The Social World

Tag: Life

  • The anarchy of a breakfast buffet

    The anarchy of a breakfast buffet

    The Portuguese guest wanted an egg, but she didn’t want it to look like an egg. She came down to breakfast with her seven-year-old son and asked me to disguise two eggs by frying them on both sides so the yolks didn’t show.

    I’ve been getting to grips with the dietary habits of the traveling public all summer – so much so that I’m almost used to a peculiar trend that I can only describe as pretend veganism. My B&B guests seem to be balanced on a capricious meat-vegan knife-edge which defies all logic and prediction, with most of them eating either some meat or some dairy, but not both. Only the French can generally be relied on to eat everything.

    As a result, I wait until someone tells me what they want before offering them food. You can, however, have a good guess based on the amount of face jewelry. This Portuguese lady had a nose ring and had just come from touring the bottom end of the Mizen Head, in the extreme south of Ireland, where she had been camping in wigwams and tipis for so long that the child had demanded a night in a bed. When they arrived late, the little boy was so happy that he could be heard leaping on and off the king mattress.

    The next morning I cooked a full Irish breakfast for another couple, whose nationality defied me until I narrowed it down to him being Scottish and she French or vice versa. I couldn’t work it out because their accents kept swapping, but they ate everything.

    After they left, the Portuguese lady came down to the kitchen with her boy and said she smelled something wonderful. She did not want to sit in the dining room, so I let them sit at the kitchen table. Here we go, I thought, eyeing the self-service buffet.

    The builder boyfriend insists this is cheaper, and we should only do the buffet. But he has no idea, because he doesn’t watch what happens when guests descend on it. They strip it from end to end, putting into bags what they can’t force down gullets, until you have to restock it daily, making it ten times the cost of doing everyone a fry-up.

    Having successfully steered the Franco-Scottish couple into the dining room to serve them a finite breakfast, I attempted to intercept the Portuguese mother and child as they came down the stairs, but she breached the barricades and wandered about the kitchen, asking what the wonderful smell was. “Bacon and egg,” I informed her. “Would you like some?” She looked appalled. They didn’t eat meat.

    I asked her to tell me, therefore, exactly what she wanted. Two eggs fried both sides, she said, explaining that the eggs must be made to look completely white and must not on any account run or be capable of having things dipped in them. Some brown toast. A cup of tea for her, black. And a cup of warm milk for the child… with cinnamon.

    I began rifling through the larder and found some, to my amazement. They ate several helpings of cereal while I fried two eggs into a concrete-hard structure. One of these they then judged still too egg-like, so I had to fry it harder, whereupon they tucked into them, on thickly buttered toast.

    After that, they went along the breakfast bar again, the child requesting more cinnamon to sprinkle on muesli. The BB came in at this point and gave the dis-appearing breakfast bar such a horrified look that I had to push him out in case he made a sarcastic comment. “Do you see how wrong you are now?” I asked him later. “Your simple self-service breakfast of cereals and toast leads to anarchy. You can’t allow unending bread-buttering and cereal-box-stripping to ensue. It’s anarchy, I tell you. Anarchy!”

    Now that he had seen the bottomless breakfast in progress, I felt I was on stronger ground with my business plan of cooking every customer a fry-up, or nothing, and making them sit at a table in the dining room to eat it and then leave.

    The Portuguese lady made breakfast so long, serving and re-serving herself and her son cereals and yogurts, that in the end even the child got bored with sprinkling cinnamon and went back upstairs to jump on and off the bed. After an hour, in a desperate bid to make breakfast end, I asked her where she was heading next. I already knew, of course.

    They’re all tearing round the Ring of Kerry in a desperate hurry to get to the Cliffs of Moher, before driving cross-country to Dublin to fly home and boast about how they’ve “done” the Wild Atlantic Way, the invention of which is genius marketing by the Irish tourist board, because it spreads the tourist spend around the entire island of Ireland, and inserts an element of panic into it.

    The sheer weight and speed of tourism this summer, with Europeans desperate to get from Dublin to Dingle, Donegal and Derry in the driving rain, for reasons they don’t entirely understand, has meant that people like us in the boondocks are fully booked because we take the overflow from more famous places.

