Have you been on social media again?
‘Have you been on social media again?’
Uncategorized
Wednesday
Stay clear
‘Stay clear of Piers Morgan.’
I see no ships
Are you vaping comfortably?
‘Are you vaping comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’
The rise of the Thomas Hardy guy
If I had to pick a king of women I’d call a draw between Vermeer, the 17th century painter, and Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet. Both had an outstanding capacity to take women’s interior lives seriously, to see individual women as distinct, intense and complex, and far from corresponding to any feminine stereotype. Whether it’s Vermeer’s young woman with a pearl necklace, Eustacia Venn in Hardy’s The Woodlanders or his mournful poems about his wife Emma’s death, these are moving, emotionally astute portraits. The pick-up artist movement, which began in the early 2000s, created its own breed of Hardys But while Vermeer seems to have been a decent husband, Hardy was not. A new
My life in storage
I’m off to South Italy for a few months having recently sold my late mother’s house and, if I can find a nice immigration lawyer, perhaps longer. This means my home is now full of cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, marker pens and panic. It’s a feeling I’m perfectly familiar with, having changed my living space (and country) more times in life than I care to count. The boxes won’t be going with me abroad. Instead, I’ll be renting local accommodation for my worldly goods: a storage space. Such austerity’s strictly for saints or lunatics, and most of us don’t make the grade as either The buildings that house storage spaces
Japan’s naked men are no longer sacred
For the first time in its 1,250 year history, Japan’s Naked Man Festival is to admit women to its sacred rites and rituals – well, one sacred ritual anyway. Later this month, a cohort of 40 women, clothed, will be allowed to participate in the naoizasa ritual where they will carry bamboo grass wrapped in cloth into the local shrine. While hardly a stunning breakthrough for women’s liberation, the decision is nonetheless revealing. Sanitising rather bizarre local events is unlikely to make much difference It is less a reflection of changing opinions than shifting demographics, with Japan’s vast underpopulated rural areas having to be more flexible with their ancient customs
Tuesday
How Vince McMahon became wrestling’s greatest villain
Vince McMahon is the godfather of modern wrestling, an American entrepreneur and media magnate worth a cool $2.8 billion. He was raised in a trailer park in North Carolina but went on to turn the World Wrestling Federation (now known as WWE) into a global phenomenon. McMahon is responsible for creating superstars like Hulk Hogan and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. He also became a character in his own right, going from a commentator to an in-ring villain, ordering wrestlers around and shouting his Trump-esque catchphrase ‘You’re fired!’ Vince turned WWE into a weird mix of Jerry Springer, sweat and steroids However, McMahon abruptly stepped down from his role as WWE
I’m addicted to property programmes
Holed up with Covid recently, I decided to binge on some undemanding TV and selected property programmes, knowing that the genre satisfied some basic human instincts – nosiness about other people’s lives, other people’s taste, other people’s money and other people’s dreams. I was happy with my choice – confident that property programmes were the chicken soup of television, gently nourishing me back into health. There really is something for every aspect of the human psyche in them – curiosity, aspiration, humour, voyeurism, escapism Apparently, there’s a whole world of people who appreciate these shows. Jonnie Irwin, the presenter of A Place in the Sun and Escape to the Country
Stop calling rugby ‘child abuse’
The look on the doctor’s face as he showed my parents the X-ray of my skull was quizzical but reassuring. ‘We were a bit worried by this line on the left,’ he indicated a very thin line from the top of the cranium, straight down. ‘But we saw that there is a line exactly similar on the other side of the X-ray, which persuaded us that it was a problem with the film, not your son’s skull’. The violent element in rugby has always been controversial. That is one of the reasons football came about We were free to leave, with advice to watch out if I felt sleepy or
Monday
Is Marvel finished?
