Mark Palmer | The Spectator columnists & writers

The general flying advice this year, with airports resembling cattle markets and when you can’t be sure if you’re ever going to take off, is: only travel with hand luggage. Packing a fortnight’s holiday into the tiniest of bags has become an art form. Social media is awash with tips on minimalist packing and dedicated websites on travelling light have sprung up, with experts advising what you should, and shouldn’t, pack. It’s depressing. Yes, the lighter the plane the less fuel it uses, which is no bad thing for the environment. But a holiday is meant to be an indulgence, a chance to experiment with new outfits. Instead, the less-is-more principle is being abused to such an extreme that we’re having to do clothes-washing while away on holiday.

Britain’s travel ban brings risks of its own

No one knows for sure how many cars are on the road without insurance. The Motor Insurers Bureau puts it as high as one million, and a good number of these won’t have a valid MOT either. Come to think of it, many such uninsured cars without MOTs are likely to be in the hands of drivers who don’t even have licences. And yet it’s never suggested that only those who have a ‘reasonable excuse’ to drive should be allowed to do so, just in case of encounters with revved-up lawbreakers. We know there’s a risk — but we don’t close down all the roads in the country. We get on with our lives. But when it comes to international travel 12 months on from the start of this grisly pandemic, we are not allowed to get on with our lives.

The quarantine debacle could cripple Britain’s travel industry

The government’s battle cry in the fight against the pandemic is ‘Follow the science’. But it is hard to see the science behind the disastrous and potentially crippling 14-day quarantine rule which came into effect on Monday — or, rather, failed to come into effect in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s not been made available or published anywhere, and even the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, politely refrained from giving the ruling his endorsement, saying it was a matter for the politicians: ‘They make the policy, and they make the timing decisions.’ There’s nothing remotely logical about closing the door on visitors to Britain when it’s been flapping wide open for months with no restrictions whatsoever, including during those awful days in April when infections were at their highest.

Why Tuscany always beats Provence for me

A family of peacocks is sunning itself in our villa garden. They all look extraordinarily happy and composed, especially the baby one, for whom (like us, come to think of it) this is a whole new experience. But then, the 150 hens wandering in and out of their coops painted like beach huts don’t look exactly overburdened themselves; nor do the sheep, pigs and cows in their 220 acres of lush Tuscan terrain near the Merse river about 45 minutes southwest of Siena. I can’t detect much discontent on the faces of the 60 staff either, here at Borgo Santo Pietro: whether the serene but remarkably strong young women in the spa with its outdoor treatment beds; the British florist; the American artist-in-residence; or the 15 gardeners who busy themselves in the herbaceous borders, rose-scented pathways and immaculate lawns.

London City Airport

The late Frank Johnson — former editor of The Spectator — had a thing about London City Airport. ‘I never want to fly from anywhere else,’ he would say, often after returning from Germany, a country he loved, not least because of its Wagner connections. He was right, of course. Even today, more than 30 years since its official opening, flying out of City is a completely different experience from any other airport in the UK. Size matters, of course. It’s merely the 14th busiest airport in the UK, just ahead of Leeds Bradford and below East Midlands. It only has one 1,500-metre runway and the terminal has a distinctly pop-up feel to it. But when it comes to getting there it must be near the top of the pile, especially if you ride the Docklands Light Railway, which snakes its way past Canary Wharf and through Docklands on an elevated track not dissimilar to New York’s Number 7 subway train which does much the same thing in Sunnyside, Queens.

Prophets of gloom

There’s a lot of anger about — and it’s not pleasant. But at least it means people are engaged as well as enraged. What’s more worrying and increasingly irritating is the negativity, the drip-drip of despondency that’s been allowed to seep into so much of daily life. Everything is broken! All is lost! The end is nigh! Which is fine if you’re a Jehovah’s Witness or believe that the eschatological prophecies of the Bible have pretty much all come to pass. Every day we are told repeatedly that ‘catastrophe’ awaits. It will be ‘-catastrophic’ if we leave the EU without a deal, ‘catastrophic’ if America withdraws from the Paris Agreement on climate change, ‘catastrophic’ if we push ahead with fracking, ‘catastrophic’ if Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister and so on.

