In England, when I grew up, kissing or not kissing women on the cheek was a class issue. Lots of people think the English don’t do the kiss on the cheek. Not true. The posher you are, the more kissing there is. It’s so French and sophisticated, see?
Among my mates, it was simple: no one ever touched the opposite sex, prior to a full snog, let alone kissed them on the cheek.
Then I went to university, like a fresh-faced extra in The Line of Beauty.
A good friend took me to the nightspots of Fulham and Chelsea, and I discovered that I was expected to kiss every girl I was introduced to. It was extraordinary.
One cheek or two?
I made a total hash of it, and did one-and-a-half.
This inept action left everyone awkward and unsure of my intentions. Was I using the opportunity to go in for the kill? Or was I so put off by their first cheek that I couldn’t bear to fully kiss the other one?
This is the part of the blog where I say: Obviously, over time I got it down pat. Nowadays, I’m a natural with the ladies… [Is that coughing I can hear at the back? Hey, come on, pipe down!]
Intimacy is, as anyone who’s lived a long time will know, fraught with dangers.
Alas, such sociable cultural fun might just be one of the casualties of Covid. But a nostalgic part of me hopes this awkward British institution will live on.
Would you consider a one- or two-stop flight from London to India? Or would you click the ‘direct flights only’ button every time? How about 21 stops, plus a rail transfer between Basle and Genoa?
I’d bet no one would consider such an option today, and yet that’s the trip Lord Beaverbrook stood Robert Byron in 1932, weeks after the first Air Mail route from London to British India opened. He recorded his experience in the wonderful odds and ends travel book, First Russia, Then Tibet.
It begins in self-deprecating travel journalist mode, moaning about the squalor of this new form of transport. But Byron ends up acknowledging that air travel has been a life-changing experience:
“I see it now as one of the great experiences of a life, a period of vivid, unclouded enjoyment in its revelation of a huge expanse of the world’s surface, of unsuspected and unimagined beauties, of heat and desolation beyond credence, of a new pleasure in physical movement.”
His trip is scarcely believable today. Byron stands in the cockpit behind the pilot, his head and shoulders clear of the windshield, the air sending goosebumps down his arms as he surveys the land below.
He gazes on the Amalfi coast, the Gulf of Corinth, the White Mountains of Crete, the endless dunes of North Africa, and the corpses of Turkish soldiers still lying in a deserted fort in the Jordanian desert, over a decade after the close of the First World War.
Time for a spot of lunch?
Byron enjoys scheduled stops for luncheon, and sleeps every night in an hotel. The carrier, Imperial Airways, lays on armchairs and morning papers in even the most remote desert locations. They land in time for tea, before a shave and perhaps a bathe in the ocean before supper.
One hint of the future of air travel occurs en route from Genoa to Naples, when they are forced to miss a lunch stop since the water is too shallow for their seaplane to land safely. In the event, the engineer produces a “typical Italian lunch of ham, salami, chicken, new rolls, cheese, Russian mushrooms, nectarines, and wine” to eat onboard.
In the age of pinched legroom, no frills and, finally, the moral yoke of ‘flight shame’, it’s breathtaking to read such a description of air travel.
“Unbuttoned, unshaven, and unfed, I clattered into the hall at a quarter past seven, to find the other passengers already waiting.” But never fear, for “we reached Gaza for tea”.
London to Karachi itinerary
Day 1 – London to Basle (Luncheon: Le Bourget, Paris) Day 2 – Basle to Genoa (by train) Day 3 – Genoa to Naples (Luncheon: onboard the aircraft due to conditions on the ground) Day 4 – Naples to Athens (Luncheon: Corfu) Day 5 – Athens to Tobruk (Luncheon: Suda Bay, Crete) Day 6 – Tobruk to Alexandria (Luncheon: unrecorded) Day 7 – Alexandria to Gaza (Luncheon: unrecorded) Day 8 – Gaza to Baghdad (Luncheon: Rutbah, Iraq) Day 9 – Baghdad to Jask (Second Breakfast: Basra, Third Breakfast: Bushire) Day 10 – Jask to Karachi (Luncheon: Gwadar)
The media (that I read) has tried to restrain itself in the fallout of the US election. It’s attempted to remain unbiased. It’s not Fox News, after all. It has standards to uphold. But despite itself, it still let the truth about Donald Trump’s inhumanity out of the bag.
