It’s so hard going back to work after Christmas
‘It’s so hard going back to work after Christmas.’
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Wednesday
We’ve let it rest enough
‘I think we’ve let it rest enough.’
Survivor’s guilt is killing me
‘Survivor’s guilt is killing me.’
The strange return of Cilla Black
She was an unlikely contender for fame from the outset, with a pub singer voice and a nose so prominent she would later have it surgically reduced. But, with her Scouser-next-door persona and trademark cropped hair, Cilla Black was in the right place at the right time: she rode the popular wave created by Beatlemania and its attendant appetite for all things Liverpudlian. This led to national stardom as a singer. Then, when her pop career waned, instead of disappearing into obscurity, Cilla managed to relaunch herself into a spectacular second career as one of the biggest names at the lighter end of TV light entertainment. Now, some nine years after
The mind-altering potential of fire walking
Thirty of us gathered in the upstairs room of a local hospice, subdued as we contemplated the imminent laying of our raw flesh onto fire. Steve from Peterborough arrived to give a pep talk to prepare us for what awaited us in the car park below. We sighed empathetically when Steve told us he had failed maths O-Level three times He was, he said, an expert fire walker, trained by the man who trained the most famous fire walker in the world – the American motivational guru Tony Robbins, an incredible-hulk of a man known for whipping people up into frenzies of self-belief and positivity. On YouTube you can see
Tuesday
With Philip Hensher
31 min listen
Philip Hensher is a novelist and regular contributor to The Spectator’s books pages. His books cover a variety of subjects and often deal with important historical change, such as the fall of the Berlin wall and the war in Afghanistan. His most recent novel is To Battersea Park. On the podcast, he discusses how he developed an affection for offal as a small child, the secret to an ‘austerely perfect’ carbonara, and why food is a such a great character device for novelists.
Monday
David Bowie: the man who fooled the world
In 1973, everyone loved David Bowie. Album buyers had put Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Hunky Dory high in the charts, while singles buyers had bought similar success for ‘Drive In Saturday’, ‘Life on Mars’ and ‘Sorrow’. Then right in the middle of this, he released ‘The Laughing Gnome’. In truth, he probably didn’t. It was a twee little novelty song recorded six years earlier, featuring Bowie duetting with the eponymous gnome. Nobody could believe that Bowie had recorded it – less still that he’d written it – but the more you know about him, the less surprising it seems. In fact, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ says more about David Bowie than anything else he did. It was early evidence
The joys of light verse
Coleridge defined poetry as the best words in the best order and at no stage did he ever suggest that being light-hearted in verse is any less worthy than the solemnest offerings of Milton or of his old pal Wordsworth. Nevertheless, there is a feeling among many who take their art seriously that anything in verse form liable to raise a good natured smile is somehow not the real thing, no matter how well it is executed and however perfectly it conforms with rhyme and metre. Since the earliest days of the quill pen, some our greatest poets have deliberately used humour to enlighten, inform and indeed entertain their readers
Saturday
Will we worship the AI?
It’s hard to believe that only five years ago the word/acronym AI was barely seen outside the science pages, and even then solely in the most speculative way: as something that might happen, in a few decades, maybe, if you’re the dreamy type. But also maybe not. Now there literally isn’t a day that goes by without some new AI revelation/epiphany/scare story. Just looking at the AI news right now, when we are all meant to be stuffed into silence by the last of the Nyetimber and cold goose-fat potatoes, I can see these headlines: ‘Rise of AI fuels looming water crisis for the world’, ‘Big Tech outspends venture capital
Friday
Two wagers for New Year’s Day
I am slightly surprised at the way that bookmakers have priced up Monday’s Paddy Power New Year’s Day Handicap Chase (Cheltenham 2.05 p.m.). Stage Star is a lovely young horse who has, with the exception of a flop at Aintree in April at the end of a long season, improved with every race over the past year. As a result, he is rightly vying for favouritism with Allaho for the Grade 1 Ryanair Chase at the Cheltenham Festival in March. However, the New Year’s Day contest is a handicap and he must give the best part of two stones to most of his rivals, some of them pretty decent in
Wednesday
How to survive the post-Christmas slump
Elizabeth David was a cookery writer who led the British palate away from the grim days of stodgy, post-war rationing towards the adoption of a fresher, more Mediterranean diet. But she saved the most resonant advice of her six decade writing career for an observation on how to survive a typical British Christmas. Describing the festive period here as The Great Too Much that has also become The Great Too Long, David wrote: A ten-day shut-down, no less, is now normal at Christmas. On at least one day during The Great Too Long stretch, I stay in bed, making myself lunch on a tray. Smoked salmon, home-made bread, butter, lovely cold
Monday
Christmas traditions and the lost practice of ‘mumming’
Christmas, we are often told, is rich in traditions invented by the Victorians (or even later), and it was a rather austere affair before Charles Dickens. But while it is true that the Victorians gave us many of our Christmas traditions in their current form, English Christmas traditions before the Victorian era were simply different, not non-existent – and they were every bit as exuberant as what came after, if not more so. One of those long-lost pre-Victorian traditions of Christmas is mumming; something which was as synonymous with Christmas 200 years ago as a fat man in a red suit with a proclivity for housebreaking is today. Mumming was
Sunday
Why are pagans so annoying?