Boxed in

Friends in Herefordshire said they were both fit and well but confessed to ‘watching far too much television’. I thought nothing of it until a Wiltshire couple whom my wife and I have known for ever said almost the same thing but with more foreboding. ‘We’ve got to break the habit of watching so much — even the good stuff.’ That’s the problem. There’s just too much good stuff on telly. It’s starting to become an issue, a tyranny of sorts, and certainly a drain on what Americans like to call ‘downtime’. Gone are the days when TV was mainly rubbish and you could just get on with life — when Dixon of Dock Green and Z Cars were all we had by way of police dramas, before the relentless onslaught of Scandi crime thrillers that have done wonders for Nordic interior design.

Tuning up to Linz

You never know who you might meet on a river cruise. It was my 89-year-old father-in-law, Noel, who first recognised a tall, professorial man only a few years younger than him remonstrating with an uninterested official at Munich airport about a pre-paid taxi to Passau, where we were due to board our ship. ‘That’s Humphrey Burton,’ said Noel. ‘We worked together at the Beeb, though he was far more important than me.’ Noel is forever modest but you could argue that Burton was the Melvyn Bragg of his day — a description I later put to him but one from which he recoiled not exactly in horror, but certainly in mild disgust. ‘I greatly admire Melvyn, particularly for hundreds of editions of In Our Time and nearly 30 years of The South Bank Show, but writing and politics always took up a substantial proportion of his working life,’ he said.

Home truths | 29 November 2018

King’s Cross station at 10.30 p.m. is not a happy place. Most commuters have long returned to their centrally heated homes, leaving the concourse free for the homeless to roam randomly in search of a few coins from stragglers. I was there to catch a late train to Potters Bar last week and almost missed my Cambridge--bound service due to the numerous men and women who approached and asked for money. Some looked dishevelled, disturbed, miserable; others were polite and seemed resigned to rejection. I keep thinking about one man in particular. He said he was an ex-soldier — a ‘veteran of conflict’, as he put it — and that he had not eaten all day. It was chilly but he was wearing shorts and had a soiled blanket over his shoulders.

Drive-thrus

My wife and I have a set routine after landing back at Gatwick. We collect our bags, clear customs and are reunited with our car (Meet and Greet parking is by far the best value for money and avoids an hour or so of inhaling a mini-cab’s ‘vehicle deodoriser’). Then we head for the McDonalds ‘Drive-thru’ restaurant next to the BP garage, where Joanna normally goes for the Big Mac meal, while I vacillate between the McChicken sandwich and a bucket of chicken nuggets with a side order of fries. We look forward to this guilty secret so much that often we discuss our order in detail while queuing at passport control. Whatever we choose fills us up and is a marked improvement on what you can buy on-board. It is also immeasurably more interesting than those boxes BA now hand out towards the end of a long-haul flight containing a stale bagel and tiny slice of processed cheese.

Durban Notebook

No one likes uncertainty and in Britain we’ve got more than our fair share. But spare a thought for South Africa, where the uncertainty is in danger of morphing into national paralysis. ‘What are your plans for the future?’ I ask a friend who lives near Durban. ‘We have no plans. We might be packing up next year and heading out.’ A lot rests on next year. The general election appears to be set for May and with every day the pressure on President Cyril Ramaphosa increases. The 65-year-old millionaire is stuck between the rock of his more militant ANC supporters and the hard place of those impatient for root-and-branch change. Which means stamping out corruption, tackling unemployment (some commentators put it at 40 per cent), dealing with violent crime, resolving the redistribution of land issue and rehabilitating, variously, the tax collection agencies, police investigation teams, security firms and the prosecution service.