    The Portuguese lady said they were heading to Killarney next, but she wanted to see castles on the way. “You have to see castles when you come to Ireland, don’t you?”

    I said I wasn’t sure that you did. Possibly she was thinking of Scotland. I said there was a small ruined tower nearby. She said she wanted a castle that was big and fancy. Was this nearby castle big and fancy?

    What she wanted from Ireland made no more sense than her egg. So I told her the castle was amazing and she’d love it. And with that, she finally relinquished her grip on the Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut and hurried off to see an old turret with the top missing.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • My clandestine night at the theater

    My clandestine night at the theater

    The poster for the Edinburgh University Shakespeare Company’s production of Much Ado About Nothing had a hippie design, with flowers and psychedelic colors. “In a false quarrel there is no true valour,” announced one flyer. Quite pointedly, I had not been invited to see the play, but I decided I should go and so when the Pleiades were low in the sky and an old lion was roaring in the valley, I set off from my farm in Kenya.

    First light rose over the Aberdares as bright-faced children hefting satchels ran alongside the road to school. In the Rift Valley I joined the suicidal game of driving in Africa, dodging matatu taxis and Congo-bound trucks, reaching the joyous mayhem of Nairobi hours later. I lounged about at the Muthaiga Club for the rest of the day, chatting with fellows at the bar about beef cattle. After the ritual humiliation of airport security, I settled down for the flights to Scotland.

    Near Waverley Station I checked in to my Premier Inn room and sat for a while on the single bed, or stood at the window like Larkin’s Mr. Bleaney, watching the frigid wind tousling the clouds. What was needed, I decided, was a disguise. On the Royal Mile, I browsed “See Ya Jimmy!” tam o’shanters, with attached ginger wigs and beards, plus tartan kilts and sporrans. An Indian shop sold fetching cowboy hats. On Cockburn Street I found huge dark glasses with mirror lenses. In the end, I settled for a big woolly hat, then wandered past bagpipe players all day, hoping not to bump into anybody who might recognize me.


    I felt regret for the hurt I had caused him, this boy of mine playing Claudio at the end of his university days

    I arrived at the Pleasance Theatre minutes before the curtain went up. The house thronged with undergraduates dressed for freezing Edinburgh New Town flats, loudly enjoying themselves before the play began. I sank deeply into a seat right at the back of the auditorium, with the woolly hat pulled down over my ears and my coat collar raised. The production was staged not in Renaissance Sicily, but a hippie scene, like 1960s London – as if the guys in Withnail and I had finally met some women.

    I sat with rapt anticipation, hanging on every line, not really because I like this play; I was searching for a different kind of meaning. I waited for Claudio – his every stage entry, his every line and all his silences. His expressions, his movement, were dearest to me and so familiar, since I had held him in my arms as my newborn son in the delivery room 22 years before. I had loved him as a baby, as a toddler with golden spun hair, the barefoot lad who got thorns in his toes on the farm, the youthful cross-country runner and the young man who had been my closest friend.

    During the interval, I slipped out, smoked a cigarette in the street, then ducked back in to catch the second half. As I strained my eyes across the length of the theater, I saw my boy had changed in the months since I was last with him, his face altered by encounters, adventures and thoughts from which I had become remote – a change, I felt, that was hard to recognize and from which I was excluded. It made me unutterably sad, wishing I could reach out with long arms to embrace and kiss him. “O, what men dare do! What men may do! What men daily do, not knowing what they do,” said Claudio. All the dialogue had become a series of clues, of messages passing between us. We hadn’t spoken since I broke up with his mother, you see, and I was now with another woman.

    Before the applause had ended, I jammed the woolly hat down over my ears again, hunched into my overcoat and sped out into Edinburgh’s night. I trod quietly down the cobbled streets back to the Premier Inn, where I ordered a burger and a pint. I felt a perverse sense of accomplishment that I had not been seen. Then I felt deep regret for the hurt I had caused him, this boy of mine playing Claudio at the end of his university days. And also my daughter, who would be seeing the play the next night.

    Early next morning, heading for the train at Waverley Station, I passed a glass screen on which I saw these words engraved for all travelers to see: “O what a tangled web we weave/ When first we practise to deceive.” I nodded in agreement: “Yes, you’re right, Sir Walter Scott.” And then there was another of his quotes up there, speaking to me: “Life is dear even to those who feel it as a burden.”

