‘There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor/ I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm/ Gonna be a twister to blow everything down/ That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground!’ How I used to enjoy singing these ominous lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Promised Land’ as I got ready to go to Israel! But when you’re going there on easyJet, the words lose their self-dramatising sting somewhat.

After decades of having to schlep all the way to Heathrow and undergo a somewhat shamefully enjoyable grilling from the sexy El Al staff who moved along the line making you step into a corner with them and answer questions, you can now check in online with the friendly orange airline and waltz through security with no more bother than if you were going to Marbs.

When I first came to Israel more than a decade ago, my atheist Jewish ex-mother-in-law cried and told me she would pray every day for my safe return, and my friends mostly gasped ‘But WHY?’ Now she is dead, and they express the earnest desire to accompany me next time. It’s pretty safe to say that the demonisation of the tiny Jewish state has been a failure, despite the zeal of the anti-Semites in anti-Zionists’ clothing.

The first thing that strikes one upon first visiting Israel is that these people appear to bear no relation whatsoever to the bookish, anxious stereotype of the Jew which initially attracted me to the breed. They are athletic beyond belief. At 11.30 at night, as K and I sit drinking in the LaLaLand beach bar, they’re still jogging along the esplanade and playing volleyball on the court. All along the seafront from the Old Port to Jaffa, there are outdoor gyms, their equipment painted in the primary colours of the playground. No matter how sweltering the weather, they are always in use.

To say that Israelis are ‘confident’ is like saying Rihanna (who played Tel Aviv last year, along with Madonna and Lady Gaga, thus making the ‘boycott’ look somewhat silly: as I leave this time, Tel Aviv is gearing up for the Rolling Stones) is attractive. And this has grown over the years I’ve been coming here. Perhaps the Arab Spring and its subsequent messy afterbirth have made them feel that the pressure is off them while the Muslim world continues to tear itself apart. Or maybe they were just made this way; the early Zionist poet Jabotinsky did warn us, ‘From the pit of decay and dust/ Through blood and sweat/ A generation will arise to us/ Proud, generous and fierce.’ About right, but he forgot ‘fit’.

I’m sitting on the Hilton Beach, knee deep in my gay brothers, when I catch a beautiful blonde woman looking at me. My hopes are dashed when she says, ‘Excuse me, you’re English. Do you have a Nurofen on you?’ I offer her prescription codeine. ‘Bingo!’ she laughs.

My new friend is Dina, a teacher from London, but long ago married to an Israeli. I ask her what she thinks of the recent change in the law which will require Orthodox men to serve in the army; Ben-Gurion, in order to get support from religious Jews (many of whom are, ironically, anti-Zionist), did a deal with them in the run-up to the re-creation of Israel allowing the Orthodox community to opt out.

‘About time! I’ve got a son doing his army duty now; my other son and  my daughter will follow him when they’re old enough. So I’ve got three children who may have to fight and die for a country their mother wasn’t even born in, while the Orthodox have children like there’s no tomorrow and don’t have to give up any of them? Like I say, about time.’ She points down the beach to our right. ‘See that — that’s the religious beach here in Tel Aviv — right next to the official gay beach. Don’t tell me this in an accident. There’s so much resentment in this country towards the religious. Hopefully the new law will bring us closer together. We couldn’t be further apart.’

In the Eretz Museum, at an exhibition of wildlife photography, I get talking to Call-Me-Boris. ‘Not my real name, but a good English name, no?’ he twinkles. Call-Me-Boris came here as a child from the disintegrating Soviet Union — he’s not even sure he’s Jewish, but that nice Mr Gorbachev’s glasnost policy brought him here: ‘My father said that it was the first time any people in the Soviet Union pretended to be a Jew to get better treatment from the government! So we don’t ask him too many questions.’

When I first came here, you couldn’t get a bacon sandwich to save your life; now Tel Aviv has more hams than Equity, thanks to the ambiguous Jewish immigration from the Eastern bloc.

What does he think of the former Soviet Union’s relationship with Israel? ‘Is there one? The Russians don’t need Arab oil any more and they’re more interested in, as you might say in England, ‘Keeping a tin lid on it’ in their own country with all the separatists, rather than interfering in this region. They have their own Islamist problem now, so maybe less inclination to come after Israel.’

On the last morning, two Israeli soldiers walk into Benedict’s — ‘All About Breakfast!’ — ahead of us; a tiny, exquisite Chinese girl, a tall and beautiful black man, they seem to exemplify the magnificent melting pot that is this tiny nation. Holding hands, huge rifles over their backs, they peruse the menu. I get tearful; also, I figure, I’ve saved literally thousands of pounds this trip by staying at a housetrip.com flat rather than an eye-wateringly pricey Tel Aviv hotel. When K and I get the bill, I ask ‘May I please pay for the soldiers?’ Our waitress smiles: ‘The soldiers are gone. But Israel thanks you.’

The post Letter from Tel Aviv appeared first on The Spectator.

At a time when feminism is grimly engaged in disappearing up its own intersection (two transsexuals squabbling over a tampon is the image that comes to mind) Caitlin Moran is to be bravo’d till the sacred cows come home for bringing her super-brightness to bear on this most vital of subjects. Like the rest of the western world and its stepdaughters, I loved How To Be a Woman and was excited to see what she would come up with next; when I heard it would be a novel, I was a little underwhelmed, having read her previous attempt at Young Adult fiction, The Chronicles of Narmo.

When I realised in the opening chapter that it was another novel about a big family, I felt very tired; in my experience, people from big families like to believe that we only children go around permanently traumatised from not having had anyone to share our toys with. But in reality, we look at them sadly not out of bitter envy but through sheer molten pity. Who on earth ever wanted to grow up sharing a bedroom in Bedlam?

There’s a lot about masturbation here — as much an age of coming as a coming of age novel — and the ensuing embarrassment which follows from treating oneself as a moveable feast while surrounded by siblings. But once you’ve shaken off these early indicators of a sordid shambles, things get really good. Moran’s writing is frequently magical in its throwaway precision; a man’s tie ‘looks like it has been put on by an enemy’, while kissing ‘is brilliant: I would put it just below telly but definitely above drinking, squeezing blackheads or fairgrounds’.

She writes with breathtaking brio, like a great professional hoofer who has been toe-tapping since tot-hood but has never grown tired of performing: very much a ‘Ta-da! — see what I did there?’ type of writer. Just once in a while it gets a bit more Louie Spence than Ann Miller — the somewhat crazed gagging and gurning over the heroine’s out-of-control sex-drive — but this could be a sign of my advanced age.

Of course, Moran starts with far better raw material than your average entitled Oxbridge hackette. This is, after all, the barely fictionalised story of a brilliant fat girl from a working-class provincial family who becomes a journalistic wunderkind; when a story is so great, why change it? Books about the wonder of working at music papers often tank — think of Tony Parsons’s Stories We Could Tell — as the only people who tend to find the subject interesting are people who get their books for free. But this is so much more, and Moran shows her shining soul — which is even more remarkable than her wit — when she writes about being young, looking for love and the utter vileness of the class system.

Sometimes I couldn’t work out whether this book was aimed at mature adolescents or immature adults, but I loved it anyway — even before I came across the very pleasing mention of myself in Chapter 20, and the even better one in Chapter 24. Moran’s detractors will find lots to loathe here, but as with the criticisms of How To Be a Woman — ranging from ‘nudge-nudge’ to ‘narcissistic’ — such poltroons immediately flag themselves up as humourless, envious ass-hats.

Ignore them; almost every page has something on it which makes you smile, makes you sad or makes you think — often all three at once, in one sentence. How very unusual, and how very Moran; from rock chick to Mother Courage, with her best yet to come.

The post How to write a novel appeared first on The Spectator.

Recently one morning, as I was weeping over Caitlin Moran’s (daughter of Mr and Mrs Moran of Wolverhampton) brilliant book How to Build a Girl — specifically, the heartbreaking way she writes about coming from an impoverished family — a report came on to the radio with the glad tidings that working-class white children are now doing worse in schools than any other ethnic group. Said one Graham Stuart, the Conservative chairman of the education select committee, ‘They do less homework and are more likely to miss school than other groups. We don’t know how much of the underperformance is due to poor attitudes to school, a lack of work ethic or weak parenting.’

No, we don’t, do we? But what if it was to do with feeling that there’s just no point in bothering? That the odds are now so shamelessly stacked against a white working-class child getting a decently paid job, let alone one they actually enjoy, that to try hard at school would be to give up the last remnants of agency and rebellion? It’s no secret that social mobility — which just a few years back we all presumed would rock on regardless — has reversed, doing over the already vulnerable working class with the force of a steamroller. Yes, you chirpy Cockneys and you stoic Northerners, not only have the jobs your parents did — making things — disappeared, but the cushy jobs that a blessed few of you once might have escaped the surly bonds of the proletariat by nabbing — modelling, acting, writing for newspapers — have now been colonised by the children of the rich/famous/well-connected, too.

Nepotism has never been so shameless and so widespread, and the Sads — Sons and Daughters — are everywhere. The very morning I heard that report, I found the following — without hunting around — in the media. Over at Mail Online, a bum-faced 17-year-old called Rafferty Law (son of Jude ’n’ Sadie) was walking the catwalk with ‘close friend and fellow model’ Cora Corre (granddaughter of Vivienne Westwood). What’s the betting they’ll soon be joined on the runway by Kate Moss’s little sister Lottie, 16, recently signed with Storm and photographed for Calvin Klein, exactly like her sister before her? Looking at photos of Moss Junior, one is spitefully reminded of that line some wag came out with about Greta Garbo’s stand-in, one Geraldine Dvorak: ‘She has everything that Garbo has. Except that thing that Garbo has.’

Upmarket at the Times, one Henry Dimbleby (son of David and cookery writer Josceline) was bewailing the diets of working-class schoolchildren in a piece with the unintentionally hilarious headline ‘Let them eat veg!’ While on the cover of Elle, Keira Knightley (daughter of playwright Sharman Macdonald) pouted out with her usual constipated air. She’s a creature of contradictions, that one; forever banging on about how she’s just an ordinary sweary bird down the pub who fame and fortune somehow just happened to — and yet, by her own admission, asking her parents if she could have an agent at the age of three and actually getting one at the age of six. In Elle she’s still at it; when asked if she would discourage a potential daughter from taking up acting, Knightley huffs, ‘Oh, 100 per cent I’d absolutely tell her not to. I would 150 million trillion per cent be totally discouraging.’