No pets shocker!
Now I am aware that Brexit Britain views the BBC as a Communist fifth column in its midst, so call me old fashioned and out-of-date, but for some wacky reason I do still use the BBC to provide me with news reports.
They did their best to keep a lid on their élan in the face of the Biden victory, but they just couldn’t sustain it. The icing on the bun – for me – was the moderate and sober item that arrived on November 9 about Joe Biden’s pet dogs.
Cuddly animals win votes
Someone should tell Trump about this. If he’s such a media manipulator, did he not hear about the oldest one in the book – cute pets? As the BBC report (and so many others) fawned over Joe Biden’s dogs, Champ and Major, the shocking, chilling truth was revealed.
Donald Trump was the first US president in more than 100 years not to have a pet.
BBC News, November 9
Yes, that’s right. There’s been a lot of debate about the Trump presidency. How low could this guy go? Did he not care about common decency? Did he not give a shit about the rules? Well, in the final analysis, all has become clear.
He doesn’t even own a pet. How inhumane is that?
I shall now go over to Fox News to hear about the very real threat of rabies infection spreading in the corridors of US power come January…
I love Rupert the Bear. There, I’ve put it out there. Anyway, I was reading my son one of the ancient Rupert the Bear Annuals the other day – those dusty old Daily Express hardbacks full of Rupert stories from the 1930s onwards, when a picture stopped me in my tracks.
Obviously, a lot about Rupert the Bear is dated. There’s plenty that could be culturally dissected today. In this case, it was the innocent sight of a cartoon image of Rupert and his friend, Bill Badger, being shown a sign on the edge of a wood by a gamekeeper.
The sign read: “Private property: no picnicking”
The pair had been doing just that – picnicking in a wood. The gamekeeper gave them the benefit of the doubt, since Rupert said so imploringly that they hadn’t seen the sign. All was well. Only it wasn’t really, was it? Two children (well, a kid bear and a kid badger) were being kicked out of a wood for picnicking.
The narrative flies in England. Now I live in Sweden, and viewed from here, it doesn’t fly at all. Swedes inherit the right to roam from birth. All land outside a person’s private garden is fair game. Picnicking in a wood is just a given. Telling kids they can’t do it would be tantamount to treason.
Trespassing is the right thing to do
It made me think about my own English upbringing. My family were walkers. We walked everywhere. I had it drummed into me, one footstep at a time. At the same time, my parents made it abundantly clear to me that while trespassing was legally wrong, it was not morally so.
I was always reminded that – like the poacher – as long as you’re not caught, it’s OK. It has meant that all my English life has been imbued with a tone of us and them – the common people and the landowners – and an uneasy co-existence. I always trespass as a point of principle, but I’m always on guard against the gentry.
I guess that’s why The Levellers came from England, not Sweden. There’s only one way of life, and that’s your own, your own, your own!
Swedes love sugar. Seriously, they’re sugar monsters. I know what you’re thinking: who isn’t? But where other nations mix the sweet stuff with other vices – be they fags, booze or deep-fried snacks – Swedes just stick to the sugar.
Example 1: fika. It’s a cute name for extremely regular coffee breaks at which you eat super-sweet cinnamon buns, with a side of coffee.
Example 2: Lördagsgodis. Literally, Saturday sweets, this is the weekly ritual of buying a shed load of candy every Saturday, without fail, because it’s Saturday.
Example 3: supermarket sweets. Sweden has a supermarket dedicated entirely to sweets. Seriously, it’s called Hemmakväll. Google it.
I rest my case.
It’s not so trad
Wall-to-wall sugarcoated pastry and buckets full of sweets feels like a traditional part of Swedish life. But then I went into Malmö’s brilliant Technical & Seafaring Museum and read this…
‘In 1850, Swedes consumed 4 kilos of sugar per person (annually). Today, they’re up to 40 kilos per person.’
Did they just get way more into sugar? Well no, and yes. The museum went on to explain the 19th century sugar beet industry (ok, you can stop reading here, but I thought it was interesting).
