City AM Winter Mag. 85

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WINTER 24

THE MAGAZINE

No. 85

MEMOIR LANE

PEARL M AC K I E

How the one per cent are paying

SOCIAL MEDIUM

Lobster, tacos

authors to write their life stories

Gen Z are letting

and a dirty mar tini: the Doctor Who star

RIP THE GIF

algorithms read their

on her dream

They once ruled the web but

for tunes –

last meal

are they at risk of extinction?

here’s why

FROM CHALLENGING PERSONAL NEWS TO BEING LOVED UP, WE CHAT TO STAR WARS LEGEND

DAISY RIDLEY 1

S ECT I O N H E R E

2

S ECT I O N H E R E

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CONCI ERGE

Wishes, Granted.

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EDITOR’S LETTER

P

utting together this issue, it struck me that it will be our last one of the first quarter of the 21st century.

Appropriately, throughout the magazine our writers grapple with what it means to live in this specific moment, when the breathless march of technology seems to make it harder than ever to step back and take in the view.

On P15 Chris Stokel-Walker asks whether this could be the last Christmas we enjoy without additional AI houseguests, while on P10 Lucy Kenningham speaks to the people turning to the algorithm to divine their futures through online tarot readings. Continuing the theme, on P42, Simon Coates looks at the changing face of the internet through the prism of the humble GIF, a onceubiquitous way of communicating that appears to be going the way of the dodo.

For a more offline read on contemporary culture, on P38 Anna Moloney writes about the companies that will research, write and print your very own memoir; a decidedly analogue take on that symptom of our time: ‘main character energy’.

And, of course, we have all the great stuff you’re used to, from an interview with Hollywood star Daisy Ridley (P28) to all the latest watch news (P58). Thanks for reading, see you in the second quarter of the 21st century!

You can find these stories and more at cityam.com or our app, which you can access using this QR code.

– STEVE DINNEEN Scan for the City AM app

INSIDE T HIS ISSU E

82.

Above: Palazzo Previtera in Sicily is a B&B like no other – read about this magical museum on P82 Below from left: Remember the dancing banana? Find out what happened to him on P42; As Goldfinger turns 60, we sent our deputy editor to recreate the iconic drive through the Alps on P70

FEATURES

REGULARS

16: TINY FOOD

30: LAST SUPPER

The Japanese perfected the art of making model food – we dive into this strange and beautiful phenomenon

Actor Pearl Mackie – star of The Diplomat and the upcoming Ballet Shoes – on her dream last meal

22: OFF MENU

58: WATCHES

Takeaway flyers, once a doorstep mainstay, are a dying art – we celebrate these objects out of time

Meet Seinfeld’s favourite chronograph and the watch that keeps DJ Carl Cox in time

34: LILY COLE

69: TRAVEL

Once the most recognisable face on the catwalk, the model and actor is now focused on your laundry

Discover the real Full Moon Party in Thailand and a spectacular ‘museum’ in Sicily where you can lodge

46: GIFT GUIDE

84: SACK THE CHAUFFEUR!

From the best festive spirits to kitchenware and funky new gadgets – we have Christmas covered

We meet the Rolls-Royce bosses making ultra-luxe cars designed for you to drive yourself

42.

70.

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CONTRIBUTORS

ANNA MOLONEY is the magazine’s resident bookworm.

On P38 she asks why people are paying thousands to have their memoirs penned by a professional writer

KYLE MACNEIL is a culture and fashion writer. On P79 he shares his terrible experiences getting on board flights and asks where it all went wrong for airports

LUCY KENNINGHAM is a features writer. On P10 she dives into the esoteric Instagram and Tiktok algorithms to learn more about the craze for digital tarot readings

ALEX DYMOKE is a speechwriter who works with some of the biggest names in politics. On P90 he gives his top tips on how to write a killer wedding speech, nervous energy and all

CHRIS STOKEL-WALKER is one of the country’s top writers on artificial intelligence. On P15 he asks what role AI will play in the future of Christmas – and whether it will suck

ADAM BLOODWORTH is City AM The Magazine’s deputy editor. On P76 he grabs his glow sticks and jets off to Thailand to celebrate the full moon, grown-up style

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 Alex Doak Watch Editor Adam Hay-Nicholls Motoring Editor Tom Matuszewski Illustrator Anna Moloney Books Editor

COMMERCIAL TEAM:

Harry Owen Chief Operating 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. Some products and websites promoted in this magazine are owned and distributed by City AM parent company The Hut Group

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And enormous demand. (The first 600 sold out in 8 hours.) Asked could we produce 5,000 annually, our Swiss CEO Jorg Bader Snr replied: “No. But we’ll find a way.” Because that is our way. Today, our supply chain is as fit for purpose as the gear chain of the new Bel Canto Classic. Which features a dressed-up dial. A dialled-down handset. And a gorgeous guilloché finish, with a precision only achievable (and affordable) using a femto laser. Outward displays, we like to think, of inward grace.

(Bel Can-)Do your research

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FIRST IMPRESSIONS

FORTUNE COOKIES

Stories from the worlds of culture, technology and design

Tarot cards are having a renaissance online – but who is getting their future told by Tiktok algorithms? And what does it say about our digital times, asks

M

y demographic – middle class, urban, Western Gen Zers – are the least likely of all generations to say they have a religion, according to a Policy Institute study in 2022 (though paradoxically they are also the most likely to say they believe in hell). So it is perhaps surprising that they are behind a huge resurgence in the quasi-mystical art of tarot reading.

“I’m addicted,” one friend told me when I confided I had just received some bad news. She whipped out a deck and threatened me with a live reading, which I only avoided by breaking into tears. “I’m looking for escapism and desperately searching for some markers to make sense of what I’m going through,” she said with wide, earnest eyes.

But most of my peers aren’t shuffling physical decks – rather they are getting their fortune-reading fix on their phones. Instagram reels and Tiktok serve up neatly edited little videos of cards being ominously flipped while a mysterious voice says things like: “You’re being asked not to worry” or “You are not seeing clearly”.

This may seem like a heretical use of this ancient, occult art, but don’t judge so soon: while you may assume tarot’s roots lie with the Roma, or in ancient China, it in fact originated in 15th century Milan.

For hundreds of years, tarot packs were just a European trick-collecting card game – think knock-out whist – of which variations included the gruffer sounding Austrian Konigsrufen and German Grosstarock.

Having been played for centuries by coffee cradling Europeans, tarot cards were only given paranormal meaning by 18th-century French occultists, who made grandiose claims about their significance and history. According to Ronald Decker, author of A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot, this repurposing constitutes “the most successful propaganda campaign ever launched... An entire false history and false interpretation of the tarot pack was concocted by the occultists and it is all but

Can the Instagram and Tiktok algorithms emulate the quasi-mystical tarot reader?

universally believed.”

In that light, perhaps reinterpreting tarot once more, for the permanentlyonline generation, isn’t that much of a stretch. But… why? Well, many of these divi-scrollers are in their twenties and thirties, not yet tied down with a family or their own home. Life is more uncertain for more people for longer. Having largely ditched religion, it’s not all that surprising they seek solace elsewhere.

I’m fascinated by the way these readings appear to subvert the core of tarot’s supposed power: the personal connection between divinator and divinee. Isn’t a random tarot reading by its very nature redundant? The consensus among those who partake seems to be that the algorithm is in on the act, that the videos which find their way onto your feed are the ones you were supposed to see (a cynic

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LUCY KENNINGHAM might suggest that those who produce the videos tailor them as such; the algorithm then works its magic to ensure they land with the right people).

“Obviously if you’re someone who believes that nothing is a coincidence and it’s all down to something predestined then you’re not necessarily going to see this as an algorithm recommending you content,” digital journalist Sophia Smith Galer tells me. “[Instead] you’re going to start thinking it was always meant to land on your page – and the themes and ideas that are presented to you get reinforced by each other.”

Gabriela Serpa, cultural strategist at Canvas8, agrees: “We’re going through a cultural shift, moving towards a place where people are trusting the algorithm to know them better than they know themselves, so why not trust it to know your future better than you do? AI has mystified technology more than ever; not even the creators know everything about how it works, so people are now unconsciously more open to seeing technology as this big all-knowing entity.

“Gen Z’s move towards astrology more generally speaks to a desire for control in a world that feels like it’s spinning off its axis. It’s not about blind devotion to tech as much as it’s about a need to believe in any signals of a brighter future.”

Personally, I don’t use Instagram much. I am not particularly interested in my star sign and I have never had an urge to see a fortune teller. Still, I decided to give it a go. What advice will the algorithm have for me? “Seek opportunity to leave and doors will open up for you,” the Eastern European sounding Red Fairy’s Instagram video says (her bio tells me she is a Tarot Reader and Pagan Witch). “You have a new path that involves travelling that will make you feel like you are on top of the world. You are meant to achieve big things in life and you have a beautiful destiny.

You may be or have been in an environment that hindered your growth and success.”

Well, reader. I do in fact plan to go travelling and par hasard, I would like to believe that I am meant to achieve Big Things in life. Perhaps I’ve got these cards all wrong.

F I R ST I M P R E S S I O N S

A BOOTH OF ONE’S OWN The open plan office is a recipe for misery, says ANNA M0LONEY, but there is a solution: her wonderful, silent work ‘coffin’

F

For a woman to write – or, more exactly, to write well – she must possess a room of her own. On this, Virginia Woolf was unequivocal. “Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days.” Woolf was looking to prove how the disparity in great male and female writers was not due to genius, but circumstance.

She illustrated this in A Room of One’s Own in a simple image: a woman walking along the Oxford riverbanks on the brink of a eureka moment – only for it to disappear. She has been told to get off the grass: women are not allowed. Interruptions, she demonstrated, were the enemy to good thinking.

The blame for any shortcomings in my writing, then, dear reader, I put upon one man: Frank Lloyd Wright, inventor of the open plan office.

The open plan office took the corporate world by storm in the 1950s and 1960s, but Lloyd Wright conceived the first of its kind much earlier when designing the New York headquarters for the prosperous Larkin Soap Company in 1906. He wanted the office to imitate a factory floor with one big main hall for all the workers, based on a belief that open space improved creativity and communication.

