Spectator Life

Spectator Life

An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.

We need to talk about femcels

Women’s expectations are off. They want men with advanced degrees, but on university campuses, women outnumber their male counterparts. They want men with above-average incomes, but the gender pay gap has been reversed – young women now out-earn men. They want men who share their politics, but in almost every western country over the past decade or so, women

Am I losing my marbles?

‘You need to get yourself tested’, my wife said after yet another of my lapses, ‘you’re fast becoming a marble-free zone.’ I couldn’t disagree. Perhaps the relentless ‘mental ’elf’ craze had alerted me to my own flaws, though groping for names and words is, surely, excusable by 67. But I would often devour a book

Why I’m a pro-screen parent

Have you ever looked after a child that doesn’t nap from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m.? I have. Just to be clear, I’m talking about a 14-hour day with no relief whatsoever from grannies, nannies or DHs, the ghastly acronym that Mumsnet uses for fathers to signify ‘darling husband’. Next question: have you ever looked

The democratisation of cocaine

Love or loathe Danny Dyer, hard-man hooligan of Football Factory, EastEnders bod and breakout Rivals star, but he does talk sense. The kind of straight-up, geezer sense you can only get down the pub, a locale to which he is no stranger. In the promotional press for his latest film, Marching Powder, Dyer, when pressed

The rise of protein washing

I bought some pork scratchings the other day, and the packet said it was ‘high in protein’. Gruntled, the brand, is distributed by the Keto Shop and is now being marketed as some type of health food. I had to laugh. Wolfing down a packet of pork scratchings in the pub is now part of

Nurses shouldn’t have tattoos

Of all the aspects of dating that make me grateful I came off the market when I did – ghosting, choking, sober socialising, facial hair like Brahms’s beard – it’s the spread of large-scale visible tattoos that makes me feel like I got the last chopper out of ’Nam. Neck tattoos and sleeves were once

The changing smell of Britain’s streets

The other day, while on my lunchtime walk, I passed a woman on a mobility scooter holding an impressive-looking doobie. Later, on my bus home, a bloke got on having just extinguished a joint, bringing the overpowering stench with him. Some commuters don’t even bother to put them out. All you can do is sit

Can happiness be found in the gut?

I share little in common with the royal family, but like certain members of that beleaguered group, 2024 turned out to be a particular annus horribilis for me. With sorrows coming at me, not as single spies but in bloody great battalions (I won’t bore you with the details), I decided to take action by

Jonathan Miller

The naked truth about French health care

Faithful readers will know of my journey through the French health care system. I have not shared these histories because anyone should be particularly interested in my aches and pains, or to complain. If I wanted to moan about a health system on the verge of a nervous breakdown I would return to Britain. No,

I was convinced by the cholesterol sceptics

It’s never a good thing when your cardiologist sounds alarmed on the phone. Come in tomorrow, he said: we’ll get you on the table. He wasn’t talking about cracking my chest, thank Christ, but threading a wire in through a vein to get a look at the heart, blow up a tiny balloon to stretch

Anxiety is good for you

These are some of the things I worried about this morning. Should I brush my teeth while drawing the curtains, to save time? Should I get out of the bath at 7.40 a.m. or 7.45 a.m. to be fully clothed for the Tesco home delivery between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.? Should I instantly pick

Love is blind? The truth about dating with a disability

Dimly lit bars are great first-date venues for most people: the seductive ambience, the candles, the gentle clink of a martini shaker. But they couldn’t be worse for a visually impaired dater such as myself. I was born with ocular albinism and nystagmus, which renders me blind in one eye and severely partially sighted in

My son was born in the passenger seat footwell

A few days before Christmas, I was gently woken by my wife telling me that while I’d been sleeping through the night in blissful ignorance, she had been writhing in labour downstairs. At the last moment, she had decided against giving birth at home and now wanted to go to the hospital. I hadn’t known

What happens when you can’t pee?