I’ve never been keen on pagans. They strike me as attention seekers with no actual merits to boast of except saying that they don’t believe in organised religion – something most of us got over at 15. Claiming to be a pagan is also a way of hinting that you’re having better sex than everybody else, whereas the reality is rather like that of those alleged ‘witches’ who oft appeared in the News of the World when I was a child. Middle-aged suburban swingers sporting pendulous breasts and maternal thighs, posing coyly inside a pentagram – and the women were just as bad. Pagans remind me of those idiots who
The importance of Midnight Mass
This year Christmas Day is on Monday; for the clergy this means two major feast days in a row, with the Fourth Sunday of Advent falling today, Christmas Eve. Midnight Mass will be the fifth mass of the day for me, to be followed by three further masses on the morning of the 25th. Clerical heaven is the time when Christmas falls on a Sunday. But this year it is going to be a hard slog. Midnight Mass, the one ceremony of the Catholic year that is familiar to many, is losing its appeal, and sticklers for tradition are fighting a constant battle to keep it at midnight. Some people
Notes from an army chaplain
It happened in Italy a long time ago. The war was still at its height, but winter had set in, the roads were impassable and we were pulled out of the front line. I was chaplain to a regiment which had been through a difficult period and the men welcomed the respite. There was some desultory shelling, but appropriately enough, as it was near Christmas, a measure of peace prevailed. We took over a small village, requisitioned a few houses, and settled down for a couple of weeks. I lived with the doctor and his unit in the Regimental Aid Post. Their home now was a stable and their beds
Friday
Three bets for Christmas
There are only some seven weeks left for connections to get their horses qualified for the 2024 Randox Grand National. This year it will be harder than ever to get a run in the Aintree marathon, with just 34 runners, instead of the usual 40, for safety reasons. That means a horse will need an official rating of around 147 to be almost certain of getting into the race when the weights are announced in mid-February. Tomorrow there are at least two horses who will be looking to win the Betfred Tommy Whittle Handicap Chase (Haydock 1.30 p.m.) and not just for the £26,000 first prize. Borders trainer and jockey
Esther Rantzen is wrong about assisted suicide
It can’t be any fun to have lung cancer as Dame Esther Rantzen does; I watched my father die from mesothelioma over the best part of a decade, and in the last couple of years this once tall, handsome, athletic man was more or less a tumour on legs. But I recall the zest with which he greeted each day, and the pleasure he took in seeing the seasons change. Once I said to him, in a fit of drunken sentiment, ‘Dad, if it ever gets too much… you do have a lot of pills, don’t you?’ He looked at me, shocked, then called to my mum while winking at
The Elizabethan grandeur of Middle Temple Hall
It’s the most beautiful restaurant in London – and the oldest. Built in 1573, Middle Temple Hall is celebrating its 450th anniversary. It’s also where Shakespeare held the premiere of his Christmas play, Twelfth Night, in 1602. How strange that hardly anyone knows about the best Elizabethan hall in London. It’s mostly used by barristers but the public can eat there too, as long as you book ahead. I looked up to high table to see a purple-faced bencher, glaring down at me The food is lovely, substantial, marvellously unponcey fare and fantastically good value for such a staggering spot – on the western edge of the City, on the banks of the
Thursday
The peculiar ritual of Spain’s Christmas lottery
Half of Britain is said to have watched The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show in 1977. Spain’s Christmas lottery, broadcast live to the nation each year on the morning of 22 December and marking for many the start of the holidays, is a similar moment of national unity. Spaniards everywhere down tools, watching with bated breath as lives throughout the country are transformed. Lottery tickets are untraceable so previous years have seen furtive-looking men carrying suitcases full of banknotes descend on bars, lottery outlets and banks This year the television cameras and the giant spherical cage containing thousands of numbered wooden balls will be in place as usual. In a ceremony lasting several hours,
Raise a glass to the age-old charm of port
When Christmas comes, there are few guilt-free pleasures that match the sheer wonder of port (aside from re-watching Dr Strangelove in the wee hours on BBC2). Sweeter than a mince pie and more intoxicating than a pre-Christmas visit to your GP’s waiting room, a glass of port is guaranteed to lift your spirits. And by the time you’re onto your third, if you’re lucky, you should feel so elevated that either you’re on cloud nine or fast approaching it. It’s like the 18th century in a bottle – but the good parts of it, not the pox, the rotting teeth or gangrene That’s the joy of port. For more than