The Skåne region – Sweden’s southern breadbasket – decided to try out their first cash crop.
Harvesting and refining sugar beet was incredibly labour intensive, which was useful since there were a lot of poor Swedes who needed a job in the 1800s. It also meant there was a lot of, well, sugar.
And in the day’s before globalisation, the closer your market, the better. So they sold the refined stuff to those same Swedes – by the truckload – and hey presto, everyone’s sugar intake ballooned.
So there you go. Next time I succumb to a cinnamon bun, I can blame 19th century agri-business. Ah, that feels better!
This week, I came across the term ‘mansplaining’ – a great word for that tendency of men to explain things to women, including what women think.
An article in Prospect magazine cited Rebecca Solnit as having popularised the term in a 2008 essay about a man she met at a party in Aspen who explained her own book on the Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge to her.
The notion immediately brought to mind the brilliant ‘Amazing Invisible Woman’ sketch in The Fast Show in which a woman suggests a solution to a practical problem to a group of men (often involving cars or directions). She’s met by silence. Then one of the men repeats her advice word-for-word, and is heard!
Early years learning
This tendency isn’t simply the preserve of adult males. We start ‘em young. On repeated viewing of the Netflix series If I were an Animal (a generally brilliant programme, I hasten to add) with my five-year-old son, I began to notice a pattern.
The narrators are two children, a slightly older boy and a slightly younger girl, interacting as a brother and sister. They talk about the animals’ lives rather like young David Attenboroughs. But I began to notice that the boy almost always provided the information.
The girl would give each animal a name, say ‘awwwh, isn’t she cute?’ a lot, and generally gush and giggle at their antics. She would also ask lots of helpful questions: ‘Why is that snow leopard digging a hole, Tim?’ To which her brother would provide the insightful science. ‘Well, Emma…’
After reading the Prospect article on Rebecca Solnit, I realised this innocent little dialogue has a name: mansplaining.
When pandemics and waning prosperity finally loosen the Northern European grip on travel, will we look back on our years in the sun and wonder why we didn’t colonise the Mediterranean more thoroughly?
The most permanent migration has been made by the middling sort. That is because, for the truly affluent, the Damp North was never so uncomfortable nor so permanent. Meanwhile, for the poor there was no option.
Croydon or the Costa?
But for the middling sort, the Med has held the promise of swapping a middling suburban home in the Damp North for a middling suburban home in the Warm South.
For the rich, the bite of a northern winter was always tamed by their comfortable country houses and their skiing holiday in the crisp sunshine of the Alps, plus at least one other trip, in the high summer, often to the Med – though far away from the middling suburban homes of the colonies of the middling sort.
The middling sort, in their turn, make sure their middling surburban homes are at a comfortable distance from the strip hotels that offer sun, sex and sangria to the poor for a week or two each summer.
Half-arsed
That is how the Northern European has half-colonised the Med. But will we one day live to rue the fact that we never moved – lock, stock and barrel – to the sun-blessed shores of the Mediterranean, heart of civilisation and ease, when we had the chance? Will we, I wonder?
When we are eking out another waterlogged grain harvest outside hovels in the swampy ground of old Surrey and Somerset, will we wonder why Northern Europeans didn’t simply turn Italian when they had the chance, so that generations to come could have popped grapes and bottles of Prosecco under the shadows of cypress and olive trees forever…
Des Lynam, John Motson, Brian ‘Johnners’ Johnston, Henry Blofeld… Illustrious names of football and cricket, the two great English sports, and yet they all have a singular thing in common – they were broadcasters first and foremost, and essentially amateur enthusiasts of the game.
So what?
I’ve always wondered why I love these personalities so much. They guided me through the games of their era with wit and excitement, doing what we wanted them to do, yet they have gradually been crowded out by a new breed of broadcaster – the professional sportsperson.
Obviously, the line is occasionally a bit blurred. Jonathan ‘Aggers’ Agnew played for Leicestershire and won three Test caps for England, but he has been far more successful as the voice of Test Match Special.
And many pros have proved to be wonderful personalities of radio and screen, from the acerbic (Geoffrey Boycott, Alan Hansen) to the agreeable (Gary Lineker, Phil Tufnell).
