Duas coisas são infinitas: o universo e a estupidez humana. Mas, em relação ao universo, ainda não tenho a certeza absoluta.
(Einstein)
But the tune ends too soon for us all (Ian Anderson)
detail of a painting by Francisco de Zurbaran, 1630 (Bridgeman Images)
As I leant over to speak to one of my dining companions in a busy restaurant, I felt something shuffle on my knee. I briefly wondered if it was a rat. But it was just a busybody waiter, who had taken my napkin from the table and folded it upon my lap. It was a bit strange that he did so without asking – but then, this same waiter had, when taking our order, crouched down (so that he was sitting on a chair) and asked, ‘Are you guys ready to order, and do you want me to explain the concept?’ So much to dislike.
My biggest gripe used to be waiters who poured your wine too frequently, and too full, in their mission to total the bottle so that you order another. A few years ago, I was in a very high-end restaurant for a celebratory meal to mark a special occasion, and had ordered some rather expensive wine. The waiters wanted to turn the table – even though this was not official practice at this particular venue. And because we were just a bunch of women, with no men involved to add an air of authority, they kept refilling my glass even though I had barely had a sip. When I told them to please stop, I heard one waiter whisper to the other, ‘Don’t give any to the cunt in the middle.’ I complained so hard that I ended up with a sizeable chunk taken off the bill.
Another thing that drives me mad is being told that the kitchen will send out whichever dish it fancies whenever it happens to be ready, so you might end up with the dessert coming first and the olives last. Then there are the tapas places where the tables are about 10 cm square and the numerous plates are in constant danger of toppling onto the floor.
Being asked repeatedly if everything is OK and whether we are enjoying our food is also a major irritant. Although to do so once is polite, I always think that if there was anything wrong, you might be expected to mention it to the waiter – despite being British.
What else? How about those chefs who think themselves celebrities, with their tour of the tables at the end of service – so that just as you’re about to take a mouthful of dessert, you find yourself having to make polite conversation with someone you would really much rather just stayed in the kitchen.
Or waiters that don’t bother to write the order down, and then get something wrong – or have to come back twice to check. Big ego thing. Some places insist that all of the food is perfectly seasoned and therefore don’t put salt and pepper on the table, then look at you as if you’re some kind of jumped-up pervert when you ask for it.
But my most serious complaint is reserved for restaurants that are incapable of serving up everyone’s food at the same time. What do you do? Force yourself to start eating (and therefore not enjoying it at all) as you look over your shoulder for where the rest of the food is? And waiters who start clearing the table before everyone has finished eating come a close second.
Of course, it’s a two-way street: let’s not forget the hell that some diners put restaurant workers through. I’m thinking of diners who continue chatting to each other, oblivious to the presence of the poor waiters standing by the table, balancing heavy armloads of dishes. And then the blank stares when half of them have forgotten what they ordered, while the server desperately tries to stop the plate from sliding onto the floor. If it were me, it would go straight into the diner’s lap.
I have eaten out with people who never even deign to look at the person serving them, just carrying on with the conversation as the food and drink magically appears before them. I would ban phones in restaurants. Not only because of how rude it looks to other diners when people act as though they are eating in their own home, barking into the phone and ignoring both the food and their dining companions – but also to stop them from taking photographs of every bloody course they are served.
Other crimes I would like to see punished include using fingers to scoop out ice when there is a perfectly good pair of tongs on the table, eating from a knife, and going outside for a smoke between courses. There is no room for complaints about the food or the service if diners behave like Neanderthals themselves.
At home, the left sees him as cynical, conniving and corrupt; while the right sees him as tired, weak and unambitious. Abroad, he is almost universally loathed and distrusted. And yet no one can deny his Machiavellian mastery of the dirty game of politics, domestic and international.
Modern history has produced only two figures who fit this description. The first is Germany’s Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. The second is Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. For Bibi – his nickname and the title of his recent autobiography – read Bibismarck.
Netanyahu has been Prime Minister for almost 14 of the past 15 years, not quite the 19 years Bismarck served as German chancellor. For nearly a decade, whether Bibi should stay or go was the central question of Israeli politics. Between 2018 and 2022, Israel held five elections in which one of the rallying cries of the opposition was ‘Just not Bibi’. In August last year, Israel was racked by anti-Netanyahu protests that drew hundreds of thousands to the streets, including almost every member of the country’s cultural and even military elite. The surprise attack of 7 October was seemingly the final nail in Netanyahu’s political coffin.
