AUTUMN 25 THE MAGAZINE No. 88
CHEF’S TABLE SOLE MATES
Anita Rani chats to The Clove Club founders about a shared love of music
We track down an ‘AI reporter’ selling made-up stories to the media
Could rubber ducks end loneliness? Inside this year’s strangest trend
Why Gen Z has abandoned heels in favour of comfy flats and goofy trainers
When I started writing about the man who had pitched me an AI-generated story about London chicken shops – originally destined for this very magazine – I figured it would be a cautionary tale about the dangers of technology.
What actually happened was very different. I ended up admiring the guy, even sympathising with him. AI – or, more accurately, the companies that make use of it – had put him out of work, so he was using AI to find more, albeit in an underhand manner. Since I wrote the piece, which you can read on P30, we’ve kept in touch. He says he’s giving up his side-hustle and enrolling on a course to truly master the art of AI, hoping to use it for good instead of evil. What started as a story about cold, hard technology became a tale about human connection.
It’s a theme that runs through this issue. On P36 we tracked down the guy handing out rubber ducks to festival goers in a bid to spark moments of joy and whimsy. On P10 one of our writers gives up his iPhone for a month in an attempt to forge real-life bonds instead of digital ones, although it doesn’t turn out as he might have hoped.
And on P40 we visit London’s famous triumvirate of esoteric bookshops to discover how a new generation is using this most analogue of mediums – pun intended – to make new IRL connections, breaking from the online world and reaching instead for something even less tangible. We have a lot of new writers in this issue and I think it’s one of our best –I hope you agree.
– STEVE DINNEEN
12: KNIVES OUT
You’ve seen the Tiktoks of strapping blokes crafting impressive kitchen knives – we went to meet them
26: OWEN MCDONNELL
The Killing Eve actor on starring opposite Brendan Gleeson in a revival of seminal play The Weir
30: GHOST WRITER
What started as a pitch about warring chicken shops became a wild story about life on the internet
40: THE OCCULT AISLE
London’s esoteric bookshops have long histories. We visit to find out how the occult is thriving in the digital age
18: CHEF’S TABLE
Women’s Hour presenter Anita Rani interviews Luca founders Johnny Smith and Daniel Willis
48: WATCHES
All the latest must-have timepieces, from asymmetrical wonders to watches themed after soda cans
60: TRAVEL
From rural China to the slopes of Austria, the Outer Hebrides to the spires of Cambridge
80: MOTORING
We drive the new Omoda 9 across nine countries in four days and take a Porsche through the Norway fjords
ANNA MOLONEY is books editor of this magazine. On P88 she examines the gothic revival brought on by the upcoming Wuthering Heights movie
MATT KENYON is City AM’s newsletter editor. On P10 he ditches his iPhone for a month to see if a ‘dumb-phone’ could be the solution to digital burnout
DAMIEN GABET is a travel writer and presenter. On P78 he packs his suitcase and heads to Cambridge to see if it can inspire him to finally write a novel
CARYS SHARKEY is a senior editor at City AM. On P12 she explores the burgeoning industry for luxury kitchen knives, speaking to the men behind the metal
ADAM HAY-NICHOLLS is City AM The Magazine’s motoring editor. On P80 he drives the new Chinese SUV by Omoda through nine countries in four days
SAM KESSLER is the editor of Oracle Time and an expert on all things horology. On P49 he guides you through the mesmerising world of asymetrical watches
For more great articles go to cityam.com. For a digital version of The Magazine go to cityam.com/the-magazine
EDITORIAL TEAM:
Steve Dinneen Editor-in-Chief Adam Bloodworth Deputy Editor Billy Breton Creative Director Chris Stopien Deputy Creative Director Andy Blackmore Picture Editor Adam Hay-Nicholls Motoring Editor Tom Matuszewski Illustrator Anna Moloney Books Editor
COMMERCIAL TEAM: Harry Owen Chief Executive Officer Graeme Pretty Agency Sales Director Nzima Ndangana Luxury & Direct Sales Director
For sales enquiries contact commercial@cityam.com. City AM The Magazine is published by City AM, 107 Cheapside, EC2V 6DN.
The vinyl revolution has been well-documented but CDs are also enjoying a moment in the sun. KILLIAN FAITH-KELLY meets the people buying plastic discs in the year of our Lord 2025
About a month ago, I read about some Lorde fans complaining that their CDs of her latest album weren’t working. And part of me thought, “That’s bad, these Lorde fans have paid money for those CDs, they should work.” But mostly, I thought, “Lorde fans are buying CDs?”
I’d assumed the CD had regressed to niche-withinniche status, the preserve of people who thought vinyl too mainstream, and maybe some old men in leather jackets who couldn’t find the 90s ambient electronica album they wanted as an LP. But Lorde fans? Buying a new album? Consider my world rocked. Who buys CDs in 2025? I went to find out. According to Nigel House – co-founder of Rough Trade – there are two kinds of CD-buyers. One is, indeed, the older music-head attracted by the price and space-saving properties CDs offer over vinyl. Head into a Rough Trade tomorrow for a copy of, say, What’s The Story (Morning Glory), and the vinyl will set you back £32.99. The CD is £12.99, and the listening experience will be closer to the original recording than you’d get on any other medium.
The other buyer, says House, is a young person who’s been sold on the “value of owning physical media” but finds the cost of the vinyl revival prohibitive. That or they’ve found their parents’ CD collection in the house and got into them from there.
This analysis bears out in my research. Loitering a few respectful feet from my local record shop’s CD section and pouncing on unsuspecting customers, I find Chris, in his fifties, who has around 700 CDs at home and says, at that scale, the price and volume difference with vinyl are multiplied to the point of enormous significance. He doesn’t have a Spotify account, and has no interest in streaming services – “I don’t want an algorithm telling me what music to listen to. I want my ears,” he says. He started out collecting music in CD form, so why switch to vinyl? Plus, his car’s got a CD player; try finding a car with a record player. Encouragingly for the medium’s future, for every one guy in his fifties perusing the racks, there seem to be two teenagers. Like 17 year-old Isaac, from Swansea, who was pulled into CD-buying by a desire to collect
Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series. “I’m tryna move towards listening to music on physical media, and vinyl’s crazy expensive, so I thought I’d collect that series on CD instead,” he says. “And they’re really great. I always thought vinyl was the best, but I’m starting to enjoy CD music a bit more than vinyl now.”
Or Anna, 18, who bought a CD player when she was into K-pop (CDs are a big part of the genre’s collect-itall ethos). She has since grown out of K-pop but still listens to a combination of her mum’s CD collection and, increasingly, her own. “I just like physical stuff – I feel like it’s a bit more special. I do use digital as well, but I know Spotify doesn’t pay artists very well, so ethically, physical seems better.”
Matt Burr can attest to that. He’s the frontman of psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll band The Black Delta Movement, and says the margins they make on CDs easily trump any other medium. Pressing a CD will cost £1-2, and they’ll sell for £10-15. Vinyl costs £6-7 and sells for £20-25 – so best-case scenario they get fifteen times their outgoings back on CD, vs four times on vinyl. And streaming? “I’ve made more money looking down the back of the sofa,” he says. “Also, seeing your work in physical form… it’s not just vibrations anymore, you know?”
When I ask House if a CD revival might be in the pipeline, he insists “It’s not in the pipeline, it’s happening!” After years of decline, data from the British Phonographic Industry shows CD sales steadying, and a study from Key Production shows that 46 per cent of under-18s listen to CDs, whereas only 38 per cent listen to vinyl. House reckons Rough Trade’s CD sales are up 15-20 per cent year-on-year.
That said, it hasn’t enjoyed a revival like vinyl – House says the CD suffers from being a little less sexy, less instagrammable, less laden with nostalgia. CDs are “a bit more… utilitarian,” he says.
Those Lorde CDs weren’t working, it turns out, because they were entirely transparent, and this prevented some CD players from being able to read them. It’s almost like the medium was rejecting an attempt to prettify it. CDs aren’t cool, and they don’t want to be. But they sound great, they’re smaller than vinyl and they stave off the algorithm. And as far as owning physical music goes, they are that most gloriously democratic of things: relatively cheap.
In being affordable, CDs invite more people into the fold of physical music ownership, meaning less money for Spotify and more money for people who make music. Perhaps it’s time to reassess those ugly, shiny, compact little discs.
l Killian Faith-Kelly is a freelance writer covering everything from property to fitness and popular culture
Once a high street staple, WH Smith is a shadow of its former self, banished to stations and airports. SIMON HUNT asks if this emporium of Post-it notes, felt-tip pens and Jeremy Clarkson books is something we will miss
So long then, WH Smith, a firm which has graced our high streets for more than a century – even though it never intended to. Founded as a small newspaper kiosk in Mayfair in 1792, the business grew massively in the mid-19th century, spurred by the rapid expansion of the railways, which allowed consumers up and down the country access to London newspapers within hours of them rolling off the Fleet Street presses.
At one point, nearly every major railway station in Britain had a Smith’s stall selling the Times, the Telegraph and the Illustrated London News, among others, alongside a coterie of the latest books and magazines. And it was a lucrative business. When boss William Henry Smith, who later became MP for Westminster, died in 1891, he left behind a fortune of £1.8m – about £200m in today’s money.
But by the turn of the 20th century, storm clouds were gathering. The railway companies, eager to squeeze more cash out of their operations, hiked rents on station stalls at an alarming pace. Smiths concocted a plan: shift the station business to the nearest high street shop, and bring the staff with them. Soon it had a chain of dozens – later hundreds – of high street stores up and down the country. Fast-forward 120 years and WH Smith is returning to its roots. In June the company signed a deal with private equity firm Modella to sell off its high street arm and refocus on its “travel outlets” – those in train stations and airports. The high street shops are being rebranded TJ Jones, a made-up name with no affiliation to the newsagent’s history – designed, presumably, to
make it sound more like a family business and less like another private equity-run monstrosity.
It will mean the departure from the high street of Britain’s oldest major retail brand. Should this be a cause for sadness? Many will say the stores were shabby, pointless places filled with Post-it notes, cheap felt-tip pens and old Jeremy Clarkson books.
But for most Brits – certainly those outside big cities – the high street is the single-biggest barometer for their feelings about the state of the country, something MPs regularly discover when returning to their constituencies.
Even if they don’t shop there much, people conjure an ideal of how their local parade should look: a butcher’s here, a bookstore there, a bakery with artisanal pastries, a Post Office, a Waitrose. Few parts of the country actually resemble this rosy vignette, besides the odd posh spot like Hampstead, Holland Park or Henley.
The reality many now face is a hodge-podge of vape stores, betting shops, Poundlands, dodgy fast-food kiosks and the ghosts of old Debenhams signage, still awaiting new occupants. A Yougov survey found just 13 per cent of Brits believed high streets had successfully recovered from the pandemic, while a mere three per cent strongly agreed that high streets are “generally vibrant and busy.”
Bustling, aesthetically pleasing public spaces are the most straightforward way to make people feel good about their communities – much more than any statistic on GDP or employment. But just as Smith’s was ousted by GWR, business rates and employment taxes are pushing retailers away. Maybe we should call time on the high street and prostrate ourselves before the mercy of the e-commerce gods. But many are not quite ready to submit, preferring to cling to our pound-shop-filled purgatory in the hope a revival is around the corner.
WH Smith’s exit from towns and villages will not be mourned on the scale of Woolworths, which many held dear for its twee pic-n-mix stands; nor that of Wilko, from which you could buy dirt-cheap washing powder. But the loss of yet another retail stalwart – with a name beginning with W –will make town centres feel that little bit
Simon is City editor at City AM
Screentime is bad. But is no screentime even worse?
MATT KENYON sticks his iPhone in a drawer for a month to go cold turkey with a ‘dumb’ phone
The Light Phone iii is an intriguing piece of kit that looks like a science fiction portable communicator as imagined by an industrial designer in the 1960s. Created by Brooklyn-based Light, it is intended to reimagine what a phone should be – and what it shouldn’t. This little square can call, text, take pictures and even use a rudimentary navigation software – and not a whole lot else. Oh, and it retails for $600 (£440). I thought this gentle, muted phone might be a balm for my brain, so I decided to put my iPhone in a draw for a month to see if it’s really possible to live without a smartphone in 2025.
DAY 1: Before this experiment began, Light’s founder Kaiwei Tang told me to think of using the handset as a “commitment to live healthier”, sort of like going to the gym. But on the first day of my experiment I tried to go to the gym and they wouldn’t let me in because I didn’t have the right QR code. Tang had warned me that this might happen and suggested that I print out a pass. But halfway through the month, the gym moved to a system where you scan a code from the phone, not on it, so I was scuppered.
greyscale, bird’s-eye-view of London, reminiscent of the slowly morphing ‘Marauder’s Map’ in Harry Potter – or alternatively a list of written instructions, like your gran might once have used to find her way from the apothecary to the bingo hall. It was not a fun journey home.
DAY 11: It was my birthday. I’d received an extended text from my Aunt, which I replied to, but by some quirk of the software it was never delivered. When trying to explain the concept of the phone in a series of apologetic emails, there was a certain irony that it had failed in its core mission: to make calls and send texts. That evening I had arranged to meet some friends at a restaurant but, having learned my lesson from last time, I asked my boyfriend to navigate us from his iPhone, which rather undermined my newfound status as an analogue nomad.
DAY 7: I took the Light Phone to an unfamiliar area of London for the first time: an event in deepest Chelsea, with a debrief at the pub afterwards. A local saw me trying out the camera – which has a hazy, turn of the millennium quality to it – and asked me what this whimsical, square device was. We had a minute or so of pleasant small talk, before he glazed over and wanted to speak to someone else.
Leaving the pub, I stepped out into June’s worst rain storm to find myself too drunk to use the directions software. The Light Phone presents you with a
DAY 14: The animal urge to reach for my phone once every forty seconds had eased off a little. The arrival of the weekend also unlocked a new perk of the phone: the realisation that you can use it to wilfully ignore friends with no immediate repercussions. It’s freeing, and a reminder that our smartphones often force us to treat messages as if we’re manning a press office. The Light Phone gave me the right to say “no comment”. The slightly dodgy digital keyboard phone forced me to text functionally and monosyllabically, and I found myself ringing people to communicate anything more than a few words. This is the key trade off: friction and difficulty in exchange for a modicum of freedom.
DAY 19: I was coming to the end of my month with the Light Phone, waiting for some kind of sign to nudge me towards a conclusion. Outside the O2 Brixton for a gig, it became painfully clear at the door that the venue would not accept anything other than the ticket emblazoned upon its own affiliated ticketing app, on a full-colour smartphone. I was sad to realise that, if you want to experience the primal joys of live music, you now require a dynamic QR code. I need my iPhone back. This experiment is over. l Matt is newsletter editor at City AM
Youve all seen the Tiktoks – rustic blades shimmering seductively the light – but who makes them? CARYS SHARKEY meets the men behind the metal
Translucent wafers of sea bass are topped with diaphanous slivers of grape; chives are chopped into oblivion; and steak is sliced bloody. If you’ve spent any time watching social media chefs, you’ll have seen this all before. You will know that knives and knife skills are a conspicuously Big Deal. Like squirty olive oil and vintage Arsenal shirts, chef knives are a staple of the boyish online realm. Even OG butter fiend and foodie love-hate figure Thomas Straker has his own brand of blades.
Like social media chefs, knives really exploded in the UK during lockdown, when obsessions were given time to fester. It happened to me, too. Navel gazing turns to bevel gazing as one makes the inevitable lurch from amateur cook to knife enthusiast. As lockdown dragged on, I bought a waxy canvas roll bag to carry my knives in like some Medieval itinerant chef, which was especially ridiculous considering I literally couldn’t leave the house.
A recent trip to Japan got me thinking about knives again. In Tokyo’s Kappabashi district you can spend an entire day walking around knife shops, where walls are burnished with razor-sharp yanagiba, gyuto and santoku knives. Sit at any omakase counter and you’ll be hypnotised by blades see-sawing through pale, fatty tuna, iridescent horse mackerel and custardy steamed eggs.
The UK knife scene is dynamic but one company has been a trailblazer, frequently topping lists of chefs’ favourites: Blenheim Forge. It started – in what seems to be a recurring theme with knife companies – as two guys messing around with fire and metal in their garden. While still at university, James Ross-Harris and Jon Warshawsky turned their backyard into an alfresco workshop, complete with DIY forge powered by a leaf blower. A decade later, the set up has come a long way. Jon and James were joined by Richard Warner, and after setting up in a workshop in Peckham’s arches, the group are now turning out
some of the best knives on the market.
I visit Jon in the workshop one blisteringly hot summer morning. Blenheim’s Japanese-style knives are made from their own steel blend, forged with a dark dappled patina that blurs into an undulating seashore effect from walnut handle to precise tip. Jon tells me they do most of the forging at another site and finish the knives here in Peckham.
“We produce them consistently, and they’re all basically the same knife with small variations. They’re handmade but they should function the same,” Jon says.
They also make limited edition knives, which Jon describes as a “passion project”. When I visit, he is working on a pasta knife, a flat-edged blade for slicing perfect strands of eggy noodles. Previous special projects have included a jamon slicer and a hunting knife. They might be niche, but these releases will often sell out in minutes. “People really do like to have something a bit specialised,” Jon says.
But Blenheim doesn’t just make knives that look pretty. They are rigorously tested in professional kitchens, which explains why they are so popular with both chefs and amateur cooks.
“If someone who’s used the knife for 10 hours finds it comfortable, then so will someone who uses it a couple of hours a week. They might not even know why, but it just sits right in your hand,” Jon explains.
Jon says being in the heart of Peckham is integral to the process, with little pieces of the community hammered and folded into each knife. It would, however, be remiss not to point out that these knives are expensive. Most people do not have the money to drop a couple of hundred quid to facilitate a marginal improvement in the chopping of onions. Jon doesn’t deny this but says that, despite rising rent and skyrocketing steel costs, Blenheim has not put up its prices. A big part of his job is now making the same high-quality knives more efficiently.
But he is facing increasing competition from companies importing or buying steel-cut blades for
cheap and sticking a fancy handle on them, then claiming to be ‘handmade in the UK’. “There’s more competition from people who don’t really make their knives… there’s no one to complain to. No one cares, apart from the customer, who gets an inferior product.”
If well-established forges like Blenheim are feeling the squeeze, then spare a thought for individual knife makers. I spoke to both Dan Prendergast of Prendergast Knives and Tim Westley AKA Clement Knives: both are acutely aware of being undercut. The issue, they tell me, is compounded by the fact that they can no longer reach new audiences on social media due to restrictions implemented in response to soaring knife crime. It leaves them fighting an uphill battle against companies with impressive PR machines for hypey-collabs and releases, which are able to crank out a higher volume of lower-quality but similar-looking knives.
Dan, a blacksmith since 2004, makes his knives from a “wonky shed” in the Cotswolds. Speaking to me from Gloucestershire, Dan is direct, both about the knives he makes and the issues he faces as an independent manufacturer. He describes his design as “very straightforward”, but these are not the kind of knives you find crammed into utensil holders in suburban kitchens. They are expertly forged and without any affectation. The steel on his blades appears almost brushed, like heavy rain streaming off a window pane.
Dan often makes knives out of reclaimed materials: iron from a railway cart dragged out of a hedgerow by “Farmer Dave”, or beams that have been stripped from an 18th century cottage. He might then blacken handles with “a potion made from vinegar and old horseshoe nails”.
He collapses hundreds of years of history into each knife but function must always come before form. His ethos is to do “as little as possible to get it from being a piece of metal into being a knife.”
“There’s not a single part of my knives that I can’t defend from a functional point of view,” he says. “I forge the steel, grind it, glaze it, heat-treat it, sharpen and handle the blade – all myself.”
Tim, who goes by Clement Knives, is also a one-man show weathering the pinches and punches from the industry. But far from the bucolic surroundings of the Cotswolds, Tim started out bobbing up and down on the Thames in a canoe. After collecting rubbish from the murky
river, Tim taught himself not only how to forge blades, but how to melt down discarded plastic to make the handles.
“I could only find one video of someone actually making something out of bottle tops, a young boy making a slingshot. I just applied that same concept.” Ten years on from those Thames trips, Tim is based in the Scottish Highlands. But the knives he makes are still all about recycling materials in surprising ways. “The interesting part is doing it within the confines of working with rubbish. And then trying not to produce any rubbish as well,” he tells me.
He takes trips to Glasgow or London to collect NOS canisters, which you will have seen scattered on streets outside pubs and clubs come Sunday morning. These are then melted down and forged into beautifully patinated blades printed with his trademark laughing skull logo. He visits Scottish beaches to pick through washed up commercial fishing rubbish, which is turned into kaleidoscopic handles of swirling blues, pinks and greens. He rails against waste in commercial manufacturing, pointing out that for every knife made, there are two or three that go to landfill – unless he can get his hands on it first.
This summer, Tim started working on an ice cream series, with handles designed to look like Fabs and Fruit Pastille ice lollies. One with a watermelon design is straight out of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. When I ask him about it, he tells me that he’s still trying to master the Twister. “It’s been a bit tough lately, but I just started trying to have a little bit of fun with it. I’m trying to do different things.”