Martin Scorsese thinks Marvel films aren’t cinema. ‘The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes,’ he wrote in a New York Times article in 2019, written after a wave of backlash from superhero fans and directors alike. Earlier that year, Marvel’s three-hour blockbuster The Avengers: Endgame had garnered over $2.7 billion. For a while it was the highest-grossing film ever made. People turned up to see it in spandex catsuits. You couldn’t move for replica infinity stones. Some cinemas in America, eager to fill the demand, screened the film over and over for 72 straight
The importance of marshland mindset
We have in our kitchen a mug purporting to belong to ‘Romney Marsh Mountain Rescue’. There is, of course, no such organisation – the mug is a reference to a long-standing family joke, about how my brothers and I love mountaineering despite having grown up in one of the lowest, flattest parts of England. The Marsh has a handful of small hillocks – really just bumps with delusions of grandeur – but overall it is very flat. My Ordnance Survey map does not mark a single contour line from Rye in the south west to Hythe in the north east and from the Royal Military Canal to the Channel. Winter
Have I been cursed by a white deer?
It was standing completely still, about 40 yards away, partially obscured by a clump of hazel: a pure white deer. It looked almost iridescent in the gloom of an overcast winter day. My dogs were straining at the lead but otherwise all sense of movement ceased for half a minute, maybe longer. I managed to decapitate it with a twist and fastened the head and horns to my car roof with bungee cords Then something broke. The white deer twitched. It was only when it began to run that we realised it had been accompanied by half a dozen other, darker-skinned herdmates. In just a few seconds we were alone again. The
Friday
One bet for tomorrow and two ante-post wagers
The two-day Dublin Racing Festival this weekend will – just as Cheltenham Trials Day did a week ago – provide a host of clues to which horses might win the big races at the Cheltenham Festival in mid-March. I covered tomorrow’s Grade1 Nathaniel Lacy & Partners Solicitors Novice Hurdle (Leopardstown, 1.20 p.m.) in my column two weeks ago. I still fancy Jetara to see off her five rivals, all from the yards of Willie Mullins and Gordon Elliott. Sadly, the odds of 10-1 for Jessica Harrington’s talented mare and the three places that were available a fortnight ago have both long gone. There are plenty of other fascinating races and
Who doesn’t love a good catfight?
Was I the only person who felt a flash of disappointment when a source said of the imminent Girls Aloud re-union that ‘No one wants it to be a catfight’? Obvs I don’t just want a catfight – they’re the best girl group ever, so they are artists and women of substance. But just a bit of a catfight, maybe? I’ve had a soft spot for catfights since I was a child; I saw loads at the rough comprehensive school I attended between the older girls – they’d always take their earrings out first and hand them to their best friend to hold, which I found unspeakably glamorous. One of
Rishi, please just have a snack
‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,’ was an offhand comment made by Kate Moss 15 years ago, one that she is yet to live down and has had to repeatedly apologise for since. Ms Moss might not be Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s obvious role model, but the recent proclamation that he fasts for 36 consecutive hours is certainly more Vogue than Downing Street. Fasting is good for the waist line but it also makes people irritable, erratic, and error prone The Prime Minister has revealed that he doesn’t eat from Sunday afternoon until Tuesday morning. He is an intermittent faster, in other words, and intermittent fasting is a fad
Embrace your Franglais, mes amis
Having breakfast at a hotel in the chouette Eighth Arrondisement of Paris last weekend, and employing what I imagine to be my faultless French, I asked for a boiled egg, ‘un oeuf à la coque.’ The waitress asked, did I want glaçons (ice) with that? Err, no, I replied, bemused. The waitress then brought me a bottle of Coca-Cola. Perhaps this is not a propitious anecdote with which to begin today’s assignment, ‘How I learned to master French.’ Perhaps it casts doubt on my claim to speak French. Or perhaps it was merely a reminder to be humble. I had a little chat in French with Karine Jean-Pierre, President Biden’s spokeswoman with the wacky
Wednesday
He’s incredibly disciplined
‘He’s incredibly disciplined – he doesn’t vape for 36 hours at the start of each week.’
It’s amazing how urbanised they are becoming
‘It’s amazing how urbanised they are becoming.’
