’ Dora Maar (‘All his portraits of me are lies. They’re Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar,’ she once told the American writer James Lord.) The challenge drew a modestly sized but accomplished entry and in another

Extinction Rebellion (XR) are once again blocking London’s streets, reportedly emboldened by the Supreme Court’s recent Ziegler decision – which found that deliberately blocking roads can be lawful protest. The police maintain that the judgment does not substantially change the law and that XR, like everyone else, has a right to assemble and protest but not to cause serious disruption to the community or to hold the streets to ransom. But while the judgment is not a sea change in the law – whatever some protestors may now say – it does reveal that the law as it stands is failing to adequately protect the public’s right to use the

Fishmongers are an endangered species in London. Thankfully, 15 minutes walk across Westminster from The Spectator’s offices there is an excellent fish stall on Tachbrook Street market in Pimlico. Jonathan Norris’s stall — much frequented by 1990s Tory politicians — does a thriving trade in live lobsters. He will happily boil the crustaceans for you in his lobster kettle, but buying them alive is more fun, especially if you have children in tow. At this time of year the lobsters are Cornish; in the winter live lobster flown in from Canada will have to do. Buying — and then boiling — live lobsters is a sure way of getting children