Given the immense pressures on hand-forged knives, 27-year-old Sean Warmington decided to go in a different
We’re proud to be made in China. I wouldn’t ever try to elude where the knives are made. It has a long tradition of craftsmanship
direction when he launched Fragrant Knives in 2024. Sean worked in kitchens in the capital before moving back to Hong Kong.
He was struck by the way chefs would use a single knife for everything: chopping, mincing, dicing, slicing, scooping and deboning – the ubiquitous and utilitarian cleaver is the culinary Swiss-army knife.
“After my grandmother gave me an old Chinese knife of hers, I would use it both at home and in the restaurant. I just found it so much easier,” Sean tells me. He saw a gap in the market for introducing high-quality, small-batch Chinese-style cleavers to western cooks. Having lived in house shares throughout his time in London, he knew that having really sharp and expensive knives that demand a high-level of care is simply not practical for most people. “I’ve seen enough beautiful Japanese knives rusted, chipped or unused in knife drawers.”
Sean goes on to point out that, for the majority of western home cooks, you’re more likely to be “cutting carrots for a stew” than slicing yellowtail for sashimi. And while Japan might be held in the highest regard for knife manufacturing, he says that China’s craft scene is often unfairly maligned.
“We’re proud to be made in China. I wouldn’t ever try to elude where the knives are made. I’m really proud to be a part of this long tradition of craftsmanship. For too long, there’s been a widely held, quite lazy assumption that equates Chinese manufacturing with low quality, knock off consumer goods”.
Fragrant Knives partners with a small workshop in Yangjiang in the south of China, which has been the centre of Chinese knife production for thousands of years. The workshop is run by a third-generation knifemaker, who relishes taking Sean out to show him the city and drink heroic quantities of baijiu whenever he is down to visit.
It’s a small-batch company still in its early stages, but Sean is looking for ways to engage with the British-Chinese community, from chefs and restaurants to authors and influencers. Undaunted by the twin titans of Japan and Germany that loom large in the western steel psyche, Sean says it’s high time that Chinese-made cleavers got their dues. “If you are willing to pay a fair price and deal with a workshop you trust, you’ll get some of the most economical high performance knives of anywhere in the world in China”.
It might just be time to add to that canvas roll bag of mine…
actor
YI SENCINDIVER tells us the story of her life through food, picking a final meal that includes Danish buns, Korean
pancakes and fresh Thai mangosteen
Ihad a bit of a rocky, colourful upbringing. I’ve had different mothers. I’ve lived in different countries. My adopted parents were an American man and a Korean woman – I haven’t seen her since I was nine and for many years, I didn’t think about her much. By the time I was 17 I was living in Denmark and I left to go to the United States for a year in high school, staying with my American aunt. We went out for Korean food and they were serving kimbap, which is like the Korean version of maki, and it brought back so many strong memories. Back then they didn’t have Korean food in Denmark so when I saw it, my whole body had this really strong reaction. It brought me back to my very, very early childhood and I started thinking about those first years of my life. It was a dramatic reunion with a classic Korean dish.
Back then my dad was in the military and worked abroad a lot and mum had mental health issues. So on a bad day we’d eat TV dinners and frozen fish sticks but during the good times I remember eating tteok, which is a savoury rice cake that has the most wonderful texture. You can’t get it anywhere in the world except Korea, where they make it by hand. If you try to make it at home it all falls apart. It’s almost impossible.
My dad got divorced from my Korean adopted mum when I was eight and married a Danish woman who was very self sufficient. Me and my twin sister came with my dad, first to Greenland, where they had met, and then to Denmark. She wanted her girls to be independent like her so we were all taught how to cook, how to clean, how to sew. Once a week we each got to cook something. The first dish I learned was a Danish meatball.
Back then Denmark wasn’t the major food country it is today – the food was mostly basic: gravy, potatoes, meat and boiled vegetables. But our family would eat Mexican and Chinese food, which was quite exotic at the time. So from as early as I can remember, food has been a huge part of my life.
For my dream last meal I’ve been a bad girl and ordered a lot of food. I want to spread this meal over many hours with lots and lots of dishes arriving from late afternoon into the night. Denmark, and especially Copenhagen, is well known for its pastries and bread. I used to go to this bakery called Hart that was shown on the TV show The Bear and they do this amazing thing called a BMO. It means “bolle med ost” which translates as “bun with cheese”. All the good bakeries have a BMO and it’s wonderful. All the hipster kids spend their money on expensive coffee and BMO. The sourdough BMO from Hart is the best – so I’ll start with one of those with whipped butter. My absolute favourite food is oysters – I f***ing love them. I will go very far to get
a get an oyster and luckily both of my sisters – my twin sister and my little sister, who’s like half Norwegian, half Danish – both love them too. My twin sister came with me to a shoot in Thailand in 2019 and one evening we took a cab to a gorgeous restaurant on a river. We got these tiny little oysters and they were so amazing that I demanded we went back the next day. We got stranded there and had to hitch-hike home, which is obviously not advisable as a woman. Like I said, I will do many things for oysters. Another time my little sister came to visit when I was filming Foundation in Prague and we went to this fish restaurant in the old town where they served an oyster platter with two of each oyster from around the
world. I ate so many oysters that day. She lives in the part of Denmark where Hamlet was from and she goes out in her rubbers and picks oysters herself. She gifted me a shucking knife once and taught me to use it so I could open them myself. I’ll get the sommelier to pick me out a nice bottle of Sancerre to go with those. I don’t drink much but I’ll have a small glass for the occasion.
Next I’ll have another starter. This one is a big Korean grandma staple that I discovered the first time my twin sister and I went to Korea in our early twenties. Trekking is a big thing over there and we love it but it’s strenuous and the nature is wild. We hiked all day and we were completely filthy. On the way back the only place we could find to eat was this tiny little restaurant owned by a really old grandma – ‘halmeoni’ in Korean – where maybe five people could sit.
We didn’t really speak the language but we knew how to order pajeon, a Korean pancake you can eat with seafood or vegetables, so we ordered that. They are usually quite small but she brought out this huge pancake and loads of banchan, which are little side dishes. There were about 20 of them, vegetables and fishes and things that were dry and things that were weird. I didn’t know what half of them were but it all tasted amazing. So I’ll have all of that, please.
Next I want some fresh white asparagus. I know they aren’t in season but you will have to find a way. I want it served with rock fish roe, which is juicier than caviar, and a white sauce.
Then we can move on to mains. This was so difficult for me. I was torn between Italian cuisine – we visit Italy almost every year – and Korean. But I think I’ll go with bulgogi: marinated,
really tender meat on the grill, all the side dishes, some fresh lettuce and little sesame leaves and a bit of chilli sauce. This is naughty but I’m not going to have normal rice – I’m going to borrow some sticky rice from Thailand. It has to be perfectly cooked, not gooey. It should be almost dry with a texture where it’s just a little bit shiny. I’ll have that with a side of palm cabbage in garlic oyster sauce and a little bit of lemon and chilli.
The next course you’re going to have to import, I’m afraid. It’s from the Taiwanese chain Din Tai Fung but you can only get this dish in Asian countries. It translates from Korean as “vitamin vegetable” – it looks a bit like a cross between water spinach and a tiny bok choy.
Okay, now we’re ready for dessert. We’re gonna have to make a little dessert buffet because I won’t be eating alone: I will have my husband and my two girls with me. There’s nothing more satisfying than watching your children eat, especially when they’re little. Now my girls are big but I still enjoy looking at them trying something interesting
for the first time and loving it. In fact, I want to invite my family and friends, my siblings and some of my colleagues to this last supper, too.
In the buffet I want dark, black, firm, sweet cherries that stain your face when you eat them. And I want passion fruit and mangosteen. I love mangosteen but it’s only in season for a very short amount of time. It’s a dark blue, hard fruit with a little green hat. You can twist it and open it and it’s full of these little white segments. I was obsessed with it when we were over in Thailand last spring shooting Alien: Earth.
Then we will have freshly picked strawberries from Denmark. There’s a concept in Denmark where you can go to a strawberry farm and pick your own strawberries and pay for what you plucked. There is one near where my sister lives that we go to when I’m back and you’ll never find firmer, sweeter strawberries. I’m gonna have that with vanilla ice cream, the kind where you can feel the vanilla kernels in your mouth.
We’re gonna have to make a little dessert buffet because I won’t be eating alone: I will have my husband and my two girls with me
I will also make everybody like a chocolate cake made from butter, egg, sugar and just the tiniest bit of flour: creamy in the middle with a crust on top so it’s crunchy and soft at the same time. And finally we’re going back to Hart in Copenhagen for a cardamom croissant. When you look at it, you’re like, ‘What is this Danish pastry that has been cooked too much?’ It’s very, very dark – it looks like it’s been burnt. But it’s not – it’s caramelised sugar. It has loads of butter in it and a whole layer of sugar on the bottom. And after all of that I’ll have a really, really strong espresso with just a little bit of water.
l FX’s Alien: Earth starring Sandra Yi Sencindiver is available to stream on Disney+
Broadcaster and author ANITA RANI interviews Luca and Clove Club founders JOHNNY SMITH and DANIEL WILLIS about making music and falling in love with food
THE MEAL: BURRATA, SEA BASS CRUDO, SCALLOPS, TORTELLINI OF OF PISTACHIO AND BASIL PESTO, AGNOLOTTI, VITELLO TOMATOES,
DANIEL WILLIS: So Anita, do you remember how we all met?
ANITA RANI: Well, which version are we going to give? The real version or the PG version?
JOHNNY: Let’s go for the PG version, shall we? We met you through a mutual friend who, if you are in his gang, brings together a lot of interesting people. I remember going to your house for the first time and you fed us all – you were very hospitable and generous.
ANITA: We went on a drunken walk afterwards and I said to you that up north we’d be sworn enemies, War of the
Roses style, but down here our northernness unites us.
JOHNNY: Exactly! And Daniel and I obviously come as a Mancunian package – we’ve known each other since we were four years old. Our lives together have basically always been in bands playing music or in restaurants, and those two worlds are constantly crossing over with each other.
ANITA: We bonded over music. Music has always been massive in my life, too. When you were doing your thing at the tender age of four, across the Pennines there was a little Asian lass doing her music thing. My moment of really opening up to music was when I went to uni and the drum ‘n’ bass scene was just massive.
DANIEL: Was there a big drum ‘n’ bass scene in Bradford?
ANITA: There was in Leeds. Huge. It was
the first scene I remember that had black kids, brown kids and middle class white kids all together in clubs. It was this amazing escape for me. Growing up in Bradford, my parents listened to a lot of Indian stuff and they had this one Boney M cassette that they listened to over and over again. So I made it my cultural quest to just absorb as much as I could.
JOHNNY: I think I took for granted growing up in Manchester at that moment in time. I didn’t realise quite how rich and plentiful that culture of music was, with the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses. I grew up listening to Deacon Blue. I knew Portishead’s Dummy by the time I was 12 because my brother and sister were playing it.
ANITA: My big inspiration was my dad’s little brother, who was an artist. He went to art college in the 80s, which is really unusual for an Indian man from Bradford. He was my absolute flipping idol. He had the attic in my granny’s
terraced house in Bradford, and I’d sit outside his attic room smelling patchouli wafting out from the doorway and listening to The The and The Cure and The Smiths.
JOHNNY: I remember being a kid and dropping my brother off at the Hacienda at like 11 o’clock on a Friday night, and then knocking on his door at one o’clock on Saturday afternoon and wondering why he was still in bed. I guess I was exposed to that kind of culture early. Manchester really looked after us – we were there till we were 28 and the Northern Quarter had really become home for us.
We did have a period living in the Lake District at Daniel’s dad’s house. During the day we would mow the lawns and walk the dogs and rake the dead leaves out the pond. And then at night we had a little space above his garage to make music. We’d drive back to Manchester on Friday nights, play records at Odd Bar and have some fun.
We had a period living in the Lake District. During the day we would mow the lawns and rake the dead leaves out the pond. And at night we would make music
DANIEL: We really wanted a career in music but you end up looking to other things to bring in the income. Then the Clove Club happened and the food took the front seat for a while. I started getting back into the studio in 2019 and then the pandemic hit so we started playing together again and that’s where our band Celestial started.
JOHNNY: It was always the plan to do one little single and see how it goes. Now we have an LP out called I Can Hear the Grass Grow.
ANITA: How would you describe your music for the readers if you had to distill it down to one sentence?
DANIEL: It’s quite hard to describe, really. Celestial is kind of ambient New Age. I also have another project called Ground that I guess you could call afro futurist pop.
JOHNNY: Getting back into the music
When we first did Clove Club in the flat, we didn’t have any formal training. We were basically a pair of northern blaggers. What we did have is decades of experience of looking after people, whether it was in restaurants or at house parties
was easier for you – I was still bitter that I wasn’t a rock star. Me and my mum had been holding out for it, but instead we had a career in restaurants. The music and food always went hand in hand though, really. You’d go out in Manchester and then you’d head to Rusholme, where it was like the Las Vegas strip but for curry houses. My family used to go to Rusholme every Friday night when I was seven or eight. We’d go to these amazing places with bright colours and new smells, being greeted by these eccentric owners. It was such a formative experience.
ANITA: I think that’s what you get when you grow up in the north. It’s different from other places. You get that cultural diversity, even just having access to something as simple as curry. Not everybody has that. If you grew up in Dorset or Devon or Somerset you might have had one curry house in your town. I’ve met people who didn’t have curry until they got to university. You take it for granted, but that tells you something about your palate from a very young age. What about you, Daniel, what were your early foodie experiences?
DANIEL: My parents are not good cooks, but there’s this very rich vein of hospitality that runs though my mum’s side. My grandma grew up in Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides and they had this very famous hotel, which was basically the only place that you could buy booze on North and South Uist. It’s on a causeway so basically anyone from the islands could walk there to get a drink and people would risk getting swept away because they were pissed. It was in the Guinness Book of Records for having the longest bar in Scotland and the most sales of whisky because it was the only place you could buy booze.
They used to serve this very simple food – mince and tatties, sausage and onion, that kind of thing – and I stole the recipes. But your mum was always the amazing cook, Johnny. She was growing her own herbs and making her own dressings when my family were still on bottles of Heinz and dried herbs.
ANITA: It’s funny how you’re embarrassed about that kind of thing as a kid. I still remember being in school and a little girl asked me what I now realise was a racist question: ‘What do you eat for your dinner on an evening?’
So I said sausage and chips even though I’d never eaten sausage and chips in my life! My mum made fresh curry every single night and it was delicious. Anyway, it all worked out because we grew up with a real passion for food. You can see that in this place. Luca is such a phenomenal restaurant. The food is exquisite but it’s more than that, it’s all about the two of you and the vibe you bring.
JOHNNY: When we first did Clove Club in the flat, we didn’t have any formal training. We both worked at St John but we were basically a pair of northern blaggers. What we did have is decades of experience of looking after people, whether it was in restaurants or at house parties. That’s the thing that speaks loudest, and is probably still the most important thing to us. We’re expanding the business, too. We want to open some great restaurants in London and beyond. We want to bring together amazing people from the world of food and drink and art and music and design. There’s lots of things happening: we have big plans for the future.
ANITA: You do all this stuff together – don’t you ever get sick of each other?
DANIEL: Friendships and business can be tricky but we’ve always been beyond that, really. We know each other better than members of our family do, you know? It’s something we’re very privileged to have, it’s very special. That’s ultimately why our names are on the door. It’s about mutual trust and about being able to communicate. It’s a relationship in the truest sense.
l Anita’s latest book, Baby Does a Runner, is out now. Check out Celestial LP I Can Hear the Grass Grow on Bandcamp; Book Luca at luca.restaurant
What does the fastest man in the world do when he slows down? Usain Bolt talks to SAM KESSLER about family, positivity, and his surprising career change
On 16 August 2009, the world record for the 100m sprint was set at 9.58 seconds at the World Championships in Berlin. Sixteen years later, it’s a record that has yet to be beaten. The man who set that record needs no introduction. Millions of people across the globe instantly recognise the fastest man in the world’s signature lightning bolt pose. Everyone knows the name Usain Bolt.
The only sprinter to win gold medals in both the 100m and 200m sprints at three consecutive Olympics, at Beijing 2008 he also became the only person in the world to hold the records for both distances. Calling him a legend is an understatement bordering on an insult. And yet far from the split-second timing and iconic showboating of the track, Usain Bolt might just be the most relaxed former athlete around.
Now that running is behind him, there’s no more regimented training sessions, no more pushing himself to the limits of human performance. I mean, if he doesn’t deserve a rest, who does?
“Life on the track, it’s fast, obviously. We’re here to run the fastest time possible. But away from the track I try to take things as slow as possible, to take it easy. If I don’t have to work, I’m always just chilling with friends, hanging out with my kids.
“Most of your life when you’re competing it is just on the go, making sure everything’s together. You’re so focused. So, when you’re not competing you can take a breath, take a week off, relax. It’s a beautiful time.”
All that spare time has given Bolt, now 39, a chance to experiment with alternative careers. He tried football, hoping to convert his speed on the track to the pitch. But now his focus has changed to music. His debut album, Country Yutes, is a combination of reggae, afrobeats and dancehall, underpinned by something very important to the older Bolt – positivity.
“It’s Jamaican music, but we try to keep it as positive as possible. You know, as youths are coming up you want to try and push the positive. In these times there’s a lot going on. If you can make sure that the music is positive, energetic, different from the negative, it helps.”
Fortunately, Bolt has positivity to spare. Thinking back on that record-breaking sprint in Berlin is still a lifelong highlight: “It was a great feeling. It was one of the times I was actually running for a record and it meant a lot to see all that effort pay off. Every time you win a championship it’s kind of a relief, know what I mean? You kind of blow out, like ‘ahh’. Because you know the work you go through, whether you’ve been injured throughout the season. It’s always tough. I just tried to focus on making sure I got it right. That time I did.”
And yet, while you might assume that looking up and seeing that clock read 9.58 would be the highlight of Bolt’s career, he thinks of it as more of a job well done. It makes sense: he aimed for a time and he got it. But if he could go back to any moment in his career, it wouldn’t be 2009, but much, much earlier.
“World juniors when I was 15 in Jamaica. That atmosphere, the feeling I got from being at home and winning, I’d go back to that feeling, definitely. At the
time I was still trying to properly get into running. I was enjoying it because I was winning all the time. But the older I get the more I understand just how big that moment was, actually winning in front of your own crowd. A lot of people never get that opportunity, you know? It was the one time we actually hosted a championship. It was a small championship, sure, but we’ve not really hosted much since and the fact that I could win at home was a big deal.”
That championship was a metaphorical lightning strike for Bolt. Prior to that championship, he was widely considered to be coasting, enjoying the sport without putting his all into it. After that 2002 World Junior Championship in Kingston, he began his ascendency.
As we’re talking, it’s hard not to spot what Bolt was rocking on his wrist: a solid gold Hublot Big Bang. It’s not a shy, retiring watch: on the contrary, it contains 45mm of industrial planes, skeletonised dial and precious metal. It’s one that Bolt had a hand in creating.
“It’s one of my own watches!” he says excitedly. “The Big Bang. It’s our second collaboration and my second favourite watch. My favourite is the first collab we did to commemorate the Beijing Olympics, where Hublot used my actual spikes from the race in the watch. That was one of my favourite spikes, too.
“We tried to just capture me, you know what I mean? That first watch was mainly focused on Jamaican colours, my pose in general. But this second one is a bit different. It’s bold, it stands out… I wanted something that I’d wear on a night out.”
It’s not hard to see why a brand like Hublot would appeal to someone like Bolt. The bombast, the boldness and more gold than Bolt’s eight Olympic medals, it’s punchy. It’s almost enough to make you forget there’s a serious Unico
movement underpinning some equally serious watchmaking. It’s also no surprise that Bolt has plenty of other watches in reserve.
“Last time I checked, I have something like 34 maybe? When I started getting watches they were all big, but now I try to mix it up, different colours, different vibes.” Usain is in good company at Hublot, who these days have a sporting hall of fame when it comes to their ambassadors. He sits alongside tennis legend Novak Djokovic, football icon Kylian Mbappe and the entire Premier League. But it’s not the flash of wrist candy or ambassadorial pedigree that got Bolt on board. It was charity.
“One thing I’ve noticed when I was growing up,” says Bolt of the eponymous Usain Bolt Foundation, “kids didn’t have the necessary means to get to school, didn’t have books or the basic necessities of education. You know what? If you miss this part, it’s harder when you get to the next level. So, I try as hard as possible to just get these kids pencils, computers in schools so they can research.
“For me, Hublot was making waves when we got together. They’d started to do a lot of collabs with different people
over the years. But we found out that they did a lot of charity work and that meant a lot to me. When Hublot came on board they really supported by giving towards my charity every year. They helped in every way they could and earned a place in my heart.”
Of course, any good partnership needs some synergy and, while his collaborative limited editions prove Hublot matches Bolt’s personal style, according to the man himself there’s a deeper reason they work well together. “Hublot’s creativity, their strong will, the time and effort they’ve put into being the best… that’s how I started. They took their time to get there and so did I. It’s about thinking how can we change, how can we adjust, how can we be better? In that, we’re the same.”