Hmm. Am I alone in finding this far from being Knightley’s most convincing performance — even more so than the one where she played a bounty hunter? She is, after all, married to James Righton of the Klaxons, and surely they’ve seen the memo that, these days, the children of famous showbiz parents have to be in showbiz too? And — whisper it — their dirty little secret is that they really do like it that way. Though simple starlets may compare showing off for lots of money to being a soldier (Paltrow and Cruise), being raped (Charlize and Kristen) and being stoned to death (Geldof), that’s just to put us ‘civilians’ off and keep the jammy jobs safe for their own spawn.

If a Martian came down today, he’d believe that only the children of the famous are allowed to have enjoyable careers — the royal family started it, but only now are we seeing how crass and counterproductive it is when people get jobs because of who their parents are. The actresses Julie Walters and Maxine Peake have spoken searingly of how few working-class actors are now coming through, and even reality TV has fallen to the toffs in the shape of Made in Chelsea, in which confectionery and hotel heirs compete to see who can best prove The Only Way Is Essex wrong. While fewer than one in ten British children attends a fee-paying school, a whopping 60 per cent of rock music chart acts are now ex-public school, compared with 1 per cent 20 years ago. And as for the level of nepotism in journalism, don’t get me started.

Insult follows injury follows indignity when it comes to the prospects of today’s white working-class youth. Sport used to be an avenue of escape, for example, but the head of Ofsted has just warned that a ‘disproportionately’ high number of successful athletes are privately educated, ‘cementing the social inequality that holds our nation back’. That’s the thing about nepotism; it’s ultra-conservative but the opposite of patriotic, wasting the endless talent of all those could-have-been runners and writers born on the wrong side of the tracks. Though 93 per cent of children attend state schools, they only make up a third of top athletes; and I wonder what the stats are when it comes to the media.

No matter, because the BBC have just announced that they have hatched a new £2 million scheme to fast-track black and Asian writers, actors and presenters. That’ll be the young blacks and Asians who in fact do better than poor whites in school — but as the white trash have a lack of work ethic, it’s probably their fault. Similarly, the Guardian has a ‘Positive Action Scheme — Ethnic Minorities’ in place, but zero for poor white would-be journalists.

These deaths by a thousand snubs add to the impression of white working-class children being young ghosts in their own country, a new blank, betrayed generation of Chesterton’s famous Secret People:

‘We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,

Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.

It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first,

Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath be the worst.

It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest

God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best.

But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.

Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.’

These ghosts may be less patient than their pacified parents, and prime candidates for the Ukip dream.

Nepotism makes countless people sad, but does it make its beneficiaries happy? From Prince Charles to Peaches Geldof, I’d say not. How can you possibly have any pride in yourself knowing that you achieved your position because of the sperm lotto? How can you sleep, knowing of the people from poor backgrounds who would be more suitable for the job than you?

But I have no pity for them. The psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote that ‘The most beautiful fate, the most wonderful good fortune that can happen to any human being, is to be paid for doing that which he passionately loves to do.’ For the kind I left behind, it is always winter and never Christmas.

‘I know what happened to girls like me, in history,’ writes Caitlin Moran in How to Build a Girl. ‘They are hard-handed, oily and unperfumed in manual labour. They drudge so hard they look 50 at 30. I would have been in a factory, or a field, with no books, music or trains down to London. I would have been one of a million sad cattle, standing in the rain, wholly unrecorded.’

She and I escaped, but for millions of girls — and boys — like us, it’s history once more.

The post Born to be famous appeared first on The Spectator.

Pity the modern starlet. Be she steaming-hot pop-tart or reality-show show-off, her range of emotional experiences will, thanks mostly to the gentlemen of the press, be strictly limited. She will have ‘lonely hells’ (often but not always linked to ‘drug hells’), ‘sex romps’ (sometimes ‘three-in-a-bed’) and watch her life ‘spiralling out of control’. She will then be ‘hurting’ and probably have a ‘public meltdown’, after which she will be certain to make ‘time for me’ and hopefully end up in ‘a good place’.

But throughout this, come rain or shine — come probiotic yoghurt endorsement or cover of OK! magazine — the backbeat of her life will repeat the same monotonous note: The One, The One, The One … and the ceaseless cycle of searching for and celebrating the same. It’s what we used to call ‘serial monogamy’, held a desperate beat too long and turned into a belief system. The phrase has now reached such critical mass that a current TV advertisement plays with what our expectations of what The One must be; a gooey girl’s voice informs us that Kate has found The One, and that they’ve been on holiday to Mexico together, thereby making her friends jealous. In a stroke of kinky and/or surreal logic, The One is finally revealed to be … a satchel? Lady Bracknell might not approve, but Dorothy Parker might conclude that Kate was rather clever to put her eggs in one basket rather than one bastard.

Definitions in the Urban Dictionary of The One include ‘The person you know you’re going to love forever’, ‘Absolutely, positively the only person on earth you are meant to be with; soul mate and best friend’ and ‘the person you spend your whole life looking for’. And also, with the bracing effect of a particularly piquant pepper spray in a smug mug, ‘To like him/her over all the rest. Could pertain to being the one for life … or the one for the moment.’ For the moment! You can practically hear the outraged braying of the One-botherers ring out across Christendom. Though for me, this is a perfect summing up of romantic love at its best.

But when did The One become such a be-all, end-all and know-all of female aspiration? I believe that (unlike body-con dresses and seeing knuckle-dragging footballers as some sort of sexual El Dorado) this is one contemporary tic which can’t be blamed on reality TV totty, though they may pursue this particular nugget of fool’s gold most noisily and publicly. No, the rotten roots of the current craze for seeing romantic relationships as a cross between a padded cell and a three-legged race began a long time ago.

Increasingly these days, surveying the soft parade of modern life, I think of the old G.K. Chesterton chestnut: ‘When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.’ This seems particularly true of romantic love — we expect it to fill the hollow places (and not just the obvious ones) where previously we might have welcomed a deity. Until comparatively recently, there were ‘three of us’ to quote Princess Diana, in every marriage; it was a sacrament which the Almighty witnessed and a promise made to Him as much as to the spouse, in the knowledge that passion lasts a few years but The Passion never dies.

It might have seemed all fun, fine and dandy deconsecrating and deconstructing marriage, getting spliced on theme park rides and underwater, but removing the religious (I hate the word ‘spiritual’; it denotes a sad-sack who doesn’t inhale and drinks decaf) element from marriage has made it far more claustrophobic than it was before, rendering it something of a psychotic seesaw. Let me stress that this is not some pathetic paean to the entirely fictional Good Old Days. I am a creature of — and one in love with — the modern world; as I always says, ‘If the past was so great, how come it’s history?’ Though I am a believer, some of my best friends are hardcore atheists, and anyone with a brain understands that a society with too little religion is far more likely to be free, healthy and yes, righteous than one with too much.

But I do think that the removal of the idea of the Almighty from society in general — and romantic relationships in particular — has left people more likely to seek superhuman solace from mere mortals — The One! — and be bitterly disappointed when they inevitably find them to be less than perfect. Liz Jones, one of the most relationship-obsessed yet man-hating of our newspaper columnists, goes so far as to capitalise the words He and Him when complaining about her current pash — not Adonai, but a middle-aged baker with a grey ponytail going under the unfortunate name of D(avid) Scrace. In place of proper feminism, there is a real rage at men from women who would in no way consider themselves militant, a real anger that men can’t be everything — provider, co-parent, best mate, sex beast — and fix everything. And the fetishisation of The One adds to this claustrophobic climate of discontent in modern marriage.

I would be very upset indeed if my husband — who I have been with for nearly 20 years and adore — and I broke up. But do I think that we would each be alone for ever, mooing in the wilderness, because we’d lost The One? Not on your nelly! If you believe that someone has so many fine qualities that you love them, you surely believe they’d easily find loads of other people who saw the same in them. (And as for oneself, of course, this goes without saying.) Peter Ustinov brilliantly said of friends that they are ‘not necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who get there first’. The same is true of lovers; it’s more like ‘The Queue’ than the ‘The One’. Do not seek the meaning of life in the dear, fallible creature lying next to you; instead, look upwards.

The post When did romantic love become a religion? appeared first on The Spectator.

In the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM (‘More stars than there are in the heavens’) was rumoured to have had a very strange chart on his wall. This graph, allegedly, kept a record of the menstrual cycles of the studio’s leading ladies: Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, Grace Kelly and the rest. By consulting it, directors and cameramen knew when their precious cargo might be feeling a mite tearful and would ruin her make-up if spoken to sharply, or when her skin might not be in the best condition for a big close-up.

Some mornings when I come back from my husband’s place, sit down at my computer and eagerly turn to Facebook, I wonder if I too should nip down to the office supply shop and buy a bunch of graph paper — not in order to track the state of the silken skin of sirens (nice work if you can get it) but rather to help keep me up to speed vis à vis the screaming sirens of Facebook feuds, as they reverse over speed-bumps with their horns on, over and over, just like a gaggle of selfie-snapping monkeys with miniature cymbals. I love a good scrap as much as the next media whore, but sometimes even I feel myself wilting in weary disbelief when I see what’s been kicking off overnight.

Don’t get me wrong — I love Facebook. Just when I’m convinced that the internet is the main domain of a gang of mass escapees from Broadmoor, the amazingly agile minds of my Facebook friends shimmy by and like a bedazzled dancing bear I stumble after them. My best barbs are long-blunted in booze and self-satisfaction — but being with these glittering ghosts is like being young again, without the boring or embarrassing bits. I don’t tweet, but that’s mostly because the first night I did (there was actually a petition, on change.org, started by the Observer’s Eva Wiseman, to force me on to it) I got into seven scraps in the first hour and realised that I didn’t need another excuse not to write my novel.

