Spectator Life

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

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

Such an awful lot of stuff is happening right now, even the keenest observer of social trends could be forgiven for missing a statistical milestone passed earlier this month. So here it is: at the beginning of October, it was revealed that, for the first time since the 1970s baby bust, deaths outnumbered births in

I’ve just seen a graph which surprised me only slightly less than one might which showed that the majority of people in the UK thought that Keir Starmer could be trusted to tell the truth about what he had for breakfast. It shows that US rates of obesity have started to fall. The reason, according

Snus is a smokeless nicotine product that you insert between your gum and your upper lip. Your saliva soaks into the pouch which in turn releases nicotine, entering the bloodstream without a million tiny pesky tar particulates. In the UK, it is illegal to sell tobacco-based snus, though the non-tobacco variant, also known as nicotine

My wife had already been given morphine and they had just topped her up with ketamine. She was now so high she didn’t seem even to know where she was. And this was probably a good thing, given she was strapped to a stretcher on the rear deck of a ferry in the Bay of

I used to think a lot about Switzerland and how to accrue enough morphine to top myself when the time comes. But yay, at last, an assisted dying law seems likely and I can stop plotting. No one talks about death. But oldies think about it all the time, not deliberately – it just inserts

Every few weeks, an attention seeker – er, truth seeker – raves to a media outlet about what they experienced when they were ‘clinically dead’. In last week’s Daily Mail, it was the turn of Julia Poole, a 61-year-old ‘spiritualist’ from Cornwall, who suffered an overdose at the age of 21. Poole, who describes her

Michael Vaughan has been through hell, twice. The first time was well publicised. On thin grounds, the former England cricket captain was accused of racism and was then subjected to a brutal investigation by cricket’s overlords. Defending himself valiantly, he was exonerated. The second circle of awfulness, though, was just as bad – he became

Like many Brits, I never had perfect teeth. Even when I was young they weren’t gleaming white and the two front ones had a gap between them. I grew to quite like my gap – ‘diastema’ to give it the correct name – and found out all kinds of interesting facts about it. In The

If you have been to the cinema recently and arrived in time for the adverts, you may already know what I am talking about. Somewhere between promotions for mega-burgers in glorious technicolour and exotic holiday destinations, you are plunged into what seems an endless, but is actually only a two-minute, horror flick, entitled ‘Sicker than

Gen Z is often described as a sexless generation. We are having less sex than previous generations did at the same age. We are less likely to have been on a date. More of us identify as asexual. In fact, according to this Stonewall report, more Gen Z Brits identify as asexual (5 per cent) than gay (2 per cent) or

A year or so ago my mum, 90, took her cat to the vet. She left an hour later, relieved of nearly £800. Her aged cat it appeared needed tests, a scan and various medicines. My mum lives in a poor area of London and is on a state pension. She has little spare money, but

Lonely children often grow up to be lonely, not to mention anxious and depressed. In one study, after factoring in profession, parenting style and relationship, sleep patterns, and dietary habits, only children were more likely to display symptoms associated with anxiety and depression than those with siblings. One, it seems, really is the loneliest number.

There is no clearer demonstration of the difference between America and Britain than their attitudes towards teeth. In America, you fix them. Doesn’t matter if they’re nearly straight. You subject yourself to years of semi-torture to achieve the American dream – a white picket fence of perfectly uniform teeth. Most perfect teeth are artificial –

There is much to bemoan about the NHS, from the cruel entitlement of its junior doctors to its zest for hiring diversity and inclusion staff when many people can’t even see a GP. I have been a harsh and consistent critic for years. I don’t like the cultish, Big Brother vibes, the gawping black hole

It’s a long time since I took a powerful drug that wasn’t dispensed by a pharmacist. Last winter, during what has become the annual post-Christmas Covid collapse, I searched in vain for the codeine cough linctus I’d been prescribed when the virus first struck four years ago.  Why must we suffer because a few scrotes

They’re everywhere, it seems: in the oceans, the fish, the soil, our drinking water, our vegetables, our grains and cereals, our meat – even in us. Microplastics and smaller nanoplastics are tiny particles of plastic flubbage measuring half a centimetre or less that result from the degradation of plastic refuse, and according to recent news coverage

I’m sleeping with the actor Richard E. Grant at the minute and can highly recommend the experience. He’s reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage to me and has the perfect voice for it, faintly lascivious but not disturbingly so. As for the content, it’s just what’s wanted – engaging but not too stimulating.

Several years ago, I went for a swim after I’d been for a job interview. I’d just finished my lengths, had my shower, and as I wrestled my knickers back on, a voice from behind me said ‘It’s Ettie, isn’t it?’ Quite how she recognised my bare bottom I don’t know, but the woman who’d interviewed me earlier in the day was

How very nice that the King is now out of hospital, back home and, will, we are told, soon be back in business with his red boxes. Is it too much to hope that we can be spared further updates on his condition?  ‘All Hail the King’s Prostate Honesty’. Oh yuck. Can we stop? We

Senior management was recently walking down the street and took a funny turn. With her habitual stoicism she ignored the swelling in her foot for two weeks until I finally persuaded her to go to the urgences (emergency room) at the local Polyclinique Pasteur, a mini-hospital in Pézenas, the town four miles from our village.