It’s been a long road (and a short sprint) for Usain Bolt to get where he is. It’s taken dedication that few could rival and that’s defined both him and his sport for generations to come. But while Bolt pushes himself, that’s not something he necessarily wants for his own children (daughter Olympia and twin sons Saint and Thunder).
I see so many kids being pushed so hard at a young age. They’re being pushed to mature so quickly. It’s good to make mistakes
“Growing up, one thing I’ve always said is to just enjoy the process,” says Bolt. “I see so many kids being pushed so hard at a young age. They’re being pushed to mature so quickly. But sometimes it’s good to make mistakes when you’re young, it helps you refocus. I made mistakes when I was younger and I learned from those mistakes. Just believe: you have to believe in yourself, believe in your time, because it’s going to be a tough road.”
So, the big question. It’s been 16 years since that 9.58 time and unlike many, many other athletics records, nobody’s come close to breaking it. Does he think anyone ever will? “No,” he laughs, “I don’t think so. I’ve seen a few athletes nowadays… but I don’t think anybody’s going to break it.”
With Killing Eve and True Detective under his belt, Owen McDonnell is taking on one of this year’s most hotly anticipated plays. He talks to STEVE DINNEEN
This is Ian McKellen’s toilet,” says Owen McDonnell enthusiastically. “Go in and have a look.” Sure enough, there’s a sign on the door of what looks like a broom cupboard that says “Ian McKellen’s WC”. Inside, the walls are plastered floor-to-ceiling with pictures of great thespians – Mark Rylance, Dame Maggie Smith, Dame Judi Dench – with a cut-out of McKellen taking pride of place, tiara perched upon his head. The toilet seat is wrapped in red vinyl to make it look like a strawberry.
McDonnell is giving me a tour of the Harold Pinter Theatre, where he’s starring in a revival of The Weir opposite Brendan Gleeson. “You can feel the history of the place,” he says as he leads me through a series of labyrinthine corridors. We make a few more twists and turns and emerge into an Irish bar. This is the set of The Weir, Conor McPherson’s seminal play about loneliness, connection and community in a remote Irish village.
“I used to work in pubs in the 1990s, when the play is set,” says McDonnell. “So I was making suggestions about what towels they should have and what should go where to make it feel really authentic.” You can almost smell the cigarette smoke and disinfectant.
After pointing out more of the impressive features, he leads me off the stage and into one of the theatre’s wood-panelled bars. The Galway-born
star – who, with an unruly mop of dark hair, looks younger than his 50 years – is one of those actors whose name you might not recognise but whose face you probably will. He’s appeared in some of the biggest shows of the last decade, including Killing Eve, the latest season of True Detective and Bad Sisters.
All three of those are famously female-led, starring, among others, Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer, Jodie Foster and Sharon Horgan. Is he drawn to productions featuring strong women?
“Not consciously,” he says. “But it’s obviously amazing – the industry is tough for women, they have to work so much harder. I’m just basking in their glory.”
Who was his favourite to work beside?
“They’re all so different,” he says diplomatically. “Sandra really dives into the detail of stuff, interrogates every single syllable of texts, whereas Sharon’s written the show, so she’s like, ‘Yeah, I know exactly what I’m doing.’ She’ll be rewriting a scene one minute then giving this incredible performance the next. Jodie Foster has this amazing presence but she’s also very humble.”
Theatre represents something of a homecoming for McDonnell, who describes the stage as “what I love and know best”. He’s clearly thrilled to be working on a play as enduring as The Weir, which has taken on an almost mythical status since it was first staged in 1997.
“I saw it in the West End when I was in my early twenties but I didn’t realise how much there was to it until I actually read it. This is the first time
Conor’s directed it, and he’s been tweaking it a little bit, not changing it massively, but adding some gags. It’s funnier than I remember and I think you need that humour because you’re dealing with some dark material. In Ireland, quite often how we deal with dark stuff is to laugh about it.”
When Jez Butterworth’s modern classic Jerusalem, a surreal parable about Britishness, returned to London after 13 years, it had taken on a whole new meaning in the wake of Brexit. Does The Weir hit differently after nearly three decades?
“Oh, of course. Ultimately it’s not a play about the supernatural or faith or religion, it’s about people. It’s five people in a bar talking to each other. There are no mobile phones and, in a world of social media and ‘likes’, where a lot of the interactions we have are impersonal, it champions personal connections. When Conor wrote it in 1994 or 1995 he didn’t know there was going to be a Facebook. I don’t even know if Friends Reunited existed then!”
The Weir also deals with loneliness, which has become an increasingly important part of the cultural conversation in recent years.
“Loneliness is something the characters have almost accepted as part of life,” says McDonnell. “It’s not necessarily something they beat themselves over the head with – they acknowledge it and then enjoy the times when they’re not alone. They acknowledge we can’t avoid hardship in our lives. I think it’s healthy to be able to say, ‘This is a bit shit’.”
Part of the attraction of The Weir was
working with co-star Brendan Gleeson. “He’s always been a hero of mine, dating back to The Treaty, a series on Irish television years ago about the formation of the Irish state, where he played Michael Collins, a big political figure in Ireland. I didn’t have any expectations of Brendan, exactly, but any I did have were completely exceeded. He’s the embodiment of generosity. I wrote in his card on our opening night: ‘They say you should never meet your heroes but it seems to be fine!’”
I ask if there’s anyone else he would like to work with and, after furrowing his brow for a few seconds, he says: “I would have loved to have worked with Philip Seymour Hoffman. He was such a brilliant actor. I met him once and he was really self-effacing, kind of awkward. I was telling him how much I loved his work and he was just like, ‘Okay!’”
Our interview fell a few days after the Emmys, at which several actors had spoken out in support of Palestine, with
Javier Bardem making headlines for saying he wouldn’t work with anyone who “justifies or supports the genocide”.
I wonder how McDonnell feels about actors speaking out on political and humanitarian issues? It’s one of those questions that can make people clam up but McDonnell answers with the same good-natured frankness he’s shown throughout the interview.
“It’s important that actors should be allowed to express their opinions,” he says. “I don’t think an actor’s opinion is worth any more than someone else’s. But if you have a platform and you have a deeply held belief, then you should be able to express it. Do I think there should be a ceasefire in Palestine?
Absolutely: I think what’s going on there is not right.”
For the most part, though, McDonnell seems to fall into that category of British and Irish actors who are genuinely happy to let their work do the talking. He says he’s more than content with his level of fame, which allows him to star in blockbuster productions with the world’s biggest stars while still going unmolested on the school run.
I wrote in Brendan Gleeson’s card on our opening night: ‘They say you should never meet your heroes but it seems to be fine!’
“My idea of success has always been to be working and to be able to give my kids the opportunities they need, you know? The bank owns most of my house but at least I can pay the mortgage!”
And with that, he’s off, back through the bar and into the warren of corridors to prepare for The Weir’s press night. With a cast as talented as this, I’m sure it will be worth the wait.
l The Weir starring Owen McDonnell is on at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 6 December
A too-good-to-be-true pitch about chicken shop espionage led STEVE DINNEEN on a surreal journey from Nairobi to Chicago, revealing the story of those left behind by the AI revolution
The ‘customer’ in the fried chicken shop didn’t touch his meal. Instead, he photographed the kitchen door’s keypad and left. ‘Corporate spy,’ muttered the cashier before showing me three identical incidents caught on his security cameras.
This is the opening line of a pitch I received from a writer called Joseph Wales, entitled “London’s Fried Chicken Wars: Espionage, Betrayal and Social Media Sabotage.”
Wales promised that after “six weeks of undercover investigation” he could shine a light on the murky, sometimes violent world in which temporary staff turn out to be spies from rival chains, social media feeds are regularly flamed by troll armies and fake mystery shoppers plant dead flies in rival stores. These claims could be backed up, he said, by FOI requests to local councils, screenshots from private Whatsapp groups and police reports linking chicken shops from Brixton to Tottenham with organised crime. He even claimed that, during his investigation, a restaurant manager handed him a napkin with a scrawled warning: “Be careful who you eat with.” It’s the kind of pitch that grabs you by the shirt collar. It has it all: colour, characters, a sense of place. It examines
something niche but speaks to something wider. The only problem? It was completely made up.
It didn’t take long for alarm bells to start ringing. Why would a restaurant manager write his sinister message on a napkin, where it could be used as evidence, rather than simply growling it in a menacing fashion? Wales claimed he was sitting in a branch of Chicken Cottage in Stratford – but there is no Chicken Cottage in Stratford. The more I looked into the story, the more absurd it all seemed.
I went back through the pitch and immediately spotted the tell-tale signs: numbered headers divided into bullet points. Pertinent words bolded up. Em dashes scattered liberally throughout. This was the work of AI. When I called him out on this, Wales admitted using AI in his pitch but assured me he would never use it to write or research his stories. I asked him to jump on a call: radio silence.
Usually at this point I would delete the pitch and move on. But there was something about Joseph Wales that niggled at me, a feeling that there was more to this story. So I started to dig. And soon this bogus pitch about warring London chicken shops had led me on a trail across the globe, from East Africa to Chicago, revealing a bigger, sadder story about the lives we lead on the internet. It’s a story about how AI is
coming for people’s jobs – and how those people are using AI to fight back. But most of all it’s about how AI isn’t only changing the world: it’s also making it the same, but more
At first I thought Joseph Wales was the villain of this story but the more I learned, the more he began to seem like its anti-hero, a man hustling and flailing in the face of generational change. And, like all good thrillers, the real villain wouldn’t reveal himself until the final act.
So what was the deal with the pitch? My first hypothesis is what I’ve come to think of as the ‘Oobah Butler theory’: that the AI chicken shop story was deliberately placed for the purposes of making me look silly, for journalism! I can imagine moon-faced gonzo journalist Butler, most famous for taking a made-up restaurant called The Shed (actually his parents’ shed) to the top of Tripadvisor’s list of the best London restaurants, struggling to stifle a grin as he explains to camera how he tricked some foolish editor into publishing his concocted story. But if it was a prank, the prankster was playing the long game: Wales has a modest online presence dating back years, including a portfolio and a website. His cuttings are made up of copywriting gigs covering financial advice (“Best Way to Invest 20k in 2025”)
Scan here to read the online version of this article complete with links to material including Joseph’s online writing and Brent’s blog post
and pest control (“What does a bat bite look like?”). Some of his posts are, according to fairly rudimentary detection tools, at least partly written by AI. His Wordpress site contains a handful of unremarkable blog posts about SEO writing: “Imagine you could get your search traffic to hang on your every word…”
The resumé he sent me says he is currently based in Los Angeles and studied business administration at Oxford Brookes University. A reverse image search of the headshot from his portfolio comes up with just one match: a profile on Cambly, a website that links language students with tutors. He is listed as “Teacher Joseph” and there is an accompanying video of a cheerful looking, bearded white man with an American accent saying he is “from Chicago in America”. Teacher Joseph apparently studied at Cairo Modern School from 2011-2014, which clashes with the dates my Joseph says he studied in Oxford.
Joseph Wales’ email sign-off and CV list two different American phone numbers: one is disconnected, the other just rings out. The first originates from east Michigan and the second is from 1,000 miles away in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Links to his profiles on Discord and LinkedIn are dead.
I keep digging and find a different Joseph Wales on Facebook who works in SEO and
did go to Oxford Brookes but this one says he lives in Palisade, Colorado. A reverse image search for this Joseph points to a stock image used commonly across the internet. Promisingly, this Joseph follows several freelance writing networks of the kind that occasionally repost my callouts for writers.
Next I follow up the references from his CV. These mostly consist of big international copywriting agencies, who I email with little hope of getting a response. One stands out, though: the WayneGlance Writing Agency, which does not appear to have an online footprint.
I am about to call it a day when I notice Joseph’s email address: “miminiwriter”. I search for “mimini” and not much comes up. I try various permutations of those letters and “mimi ni” (with a space) gives me a clue: it means “I am” in Swahili. “I am writer”. This matches another tantalising nugget from his resumé: a “professional affiliation” with the NCCK – the National Council of Churches of Kenya.
A search for “WayneGlance Kenya” points me towards a Kenyan jobs website featuring a CV with identical wording to the resumé of my Joseph Wales. It belongs to someone based in Nairobi: I have found my man.
I email my findings to Wales, not to berate him but because I’m not sure
who else would be interested. I’ve spent so many hours trying to work out who he is that I’m starting to quite like the guy. He is a grifter, sure, but he knows a good pitch, and he could tell you what to do if you discover a snake’s nest on your property, which sounds like a useful life skill. He doesn’t reply.
As an experiment, I feed ChatGPT the last few issues of this magazine and ask it to come up with some features: it immediately spews out two ideas that are worryingly close to stories I’ve been thinking about writing. I wonder how many pitches I’ve accepted originated in the digital mind of an LLM.
I reach out to a few fellow editors and discover that I am not alone in receiving AI-generated pitches. One desk head at a major British tabloid says “a blizzard” of AI pitches “arrive with depressing inevitability.” She forwards me a press release so anodyne it couldn’t possibly have been written by a human. Nobody I speak to has received anything quite as audacious as Joseph’s chicken shop pitch.
Then the journalist and broadcaster Sonya Barlow, who I’d spoken to for this story, sent me an email with the words “Might be of interest…” with a link to a story in the Press Gazette: the now infamous Margaux Blanchard scandal in which AI pitches became AI articles that were published in respected outlets including Wired and Business Insider. This was a bombshell moment for
British journalism. Dispatch Media journalist Jacob Furedi, who broke the story, had himself received a macabre pitch from Blanchard about a decommissioned mining town in Colorado called Gravemont that she said was being used as an underground training facility for forensics teams and first responders.
“The bodies arrive by night,” went the pitch. “They’re rolled in on stretchers, unzipped, and placed in the mock apartments, classrooms, and bus stations.”
Like my chicken shop story, it was an irresistible pitch. And like my chicken shop story, it was entirely fabricated by AI. Gravemont, Colorado doesn’t even exist. But unlike Joseph Wales, Blanchard appeared to be a respectable journalist. She had written a charming story for Wired about couples getting married inside the world of Minecraft (Wired had already removed the piece after getting suspicious over the unorthodox way Blanchard had asked for payment).
Business Insider, meanwhile, had run a pair of essays by Blanchard entitled “Remote work has been the best thing for me as a parent but the worst as a person” and “I had my first kid at 45. I’m financially stable and have years of life experience to guide me.” Other publications carrying her articles include SF Gate and Index on Censorship magazine.
I search my emails for “Margaux Blanchard” and get a little hit of dopamine when I find a result. A pitch from 21 July entitled London’s Silent Raves Are the New Status Gyms. “This feature would look at the rise of silent dance parties doubling as fitness classes—happening in parks, rooftops, even under train arches—where participants wear wireless headphones and vibe out together to curated DJ-led workouts. It’s sweaty, spiritual, and
extremely Instagrammable. But here’s the twist: I’d position it as the new status symbol for the wellness-obsessed and burnout-weary.”
She offered to write 1,200 words “with that slightly cheeky City AM voice”. It’s a terrible pitch – I’m slightly jealous she saved her best ideas for other publications – and if I ever opened the email, I immediately forgot about it. I reply telling her I love it. She never responds. I do some more digging. The headshot associated with Blanchard’s Gmail account – margauxblanchard414 – is a lady in her fifties with a neat bob. I’m almost certain it’s a picture of the French-American author Mireille Guiliano, who wrote the 2004 book French Women Don’t Get Fat (as far as I know she has absolutely nothing to do with this story).
“This is the first time I’ve received a story that’s just blatantly what you might call an AI hallucination,” Furedi would later tell me. The thing neither of us can work out is the why of it all. “I would love to know what’s the motivation,” he says. “Business Insider don’t pay very much for that sort of lifestyle op-ed slop. There must be an easier way to make money.”
I’m mulling over what all this means for my AI story when – record scratch – I
Margaux Blanchard sent me a terrible pitch. I’m jealous she saved her best ideas for other people
get a reply from Joseph. “I was just going through your emails and I can’t help myself from smiling,” he says. I tell him I want to talk to him and he asks why. I say I want to find out who he really is. “Alright, brace yourself for the truth!” he says. “It’s about time I shared this... You’ll definitely have a field day… Of course, there’s a story behind everyone.” He signs off with a winky face.
It is a glorious afternoon in Nairobi. The sun is dazzling blue against the green of the garden where the man I have known as Joseph Wales is sitting with three of his dogs – “I have so many dogs, bro” – all sturdy mongrels who occasionally jump up at him for strokes. In the background I can see squat brick houses and tropical vegetation. This is the suburb where he lives with his wife and the two young girls he has just dropped off at school. “They are very pretty,” he says with pride. “And they have my brains.”
After several false starts and some fraught negotiations (I ended up wiring him £20 out of my own bank account as a “token”), we connected over Google Meet. Wales, it is immediately clear, is not the jovial white bloke “from Chicago in America” but a slim black guy “born and bred” in Nairobi to a Kenyan mother and a British father, who he says works for the Kenyan air force. He speaks good English with a thick, friendly accent. He’s wearing a tracksuit top and a black Covid mask, which he says is to cover a fat lip he suffered during a recent car accident. The first revelation is that his name is not Joseph Wales, it’s Wilson Kaharua. “I told you, I have a long story to tell!” he laughs. I ask him to start at the start. He tells me he’s always been interested in technology. As a boy he would read about the phishing scams that
originated in Nigeria, which was years ahead of Kenya when it came to online culture, although he says he’s never tried anything like that himself.
He studied economics and finance at Kenyatta University, “one of the best in my country”. After graduating in 2011 – which would put him in his mid thirties – he worked as a tutor helping language students write essays and also “worked at a few banks”. But he says “the money they were paying me was not enough” so he began applying for international copywriting assignments. Among the first was for a British company that sold industrial lighting. The owner’s name was Joseph. “He taught me the ropes. He was the one who taught me who I am… before I started teaching myself. I have a lot of gratitude for him.”
When Joseph died of a brain tumour, Wilson took his name, reasoning that English language publications would be more comfortable with an English-sounding name. Why “Wales”? He just liked the sound of it. The picture he uses on his website was just something he found online: “It was someone who looks almost like me,” he says (in fact, it would be hard to imagine two people who look less alike).
By 2015, Wilson was working for a number of big copywriting agencies. The pay wasn’t great by British standards but it went pretty far in Nairobi. “I was making good money,” he says. Much of his work appeared without a byline but some – like the pest control articles – appeared
under “Joseph Wales”.
I ask how he managed to get paid when his byline didn’t match his bank account. “That’s very easy,” he laughs. He says some of the companies paid him in crypto but for the rest he simply bought a fake drivers’ licence off the dark web and registered a Paypal account under Joseph Wales. I ask about the American phone number on his CV: he says he pays $3.99 a month for it and it reroutes to his phone in Kenya.
Things were going well for Wilson Kaharua. Money was rolling in and his alter-ego Joseph Wales seemed to have everyone fooled. But then, in 2023, the bottom dropped out of this carefully constructed world: “AI replaced us.”
Suddenly there was no need to pay people like Wilson to write about bat
bites and snake nests – AI can do that for free in a few seconds. So what’s a guy to do? “I’m not liking AI but I started to study it every day,” he says. “You have to work with it because it’s not going anywhere and we can’t do anything about it.”
Wilson paid to subscribe to a service that would alert him to callouts for pitches: callouts like the one I made on X asking for “big, bold, fun, weird” ideas. Using DeepSeek, Wilson generated a pitch that would be perfect for this magazine. “If you were not smart enough, it would have gone through,” he says pragmatically. “I have to try. I’m not a scammer, I’m just doing what I have to to survive.”
I wonder if he ever worries about the legal implications of this set-up but he deflects. It’s the magazine that would end up being sued, after all, not him. He’s coy about how many publications he’s sent AI pitches to but he’s adamant that what he’s doing isn’t nefarious. He says that, had I commissioned the chicken shop article, he would have researched it online and written it as best he could. He claims to have relatives in London who could have visited the chicken shops. But the places he spoke about weren’t real, I say.
The story wasn’t real Wilson seems unperturbed. “I’m not a bad person,” he shrugs.
This sentiment is rather undercut by a link he sends me to a story that went live the morning we spoke, which is, by his own admission,
“pure fiction”. It’s an essay called The Skip That Built a Family: How a Broken Led Zeppelin LP Taught Me to Love Imperfections, published on a website called I Have That On Vinyl. Byline: Joseph Wales. It’s an elegiac story about listening with his dad to a Led Zeppelin record that jumped at a certain point in the song, and how that jump became an integral part of the music for his family, leading to a lifelong obsession with damaged vinyl.
The story (which has since been taken down by the website’s owner Michele Catalano, although you can read it on the Way Back Machine archive) has some of the tell-tale signs of AI – em dashes, bullet pointed lists, words bolded up – but it also contains some quite beautiful turns of phrase. It describes a water-damaged copy of Pet Sounds where the warp slows Wouldn’t It Be Nice “just enough to make the teenage romance sound like a middle-aged memory”. It describes how his “friend’s” Nashville basement studio “smelled of old electronics and cheap bourbon” and recalls the author dropping $200 on a pristine Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab reissue. In no possible world is this the work of a man with a solid but imperfect grasp of English who lives in the outskirts of Nairobi.