Yet there Bibi still sits in his office in Jerusalem: still Prime Minister. As the anniversary of 7 October approaches, he is again ahead in the polls.
And no wonder. Hamas has largely been vanquished in Gaza, its remaining fighters confined to tunnels under a heap of rubble. More impressively, Israel has conducted arguably the most successful clandestine operation of the 21st century, maiming around 3,000 Hezbollah operatives with explosive pagers. And it is waging a war in all but name in Lebanon, attacking more than 5,000 targets in the past month and eliminating 16 of Hezbollah’s most senior operatives.
Last week, Bibi was at the UN General Assembly, defiantly quoting the Prophet Samuel: ‘The eternity of Israel will not falter.’ Half an hour after he stepped down from the podium, from his hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he ordered the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the seemingly invincible secretary-general of Hezbollah. On Monday, Netanyahu went even further. In a video addressing the Iranian people, he hinted that Iran ‘will be free sooner than people think’.
Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at the UN General Assembly in New York City, 27 September 2024 (Getty Images)
At the time of writing, Iran has launched more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Judging by his recent performance, Netanyahu may seize the opportunity to hit the Iranian ‘octopus’ over the head, seeking to topple the theocracy in Tehran, or at least to strike a blow against its nuclear weapons programme.
When we met with Netanyahu in Jerusalem in February, we were struck by his Bismarckian demeanour. Throughout our conversation, he kept glancing sideways to a map of the Middle East that hangs on his office wall, as if to remind himself of his country’s predicament. Bismarck famously said that his map of Africa was a map of Europe. Bibi’s map of the world is a map of Israel, tiny and surrounded by foes.
Asked what a future historian in 20 or 30 years’ time might think about him, he replied: ‘The United States was declining. But Israel was able to resist the regional ambitions of Iran by defeating or containing the tentacles of the octopus.’ He added that in pursuing this objective, he always took care to avoid antagonising ‘superpowers’, meaning Russia and China. The future historian may add that, by focusing relentlessly on the Iranian threat, Netanyahu succeeded in building bridges to the Arab states, including those in the Gulf, while at the same time marginalising the Palestinians. The Abraham Accords were the result not of idealism but of vintage Realpolitik. In pursuit of his goals, Netanyahu has worked with Russia in Syria, enabled Hamas in Gaza, and defied first Barack Obama and then Joe Biden in Washington.
Moreover, like Bismarck, Bibi has combined devious foreign policy with devious domestic politics. He took the soft-left Yair Lapid as his finance minister, the hard-right Itamar Ben-Gvir as his national security minister and rallied the conservative masses against the liberal bourgeoisie with the lightning rod of judicial reform, repeatedly dividing the nation to secure his own political position.
Bismarck instrumentalised German unification to defend the Prussian monarchy and aristocracy against the threat posed to them by bourgeois liberalism. He built the German Reich with a series of short, sharp wars: against Denmark, against Austria and against France. Having founded the Reich, he never lost sight of Germany’s vulnerable position between France and Russia. He devised the intricate diplomatic instrument of the Secret Reinsurance Treaty to avoid being dragged into a fight with Russia on Austria-Hungary’s behalf. All this could be sustained domestically only with a series of artful measures to divide the liberals, exploiting their anti-Catholicism and anti-socialism, as well as the susceptibility of the industrialists to the temptation of tariffs.
Yet, for all the resemblances, Netanyahu seems to be reliving Bismarck’s career in reverse. In 1874, 16 years before being forced out of office, Bismarck complained: ‘I am bored. The great things are done.’ After close to the same amount of time in office, Netanyahu has never been less bored, for he now has the chance to do the great things. The decapitation of Hezbollah may be his Königgrätz, the battle in 1866 which confirmed Prussian primacy over Austria. Destroying the Iranian nuclear programme – or the regime itself – would be his Sedan, the battle that doomed the Second French Empire of Napoleon III.