But devoted though I am to Facebook, the level of feuding which I’ve experienced recently in my immediate circle of female friends — people I met through FB but have since pressed the flesh of and consider to be mates — has reached fever pitch. Or rather, PMT pitch. Recently, I got back to one particularly vicious skirmish, dreading what I would find, only to be informed by one of the feudees that she and her foresworn enemy had both started their ‘periods’ and were now bosom buds. Too much info — though Louis B. would have appreciated it. Elsewhere, another ‘friend’ posted rabidly jealous comments whenever I Facebooked photos of myself out and about with other amigos. Mrs Patrick Campbell famously called marriage ‘the deep, deep peace of the double-bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue’; I have come to see it as the slow dark ride of sexual companionship after the helter-skelter of female friendship.

I can see that some people might think I’m being a bitch to be bitching about bitches, as a good part of my career has been built on flagrant bitchiness. But my scraps have been about something — usually about calling out broads I saw to be bullying other women. I took on Dawn French when she made the ludicrous claim that ‘Big women do sex fantastically well’ (bitch-point: thin women are bad in bed) and Camille Paglia when she dismissed just about every living human with a vagina except Madonna (the starstruck old stick!) But so much modern bitching can be boiled down to two un-burning issues: ‘She looked at me funny’ and/or ‘You like her better than me’. Ick, ick, and thrice again ick!

Where does all this tiny-minded toxicity in female friendship come from? Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol’s film director, had a theory that the young Americans he met took so many drugs because they had been the first generation of generally healthy babies and, perversely, wanted to test themselves by inflicting ill-health upon themselves. Are the first generation of women to take the sisterhood as a given attempting to taste the forbidden fruit of cat-fighting through Facebook feeding frenzies? Once women have said how ‘strong’ and ‘supportive’ they are, do they feel they have a blank cheque to act like a menopausal mean girl? An experiment once showed that people who buy ‘green’ and ‘ethical’ products may be prone to acting in a shady way in other parts of their lives; does posting inspirational FB messages about kindness and karma mean it’s OK to go around slagging off other women?

Is it because modern women don’t have enough hobbies? Women like to mock men’s friendships, saying that they’re shallow and mostly about football and video games, but is that so bad? It certainly seems to contribute to them not getting their knickers in a twist over their mates. When I asked my husband whether he’d be upset if one of his mates went out for a drink with another mate and not him, his face was a picture. So many female friendships seem to be about emotion, pure and simple — except it hardly ever is those two things. And we all know that the over–examined life is not worth living.

Reading about Theresa May’s new ‘Cinderella’ law, I wondered if there would be any chance of using it against one’s ugly-hearted ‘sisters’ as well as men. I’m not one of these halfwits who says ‘O, female flack is worse because it’s psychological!’ It’s not — two women a week killed aren’t killed by being unfriended on Facebook. But I do know that while I have experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from men, I have also experienced jealousy, possessiveness, verbal abuse and violence from women — usually when I failed to respond to their advances. Of course the former was worse — being beaten up by a man is far scarier than having a bitch-fight with someone of your own strength, and usually comes without the handy advantage of earring-pulling. But the sisterhood warns you about the first, whereas the second is swept under the carpet in the name of feminism.

I don’t hate the old-style bitchiness, which is plain in its intent, and which knows itself. How could I — that would be self-loathing! But I am repelled by modern passive-aggressive bitchery as demonstrated by the spiritual slop-buckets who post pictures of sunsets with ‘positive’ messages and then stick the boot in, all the while telling mates that they are ‘worried’ about one.

Dame Edna got it completely when she would destroy a female member of her audience from head to toe, then murmur: ‘And I mean that in a caring, nurturing way.’ All I’m asking for is a good, fair fight — one that isn’t based on jealousy, envy or any of the other things that add nothing to the quality of life or the gaiety of nations but actually drain and corrupt our daily lives, and which pass as bitching in these dog-end days. Remember, ladies, ugliness goes to the bone, no matter how many smiley face emoticons you slap on to the surface.

The post A slap in the Facebook appeared first on The Spectator.

My husband and I stay for a week most summers in Portmeirion, the strangest and loveliest ‘village’ in the world. Built amid 20 miles of woodland on the peninsula of Tremadog Bay in Wales, it was called ‘a home for fallen buildings’ by its creator Clough Williams-Ellis, a local landowner. It was opened in 1926, and George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell were early visitors; Noël Coward wrote Blithe Spirit here in 1941. I won’t try to describe it; if you’ve never seen it, just google it and prepare to be astonished.

But oy, the drive! In the past we’ve motored from Brighton through Birmingham, a trip of more than eight hours. This time, we stopped at a hotel near Shrewsbury created by Williams-Ellis for luvvies who couldn’t make it all the way without a dry martini or a wet wash: the Mytton and Mermaid.

The mermaid is the symbol of Portmeirion — but the Mytton bit is nowhere near as enchanting. ‘Mad Jack’ Mytton was a local squire who devoted his life to causing havoc; he took 2,000 bottles of port to Cambridge, predictably leaving without a degree, and his favourite dogs were fed on steak and champagne. He once rode a bear into his drawing room; she bit him on the leg and survived, but later attacked a servant and was put down. He killed a horse by forcing it to drink port; he threw his wife’s lapdog into a fire and died bankrupt in jail. Still, what a gorgeous place the hotel is! We sat in the grounds drinking martinis in the blazing sun by the river Severn before a lovely dinner at ‘Mad Jack’s Bar’.

It would take us just two more hours to reach Portmeirion, and we were soon driving through Snowdonia where, last year, a bunch of al-Qa’eda wannabes from Luton took several trips in order to prepare themselves for Afghanistan. I wonder what the sheep made of them.

There are two hotels at Portmeirion, but I prefer the self-catering option (there’s a sentence I never dreamt I’d write). We stay at a house called White Horses, right on the estuary, which is where Patrick McGoohan lived while making The Prisoner. There are 15 cottages here, and although normal inside, they are topped and tailed by the most astonishing sugared-almond carapaces, domes and spires, neoclassical colonnades and Ionic columns. It’s all set in weird and wonderful woodland featuring dancing trees, ghost gardens and a dogs’ cemetery where Miss Adelaide Haig, who lived in the mansion which became the Portmeirion Hotel with no one but her dogs (reading them the scriptures from behind a screen each Sunday), buried her pets.

Up to 3,000 visitors a day can arrive in the summer, but they leave at dusk and then this wonderland is inhabited by the fortunate residents of the hotels and cottages. Some reviewers on TripAdvisor have complained that there is ‘nothing to do’ here. If your idea of fun is running with the bulls, you might find it tame. But I am with Williams-Ellis, who called beauty ‘that strange necessity’, and am happy just to sit and stare and sip.

He who is tired of London isn’t necessarily tired of life — just tired of ceaseless noise, overcrowded streets and the sight of Boris on that stupid bike. The first time I came to Portmeirion I was necking a considerable amount of ecstasy, and thought that this might well be influencing my reaction. Well, I’m tired of E, and I’m certainly tired of London. But the day I tire of Portmeirion, you can plant me in the dogs’ cemetery and be done with it.

The post Portmeirion appeared first on The Spectator.

Watching the recent footage of Islamic State gang members haggling over the price of captured Christian women in a makeshift slave market — one of them wants a 15-year-old with green eyes, another wants to exchange a girl for a gun — I was reminded that Islamists are at least consistent in their hateful worldview and in a way uniquely honest. Even a terror gang as vile as the IRA tried to keep a lid on the rapes and paedophilia going on within its rancid ranks. But when Amnesty International first claimed in September that Isis were enslaving and abusing ‘hundreds, if not thousands’ of Yazidi women and children, it only took the group a few weeks to admit to the practice in their English language magazine, Dabiq, and breezily post videos of themselves doing just that.

Yet there are still a considerable number of people on the left making excuses for them — mostly at the Guardian, the house magazine of ‘the silly led by the sinister’, as the sainted Christopher Hitchens called the Not In My Name marchers. And with Isis so frank about its own foulness, I’ve come to the conclusion that certain strange types are so sympathetic to Islamism not despite the way it treats women — but, at least partly, because of it.

There are other reasons, of course. The western left has been a busted flush for so long, caught up in its own eternal infighting, that it must feel good to be on a side apparently winning with old-fashioned brute force. Then there’s our old mate paint-chart politics: choose the side with the darkest skin on principle, no matter how their belief systems actually treat people; thus democratic Israel, which gives full civil rights to women and gays, is worse than the countries which surround it, which don’t but are darker. In Darfur, of course, the left were thrown a curveball when it turned out that the Arab Muslims were terrorising the black Christians. Um, Islam good, Christianity bad but hang on, Christians darker here! DOES NOT COMPUTE!

But, to get all Freudian, I think a lot of the reason that some left-wing men seem to have so much time for Islamism is to do not with race but sex — specifically, with suppressed feelings of resentment towards the march of feminism, which they could never in a million years admit to. After years of being yelled at by female comrades whenever they inquired about the likelihood of a hot beverage being imminent, imagine how excited they must get watching big bad men in balaclavas selling ‘slave girls’ in a sweltering marketplace. It’s like T.E Lawrence getting his dish-dosh in a twist over all those Arab boys you could buy for the price of a melon, and boys called Barnaby fetishising the most woman-hating type of rap music in the pop press, and middle-class man-boys who’ve never been in a fight telling rape jokes — only far, far worse.

Ever since the Black Panther Stokely Carmichael said in 1966 that ‘the only position for women in the struggle is prone’, it would have to be a very silly leftie lass indeed who has not cottoned on that sexism can beat in the most apparently comradely brother’s breast. The first sign that the metropolitan left (which had spent the previous 30 years telling white working-class people how stupid and backward they were for being sexist, homophobic and insular) could have a chronic crush on a belief which specialised in being sexist, homophobic and insular came when Ken Livingstone cosied up to the odious Yusuf al-Qaradawi in 2004. Livingstone is a man not averse to the idea of a man having several wives, one feels, having had five children by three women. Then there’s Gorgeous George Galloway, whose revolutionary spirit seems quite able to contain the contradictions of both sucking up to an ultra-conservative religion and saying, in 2012, of the Julian Assange affair, ‘Not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion.’ And they said romance was dead.

As Assange and Russell Brand (weirdly linked by the Muslim convert Jemima Goldsmith Khan, who was the bailswoman of one and the lover of the other) prove, many men believe that once you’ve ticked the Brotherhood of Man box on your spiritual census, this gives you the right to be as big a bastard as you like towards women. Yes, some of their collective cultural cringe is stupid guilt about being white and western — the sort of poltroon who, if they happened across their dear grey-haired old mother being ‘roasted’ by al-Qa’eda at one end and Isis at the other, would ask ‘What did she do to make these innocent young lads act in such an uncharacteristic fashion?’ — but a lot of it, I believe, is sheer sexual wish fulfilment.