Wilson and I end our call on good terms. He shares with me some Youtube videos he made eight years ago showing drone footage of his village, set to a hiphop soundtrack, and invites me to stay with him should I ever visit Nairobi. Still, I’m still not sure if anything he told me is true or if all of this has been a colossal waste of time.
But there is one more character in this story. When I was checking Joseph Wales’ references, I did get a reply, from Loud Interactive, an SEO agency in Chicago. “Hi, possibly a strange email but I’m a journalist in the UK and a guy called Joseph Wales has listed you on his resumé as an employer,” I wrote. “I don’t think he’s based in the US and I’m pretty sure the story he pitched to me was generated by AI – I wanted to check if he was indeed employed by you as an SEO copywriter… Hope you can help!” Within an hour I received a response –from the founder, no less.
Allow me to introduce you to Brent D Payne, a bull-headed gentleman who is not afraid to blow his own trumpet. His rather dizzying website is divided into subheaders that say things like “Brent D Payne is an SEO visionary”. There is a section dedicated to his “journey” from Oregon to California to Chicago. Even back in the days of web 1.0, Brent reckons he “had a vision for the future with the internet as he does now have vision of the future with AI”.
I enjoyed researching Brent. He likes to @ people like Elon Musk on X. His
followers include Barack Obama as well as a couple of mutuals of mine. He was once mentioned in a New York Times story regarding a spat he was having with Google. He’s the kind of guy who is probably quite a big deal but thinks he’s a much, much bigger deal. The first line of his email to me – no “hello” – reads: “We had over 600 stay at home moms and dads working for us then. I fired them all and replaced them with [a] homegrown AI tool I built over the past two years. Managing AIs is much easier and more predicatable [sic] than humans.”
He then shared a link to a blog post from December 2024 about firing all those moms and dads, which he says was also written by AI. He signs off with: “I am not surprised someone we had employed may be trying to pass something off as original when it was AI generated. Lots of slimy writers out there. Not saying he is or isn’t one of them, but…”
I am a bit taken aback. Most founders are cautious when talking to journalists and very, very few respond when someone in another country contacts the generic email address at the bottom of their website.
We had 600 stay-athome moms and dads working for us. I fired them all and replaced them with AI
I read his blog post and it is… quite something. “Yesterday morning, while making ‘roll-ups’ for my family, Mr. Roboto by Styx came on through our HomePods,” it begins. “You know that feeling when a song hits the right note emotionally and intellectually at just the right moment in life? There I was, with a crepe being served in one hand and a spatula in the other, singing ‘Domo arigato [“thanks a lot” in Japanese], Mr. Roboto…’ when a thought struck me: how fitting this song was for what we at Loud Interactive had just
accomplished.”
Mr. Roboto, for those unversed in 1980s synth rock, is a song on Styx’s eleventh studio album Kilroy Was Here. It tells the story of a cyborg – neither man nor machine – finding his place in a world of humans, exploring themes of alienation and the need for connection. I do not think it is quite as pro-robot as Brent assumes. It goes:
You’re wondering who I am / Machine or mannequin? / With parts made in Japan / I am the modern man /
The problem’s plain to see / Too much technology / Machines to save our lives / Machines dehumanize
“The decision wasn’t simple,” Brent continues, “after all, we replaced 600 part-time, stay-at-home parents who had been with us for over a decade. But as I think about it in light of that Styx song, it feels like a necessary progression. It’s a moment where technology takes the baton from human hands… Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto echoed in my head as I worked on breakfast, handing out crepes and singing along.”
It’s quite an image: the tech founder in his fancy kitchen singing along to existential 80s dance-rock as a small army of moms and dads start glumly updating their CVs. It is also, if I may be so bold, a horribly written blog post. Perhaps he should have kept one or two of those moms and dads around.
“Thanks for the reply,” I send back, “and fair enough – this isn’t an anti-AI story, more a story of how AI is changing the way people – and traditional media –
works. As an editor these are questions I’m currently battling with, although I don’t like the idea of being entirely replaced by a consortium of LLMs! Did you ever regret casting off the 600 humans? Also is there any way of checking if Joseph Wales was among them?”
Brent, clearly having a quiet afternoon, replies immediately. “Zero regrets. Much better outputs from our tool.” He goes on to list all the things his proprietary AI can do before reassuring me that “Journalism is safe. Stay at home mom and dad’s [sic] that do spec writing… they’re obsolete. Joseph Wales fits in that category. Joseph worked for us. He wasn’t in our top 10% for output quantity or output quality. So, I never directly interfaced. But he did do a lot of spec writing for us and for a number of years. No clue if it was any good.”
So Joseph – or, more accurately, Wilson – did work for Brent. His resumé isn’t entirely fabricated. I’m inclined to believe he’s telling the truth about most of the other stuff he told me, too, although there’s no way to be sure.
As an editor, I clearly can’t condone using AI to generate made-up pitches, especially if you plan on sending them to me. The last thing we need is more people adding to the growing fatberg of hallucinated slop that, day-by-day, makes up a larger and larger proportion of the internet (some reports suggest up to 90 per cent of new online content could be AI-generated by 2026, although this statistic could itself be AI-generated for all I know).
But I do enjoy the irony that people put out of work by AI are turning to those same tools to re-enter the market through the back door, threatening to form a surreal feedback loop of garbled content, fragments of real life jumbled up and reassembled, a limitless supply of cut-and-shut cars rolling off the forecourt of an infinite number of dodgy garages.
AI exists. It will change the face of almost every industry, upend and uproot us all, shake the system by its ankles with no regard for what might fall out of its pockets. And, as is the way of things, it will start at the bottom and work its way up. I don’t even think what Brent did is wrong, necessarily, although I could do without the triumphant tone and all the ‘Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto’ nonsense.
The last thing we need is more people adding to the growing fatberg of hallucinated AI slop
In light of all this, I can see why someone like Wilson might decide to finally take a leaf out of the book of those Nigerians he read about all those years ago. He’s smart, resourceful, charismatic and in danger of being utterly left behind, his livelihood swept away by a tsunami within which he couldn’t possibly stay afloat. There but for the grace of God go I, and you, and all of us.
Rubber ducks have been appearing at music festivals and gigs, handed from stranger to stranger. ADAM BLOODWORTH speaks to the people behind the phenomenon
We were at a festival when two girls I’d never met tapped me on the shoulder and handed me something,” says Aggie Morris, who lives in east London. “They asked me if I wanted some quack. Then they dropped a duck in my hand and carried on dancing.”
Aggie is one of thousands who’ve been handed tiny yellow ducks by complete strangers this summer. Instagram feeds and Tiktoks of people looking delighted with their bright yellow toy animals have been plastered over social media. ‘Quack teams’ have been handing out the ornaments, and stray ducks, no bigger than an inch long, have been found strewn across regional towns.
Whimsical waterfowl have been placed in belly buttons, matted into hair and lined up on the countertops of food vendors. This summer’s strange but joyous new trend is taking hold at music festivals –luminous yellow birds were a common sight on DJ decks this year – and there have been reports of ‘duckers’ at concerts too.
Smudge McIntosh, who set up The Joy of Ducks Instagram page in April 2024, is a DJ and events runner. He has posted photos of himself covered in duck mascots, wearing duck outfits and handing them out to strangers. The Duck Diggory Instagram account is another example of the secret
underground world of duck giving.
A month after Aggie was given a duck, her sister had been handed a silver metal one by a stranger at another festival in another part of the country. Who is Smudge McIntosh? And, more importantly, why are so many people handing out little ducks?
“The angriest of people can crack a smile,” Smudge DMs me. “It’s very rare that it goes badly, but it’s a subtle art to do it well.” Smudge lives in Liverpool but travels the country to attend festivals alone. He’s into absurdism, sending me a link to a video entitled How to Party at the End of Meaning. “I don’t know really,” he says when I ask him why he hands ducks to strangers. “Geese are silly, but ducks are cute. I think that’s what people like. Having a big suitcase full of ducks, that’s when it becomes ridiculous.” Then he gets serious: “It’s about bringing joy into the world.”
Smudge got into ducking after wearing a yellow hat to a festival last summer and receiving loads of compliments. To one-up his look he placed a rubber duck on his hat, which drew even more flattery. As a DJ, Smudge has played at Glastonbury and Pikes in Ibiza, but he views ducking as his most successful project. “It’s radical connection,” he says. “It’s laughing in the face of what’s going on. It puts the other person at ease. When you’re extroverted and talking to somebody it can come across as intrusive.”
Curtis, who also lives in London, met Smudge at Lost Village festival. He had been working there
when he was confronted by a man wielding a shoebox. “A pile of tiny yellow ducks were just smiling up at me,” he says. It was a similar experience for Matt, a tech worker from Liverpool. “He just sort of appeared and started to change the dynamic of the dancefloor,” he said. “I was really impressed by how quickly he brought something different.”
Like festival wristbands that people keep on throughout the year, Matt, Curtis and Aggie took their ducks home. Aggie has hers in the living room to remind her of the fun she had at the festival, and another festival-goer, Tamsin, tells me she keeps hers in her handbag when she goes to raves. “They’re like a good omen,” she says.
The trend for passing out gifts at raves has been around in America for some time, particularly on the EDM scene, where ‘PLUR’ culture (peace, love, unity and respect) is about connecting with new people. Kandi bracelets are commonly given as gifts, similar to the way Taylor Swift fans exchange friendship bracelets. In the UK this summer, the trend appears to have taken on a more whimsical form.
Smudge admits he’s “upped the game a bit,” but suspects dozens of duckers are now at large. Ducker Clare from Manchester had been attending Lost Village when one of her group graduated from duck receiver to duck hander-outer. “One friend was very excited about the ducks and ‘with permission’ grabbed a handful and popped them in her handbag,” she says. “By the end of the festival she gave them out to festival goers to spread more joy!”
Ducker Arman, a videographer based in London, takes a more targeted approach than Smudge, spotting specific people in crowds he’d like to gift. “We’d see a certain unique characteristic about someone and we’d look at each other and be like ‘I wanna duck them,’” he says. “We’d look at each other and be like, ‘We need to duck
them hard.’” He is particularly keen on passing ducks to people wearing peculiar outfits, and likes to place them in random locations around the house to surprise his girlfriend. “I place them inside her boots, on her desk, in the kitchen cabinet.”
All duckers have different methods. “I don’t like that line,” Smudge tells me when I bring up the ‘quack dealer’ joke. He sounds genuinely exasperated at the thought of it. “Everyone makes that joke.” He says he takes his “silliness very seriously,” helping him reach the higher echelons of the festival hierarchy: even Gilles Peterson has played sets with ducks on his mixing decks. Altogether, Smudge reckons he gave out north of two thousand of them at festivals this summer. He has since seen people handing out mini brussels sprouts and little pigs. “The best I got was when someone gave me a little
bottletop man with googly eyes made out of upcycled trash,” he says. “It does make me uncomfortable that I am handing out little bits of plastic in a field. I have considered how I can make it more eco-friendly. Origami is the obvious one but it doesn’t have the same effect. So now I’m researching using recycled plastic.”
As autumn hits, duckers have turned to making mallards memeable while everyone’s stuck inside, sharing ducklings digitally, instead. “I want to start a campaign to get the rubber duck emoji!” Smudge says. “It’s been rejected twice. The ordinary duck and chick ones aren’t good enough.”
There is science behind the silliness, too. Humans require these encounters with strangers “as much as they require food and shelter,” according to counsellor Debbie Keenan. Without them, “feelings of isolation and alienation tend to grow.” The act speaks “to a part of our desire as humans to connect,” says psychologist Lianne Terry, who says duck-giving “fits into a larger cultural moment of people actively seeking offline connections.” It’s a tonic to the loneliness epidemic and our messy digital lives, where doom scrolling so often takes precedence over IRL social connections.
As a social glue, ducks are a canny choice. Their luminous yellow is a colour widely understood to evoke feelings of happiness, optimism and energy. But there’s more to it than just that. Specialist shops have sprung up across London in recent years, selling ducks dressed as beefeaters, navy seals and pirates. New Square Mile arcade Fairgame has a ten-metre-wide spinning duck that greets you as you enter, and inside you can play the classic village fete game of hook-a-duck. The duck is a nostalgic symbol of childhood and care-free play.
So next time someone makes eye contact with you at a festival or gig, don’t look away – you might end up getting ducked.
Three esoteric stores dominate London’s witchcraft scene.
CHRIS DORRELL makes a pilgrimage to all of them – and receives a glimpse into a future that features ‘unresolved sadness’
As I stood outside Watkins Books, the oldest occult bookshop in London, an old man approached me.
“Number 23 is the one you want,” he said, pointing down the street. I looked confused. “Murder! A woman stabbed in the basement!”
The man, who quickly walked on, was referring to the 1961 murder of Elsie Batten, a 59-year old assistant who worked in an antiques shop. The crime had nothing to do with Watkins, based at 19-21 Cecil Court, but the brief interaction gave me the sense that it was a mysterious place.
Inside you can find books on folklore and self-help alongside healing crystals, tarot cards and ‘sacred’ sculptures. Downstairs are the books on magic, mysticism and tantric Christianity. It’s an eclectic mix.
Carl Nordblom, the scholarly store manager of Watkins, says the shop embodies “a willingness to explore and seek to have direct experiences – not just theories – of that which all religions talk about, something more than human.” Gulp.
London’s occult bookshops might go unseen by most passers by, but they have seen a lot. Watkins was established in 1893 near Charing Cross, the historic centre of London, moving to Cecil Court in 1901. Atlantis Bookshop, the other mainstay in the city’s occult scene, was founded in 1922, and has been based on Museum Street since 1941.
The two shops are among the oldest bookshops in London. They had a duopoly
on the world of occult books until 2003, when Dr Christina Oakley-Harrington established Treadwell’s, which is now based in Bloomsbury. The three are within a 25 minute walk of each other, so visitors to London interested in the occult often visit all three.
But what actually is the occult? “The word means ‘hidden’,” says Geraldine Beskin, co-owner of Atlantis and a self-described practising witch.
”You can plan a party, pick the perfect day and make sure everything is as it should be, but that doesn’t mean the party will be perfect. The occult is that indefinable something. You can’t grasp hold of it, but you can see it working.”
The items stocked in the occult shops claim to help customers to engage with this inexpressible force in a variety of ways, whether through greater selfawareness or elaborate magical practices. Alongside these, there are more familiar volumes on history, philosophy, and nature.
Each shop has its own speciality: “We are like pubs. We each have our different character,” says Beskin. Atlantis has a special connection to modern witchcraft, or Wicca, a religion founded in the mid-20th century by Gerald Gardner. In 1952, Gardner held his first coven in the Atlantis basement, which Beskin says is “arguably the most magical room in London”. That fact alone makes the shop the birthplace of Wicca, the only modern religion Britain has ever produced.
“At Atlantis we field questions about witchcraft, from the very basic to very specialist, in a practical way. I’ve been working in the shop for over 50 years so we can hopefully steer people in the right direction in a gentle way,” she says.
Watkins is more international in its aspirations. The shop was established when theosophy – a religious movement that sought theological insight through mystical intuition – was sweeping the drawing rooms of late Victorian London.
“Theosophists held the belief that at the centre of all religion, was a unified core. You could study all kinds of religiosity and you could find an essence,” says Nordblom.
This helps explain the dazzling variety of books on offer in the shop. Nordblom says international visitors find books they can’t source elsewhere.
Watkins also embraces some of the
stranger parts of the occult, with shelves for subjects including ‘paranormal’ and ‘secret societies’.
Treadwell’s, the relative newcomer, avoids the most whacky topics. “Our speciality is that we overlap with the academic world,” says Oakley-Harrington. There’s no self-help, no UFOs and no alternative healing. Part of the purpose of the shop was to help bridge the divide between occult practitioners, who were suspicious of scholars working in the same field, and the scholars, who did not want to be labelled as “weirdos” in the academy, she says.
London has had a rich occult history, stretching back to the Roman Age. In the second and third centuries, traders, soldiers and administrators would gather in the underground temple devoted to the Persian god Mithras for secret rites and rituals.
For the next thousand years, some of the most influential Londoners have been deeply immersed in occult practices. In the 16th century, John Dee was an important advisor to Elizabeth I, a founding fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and an occultist. Quite the CV.
Similarly, Isaac Newton spent years of his life studying occult messages in scripture. “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians,” John Maynard Keynes, the great 20th century economist said of him.
Although modern science gradually parted ways with the occult in later centuries, it has remained an important influence on religious and cultural life in the city. In the swinging sixties, Mick
Jagger was known to go into Watkins Books while Jimmy Page, guitarist of Led Zeppelin, established his own shortlived occult bookshop in Kensington in the early 1970s.
Even in the most modern and most rational parts of the city, the occult still makes its presence felt in unexpected ways. When Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, published his book dissecting the causes of the global financial crisis, he called it ‘The End of Alchemy’, referring to the ability of banks to simply create money out of nothing. “For centuries, alchemy has been the basis of our system of money and banking,” he wrote. Dee and
Newton’s dream was realised at last, not through divine aid but through the wizardry of fractional reserve banking.
So are we living through an occult revival? “There always seems to be an occult revival,” says Nordblom. And in some ways this is true. The occult is such a broad church that some element of popular culture will likely touch on it, consciously or not. Oakley-Harrington says this gives each wave of revival a distinctive character. “This occult revival is different to the Harry Potter revival, or the Buffy the Vampire Slayer revival.”
One distinctive aspect this time around is the importance Gen Z places on that great modern buzzword: authenticity.
“Self-expression and authenticity are very important to young people,” she says. “They don’t want to be in corporate lock-step, so they look to the occult practices of outsiders through the ages, particularly women, for expressions of personal creativity.” Tarot cards and witchcraft are two of the practices enjoying a resurgence.
The lockdowns also generated a wave of enthusiasm for folklore and nature, she says. “We had people of all ages coming in to look for books about how to connect with the land, how to spot trees, and walking routes to megaliths and stone circles.”
While it might seem that spiritual practices adorned with millennia-old symbols might not be the most natural fit for the modern world, many occult beliefs align better with mainstream thought than the major religions. The sacredness of nature is often embedded
at the root of occult thought, making it well-suited to modern environmental movements. “Witchcraft is a nature religion,” stresses Beskin.
Witchcraft and feminism also sit comfortably together. After all, the witch is one of the few symbols of independent female power in the Western tradition. And if you are wondering whether a man can be a witch, the answer is yes: “Men make fabulous witches,” says Beskin.
Ronald Hutton, a leading historian of paganism, said there is a “splendid paradox” with modern witchcraft and paganism more broadly. Although witchcraft was first presented as the planet’s “most ancient religious tradition”, its emphasis on feminism, environmentalism and enlightened self-realisation means it is “especially well-suited to radical late modernity.”
lll
Such theorising is all well and good – but it was time to put the occult to the test. Approaching my first tarot reading at Watkins Books, there were precisely two thoughts in my head: “I don’t really believe in this” and “Maybe I am the chosen one”.
As I arrive, I’m shown to a gloomy corner
where Wendy Erlick, my tarot reader, sits in a small alcove. “Welcome to the table,” she says dramatically. I draw the green curtain, pull out my notebook and she begins to turn the cards.
At the centre of my table lie two cards: the four of wands is “blessed and auspicious”, symbolising harmony and celebration. The second card is the three of pentacles, Wendy’s favourite. It’s a card of service and community. “I like working with people who draw this card,” she says.
A succession of other cards follow, showing twists of colour, ghostly figures and an intrepid boat. Apart from a deep, unresolved sadness, things were looking good. “This is a very beautiful set,” says Wendy. “It is benevolent, hopeful, even wonderful. So golden and beautiful. There’s no poverty or destruction, and lots of creativity. But we’ll have to talk about that,” she says, pointing to a sombre looking card adorned with what looks like a pale blue teardrop.
Witchcraft and feminism sit well together. The witch is one of the few symbols of independent female power in the Western tradition
The cards were drawn before I had told Wendy anything about myself. I then explain I am a writer, pursuing the dream of being a freelance journalist, but the climate for freelancer journalists is precarious and I might have to put my dreams on hold. “You will break through,” she says firmly.
I do not tell Wendy that I also harbour musical ambitions, but she knows anyway. She suggests I might have to wait until I turn 28, but that it will be worth the wait. “One day you will write a song that everyone will sing. You can write that down,” she says, gesturing at my notebook. I like tarot readings, I thought. And what about that unresolved sadness? Well, that’s between me and Wendy. I drew the curtain for a reason.
There’s been a quiet revolution in office fashion, with the post-Covid workforce ditching stilettos for sneakers.
DR ELIZA FILBY surveys the footwear landscape
Back in the 1990s, the image of a corporate woman rushing to the office with trainers hastily slipped over tights – formal footwear stashed in a bag or left under a desk – was ubiquitous from Canary Wharf to Kuala Lumpur. But like cash payments and regular trips to the cinema, the pandemic put paid to that.