In Krav Maga, Israel’s national martial art, breaking out of a headlock requires striking the opponent in the head with a free hand, disorienting them, then going on the offensive. This metaphor describes many episodes in Israeli military history. In 1955, Operation Elkayam killed 72 Egyptian soldiers in retaliation for the Fedayeen insurgency, humiliating Egypt into a ceasefire. In 1967, Israel launched the Six-Day War as a response to Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran. In 1978, Israel launched Operation Litani to end PLO raids in northern Israel. Israel’s headlock, before and after 7 October, was obvious. Iranian proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad – threatened it from multiple sides. We now have a sense of how Netanyahu seeks to emerge from it.
Launching a new war in Lebanon gave Israel three options. The first was to trigger an Iranian response, which would yield an opportunity to strike either the Iranian nuclear programme or the stability of the regime itself. The second, had that not materialised, was to hit Hezbollah so hard that Iran weighed in to try to push Hamas into a ceasefire on Israel’s terms. The third was to pre-empt a harsh reaction by a weakened Hezbollah, which would have given Israel the opportunity to effect lasting strategic change north of its border.
As with all Bismarckian stratagems, there were many risks involved. It seems unlikely that the Hamas chief, Yahya Sinwar, if he is still alive, will be more likely to agree a ceasefire now, as Hamas does not depend on Iranian supplies, and a larger war might even save it from perdition. And an all-out Lebanon War would absorb Israel’s capabilities, giving Iran a window to sprint to a bomb.
Bismarck saw five fronts in his famous ‘combinations’ (Austria, Britain, France, Russia, Italy). Netanyahu has to think about more than seven (Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Iran – to say nothing of Turkey, Egypt and the Gulf states). The coming days, more than any other period in his career, will determine Netanyahu’s place in history. As the son of an historian – his father Ben-Zion wrote The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain – Bibi is no doubt aware of that.
Perhaps the most profound similarity between the Iron Chancellor and the Iron Prime Minister is the way they look at history. Survival is more important than ideology, a principle that extends as much to one’s own political career as to the life of the state. Bismarck was born in 1815. His political career tracks the rise and fall of the great powers’ Congress System. Netanyahu was born in 1949. His political career tracks the rise and fall of the Pax Americana.
After living through the revolutions of 1848, Bismarck concluded that the advance of modernity was unstoppable. Netanyahu’s father taught him that Jewish history is a ‘history of Holocausts’. The conservativism of the two men is perhaps rooted in this essential pessimism. Netanyahu, unlike his settler allies, can all too easily imagine a world in which Israel no longer exists. Unlike his opponents on the left, he cannot imagine a utopian end of history. Like Bismarck’s, then, his is a vision of perpetual struggle.
The key question for Israel is what follows Netanyahu. Henry Kissinger’s critique of Bismarck was that it is impossible to institutionalise a multi-year tour de force. The same may be said of Bibi. He has no obvious successor, and that is by design. The Israeli political landscape is littered with protégés turned enemies: former prime minister Naftali Bennett, former defence minister Avigdor Lieberman, former defence minister Moshe Yaalon and former justice minister Gideon Sa’ar (though Netanyahu managed to coax him back into the cabinet last week).
Netanyahu’s view that there is no one up to the task may be true. But after Bismarck came Caprivi. And eventually came Bethmann-Hollweg, the chancellor whose miscalculations plunged Europe into war in 1914. Netanyahu’s most likely successors in the Likud party are avowed populists without his historical sensibility or facility with the English language. He thus bequeaths his country as uncertain a future as Bismarck left to his. Bismarck unified Germany but failed to unite the Germans. His successors embarked on a road that led to war and the dissolution of the Reich.
To be the Israeli Bismarck is no mean feat. But there may be a sting in Bibi’s tale.
Uma perspetiva única dos rios Severn, Test, Clyde e Derwent. Série documental de 4 episódios.
Richard Hammond atravessa o Reino Unido para explorar os mais belos rios da Grã-Bretanha. A série documental de 4 episódios leva-nos pelos rios Severn, Test, Clyde e Derwent e explora a importância histórica, ecológica e económica de cada um. Da nascente à foz, Richard revela as histórias não contadas e a incrível variedade de personagens e história de cada rio. Nadando, andando de caiaque e percorrendo esses notáveis cursos de água, conhece pessoas para quem o rio é parte fundamental da sua vida, seja para viagens, comércio ou lazer.