‘But there are women involved, who choose to become Islamists? How do you explain that?’ I can hear Laurie Penny (like Khan, another privileged half-Jewish girl who briefly got a thrill from donning a hijab but is also now happily ensconced back in her world of freedom and privilege — unlike the millions of poor women condemned to life in a shroud) squeal indignantly. Well, let’s face it, all those copies of Fifty Shades of Grey didn’t buy themselves. Serial rapists and killers on Death Row are never short of female attention, regrettably. Whatever, this mixture of sadists, masochists, gangsters, dupes, fruit-loops and pimps is turning out to be one big happy Manson family.

Good luck apologising for them, all you gutless western lefties — but you can put your fingers in your ears and sell out other sections of humanity all you like, and squeeze your eyes shut like a child in a storm, determined to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil — and still that evil storm may come at you with hands like knives one day. Look what they did to an Islamic convert on a humanitarian mission to help Muslims. You think they wouldn’t do it to you?

The post The hate that dare not speak its name appeared first on The Spectator.

It’s always interesting when people succeed in two different arenas — like Mike Nesmith’s mum, who gave the world both a Monkee and Tippex, or Hedy Lamarr, the beautiful film star who also helped develop wireless communication, or Paul Winchell, the voice of Tigger who also invented the artificial heart. (If only he’d played the Tin Man in The Wizard Of Oz!) William Moulton Marston created both the cartoon heroine Wonder Woman and the lie detector machine, though by the time I had finished this book I was wondering how he found the time or the energy to do either.

To my generation, Wonder Woman is most famous for being played by the former Miss World USA Lynda Carter in the 1970s television series, wearing the bare minimum of pre-watershed clothing; a patriotic pin-up girl, as the theme song explained; ‘In your satin tights, fighting for your rights — and the red, white and blue!’ But she was conceived by Marston as a feminist symbol, an Amazon from a man-free land who ‘came to the United States to fight for peace, justice and women’s rights’. It’s a bit like finding out that Barbie was a post-dated Pankhurst plant to get women into the workplace.

Coincidentally I was reading a book called Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit when this hefty tome rocked up, and was just embarking on the section about Marston himself. Describing him as ‘irrepressibly optimistic’, it goes on to claim that the lie detector, or ‘polygraph machine’ as it was more pompously known, was so useless that in 1986 when Aldrich Ames, a CIA operative spying for the USSR, informed his paymasters that the government intended to give him a routine polygraph test, they simply advised him to get a good night’s sleep and relax. He did so and passed — and passed again, in 1991, when the CIA were carrying out a search for an internal mole (i.e. Ames himself).

We generally think of snake-oil salesmen as coming from humble origins and turning into fantabulists through financial greed, but Marston’s was a full-on blue-blooded Bostonian background with the flashes of pure American gothic such a heritage often holds. His mother was one of five sisters whose father, after the only son of the family had died, built a whole turreted medieval-mode mansion and closeted himself in the tallest of its towers to write a treatise entitled The Moulton Annals, in which he traced his family back to the Battle of Hastings. His grandson would carry on these traditions of eccentricity and self-importance; the book starts weird and gets weirder.

For instance, WMM married his teenage sweetheart, bluestocking Sadie, who he puzzlingly calls ‘Betty’ — but then set up a ménage à trois with a young suffragette student of his, Olive Byrne, giving his allegedly feminist wife an ultimatum to join in or bail out. (There they are, in Olive’s graduation
photographs, looking creepily like her parents.)

Reading this, I was reminded of Russell Brand’s brand of revolutionary talk and old-school alpha-male sexism, and of smug men wearing ‘This is What a Feminist Looks Like’ T-shirts, and of The Handmaid’s Tale. Olive Byrne never finished her PhD because she was too busy bringing up the Marston baby.

Still, the trio must have had their fun along the way — they were right goers, and kinky as all get-out. An unusual amount of Marston’s research seemed to involve ‘restraining’ women and Wonder Woman ends up bound and/or caged more often than you might think credible even for your average superhero. Early in the book, Olive the student takes her professor Marston to a sorority initiation where inductees were required to dress up as babies, be blindfolded and beaten with long sticks. (And I thought my comp was rough!)

Lepore’s voice is fresh, clear and often cheeky despite its scholarliness; ‘It sounds a little filthy,’ she remarks of a poem the young Marston sent his wife. This is a truly gorgeous book — beautiful to have and to hold, with lovely little black-and-white photos on most pages — as well as a sumptuous colour cartoon section. It is brilliantly written and splendidly researched. As well as learning lots about Wonder Woman, I picked up many fascinating facts about 20th-century social history: for instance, that all feminists were suffragettes but not all suffragettes were feminists; psychology started as a branch of philosophy; the Age of Aquarius was invented in 1908, not by the Sixties musical Hair; most members of the orginal Birth Control League were Republicans and Rotarians; the word ‘gay’ to indicate a (female) homosexual orginated in the 1920s, not in modern times, despite the fuming of uptight busybodies in the 1970s about how the English language was being robbed of a fine, innocent word by a bunch of in-crowd inverts; Margaret Sanger, the pioneer birth-control fan, married a millionaire in order to finance her feminist crusading — talk about taking one for the team.

‘One tragedy of feminism in the 20th century was the way its history seemed to be disappearing,’ Lepore writes in the final chapter; as anyone with the slightly knowledge of feminism today knows, this is still true. She refers to ‘feminists trashing each other’ in the 1970s and 1980s; they still are. It could be seen as the world’s longest cat-fight — or simply as proof that women are as individual as men.

One of the modern battles is between anti-porn crusaders and pro-porn suck-ups; one wonders what side Marston would have been on. What a shame his harem didn’t try out his polygraph test on him. Because surely even such a gimcrack gimmick could have told them that Marston’s plans for women were far more to do with his getting his end away than their achieving equality. WMM hog-tied by his own creation’s Golden Lasso of Truth; that would have been a sight worth seeing.

The post Bound and caged, but fighting-fit appeared first on The Spectator.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Mark Steyn is sort of a hairy, successful version of me— a civilised, larky type of chap who was just tootling along minding his own biz and scribbling about his favourite show-tunes when — crash, bang, wallop! — he found himself on the frontline of commentating on the clash of civilisations. He is obsessed with the fact that Islamism poses the greatest risk to peace, progress and piano bars since the second world war and is unable to comprehend why so many people seem so bovinely oblivious to this fact.

Like Richard Littlejohn — another fine, undervalued writer — he is unfashionable, not using 20 words when two will do and never apologising for being alive. I don’t agree with him on everything — but who fears being challenged in their beliefs except someone not entirely secure in them? I’m with him — as I am with Melanie Phillips — on foreign affairs, while differing drastically with him over domestic matters — abortion, the family. But (unlike Phillips) Steyn’s tone is so light and breezy that you are lulled into a chummy sense of accord — only to have him turn on a sixpence.

It’s as though one minute you’re nattering over the garden fence to a neighbour, dishing the dirt on the weirdo down the road, and the next minute he’s waving a gun at you; Steyn approves of firearms, and is a fount of information on the benefits of the right to bear them. He fawns over the British monarchy a bit too effusively for my liking — but maybe it is something to do with being Canadian. Anyway, I was occasionally reminded of the words of Miss Jean Brodie: ‘For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.’

And Steyn’s writing is so rompily gorgeous that you can forgive him a bit of chest-beating and rifle-riffing. ‘If you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there; if you can remember the Seventies, chances are you aren’t here.’ ‘The photographs of Studio 54’s celebrity couples are like a computer breakdown at a dating agency — William Burroughs and Madonna; Regine and Salvador Dalí; Margaret Trudeau on the floor with marijuana-importer Tom Sullivan.’ Steyn likes to bait Horrified of Hampstead, pricking Guardian pomposity like a clown on crystal meth at a balloon-filled birthday party; after the ludicrous Jaffa Cake-heir George Monbiot has hymned the happiness of poor people in Ethiopia (does that mean socialism, which seeks to make the poor richer, is bad?) Steyn smirks: ‘In Ethiopia, male life expectancy is 42.88 years. George was born in 1963. If the streets and fields are crackling with laughter, maybe it’s because the happy peasants are reading his column.’ Monbiot is joined in the sniggering stocks by his colleague Decca Aitkenhead when Steyn pillories her for her profoundly thick take on Jamaican homophobia which is summed up with the classically stupid Guardian headline ‘Their homophobia is our fault’. I have to say, I fair hugged myself with glee at that one.

Some of the more surreal sketches are a bit trying (in both senses of the word), but when he hits his target it makes you wince on behalf of the bullseye. His takedown of the odious Edward Kennedy is total, but starts with the unlikely object of a foot-rest. But it’s on the Islamist threat that he is at his best. Read this without feeling that a heavily-veiled goose has walked over your grave:

A world that becomes more Muslim becomes less everything else. First it’s Jews, already abandoning France. Then it’s homosexuals, already under siege from gay-bashing in Amsterdam, ‘the most tolerant city in Europe’. Then it’s uncovered women, targetted for rape in Oslo. And if you don’t any longer have any Jews or (officially) any gays or (increasingly) uncovered women, there are always just Christians in general, from Nigeria to Egypt to Pakistan. More space for Islam means less space for everything else, and in the end for you.

There are also a few fun facts along the way; for instance, did you know that the Graham Cracker, beloved of our American cousins, was originally conceived as a weapon against self-abuse? You’ll laugh, you’ll sigh, you’ll learn something. And you’ll whistle a bracing Broadway melody while you go about doing your bit in the ‘End Of Days’ scenario which Steyn sketches so convincingly and, yes, so entertainingly.

The post A clown on crystal meth appeared first on The Spectator.

As a provincial teenage virgin with ideas so far above my station that they gave me vertigo, I frequently reflected bitterly that whoever coined the phrase ‘Schooldays are the best days of your life’ must have come to that conclusion after being involved in a serious car-crash the evening following their last day at school, probably rendering them a tetraplegic. And the little thing which summed up how thoroughly inappropriate it was was the horridness of name tags. All the wondrous beings I had it in me to be, written off by my mum’s humdrum hand in those four syllables: Julie Burchill.