Virginia Woolf wept.

More than a hundred years on from that experiment, I think we can all agree it went terribly wrong. Indeed, many studies have shown open plan offices are bad for productivity (few work well with noise), bad for collaboration (some have shown colleagues actually speak less) and bad for our health (ahem, Covid-19). The natural desire for privacy has also resulted in employees creating what researchers have termed the “fourth wall” – visual signals to others (headphones being the typical choice) that they do not want to be interrupted. It’s a wall most find exhausting to keep up.

It also seems reasonable to suggest it is chiefly the cost benefits (cramming as many workers as possible into prime rental estate) of the open plan office, rather than any promises of a ‘creative working environment’, that make them so tantalising to employers. To its credit, the UK government was onto this from as early as 1856, when they issued official guidance on office space layouts: “For the intellectual work, separate rooms are necessary so that a person who works with his head may not be interrupted.”

But this was all before The Booth: the shining 2.2m x 1.05m x 1.10m isolation-inducing box that I write to

you from now. Office phone booths, or ‘pods’ as their marketers often prefer, are popping up across corporatopia as fast as work-from-home mandates are being removed, and I am their unwavering disciple.

Granted, The Booth has a number of characteristics to not recommend it. It’s small, mildly coffin-like, and always a little too hot. It has a full glass side which is uncomfortably exhibiting, particularly for the poor-postured. The first booth I encountered was condemned as a fire hazard – there was no sprinkler installed inside – so they took it away. It may not be exactly what Virginia Woolf, who herself wrote from a whimsical wooden cabin with big windows overlooking the South Downs, had in mind.

But all of that is of small matter; for The Booth – My Booth – is quiet. Sometimes I stay in The Booth for hours in silent bliss. There’s no seat, so I have to stand. All the better, I think, I’m bound to live hundreds of years longer, or so the standing advocates assure me. That’s more years to write in The Booth.

Occasionally, a heedless colleague has come up to The Booth and knocked. “I’m in the booth,” I mouth, perplexed, gesturing to my cuboid surroundings.

I’m close to ending this story, tapping away joyously, when a note is pasted on the glass: YOU OWE ME WORDS, my editor writes. I’m reminded of the final crucial tenet to Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own: a lock on the door. l Anna is City AM The Magazine’s books editor

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F I R ST I M P R E S S I O N S

BLEEP BLOOP, MERRY CHRISTMAS! As AI continues its ceaseless march, CHRIS STOKEL-WALKER

plays the Ghost of Christmas Future, asking whether chatbots will replace relatives around the dinner table

G

lad tidings of comfort and joy! Christmas has traditionally been a time for congregating with your fellow homo sapiens – but play nice over the turkey and sprouts this year: it could be one of the last where unmediated human interaction is still the norm.

We’re about to enter a world in which AI bots insinuate themselves into every aspect of our lives, even joining us at the festive dinner table, present but invisible, there but not there.

Just as Covid changed everything in 2020, so will the little chatbot developed

by OpenAI change the near future. It’s becoming increasingly easy to imagine a world in which we no longer need friends, instead having a pliant, persuasive and peppy AI partner with whom we can interact.

Feel lonely? Log on to ChatGPT and have it listen to you moan about that one officemate who keeps leaving the milk out. Feel horny? There’s an AI for that. Your AI mate won’t let you down, or post something embarrassing about you on the group chat. If this all sounds like a dystopian movie, well, that’s kind of the point.

The shiniest bauble on the AI tree right now is ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice.

Unlocked for all paying users in late September, it allows you to hold real-time conversations with your friendly artificial intelligence. It is unquestionably impressive the first time you use it but soon veers into uncanny valley territory.

The stomach-drop moment for me was when the disembodied voice mentioned in an offhand manner something I had discussed with it weeks earlier. I had been trying to stress test an idea for a book, and had called upon it for feedback. Out of nowhere, a chirpy American voice asked me: “How’s the book coming along?” My girlfriend and I both stared at each other, dumbstruck.

How did it know to ask that? While

unnerving, this highlights how powerful the technology could become now we have an innate, natural way of conversing with generative AI. In a way this future is already here: musician and artist Laurie Anderson, widow of singer Lou Reed, worked with the University of Adelaide’s Australian Institute for Machine Learning to programme a chatbot to respond in the manner of her late husband. She found the results so convincing she says she got “hooked” chatting to it.

There’s a burgeoning market flogging AI romantic partners, with countless options available on the various app stores. The maker of one of the most popular such services told me when he launched his version that the idea came from his desire to speak to his long-dead dad again.

Even social media isn’t safe. You can log on – today! – to a social network where

I can’t imagine falling for a chatbot, nor do I want to hear an AI version of a lost relative’s voice, no matter how good the impression 15

there are no humans apart from you. In this brave new world you instead interact with AI-generated companions. SocialAI is not an April Fool’s joke, it’s a real app you can download from the real App Store, and enter a world where you share what’s on your mind to a collective audience of AI bots, which will respond like humans do.

In some ways, ‘real’ social media is already like this. Meta seeds AI bots within its community groups to provide trite comments it thinks will add value to conversations (spoiler: they don’t). And despite one of Musk’s expressed aims after taking over Twitter being a crackdown on bots, they’re worse than ever on his rebranded X. I’m often asked what to make of the march of automation and AI – especially as I’ve toured the country to talk about my book on the subject, published earlier this year (it makes a great stocking filler).

My answer is that I can’t imagine falling head over heels for a chatbot, nor do I want to hear an AI version of a lost relative’s voice, no matter how uncanny an impression.

Moreso, I think the ubiquity of this stuff will help us cherish our genuine human interactions, just as the morass of AI art will help us appreciate real brushstrokes. So hug your loved ones a little closer this Christmas. Forgive the gift-wrapped socks and the display box of Lynx deodorant. Silicon Valley has a vision where we no longer need one another – and it’s getting closer. l Chris is a freelance technology journalist

FO O D & D R I N K

A LITTLE

SNACK

The Japanese have been making intricate replicas of food for a century. JAMES BALMONT speaks to the people keeping this art alive

J

apan is famous for the way its cultural artefacts seem to evolve separately from the rest of the world. Travel to Tokyo and you can find fax machines that have continued to develop new bells and whistles long after their use in the west began its terminal decline in the 1990s. Shokuhin sanpuru (literally: food samples), ubiquitous in restaurants and cafes across Japan, are another such Japan-centric creation, accepted as a part of daily culture from Hokkaido to Kyushu but rarely seen elsewhere. But this unlikely crafts industry, which rose to prominence in the 20th century, is having a moment on these shores.

Shokuhin sanpuru provide the focus of a fascinating new exhibition at Japan House in Kensington, while the UK’s first food replica store has begun supplying everything from historic palaces to major blockbuster movies. Could this Japanese tradition of hyper-real food mimicry have a genuine future beyond izakayas (Japanese pubs), retro cafés, and ramen joints?

The phenomena began in 1920s Japan as a culture for eating out in department store dining halls emerged. High-quality replicas were utilised as a marketing tool for window-front displays at casual restaurants before colour photography was widespread — the primary function being to catch the eye and make people hungry. Ninety-two years after

Iwasaki’s grandfather founded Iwasaki Co in 1932, it has proven as durable as its hyper-realistic creations: it now controls some 70 per cent of the industry’s domestic market, with the wider food replica industry worth an estimated $90m as of 2018.

The science behind these models is simple: when we see nice food, we get hungry. Accuracy is therefore essential to Iwasaki Group’s craft – replicas are faithfully moulded and painted based on dishes supplied by their clients. And it makes sense, when you think about it: there’s less chance of buyer’s remorse if you’ve already eye-balled, in all three glorious dimensions, what you’re about to be served. This “immediate advertising” remains effective, according to John Prescott, professor of psychology at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and editor of the Food Quality & Preference scientific journal.

“We rely on and trust visual information more than any other form of information,” he says. “In other cuisines, we can go on a menu description, but that’s really a poor way of describing what we’ll be getting.”

HIDEN, a Japanese “curry lab” founded in London in November 2020, and operating in two locations in King’s Cross and Finsbury Park, shares this sentiment.

Though their bold yellow branding, minimal interior design and use of stylised photography highlight an astute understanding of contemporary marketing, co-founder Yuichi Hashimoto also sees the value in replica food models, which are imported from a

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Above: Beer and food replicas on display; Opposite: An artisan airbrushes a plastic squid Inset: Replicas of spaghetti and bacon and eggs, all taken for Japan House

bespoke manufacturer in Japan. “It’s a conversation starter,” he tells me. “People come inside and touch it, and ask ‘what is it?’, and take photos. It’s all about design, information, and who we are as a business.

It’s not like an Apple product being manufactured on a large scale – [the craftsmen] put so much effort and time into making them.”

So why do we rarely see these models at restaurants serving other cuisines? Beyond the simple fact that most other countries haven’t developed such a specialised industry, Prescott believes a difference in psychology is a factor.

“French chefs have a tradition of believing that they are offering the best dish and you should just trust them,” he says. “Many Western cuisines probably follow this model.”

As a Western food replica manufacturer, Kerry Samantha Boyes is a rarity – but her business, Fake Food Workshop, is thriving. With a background in stonemasonry and taxidermy, Boyes now specialises in British food, ranging from pork pies and pastries to roast chickens and fry-ups. She gets enquiries “daily” from all over the world, with around 40 per cent being shipped abroad. She started out on her kitchen table in Edinburgh in 2019 before graduating to her spare room; in November 2023, she opened a dedicated workshop in picturesque Kirkcudbright, Scotland. She believes it’s the UK’s first fake food store.

“Our clientele is a real mixed bag,” she says, during

a virtual tour of her enchanting, pink-walled haberdashery. “One of the first jobs I did was build a dessert menu for a franchise in America called Johnny’s Italian Steakhouse. They use them on a dessert trolley. Instead of having to chuck out products at the end of the day, they bring out my replicas.” She’s just received a repeat order from the chain, which has 13 locations across the States.