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • The problem of the progressive middle class

    The problem of the progressive middle class

    A month or two ago, Rod Liddle had the audacity to write in The Spectator that the besetting problem of modern civilization is the middle class, while implying that something ought to done about it. Reading the article, I was reminded of an entry made by Harold Nicolson in his diary early in 1939 where he observes, à propos the homogenization of the modern world, “Even revolution is becoming bourgeois.”

    While it is a matter of historical record that most revolutionaries from the early 19th century onward, in France, Russia and elsewhere, have sprung from the middle classes, Nicolson’s readers (if he still has any) in the first quarter of the 21st century will recognize at once what he is complaining of, roughly 100 years after the children of the commercial and industrial middle classes began attending university, for reasons more financial and social than intellectual, whence they depart under the illusion that they are now educated, thinking persons. In fact, they are at best half-educated and unthinking people who reflexively and unhesitatingly adopt the thought, ideas, opinions and language that happen to be fashionable at any given time among the bourgeoisie.

    Directly following World War One, a significant portion of the middle class developed a romantic view of the progressive or revolutionary mind in politics and social thought as well as the arts, and indeed in what it imagined to be intellectualism itself; a disposition it mistook for a credentialed profession and accepted as a badge of sophistication and superior social status.

    For the western (and westernizing) bourgeoisie, the maintenance of cultural health, vigor and what it calls “creativity” is a matter of progressive intellectual and artistic breakthroughs corresponding with technological advances in the scientific, business and industrial worlds. Similarly, what it calls a “vibrant” culture is one whose highest value is novelty for its own sake, conceived as progress toward “truth” as the word is understood in a fully rationalized, secularized and trivialized age.

    “Novel” ceased a century and a half ago to refer to what it did in the 18th century, when the literary form signified by the same word – a fictional prose work at some length – was developed. Today, anything “novel” means something previously unheard of, and even unimagined; unprecedented, startling and preferably shocking. (Flannery O’Connor employed a similar aesthetic in her fiction to opposite ends, for the reason she herself gave when explaining why her characters are so often freaks. To the hard of hearing you have to shout, she said, and for the nearly blind you have to draw large and startling pictures.)

    Inevitably, the desire for relentless novelty promotes the dissemination of the most extreme ideas, theories, creations, absurdities and fantasies, including those claimed by their inventors and proponents to be “scientific” though they are defiantly anti-scientific: for example, the current claim that a biological man endowed with both an X and a Y chromosome can be surgically transformed into a biological woman with two Xes. “La raison a ses principes que le cœur ne doit pas nier.”

    The progressive middle class believes in everything and anything – and thus in nothing at all

    In one of their inimitable films, Laurel and Hardy are handymen summoned to Oxford University to perform various small jobs, among them the repair of a broken window sash. Attempting to secure the upper frame, Laurel inadvertently brings the thing down upon his head. The blow transforms him into a don who spouts academic gibberish until the window strikes him on the head a second time and he reverts to being Stan Laurel once more.

    Analogously, intellectualism untethered from intellect and untempered by wisdom has turned masses of hitherto sensible people, many if not most of them representatives of the professional middle classes, into blithering self-righteous poseurs of the sort that are presently afflicting Great Britain with their highly disruptive and frequently illegal demonstrations on behalf of Just Stop Oil, Palestine Action, “human rights” and numerous other middle-class causes. Orwell, famously, saw it all coming, though foresight was insufficient to cure him of his own socialist sentiments, delusions and beliefs, no matter his innate English common sense. Perhaps, had he lived past middle age, he might have learned better. (Then again, perhaps not, the middle-class disposition toward progressive liberalism being nearly ineradicable.)

    The famous saying often attributed to Chesterton – that the danger for the religious unbeliever is not that he is liable to believe in nothing, but rather that he is likely to believe in anything – comes to mind. Today, the progressive middle class (which is so large a portion of that class) believes, paradoxically, in everything and in anything – and thus in nothing at all. At bottom, it is nihilistic, which is what makes it so dangerous a social and political force. It is indeed, as Liddle perceives, a civilizational menace, and one that needs to be dealt with – starting, perhaps, with the almost wholly unrestrained legal profession that has aligned itself in western countries with the enemies of majority rule, constitutional government and democracy itself.