A Nissan Juke hybrid car on the production line (Getty Images)
Is it really any surprise that car manufacturers have started refusing to sell us petrol cars? According to Robert Forrester, chief executive of dealership Vertu Motors, anyone trying to buy a petrol car at the moment is likely to be quoted a delivery date into next year. As I wrote here last December, unless electric vehicles (EVs) enjoyed a sudden rush of popularity, the inevitable result of the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate would be that car manufacturers would be forced to withdraw from the UK market. The reason was coming down the road at us like a three-ton electric SUV. Under ZEV, which began on 1 January this year, manufacturers are obliged to ensure that at least 22 per cent of their sales this year are pure electric models. If they fail to meet this threshold they will be fined £15,000 for every petrol, diesel or hybrid car that they are over the limit.
Trouble is that the demand for full EVs has stalled at around one sixth of the market. In the seven months to the end of July, according to the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), just 16.8 per cent of cars sold were battery electric vehicles (BEVs). This is marginally above the level of 16.1 per cent in the same month of 2023, but it is nowhere near 22 per cent – and that is in spite of manufacturers bending over backwards with generous discounts on the vehicles. Motorists are refusing to take the bait partly because of the high price of EVs – which still cost around 50 per cent more than the nearest petrol equivalent – and partly because of charging problems. For the third of UK households which do not have off-street parking, an EV remains an impractical and expensive solution – whatever EVs’ evangelical supporters may say. Moreover, EVs tend to be a lot bulkier than the petrol models they are replacing, which makes them far less practical for people who have to park them on the street.
Now the crunch has come, as it was always likely to do in the autumn: car-makers are getting to the point at which they can’t afford to sell many more petrol, diesel or hybrid models this year without risking running into those punitive £15,000 fines. Hence the efforts to push sales into next year. But that will only buy a temporary stay of execution, because next year manufacturers will have to ensure that 28 per cent of vehicles they sell are BEVs – and the proportion rises to 80 per cent by 2030 (or quite possibly 100 per cent if Labour returns to an all-out ban on petrol and diesel cars by 2030, and adds hybrids to the banned list too). If you have pre-sold much of next year’s petrol and diesel quote in advance, life is going to be even more difficult next year.
What can manufacturers do if buyers simply don’t want the EVs which are being pushed at them and opt to keep their old banger running instead? They could try doing as Stellantis (which owns Vauxhall, Peugeot-Citroen and Fiat) did in May: announcing that it is to team up with Chinese electric car maker Leapmotor, whose relatively cheap vehicles it will sell under an Amsterdam-based subsidiary. But while we are seeing more Chinese EVs on the roads, there is no guarantee that buyers would take to these vehicles in their masses, even if price parity with petrol cars could be achieved. That has been made all the more difficult thanks to new EU tariffs of up to 37 per cent on Chinese-made cars.
No-one should be surprised if some manufacturers simply withdraw from the UK market altogether. German car-makers used to call Britain ‘Treasure Island’, so lucrative was our car market. Thanks to the ZEV they may start treating it instead like Snake Island – a place to avoid landing at all costs.
What a thrilling number of glass ceilings have been broken this century – with more still to come, apparently. In 2008 America elected its first black president. In 2012 Barack Obama was re-elected and so became the first black president to win re-election. In 2016 America had a chance to elect its first female president but the public blew it and failed to elect Hillary Clinton. Fortunately they somewhat made up for this in 2020 by voting in the first female vice president. A vote that was made sweeter by the fact that, on that occasion, the public had a two-for-one offer and were also able to vote in the first black vice president. Now the public have a further chance to improve themselves by voting for the first black female president.
Hillary Clinton had a chance to ruminate on this at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, declaring that between herself and Kamala Harris: ‘Together we’ve put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling. On the other side of that glass ceiling is Kamala Harris raising her hand and taking the oath of office as our 47th president of the United States.’
Close observers might have sensed a certain forced smile on Clinton’s face as she said this. She had hoped to be commander in chief since at least the time that her husband was breaking in the new intern pool in the 1990s White House. An unkind person might say: ‘Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.’ But a kind interpretation of history (of the sort that Hillary is presumably already writing) is that she is like one of those early astronauts who paved the way for Neil Armstrong. Or an early explorer who traversed the Arctic wastelands and in whose historic footsteps other explorers more successfully followed in less bigoted times.