At the other end of the spectrum, she’s supplied TV and movie productions — ranging from British soaps (“my sister saw one of my pieces on Corrie the other day”) to Hollywood blockbusters. For Guy Ritchie’s Netflix crime-comedy series The Gentlemen, Boyes created a banquet feast that included a gun set in jelly at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which was transformed into a stately home for a “fully immersive” premiere event.

And Warner Bros. bought raspberry ripple ice cream replicas for use in their $1.4 billion-grossing Barbie movie (Boyes admits these jobs are uncommon, since most film companies have their own in-house prop makers).

“There is a real appreciation of how food can help interpret a story and create a narrative now,” says Boyes. “We’ve just done Christmas menus — turkey, pies, jellies — for Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland. For Hill House, the National Trust site, I’ve created dishes that tell the story of the Blackie family who once lived there. We’ve just sent three parcels to the Kunstmuseum in the Hague for The Grand

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FO O D & D R I N K

Clockwise from above: A food replica display case in the Shinsekai district of Osaka; Fake prawns that look good enough to eat; An artisan crafting food replicas in Iwasaki Co’s workshop

Dessert, a big exhibition covering the history of dessert. And I recreated iconic dishes by Julia Child [the American chef who popularised French cooking in American homes in the 1960s], like cheese soufflé and coq-au-vin, for a touring exhibition.”

“There’s a real push to make historic settings, kitchens and dining rooms more accessible to the public,” she says. “If there’s food on the table, people can relate to it.”

The souvenir market is another major outlet for food replica manufacturers, making up an estimated 10-15 per cent of Iwasaki Group’s total sales. Boyes, too, sells directly to customers through her online Etsy business. Sushi wall clocks, hamburger bento handbags, and takoyaki (fried octopus ball) back scratchers are among the items that can be purchased from Fake Food Japan’s English-language website. The highest demand comes from the US and Australia, says founder Justin D. Hanus, and he believes that the artistry is part of the appeal: “I would imagine [it’s about] wanting something from Japan that is unique and handcrafted to show to friends and family.”

At Japan House, the exhibition’s spread of regional dishes – citrus fruit somen noodles, mustard-miso lotus root, sweet red bean paste on-toast – are realistic enough to make your stomach rumble, although the sillier installations are the most fun. In one corner, a snow crab is reassembled as if it were a Transformers robot — while an impossibly tall “earthquake-proof burger” stands a few tables over. In the gift store, you’ll find books containing pizza cowboy hats and shoe-shaped lasagne, “masterpieces” of Iwasaki Group’s annual staff contests, which have run since 1968 as a way of encouraging creativity and developing new technology.

This light-hearted character is part of the industry’s charm, which endures even as Iwasaki admits that

usage rates in restaurants are on the decline. New technologies such as 3D printing and holographic displays threaten to disrupt the market further (it’s not lost on me that one of Iwasaki’s presentation slides, titled ‘Uncovering the Potential of Food Replicas’, depicts a giant T. Rex made out of crisps) though Iwasaki aims to harness new technologies rather than bow to them, experimenting with digital processes to give the impression of steam rising from a bowl of hand-crafted replica ramen, for instance.

In any case, “relying on skilled craftsmen making everything by hand” remains the plan for Hanus for the foreseeable, while Boyes’ innovative use of Jesmonite, a composite material made from gypsum and water-based acrylic resin, points to a sustainable future for the craft (in Japan, PVC has been the primary material in food replica manufacturing since the 1970s, replacing wax designs, which were prone to melting).

As for whether they belong in the realm of high art – be it as decorative installations in British heritage homes or as the subjects of kooky museum showcases – history speaks for itself. In 1985, the New York Times declared food replica models as being “gleefully added to the canon of pop art”, pointing to their use at the Japan Style Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1980. By 1990, Japanese food samples had even been incorporated into the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. As recently as 2022, New York Times Magazine deemed the craft worthy of a stunning photo series shot by Kyoko Hamada, declaring the area around the Tokyo Biken fake foods store a “Plastic Paradise”.

Whether they’ll one day be found in the Louvre remains to be seen – but they might at least convince you to stop by the café on the way out.

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FO O D & D R I N K

THE LAST SUPPER Star of Netflix thriller The Diplomat and the upcoming production of Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes at the National Theatre, PEARL MACKIE tells us what she would eat for her last meal

M

y mum was vegetarian so I was veggie when I was growing up, until I was about 12. Back then it wasn’t great being vegetarian – it was basically all Linda McCartney. I was always curious though – I was one of those kids that ate everything. I would have carrot sticks and hummus in my lunch box long before it was trendy, especially in my sort of inner city school in South London. I would swap with other kids for bits of sausage so I could see what meat tasted like.

My uncle was an amazing cook and I used to eat meat when I went to his house. He’s Jamaican and he would make these amazing chicken curries, which is what first got me interested in food and cooking. I asked him for some recipes and he would tell me what to put in the pot but no actual quantities, he was just like: “Add seasoning until it tastes good...” And to this day, that’s how I cook. I’m not very good at following a recipe but I know when something tastes nice.

I cook a lot of East Asian dishes these days. My wife and I eat pho and ramen and tom yum soup. It can be tricky though as I have quite a serious shellfish allergy so I have to get fish sauce that doesn’t have shrimp paste in it.

One of my favourite restaurants in London is Jose Pizarro’s ‘Jose’ on Bermondsey Street – you can’t book a table so you have to just queue and you might end up sitting on the tiny little tables outside but the food is so good. I know people are over small plates but I love them. I’m indecisive so I want to order as much of the menu as I can.

I’m gonna start my final meal with an absolutely filthy vodka martini. Like, disgracefully filthy, so you can’t even see through it. I don’t drink martinis much because they’re lethal. I worked with an actor friend who used to make martinis after the show in her dressing room – I once had two and could barely walk out of the theatre.

I’ll kick off the food with this Scotch bonnet pork fat on toast, which I ate at

Picture by Alex Lake

the Camberwell Arms and it was just amazing, and I’ll have them bring me some of the jamon Iberico croquettes from Jose.

Next I want a taco – just a small one – from this taco stand my wife and I went to on New Year’s Eve in Roma in Mexico City just after we got engaged. We were really jetlagged and we ended up at this tiny taco stand – I couldn’t even tell you the name of it – and to this day, it’s the best taco I have eaten in my whole life. It was just a really simple taco al pastor, which is a specialty in Mexico City made using thin slices of really crispy pork shoulder with a bit of pineapple on top.

This next course is going to sound a bit weird given I have a shellfish allergy but

This is going to sound a bit weird given I have a shellfish allergy but I’m going to eat as much shellfish as I can. I might die before they can kill me 20

I’m going to eat as much shellfish as I can.

If I’m going to die anyway I may as well, and if I’m on death row it will be two fingers up to whoever put me there because I might die before they can kill me. So I’m going to order a whole lobster.

My auntie used to live in LA and when I was about 13 – before I developed the allergy – we went to visit her and drove out to Malibu Beach. We found a cute beach restaurant and went inside to eat – that lobster was so delicious and I’ve wished I could eat it again for most of my adult life. I’ll actually make it a surf and turf and add a fillet steak, too. I know we’re supposed to go for the more unusual cuts these days but for me you can’t beat a melt-in-the-mouth fillet.

My wife has quite a serious nut allergy, so I basically don’t eat nuts anymore, because I’m absolutely paranoid about eating them and forgetting and kissing her and, you know, killing her. But we’re gonna do a scoop of this pine nut ice cream I had when I went to Rome when I was a student, which I got from this gelateria that stocked like 200 flavours of ice cream. And to round off dessert I’ll have a classic tarte tatin because it will remind me that I used to spend a lot of time in France when I was younger.

There is no wine that could possibly go with all that but I’ll wash it down with a glass of nero d’avola. Between that and the martini I should be nicely tipsy, which will be a good way to go. l Pearl will star in Ballet Shoes at the National Theatre from 5 December

FO O D & D R I N K

LAST ORDERS These garish cultural artefacts are posted indiscriminately through letter boxes across the country – but they are under threat from delivery apps. CHRIS STOKEL-WALKER on the dying art of the takeaway menu

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hen I walked through my front door in Gateshead as a teenager, the doormat would be covered in a carpet of brightly coloured paper. A cherry-blossom pink menu from the local Chinese takeaway, the red and gold of an Indian place, and pictures of row upon row of bargain buckets from the local chicken shop.

When we sat down as a family on a Friday night, those menus would come out – and the arguments would commence. Often the loudest menu would win out, making the strongest appeal to our lizard brains with its bright colours and alluring photographs.

It never occurred to me, at the time, that someone had sat down and painstakingly designed these menus, that there was an unruly kind of logic to these garish flyers

posted indiscriminately through letterboxes across the country.

Today the flow of these menus has been stemmed. A few still land on my doormat but nothing like the volume of yesteryear.

Delivery apps, which 44m of us in the UK

There are dozens of wannabe menu impresarios, many of whom have cornered the market in their own particular geographical area 22

now use, have largely superseded them. But Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat strip away intrigue and individuality. Boxed into a clean, sterile app, the power of the menu is lost. I find myself feeling nostalgic for these chaotic, unruly cultural artefacts. But what is it that makes the classic British takeaway menu a work of art?

“They don’t follow rules,” says Michelle Pegg, co-founder and director of Curate Creative, a design agency that has carved out a specialism in creating (non-takeaway) menus for restaurants. She says takeaway menus strike out on their own, with their “unconsidered style”. She points out that they tend to emblazon their wares with bright colours, clashing fonts and layouts designers in other fields would baulk at.

The menus often use that familiar, trifold design to make them fit more easily through letterboxes, and most companies that make them offer both a design and print service, keeping everything in-house.