Our new era of hybrid working has meant many of us are no longer in the office as much, and if we are, we’re not in so much of a hurry. The trend of wearing trainers over tights has a traceable cultural origin: Melanie Griffith in the first iconic movie to celebrate corporate feminism, Working Girl. Released in 1988, it was all power suits and trainers, questioning how far women should and could contort themselves to make it in a working world designed by and for men. Trainers over heels embodied the workplace contradiction for that generation of women: the blurring of old and new feminine standards, the modern requirement to be both efficient and elegant, productive and polished.
Over the last 30 years, we have witnessed the casualisation of office attire and, more specifically, the decline of the heel. Trainers began outselling high heels in the UK somewhere between 2015 and 2017, a quiet but telling cultural inflexion point. Women aged 35 to 44 (Millennials and, increasingly, Gen X) have become the main trainer buyers, proving the trend is no longer limited to younger consumers. Hybrid working, looser dress codes and the pandemic all accelerated the shift. But this isn’t a story about fabric, fashion or footwear – it’s about power. The slow retreat of the heel reflects the gradual empowerment of women in the workplace, and a rejection of the discomfort once demanded as the price of looking “professional” for the male gaze.
As someone who spends a lot of time in corporate
spaces, I can say with confidence that in 2025 the towering arc of a stiletto is a rare sight. A wedge is common, a stacked trainer even more so. A smart flat is very now. A croc is entirely possible. Millennials and Gen Z have chosen practicality and comfort, and their Gen X leaders have embraced these trends with relief and gusto; even the grand dames of the corporate world, the Baby Boomers, feel they no longer require such elevation. So how did we get here?
1960s/1970s
We often assume the mini skirt of the 1960s was the first true act of clothing rebellion. Yet for feminist icon Gloria Steinem, the critical rupture came in the 1970s with the rejection of the midi skirt. That, she argued, was the moment women finally began to shed workplace dress codes and dress for themselves.
“When we were told to give up our miniskirts for midis,” she remembered, “there was a semiconscious boycott on the part of American women. We were fed up with being manipulated. We now wanted to make our own decisions on hundreds of things, not have them handed down from on high.”
The feminist movement naturally found expression in fashion: the rejection of corsets, even bras, the switch to formless dresses or dungarees; women found their freedom in a looser, more masculine silhouette. This was not lost on observers. “Every time I see a girl in slacks,” President Richard Nixon informed White House journalist Helen Thomas in 1973, “it reminds me of China.” It’s a comment that demonstrated how the private fashion choices of women had become political.
But fashion history never moves in a straight line. Trends rise and fall, reflecting culture itself, in waves of liberation and backlash. The trouser suits of the 1970s (remember the iconic image of Bianca Jagger gliding into Studio 54 in her white YSL suit?) were a modern, sexier, flared reimagining of Katharine Hepburn from
the 1930s. In the 1970s came the conservative recoil: out went the dungarees, in came pussy-bow blouses and, eventually, Laura Ashley floral dresses.
1980s/1990s
By the 1980s, women’s clothing had become even more overtly political, embodied most of all by Margaret Thatcher. Her style went on a journey: first, blouses and skirts as she talked groceries and housewife economics, then full-on power-suits when taking on the USSR or saying “No. No. No” to the Europeans. The fashion of 1980s corporate feminism encouraged the then-growing number of women entering the workplace to imitate men, to literally broaden their frame with shoulder pads, to appear larger, with straight-line trousers to echo the male silhouette.
But wasn’t this still a kind of conformity? To operate in the same spaces as men, you had to dress like them. Was it a submission, too, to the male sadomasochistic fantasy of the ‘dominant’ woman? Thatcher herself was notoriously reluctant to promote other women, deriving much of her power from being the only female voice at the all-male cabinet table. And she was hardly unique. Many of the corporate women elevated in the 1980s and 1990s built their authority on similar terms, rising precisely by mimicking rather than challenging masculine codes of dress and codes of power (this still continues and, frankly, it’s not talked about enough).
1990s/2000s
The 1990s ushered in a profound shift, both in the workplace and in what women wore there. For the first time, Gen X women began to outnumber men at university, and that educational milestone carried into the professional sphere. With more women entering the workforce came two key changes: greater disposable income and, crucially, a more feminised office culture.
Women’s wardrobes began to reflect this evolution. The hard-edged power suit of the 1980s softened into something more minimalist, even preppy. Workwear demonstrated greater freedom and self-expression; women no longer had to ape men to be taken seriously. Moreover, the rise of a gender-neutral “business casual” – accelerated by US tech culture and tech itself – blurred the boundary between the office and the outside world. The 1990s and early noughties were less about women storming the gates of the corporate world in armour and more about reshaping the office in their own image, even if that image remained dominated by traditional gender dynamics
(and was often policed in subtler ways). What woman didn’t want to become a lawyer after watching Ally McBeal?
But then the kids of the 1980s and 90s, the millennials, who had grown up with US sports-casual sneaker culture and Spice Girls feminism, entered the workplace. The 21st century became a strange contradiction: a revival of formality and a creeping casualisation of office life.
The rise of Silicon Valley chic – hoodies, jeans and trainers – seeped into the corporate world, eroding once-rigid codes of officewear. By the 2010s, “dress-down Friday” was a permanent fixture, as was the laptop, further blurring the professional and the personal.
If Sex and the City had set the standard for aspirational glamour in the late 1990s, Girls arrived as its millennial antidote. Out went Carrie in her Manolos, in came Hannah Horvath in all her social awkwardness and ill-fitting garb. Girls was deliberately anti-SATC, reflecting both the financial struggles of millennials coming of age in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis, but also the ‘me, me, me’ generation’s desire for careers and clothes to embody their purpose, identity and selfhood.
On the other hand, the 2010s also saw Mad Men nostalgia sweep through popular culture. Men embraced their inner Don Draper with sharp suits, while women channelled Joan Holloway with pencil skirts, cinched waists and a resurgence of figure-hugging dresses. Princess Kate amplified this look, her fitted dresses and nude heels offering a reassuringly traditional mode of feminine dress: polished, middle-class, in control. This was the dichotomy of the 2010s: Hannah Horvath vs Kate Middleton, the polished vs the unpolished. The forces of economics seemed to favour the latter. Women battled stagnant wages, digital overload, dual-income pressures and the
This was the dichotomy of the 2010s: Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath vs Kate Middleton, the polished vs the unpolished
relentless, pointless demand to ‘lean in’. No wonder then that there was outrage when, in 2016, Nicola Thorp, a temporary receptionist at PwC, was sent home for refusing to wear high heels, as demanded by her agency Portico. The story went viral, sparking a parliamentary inquiry and a petition signed by more than 150,000 people. It revealed just how out of step corporate dress codes had become. By then, millennial women entering their thirties had already established their unofficial uniform: the floral dress and trainers combo. The heel was not just unfashionable: it was extinct.
The 2020s will be remembered as the decade when office fashion came undone. Covid didn’t just mean closed offices, it signalled the end of a certain type of all-consuming work culture that defined the late 20th and early 21st century. That previous era demanded constant presence, endless productivity and a uniform of conformity.
The pandemic broke that spell. Overnight, traditional workwear felt uncomfortable, unnecessary and out of vogue. Unsurprisingly, sales of heels fell 65 per cent in the second quarter of 2020. Dry cleaners began to disappear from high streets. Soon the cost of a man’s suit was no longer being used as an official measure of inflation. Mandatory work from home (WFH) orders forced us to rethink not only our wardrobes (and all those ‘dry clean only’ garments) but also our deeper priorities around work, life, health and family. Emerging out of our Covid bunkers, we found ourselves tentatively in a new, uncertain corporate world. If bosses had issued a blunt, five-days-back edict when restrictions lifted in 2021, perhaps things would have snapped back. Instead, the return to office happened in drip, drip, drip increments: first two days, then three. For many professionals, the creep is now toward four. The flexibility in our work schedule was mirrored in our wardrobes. We permanently loosened waistbands, we over-purchased Zoomfriendly accessories, we blurred the boundary between workwear and workout wear.
The fashion industry, always quick to reflect cultural shifts, leaned in. The telling trend of the hybrid moment? The rise of the luxury trainer. No longer confined to Nike or Reebok, they appeared more and more on Russell & Bromley shelves and Dolce & Gabbana catwalks. Comfort, glamour and cost went hand in hand; luxury trainers became the new handbags.
Hybrid clothing was shaped not just by
location, but also shifting attitudes to work itself. The career woman was no longer glamourised or romanticised, rather the attitude was: ‘More fool you girl, you can’t have it all, and you’ll just burn out trying’. Online trends like “lazy girl jobs” and “quiet quitting” pushed life satisfaction to the forefront, replacing old “girlboss” aspirations. Fashion followed suit: athleisure became the uniform for a generation that moved fluidly from 9–5 to 5–9, from Zoom meetings to Pilates classes. But this took on a particular edge for Gen Z. WFH and then hybrid working was an expectation for a generation that had entered the workforce during a pandemic. Their scepticism also came from having grown up watching dualincome parents return home exhausted by digitalisation and an always-on work culture, as well as their own initiation into office life, which was staring at the green dot of a laptop camera for eight hours a day.
No wonder the humble, bendy, washable Croc became their fashion symbol. It’s a shoe with no structure, no support, but also no constraints, a semi-knowing critique of late-stage capitalism. In China, Gen Z became known as the ‘lying flat’ generation, describing the young people ‘opting out’ of the hyper-competitive work culture known as ‘996’ (9am-9pm, six days a week). It just seemed so… exhausting. This is a generation whose careers had been derailed by Covid, whose very
existence felt digitised and dehumanised, whose economy was defined by stagnant wages, rising costs and the looming shadow of AI. Why would they physically contort themselves (or squeeze their feet) into a system that offers so little certainty and so few rewards?
If economics reshaped how we thought about – and dressed for – work, so did politics. Pre-Covid, the MeToo movement had forced a reckoning with workplace power structures, from Hollywood to corporate boardrooms (with varying degrees of success, of course). It also pushed out into the open how those structures enabled abuse. In its wake, greater DEI initiatives – however
The ‘Office Siren’ trend peaked on Tiktok in 2024, turning workplace culture into a kind of corporate cosplay
performative – gave women more freedom (and, one would hope, more acceptance) to wear their identities at work. It opened the door to sartorial self-expression beyond Western norms, whether that meant a hijab, natural Afro hair or a sari. These are small but powerful signals that ‘professional dress’ no longer had a single definition.
Technology, meanwhile, enabled fashion to become more bespoke (personalised trainers, anyone?) – a phenomenon entirely befitting of the algorithmic age. Tiktok trends also started to dictate office fashion. The ‘Office Siren’ trend, which peaked on Tiktok in 2024, turned office culture into costume or, as the platform would have it, #corporatecosplay. This short-term trend saw workwear reimagined as dress-up, with viral videos such as ‘my short skirt got me the sack’ prompting bemused but sincere Gen X HR managers to make explainer videos on what was appropriate officewear. The trend spoke to a generation for whom office culture felt alien and oddly exciting. Perhaps it was about projecting control in an uncertain political and economic climate, an antidote to the dewy-eyed soft-focus of the “trad wife” movement. Or maybe it’s a recalibration of modern femininity: unashamedly smart but not unduly masculine, pragmatic yet sexy, tailored for young women living hybrid lives, many of whom now out-earn young men in major cities. High heels now entirely optional.
New Bond custodian Amazon remains tight-lipped over the new 007 –but Aaron Taylor-Johnson has fans hoping, says LAURA MCCREDDIE DOAK
BETTING ON BEING BOND?
As if the Bond rumours weren’t feverish enough, Omega has added to them by signing Aaron Taylor-Johnson as its newest ambassador.
Taylor-Johnson, who is famous for Kick-Ass and most recently 28 Years Later, attended an “in conversation” for the
latter film with co-star Jodie Comer and director Danny Boyle wearing a Speedmaster Moonwatch Professional, in his first appearance as ambassador.
Obsessives took that as a sign that he won’t be given a licence to kill as Bond only ever wears a Seamaster. However, ex-007 Daniel Craig was spotted wearing
the same watch at a Planet Ocean event in 2023, a coincidence that sparked speculation that Taylor-Johnson would be stepping into the famous dinner suit.
Maybe Taylor-Johnson is the next Bond or maybe he just has the same taste in watches. Either way, he’s a great addition to the Omega family.
We celebrate a trio of asymmetrical beauties worthy of a gallery exhibition. Words by SAM KESSLER
There are no prizes for guessing which particular work of art Exaequo’s surrealist cases are pulling from; Salvador Dali’s 1931 masterpiece The Persistence of Memory has never been so literally interpreted into a timepiece. But where the brand’s debut Melting Watch took a rather two-dimensional approach to the concept, the squeezed contours of their Polyhedron variation add some welcome depth.
There are 62 facets across the 35.35mm case giving the entire thing a more sculptural look. It’s basically Dali by way of Orlinski, made from 925 Sterling silver. Available in black, white and a version dominated by ‘101 Years’ in the centre of the dial (a reference to when the surrealist manifesto was first published), there’s nothing else quite like this. The only downside is the quartz movement inside, but fitting a classic, round automatic calibre into that case? Even Dali would have trouble imagining that. £2,075, exaequowatches.com
With a boldly geometric design, it’s quite the departure from the Bristolian company’s recent ‘Redcliff’ and ‘Brunswick’ conceits. But it remains in the spirit of the brand’s redux, with nomenclature inspired by historic and newfound premises in the West-Country capital.
When Anoma launched the A1 last year they made one of the biggest splashes on the British watch scene since Studio Underd0g. It was defined by its pebblesmooth, worryingly tactile case inspired by the 1950s freeform work of designer Charlotte Perriand.
The new A1 Optical adds a geometric string to Anoma’s aesthetic bow courtesy of Adam Fuhrer, who has created a dial like an optical illusion. Repeating the silhouette of the case in concentric engravings, it lands somewhere between a magic eye picture and a spinning turbine, recalling Bridget Riley or Ferruccio Gard.
The A1 optical is available in either monochrome silver or eye-catching copper, both equipped with the workhorse automatic movement that is the Sellita SW100. To round things off, each limited edition watch comes with an accompanying artwork of the same number, so you can admire it on the wall as you admire it on your wrist.
£2,200, anomawatches.com
BERNERON MIRAGE TIGER’S EYE
Stone dials are hotter than magma right now, particularly the signature golden and
brown striations of Tiger’s Eye. And yet rather than the usual bold grain, the dial of Berneron’s Mirage collection looks more like set caramel. Given the entire watch seems to have slipped out of a mould before it was set, that fits pretty well. While it’s definitely off-kilter, there’s something to its golden ratio-inspired proportions that tone down its surrealist tendencies into something that’s not only readable but downright lovely to look at. That’s especially true of the subdial, which is carved right into the stone. What really sets the Mirage apart, however, is its movement. The miniscule calibre 215 is largely made from 18kt gold and built from the ground-up to fit the diminutive 35mm case. The end result is a beautifully made movement in a dress watch with a difference. Just don’t go thinking this is a budget option; this is serious watchmaking.
£50,000, berneron.ch
Cars and watches are the ultimate partnership – and one that’s only getting stronger in the digital age, says ADAM HAY-NICHOLLS
Revolutions per minute. We could be talking about pistons punching inside a V8 engine, causing 30,000 explosions every sixty seconds. Or we could be discussing a hand on a chronograph sweeping the watch face in the time it takes another hand to click once. Timepieces and combustion automobiles are both slaves to RPM.
One may live in a garage, the other on a wrist but both are objects of desire. One measures time, the other devours it. They’re both motorised status symbols celebrated for the precision of their engineering. A Vacheron Constantin has as much to do with telling the time as a Ferrari does to getting from A to B. It is little wonder that the two go together so well.
The motor car has relied on accurate time keeping since the first tyre met tarmac, and motorsport is inseparable from the stopwatch. A race is measured not in laps or miles but in fractions of a second, with the difference between victory and defeat often less than a blink. Before the advent of electronic timing, mechanical chronographs were indispensable tools. Drivers would measure lap times with them, team managers would pace their cars by them and spectators could track the action with a glance at their wrists.
Heuer (before it became TAG Heuer) was one of the first brands to see the opportunity. Long before the war, Heuer supplied timing instruments for sports cars and aircraft, and by the 1950s its dashboard-mounted stopwatches were a fixture in rally cars. When the Carrera Panamericana roared across Mexico in the 1950s, Jack Heuer, the great grandson of the Swiss founder, was inspired to immortalise the race with a watch collection. The Carrera Chronograph – clean, legible, purposeful – became the template for generations of racing watches. The squarefaced Heuer Monaco followed in 1969, and cemented its legendary status in 1971 when Steve McQueen wore it in the movie Le Mans. Beyond utility, watches have long borrowed aesthetic cues from vehicles. Dials echo dashboards;
bezels mimic tacheometers; cases adopt the curves of Scaglietti bodywork. In the 1920s, Cartier created the Tank watch, which was inspired by the caterpillar tracks of the Renault FT light tank. A decade later, Swiss brands began producing ‘driver’s watches’, with the dial angled so one could read the time without taking a hand off the wheel. The post-war boom saw both cars and watches become aspirational commodities. Just as the Jaguar E-Type was hailed as the most beautiful car ever made, watches like the Omega Speedmaster and Rolex Daytona were celebrated as symbols of masculinity and modernity. The Daytona was named after the famed racetrack in Florida, and its chronograph layout was designed to appeal to petrolheads. The actor and racer Paul Newman’s personal Daytona would go on to become the most expensive wristwatch ever sold at auction, hammering down at £13.2 million in 2017.
From the 1980s onwards, collaborations between car and watch brands became increasingly common, each reinforcing the other’s prestige. Breitling partnered with Bentley, producing oversized watches with knurled bezels reminiscent of the marque’s brightwork. Hublot paired with Ferrari, crafting bold designs in carbon fibre and ceramic that echoed the Prancing Horse’s bleeding-edge technology. TAG Heuer has remained synonymous with motorsport, and recently returned as official timekeeper of Formula One. It partnered with McLaren for decades, but is now with Red Bull Racing. Richard Mille is linked to Ferrari and McLaren, and hotshots Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris have both fallen foul of RMtargeting thieves.
Featherweight innovation is epitomised by the Mille-Ferrari collaboration. The RM UP-01 Ferrari, released in 2022, was at that time the thinnest mechanical watch ever made – just 1.75mm. It’s an absurd demonstration of micro-engineering, the horological equivalent of Ferrari’s 499P hybrid hypercar, which won the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Some 150 RM UP-01 Ferrari are being manufactured, priced at almost £1.4 million each. Other tie-ins trade on heritage and romance.
Chopard has sponsored Italy’s glamorous Mille Miglia since 1988, releasing annual editions of its collab chronograph inspired by the historic rally from Brescia to Rome and back again. British watchmaker Bremont has celebrated Jaguar’s E-Type, while Zenith has collaborated with Range Rover on understated yet rugged Defy pieces.
Seiko unveiled a new Prospex Speedtimer in August that honours the Datsun 240Z (£880), the popular Japanese fastback, both having been born in 1969. Designed in Britain but made in Switzerland, Aera is a relatively new brand that delivers contemporary style and robust artisanship. They’ve twinned with UK Porsche restomod specialist Rennsport to produce a 25-piece limited edition, the C-1 Rennsport Chronograph (£2,250). Porsche purists on a slightly smaller budget may find their attention grabbed by the GT3-esque colour palette of an Omologato Weissach (£350), christened after the BadenWüttemberg town where Porsche has secretly developed its sports, racing and hypercars since 1971. To owners of these cars, or simply those that aspire to own them, these watches represent their favourite automobile in miniature form. But in the case of the Jacob & Co Bugatti collection, there is nothing miniature about the price. The Bugatti Tourbillon Baguette, for example, boasts 419 diamonds and can be yours for £822,500. Normally, watches get named after cars, but in this case it’s the other way around. The upcoming Bugatti Tourbillon will enter production next year as the successor to the Chiron. Limited to 250 units, the 1,775bhp V16-hybrid hypercar has an estimated top speed of 277mph. The price? About four of Jacob the Jeweller’s watches.
The most successful collaborations are those that transcend marketing. Consider the bond between
Rolex and endurance racing. Rolex has been title sponsor of the 24 Hours of Daytona since 1992, and the Daytona chronograph’s name predates that partnership by decades. To win a Rolex at Daytona or Le Mans means more than the trophy: it’s an instant heirloom, proof of mastery over man, machine and time itself.
Another more recent example is the partnership between IWC and Mercedes-AMG. IWC’s clean and functional designs align perfectly with AMG’s Teutonic power. Their joint special editions, such as Ingenieur AMG, fuse titanium cases with automotive materials and aesthetics. Then there’s Porsche Design, established in 1972 by Ferry Porsche, the man who created the 911. His first watch, the Chronograph 1, was the world’s first all-black wristwatch, echoing the matte dashboards of his cars. Last year, Porsche celebrated 50 years of the 911 Turbo with a new timepiece steeped in Bauhaus philosophy: the £10,950 Chronograph 1 50 Years 911 Turbo Edition, limited to 500 units.