Political football | 24 May 2018

Politics and sport should never mix is the hoary old chestnut — but they always do. It’s a thrilling concoction. In just under three weeks, the World Cup kicks off in Russia and while I can’t vouch for the quality of the footie, the whole extravaganza is likely to be edge-of-the-seat stuff. At the end, Vladimir Putin will either be grinning like a creamed-up cat or grinding his teeth in rage, lamenting about what might have been. Never has there been a backdrop quite like this. A couple of months ago there were calls (including from Alan Johnson, the former Labour home secretary) for England to boycott the tournament altogether. This wasn’t to save us the pain of going out on penalties in the quarter finals, but because the host nation had just been accused by our Prime Minister of poisoning an ex-spy and his daughter with the deadly Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury.

Good grief

Just over a year ago, my best friend dropped dead. He was in his early sixties and many of us expected him to die, because he was hugely overweight and desperately unhappy — and the ciggies can’t have helped. ‘If you don’t look after yourself, we’re going to lose you,’ was the polite refrain from those who knew him well. Chris had no money, no real job, precious little hope. We first met as new boys aged eight at our boarding school, where he went on to become one of the best sportsmen the school had ever had and sat a scholarship for Harrow. Early success might have played a part in what was to come. We all know people who peak prematurely. On leaving school, Chris and I and then shared a tent while hitchhiking through Canada and America.

My football lesson

Every now and again my Tube ride to work on the District line is enlivened by children on a school outing. Presumably they are heading for the Science Museum or possibly the National Gallery. Often, they have different coloured badges stuck to their jumpers. As far as I can work out, if, for example, you are a red, then you’re meant to sit with other reds, and sometimes the teacher barks instructions such as: ‘Could the reds try to be a little quieter please?’, or asks: ‘Blues, how many more stops until we get there?’ This last question gives rise to a piercing shriek as a dozen or so blues shout out their answers, sometimes coinciding with the doors opening at Fulham Broadway, giving commuters just enough time to rush off in search of a child-free carriage.

‘I never had anything against Nancy’: coffee and cookies with Tonya Harding

The film I, Tonya, has been well-received and is even up for an Oscar or two. I’m pleased about that because I’ve met Tonya Harding and her story has always fascinated me, not least because to watch her skate in the run up to the 1994 Olympics (particularly in Oakland, California in 1991 at the Ladies Free Skate competition) is to witness sport, art and sheer guts come together in an unfathomable holy trinity. It all went terribly wrong, of course, and she became the most reviled ice skater in the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOP3Dj0DraQ Just to recap, six weeks before those Olympics, Harding’s bodyguard, acting on instructions from her already ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, clubbed the golden girl, Nancy Kerrigan, across the right knee with a metal bar after she had finished a practice session in Detroit.

Padel

When we arrived, we discovered that our villa had a padel court. Few of us had seen one before and no one knew the rules, so we invented them as logically as we could and got on with it. Within a couple of sets we were hooked. Some people started to get up early to practise; others began watching matches on YouTube. Specialist websites were consulted to establish the basics, such as how many underarm serves you get (the answer is two) and whether the ball is out if it hits the back wall without bouncing first in the court. (Absolutely). What a game! It’s a cross between real tennis, regular tennis, squash and ping pong. The racquets are solid and stringless and you can play it to a high standard well into your dotage because it’s all about strategy and guile rather than muscle and smashing the ball as hard as you can.

Low spirits

You may have noticed that we’re in the throes of a 21st-century Gin Craze. It’s not as serious as the one which began in the 1720s, when London was awash with the stuff, much of it adulterated with turpentine, alum and sulphuric acid, but it’s still an irritation with no signs of an imminent hangover. The big difference between then and now is that sales and marketing ‘creatives’ have been let loose to talk up ‘boutique’ distilleries with fancy names, trendy bottles and romantic back stories about Uncle Jack dusting off his great-grandfather’s rusting stills down a remote back alley. I found one gin, for example, with a tag line that says ‘intricately realised’. What on earth does that mean — apart from justifying a price of £35 a bottle if ordering direct or £42 when buying from the likes of Majestic? There was another, called Conker Spirit Gin and produced by Dorset’s ‘first gin distillery, nestled in the back streets of Bournemouth’, according to its website.