I decide to go in search of the men and

Opposite page from left: Menus from Caribbean takeout The Real Jerk in Streatham Hill, A classic Chinese takeaway menu, and Baba’s in Perth; Right from top: Adil Niazi prepares deep fried cod in Olley’s fish restaurant in London; Baba’s menu with its impactful white-on-black design; The menu for Muziris in Ilford, with its striking blue background

Takeaway menu designs are like the food the outlets serve: indelicate, sloppy and over-the-top women who put together these endearingly eccentric menus that sit on chip shop counters and Chinese takeaway seats. It turns out there are dozens of wannabe menu impresarios, many of whom have cornered the market in their geographical area. In my part of the world, north east England, a surprising number are produced by a person who goes by the name of Menu Man, who places a small credit at the bottom of each of his works (regretfully, Menu Man declined to talk to me, saying he was too busy). Michael Parkhouse, who has run Low Cost Menus with his wife in Swansea since the mid-2000s, has around 4,500 takeaway clients across the UK (they also do work for restaurant chains including Star Pubs & Bars). And Cameron Armstrong’s Stirlingbased ABSS Print & Design services clients across Scotland.

Armstrong says his job usually begins with a text-based list of dishes takeaway owners want to include on the menu. “It starts with me placing all the text, and that gives an idea of how much space there is to play with,” he says. He will use the existing branding or logo to help inform the layout and design of the menu. “We use the same colours and styles, and usually they have a couple of fonts, either in their logo or alongside it.”

He points out that Chinese and Indian takeaways both embrace standard colour palettes of reds and golds (evidenced by my local Chinese and Indian takeaways). “It quite often goes back to the origin of the food,” he says. “Red and gold are traditional colours. With Chinese, sometimes it’s cherry blossom pink. The same goes with Indian restaurants; quite often there’s a henna pattern and the colour palettes tend to be either from the flag or some form of traditional Indian patterns.”

Parkhouse takes a similar approach with Low Cost Menus, each of which takes three to four working days to design. Sometimes Parkhouse will receive pre-existing menus, which he has to update, including checking whether the mouthwatering stock images of doner kebabs and burgers

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– yep, those pictures are rarely of the actual dishes, rather a Platonic ideal of what that dish could be – are used with permission and respect copyright. The answer is often ‘no’.

Low Cost Menus’ approach is highly collaborative, says Parkhouse. “I explain to the client how a well-designed menu can bring in customers and how a bad menu will drive customers away,” he says. Menus crammed too full of text, poorly laid out, or repeating imagery across the design are some of the biggest offenders, he says. A well-designed menu can be worth hundreds of pounds a month.

A good takwaway menu is “like your front of house,” says Chin Taylor, a longtime takeaway proprietor in Somerset. “It has to be eye-catching – especially when there’s a drawer full of 20 Chinese takeaway menus.”

Taylor’s own takeaways – Ziangs and Mama Chins – evolved their menus from folded sheets of black and white A4 in the 1990s to glorious technicolour. “You have to shout for the customer to come your way,” he says.

Despite forward-thinking owners like Taylor, Chinese takeaways have been particularly slow to move with the times, says Parkhouse. “It’s only in the last three or four years we’ve seen them move beyond straightforward black writing, perhaps on coloured card, perhaps with a colour header. They were just really boring. But we’re starting to see them look more at the design elements.”

For what it’s worth, none of the menu designers I spoke to thought their work was bad design. Far from it. “A lot of print nowadays is just thrown out,” says Armstrong. “People get leaflets in the door, and they go straight in the bin.” But he

made an impassioned defence of his art.

“There’s something unique about menus.

People keep them, because they can see there’s a lot of effort put into them.” lll

From top: Takeaway owner Chin Taylor says the key to a good takeaway menu is attracting the attention of potential customers; His menu at Mama Chins

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There was once an archive of takeaway menus. If I mislaid a copy of my local Chinese’s menu, I’d turn to take-a-way. co.uk, a site that was populated with thousands of lovingly scanned and uploaded menus from around the country – the result of regular competitions among its community. Sadly, the website is no more: at some point between late 2019 and early 2020, the site was replaced with a placeholder saying it was undergoing renovations. It never returned.

It was last archived by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine in June 2020.

The number of people who use meal delivery apps rose from 18.6m to 27.4m in the time the site was undergoing renovations. Seeing what was happening, perhaps they chose to throw in the towel.

Still, their uniqueness is what makes paper menus strangely resilient, reckons Armstrong. “Having a menu is as important as ever,” he says. “All these apps like Deliveroo… they don’t really have any personality. They have a profile, which is just their food items, maybe a logo. It’s just price and food.”

In some ways, takeaway menu designs are like the food the outlets serve. It’s not refined – well, apart from all the fats and sugars. They are indelicate, greasy, sloppy and over-the-top, the kind of thing that you’re likely to consume while drunk, your better judgement abandoned for the sweet release of a stuffed crust.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT JESS THOMSON

THE JOY OF FOREIGN GROCERIES If you really want to find the soul of another country, forget the tourist spots and head straight for the aisles of the local supermarket

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y favourite thing about travelling abroad isn’t the sun, the sand, nor the sea – it’s going to the local supermarket.

Walking through the doors of a foreign grocery store is like passing through the looking glass into a place where everything is both familiar and alien, a fairground mirror that reflects a strange, distorted take on your weekly shop.

I would forsake the Parthenon for the produce aisle, the Taj Mahal for the trolley, the Colosseum for charcuterie. As the slightly metallic air of the store lingers in your nose, you pass such delicacies as ketchup and oregano-flavoured crisps, something called “salt lychee”, a selection of melon and mascarpone cheeses, sweet potato flavoured Kit Kats, and a tub of what might be yogurt or cream cheese or after-sun (I cannot read Greek). Into the trolley they go.

I can spend hours slowly perusing strangelyshaped vegetables, excitingly cheap fruits and bizarre confectionery, much to the chagrin of whoever is unlucky enough to have come on holiday with me. A foreign supermarket is a liminal space, an uncanny valley where you are thrown off-kilter, your expectations confounded. One man’s groceries are another’s treasure trove, these aisles of food and drink so mundane to locals yet so novel to visitors.

In Cape Town, the welcoming red and blue arms of Pick n Pay offer a banquet of biltong and

boerewors, boulder-sized watermelons, spicy crisps that look like ET’s fingers, and chocolate bars filled with marshmallow. I could wax lyrical about South African jelly tots for hours — they’re better than ours in every way.

In a backwater town in Queensland I fawned over TimTams and Wimmer’s portino-flavoured soda. In a teeny family-owned store on a Greek island it was vast swaths of shimmering gold kataïfi and deep purple, velvety tapanade. Anyone who has ever driven through France will know the glories of the Big Carrefour, packed full of jars containing whole ducks and the worst-smelling yet most delicious cheeses you will ever come across.

In Berlin, I stared saucer-eyed at currywurst sandwiches, oat biscuits called “Hobbits” and a Percy Pig knock-off called “Fred Ferkel”, while a billion schnitzels steamed in the heated section nearby.

Flavours of yogurt I haven’t seen before or since were housed in glass jars rather than plastic buckets. In grocery chain Rewe, if you’re lucky, you might even find a packet of cigarettes featuring a picture of what looks like a German boy I used to date gazing sadly at a gravestone.

The foreign supermarket is a window into the soul of a country. It contains everything locals need to live their lives: the ingredients for the meals they like to cook, the treats they guiltily consume during their lunch break, the little gifts they pick up for a loved one.

When you shop in a supermarket abroad you’re living, just for a moment, like a true local. l Jess is a freelance science writer

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TAKE HOME £1,000 WORTH OF WINE City AM and Naked Wines have teamed up to bring you a chance to win four cases of wine this year, with the first one arriving in time for Christmas. LIBBY BRODIE explains

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ake this Christmas one to remember by winning a case of fine wine from the cellar of Naked Wines. All you have to do to win is scan the QR code below, correctly guess the wine I’m describing in the video, and four cases of some of the best bottles in the world, worth a total of more than £1,000, could be winging their way to your door, with one delivered each quarter and the first arriving in time for Christmas dinner.

In the video I’ll give you clues about what type of wine I’m tasting – these should be enough to tip you off on whether it’s a Riesling or a Chardonnay. Then all that’s left to do is fill in the form and see if you’re selected as our lucky winner.

The competition is part of the wonderful pairing that is City AM The Magazine and Naked Wines, with amazing wine at unbeatable prices exclusive to our readers. Buying through Naked makes smart business sense – its Angel investing model guarantees a better deal for both growers and drinkers. Funding independent winemakers up front, Naked Wines allows them a profit cushion between making the wines and selling them, which means winemakers can focus on creating their delicious drops rather than hitting the road trying to flog them (and, speaking of roads, Naked also delivers wines to your door, which means no middleman distributor bumping up the price).

Naked seeks to democratise wine and make it enjoyable for everyone, with its name representing the transparency of its business model. This allows them to offer incredible discounts on exclusive wines from award-winning producers across the globe.

You may already be a hardened oenophile and know of Jesse Katz, who cut his teeth with icons including Petrus and Screaming Eagle, and whose wines have sold for up to $1m at auction. Well, a lesser-known fact is that he also creates wines solely for Naked priced at just £44.99, or a jaw-dropping £29.99 for members. Personally, I would say it is worth signing up for that alone.

Or you may be one of the wine curious, who wants to enjoy a tipple or two without the hassle of thinking about it, in which case Naked offers a personalised service to specially select a case of

wines that will suit your palate. Job done.

Founder Rowan Gormley was ticked off at the profit-driven “production line plonk” available at most supermarkets, squeezing the producers and resulting in some pretty uninspiring wines. He set out to create Naked to work directly with the winemakers themselves in a classic crowd-funding model, and he has managed to secure some exceptional wines, unavailable anywhere else, at extremely competitive prices. Even more so for their more than 700,000 Angels. When it comes to pairings, City AM and Naked are as delicious a fit as Champagne and caviar!

BECOME AN ANGEL THROUGH CITY AM AND RECEIVE: l Exclusive access to unique wines from awardwinning winemakers across the world. l Significant discounts up to 33% off retail price for excellent wines. l A wine guarantee. Don’t like it, don’t pay for it.

Naked credit you back for any bottle you don’t love. l A personalised service tailored to your tastes. l A City AM exclusive offer of 50% off your first case.

HOW IT WORKS: l Scan the QR code and sign up. l Pick which selection you’d like in your first order.