Then and there, I took a violent dislike to clothing with writing on. In the 1980s I was repelled by the rise of designer clothing. Excuse me, but who ever dreamt of growing up to be a sandwich-board man, with all respect? It got even worse when the author’s message took over; top of my loathe list was the trendy tat-touter Katharine Hamnett, whose infamous T-shirts — CHOOSE LIFE, 58% DON’T WANT PERSHING— made my eyes cross in fury.

Imagine my glee when my second husband’s bezzie starting sleeping with her and we were asked over for ‘supper’; we’d barely sat down before she was dropping bons mots. ‘The young poor dress so much better than the young rich,’ she drawled. ‘That’s because the young poor can’t afford your clothes!’ I came right back. She had her boy toy show us the door, but I’ve often recalled that evening when I pass yet another halfwit walking down the street bearing the legend NO WAR, SAVE THE FUTURE or, best of all, NO MORE FASHION VICTIMS in big black letters on a baggy white T.

Most of all, I think of the immortal words of Fran Lebowitz: ‘If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?’ When I see someone wearing clothing with words on my first reaction is usually, ‘Ooo, I bet you’re really boring!’

It’s not just clothes with legends or logos on, either; it is my experience generally that the more trouble people take with their appearance, the duller the company they are. I make an exception for young things in their teens and twenties, of course, who are still in that adorable ‘the wonder of me’ phase, and who quite understandably want to gild the lily before it fades. But I am firmly of the opinion that women who fuss over their appearance in middle age (unless they are entertainers or prostitutes) are rather sad, as one should surely have something more substantial to recommend one by this time — such as kindness, spite or cleverness.

Fully functioning human beings express themselves through their words and their actions; only the voiceless are reduced to expressing themselves through the way they look. The dictionary’s first definition of the word ‘statement’ is the best: a definite or clear expression of something in speech or writing. Yet we are now offered the chance to buy statement necklaces and statement earrings and be told by Fearne Cotton — a 33-year-old woman — that ‘I like a red lip against a white dress as it makes a statement.’ Yes — it tells us that you wore red lipstick and a white dress. The words ‘female eunuch’ come to mind when confronted with such cretinism, but never more than when faced with the trend of writers and books — the opposite of looks — being co-opted into such shallow show-offery. Bella Freud’s GINSBERG IS GOD T-shirt may as well have I AM A SUB-LITERATE HALFWIT printed on the back. And as for carrying a clutch bag made in the image of a book — words fail me.

It’s not just the clothes on your back and the bag in your hand which beg for attention in lieu of personality these days, though. The new director of Tiffany, Francesca Amfitheatrof, says quite shamelessly: ‘Jewellery is a way of expressing your personality, sometimes telegraphing your social status and, ultimately, making your mark in a tangible, beautiful way.’ You can eat your words, too, by having your name printed on a jar of Nutella for less than a fiver, or waste £50 on a personalised silver Marmite jar lid. The Times reported recently that retailers reported a steep rise in the demand for ‘personalisation’, which has become ‘a right rather than a privilege’, according to retail analysts.

In a more confident era, Andy Warhol wrote:

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Perhaps now that it is closing time in the gardens of the West and we contemplate a Chinese-led future, our fear of anonymity leads us to insist, over and over through the medium of monograms, that we are not numbers but free men — and here’s our personalised Coke to prove it. A third of us, according to a recent survey, feel that we are denied free speech on important issues such as immigration, religion, moral and ethical issues; never mind, sling a monogrammed Cambridge satchel over your shoulder and you’re good to go, right down that road to nowhere.

The problem is that visual signalling is an utterly useless way of establishing identity — not waving but drowning — because only ‘a definite or clear expression of something in speech or writing’ can do this. And it is crack cocaine to the insecure; I know without doubt that I am interesting and un-usual — why would I ever visit a beauty site called Feel Unique, or buy a perfume called Original (‘to inspire you to rediscover your uniqueness’) or knit a personalised Whistles beanie hat (£45 for the kit)?

Imagination, wit, originality; these are the qualities that can build a better life, both for individuals and for cultures. Rely on your possessions to express yourself, however, and you might as well walk alongside someone wearing a T-shirt bearing that immortal legend I’M WITH STUPID. Now there’s a logo I thoroughly approve of.

The post Fashion statement appeared first on The Spectator.

I’ve never lived with a man I didn’t marry: Tweedledee, 1979–1984, and Tweedledum, 1984–1995. (The names have been changed to irritate the pair of them.) So when I left my second union and moved to Brighton to chase the man who is now my third (and hopefully final) husband, I was keen to establish and keep separate households. I was quite pleased to find that not only was I having a blast seeing Daniel while maintaining a maverick social life (he didn’t want to be in a swimming pool full of drunken, shrieking girls’n’gays any more than I wanted to be in a room full of game-playing, beer-drinking men) but was apparently part of a growing social phenomenon.

A 2005 study from Oxford University found that the UK had two million ‘Living Apart Togethers’ (Lats — unfortunate name, making us sound like some tardy, overpriced beverage); poster children for this trend soon emerged in the somewhat wearyingly eccentric Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter, who lived in two adjoining townhouses in north London.

They were, truth be told, a welcome replacement for and distraction from the previous holders of the honour, Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, whose Lat union had started out so bravely. As the New York Times had it, in 1991: ‘They are not married, neither do they live together; their apartments face each other across Central Park. When they began to date, they would wave towels out the window as they spoke on the phone, delighting in saying they could see the other.’

O tempora! O mores! What began as a brave new sunlit experiment, a stroll in Central Park, a dream of artistic and personal freedom and fidelity, ended in swerving, perving and tears before separate bedtimes when Woody made free with Mia’s daughter — a young woman, one notes, who despite her tender years and empty pockets broached no silly modern concepts such as Latting when she bagged Allen.

That both Farrow and Bonham Carter (who has now separated from Burton) were somewhat indebted to their boyfriends for work in an industry which is not kind to older actresses adds an additional air of retrospect-ive desperation to both set-ups. Were semi-detached relationships what either of these women wanted, or a compromise they made with more powerful men insistent on their own ‘space’?

I’m certainly not looking for my husband to give me a job, though it doesn’t hurt that he is, by trade, a grammarian — probably the most rigorous grammarian in both East and West Sussex. (Once he punctuates one, one stays punctuated.) As a Swedish journalist once said to me with the forthrightness which is a feature of her countrywomen, ‘How convenient for you! Like a prostitute being married to an STD doctor.’ But in our 20th year together, I’ve finally moved into his flat in a gorgeous seafront square. I’m not smug; for all I know it could be over by springtime. Who’s to say whether the nigh-on two decades of hell-raising, mickey-taking and five-star sun-chasing that have made my life with Daniel such a riot will stand the test of the badly rinsed coffee cup (mine) or the atmospheric ashtray (his) — those mute witnesses of household banality which put romance in the dock daily and find it guilty of going awol?

But luckily, I’m not keen on romance; I prefer fun and sex, and from what I’ve seen romance is often the bed-wetting enemy of both. Surely my dearth of female trouble, added to the separate bedrooms and bathrooms, will work towards ensuring that we get along.

And the fact that I am a lark and Dan is an owl. I have only two speeds; full-tilt and stock-still; when I’m not up all night, I’m in bed by sundown, whereas Dan works regular hours and then likes to enjoy his leisure time at leisure. I do like to burst upon my husband as a revelation each day, as Saki put it, and the different hours we keep ensure that we are not permanently in one another’s way.

I thought I’d like it, but in my second week here, I’m loving it. And if it doesn’t work out, I can move on in the springtime — to Tel Aviv or Tenerife, chasing the sun, or maybe just around the corner, though I’d still be keen on staying married. But I have a feeling that this time, at long last, I’m going to stay.

The post Singles match appeared first on The Spectator.

Looking at the brightly coloured front cover of this book, I felt cheerful; turning it over and seeing the word ‘gender’, my heart sank. When I was a kiddy in the early 1970s, the word (especially when combined with ‘bending’) seemed full of fun and flighty possibilities — David Bowie in a dress, Marc Bolan flouncing about on Top of the Pops like a little girl at her birthday party, Danny La Rue making my mum snort Snowball down her nose on a Saturday night.

Now gender-bending appears to have boiled down to a bunch of hatchet-faced transsexuals demanding to use the Ladies, ‘no-platforming’ veteran feminists who have worked all their lives to better the lot of women and children, and generally telling born females what to do. Not so much bending as bossing, and definitely no fun at all.

But in the wake of the success of the Divine Caitlin, all feminism must show willing on the fun front, so the back-cover blurb of Girls Will be Girls insists that the contents are ‘hilarious’. I’m always a bit doubtful about this claim by a book about itself. Isn’t it rather like giving oneself a nickname? I must say I suppressed a shudder as I read on:

Emer O’Toole once caused a media sensation by growing her body hair and singing ‘Get Your Pits Out for the Lads’ on national TV. You might think she’s crazy — but she has lessons for us all.

Oh dear — as in ‘You Don’t Have to be Crazy to Work Here, but it Helps’,the bore’s eternal mantra.

You can’t blame publishers for wanting to have their very own Caitlin Moran, any more than you could blame record labels in the 1960s for wanting their very own Scouse pop-combo in the wake of the Fab Four. There must be a bit of personal stuff, showing the writer up as a ‘lovable klutz’, then a bit of feminist theory, with a spoonful of selfie making the mis old medicine go down.

Laurie Penny’s Unspeakable Things was the bed-wetting version, for sensitive, privately educated young women who could fearlessly look anorexia and self-harming in the eye but just couldn’t identify with coming from Wolverhampton. Lena Dunham’s was the Yank bourgeoise boho angle — complete with sexually investigating your sisters because you were a perve rather than sharing a bed with your sisters because you were poor. And now here’s Girls Will be Girls, whose author is a sort of Freddy and the Dreamers to Moran’s Mop-Tops (and even has a similar Gaelic-sounding name).