Much of the media is content to frame things in this light. In a news story this week, the BBC asked ‘whether the political backdrop has transformed enough for the vice president to reach the nation’s highest office’. Are the US public yet bold enough, open-minded enough and – yes – strong enough to agree with a BBC editorial team? We shall see. And the BBC will be watching.
The ‘glass ceiling’ conversation sometimes seems to be the main game in western politics. If the public do not vote for the glass-ceiling-shattering candidate, then it is they who are at fault. Here is the BBC again: ‘During her run for president in 2016, Mrs Clinton faced a barrage of criticisms over her appearance, her clothing and even the sound of her voice.’ For shame. Anyone with a long memory will recall that in 2016 nobody made any comment on Donald Trump’s appearance, clothing or vocal habits.
A couple of years after her election defeat, Clinton and her daughter Chelsea were hawking around a book they had put their names to called The Book of Gutsy Women. Asked by the excellent Emma Barnett on the British leg of their tour why this book of female trailblazers did not include Margaret Thatcher, Clinton acknowledged that Britain’s first female prime minister could be said to be ‘gutsy’ but that ultimately she failed to make the grade because ‘she doesn’t fit the other part of the definition in our opinion, which really is knocking down barriers for others and trying to make a positive difference’. Which is the sort of moment where the game truly reveals itself.
Because – as the wiser students of politics will by now have worked out – a female candidate is not a female candidate if she does not conform to various leftist shibboleths. I do not remember these voices celebrating the idea that Sarah Palin might have broken a glass ceiling. Even the career of Britain’s most successful postwar prime minister can be dismissed by these people if she can be deemed not to have tried to make ‘a positive difference’ – which translates as ‘doing what the left agrees with’. And so we must agree that Thatcher broke no glass ceilings, was not a force of positive change or even in any real sense a woman, and that the British public can spend this century making up for our bigotry.
In 2017 we seized the magnificent opportunity to re-break a glass ceiling when we decided with overwhelming public enthusiasm that it was time to give another woman a go at the top job. Who can forget the resulting glory years of Theresa May? We then had the opportunity to celebrate our first ethnic–minority prime minister in Rishi Sunak and, although he didn’t prove to be our most popular PM, Keir Starmer was among those who paid tribute to his ceiling-shattering. The first words Starmer said, on returning from Buckingham Palace last month, were to thank ‘the outgoing prime minister, Rishi Sunak, for his achievement as the first British Asian prime minister of our country’. Perhaps it was churlish not to point to all of Sunak’s other achievements. But it didn’t matter, because the achievement for Sunak was in just being, and ceiling-breaking.
In March, Vaughan Gething was likewise celebrated for becoming ‘the first black leader of Wales’. When he fell from office his supporters inevitably blamed ‘racism’. Which goes to show that Wales ought to find another black leader to atone for things fast.
Scotland has also broken ceilings by briefly having a Muslim first minister in Humza Yousaf. A point he made on the way up. But on the way down, he started to refer to bigotry – and now says it’s so bad he may have to leave Scotland altogether.
I do wonder how long this can go on. Will it stop when we have all voted in the first black transgender dwarf in each of our countries, and promised to re-elect them? Or will it never stop?
Proportionally, there are three times more gays who are MPs than there are gays in the general population. Which suggests that if representation is the key, there should be a cull of gay MPs at the next election. But that won’t happen. And no one will suggest it.
It’s almost as if ‘representation’ and ‘glass ceilings’ aren’t the real issue. I miss the times when competency and achievement were.
When you have small children just getting them out of the door can be traumatic. Finding and applying each shoe can be enough to provoke a tantrum – and not just in the parent. And no, they can’t bring their Power Rangers swords, because we are going out to lunch and everyone knows that plastic swords and restaurants don’t mix.
Eventually you will arrive at the restaurant, although it will 20 minutes later than the booking. As you push the buggy inside, the establishment falls quiet like the Slaughtered Lamb in An American Werewolf in London. There’s a scrape of chairs – a pause – then the chatter resumes. But in that moment everyone is thinking the same thing: please don’t sit next to us.