Try the wines in your own time and rate them to make future recommendations smarter and smarter. l Choose how much to invest each month or when to receive your next case. l Change investment amount or even cancel at any time with no tie-ins or issues.

TO ENTER THE COMPETITION OR TO SIGN UP AS AN ANGEL SIMPLY SCAN HERE Then start drinking great wine courtesy of City AM and Naked Wines – it’s that simple!

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Clockwise from top: This is how your festive wine spread could look if you’re a Naked Wines winner; wine columnist Libby Brodie enjoying Naked Wines; A bottle of Sacchetto Col de L’Utia Prosecco Brut is sure to be a festive treat

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‘IT MUST BE AMAZING TO FEEL LIKE A STAR’ Earlier this year, Daisy Ridley became very unwell. She talks to ADAM BLOODWORTH about her Graves’ Disease diagnosis, optimism and working with her husband on new movie Magpie

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imagine life must be simpler if you really think you’re the shit!” says Daisy Ridley matter of factly. It’s safe to say the Star Wars star does not consider herself “the shit” – or if she does she’s an even better actor than I’d given her credit for.

For a woman who has become one of Britain’s most prized acting exports, she is disarmingly ordinary. The 32-year-old who went from Maida Vale to Tatooine answers my every question with service-like efficiency, nodding like a tutor eliciting the correct answer from a pupil when I suggest she doesn’t *seem* very famous. “There are times where I think, God, if I were 10 per cent more sure of myself, this would be easier! Living your life like that must be... amazing. I have too much self doubt.”

You believe her. She logs in seven minutes early to our Zoom, surely the first person in the history of time not to join the meeting a few seconds before. “I had a minute to change my washing over,” she laughs. She’s talking from her high-ceilinged period home in London, and, even though she acknowledges she’s from a privileged background, she sometimes has an endearing, slightly puzzling Essexiness to her accent, especially when she tells me: “Thanks for ‘aving me!”

Ridley’s rise sounds implausible. She had a job pulling pints in a London pub 10 years ago when her agent landed her an audition for Star Wars director JJ Abrams, who was looking for his Rey Skywalker, a human female Jedi fighting on the side of the Resistance. She landed the leading role in the trilogy, quite the promotion following a series of bit parts in TV dramas including Silent Witness, Casualty and Mr Selfridge. Over the last decade she has shape-shifted with a series of indies that have harvested critical acclaim and suggested Ridley’s long-term focus may be more earthbound than Star Wars. Mental health drama Sometimes I Think About Dying, released last year, was a masterstroke, an acute study of social isolation, the sort of thing that feels so relevant to our lives you want to watch it over and over again and take notes. In 2024’s low-budget Young Woman & The Sea, Ridley cemented her critical darling status, paying homage to Gertrude Ederle, the first

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From left: Daisy Ridley in her breakthrough role as Rey in Star Wars; Ridley in indie movie Magpie

woman to cross the channel. The last Star Wars entry was in 2019, though she’s returning with a Ray spin-off.

Her new film, Magpie, marks a bold new direction. It’s Ridley’s first turn working alongside actor-writer husband Tom Bateman. It’s a surprising and nuanced character study of a woman in a toxic relationship, which also confirms her penchant for enigmatic women. During the filming process Ridley became very unwell, and earlier this year spoke about her Graves’ Disease diagnosis, an autoimmune condition that can cause a variety of symptoms, from memory loss to anxiety and palpitations. Throughout our interview she becomes deeply introspective about seemingly trivial questions, but can sink into a protective bubble of vagueness when we talk about the stresses of the past 12 months, both professionally and personally.

“Filming Magpie was probably a time where I was putting too much pressure on myself,” she says. “I was thinking, ‘Oh I’m fine’. That’s where the grace left me for a little while.” She says she has struggled to dial back her life to give herself the space she needs to recover, and you can imagine it. Ridley is good fun, and tremendously excitable. She’s so driven by future projects that she talks at a mile-a-minute. Her love for Bateman, whom she married quietly a year ago, makes her fizz. But her zephyr has been challenged. Despite seeming upbeat, she mentions stress seven times during our conversation, and says the disease can insidiously creep up on her.

Watching Lilo & Stitch on a plane the other day helped her release some emotion: “It makes me cry anyway but I was probably crying more tears than just for Lilo & Stitch… I cry it out, give myself a little time to stress and then get back on the horse.”

Her mother, a handful of brilliant friends and Bateman, three years her senior, have been stabilising forces.

Tabloids suggest Ridley is cagey when asked about her personal life, but she seems keen to talk about her husband.

“It’s really good,” she says of their first year living and working together. “To the point where I said: ‘When Magpie’s out, what are we going to do next?!” It’s really been wonderful. We really share love of the movies and we tend to agree on what we like and even if we disagree I find it to be an interesting conversation. Tom and I made the film we wanted to make, which is really thrilling. It was always really… easy… I suppose.”

Bateman was filming in Los Angeles during the production of Magpie but they’d schedule calls at the end of the day when the time zones lined up, and their smushy feelings for one another made the stressful (there’s that word again) parts feel easier. “No one wants to hear the ins and outs of a 15 minute meeting, but when it’s your partner, they will listen!” When they’re done with meetings they “fill the stress with terrible TV, so when the stress is too much you switch on something hideous that you know you shouldn’t be watching. It’s helpful to do something that

Filming Magpie was probably a time where I was putting too much pressure on myself. That’s where the grace left me for a little while 31

is totally away from the thing.”

“I’m such a fan of him as an actor and such a fan of his as a writer and he’s a fan of me. We honour each other. On set he was filming something else but I really felt like a custodian of something incredibly special.” Ridley came up with the initial seed idea for Magpie, though it changed in production. It was unusual for Bateman to turn someone else’s idea into a script, as he has “a pile” of his own at home waiting to be made; conversely, Ridley says she “actually doesn’t have that many ideas.”

Can’t she rope Bateman in to pen her new Star Wars script? Ridley’s Ray spin-off is in what fans call ‘production purgatory’ after a string of creatives pulled out and there are fears the whole film may get scrapped. “That’s actually funny, I got a text from my friend the other day saying this... But I can categorically say that he’s not going to be involved. That would be hilarious. I mean that would be a story.”

The script’s secrets are openly discussed in the Ridley-Bateman household. “He knows the whole story, it’s nice to share that. To be honest that’s something I haven’t really done before, I always took it incredibly seriously that I was not telling anyone, but now I feel he can know.”

I wonder if she will be involved in the production side of the movie? “Certainly in the producorial way I don’t know that I will be that involved, but what has been amazing was Kathy [Kennedy, producer] told me the idea for the story which is great and I’ve been over the developments.

I remember various things either JJ [Abrams] or Ryan [Johnson] told me, so I was always really made to feel involved. I’m aware of the route development. It’s really nice to know that we have the time to do it right, and I’m really excited to film and I’m really excited to share developments with the world. It’s all good, it really is!” l Magpie is available now on digital platforms

I N T E RV I E W

MODEL CITIZEN

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Did Lily Cole turn her back on Hollywood? ADAM BLOODWORTH chats to the model, actor and environmentalist about her unusual career, washing machines and what makes her tick

hrow back to the mid-noughties and the Saltburn-era of British fashion, and there was one style icon as ubiquitous as the popped collar and the Ugg boot: Lily Cole. Her ceramic complexion and flame hair gave the young lady from Devon an otherworldly beauty that led her to become the first model to be booked for British Vogue aged 16.

By the turn of the decade Cole had also established herself as a leading actor, playing opposite Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and with memorable turns in era-defining comedydrama St Trinians, the Ab Fab movie and Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

But while Cole was fraternising with the A-List, she was also pursuing projects with an intriguing lack of commerciality.

Actors often sign up to charitable causes, but Cole’s CV was beginning to display a deeper interest in social change, going against the grain in a way that didn’t feel the slightest bit celeby.

In 2007, while studying at Cambridge University and at the height of her fame, she contributed to seminal eco-friendly book Green Is The New Black, and two years earlier refused to model for DeBeers over their ethics. In 2013 she launched Impossible, a social enterprise she said is “more enjoyable than modelling”. The same year Cole received the Doctor of Letters qualification for her “outstanding contribution to humanitarian and environmental causes” from Glasgow Caledonian University.

She is patron of the Environmental Justice Foundation and The Ethical Justice Foundation and an ambassador for Beauty4Empowerment, a UN-affiliated organisation.

Aged 36, Cole hasn’t been in a major commercial project since the TV series Upstart Crow in 2018, despite her acting often being a critical hit. It’s possible that,

in an ageist industry, Cole simply hasn’t been offered the same calibre of roles as when she was in her twenties. But there’s something about her that feels different, that she may well be disinclined to take a project with a major studio simply to maintain her profile. You get the sense Cole doesn’t care much about fame.

Living without much of an ego is a rare thing to suspect of an actor and when I (gently) ask Cole how she feels about mainstream plaudits, she proves my point.

“I don’t think I’ve ever put commercial success to the forefront,” she says, making a sound with her mouth that suggests she hasn’t thought about the topic for a while.

“I try to just do what feels authentic and honest. Sometimes I’ve been surprised that things I’ve done have been very successful and had lots of traction and then things I have laboured over and thought were gonna be bigger have ended up being very small. Of course one has to be open to markets and audiences and not exist in a bubble. And there’s probably a sweet spot somewhere between being open to those influences but also trying to be authentic to your own voice and do something different.”

She pauses again. “If you’re trying to do something different it means that it’s not

I don’t ever put commercial success to the forefront. I just try to do what feels authentic and honest 32

always obvious if it’s going to have a big audience or not.”

Cole hasn’t moved away from blockbusters to focus on environmentalism entirely, instead choosing to work on surprisingly niche film projects. She has just directed Mother Weaver, a short film about art collector Ursula Hauser, although it’s so underground it’s not even featured on her IMDB page. In 2018 she directed the short film Marble Hill (again, not listed) about a “really hardcore environmentalist” who has chosen to live off-grid without any technology or electricity.