As the automotive world shifts towards electrification and telling the time is most commonly done with smartphones and smartwatches, one might ask whether the traditional synergy between cars and watches is becoming obsolete. But the evidence suggests otherwise. As the mainstream becomes digital and disposable, connoisseurs instead crave the analogue and the enduring. A mechanical watch, like the Bugatti Tourbillon’s naturally-aspirated V16, is an act of defiance in an age of algorithms. It’s not the most practical way to tell the time, or the most efficient way to travel, but it is the most soulful. Together, watches and wheels embody our contradictory relationship with time: the urge to outrun it, and the desire to preserve it.
Do your research Holy cow!
Cheese and watch making. Two things the Swiss hold as sacred. We pay homage to them both with our new watch, launching in April. But not everyone will be amused. Some may even accuse us of sacrilege. What next? All will be revealed in April. Sign up now for more clues.
LAURA MCCREDDIE-DOAK
They are the first digital native generation but Gen Z is turning to analogue timepieces over smartwatches
It’s ironic that the generation that grew up with a smartphone in their hand is ditching the smartwatch in favour of an analogue alternative. Last year Watchfinder, the Richemont-owned pre-owned retailer, commissioned a survey into Gen Z – those born between 1997 and 2012 – and their watch buying habits. According to the survey, 41 per cent had bought a luxury watch in the past year. Other surveys have all come to similar conclusions. Deloitte found that 40 per cent had purchased a timepiece as a part of an investment portfolio, while in a YouGov poll done for Chrono24, 20 per cent of people between 18 and 25 said they were “likely or very likely” to buy a luxury watch in the next 12 months.
Gen Z, predictably, takes its cues from social media, with 71 per cent saying they looked on platforms such as Instagram and Tiktok for inspiration. It can’t be a coincidence that, after Tyler the Creator took to Insta to declare his love of vintage Cartiers and Timothee Chalamet was seen wandering the streets of New York with a slinky Panthere on his delicate wrist, Cartier is now the fourth most searched for brand on Watchfinder.
Rolex still tops the horological pops, with 58 per cent of all Gen-Z’ers saying this is the luxury watch brand they aspire to own, 29 per cent are crushing on Cartier, which, as the report says is “unsurprising when you consider the wave of red-carpet sightings”. #Watchtok is huge, while Instagram has been a vital platform for younger watch influencers, who bring a touch of irreverence to an industry that has in the past taken itself a little seriously at times.
for investment purposes, this isn’t the main drive for Gen-Z, with 63 per cent seeing them predominantly as an accessory, while 62 per cent say they choose their timepieces based on looks rather than what’s under the bonnet.
This is supported by trends such as “wrist stacking”, a fad that involves literally stacking your wrist with multiple watches and bracelets. Audemars Piguet’s recent campaign for its 23mm Royal Oak backed the trend, which would have been anathema to the Swiss watch industry a decade ago. The playful message, which goes against the received wisdom that you shouldn’t wear anything next to your timepiece to avoid scratching it, is that your watch isn’t the centrepiece but just one object among many to express your personality.
The pre-owned market is also benefiting from the Gen-Z dollar with 80 per cent saying they had purchased second hand, in keeping with the rise of vintage clothing retailers like Vinted and the move away from fast fashion purchases.
Although a percentage are using watch purchasing
There is also the Black Mirror effect: Gen Z has grown up online and is now becoming aware of how much of their personal data has been harvested. Smartwatches gather information including location, health metrics, and activity patterns, which can be used for targeted advertising or shared with third parties. Some of this access can be restricted but many are now making the decision not to take a chance and go mechanical instead. With a taste for smaller indy brands or less vaunted watches from established names, Gen Z could be on the precipice of giving the watch industry its biggest shake-up since the 1980s. Terrifying? Slightly. Exciting? Definitely. l Laura is a leading watch and jewellery writer
Why are watch brands so drawn to drinks companies? ADAM HAY-NICHOLLS quenches
his thirst with the latest drinks collabs
There’s that old saying ‘you are what you eat’ but I reckon what you drink says a lot more about a person. I can tell by the liquid in your hand –Shirley Temple? Long Island iced tea? Double espresso? – whether we’re likely to be friends. Maybe that explains why watches are so often inspired by our bar orders: both are about projecting personality and taste. And if you’re the lucky owner of an Audemars Piguet or an FP Journe, I assume every hour is happy hour.
Watch aficionados like to refer to Rolex GMT Master-IIs with red and black bezels as a Coke Rolex, or a Pepsi Rolex if it’s red and blue. These are unofficial terms – Rolex has never had an official partnership with either drinks giant – though Coca-Cola did order company-branded Rolexes for long-serving executives in the 1950s and 60s, which are now quite collectable.
SEIKO X PEPSI
Seiko, however, has just collaborated with Pepsi to produce the limited-edition Seiko 5 Sports x Pepsi. They say it has arisen from “the mutual respect the brands have for the history and culture each has built.” White faced with a red and blue bezel on its 38mm case and a stainless steel bracelet, it uses the 90s Pepsi logo and colour signature to remind us of the era when Bill Clinton was in the White House and the Spice Girls were on MTV.
There’s a second watch, based on Seiko’s 42mm SKX series, in all black apart from a red and blue bezel, and the latest Pepsi logo, bringing things bang up to date. Just 7,000 will be made of each, priced at £330 and £470 respectively. l seikowatches.com
JACK MASON X DR PEPPER
If your preferred American diner beverage is Dr
Pepper – created in the 1880s by a pharmacist in Waco, Texas – then allow me to introduce you to the Jack Mason Strat-o-timer x Dr Pepper 2024, which also hails from the Lone Star State.
It’s another official collaboration, with a steel 40mm case, frosty white metallic dial, white face and red bezel. During nighttime illumination, the indices 10, 2 and 4 have been highlighted in a different colour in a nod to Dr Pepper’s pre-war ad slogan: ‘Drink a Bite to Eat at 10, 2 and 4’, to keep your energy topped up. There’s a choice of threelink, seven-link or tan leather strap. It’s got a Miyota 9075 movement and at £770 it hits the sweet spot between impulse buy and potential investment. l jackmasonbrand.com
HUBLOT X VEUVE CLIQUOT
But that’s enough soft drinks. Let’s talk proper fizz. A champagne lifestyle requires a cork-poppingly expensive watch that truly celebrates a maison of Reims. Voila, Hublot x Veuve Cliquot. Together, they’ve produced a number of watches in recent years, including the Spirit of Big Bang Veuve Cliquot Polo Classic, fashioned from matte black frosted carbon with a skeleton chronograph and both orange and black alligator straps. They retail at £28,900 and are limited to 30 pieces. Even more exclusive is the Tourbillon 5-Day Power Reserve spin-off which is, or was, limited to five pieces priced at £77,800. l hublot.com
OMEGA X CASAMIGOS
If you’re more of a spirits guy or gal, there are a range of options for the hard-drinking horophile. We all know George Clooney rocks an Omega – he’s in all the ads. So one assumes that when George is hanging out in Los Cabos and Brad asks him what time it is, he refers to his Omega x Casamigos Seamaster. This blacked-out dive watch, officially christened
Seamaster Planet Ocean ‘Deep Black’ Casamigos, takes 007’s signature wristwatch and imbues it with the billion-dollar tequila brand that Clooney co-founded.
The ceramic matte-black 45.5mm case, dial and rubber-stitched strap are inspired by Casamigos’ mezcal bottle, and the watch face wording is in the same shade of teal as the Casamigos logo. Eighty pieces were built exclusively for the US market, priced at £8,600 each. l omegawatches.com
KIEL JAMES PATRICK X MOUNT GAY RUM
So far we’ve seen pop culture collisions and luxury lifestyle synergies, but Mount Gay Rum has gone about things differently. The world’s oldest operating rum distillery (est. 1703) wanted to celebrate the 40th birthday of its Red Cap bottle. Instead of going to an established watchmaker, they turned to Kiel James Patrick, who makes cardigans and affordable nautical-inspired jewellery in Rhode Island.
The result is a round brass case with 14k gold plating, and a large white face with an outline of the island of Barbados, as well as an anchor for an hour hand and an arrow for the minutes. It also features nautical flags and has a regatta-style red, yellow and black strap. It speaks of smuggling coves, pirates, shipwrecks, and the morning after. Priced at £146, fewer than 200 will be made.
l kieljamespatrick.com
OAK & OSCAR X FEW
Another wrist-adornment for lovers of brown liquor is The Olmsted FEW, created by independent Chicago watchmaker Oak & Oscar, which has been going for ten years and has made a
name for itself producing handsome, casual watches that get the details right (this one uses the ol’ reliable Swiss-made Sellita SW300 movement).
FEW is a small-batch bourbon and rye distillery, also based in Chicago, which is inspired by pre-prohibition traditions. Priced at £1,392, The Olmsted FEW uses the distillery’s colour palette, with a deep salmon dial and Horween (another Second City atelier) leather strap. Where it gets really special is the flipside. Limited to 50 editions, there’s a piece of actual oak bourbon barrel in the caseback. Customers receive a bottle from the very same bonded barrel with their watch.
l oakandoscar.com
From blue-collar Chi-town and their craft bourbon, we head to Pauillac, home to the finest Bordeaux. Never mix the grape and the grain, but for the purposes of this feature I think it all goes down quite nicely. Chateau Latour could be considered the Girard-
Perregaux of viticulture, and therefore it’s entirely apt that the two domaines have come together to produce a £34,300 watch.
The Girard-Perregaux 1966 Chateau Latour Edition is 9.4mm-slim, elegant in its 40mm pink gold case, and has a watch face crafted from polished pebbles that were sourced from the Latour vineyard. Just 18 have been released; an exceedingly rare vintage. The watch is only available to private guests of the Chateau Latour estate and the Villa Girard-Perregaux in Switzerland’s La Chaux-de-Fonds, which in watch manufacturing terms is every bit as thoroughbred a terroir as Pauillac’s grand cru slopes.
l girard-perregaux.com
HUBLOT X NESPRESSO
There’s one more to show you. After all those sodas, fine wines and spirits, you may wish to order a coffee as a digestive. Hublot has just the job: a Nespresso watch. Offered in the same pistachio green as one of Nespresso’s Master Origins Peru Organic capsules, the 42mm case, bezel, crown and pusher are actually made from recycled aluminium coffee capsules. The rubber strap uses coffee grounds and recycled rubber.
The world’s oldest rum distillery wanted to celebrate with a watch that speaks of smugglers’ coves, pirates, shipwrecks, and the morning after
The Big Bang Unico Nespresso Origin is for those who have a very strict bin policy. Or, as Nespresso CEO Guillaume Le Cunff put it, this Hublot illustrates “the harmonious coexistence between circularity and luxury. Circular products can be just as elegant and refined as conventional luxury products, proving it’s possible to combine environmental values and aesthetic requirements without compromise.” There’s no compromise on price either: the run of 200 has been marketed at £21,715 apiece. l hublot.com
For Europeans seeking reliable snow, American resorts are increasingly desirable – and this one more than most...
The wonderfully romantic name “Moonlight Basin” is entirely in keeping with the vibes of this brand new ski-in, ski-out resort. Located in Big Sky, Montana, it’s a new five star accommodation from One&Only, combining rugged wilderness and off-piste glamour.
You’ll find 73 rooms in the main lodge, whose design is a combination of rustic Americana and Bond villain lair chic. Each room offers atmospheric roaring fires, foodies can expect alpine forest-to-plate dining and the curious may even stumble across a hidden moonshine whiskey shack in the nearby woods. Watch for eagles and free-roaming bison from the windows. There are also 19 private cabins designed by Olson Kundig offering larger
groups a more intimate retreat. The glass front of the lodge looks out over spectacular mountains and a gondola connects the hotel to the summit of the closest peak, giving you the maximum time to explore the 5,800 acres of world class slopes.
For those less interested in winter sports, there’s an observatory and a private lakeside beach. l Go to moonlightbasin.com
Yunnan is a place of contradictions, at once advanced and traditional, developed and desolate. LUKE ABRAHAMS takes
a 12-day tour to discover more.
Pictures by NICOLAS QUINIOU
Ilove China. There I said it. Nowhere else I have visited has caused such a ruckus among my friends and family. My departure was marked by a stream of messages warning me to ‘be careful’ and ‘make sure you behave’. At first, I couldn’t understand it. Was it because I was a journalist? Latent xenophobia linked to Covid? Or was it because of western anti-China rhetoric? The truth is it took me 12 days of prancing around Yunnan province to find out, and I left a convert.
From touch down in Shanghai to my domestic flights hopping around the country, I encountered a world of complete order. Nothing was broken, timings were precise, facilities were spotless and there was a sense of calm and nuanced structure that quite literally left my travel companion Nicolas and I speechless. The only thing that raised our heartbeats was the bumpy landing into Dali, over 1,500 miles from modern civilization and the gateway for our 12-night sprint around this part of wild China.
The trip began with somewhat of an eye-opener. While visions of desolate lands and forests blooming with native flowers had swamped my fantasies prior to hopping on the plane, they turned out to be just that: pure Disney. This was not the rural escape the magazines and guidebooks raved about. Did we see lonely landscapes, remote hilltop villages untouched by Western hands and locals draped in their traditional dress? Not at all. It was, as with everything nowadays, excellent yet deceptive marketing. While driving around the city’s mammoth Erhai Lake, in place of all the nomadic nostalgia we were promised, we were greeted by a patchwork of villages dwarfed by towering skyscrapers and duplexes. We felt almost cheated as we quizzed our chaperone and tour guide Stephen about Yunnan, a place that looked frankly nothing like the guide books. Our impressions changed by the time we hit Xianglong Village in
Xizhou Town. Set 30 minutes or so outside of the hustle and bustle of downtown Dali, this side of town still feels remote and exciting.
Yunnan province has always stood apart from the rest of China. Shielded by mammoth mountains and barren plateaus that stretch as far as the Himalayas, it is the only place in the country where you can see border markets, jungles, temples and the remnants of vanished kingdoms in one place. It’s distinctive, not just in its natural splendour, but also in its diversity of cultures. There are 25 officially recognised ethnic groups that lay claim to the land here, from shamanic tribes to ostracised Muslims. Dai and Bai, Wa, Lahu, Hani, Jingpo, Nu, Naxi and Lisu people all speak their own languages, have their own cuisines, belief systems and forms of dress separate from the rest of China.
Xianglong itself is a melting pot for them all. Set under the shadow of Cang Mountain, this part of greater Dali has historically been an important trading post along the Tea Horse Road, an ancient trade route linking south eastern China to the rest of Asia.
Xizhou’s daily morning market is a flurry of colour sound, with locals from all over descending on its streets – many aboard tuk-tuks – to buy their groceries, from rice noodles to live carp and vegetables of all varieties. Our base here is the storied Sky Valley Heritage boutique hotel, set in a former Bai style palace and decorated in calligraphy, paintings and ceramics. It gives the impression of a town still very much in touch with its roots. Nearby tea houses attract travellers from as far afield as Beijing, lured by Yunnan’s infinite selection of brews, while pottery shops crammed with art pieces fashioned from indigenous clays tempt western tourists with their designs.
After two days immersing ourselves in it all – fried noodles and insects included – we jump ship and head south. Urban sprawls eventually morphed into desolate landscapes as we drove up snaking roads that meander through pine forests and valleys. Eventually we hit the city of Liljang. Travelling through China you will often hear stories of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain range; the entire length of its famously beautiful jagged peaks serve as the backdrop to the city. In the middle of it all is our refuge for the next two nights: Amandayan, a collection of old houses set in Liljang’s ancient citadel. Architecturally, the 35-suite hotel is an ode to the city’s hey-day, when it was an important stop along the Silk Road. It is laid out in the classic, understated Aman style (think bare minimal lines and stripped back aesthetics) but pays tribute to the land’s cultural roots as the ancestral home of the Naxi Kingdom. This ethnic group is widely known for its Dongba shamanic, literary, and farming practices, all influenced by Confucian Han Chinese history. Nods to their customs are in evidence throughout: you will find pale Yunnan pine and typical Naxi embroidery – silk threads and intricate patterns of landscapes – on the bed heads and latticed shutters.
After a morning exploring the commodified old town on foot – there’s a McDonald’s and KFC for western folk tired of noodles – we headed for Wenfeng temple and its spectacular camellia- and pine-scattered grounds. Set on the foot of Mount Wenbi, 8km outside of the main city, the golden monastery was founded under Mu Tian Wang, the 17th-century Naxi king. It was once used to welcome the supreme academy of the Gagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhists.
Now it’s a place of meditation where monks chant among the rows of cherry blossoms and swirling plumes of incense. After a short prayer, we scurry past Tibetan flags and gongs to the ancient Naxi village of Ciman. Here we spend time learning about cultural traditions, from shamanic religions to dress and the art of Dongba (an ancient Naxi script predating Chinese), courtesy of a writing class. In between a banquet lunch of hotpot, whose ingredients included chickpea jelly and local mushrooms stuffed with meat, we make our own drums bound with yak skin that we later bash while being treated to a dance.
The next morning, we followed the electric-green Yangtze river downstream to the rural village of Daju. This was the first time we felt as though we were really in the sticks. There is one shop on the main high street and overlooking it all is a swathe of local women scurrying to harvest everything from loquats to oranges and huge blueberries from the
Tea houses attract travellers from as far afield as Beijing, lured by Yunnan’s infinite selection of brews
Opposite page from top: A yak farmer tends to his flock on the outskirts of the city of Shangri-La; Camellias and roses bloom at Amandayan, an Aman resort in the city of Lijiang; This page from top: A young Buddhist monk bangs the temple gong for lunch at Wenfeng Temple in Lijiang Market; Lijiang locals dine in the city’s Old Town around Sifang Street
farms that snake around our hotel, the LUX Daju village. Here, nobody speaks English, and all forms of communication come in the form of a smile or a polite nod of thanks. While the slow life reigned supreme, we were really here to explore this small town’s headline act: the mighty Tiger Leaping Gorge. Framed by the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and the Haba Snow Mountain, it is named after a legendary tiger that escaped hunters by leaping across the narrowest point of the gorge to safety. The largest and deepest of its kind in the world, the canyon stretches 10 miles. It’s exhilerating to navigate this dramatic craggy landscape with nothing but the roar of the Yangtze below and the cackle of the heavens above. Aside from a swathe of tour buses traversing its perilous roads (often littered with rocks from overnight landslides), the only company we had during our short walking tour of its “upper section” were the few weary and nervous hikers tackling its razor-sharp peaks.
The road from the gorge twists and turns across snowy tundras that stand 3,200m above sea level. Our journey eventually ended in Shangri-La, named after the mythical paradise described in
Haba Snow Mountain is named after a tiger that escaped hunters by leaping across the gorge
James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. Naxi dwellings slowly morphed into Tibetan farmhouses, their rammed-earth walls filling the hilltops, surrounded by primeval forests and farmlands dotted with yaks. Ethnic Tibetans make up 80 per cent of Shangri-La’s population, but like in Dali, the streets of the new town were a riot of Han Chinese tourists strolling around in Tibetan garbs and glittering headpieces in the name of social media likes.
The Ganden Sumtseling Monastery lies behind all this commodity culture and is perhaps the only slither of authenticity worth exploring outside of the heavily congested and touristy Old Town. The largest Tibetan monastery of its kind in Yunnan, its gilded roofs are adorned with dragons and giant chimneys billowing smoke. If you go early, you’ll spy Tibetan pilgrims fingering prayer beads under giant statues of Buddha. These days it serves as a reminder of what Yunnan once was: the final frontier of Himalayan adventure.
While the politics of progression in China might be blurred by the repression of its own cultures in larger cities, this is a civilisation more advanced than its adversaries would have you believe. Yunnan is the best of both worlds, where the past and the present live in unwavering unison. It might have suffered from a degree of western-style commercialisation, but underneath it all, this unique province is a place where modernisation works in unison with ancient customs. China, I am sold.
l Luke Abrahams was a guest of cazenove+loyd (cazloyd.com), which offers a 10-night trip to the Yunnan region of China from £8,500 pp (two sharing) including B&B stays at Sky Valley Heritage Boutique Hotel, Dali; Amandayan, Lijiang; and LUX Tea Horse Road, Daju. Includes international and domestic flights, tours and transfers
Britain’s first vineyard cycle trail has launched.
ADAM BLOODWORTH went for a tipsy turn on an e-bike and tried not to get lost in the Sussex rain
The Rother Wine Triangle unites two groups that should arguably never meet: cyclists and vinophiles. Connecting seven vineyards together with one handy new map, one bloke got so drunk at the first stop he was forced to cancel his whole expedition. “You can’t be done for having a glass of wine or two and riding a bike, but he pushed the limit,” says Aaron Barham, head of the bar at Tillingham Wine Estates. “I imagine he didn’t have a pleasant hangover the next day.”
Another guy woke up at 3am to cram all seven vineyards into a single day instead of the recommended three; venues have been pushing cheese boards to soak up the damage. The odd lubricated customer aside, Kent’s Wine Triangle is a great idea, because visiting British vineyards is often an admin nightmare. Driving is obviously not an option, and getting out of London on trains and taxis takes twice as long as the time you spend quaffing wine.