You are led to a table by a waitress who feels like a goddess – she has the power to make or break the mealtime of all she surveys. At the table, usually in the darkest, remotest and most joyless corner of the restaurant, the fun begins – coats are discarded; the buggy is folded away or pushed aside to be a tripping hazard; a high chair is wedged in against the back of a diner behind, performing an impromptu Heimlich manoeuvre on them and doubtlessly spilling a drink all over them, too.
If your fidgeting children haven’t already upset the water jug, then this is the moment. The next victim will be a glass of wine – smashed to smithereens as soon as it arrives by a flying menu card that the kids can’t read but can fight over. The waitress immediately disappears to get a dustpan and brush and large roll of blue paper to mop up the mess.
Once the destroying stops, the complaining begins. ‘I’m bored,’ one will yelp before administering a sadistic Chinese burn to the other. The youngest will then erupt in agony – tears springing from his eyes as you attempt to decide between the fillet steak or the leg of lamb and whether that should be dauphinoise potatoes or twice-cooked chips.
Then the waitress returns and begins cleaning away the wine and broken glass – only to cut herself. She races away clutching her arm as if she’s been set upon by dogs. You, meanwhile, still have no glass of wine, even though its nearly 2 p.m. on a Sunday and God alone knows you’ve earned it. Eventually, the table is cleared of hazardous shards, and you’ve all avoided having to take anyone – granny included – to A&E. Forty-five minutes after arriving you are finally presented with a glass of wine by the waitress whose hand is now swathed in blue plastic tape and supported by sling.
You order, a process that resembles a nutritional interrogation and requires several returns to the kitchen to establish the antecedents of certain ingredients, down to molecular level. All the while the children refuse to settle. One moment you snatch the cutlery away from Child A just before he impales himself with it; the next you are removing the salt cellar from Child B just as he draws a face on the table with its contents. By the time you’ve ordered everything on the table is piled in a heap at one end out of reach of Child B, who is bawling ‘Pepppppper!’ at the top of his voice.
When the whimpering fades, you make an attempt at conversation with your spouse – only to be interrupted by another Chinese burn. But it’s when you see your eldest prancing across the restaurant waving two napkins like a Morris dancer, with no shoes on, that you throw in the towel.
You hand your phones to the children and you become those people. It’s for the best, you remind yourself, as you offer your offspring up to the gods of Samsung and Apple in exchange for peace, digital Danegeld. As they sit their agog, their little brains melting quietly, the disapproving looks and sideways glances begin. But what do you care? Pah! You say ‘cheers’, clink glasses and remark about what a nice time everyone’s having.
The children’s food arrives – organic chicken nuggets, priced to the point of pain – and you butcher it into tiny non-choking pieces because even though the blighters can open jars with their teeth you constantly worry that a waffle or a cumbersome strawberry will be the end of them. Then, wonder upon wonder, your fillet steak arrives with pepper sauce and sides; the children are eating, too – albeit with their hands – and you take up your knife and fork. At last. It might not look like it, but right now, you are Napoleon after Borodino…
Suddenly there’s a tug at your arm: ‘Daddy. I need a poo.’ By the time you return your steak is cold, the pepper sauce is congealed and funnily enough – after padding about playing ‘I Spy’ in a poorly ventilated disabled loo, your appetite has been eviscerated.
You get through pudding, coffee, and then coats are fought back on. Once the staff have gratefully closed the door behind you, you remember that this is exactly what happened last time. And it’s a sign. You shouldn’t do it. You should stop trying to take your small children to restaurants. Small children and restaurants go together about as well as potassium and air. They hate each other. And everyone else in the room hates them too. The problem is that we forget this and we delude ourselves with a fantasy that it’s feasible. But it isn’t. It’s folly.
So we should save parents from themselves. Like denying cigarettes to the under-21s, we should ban all children – say, under the age of eight or nine – from restaurants (with exceptions for the likes of McDonald’s, or Nando’s). While this isn’t for the benefit of child-haters, they will be overjoyed, and – who knows – even the restaurants themselves might profit since having fewer tiny brutes ruining it for everyone else might allow others to enjoy themselves more.
Yes, a ban sounds a bit 1970s, but the truth is that young families have a better time at home: the toys are there, the environment is kid-proofed and you know what’s in the food you’re serving. Plus, for the amount of money you have to part with in a restaurant these days you can probably buy a rib of beef the size of a Mondeo – and what’s not to like about that?