    Harold Nicolson ended his diary entrance with the simple statement: “I hate it all. I hate it all.” So, one gathers, does Rod Liddle. So do I. And so should we all. “À bas la bourgeoisie!”

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • Why September 1 is the worst day of the year

    How are you feeling about the first day of fall? If, like me, you get a distant sense of foreboding, then you might suffer from seasonal affected disorder, aptly acronymed SAD, caused by the body’s inability to produce enough serotonin. Surveys suggest up to five million of us, over in Britain, are afflicted to some degree – from people whose mood dips a bit, to those who, as the nights draw in, experience anything from anxiety, lethargy and sleeplessness to a general feeling of hopelessness. Sad indeed.

    The awful thing is that SAD can kick in as early as late summer, when days start to get noticeably shorter. September 1 is particularly depressing. Those who follow the astronomical calendar might convince themselves there’s still three more weeks of summer, but we SAD sufferers think differently. For us, fall starts today, with that long slope towards Christmas, pockmarked with other nasty dates, like September 22, when we enter the darkest half of the year, followed by the darkest third a month later. You get the picture. Or, rather, by that stage, you don’t, because it’s too grey and horrible to see anything.

    An elderly relative has always rejoiced at “the changing of the seasons,” and insists she gets as much pleasure from a grim late-fall afternoon as from a gorgeous June morning. I suppose she must be telling the truth, as she always seems so darn cheerful. But I, and other SAD sufferers, struggle to accept it.

    Fall, for me, is worse than winter. December has Christmas, and by January each day gets a bit longer. But September through the end of November? Endurance is the word most suited to it. And it seems to attract life’s worst events. A friend dies before their time? It usually happens in the fall. I come down with an epic dose of flu? Likewise. I fall out with a friend? You guessed it.

    If I have a really good fall day it’s despite the darkness, not because of it. If it were possible to hibernate through the whole thing, and on through winter, I’d certainly consider it. Or, better still, I’d have enough money to hop on a plane to Australia each October, returning home once spring was in the air.

    But the vast majority of SAD sufferers don’t have the means for any such thing. So, we must be creative. I keep a SAD lamp on my desk, which tricks the body into believing it’s sunny, even when it’s midnight. When I first acquired this beautiful little gadget, I was so keen to get immediate benefit that I tore off its packaging and switched it on without bothering with the instructions. You’re not meant to point it straight at your face (I did) and you’re not meant to use it for more than 15 minutes (I supped for a good hour). The result was like a bad hangover. It was worth it, though. Okay, since then, I’ve been more moderate, but this thing still works overtime.

    Then there are daylight-simulation light bulbs, though they can mean walking to the bathroom at 2am in blazing sunshine. Or you could try a light-based alarm clock, which gradually fills your bedroom with pretend sunlight until you wake up bang on time.

    If I have a really good fall day it’s despite the darkness, not because of it

    What else? Well, there are drugs, which can be broken down into prescription and non-prescription. I’m not dissing those who go to their doctor for a pharmaceutical intervention. I’m told they really help, especially those with the very worst of it. Solidarity. Personally, though, I turn to the one socially acceptable drug that works every time. Red wine. A glass a night does the trick. And if you have the TV on, choose a movie with loads of tropical blue skies. My parents always wondered why, as a child, I loved watching Papillon – a story of unrelenting human misery. The truth is I ignored the plot and just binged on the weather.

    Some SAD sufferers go down the counselling route. There’s something called ecotherapy, which encourages outdoor pursuits in nature. And if all else fails – and this one is a bit out there – you can write a letter to winter, or in my case fall, explaining your feelings. According to researchers at Glasgow University, this might make a difference, just like it might help you deal with the workplace bully to let them know about their awful impact. Well, it wouldn’t work for me. My letter would be full of expletives, and I can’t imagine that being much help.

    You must, of course, choose your own remedy from the many available, but for me it remains a touch of booze, blue sky on the telly and a SAD lamp. And the certain knowledge that, however miserable the next six months are, spring will, eventually, arrive.