‘I really do think you should think seriously about that operation,’ my urologist told me about a year ago. The plumbing had deteriorated further and, in a calculated gamble for more tranquil twilight years, I eventually capitulated, submitting in early December to a so-called TURP, a transurethral resection of the prostate. Two days later, he

An insomniac’s guide to sleep

One of my favourite dad jokes – and, since I became a father, I have many – is to respond to the question ‘How did you sleep?’ with ‘I lay horizontally in a darkened room with my eyes closed’. But it has never been that simple for me. All my life I have suffered from

Julie Burchill

In praise of hospital food

I’ve been in hospital, bed-bound, for six weeks; because I can write it’s not so bad, but between deadlines time passes slowly, so landmarks in the day come to mean a lot. Most of all, I look forward to my husband visiting at 3 p.m.; secondly, the meds trolley trundling towards me like a dear

The vanity of hair transplants

I used to think that one of the few things that men had over women was their lack of manifest vanity. Not that men weren’t vain, but apart from turning their chests into Doritos at the gym or dyeing their greying locks that unnatural shade of black, there were very few ways for them to

Prisons must prioritise mental health

What is prison for? I’ve wondered that a lot, these past five years. In February 2020, just a few days after the UK left the European Union, and as scientists worked to agree an official name for the ‘new coronavirus’, I was sentenced to 45 months in prison for a fraud I’d committed in 2014.

Julie Burchill

I am facing a future in a wheelchair

I’ve always liked the old Winston Churchill maxim ‘Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down’. After a month lying down in hospital, contemplating life without the use of my legs, I now utter a laugh which I hope is suitably hollow. O, my lovely legs!

The science of a happier 2025

As 2025 gets under way, I’m going to guess that one of your hopes for the coming year is ‘to be happy’. I’m also going to take a punt that you’re likely to spend a considerable amount of time, effort and money doing things you hope will make you feel that way. But considering that

How real is your ADHD?

Why does everyone suddenly seem to have ADHD? It’s a question that many of us working in mental health have been asking each other recently. Just a decade or so ago I rarely saw anyone in clinic with ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’; now I see at least one case a day. It’s bewildering. Have all

Theo Hobson

Lily Phillips is scared of real sex

A young woman called Lily Phillips, known to certain users of the internet, has recently spoken about a cunning stunt she performed earlier this year. She had sex with 101 men in a single day. As I see it, there are three possible responses to this story. Or maybe four (phwoar!). The first is to

The day my mother asked me to kill her

With today’s vote on the assisted dying bill, I am reminded of my mother. Susie was 89, in failing health but of sound mind, when she took me aside at her house in the south of France to tell me she wanted me to kill her. She had no intention, she said, of enduring the

The fundamental flaw in Britain’s maternity care

Just over a year ago, I gave birth to my daughter. Labour was surprisingly smooth, unlike my previous emergency c-section. Once I started pushing, my daughter came quickly. I heard the reassuring sound of a newborn crying, and I felt the most indescribable sense of relief. Then, I started haemorrhaging. Before I knew it, I

Ross Clark

Should we worry about Ozempic?

History has taught us to be shy of miracle drugs. But that hasn’t stopped weight-loss drugs being eagerly promoted by fans such as Boris Johnson, and even touted by Keir Starmer as a possible means of getting people back into the workforce. In the US, according to a survey by polling firm KFF earlier this

I’m one of the new wave of stroke victims

The NHS has warned of a staggering 55 per cent rise in strokes among healthy middle-aged people in the last two decades. Sir Stephen Powis, medical director of the NHS, offered no explanation for what he calls an ‘alarming’ increase, beyond the standard advice to take more exercise, eat carefully, and avoid smoking and excessive

Why girls love fags

I can’t remember exactly when I had my first cigarette, but I remember roughly how I started. I was probably 13. I picked up one of my mum’s packets of ten Silk Cut, which was about half full. I slipped one out, put it in my pocket, saving it for later. My friends and I

Why blokes love coke

If cocaine were a perfume, it would be Chanel No.5: a timeless classic impervious to the flux of fashion and taste. It straddles all socio-economic divides, provided you can afford it. When I lived in Spain, cocaine was the recreational drug of choice because it was more widely available than other narcotics, and its grade

My failed attempt to game GP appointments

Nearly 20 years may have passed, but a good number of people will still recall the exchange between a salt-of-the-earth member of the public, Diana Church, and the then-prime minister, Tony Blair. The year was 2005, the occasion a pre-election edition of BBC Question Time, and the issue at hand? Well, plus ça change –