On the very first page a teenage O’Toole has ‘just made a dick of herself in front of the entire school’, and though this is meant to be a bit of aw-shucks-folks-I’m-no-dry-old-theorist business, it just made me feel weary dread that O’Toole was about to continue her dickhood as a career path. (It’s a really odd sensation to feel bored by a book when you’ve barely cleared the first paragraph.) She has her hair done, she gets her body hair removed and she applies make up — calling this ‘an experiment in gender-performativity’. It’s like bin men being called waste technicians. But if you don’t empty the bins they’re going to stink — and if you have nothing new to say, neither does your book.

Despite all the look-at-me-I’m-wearing-odd-socks zaniness, there is a definite whiff of the campus cry-bully about this book; there’s actually a TRIGGER WARNING! on page 183. (My first: now I truly feel part of the intersectional community.) Though younger than Moran, O’Toole lacks Caitlin’s inherent teenage joyousness and comes across more like a trendy teacher wearing ethnic earrings and trying to get down with the youth by playing grime in the classroom. (Every so often, when the kids get over-rowdy she bursts out that ‘There’s always one who has to spoil it for everyone else!’) When she boasts of being bisexual, it’s hard not to snigger; it’s like someone boasting about being able to hop. So what?

Her publishers claim that ‘Emer O’Toole is the perfect mix of Caitlin Moran, Germaine Greer and Lena Dunham’. Leaving aside the odd, un-feminist, people-pleasing use of the word ‘perfect’, I could claim this too — because I swear, I’m old and I’m fat. But I’m not that thing, and neither is O’Toole. She apparently has ‘a PhD in theatre studies’ — and this reads very much like a book by someone who has tried and failed to make it as a performer. (No true writer uses the phrase ‘joking aside’ or the word ‘tummy’, surely?)

To give credit where it’s due, O’Toole is very pretty — and she made me laugh with her dedication: ‘For my brothers Ronan and Ciaran: never liked ye.’ I’ve never before singled out a book’s dedication page as its high point, so at least there’s one thing about this effort I liked among all its dreary, derivative dead wood.

Save your money, buy a bottle of whisky and re-read How to Be a Woman instead.

The post The absolute pits appeared first on The Spectator.

When I told my friends that I was planning to attend a silent retreat, they all laughed. It’s true that I am something of a convivialist; my idea of heaven is a big table in a warm restaurant, the table shimmering with the laughter of friends and the glugging of wine, and me picking up the bill.

On the other hand, I was a solitary only child and I look back on those days with great fondness. Before the long stagger up the primrose path of pleasure started, the only companion I needed was a book; I well remember my mother crying because I preferred to sit in my room reading rather than hang around on street corners getting drunk and/or pregnant like a normal teenager. Imagine my dismay on discovering that the nearest silent retreat to me was a Catholic one, St Cuthman’s, within an hour of Brighton. But at least my antipathy to the religion would mean that there was no chance of me trying to engage anyone in theological debate, which might not be the case under the care of Protestants.

St Cuthman’s offers both quiet and silent retreats, but I decided that if I was going to do it, I was going to do it properly. I chose the 48-hour silent option on two weekdays in February; I didn’t take my laptop, just exercise books, my Hebrew textbooks and a carefully selected Iris Murdoch novel, A Fairly Honourable Defeat (hoping that the title wouldn’t be a self-fulfilling prophecy). In a Jacobean house smelling pleasingly of log fires, I found my monastic room — a single bed, a chair, a table — very restful. I sat down at the Catholic table and looked out over the Catholic lake with its Catholic swans, and felt pleasingly subversive as I tussled with Hebrew tenses.

After a while I went downstairs to be inducted, feeling mutinous. My mulishness grew as dishy blonde Mary-Jane, the director, told us over tea and biscuits that the house had once belonged to a community of Anglican missionaries and was ‘gifted’ to the Catholic Diocese of Arundel and Brighton when Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor was boss. As one whose idea of a good read is Foxe’s Book Of Martyrs, I felt my hackles rise, though I couldn’t actually pinpoint them on a map; even more so when I recalled that in the 1990s, O’Connor installed a paedophile priest, Father Michael Hill, in the chaplaincy at Gatwick Airport. Hill was subsequently convicted of sex attacks against nine children, some handicapped. So when Mary-Jane told us that we would be silent apart from our time with individual ‘spiritual directors’, I was just about ready to break out into a hearty chorus of ‘The Protestant Boys Are Loyal and True’, an instinct strengthened when M-J mentioned ‘Mass’. It’s childish, but I can’t hear the word without seeing an image of a sinister hooded being mucking about with a nubile girl on the cover of the Dennis Wheatley novels of my wasted youth. It was time for me to speak up.

‘I’d rather not be spiritually directed, thank you. Or attend prayers. Is it OK if I just read?’

M-J looked slightly surprised but said, ‘Of course!’

I went upstairs and started on the Murdoch. It happened straight away; I returned to the reading trance of my youth — not skimming, not speed reading, totally in the moment. What a relief! I read for hours and fell asleep, and woke up feeling very words-I-don’t-usually-use-ish: clarified, vivified, tranquil. In the spirit of getting with the programme, I perused the information folder: ‘Please note that we are not allowed to provide you with any medicines, not even an aspirin! You will be encouraged to call NHS Direct.’ As Mary-Jane had informed us earlier about the yearly pilgrimages to Lourdes that St Cuthman’s was involved in organising, I was disappointed that we weren’t encouraged to pray for a cure. I didn’t just stay in my room reading; I read in the hall, in front of a blazing fire, and in the drawing room, ditto. Most agreeably of all, I read in the library. My dedication to self-denial surprised me. I sneered at the payphone, and raised an eyebrow on finding instructions on where to get the best mobile signal in the grounds, and the nearest supplier of sweets and newspapers. As someone who has been spending like a sailor on shore leave for the past 30 years, it was strange to want nothing; not even the Neal’s Yard organic aroma-therapy candles jostling for attention with religious tracts in the modest shop — Balancing, Calming and Uplifting, £34.80 a throw — tempted me. I was relying on nothing more than the act of staring silently at a printed page to bring balance, calm and uplift.

Though I had fully intended to swerve the Papist hijinks in the nearby chapel, when the bell for morning prayers rang I found myself following the others; it seemed churlish not to give it a try. There was something moving about the plain trestle table with a candle at each end in front of a plain cross etched on a plain window — none of the frocked-up misogynists prancing around in thousands of pounds’ worth of bling and titfers I had expected. There were just six of us in the congregation, and Mary-Jane led the service sitting behind us rather than standing in front like a big old show-off: as we sang hymns, I thought of what Christians in the Middle East were going through, and I began to cry. (Silently, of course.)

This isn’t one of those I-was-lost-and-now-I’m-found sob stories; I wasn’t looking to be ‘healed’ and I’m not ‘stressed’ — my life is easy and enjoyable. The only ‘journey’ I was expecting to experience was the one from Brighton and back. In a way, this being a religious retreat, I wasn’t there for the ‘right’ reasons — it had been a sort of joke, a dare, a snook-cocking to the loved ones who tease me for being a chatterbox; I had prideful intentions, if you like. Whenever I read about some pampered hack bigging up some soppy old spa, I wonder why it is that the people who could use such ministrations the most seek them the least, and why the softer people’s lives are, the more ‘pampering’ (ick!) they appear to need.

But I did feel that being alone had steam-cleaned my mind. Because I had swerved smartphones, I thought I was smart — but I had in a way become my own smartphone, ceaselessly entertaining and distracting myself, never sticking at anything for long. I wasn’t seeking a ‘safe space’ but a quiet space, where I could get lost — and it would feel like coming home. And by Jove, I got it!

The post A quiet revolution appeared first on The Spectator.

I’m a very off-message type of fat broad; one who gladly admits she reached the size she is now solely through lack of discipline and love of pleasure, and who rather despises people (except those with proven medical conditions) who pretend that it is generally otherwise. I’m not attached to my fat in any but the most obvious way; would I lose it if I could snap my fingers? Without doubt. Would I work at losing it? Not a chance, Vance.

‘But it’s not about vanity,’ the weight bores bleat, ‘it’s about health.’ Hmm. I was the one person I know who didn’t have some sort of crippling cold this winter — not a sniffle, while my gym-bunny mates all claimed to be dying to some degree. On group holidays, I invariably perplex my companions by spending the evening drinking enough straight alcohol to stun a stevedore before sicking up into my hat, and then rocking up at the break of dawn at the swimming pool while they’re still at breakfast, and drinking shots between laps. As Douglas Murray once noted in this very magazine when we were in the same Ibizan wedding party:

At a late stage I have a well-oiled dance-off with Julie Burchill. The effort finishes me for the evening and I retire a sweaty mess. We reconvene the next morning by the pool. Hardier than me, Julie is having a two-martini breakfast and doing her Hebrew revision.

So imagine my lip-smacking delight at the news last week — according to the largest and most precise investigation into dementia to date — that the fatter one is in middle age, the brighter one is likely to be in old age. Frankly, I wasn’t surprised. Sure, I can’t do that silly ‘Exercise That Predicts Your DEATH’, as the Daily Mail called it with typical joie de vivre a while back — standing up really quickly from a cross-legged position without any support. But I can have all the sex I want, swim myself stupid without fearing public ridicule and fasten my seat belt with ease on any number of trips chasing the five-star sunshine — unlike poor Dame Jenni Murray, who was so mortified at having to order a belt-extension that she’s now booked herself in for a gastric band. I certainly don’t want to walk for miles or — the Lord forfend — run or jog — when I was a teenage size eight, I saw a successful life as one in which I never had to exert myself physically in any way, except in water; to paraphrase Tarantino’s Melanie Ralston when told that smoking dope will kill her ambition, ‘Not if your ambition is to get high and watch TV.’ My ambition was to write, feel love and have fun, and I can’t see a time when my weight is going to interfere with any of those.

Besides, I don’t want to make very old bones; unlike most of the health bores, I’ve actually worked as a volunteer in care homes for very old people — good care homes, with great staff — and the sorrow of the residents made me so sad that I gave up volunteering for years. (I also worked with Down’s Syndrome adults, whose company I invariably left laughing, so not all volunteer work has this effect.) Dementia is now the top killer of women — 32,000 a year — and it’s not a fate I’m keen to save myself for. And even if you do live to be both a great age and compos mentis, chances are you’ll wish you weren’t when you realise clearly how, despite all your experience and toil and contribution to the NHS, you’re seen as a pesky old bed-blocker who is going to end up drinking water from vases. As Kingsley Amis put it, ‘No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare.’