“I absolutely love acting when it’s the right project, a character I feel inspired by, a story I feel inspired by, a team of people I want to work with. It’s one of the best jobs in the world. Finding that intersection doesn’t happen for me all the time, so I’m quite happy to just not.

“I’ve got plenty of things to work on, including trying to write and direct and produce [she’s currently working on a screenplay for a feature length film]. I’m sort of delighted when a good opportunity comes in, but I’m not trying to live off it financially.”

Right now Cole is promoting a new campaign by ethical cleaning brand Ecover, pushing the idea that we should wear our clothes more than once before we wash them to help reduce our eco-footprint. Does she spend much time worrying about whether projects like this will resonate?

“I don’t to be honest,” she says matter of factly. “I don’t think that’s my… job… necessarily. I’m not a marketeer, and I think a lot of the things I’ve spoken about in the past or campaigned around are not always sexy, headline-grabbing topics. I don’t try to manipulate my message to make it more mainstream.” She laughs at the idea as if it were a crazy thought. “I just speak honestly on things I care about and then see what resonates.”

The laundry campaign is eye-catching,

Model, actor and evironmentalist Lily Cole is urging people to use their washing machines less

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From left: Lily Cole at the Burberry show during London Fashion Week this year; Cole at the Ashley Isham show in 2006

and has actually generated the sort of tabloid coverage Cole garnered in her earlier career. The Daily Star ran a piece headlined “Supermodel Lily Cole is demanding we wear our grubby grundies for several days to save the planet.”

“That’s funny,” she says, heartily laughing and dispelling any fear she is prim or overly-academic. “I haven’t seen that but I anticipated someone would do that. Just for the record it’s very clear that it’s not about underwear and the report and campaign is definitely not encouraging anyone to wear their socks or their underwear or their gym clothes more than once. There are definitely things that need more washing, but do you have to wash your jeans and your T-shirts every time you wear them or is it sensible to check before you wash them?

“I find in a geeky way the history of the development of laundry practices quite fascinating. How it’s changed over the years and the norms we have today, where they’ve come from, how they’ve shifted in recent decades and how, potentially, advertising and marketing and commercial interests have driven the norms we have around laundry.”

Her friend Mark Boyle, the environmentalist from the Marble Hill film who doesn’t use anything made post-industrial revolution, says giving up his washing machine was the hardest part of his journey. “That sort of stuck with me. The hardcore position would be not to use a washing machine, right? The less

hardcore position is can we change our relationship to them? Our habits with them?” She laughs and makes up a new Daily Star headline: “She wants you to lose your washing machine! Never wash your underwear ever again!”

There has been a suggestion that Cole is formidable but that’s only if you haven’t done your homework. As you’d imagine, she is acutely well informed about a wide range of subjects, and like many clever people, you feel the idea of small talk makes her shudder. We do it anyway: when I ask if she has morning sea swims where she lives in Lisbon she replies with just the right amount of words to be polite without going a syllable further. “I don’t have many morning swims, no, but I am surrounded by nature; it’s beautiful.”

I find in a geeky way the history of the development of laundry practices quite fascinating, how it’s changed over the years 34

I bring up modelling because she returned to the catwalk for London Fashion Week this year after telling The Guardian she would never model again.

“Well, that’s actually why I try not to say anything definitive about the future because you never know what’s going to come and surprise you,” she says. On returning to modelling for sustainable fashion brand Completedworks’ show, she’s taking more control of her hair and make-up than when she was younger, when she got bossed around by fashion big-wigs. “I’m a lot more opinionated than I used to be in terms of what I think in those situations,” she says. “And this wasn’t a classic modelling job, it was a performance piece.”

Keep her on topic – and that can be about anything from washing dirty undies to the scorched Earth or her feminist-tinged screenplays – and she is refreshingly self-effacing. “You think I’m more niche now?” she asks with trademark directness when I fumble over a question. “Hahahaha. Yeah, erm, I mean I don’t love doing things I don’t believe in.

“If I was doing stuff that was bombastically mainstream but my heart wasn’t in it, that doesn’t feel good to me.

I think I’d rather do things that have a smaller audience but that I feel aligned with. I’m not lying, basically, I’m not lying, to myself or to other people. That feels better.” l The full Ecover report on washing better, wasting less can be found at ecover.com

I N T E RV I E W

LIFE AFTER SALTBURN Sadie Soverall was the romantic link between Barry Keoghan’s Oliver and Jacob Elordi’s Felix.

She tells ADAM BLOODWORTH how she still misses hanging out at the estate with the ‘Alpha Hotties’

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t was almost exactly a year ago that Saltburn and the mid-noughties aesthetic blew a hole in Tiktok to become the most viral film of 2023.

Alongside The White Lotus and The Triangle of Sadness, it came to define a new era of upper-class satire. A new nostalgia was heralded for 2006, the year in which writerdirector Emerald Fennell set the film.

If you were drawn in by the hedonistic entanglements of Felix’s impossibly attractive crew at Oxford, then Sadie Soverall should be a name you remember: her character Annabel was the only one to be romantically involved with both Jacob Elordi’s Felix and Barry Keoghan’s Oliver. She was introduced as Felix’s girlfriend but turned up at Oliver’s place later for a revenge-inspired dalliance.

“It was pretty crazy. I deleted Tiktok and I stayed off social media,” Soverall tells me. “It was just very cool to be a small part of this massive thing, and very surreal.”

How was it trying to make out with the two heartthrobs while a 50-strong production crew looked on?

“They both were really different. Barry’s this incredible physical actor, I feel like he works very instinctively, he’s this instinctive genius, and Jacob is a genius too but in a different way, a more cerebral way. They’re both very, very talented. The film also looks so amazing, it was about making sure it worked well visually.”

Soverall, who is 22 and grew up in Wandsworth, south London, says she’s “never felt more comfortable” professionally than when she was filming the intimacy scenes, but is fearful that stories involving nudity are too often gratuitous. “I find sex scenes interesting because it’s a massive part of life and it’s important but I find in a lot of things it’s used as a shock value, and that is fine and an artistic choice, but with the amount it’s used now it’s not very shocking anymore,” she says. “I just find it’s not furthering the story in any way.”

Many of Soverall’s scenes were cut; Fennell’s workstyle is to shoot a lot of extra material, but even so, Annabel’s limited screen time became a discussion point with the fans. She is comfortable that those decisions were made “to serve the story.” Nevertheless, she’d be keen to see an extended edit. “There was so much in the house that was shot, I’d love to see if there was anything else there.”

Soverall has played a range of nuanced roles in her

short career, but it wasn’t always that way. She reflects back to the time when she was starting out when she was asked to play “characters who were there just to further a complex story written for an interesting male character.” She feels “very comfortable” turning down scripts like that. “I think it should be talked about,” she says. “It’s not just women, it’s younger male actors too.

I don’t want them to feel pressured so I think it’s important for me to speak my mind.”

After attending Parkgate House School and Emanuel School in London she was noticed during a school production of Twelfth Night. “An agent came and I got signed, it was very lucky,” she says. Swerving professional training to go straight into work, her breakthrough role was in 2021’s Netflix drama Fate: The Winx Saga, a supernatural teen drama in which Soverall played a fairy called Beatrix.

The show was a huge fan hit but was controversially cancelled after two seasons. “It was a tumultuous time in the world; what I took away from it was the really warm hearts of the fans and everyone involved.

Not to be cheesy but I think in this industry you have to think things happen for a reason. If something’s ended then something new is coming – that’s how I have to approach things.”

We’re choosing loose-leaf tea in posh tea house Mariage Frères in Covent Garden, a favourite of Soverall’s. She worked nearby this summer in a Donmar Warehouse production of Ibsen’s The Cherry Orchard, which was well received by critics. “For the first half of the rehearsal process I was like, ‘I should not be here!’” remembers Soverall, who felt “a sickening, giddy excitement” taking on the role. “Every night was very different. It was thrilling.” One night was very different: Soverall noticed one of her idols, Cate Blanchett, in the audience. “It was terrifying but I have a way of using the adrenaline.”

She’s got multiple projects in the pipeline she’s unable to talk about, but for now she’s feeling nostalgic about her days spent knocking about Drayton House in Northamptonshire where they filmed Saltburn.

She’s hoping for a mini cast reunion with the ‘Alpha Hotties’, the name for the group of girls she was filming with.

“It was such a unique film,” she smiles. “A film that was so much about change.”

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F E AT U R E

A TRIP DOWN

MEMOIR LANE

H

Once the preserve of ‘Great Men’, now anyone can get their autobiography ghost-written by a professional author. ANNA MOLONEY investigates

ow do you want to be remembered?

It’s a question humans have asked since time began, but have you ever paused to think about it – I mean really think about it? Who do you want to be remembered as, which stories do you want your grandchildren to hear? When you’re dead and gone and no longer able to put it in your own words, who will

decide your ‘legacy’? For some, with cash and time to spare, the answer to that question is “through my own professionally-written autobiography” – and it’s leatherbound. Welcome to the age of the memoir, where everybody is a main character. lll

I’m on my way to meet Roy Moëd. He first made his fortune selling juice ‘cuplets’ to airlines but now

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Opposite: Roy Moëd and his wife Yvette, founders of Lifebook Memoirs; Above: Portraits of Nigel, a 79-year-old retiree, for his Lifebook memoir

operates in the far more intangible world of storytelling. His business Lifebook Memoirs is – in short – a service that will write you your own autobiography. Equipped with interviewers, ghostwriters, editors and an all-the-frills production team, Lifebook promises to take your story, no matter how banal or ordinary, and distil it into a polished 200-or-so-page memoir that you can place on the shelf for posterity. And you don’t have to write a word.

I approached Moëd for a quick chat over the phone about how this kind of service works, but a phone call isn’t quite Moëd’s style. Instead, I find myself on a train to leafy Godalming, where Moëd has offered to show me around Lifebook’s HQ. Rolling into the station around midday (to ensure we have “plenty of daylight”), I’m awaited by Moëd in a vintage, midnight blue Citroën 2CV. “You won’t miss my car,” he had told me in advance. A short trundle down prime stockbroker belt country lanes later and we pull up at the kind of house that can only suggest business is doing well (stables, lush gardens and a 17th century barn converted not only into a space for Lifebook’s office but also an indoor pool).