Finally, you also have the television on at home. And as every parent knows, when it comes to pleasing young children, Peppa Pig is far more important than Michelin stars.
Am I the only one who feels stumped by public notices?
‘Buglers are operating in this area’ warns the Metropolitan Police sign, heralding the sound of trumpets perhaps. Aggravated burglary is often described as ‘a burglary gone wrong’, the planned effortless removal of domestic goods having met with some kind of ‘unforeseen’ opposition, the fireside poker taken up by the victim perhaps, or an XL Bully.
Venturing out in London has become a little daunting. I was startled on a recent tube journey to hear over the intercom that one should ‘beware of unforeseen spillages’. What, one wonders, are foreseen spillages? The explorer Wilfred Thesiger crossed the Arabian Peninsula with only a few small leather water skins; an ancient test for the Vestal Virgins’ chastity was to cross the Roman Forum with a sieve full of water without spilling a drop. How expectations have slipped.
Americans are reputed to be baffled by the signage on the Piccadilly line from Heathrow warning that ‘This train is for Cockfosters’. Many are driven, in alarm, to ‘alight’ at an earlier station. Warning notices now are posted as ‘advanced’ but then left there for weeks after the feared-for event has long faded into history. A simple ‘advance’ warning is indeed a paltry thing.
My Princeton-educated brother-in-law was much taken with the tube warning to telephone a designated number if the victim of sexual staring. The ensuing conversation, if the interlocutor picked up, might have fuelled Samuel Beckett’s dialogues. Nonetheless, as Sadiq assures us, ‘every journey matters’.
At my GPs’ surgery, as I stepped over a rough sleeper in the narthex, I observed two signs, the first letting one know that this was a ‘Yellow Fever Centre’ and the other that it was advisable to ‘check with your dealer, as some supplies are impure’. In the adjoining Mary Seacole Library, dedicated to her exploits in Scutari, is an offer of ‘Free Condoms’ as you leave with your improving tomes. At Dulles airport, Washington DC, undergoing ‘refurbishment’ Annenberg-style, an exculpatory sign begs the traveller to ‘Pardon Our Dust’, creating an almost teleological aura of finality.
When I was inter-railing as a youth, I spotted the pleasing French warnings ‘Ne Pas se pencher au dehors’ and further ‘Un train peut en cacher un autre’ so useful in the learning of this complex lingo and for the avoidance of decapitation. A recent French GCSE exam paper asked for translations of washing-labels (a close study of Les Fleurs du Mal is no longer required). One of my sons was anxious that he was accurate in rendering the label ‘Ne Pas Frotter’ as ‘Don’t Worry’.
Indeed, if one were sensitive to many of these injunctions, signs, and portents, one might hesitate to go out at all. It’s reassuring to recall P.T. Barnum, who, when his American Museum became overcrowded, displayed a sign reading ‘This Way to the Egress’. Visitors eagerly followed the sign, anxious to glimpse her. Instead, they found themselves abruptly in the open air, with a charge to re-enter.
Daniel Lambert (1770–1809) by Benjamin Marshall, 1806 (Bridgeman/Leicester Museum & Art Gallery)
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 to the Financial Times, which published the graph, is that one in eight Americans is now taking semaglutides, drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy.
I’ll state right here that I’ve got flesh in the game – though a good deal less than I did before I encountered the wonderful world of semaglutides. I wrote here in the summer of 2023:
I’ve had an interesting relationship with my weight. In my teens, I was so thin that my mother would cry when I went home to visit. In my twenties, I started to ‘fill out’ a bit, which was strange as I was a coke fiend. In my thirties I got so fat that a magazine printed a photograph of Jabba the Hutt holding court and said that it was me with my fan club. In my forties, a private doctor prescribed me a drug called Reductil; the effects were so rapid and extreme that I started to wear tight black yoga shorts under my skirts, as there was a chance that a waistband which fitted me in the morning would be down around my ankles at sundown and I’d have to coolly step out of the errant garment and chuck it in the bin. Like most good things, it was banned and I packed it all back on. In my fifties my son died and I lost a third of my body weight; the fact that the worst thing that ever happened to me was also the thing which caused the most people to say, ‘You look great – I didn’t recognise you!’ has made me sceptical about weight-related happiness.