A thirty minute walk from Rye station to Rye Bay Ebikes, and I’m soon putting the power assist function to good use on some formidable hills. I pass the village of Winchelsea, with its roofless church, and turn through one of the old entrances to the city of Rye, which was used for filming The Crown. I ascend to an incredible view of the coast, the Sussex vineyards and a beautiful old pile once home to William Penn, the founder of the US state of Pennsylvania.
Chantal Palmer greets me with the family’s german shepherd. Her husband Robert Palmer is the son of Charles Palmer, who set up this vineyard. Since the route launched earlier this year, there’s been a spike in international visitors, although
some of the people turning up on their doorstep don’t seem to understand what a vineyard is. “They want to ride a bike through the English countryside, drink cream tea and eat fish and chips,” says Chantal. Charles Palmer Vineyards is so far from road noise that the only thing I hear approaching are dragon flies.
Chantal incorporates her French heritage into long and relaxed tastings. “Everything in England is quick quick quick,” she says. I drink a particularly good, earthy rosé made in the blanc de noir style. “This group of lads came in and said they don’t do rosé but we categorically changed their opinion,” she says from tasting benches overlooking the vines. She’s happy with comparisons between the Rother Wine Triangle and California’s Napa Valley. “It’s making me very proud,” she says.
Visiting Charles Palmer is like turning up at your rich relatives’ place but Tillingham, a 25 minute cycle away, feels more like a small resort. There’s a pizza place, hotel, Michelin Green star-rated restaurant and bar with a proper alfresco tasting area.
Still in my muddy clothes I sit in the fancy restaurant surrounded by people celebrating their anniversaries. The food is exactly what you need after a long day on the saddle: on the menu are seared Rye Bay scallops, local lamb and goat’s cheese mousse with peach. The wine is funky and experimental. Too funky for some, including one local resident who smirked as she told me, “Tillingham is great for beer and pizza.”
I stayed overnight and did a tasting at 11am the following morning. The Pet Nat, an organic wine free of any interference, is a sharp awakening. During a slightly awkward tasting I note the wine is “interesting” a lot. I could see myself enjoying a glass as a conversation starter but even in situ, with the vineyard views, it’s… challenging. That said, it is gorgeous here. “When it’s sunny it looks like Tuscany,” Aaron says as I wander the vines.
The wind is life-giving on my cheeks after the mid-morning plonk. Another 25 minutes on the bike and I experience my first rain as I pull up at Oxney Organic Estate, a counterpoint to the touristy Tillingham. There is no need to book
ahead for a tour and tasting. Tabitha, who works in the office, shuts her laptop to take me around. Shepherds’ huts with cosy beds for overnight stays sit adjacent to the vines, and a short walk away the horse box bar is set up for al fresco tastings. Oxney does some truly special fizz, the best of which is the classic cuvee and a pinot noir rosé, which I quaffed with a vineyard view and some problematically moreish local cheese. The next cycle feels faintly intimidating: I prepare our bums for a 50-minute ride west to Oastbrook. This is all done using Google Maps because the Rother Wine Triangle, as one tourism worker puts it, is “more like an idea dreamed up in an office” than an intuitive guide. The only signage is outside the vineyards themselves, which isn’t much good if you’re lost en route. I get lost, with Google sending me along a bumpy riverside path. My bag falls off its holder three times. Expletives are muttered into the Kent air. I am sweating profusely and embarrassed to be late again when I meet Brazilian America and her husband Nick who run Oastbrook. America is wearing a silver party dress at 3pm on a Wednesday. The first thing she tells me is that she never has a bad day. She drives tractors in high-heels and at one point flummoxes me by standing up and jousting with the air in the middle of the tasting room apropos of nothing. She is also more passionate about British wine than anyone I’ve ever met.
“Everybody knows England is the best place to make sparkling wine in the world,” she says. “But English people don’t know we make wine. Tell me, do you go to Bordeaux and ask for Chianti?” Nick, her soft British counterpart, shows me the Hobbit House they built into their land near the vineyards and tasting room. Sometimes he and America disagree over wine blends so they make both instead of picking one. The still whites stand out for me: try the Pinot Gris 2023 and the Pinot Gris Block 1 for an insight into both of their winemaking and their marriage. Give this duo a reality show.
America made me late again. The next leg was 25 minutes south during a medium-sized downpour to my final stop: Sedlescombe. I make more sweaty apologies before sitting down for another tasting of fabulous organic sparkling out on the terrace. I drank into the evening, wandering the World War II defences that have been left in these fields. I see what Aaron means: this really could be Tuscany, apart from the need for a good brolly.
l Go to visit1066country.com for information about the Rother Wine Triangle. Adam spent two days and two nights on the above trip, visiting five out of six vineyards (Carr Taylor went out of business since the publication of the map). Accommodation is available at all of the vineyards at varying prices.
Everyone loves the thrill of the chase. The thrill of maybe; just maybe - winning. When the prize is something unforgettable - it is even more exciting. Whether sharing champagne with friends in a Michelin star restaurant, rubbing shoulders with your favourite celebrity on the red carpet, getting backstage access to the biggest sporting or music events in the country, pampering yourself at one of London’s most exclusive hotels or sharing a spectacular luxury holiday with friends and loved ones - we all have dreams we would love to win.
From gong baths to ‘healing vibrations’, sound is the new frontier in the wellness industry.
ADAM BLOODWORTH dons his headphones and slips into the world of radical listening
I’m lying on my back with my eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the Outer Hebrides. I can hear water trickling into rock pools and great thunderous waves. I couldn’t feel further away from my desk in London. But I’m not really on some far-flung remote isle: I’m in a posh spa in Edinburgh.
The Swell Studio at the Kimpton Charlotte Square Hotel claims to be the world’s first dedicated “sound wellness” studio. Stressed workers can leave the office and, minutes later, be experiencing the sounds of Scotland’s Western Isles. Cuddled up under a duvet with an eye mask and headphones on, I was about 30 seconds away from the city’s prestigious Charlotte Square, home to Scotland’s First Minister.
Sound is having a moment. Not just music but the acknowledgement of sound in its broadest sense. People are exploring the effects of the daily soundscapes we experience, from bird noises to the soundtrack of Scottish islands, and how they can make us feel better. The Swell studio is one of dozens of newfangled ways the luxury wellness space is pivoting to make us think – and listen – to the broader benefits of noise.
“Sound is experiencing a surge in popularity in the luxury wellness space, which is evident by the rise in the use of music during spa treatments, and events such as sound baths,” says psychologist Dr Sarah
Chandler. “More and more people are beginning to realise the impact sound can have on them, and are experimenting with it.”
A good starting point to understand where the trend came from is the contrarian-sounding drive for silence. On Tiktok, #silentwalk has been trending and there is a rise in demand for quiet areas in public spaces, on trains and in nature. “Increasing numbers of people are using noise-cancelling devices to help them focus or to manage anxiety, which shows that too much noise, or noises we do not like, can have a damaging effect on us,” says Chandler.
The ‘Vibe Lounge’ at Y Spa in Wyboston has installed “sound loungers”, which combine sound with vibrations. Like at the Swell studio, you lie in a comfy
lounger, pop on a pair of headphones, throw a rug over your legs and try to reach that elusive Zen state. “Soothing” sound waves and “zero-gravity comfort” create a multi-sensory experience that helps you “melt away stress,” according to the sales pitch.
Liverpool’s Municipal Hotel & Spa’s sonic bathing experience invites guests to float in a swimming pool on lilos with headphones on. They experience a live sound bath while the undulations of the water act as the gently percussive second fiddle. The gimmick, which sets you back £150, has racked up over two million views on Tiktok. “My problem would be I’d forget I’m in a pool and roll over,” one user wrote, racking up more than 7,000 likes. “Went to book it but didn’t want to remortgage my house,” wrote someone else.
On Tiktok, #silentwalk has been trending and there is a rise in demand for quiet areas in public spaces, on trains and in nature
Equally Insta-friendly but less precarious is the Bingham Riverhouse’s sonic punt. The fancy hotel in Richmond invites guests to book a massage with a twist: the therapist spends part of their time massaging, and part of their time playing a Tibetan singing bowl placed on the guest’s back, allowing the resonant tones to flow through you. It feels strange having a heavy item placed on my back. For newbies like me, therapists at the Bingham strike the healing bowl four times at the beginning of the treatment and four times at the end, increasing the number as you become more accustomed. The idea is
that the massage stimulates the parasympathetic system while the vibrations encourage your muscles to relax. It’s a potent experience; apparently some people leave the massage and start crying because of the emotional release, according to my therapist.
“The sound healing element shifts the client out of the stress response into a rest and digest response,” says Sama Trinder, founder of the Bhuti wellness programme at the hotel. “Then they can reap the benefits of the treatment.”
Third Space, the luxury gym setting Londoners back £280 per month, is going one step further, aligning their sound therapy with longevity. Jump on the catchily-named ‘vibroacoustic’ therapy bed and the low-frequency sound vibrations travel through the body, “stimulating cells, tissues and the nervous system,” with the experience designed to “synchronise the body and mind.”
Intrigued, I go to the Canary Wharf Third Space to try it myself. Sophia, my therapist, pulls the curtain so I can’t hear the changing rooms a few metres away, decorates me with headphones and a proper eye mask so I’m in complete darkness, and tilts my chair back so my head is lower than my waist. The chair vibrates at different speeds to match the sounds on my headphones, my head tingles, and my body feels great. This is quite something: if Swell reckons it was the first, this is sound wellness 2.0.
“We have always excelled at fitness [but]
more recently we are responding to the need for… quiet practices that support rest and recovery,” says Third Space’s head of group exercise Gillian Reeves. You can see this increased demand across the country, with sound baths and gong baths now fairly common meditative practices. While this may all seem very 2025, sound healing is actually an ancient practice that’s been around in one form or another for thousands of years. “Hippocrates used sound healing as far back as 400 BC,” says Trinder. Lately, though, one of the most popular sound healing techniques has broken through into the public consciousness: ASMR. While millions were stuck at home during the pandemic, they donned headphones, closed their eyes and listened to the
While this may all seem very 2025, sound healing is an ancient practice that’s been around for thousands of years
sounds of people playing with everyday items. Running their fingers across a microphone, eating food or simply talking in a breathy manner, emphasising the sound of a mouth opening and closing with the delivery of every word.
Research suggests between 10 and 20 per cent of Brits experience a “tingling” sensation when listening to ASMR. “For years we’ve spoken about food, yoga, meditation, movement… but sound is now scientifically proven to impact… the body,” says Trinder. A recent study from Kyoto University showed how sound waves can directly influence the way cells behave. “Not only do your brain and ears perceive it, but your cells may also… Its capacity to induce physiological responses at the cell level is only just beginning to be understood.”
Perhaps the most exciting part is that sound wellness is available to us all. Like breathwork or meditation, anyone can have a go. “You don’t have to be ‘good’ at it,” says Reeves from Third Space. “You simply need to show up and settle into stillness.”
I checked out of the Kimpton in Edinburgh and hired a car. Five hours later, I was lying on a bench in the September sun on The Isle of Lewis with my eyes closed. Just like my experience at the Kimpton’s spa, I could hear the sound of the water trickling into rockpools and the great thunderous waves. Perhaps the best sound experiences are free.
It seems inevitable that these two most middle class of pursuits would be combined. GUY TAYLOR dons skis and attempts a downward dog
Ihave always been a light sleeper, but to my delight, a snooze on the floor of an old gymnasium properly sends me under. The sleep is so deep it takes about 20 seconds to remember where I am and I let out something of a tormented grunt as I abruptly come to my senses. We’re in the small alpine village of Saint-Martin in the Three Valleys. The occasion is Yogiski, a flagship well-being event in the Alps that seeks, as the name suggests, to bring together yoga and skiing.
The sound bath had followed a long morning on the slopes and although I’m not advocating the yoga/ski combo to put anyone to sleep, it’s undeniably an incredible way to relax after a day on the mountain.
For a trip that advertises itself as a celebration of “life in the slow lane,” the Yogiski itinerary is absolutely jam-packed. Visitors to the quaint mountain village, only a 20 minute drive from Val Thorens, can participate in everything from skiing to night-time hikes, body art, candlelit yin yoga, tai chi,
and reflexology. It’s the latest way in which these ski towns are adapting to incorporate different types of attractions as, sadly, the snow becomes less and less sure with every warming year.
Everything kicks-off on Monday with a full-day of skiing in the Three Valleys. It’s at the tail-end of the season so the snow is a bit slushy, but no one can take away from the huge scale of the resort, spanning Val Thorens, Meribel and Courcheval with about 600km of skiing. All’s fair game; beginners can take a lesson at Saint Martin’s more forgiving slopes, while the more advanced have the day to explore the world’s largest ski area.
We head back that afternoon for a “wine and yoga pairing.” I’m excited for some drunken yoga but, unfortunately, it’s more of a taste-testing session.
There’s an eclectic array of fruity, spicy and earthy red and white wine samples on offer, and the theme of the week is to “awaken all senses.” The various tasters act as a form of mindfulness to bring yourself back to the present, I’m told.
It sort of works, but I don’t have a spiritual awakening of any kind; the wine’s good though. A cocktail evening follows and everyone is pretty hazy by bedtime. The sound bath follows the next day and is a good test of the yoga-skiing combination. Being engulfed by a cascade of sound waves and vibrations is a ten out of ten experience I’d recommend to any stressed City worker or skier wanting to add a new element to their trip.
My ideal yoga-skiing mix would be a more active one: perhaps of the Vinyasa or Ashtanga variety, to stretch out tight muscles before heading up the mountain. The hours following the sonic dip are noticeably more tranquil though and a session of sound-induced existentialism is definitely a good way to tee up an evening of exploring Saint-Martin.
With a population of about 3,000, Saint Martin sits at the start of the Belleville valley between Meribel and Les Menuires. Historically an agricultural village, it first transformed into a ski resort in the 1960s. The transition has been balanced well and it retains the feel of a traditional French mountain village. Many of the old stone and wood-beamed farms have been replaced, but there are still farmhouse inns interspersed between the ski chalets and shops.
It is a great location for those who want to experience the Three Valleys while avoiding the busyness of the big-hitting resorts. Saint-Martin also stands in stark contrast to Les Menuires, which has been dubbed the “ugly
duckling” of the area with its famously brutalist 1960s tower blocks.
There’s a fair amount going on, from secret refuges to pop-up bars to the three-Michelin-starred La Bouitte offering its signature Reblochon cheese fondue and snail and mushroom casserole. Convenience-wise, there’s plenty of ski-in ski-out options, although the snow lower down the mountain has already melted by this point in the season.
The best day of the trip is the last. Rising in the early hours, we head to the top of Pointe de la Masse above Les Menuires. It’s absolutely freezing but in a setting that wouldn’t be out of place in a film, with spectacular views across the Belleville valley.
I’ve never quite cracked the yoga and mindfulness craze. But busting out dramatic poses at 2,800m in the crisp cold and blue skies is incredibly invigorating. It also proves my theory that a more active form of yoga is the best supplement to
I’ve never quite cracked the yoga craze. But busting out dramatic poses at 2800m is incredibly invigorating
skiing, as I enjoy my best morning on the slopes after this sky-high stretching, following a quick pit-stop for croissants and jam at a nearby mountain-top restaurant, naturally.
The evening though is even better. The final outing of the trip is an “apres ski” hike to the Lac du Lou refuge, which sits at around 2,045m.
Complete with snowshoes and head torches, we enjoy a “meditative” walk as the sun sets, trudging across the now-empty pistes and onto a winding track up through the mountain. The noise of Les Menuires slowly fades into the distance and is replaced by the steady trickle of mountain streams just free of ice ahead of summer.
At the lakeside refuge, we get another, much longer and more grueling yoga session, before a hearty alpine dinner. The trek down is pitch black, but it’s a remarkably calm evening and brings the trip nicely full circle.
Would I recommend Yogiski? The journey back to the UK is a long one the next day, with multiple trains across Paris and the inevitable stress of catching the Eurostar on time. I’m soon back in the hustle and bustle of London life and already dreading the rush-hour commute on the Tube the next morning.
Thinking back though, I definitely felt a lot more at ease than on the way outthat might be worth reflecting on.
l The annual Yogiski programme returned for its 9th year from 6-11 April, and included classes from Caroline Perrinea. A seven night stay costs around €250 for accommodation and workshops
Cambridge has been a seat of learning and creativity for centuries. But can it help DAMIEN GABET realise his ambition to become a published author?
You get to 40 years old and something in your psyche screams: “You’re halfway there, buddy – if you’re going to make something of yourself, you’d better hurry the hell up.” Kids are the obvious legacy fodder, but I’m still on the fence about all that. Attempting to create a cultural artefact feels more feasible. I did try writing songs once, though that dream did a synchronised nosedive with Myspace.
But I can write, damn it. So, a novel then? That time-honoured paean to the ever-heavying heft of mortality. Existential dread, writ small. The issue with novels, of course, is that they’re famously hard to finish, demanding quiet concentration and passive income. Kryptonite to an ADHD-addled writer. I was going to need a leg up.
Enter the University Arms, Cambridge’s smartest hotel, which, at my time of panic, had just begun offering guests the chance to spend time writing at neighbouring Cambridge University. Yep, actual Cantab, with its limestone erudition and lettered line of poet laureates.
Specifically, guests are now permitted to use one of the stately private rooms overlooking the quadrangle of Christ’s College, a few minutes’ walk from the hotel. By chance, I’d be visiting during the Cambridge Literary Festival and so planned to attend a few talks to learn from the literati.
It started badly with my poor Rover 75 dying on the M11, but when we did eventually arrive the martinis were cold – write drunk, edit sober, right? – and our lovely corner bedroom had all the dark-academia chops we’d hoped for. Lovely view, too, onto Parker’s Piece: a linden-fringed square, perfect for chinscratching walks and nature’s inspiration.
The book I’m writing, in case you’re interested, is a mostly-made-up tale of a young lad who becomes addicted to progressively more daring trespasses. Roald Dahl high jinks with a bit of Brass Eye bite. Anyway, my day at Christ’s College was bloody lovely: quietude, the must of old tomes and the topical feeling of sneaking into somewhere you don’t belong. It made fine fuel for my first 1,000 words. No wonder this place turns out Blighty’s brightest.
“The ire lining the teacher’s tone made the room brittle and the single-glazed windows behind Gabriel seemed to bulge out like an infected eardrum.”
A little try-hard, granted, but I was having fun –and isn’t that the point? I actually hit a flow state. That lovely mix of focus, immersion and enjoyment where time seems to disappear. Like a bubble bath for the brain.
That evening my partner/muse/minder and I dined at the hotel’s “English brasserie” restaurant. The dish to order is the Creedy Carver duck, dry-aged like beef and roasted till the skin turns lacquer-like and the flesh blushes just-so. But it was the simple burnt cream pudding that I’ll remember the longest.
My full English the next morning was in the same space and that’s when we noticed how charming it is: palladian arched windows, dark parquetry and eccentric Brit-coded art lend the place a Bloomsbury Group tone. Spot on for my literary delusions.
Day two was spent zigzagging (on an electric scooter) over wet cobbles, around dreaming spires, looking for the festival’s various venues. We were most looking forward to seeing historian Janina Ramirez, billed to talk about her new history of women in the Middle Ages, Femina. But she flaked and we were given a hard-to-hear Zoom call projected onto the wall instead. We left early, dodging tuts on the way out. Not a great start, though sitting in the Old Divinity School at St John’s College was its own reward.
Sebastian Faulks’ evening talk, A Life in Writing, made up for things. His advice: write what you don’t know, research hard, plan loosely – and accept that the norm of literary life is “qualified disappointment.”
Belly laughs went round the room for the last point, as he went on to admit that it took four books for him to write something he considered readable. Ah, humble British writers – a beautiful thing.
The next day, I took his tips and dragged out another 1,000 words at my bedroom’s desk. We celebrated a successful weekend with an ale at the Diagon Alley-worthy Mill pub and my gal dutifully listened to me harping on about my nascent works. “...so, yeah, I can call myself a novelist now, right?” l To book the University Arms in Cambridge where Damien stayed, go to universityarms.com
Meet the Omoda 9, the so-called Chinese Lexus. ADAM HAY-NICHOLLS put its epic range to the test on nine-country road trip, pausing only for Michelin-starred lunches and five-star suites
Remember how Alan Partridge used to call Lexus the “Japanese Mercedes”? Well, behold the Omoda 9, the Chinese Lexus.
The new world order of cars has seen the Chinese sweep in and undercut the competition thanks to cheap labour and direct access to the raw materials that make batteries. Getting to grips with all the Chinese car brands washing up on our shores is a full time job: there’s MG, BYD, GWM and its sub-brand Ora, Aiways, Maxus, Xpeng, Leapmotor, Skywell, and now Chery and its cousins Jaecoo and Omoda. Nio, HiPhi, Avatr, Zeekr Geely and Hongqi are all set to follow in the next quarter. Not since Operation Barbarossa have we seen an invasion on this scale.