Though if you do want to live to a ripe old age, there’s still no guarantee that your pleasantly padded person will kill you. Even before the report earlier this year that most cancers are the result of bad luck rather than bad lifestyle choices, the health bores got their Lycra in a right old twist last year with the publication of The Obesity Paradox: When Thinner Means Sicker and Heavier Means Healthier by the American cardiologist Dr Carl Lavie. There had already been a study some years before — published in the Journal of American Board of Family Medicine, based on nationwide data from 2000 to 2005 of nearly 51,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 90 years — in which, by using the National Death Index, researchers assessed the mortality risk of the people included in the study and found that those who were ‘severely obese’ were significantly less likely to die than underweight people. You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh and pass the cream cakes.

Eat sensibly, exercise regularly — die anyway. I know of people who have died young after following all the boring rules for an allegedly healthy life, and also people who seem old before their time because they live in fear of death. I decided long ago, before I could vote or marry, that youth, beauty and health were fuel to be burned rather than fruit to be preserved. I have seen nothing during my long, wicked, wonderful life to make me change my ways — or my weight.

The post Fat chance appeared first on The Spectator.

Work is a funny old thing — a four-letter word to some, the meaning of life to others. There have been occasions during the past three years, since I was given the heave-ho from my last regular newspaper column, when I’ve felt that I didn’t exist any more, despite having a happy marriage and more than enough money. Then I recently returned from a carefree holiday, realised that I had four deadlines over the next four days (including this one) and momentarily wished for those wilderness times. But on balance I know I would rather work than not. That is, of course, if one can call reading a book about work, and then scribbling 700 words about it, ‘working’ at all. I’ve never had any other paid job, and I’m well aware of the old saying ‘Choose a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.’

This book begins in Dover, where Joanna Biggs’s first interviewee is steam-cleaning clothes for a charity shop — a volunteer job I myself started last month. I recognise the camaraderie and satisfaction involved, though, like me, Eve works for nothing: ‘I love working here. It’s well nice.’ Though it’s hard for the educated to grasp (not so clever now, eh?), work isn’t necessarily something that gives people more satisfaction the more qualifications it requires or the more money it yields; in repeated surveys of happiness in the workplace beauticians come out top and lawyers bottom.

Women with children in particular gain immeasurably from working; as a tot I well remember my father presenting me with my own latchkey ‘because ladies goes mad if they don’t work. You don’t want your mum to go mad, do you, love?’ In a letter to his daughter in 1938, F. Scott Fitzgerald urged her to read the following lines twice:

[Your mother] realised too late that work was dignity and the only dignity and tried to atone for it by working herself but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever.

On the other hand, pensioners are often reported to be happier than workers. The happiest person I know is a very rich self-made man of working-class origin, in his fifties, who retired young and spends his days reading, learning Hebrew and going on the lash with me. But he is taking his ease after great exertion and achievement. The position of the idle rich, whose sour-faced scions always seem to end up going to the bad, seems to indicate that this is an important factor.

Biggs took two years to complete this book, talking to workers from the Outer Hebrides to North Wales, and while there’s something for everyone, I think it’s fair to say that most of us might be more interested in what a rabbi does all day than what a pot-glazer gets up to. Sometimes the jobs people wanted to do, and didn’t, say more about them and society than the ones they actually do — as in the case of the young shoemaker who dreamed of being a pilot. (When my cousin Kim, a bright, pretty girl, told a career guidance bod in the 1970s that she fancied being an air hostess, he advised her to ‘Come back down to earth!’) Working-class ambition is often discouraged at a heartbreakingly early age — and then those same kids are scolded for putting their faith in talent-show fame.

Biggs has a lovely, calm, measured style, with just a hint of menace behind it — like a tour guide in a stately home who suddenly pulls out a baseball bat and just holds it there, smiling. This is very much a book about work during a recession; but I hadn’t known till I read it that wages in the USA were at their highest, comparatively, in 1973 — which made me feel very closing-time-in-the-Gardens-of-the-West-y. Look on your zero-hour contracts, you meek, and despair.

The post Heigh-ho, heigh-ho… appeared first on The Spectator.

Unusually, I didn’t leave the British Isles until I was 35, when I went to the Maldives for a fortnight. (You bet it was a culture shock, considering that the most exotic place I’d been until then was the Bognor Regis branch of Butlins.) But I’ve globetrotted like a footloose fiend since then, and on my travels I’ve observed that the pricier the watering hole, the less likely vacationers are to look happy.

The Crane is one of the most beautiful hotels in Barbados, but plagued by sour-faced English types complaining about there being no skimmed milk or a cloudy swimming pool (‘quite troubling’). There were groups of good-natured Americans scattered about, whose parade the Englishers appeared to take some pleasure in raining on with the intensity of a tropical shower. No wonder they make us the villains in their films. After five nights we moved on to a cheaper hotel, the Southwinds — a bit down at heel, but the guests were having the time of their lives. Early in the morning I watched old broads of all hues getting their aqua-aerobic whine on to Barbadian pop in the pool; the next day they’d be at Gospel Breakfast, testifying.

We were staying on St Lawrence Gap, a mini Vegas strip. soup of the day: rum boast the hostelries — but just a few yards from Sugar, a nightclub where Rihanna has dirty-danced, there is the most immaculate white church and a few feet from that a breathtaking beach complete with fishing boats. In Hal’s Car Park Bar, a handsome Bajan tells me, ‘Tourists are our harvest. We love them, genuinely, not like other people who just put up with them. If we see someone hurt a tourist, we’re gonna hurt them. Because by hurting that tourist, they’re hurting our country.’ They especially like the Brits. ‘We’re Little England!’ Bajans say kindly to their Anglo guests, and the love of cricket and afternoon tea, the old-fashioned red postboxes and the beaches somewhat incongruously named Worthing, Hastings, Brighton, Bristol and Bath bear this out. But if so, it’s an England long gone, hard on crime — shoplifters: barbadian prisons aren’t fun! — and big on education, where girls wear Mallory Towers-type uniforms.

At the beautiful St James Church, our friend Junior tells us that this is one of the oldest pieces of consecrated ground on the island. Inside, the majesty of the building is marred a little by the shocking colour photographs of Cliff Richard and the Blairs on the pews they take when in the country.

Junior shows us the statue of Bussa, the slave who led the first revolt in 1816; his broken chains hanging from his triumphantly raised hands, he seems to exemplify the can-do confidence of the country. ‘Other Caribbean islands have rich and poor — we have a middle class and a 98 per cent literacy rate,’ Junior tells us. They have been hard-hit by the recession, with 14 per cent unemployment, but sitting outside the 19th-century Round House restaurant, looking over the beach, drinking Corn’n’Oil cocktails and eating mahi-mahi with breadfruit, you could be forgiven for thinking that you’re in paradise.

Later that day, I give a blind beggar a note. He smiles. ‘How much is that, child?’

‘Fifty dollars.’

‘Fifty Bajan or fifty American.’

‘Bajan?’

‘Bless you,’ he says, with a resigned smile. Surely it’s one for the tourist board: ‘Barbados: Where Even Beggars Are Choosers.’

The post Barbados appeared first on The Spectator.

Gore Vidal once famously said that ‘Television is for appearing on, not watching.’ I feel the opposite. I’ve just turned down a financial offer from Celebrity Big Brother for this summer’s series so big it made my eyes water — and I’m not easily impressed, size-wise. Verbal people just don’t do well in such a visual medium — and speech is my second language, anyhow.

It would be easier to go in if I was guaranteed first eviction — but Liz Jones was stuck in there for weeks, and I’m a good deal more entertaining and lovable than she is. There’s a chance I would end up walking out, thus losing my fee. I would miss my husband, being alone (a textbook only child, I feel like murdering someone if can’t be by myself for six waking hours each day), and reading.

But O, I love Big Brother so! When, as part of their effort to bag me, CBB arranged for me to go into the house and call one of the housemates to the Diary Room, it was one of the most exciting vertical experiences of my life.

When I read about the recent study by Bonn University claiming that reality TV makes you nicer — or rather ‘reality TV formats with high vicarious embarrassment content activate brain regions associated with empathic concern and social identity’ — I wasn’t in the least surprised. In the halcyon hinterland of Big Brother, humility and honesty are rewarded by housemates and voting public alike, and snobbishness and sneakiness are punished. Bring me your gays, your transsexuals, your misfits and wallflowers, and Big Brother will dust them down and polish them up and make them Queen of the May, if just for a day.

Those who take part are routinely demonised, but this says far more about the slaggers than the slagged. Yes, there are some sexually incontinent, binge-drinking sad-sacks in there — but no more than you find in daily life, and far less than you find in the British media. In the early years it was far more working-class than now — this season the two most beautiful women are law students and the most handsome man is a medical student — but the kids involved have always been bright, and seen it as a sort of gap-year for the non-entitled.

Saskia from Big Brother 6 told me, while I was making my documentary Reality TV Is Good For You a few years ago: ‘I knew when I came out of the house there wouldn’t be a limo waiting to whisk me off to Hollywood. I got some nice clothes, a couple of nice holidays. I’ve already got a nice boyfriend out of it. And soon I’m going to get back to work.’ Even Jade Goody, monstered as the thickest woman in Britain, invested wisely and made her own fortune after surviving an upbringing of Hogarthian horror.

And this is what horrifies a lot of the people who hate Big Brother. Over the years, I’ve observed that the use of the C-word (‘chav’) indicates a socially insecure seat-sniffer who hasn’t got half as far in life as they thought they would, and who isn’t having half as much sex as they dreamed they would. Every year, these busted flushes see all their fear and loathing made flesh in the BB house. Young people enjoying themselves! Having sex! And one of them will be rich! Polly Filla columnists bang on about how dreadful it is that young people today just want to be famous — i.e. they want to earn decent money, do negligible hard work and get their picture in the papers, just like Polly herself.

Over the years, Big Brother has acted for me as a shorthand filter to finding new friends; if someone prefers to watch actors dressed as 1920s servants speaking to each other in silly accents rather than watch a good-looking girl having sex with a bottle on a lawn, we probably aren’t going to get along. I genuinely enjoy it; I find it far more subtle and insightful than, say, the theatre — and much less manipulative.