The Britten Theatre

When friends from overseas with the slightest interest in music ask for recommendations about what to see in London, I always come up trumps. Boastful but true. In fact, even friends who’ve lived in London all their lives are impressed when I suggest a night of opera at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre. Normally, that’s because they’ve never heard of it, never mind not knowing where it is or what it does. And what it does is the key. For this is the stage upon which some of the best young singers in the world prepare for stellar operatic careers, and it’s where you and I can listen to them in supreme comfort for a fraction of the cost of a ticket to the Royal Opera House. We’re talking talent of an extraordinary kind, talent that bristles with the confidence of youth, talent not yet tainted by prima donna histrionics or big money strops — all on show at one of the most intimate opera venues anywhere in the world.

A rugby legend

‘There’s a chance we’ll meet up with Richie McCaw in Christchurch,’ proffered the PR on our New Zealand press trip. The man from the Sunday Times and I let out a little gasp. We weren’t sports journos but we knew where McCaw stood in the pantheon of all-time greats. He is the most capped player in rugby union history, a World Cup winner on two occasions and arguably the best open-side flanker there has ever been. He captained the mighty All Blacks 110 times out of his 148 matches, and is probably the most popular living Kiwi. That’s all. Richie, as everyone knows him, retired from the game in 2015 after lifting the William Webb Ellis trophy at Twickenham. Married to a hockey player, he’s now involved with a helicopter company (he has his pilot’s licence) and has no interest in becoming a coach or TV pundit because ‘I’m not good at getting into all that criticism business’.

They can’t handle the truth

Every now and again I ask my daughter, who is a primary school teacher, if she is free for a curry after work. And almost always she replies that she can’t, as she has a ‘parents’ night’. Now, either she has become lazy in her excuses for not wanting to see me, or her school organises a great number of parents’ nights. Hoping it might be the latter, I consulted a friend called Lucy, a teacher at a primary near Guildford in Surrey. She said it was quite normal to have at least one parents’ night per term, plus two or even three ‘parents’ workshops’. These workshops are dedicated to specific themes such as ‘how to support your children’s homework’ or ‘how to support your child’s literacy development.’ These usually happen at 6 p.

Bordering on insanity | 3 November 2016

There are lots of signs at Gatwick about how it is unacceptable to be ‘rude or abusive’ to Border Force staff. One poster warns that losing your temper or gesticulating in a threatening manner could be a criminal offence. Keep a lid on it, is the-message. My wife Joanna and I recently had plenty of time to study these missives and just about kept a lid on it after returning from a weekend in Spain. It was a Monday evening that became a Monday night at Gatwick’s north terminal as thousands of travellers snaked back and forth for nearly an hour at passport control in an atmosphere that swung from anger to sheer astonishment at the incompetence of the government agency that mans the UK border at British airports. ‘You do wonder why one bothers to go on holiday at all when you come back to this,’ said Joanna, which seemed a little extreme given the lovely few days we had just enjoyed in Andalucia.

A home from home at school

The Earl of March, who owns the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex, said recently that he ‘hated’ Eton and ‘couldn’t wait to leave’. This came as a surprise to the interviewer, who immediately asked Charles March why on earth he then packed his own three sons off to his horrible alma mater. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ came the reply. ‘It’s completely different now to how it was in my day. Fathers and sons have a completely different relationship — warmer, loving. People I was at school with often barely had relationships with their fathers. Mine was different; my parents have always been modern, liberal thinkers.’ It didn’t make much sense. So what, really, was his problem? What had caused his unhappiness at school? Was he bullied? Serially naughty? Out of his depth? I doubt it.