These brands mostly build value-formoney electric and hybrid SUVs. And of the lot, Omoda is the brand Partridge is most likely to warm to. I don’t blame him. It’s cavernous hybrid SUV is well-appointed and has legroom that’ll embarrass a Mercedes GLE. And just savour the price: this is a D-segment car for C-segment wonga. The GLE 400 e 4MATIC Urban Edition, offering a combined 408bhp, costs £80,490. The Wuhu-built Omoda 9 is more powerful, with a combined 443bhp, faster to 62mph (4.9 seconds versus the Merc’s 6.1), and it costs just £44,950.
To labour the point: the Omoda costs just £101 per horsepower. The Mercedes GLE is twice that at £197 per horsepower. The Lexus RX 350h, which has similar character to the Omoda – i.e. not a whole lot – only has 245 horsepower, and each one costs £29. In Premium Plus spec, the Lexus is £69,345 and it has £2,500 less stuff as standard than the Omoda, according to the Lexus options list. String-back driving gloves are extra. Actually there’s only one cost option, and that’s paint. White is free, black or grey is £750 and satin grey is £1,000. Everything is included as standard. All the safety tech, self-parking, 20-inch wheels, 14 speaker Sony audio, a huge panoramic powered sunroof that would costs thousands on any other car… you name it, it’s got it. Obviously it doesn’t have the brand caché of Mercedes-Benz, nor is it as pleasing behind the wheel, but this seems to matter less and less to Gen Z. These days, people are more interested in connectivity than suspension damping. I know, don’t get me started! As for styling, the Omoda 9 looks like everything else in its class. In fact, my neighbour assumed it was a Merc.
Perhaps its biggest trump card is range, which is why I agreed to a challenge: to drive across nine countries in four days on a single tank of fuel and plug-in charge. We would start at The Pig Hotel
near Canterbury and head to the Eurotunnel in Folkstone, fuelling up on the way. Once in Calais we would drive to Lille then Brussels, overnighting in the Belgian capital. The following day we’d drive to Maastricht in the Netherlands and on to Luxembourg City. Day three would see us pass through Germany, push on to France’s Strasbourg and wind up in Basel, Switzerland. The final day’s travel would tick Liechtenstein and Austria off the list. To add jeopardy, the route we were given was longer than the car’s WLTP range.
The stated range is 700 miles, including what comes out of the battery. With a pure electric range of 93 miles, it’s the longest-range PHEV on sale. You could easily do most daily commutes with this car and never have to pay for petrol – a huge plus point. The battery feeds a pair of electric motors, while the other half of the powertrain is made up of a 1.5-litre four-cylinder engine that’s good for
154bhp on its own.
In short, this is a frugal car. The same cannot be said of my own appetite for food and five-star accommodation. Our lunchtime pitstop in Lille, for example, saw us gorge on line-caught turbot with roasted fish bone sauce and samphire from the Bay of Somme, along with six other courses. Then it was on to Brussels’ most VIP hotel, the Corinthia, which completed a 17-year no-expense-spared renovation last December. Previously known as the Astoria and built for the 1910 International Exposition at the request of the Belgian king, this BeauxArts gem has hosted many famous statesmen, including Churchill, Eisenhower, The Shah of Iran and Emperor Hirohito. Michelin-starred chef David Martin’s artfully presented ten-course tasting menu is worth the mileage alone. You’ll definitely feel like a world leader by the end of it, even if it’s on account of your calorie intake.
The Omoda 9 will take you further than any other car in its class. And it’ll do so comfortably and for much less money than its prestige competition
Incidentally, my suite was bigger than the Berlaymont.
The next day we pushed on to Maastricht, home to every Remainer’s favourite treaty, mainly just to tick the Netherlands off the list before cruising into our sixth country in two days, Luxembourg. The 22-bedroom Villa Pétrousse is the Grand Duchy’s newest and most refined hotel, located at the foot of the Old City.
Previously a bourgeois private residence, it opened to guests this summer and is notable for its late 19th century architecture, boldly-frescoed dining rooms and landscaped grounds. Your cardiologist will have his head in his hands here too: chef Kim de Dood likes to fuse traditional Luxembourgish fare with Asian influences, such as pigeon with myrtle berries and Sichuan peppers. One is invited to select one’s own sharp knife, like a scene from Kill Bill. Parked outside was an absolutely mint classic Range Rover with an interior bespoke-crafted by the Pétrousse’s interior designer, Tristan Auer. I doubt we’d have got as far as Lille on a single tank in that thing, but it’s a reminder that while the Omoda boasts impressive range, it lacks in the cross-continental style stakes.
Day three and a short excursion into Germany before returning to France for lunch in Strasbourg. Then it was across the border to Basel and Zurich. After seven countries – Liechtenstein and Austria still before us – I had just 62 miles of ICE range and 13 miles of electric; 75 miles in total. Slight problem: there were still 77 miles to go.
I needed to save two miles somewhere, and I’d already been driving at no more than 50mph. So I stuck to the tail of one of the other cars in our convoy, squeezed right up to their bumper and hung on there, platooning along the autoroute, letting them deflect all the air so I could barrel along at the same speed using less power. The fuel meter read LOW, meaning I was in the lap of the gods, and then it changed to ELECTRIC ONLY. I was down to just the 13 miles-worth of electricity left in the battery.
I crossed the border into Austria and arrived at the Shell station in the nearby town of Feldkirch. Challenge completed, and with three miles of range to spare after a 760-mile mission.
I now know the Omoda 9 will take you further than any other car in its class (the longest-range PHEV overall is the VW Golf eHybrid, which is good for 941.6 miles). It’ll also do so comfortably, and for much less money than its prestige competition.
When it comes to actually driving the thing, it’s less satisfying than the GLE, but its handling is sharp and the power delivery is unruffled. After maxing the range in our cross-continent test, I was able to refill, pull off the autobahn and have a play on the B-roads. Put it in sport mode and it tugs at the leash. It won’t reward like a Porsche up a mountain pass, but no one’s going to buy it with that in mind. This is a car for getting from A-B cheaply, comfortably and reliably, and on that score it delivers better than any car under £60,000. It’s far better value than a Range Rover or Mercedes, even if it lacks their heritage and verve. It certainly overshadows the Lexus.
On the other hand, if you can spend more and wish to support the workers in Solihull or Stuttgart, you probably should. Chinese imports provide more bang for your buck, but they could completely knacker economies close to home. In forcing people towards electrified motoring, the Ed Milibands of this world have delivered the PRC a £2 trillion industry with a bow tied around it, potentially costing Britain billions in revenue.
Europe’s leaders would be welcome to come over and debate this in my massive Brussels hotel suite.
l For more information on Omoda go to omodaauto.co.uk
These roads made famous by James Bond leave this Porsche Taycan, not stirred. Take a trip with ADAM HAY-NICHOLLS through Norway’s spectacular scenery
The roads that thread around Norway’s vast network of fjords are among the most rewarding bits of blacktop in the world, and that’s before you even factor in the jaw-slackening mountain views, the bracing fresh air and the eerie solitude. It’s cinematic and steeped in legend. Add an all-electric Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo to the picture and we have a road trip for the ages.
I’ve fashioned a playlist of suitably icy dark wave sounds: Björk, Beak, Depeche Mode, Joy Division, Gary Numan, and The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World. If you were to distil my music taste down to three words, I think it would be Winter-Fjords-Porsche. The stealthy wheels come courtesy of 62° Nord, which also owns the two Relais & Chateaux hotels I’m checking into on this trip. 62° Nord (which refers to Ålesund’s latitude along Norway’s crinkle-cut coastline) has put my whole itinerary together, so all I need concern myself with is the soundtrack, the hairpin bends and occasional drift of fog.
Having flown into the Art Nouveau fishing port of Ålesund, via Amsterdam, I settle into the outdoor hot tub of the Storfjord Hotel, on a pine-forested hillside overlooking the namesake fjord, and take stock. The hotel is owned by a stylish family of Norwegian industrialists. The multigenerational business focuses on renewable hydrogen, but also embraces knitwear, hospitality and curated adventure travel. I’m assured there are no Succession-style dynastic issues here, but it’s easy to imagine the Roy clan choppering into the Storfjord Hotel for a private summit. This is cabin pornography on a grand scale. Hand-built in the traditional ‘laftehytte’ Nordic style, Storfjord comprises three large turf-roofed wooden chalets filled with bold-checked fabrics, cocooning sheepskin rugs and crackling fireplaces. The food – I have wild salmon and wild reindeer – is hearty yet healthy. I’m staying for two nights, and use my first day to drive to The Atlantic Road, which writhes like an eel
over inlets and reefs and through the spectacular landscape. The portion from Vestnes to Molde requires a ferry connection, which adds to the sense of adventure. I’ve driven many roads that are contenders for the ‘most beautiful in the world’ title, and this is comfortably in the top five. It even has 007’s stamp of approval; the cantilever Storseisundet Bridge is now better known as the James Bond Bridge. In No Time to Die, Daniel Craig was chased across here by Range Rover-ragging bad guys. Bond dispatched them with a late ‘90s Toyota Land Cruiser. He’d have had a much easier job of it with the Taycan.
I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to electric cars. They make good luxury and urban transport, but as sports cars they lack drama, soul and satisfaction. The one exception to the rule is the £99,200 Taycan. Porsche has played a blinder: although it’s heavy and the synthesised hum lacks the aural opera of a 911, it feels like a Porsche. Zero to 60mph takes 3.6 seconds, thanks to its 589 digital
horses. The Taycan’s range of 330-380 miles means I never have to worry; each 62° Nord property has chargers. Being the Cross Turismo, it has a novel estate car silhouette. It’s hard to imagine a better GT car for experiencing Norway’s curves, especially given the nation’s love of all things eco.
Another way one can experience the fjords is by helicopter. Taking off directly from the hotel, my pilot heads towards Geirangerfjord, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We hover below the serrated snowy peaks, which are reflected in the abyssal lake, and skim the cascading waterfalls. Cruise ships below look like Lego models, such is the scale of everything that surrounds them. Faces seem to stare out from the precipitous Pleistocene cliffs.
Having checked out momentarily from the Storfjord, I pack up the Porsche and head to the Hotel Union Øye by way of the Trollstigen. Meaning ‘Troll’s Ladder’, the Trollstigen is famous for its serpentine series of steep hairpin bends through the
Romsdalen valley. It passes the Stigfossen waterfall. Maybe it’s named after The Stig; it would make sense that this otherworldly road was the birthplace of Top Gear’s famous racing driver. Located south of the Storfjorden, the Hotel Union Øye sits on a bank of the Norangsfjorden tributary, circled by the ethereal beauty of the Sunnmore Alps. The Union Øye, half-timbered and painted red and cream, is like a working museum. It’s a Victorian-era hideaway to which royalty, creatives and adventurers have beaten their path since 1891. The guest book includes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Coco Chanel, Roald Amundsen and German emperor Kaiser Willhelm II. I spend an evening lying in his monogrammed bath.
There’s a ghost, too. Only visitors not faint of heart should stay in the Blue Room. It used to belong to Linda, a maid in the 1890s who had a doomed love affair with one of Wilhelm II’s officers. Philip von Moltke was lost at sea and, upon receiving news of his death, Linda
walked into the fjord dressed in a bridal gown and drowned. There are stories of sightings, of wailing noises in the night, and paintings shifting mysteriously on the walls of the Blue Room.
One crisp morning I take a kayak out with a guide, where one really appreciates the scale of the alps, the freshness of the air and water, and the bite of the cold. On the hotel’s jetty there’s a sauna which can be booked privately. It has a vast window, so you feel at one with nature, and taking a dip in the freezing seawater after baking at 70°C will make your serotonin levels soar. It’s amazing to think that these fjords are over 1,000m deep, and that during World War II the Nazi Kriegsmarine secreted their feared U-Boats and destroyers in these tributaries.
For the last day’s driving, I visit the Loen Skylift, one of the steepest cable cars in the world: 1,000m almost straight-up, with views surveying large tracts of where the Porsche and I have
been. The final night is spent back at Storfjord, to which 62° Nord has dispatched a flybridge yacht to take me to dinner in Ålesund. The skipper pops a bottle of champagne as we cruise past the vast fishing trawlers, emptying their catches of cod, haddock, halibut and king crab. My destination is Sjobua, an acclaimed seafood restaurant in the
The guest book includes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Coco Chanel, Roald Amundsen and Kaiser Willhelm II
fish-packing district. The yacht is able to moor right beside it. The five-course tasting menu, well-lubricated with riesling and Burgundian chardonnay, is well worth the trip to Ålesund alone, and Sjobua’s lobster bisque is rightly storied.
A trip to the fjords ticks so many boxes for those who love the outdoors, gastronomy, cosy lodgings and thrilling roads. Best of all, there’s hardly anyone here. No hordes, apart from when the cruise ships disgorge, and barely any traffic. It’s pure escapism, and 62° Nord does an unparalleled job of making you feel at home. For road trip aficionados, there’s no finer destination in Europe, and the Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo is a stirring EV GT that combines intelligence, practicality, sustainability and sex-appeal – the very things Scandinavia lives by.
l Drive the Fjords 2025 rates start at £9,189 per person for a six-day experience, including accommodation, meals, transfers, helicopter flight and Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo. For more information, visit www.62.no/en
A new bodice-ripping adaptation of Wuthering Heights has melted the internet. ANNA MOLONEY asks why
To nobody’s surprise, the release of a 90-second trailer for Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights has been enough to lay the golden egg of modern media: discourse. Five months away from its Valentine’s Day release, nearly every frame has already been tugged and stretched to discursive oblivion.
Starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, and set to an original soundtrack by Charli XCX, fans have not been short of things to object to: too old, too white, too commercial. What has been most objectionable for many, though, is the inclusion of sex. Corsets, horse whips and some surprisingly seductive kneading of dough, those 90 seconds have been enough to send many in frantic pursuit of pearls to clutch. So one can only imagine
what reactions the full feature length, which leaked test-screening reports say opens with an ejaculating man being hanged, will evoke.
“Wuthering Heights has always been a provocative text,” Dr Claire O’Callaghan, author of Emily Bronte Reappraised and a senior lecturer in Victorian literature at Loughborough University, tells me when I ask if Emily Bronte would be turning in her grave at Fennell’s sexed-up version.
“While Heathcliff and Catherine’s bond is undoubtedly emotional, it is also expressed in physical ways. For example, Heathcliff enters Catherine’s chamber when she is sick, and Emily writes that he ‘had her grasped in his arms’, and his grasp leaves bruises on Catherine.” Scandalous. Sex is not explicit, but it isn’t absent in the novel either. “Desire and eroticism are present in coded terms and often gestured to as taking place off the page, so to speak – that’s part of the book’s power,” says Dr
O’Callaghan. After all, there are several pregnancies in the novel. “Sex is taking place in the world of the text somewhere.”
Prudish naysayers may not be convinced that’s enough to go full 50 Shades, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll be turning out to watch the film come February. Fennell, you see, has captured something at the heart of the Gothic genre: the inability to look away, even when we think we should.
“In Wuthering Heights the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance,” wrote one contemporary reviewer of Emily Bronte’s novel in 1848. “The women in the book are of a strange fiendish-angelic nature, tantalising, and terrible, and the men are indescribable out of the book itself.” And yet, they added, “it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it.”
Conceived partially in response to the cool rationality of the Age of Enlightenment, Gothic fiction came into its own in the 19th century arguably not in spite of, but because of, the Victorians’ famous prudishness. The private realm, so safely guarded in the 19th century, was made partially accessible through the reading of such novels. Exploring nature not in an ‘I-wander-like-a-cloud’ but an ‘aren’t-we-all-so-twisted’ kind of way, Gothic fiction allowed Victorians to look into the darker side of humanity, even if only to be able to object to it – an impulse we can certainly understand today.
Indeed, in 2025, the Victorian Gothic genre seems to be having a resurgence. Nosferatu (a copyright-evading adaptation of Dracula), Netflix’s new adaptation of Frankenstein and now Fennell’s saucy take on Wuthering Heights show that at least in the film world, there is a healthy appetite for the horrors born from the repressed writers of 19th century Britain. Modern novelists have taken up the mantle, too. As well as the prolificity of dark academia – in many ways indebted to the genre, especially in aesthetics –many writers today are drawn to the Victorian Gothic. Virginia Feito, author of Victorian Psycho, a novel about a 19th-century governess-turned-murderer currently getting its own Hollywood treatment, said she was drawn to the “drama” of the period; a time where “every single decision was life or death” and marriages at 13 and deaths at 30 really raised the stakes.
Dr O’Callaghan says part of the appeal of the Gothic is that it “allows readers and viewers to safely explore the darker side and complexity of the world”. Our modern fascination with true crime and horror (now the fastest-rising film genre, having doubled its market share over the last decade) speaks to the same impulse. According to the surveys, Gen Z hates sex, hates risk and is too busy doomscrolling to have picked up any real vices. Perhaps, just like the Victorians, they protest just a little too much.
RF Kuang said she will never write a novel in the same genre twice. Fittingly, then, after her runaway success with Yellowface, a zippy satire on culture wars in the publishing industry, her latest offering is a fantasyromance descent into hell – literally. Alice Law, a student of analytic magick at a fantastical Cambridge, journeys into the underworld, a ‘katabasis’ in the ancient Greek. In Alice’s mind, she has been left with little choice: her professor, from whom she urgently needs a reference, has died. The only thing to do is go fetch him. On her way she’s forced via the rule of tropes to bring along her despised (but charming) university rival Peter Murdoch. And off we go into a NormalPeople-cum-Inferno adventure. The punchline? Hell, it turns out, is another university campus.
It’s Kuang’s sixth novel and highly anticipated. At just 29, and with degrees from Oxford, Cambridge and Yale to boot, she has established herself as a literary superstar. Katabasis is a departure from the zeitgeist-capturing magic of Yellowface but shares some of its irreverence. To my chagrin, though, it also yearns for profundity. Alice actually isn’t in hell just to get a reference; Peter’s cavalier attitude is a defence mechanism to mask a deeper turmoil; hell – oh dear – is actually not so fun a place.
In writing Katabasis, Huang was partly inspired by the nonsense literature of Lewis Carroll: Alice is called Alice, and magic is conjured via logic problems. But where Carroll was happy to play flamingo croquet in the surface world of the absurd, Kuang is eager to create depth. She wrote it while coming to terms with her husband’s diagnosis with chronic illness and battling her own depression.
The problem is that hell, counterintuitively, is full of suffering but not peril: after all, what is there to fear when one is already in the burning pits? Conversely, what Katabasis does confirm is something we intuitively all know: the scariest thing about death is that we don’t know a jot about it.
And from hell to heaven. When we think of the saints, it is easy for our minds to travel to the ethereal, a golden world depicted through the haze of stained glass windows. But canonisation is a disturbingly corporeal affair. Carlo Acutis, dubbed “God’s influencer”, was canonised in September in a landmark ceremony that created the first millennial saint.
He died in 2006, aged 15 from leukemia, and his body, exhumed in 2019 and preserved in wax, now lies on display in Assisi for worshippers to visit. If you are unable to travel, there is an online portal facilitating “virtual visits”. Taking just 19 years (an express service compared to usual Catholic timelines), Carlo’s canonisation has been seen by many as a concerted PR effort from the Catholic Church in need of relatability. He is displayed in his tomb in a track jacket, jeans and Nike trainers.
It’s this – the jarring interplay between flesh and faith – that is so perfectly captured by Ordinary Saints, Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin’s debut novel released this summer and heavily inspired by Carlo’s case. The novel follows Jay, a 20-something marketing executive in London, whose otherwise unremarkable yuppyhood is disrupted by the campaign spearheaded by her family in Ireland to have her brother, a former priest-in-training who died in a freak accident, raised to sainthood.
As Jay takes a call from a priest explaining the processes of beatification to her in an office phone booth, her boss mouthing to her outside about the next steps in their latest advertising campaign, Ni Mhaoileoin slyly winks to the fine line between preachers and PR executives. Her brother’s teenage diaries may have to be read, and sanitised; his holiness proven; and, of course, in the next decades he will have to posthumously perform some miracles.
In a way, Ni Mhaoileoin reverses Kuang’s script: in Ordinary Saints it is not the afterlife that haunts its characters, but the more terrifying prospect of being dragged back to earth.
Each issue we ask a photographer to talk about their favourite frame. This edition QUAN-YOU ZHANG
This photograph was taken on Golden Mountain, part of the Datong Volcanoes National Geological Park in Datong City, Shanxi Province. The park has become a popular destination for geological research and outdoor activities. The volcanic cluster is a typical remnant of the Quaternary
period, with more than 30 volcanic reliefs distributed around the area.
This shot came about very naturally. A group of cute tourists were taking photos in astronaut suits near the extinct volcano. It feels like astronauts landing on the moon. The children were filled with curiosity and a desire to explore; the poses
they made in their space suits really gave a sense of people travelling through space. I just recorded the scene authentically.
l Quan-You Zhang lives in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, China. He is an amateur photographer and an associate professor with the College of Artificial Intelligence at Taiyuan University of Technology
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