I lost three stones in as many months last year taking the oral semaglutide Rybelsus in June, July and August; then I stopped as, with autumn approaching, I wanted to go back to my much-loved habit of socialising in restaurants and bars. I put a third of it back on between then and now, but I was definitely eating much less than I had before, even in the year I was semaglutide-free, before I started injecting Mounjaro – the King Kong of diet drugs – six weeks ago. (I get mine from the highly reputable online weight-loss clinic Slimmr, co-founded by the brilliant Spectator writer and excellent physician Dr Max Pemberton.) I haven’t had any of the side effects others complain of (unfortunate occurrences in the digestive and elimination systems which we shall pass over here in the interests of good taste) but then I’ve always reacted well to chemicals; I only had to have a quarter of an E back in the day to get off my bonce.
Talking of drugs – which I rarely do, having kicked a massive cocaine habit overnight nine years ago – semaglutides have proved highly successful in helping people cut down on using them, and on cigarettes and alcohol, even helping with gambling and over-shopping disorders. Internet talk-boards abound with surprised semaglutide-takers comparing notes on how these meds have sorted them out not just physically but mentally; one, a depressed woman who hadn’t cleaned her house in five years, suddenly being energised by her first injection to embark on a massive spring clean. In a recent AirMail essay, Ashley Baker wrote: ‘I linger at mirrors. I allow myself to be photographed from the waist down. I wear high-cut bikini bottoms. I’ve changed. Actually, Mounjaro has changed me. I don’t want to jinx things by calling it a miracle drug, but that’s what it feels like: the antidepressant I never knew I needed.’ I’m generally a cheerful person who doesn’t suffer from any Mental Elf issues, so I can’t comment, but I have noticed a new clarity of thought – and I was smart to start with. I think of it as a Bad Habit hunter in a handy pen-sized syringe.
Is there any reasonable argument against the use of semaglutides? It’s expensive, but I’m saving a fortune on restaurants and fruit; it wasn’t unusual for me to get through twenty quid’s worth of blueberries in one sitting (don’t judge). It could make huge savings for the NHS, considering the massive amount spent on obesity-related diseases in old age; furthermore, two studies this year concluded that these drugs can reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes regardless of the amount of weight lost.
The usual scolds will bang on about it being ‘unnatural’ and huff out the tired old mantra about eating less and moving more, but I’ve always been quite against nature – especially for women, trapping us as it would at the level of beasts. The fetishisation of natural living is an addled delusion; I think of the amusing cartoon in which one cave-man says to another, ‘We have pure air, lots of exercise and raw food – so how come we die at 35?’ It was only two years ago that the NHS abandoned targets for ‘natural’ births due to the totally avoidable rise in infant mortality it brought about. Then there will be the daft quasi-feminists who insist that wanting to lose weight means that one is a puppet of the patriarchy – completely ignoring the fact that plump women were a benchmark of beauty in the past, when women had no rights. The ‘fat activists’ such as nepo-baby Honey (daughter of Jonathan) Ross will be cross, but then they always are. By the way, that’s not ‘activism’ as we once understood it, as in organising to improve the lot of the disadvantaged, but rather sitting on your ever-spreading BTM all day swearing at naysayers on the internet while a gaggle of similarly chunky girlfriends call you ‘Kween’. If one believes in agency for women, it seems perverse to get het up about the fact that some of us are choosing not to gorge ourselves into an early grave.
As John Burn-Murdoch says in the FT, ‘There has been a tendency to view taking drugs to lose weight as cheating. Not the way it’s meant to be done. But here’s the thing: it works. And I suspect when we look back at charts of obesity rates in generations to come, they will prove it.’ In my own small way, I’m pleased to be part of this totally unforeseen and intriguing experiment, when against all expectations the worldwide obesity epidemic was reversed. I should stress here that the main reason I take semaglutides is that I am overweight and keen to be as healthy as I can be at the age of 65 – but only a fool would ignore the other benefits it confers. I’m aiming to stop in December, have a fun festive season and get bang on it in 2025; I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions, but with my little Mounjaro pen stashed in the fridge, I think it might just be the time to start. Whether it’s losing that weight or writing that novel, I’m entranced and emboldened by this interesting drug.
_poster.jpg)