In defence of dinner parties

In or out? Almost two months on and I’m afraid the great debate shows no sign of abating, certainly not in our divided household. And while we’ve had several referendums over the matter, the result is always a stalemate. The only upside is that this argument has nothing to do with Brussels. It’s far more rudimentary. The battle in Palmer Towers is whether we eat in or out when wanting to see friends. My wife Joanna — who, as it happens, was for In over the country’s EU membership — is a firm outer, while I, who voted Out on 23 June, am a determined inner. As with the EU conundrum, there are good points to be made on both sides. Joanna thinks that conversation is more focused when seated at a restaurant table, ideally one that is round rather than rectangular.

White power

Ruby Wax makes the point (repeatedly but it still gets a laugh) that the British discovered the practice of brushing their teeth in the 1980s. I dare say our dental hygiene is the butt of more jokes throughout North America, where wearing a brace is something of a fashion statement. But something strange is happening on our side of the pond. This struck me — in fact, almost blinded me — a couple of weeks ago when a hotel manager introduced himself at a central London gathering and dazzled me. His teeth were super-white. They were super-straight, too, but it was the brilliance that startled me. It was as if someone had told the poor fellow to open wide and poured a pot of Dulux gloss into his mouth. I couldn’t take him seriously.

Blazers of glory

Most mornings on the way to work I pass students flowing out of Fulham Broadway tube station en route to the London Oratory School. They are an assorted bunch. Some seem more confident than others. One or two of the boys look immaculate, while others have clearly stirred their cornflakes with their ties. Some of the girls appear remarkably grown- up for their age — but presumably that’s my ‘how-come-policemen-are-getting-younger’ syndrome. What they share apart, obviously, from wishing they were still tucked up in bed, is a uniform chosen for them by the school, which they have adapted with varying success to their own personalities or moods on any given day. They might think their uniforms are in some way stifling and repressing their true personalities, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Planet of the canapés

Even the name is pretentious. And something of a misnomer, too. After all, a canapé comes from the French word for ‘couch’ — the idea presumably being that a garnish of some kind or other sits on top of tiny slices of bread or small crackers in the same way that tasty people plonk themselves down on a sofa. Except that the whole business of dainty finger food — as liberated Victorians used to call it — has got so out of hand that wherever you fetch up, chefs are going to extremes to outdo each other. During the preamble to new year, I attended one bash at a swish hotel in central London where the canapés kept coming (and heaven knows what they must have cost) but all they did was make everyone long for a proper dinner.

Maximum Bob

We were like four hapless contestants on University Challenge. None of us knew the answer. But just like they do on the telly, I leaned learnedly across towards my 28-year-old son, who in turn looked despairingly towards one of my stepsons, before my other stepson made his contribution with a shrug of the shoulders. So, it was up to me as captain of the team to take a guess as the first few bars wafted through the Royal Albert Hall. ‘“Tangled Up in Blue”?’ I proffered with as much enthusiasm as Jeremy Corbyn at a white-tie dinner. But, fingers on the buzzer, there were far bigger questions to be answered. Such as, what on earth were we doing turning up yet again for a Bob Dylan concert when not only did we fail to hear most of the words last time but didn’t even recognise many of the tunes? Ah, but to paraphrase one of my favourite Dylan lines, we were so much older then, we’re younger than that now.

Bring back the bungalow!

Sheila Pugh is 91 and in good health. She lives on her own in Congleton, Cheshire, where she takes pleasure in cooking for herself and moving about the place with a dustpan and brush, albeit a little gingerly at times. She has a private garden with a pond and views over arable land. A lot of her friends and a great number of people of a similar age have had to move into retirement or care homes, cashing in their savings and surrendering their independence in the process. Mrs Pugh’s good fortune and the difference between her and so many other ninetysomethings is simple: she lives in a bungalow. ‘It’s a real lifeline for her,’ says her daughter, who is a friend of mine. I get that. My parents-in-law moved into a 1960s bungalow in Swaffham, Norfolk, two years ago and although at first it was a wrench to leave their cottage spread over three floors, the move couldn’t have come at a better moment.