The post Reality check appeared first on The Spectator.

Just so you don’t get it confused with the City That Never Sleeps, Tel Aviv — my favovurite place on earth — now markets itself as the Non-Stop City and, indeed, it never lets up for a moment.

We like to refer to the Blitz Spirit; Israel has it. Any of the lovely youngsters playing matkot on the beach (an American journalist once used the bat-and-ball game as a metaphor for Middle Eastern conflict — ‘No rules, no winners and it never ends’) could be called up to fight and die for their country that evening. And life during wartime leads to living for today.

At the beach bar every morning at nine sharp, our beautiful waitress serves us G&Ts and tells us: ‘You come to nightclub on beach, near the Dolphinarium, where I work?’ What time are you there? ‘From 11 till 5 a.m.’ And then you start here? ‘Yes, I here 9 a.m. till 5 p.m.’ As if to make up for all the centuries when they were forced to hide or leave quickly in the night, Israelis never stop moving. We join them at 5 a.m. in the Hilton swimming pool, and again for a sunset dip at the Gordon Lido; between that they’re biking, boarding, surfing and playing ball games on the beach.

For someone like me who holds to Winston Churchill’s theory of energy conservation — ‘Never stand up when you can sit down. And never sit down when you can lie down’ — this can be alarming. So my boon companions and I take our ease while we take it all in. At Toto we drink Bloody Marys and eat artichoke cream pizzas. At Suzana we eat potato latkes and drink arak cocktails, watching the hipsters of Neve Tzedek do their thing. At the Landwer Café, right by the beautiful Gordon pool (scatter my ashes there just before they switch the skimmer on) we eat halloumi shakshouka and drink the dry, elegant wine of Israel. At Manta Ray we drink frozen margaritas and the ‘Optimistic Breakfast’. We decide to pass on an establishment boasting warm beer, cold women, bad service and rubbish food.

The one place that anyone — and apparently time — stands still is in the gloriously icy bar of the Dan Hotel, where you can sip sidecars and imagine that you see Moshe Dayan, fresh down from the Golan Heights and letting his eye wander. A graceful young Orthodox couple walk slowly in, their eyes wide with delight at being in such a worldly place — but leave because they can’t smoke inside. Everyone seems to smoke in Tel Aviv, especially the Orthodox, and not just tobacco — not so long ago Rabbi Hagai Bar Giora of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate told the Israeli magazine Canabis that, ‘If you smoke it, there is no problem whatsoever.’

Yet the backbeat to all this hedonism is the sobering thought that, here, people lost their lives simply for wanting to live in their own tiny, free country. At Mike’s in 2003, British Muslim suicide bombers killed three people; at the Dolphinarium Disco, in 2001, a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 21 Israeli teenagers and four adults.

A sculpture of two youngsters outside the abandoned building reads, in Hebrew ‘We won’t stop dancing.’ It could serve — just as much as the Non-Stop City — as the motto for this wonderful city that I love above all others.

The post Tel Aviv appeared first on The Spectator.

Novels set in the music business (from blockbuster to coming-of-age) are few and far between — far less than in the film industry, say. Is this because writers are scared of looking square, Daddy-O, being as a breed not the most ‘street’ of types, whereas pop stars have traditionally been quite rough, ready and proletarian? Mind you, these days so many chart musicians are privately educated bedwetters that, shamefully, this shouldn’t be a problem any longer. I look forward eagerly to the roman à clef which reveals the backstage Babylon of Mumford & Sons.

It certainly couldn’t be more boring than this stinker. I haven’t read any books by Bret Easton Ellis, but I imagine they’re a bit like this: a bunch of seen-it-all ciphers wafting around Los Angeles, turning on and copping off, with no one enjoying it. And it’s all meant to mean something horrid about democracy and capitalism while being a damn sight nearer to Flanders and Swann: ‘Ma’s out, Pa’s out, Let’s talk rude!/Pee Po Belly Bum Drawers/Let’s write rude words all down our street/Stick out our tongues at the people we meet/Let’s have an intellectual treat/Pee Po Belly Bum Drawers.’ And sure enough, there’s a quote from old Fun-Boy Three-Names at the start: ‘LA forces you to become the person you really are.’ Sure — but couldn’t you say the same about Penge?

‘This book is based on the experiences and recollections of the author. Names of people, places, dates and details of events have been changed and characters created as a literary device and to protect the privacy of others.’ This seems a wise move. If I, for one, suspected that I had inspired a character as drippy and dreary as the ones who waft across the pages of this tome-stone, I’d sue. They’re all utterly interchangeable. You’ve very probably come across a string of paper dolls with more depth and differentiation. Even when ‘real’ people, such as Pamela Anderson and the chaps from Mötley Crüe, rock up, there’s no sense of excitement; the wild bunch are a mild bunch, the wild parties mild parties and the principals all take a walk on the mild side.

It’s also strangely old-fashioned. A girl (single, young) is described as ‘openly flirting’ with a single man at a party. Whoa — shameless hussy! ‘Want to come round the back and smoke a joint?’ someone asks. ‘The singer who slept with the older wife of another rock star’, ‘the bass player who was raising one of his bandmate’s children as his own’ — it’s set in 1988, but seems as wide-eyed as 1955 where matters of sex and drugs are concerned. (I half expected to read the words, ‘She flew, hatless, into the street’ at some point.)

When the mores weren’t confounding me, the ‘insights’ just made me want to blow a loud childish raspberry: ‘The one thing your lover can’t give you — the experience of another.’ What, not even if they put on a Blair mask and clown-shoes and talk dirty in a South African accent?

There’s a lot of tossy meteorological details — ‘golden light’ and ‘sea-blue sky’ and ‘white caps of the waves’ and ‘Phoenix was hot with a dry wind’ — to the point where you think you’ve wandered into a bad bit of travel writing rather than the steamy, no-holes-barred exposé of ‘the glory days when the music business was a vast and amoral empire and sex, drugs and rock’n’roll were the lifestyle of choice’ promised by the blurb.

The central plot — that a random man is pretending to be the rock star Nikki Sixx — is appropriate, as this book is pretending to be a sensational exposé while actually it is marginally less thrilling than one of those garden accessories catalogues that falls out of Sunday newspapers. It somehow makes weird sense that the author, once of Kerrang! magazine, is now the proud parent of the cricket blog the Old Batsman. Add cycling spinsters and warm beer to the mix here, and you’ve got a slice of life so tepid that it would warm the cockles of even John Major’s cautious heart.

The post A walk on the mild side appeared first on The Spectator.

Body dysmorphia, the unfortunate medical condition whereby a perfectly pleasant/slender person believes themselves to be ugly/fat, is a strange and sad thing. I’d always presumed it to be (like anorexia and bulimia) a primarily female problem, so much more importance being placed on the appearance of women than men. Respectable medical surveys indicate otherwise.

Nevertheless, women tend to see themselves as less attractive than they are. A sizeable number of men, on the other hand, suffer from the opposite delusion. I call them Magic Mirror men, because they seem to possess an inner looking-glass which tells them that they are, indeed, the fairest of them all.

Why else do ugly men not feel ridiculous passing judgment on the attractiveness, or otherwise, of women? He may be a politician or a businessman, or one of those half-witted fat American men who insist on wearing T-shirts bearing the legend NO FAT CHICKS. But he will have no doubt that all women between the ages of 16 and 61 are waiting in an agony of exquisite anticipation to find out if he thinks them attractive.

This being the case, he acts the cad when assessing the physical appeal of women he encounters. The very presentable Linda McDougall (wife of Labour MP Austin Mitchell) claimed that the barely human-looking John Prescott pushed her against a wall and put his hand up her skirt in 1978, when such behaviour ‘was very common for men at that time…I just rebuffed him, he shrugged and winked and we all carried on.’ The lardy lord brought it up in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, after declining to attend Mitchell’s retirement party: ‘Have you seen his wife? Built like a bloody barn door. If I threw her against the wall, the fucking house would fall down!’ This is rich from someone who had his lavatory seat repaired twice in two years at taxpayers’ expense.

Then there is Donald Trump, a preposterously unappetising specimen with an almost Tourettish compulsion to pick holes in the appearance of women. Apparently the bewigged bell-end thought he ‘had a shot’ with the Sainted Diana. He bombarded her with massive bouquets. Not surprisingly, Trump also gave Diana ‘the creeps’, according to her confidante Selina Scott.

Hollywood has done all it can to perpetuate this surreal double standard — see Jack Nicholson recoiling with horror at an unclothed Diane Keaton in that film no one remembers the name of. The opposite would be unthinkable, despite the fact that a naked Nicholson would surely make most even half-sighted people heave.

How did men become so self-deluded? Women are not blameless, though until very recently it was impossible for them to earn a living without skivvying or prostituting themselves. Otherwise, they used their beauty to make a marriage to a man who could support them financially. Women convinced themselves that a man with fiscal appeal was a better bet than one with physical appeal and, as no one wants to be a meal ticket, unattractive but economically viable men convinced themselves that they had ‘something’ that young, lovely women craved, beyond the size of their pocket-book. ‘Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,’ smarmed the charmless Henry Kissinger.

Times are changing and men and women are coming to terms with the nasty things that happen to their souls when beauty is sold to the highest bidder. When asked what he would have been if not a fantastically rich footballer, Peter Crouch answered, ‘A virgin.’ A book by Holly Madison, the American reality TV star and ex-‘chief girlfriend’ of Hugh Hefner, details exactly what a modern gold-digger can expect; habitually drugging oneself in order to be able to submit one’s 23-year-old body to the arthritic caresses of a 90-year-old, 9 p.m. curfews, bestiality porn to put one in the mood for love, and carpets reeking of urine from the Boss’s posse of dogs.

Madison writes of her shock at first witnessing the Hefner’s behaviour in a disco, when he gets up to boogie; ‘I was genuinely mortified for him…had no one told him how silly he looked?’ Of course not — and his Magic Mirror had probably told him that he was the greatest dancer, as well as lover.

No matter how men judge women’s looks, it must remain a mystery to them that the plainest woman can get sex any time she wants, while even decent-looking men are reduced to masturbating and/or paying for it. Maybe the Magic Mirror is more of a comfort blanket, after all?

The post Mirror, mirror appeared first on The Spectator.