I’m ushered into the home office, where the faces of Lifebook’s 12,000 memoirists beam at me from the booklined walls. I settle into one of two armchairs set up in front of a spaceship-looking modern fireplace and tuck into a platter of sushi that had been prepared ahead of my visit. When Moëd tells me he values creating an experience, I believe him.

Lifebook is just one company offering “private autobiographical services”, an industry which seems to have sprung up overnight. The pandemic, which encouraged many to take stock of their own lives while also confronting us with our own mortality, has certainly played a part in their success – but it’s not the whole picture. Services range in price (and corresponding paper quality), but you can expect to pay at least £1,000 (and even that’s the cheapskate’s choice and may involve your ‘ghostwriter’ being an AI bot).

Lifebook, by contrast, is unashamedly on the indulgent end. Their process is lengthy and expensive, taking around six to 12 months and £12,000 to complete.

Interviewers are hand-selected by project, and chosen only if they live within a 30 minute drive of the subject, who they will be visiting for around a dozen 90-minute sessions in order to extract all their best anecdotes to then be sent onto a ghostwriter to thread into a narrative.

What I was most interested in, however, was who actually uses these services. It was, admittedly, a ‘who’ I was a little cynical of. To pay someone to write your autobiography struck me as a pursuit for the vain, the rich, not to mention the lazy; those with too much money, and consider themselves interesting because of it. In the end, however, that wasn’t what I found. lll

The average age of a Lifebook customer is 80, but first on my list is Haviva, ‘lead of employability programs’ at Google, who had her memoir written at just 40 years old. Haviva had always said she would write a book,

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F E AT U R E

but it was her husband who pushed her when he bought her the Lifebook experience for her birthday. When I went to meet her, I was expecting a Steven Bartlett-style discussion about the grind and the hustle but Haviva turns out to be far less concerned about herself than someone who has written a memoir at 40 would suggest. On the contrary, I find myself answering more questions about myself than asking them of her as we shoot up in the glass elevator to chat over coffee on the top floor of Google’s King’s Cross office.

Haviva is explicit though: she always wanted to be special. “One of the things that really became clear to me, and this was from a young age, is that I had a disdain for averageness. It’s a really deep-seated sentiment. I can’t deal with the mundane. I’ve always struggled in an average setting.”

Growing up in a community in Los Angeles where nobody really went to college, Haviva said she had a chip on her shoulder. She left home at 12 so she could attend a school where she won a scholarship, working in exchange for room and board with local families. In her memoir, this chapter is called ‘Cinderella’.

And indeed, the impulse to view herself as a character was something Haviva had to carefully navigate throughout the process. She wanted her voice to be authentic, but she also wanted it to be a compelling read. “You get to pick and choose how you script your narrative.

You’re the producer of your own movie, so I thought: what do I want to happen in that movie?”

Studying in Ghana, moving to Tanzania, the time she met Bashir al Assad, being in a grenade attack – Haviva has an adventurous and turbulent life. What becomes clear, though, is that far from just documenting it, Haviva’s memoir was a way to reckon with it. “I wanted to put my past behind me.” It was akin to therapy.

Nigel, a 79-year-old retiree, is less sugary.

His book stood out on the shelf when I visited Roy: on the front, a picture of Nigel, clad in a denim shirt, in his moustachioed prime. On the back, a picture-perfect recreation, now aged in his seventies. He certainly looks like a main character.

Nigel is far briefer on his motivation to write a memoir: “I heard my daughter telling my stories and getting them wrong.” He pauses. “And, I suppose, I wanted to show off a bit really.” I appreciate his honesty.

He tells me about his free-spirited life as a photographer in the 1970s, hanging around Carnaby Street and living la vie bohème. He lived among the kind of crowd good for anecdotes, once even going to the pictures with Princess Margaret.

I ask if the process of writing his memoir helped him reframe his life, or come to any epiphanies, but Nigel says I’m getting carried away. “I don’t think it gets that deep,” he says. “I just thought it would be nice for my daughter.” I change tack and ask if it’s achieved his objective: does his

daughter now get his stories right? “I don’t think she read it in depth,” he says. lll

When looking at the rise of memoirwriting, “democratisation” is a key theme.

“This is the age of memoir,” William Zinnser declared in the 1980s. In the

People want to know that their lives have meaning, that their little speck of time, 70 years, 80 years on this earth, has some value 40

1990s, he doubled down: “Never have personal narratives gushed so profusely from the American soil... Everyone has a story to tell, and everyone is telling it.” He was referring to the rise of what some have dubbed the “nobody memoir”, stories written by ordinary people about ordinary lives. Author of The Liars’ Club Mary Karr, whose memoir about growing up in Texas with two alcoholic parents has been widely credited for launching a resurgence in these books of this kind in the 1990s, says it’s exactly this that she loves about the genre: “Its democratic (some say ghetto-ass primitive), anybodywho’s-lived-can-write-one aspect”.

Since then, the genre has only gathered pace. According to Goodreads, 443 memoirs were published in English in 2023, up from 108 in 2019. In the age of the selfie, it’s hardly a surprise this me-centric narrative has gained traction.

Companies inserting your child’s name into children’s books to make them the main character is just another symptom of this age. Today’s rent-a-memoirist

services hardly advertise themselves as providers of the “nobody memoir”, but there is certainly a lineage. “Everyone’s got a story, and everyone’s story is valuable,” Nick Boulos, the founder of another memoir-writing service, Master Storytellers, says. “We have clients for whom it’s been bought as a gift, who say ‘I’ve not done anything and I’ve just been a housewife blah blah blah.’ But they’ve definitely done more or achieved more than they think they have.”

Not every memoirist I spoke to thought this way. “With no disrespect, if you sort of grew up normally, worked on a bus all your life, done nothing, then you’ve got no content,” says Lifebook customer Jimmy, an East Londoner who heads up a fruit and veg business. “I don’t know anybody who’s done more than I’ve done. That sounds terribly arrogant but it’s not like that.”

Lifebook’s standard packages come with 12-24 physical copies of your book included, but Jimmy tells me he’s already given out 150.

W

hen I ask Moëd why he thinks people want their memoirs written, he describes it simply. “They want to know their lives have meaning,

Top: Covers from Lifebook projects; Above: Part of the Lifebook collection of completed memoirs

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that their little speck of time, 70 years, 80 years on this earth, has some meaning.”

His own inspiration for the company was personal, and maybe also regretful.

Wanting to find an occupation for his father, almost blind and battling depression, he started sending his secretary to go visit him, ask him about his life and record the stories. Moëd had already heard them all.

It was only after his father died that he compiled them and found there were stories he had never heard. “And I couldn’t ask him about them anymore.”

Moëd admits he’d often shut down his father’s storytelling; his secretary, by contrast, a stranger (and on paid time), would ask him what happened next.

Having strangers conduct the interviews for his clients now is a key tenet of the approach.

Many, in writing their memoirs, are confronting death. One woman I spoke to had used Boulos’s service to write her younger brother’s memoir after he tragically died of cancer after a diagnosis at 19. The memoir was written after his death, pieced together from interviews with her, his doctors and others in his life, but written in ‘his’ voice. In a similar vein, Master Storytellers recently set up a sister non-profit endeavour, The Storytellers Foundation, which writes memoirs for the terminally ill as a way for them to live on.

Moëd tells me about another of his clients, a woman with no family left who was living in a care home. She was scared of being forgotten. Moëd says he was concerned about taking her money, but she was resolute. “I’ve got no one to leave my money to. I want this. This is my legacy.” She wrote her memoir and gave a copy to every member of the care home staff and some of the residents. In the front is a dedication to St Leonard’s taxi company, which drove her to church every Sunday.

Gesturing at the shelves, Moëd says what he has, really, is an amazing resource of social history. I’m reminded of a summer I’d spent in the office of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) as an intern, where piles and piles of huge leatherbound books fill the room, containing thousands of biographies of “notable” people. The ODNB is a ‘great man’ enterprise, but its sheer size is humbling – even those who make it are just one of many. “The very act of putting someone in a collection of biographies cuts people down to size,” says Dr Alex May, the Dictionary’s senior researcher.

Perhaps the modern impulse for memoir-writing, then, does the opposite: expands the everyman into the great man.

Or, perhaps more accurately, allows them to view themselves as such.

One memoirist’s daughter got in touch with Moëd after reading her mother’s book.

“I hope you know, not a word of that memoir is true!” she told him. But Moëd says that didn’t matter. As Zinnser puts it: memoir is the art of inventing the truth. No wonder it’s booming.

F E AT U R E S

WHO KILLED THE GIF? Once dancing bananas were the kings of the internet. Now GIF use is on a seemingly terminal decline. SIMON COATES asks where they went – and whether they can stage a comeback

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n a 2021 Twitter (now ‘X’) post, US journalist Jenny Zhang wrote, “Any time I see someone use a reaction gif I immediately know they are above the age of 33”. The replies to the post featured a mix of indignation and applause, but Jenny had a point. Once the quick and easy reaction to an instant message, social media post or even as a cheeky addition to an email, by 2021 GIF usage was dropping. And it continues to do so.

A 2022 report by Zoom noted that, while 20 per cent of their users loved GIFs, 28 per cent hated them and 53 per cent were indifferent.

In the same year, even Giphy, the internet’s biggest GIF database, admitted the use of their product was on a downhill slide. In a bitingly honest filing valuation, the database admitted that “user sentiment towards GIFs on social media shows that they have fallen out of fashion as a content form, with younger users in particular describing GIFs as ‘for boomers’ and ‘cringe’”.

Jess Rauchberg, assistant professor of communication technologies at New Jersey’s Seton Hall University, says GIFs are now largely the domain of boomers. “As technologies evolve, so too do generational demographics around what’s considered cool or socially

appropriate,” she says. “GIFs are coded as uncool for newer gens.” London-based UX strategist Millie Spalding agrees.