But the vast majority of pros-turned-broadcasters remain sportspeople who happen to have a microphone or a camera pointed at them. Anyone who has been forced to listen to interviews with players knows how excruciating that can be.
Let’s hear from the man himself…
I always fast forward player interviews. Why? They’re just not interesting. They say what you expect them to say, laden with cliches, and most of those who graduate to telly or radio by dint of their sporting prowess continue in the same vein.
Which brings me to my theory. I suspect why I like the amateur enthusiast broadcaster so much is that I relate to them. When Lynam or Johnners talked of the game, I related to their perspective.
When a superstar pro talks about the game, they will always see it from a vantage I cannot really imagine, that of the insider. They may be engaging, if I’m lucky, but only really as a pundit.
As my presenter and guide to the day’s play, I would always choose a person who simply loves the game, and also happens to be an exceptionally talented broadcaster.
It’s called my ‘supermarket-to-kitchen run’. But I hadn’t realised – until I read Dan Hancox’s article in the June issue of Prospect magazine – just how recent and unusual my lifestyle is.
Don’t panic, Mr Mainwaring!
We’ve all heard the tales of rationing, and how it lasted into the mid-50s for Britons. But it always felt very far away from a 1980s childhood.
Hancox relates how responsibility for food security has been handed to supermarkets by the British government since the 1960s, and in earnest since the 90s.
But since the 90s, just-in-time supply chains have become the norm, reducing waste and unused capacity, and allowing us ever cheaper chickens and strawberries whenever we want them.
Freezers are for losers
I don’t really do freezers. Like many of my generation, I smirk at 70-somethings with their bursting freezers and their back-up chest freezer in the garage with another years’ supply of Findus crispy pancakes and Quiche Lorraines.
Just like Sainsbury’s, my supply chain has about enough capacity to last two days in a crisis. I haven’t even planned for what I’ll eat tomorrow, let alone at the weekend.
But I am also completely at ease with the idea that what I will eat might be a poké bowl, or a Greek salad, or perhaps some tuna sashimi. Because growing up in this culture has given me infinite choice.
Meat and two veg
This has shielded me from another uncomfortable truth. I don’t much like the food that actually grows in my country. I’ve often been given pause by Blackadder episodes where Baldrick bangs on about turnips. Turnips! Are they edible?
I’ve always preferred mezze to Sunday roast. I’ll take calamari over fish’n’chips. I’d rather an olive than a turnip. If I hadn’t lived in this hyper-connected age, what might I have never tasted?
For my friends and I – being English – the most exciting thing about Malmö, Sweden is the kallbadhus – a bathhouse on stilts over the sea where it’s against the law not to be nude.
The idea that a public space is frequented in the buff – as per regulations – by ordinary Swedes without a ‘by your leave’ is the stuff of English fantasy and scandal. And yet, it’s not the biggest deal about the place.
No phone to preserve my modesty
Having become a regular to the kallbadhus over the past year, I have long since got over the initial transgressive thrill of being nude in public. I’ve quickly become at ease with the murmured chat of portly businessmen on their hour off.
What I have come to savour is not so much the nudity (which is nice), but the calm. Aside from nudity, another sauna rule at the kallbadhus is minimal noise. It is a place of quiet reflection.
It is also a place of intense heat and moist bodies. It’s not easy to take a locker key in without it burning you, let alone an iPhone. Which is perhaps one reason why no one does. The kallbadhus is not only a clothes-free zone, but a tech-free zone.
An island of gazing faces
This makes the kallbadhus something truly unique in today’s world: a public space in which no technology intrudes. Even my beloved English pub is now a place of smartphones and TVs. But not here.
At the kallbadhus, a large group of strangers congregate to sit, side-by-side, in relative silence and stare out of the windows at the rocks, the sea and the sky. There’s nothing else to do.
When the event of the last half an hour is the seagull that passed the window, or the oil tanker making its steady progress across the screen of the horizon line, the mind feels something a bit like what childhood was to me – a time before the internet.
The kallbadhus is a little accident. An anachronism. It’s not a techlash. I don’t think anyone planned it. But by chance, it is the place where I can go to be in another place, where only your thoughts roam, and boredom lurks quietly.