“There is a stigma associated with feeling behind the times,” she says. “Cultural references used in GIFs are becoming less well-known, the visuals are tacky and the rise of content creation on platforms like TikTok have increased the desire for short-form video over other content.”

The first Graphics Interchange Format (GIF for short) was an aeroplane in flight created by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite in 1987 as a way of animating static images (for the record, Wilhite has confirmed the unpopular opinion that GIF is pronounced ‘jiff’ rather than ‘giff’). Wilhite led a team of software engineers at CompuServe, the US technology firm that became the first to offer internet connectivity in 1989.

So when the first publicly-available version of the world wide web was unleashed in 1993, CompuServe was there to help users get online. Now anyone with the time and the required equipment could build a website, and anyone with a browser could explore the internet. By the end of 1995, more than 24 million people were spending an average of five hours per week online in the US and Canada, and homemade versions of Wilhite’s invention were

42

being sprinkled across newly sprouted websites like psychedelic, looping confetti.

The Hampster [sic] Dance, the fighting stick men and Under Construction GIFs count amongst early classics. Designed in 1999 by Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte, the jiggling hamsters GIF featured on the front page of her website.

The stick men were homemade content for the 1990s Stickdeath site and the Under Construction GIF (and its variants) was the ideal placeholder for burgeoning web developers building an online presence. There are plenty more vintage GIFs on the gifcities.org website.

Some GIFs took on a life of their own, gaining a cult status in the process. The frankly terrifying Dancing Baby surfaced in the mid-nineties as an experiment in animating the human figure and went on to become a symbol of the lead character’s ticking biological clock in the sitcom, Ally McBeal. Created in 1999 by Norwegian web developer and music producer Trym Stene, the Dancing Banana GIF originally appeared on Norsk FreakForum, a late-nineties online notice board for people who took part in phreaking, the practice of manipulating communication systems. By 2005, Stene’s creation was so big that Family Guy’s talking labrador Brian Griffin dressed up as the Dancing

The famous dancing banana was created in 1999 by Norwegian web developer and music producer Trym Stene

As younger generations romanticise early 2000s cultures, we may see a GIF resurgence

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F E AT U R E

Clockwise from above: The Barack Obama mic drop GIF; A GIF of Dancing Hampsters [sic]; Fighting stickmen, which was one of the early internet sensations; The first Graphics Interchange Format file, an aeroplane in flight created by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite; A GIF of Homer Simpson backing into a hedge, which is still seen today; The Under Construction GIF was a favourite of web developers; Lady spitting tea – a classic; Ally McBeal with the infamous Dancing Baby

Banana. Trym is phlegmatic about the demise of the GIF. “Now we have so much content on social that GIFs have become a small part of the vast amount of content we consume daily,” he says. “You won’t find many GIFs on websites anymore unless they’re put there ironically. In my experience, GIFs still have a place to quickly and low-key express our emotions with something more than words.”

That GIFs have reached ‘cringe’ status explains part of the usage decline, but there are other factors in play, too.

Take the reduction in relevance of micro-blogging site Tumblr. By the time Facebook added GIFs to its Messenger service in 2015 and to comments in 2017, and WhatsApp began allowing users to send GIFs in early 2017, the format was already an intrinsic part of Tumblr culture, especially those made by the site’s community. One of the world’s mostused sites at the time, Tumblr users once revelled in its outsider status. Its busiest period was during 2014, when activity hit over 400 million posts a year. Rauchberg cites the sale of Tumblr to Yahoo in 2013 as another nail in the GIF coffin.

“Obviously, there are still many users on that platform,” she says. “But after Yahoo acquired Tumblr its popularity began to decrease due to governance changes”. These changes included Yahoo introducing adverts and tighter censorship controls, leading users to feel Tumblr had lost its anything-goes edge and become, well, uncool.

Designer and web expert Jason Eppink was curator of digital media at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York

The sale of Tumblr to Yahoo was another nail in the GIF coffin, making them seem uncool 44

City from 2006 until 2018. He highlights the role of smartphones in declining GIF use. “We spend more of our internet time on our phones than ever, and they all have incredible cameras and microphones just a tap away,” he says. “That ease of use frames a way of understanding what our devices are for. Now TikTok dominates the social media landscape, so its default assumption about the audiovisual nature of the moving image on mobile devices will, too.”

Eppink goes on to point out that GIFS are silent, while users can add sound and music to their phone-made Tikkoks, Instagram reels and Snapchats. Plus, GIFs are a short watch, while videos made for sharing between friends and contacts can be as long — or as brief — as the creator wishes. “They’re also low resolution, are not easily responsive, their colour palette is limited and they have slow frame rates and slow loading times,” adds Spalding.

Eppink mentions the recurring theme of something becoming too popular as well. “I remember seeing Giphy being integrated into everything in the mid 2010s — Slack, Twitter, iOS keyboards —

and thinking ‘this is how it ends’,” he says. “When anyone can do something cool, it becomes uncool. I’ve always had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, GIFs are fun. Everyone should be invited to the party. But also, there’s an art to hoarding and using GIFs. So when millions of GIFs are stuffed into a database, flattened by lowest common denominator indexes, and easily searchable and accessible by your grandma, of course that becomes a less fun space to play in. The effort and knowledge it took to use a GIF well was a key element of its value.” The rise of the meme — typically a static image but more recently incorporating videos and moving images — has also diluted the potency of the GIF in a similar way.

Then there’s the generation gap effect. Boomers, Generation X-ers and Millennials have persisted in sharing GIFs like the Barack Obama mic drop, Homer Simpson backing into a hedge and the lady spitting out her tea, but Generation Z (born between the midto-late 1990s and early 2010s) and Generation Alpha (born during the

2010s) have moved on. “Millennials and Generation X were prime users when the GIF became a popular media form to share in conversations,” says Rauchberg.

“Now, younger generations, like Gen Z and Gen Alpha, have other ways to interact in digital spaces. We’ve seen this happen with emojis. Gen X, Boomers and Millennials will use the crying-whilelaughing emoji to indicate a humorous interaction over text, whereas Gen Z and Gen Alpha use a skull emoji when

Millennials have persisted in sharing GIFs like the Barack Obama mic drop and Homer Simpson backing into a hedge 45

they’ve found something funny.”

But perhaps all is not lost. Stene thinks the humble GIF may be down, but it’s not out. “GIFs will have their place for years to come in people’s social media apps,” he says. “I don’t think there will be a renaissance, but they will play their small part in people’s lives. When we communicate digitally, it can be hard to show our feelings and empathy, and GIFs can provide those small extras that deepen our interpersonal connections.”

What about Rauchberg? Does she think GIFs might stage a renaissance, even if it’s an ironic one, like with moustaches and the mullet? “Yes! As younger generations romanticise early 2000s cultures, like Y2K and indie sleaze, I predict we’ll see a resurgence in older Web 2.0 practices, such as GIF use, as ironic and satirical,” she says. “We’re starting to see younger generations turn to older media tools, like using pointand-shoot cameras and camcorders instead of phones to take pictures. I wouldn’t be surprised if GIFs have a similar moment in the next two to three years, if not sooner.”

S ECT I O N H E R E

GIFTS KITC H E N WAR E | 48

G A D G E TS | P 5 0

SPI RI TS | P56

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into a screen for your favourite films. The projector will beam up to a mammoth 150 inches and runs at 1080p with 400 ISO lumens. It has built in speakers, which are entirely passable if you don’t have external speakers to hook it up to, and it comes with Android TV smart interface, both

wi-fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and an Auto Game Mode for gaming. Pretty cool for a device that’s just 2.5 inches thick when folded and will slide nicely onto your bookshelf. If you’re shopping for a movie buff or just want to level up your date night, this could be the perfect gift.

XGIMI ELFIN FLIP £339, UK.XGIMI.COM XGIMI markets its Elfin Flip as a “booksized movie theatre” and you can see why.

It’s a super compact, stylish and powerful projector that can turn almost any surface

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ART OF PING PONG X MARCO OGGIAN SET, £98, THEARTOFPINGPONG.CO.UK If you’re looking for something a little off-beat for a sports enthusiast, The Art of Ping Pong has released a limited edition set of table tennis bats by Italian artist and designer Marco Oggian. The Art of Ping Pong is a purveyor of beautifully crafted bats, balls and tables using responsibly sourced, sustainable wood and air-dried natural rubber. These ones feature happy and sad faces to “remind us that it’s within our power to control our outlook on the game and life”.

PATRIZIA ITALIANO VASE £195, SOROKALONDON.CO.UK

CARL FRIEDRIK CARRY-ON LUGGAGE £465, CARLFRIEDRIK.COM

This vase by Patrizia Italiano celebrates “the beauty of Sicily and its sea that surrounds the island” – and it’s an excellent gift for anyone who takes their homeware seriously (but not too seriously...). Stick some flowers in it or display it as a piece of art in its own right.

Carl Friedrik makes fine leatherware, accessories and an awesome range of rugged luggage that will be a welcome treat for any jet-setter. This tough polycarbonate carry-on suitcase comes in a new Arctic grey and tan colour scheme that looks slick.

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GIFT GUIDE

WILLIAM WHITELEY & SONS SCISSORS, £107, WHITELEY.CO.UK

William Whiteley & Sons have been making scissors you didn’t know you needed since 1760. Their handcrafted pieces have supplied royalty and are handsome enough to be artworks, but have multi-purpose cutting abilities too: they can cut through bone, have an in-built nutcracker function and a micro-serrated blade for extra grip. But mainly they just look awesome.

JAMES BOND STYLE £100, ASSOULINE.COM

STEAK BY TIM HAYWARD £30, PENGUIN.COM

There’s silence about who will assume the role of the next 007. In the meantime, all fanatics can do is look back: this comprehensive coffee table book explores the iconic looks of every Bond actor, from Roger Moore to Sean Connery and Daniel Craig.

Promoted by its publishers as a book that’s essential for dads, Steak by chef Tim Hayward is an encyclopaedic exploration of the world’s best cuts of meat, from farmers, butchers and restaurants to cooking techniques and recipes.

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LOFTIE CLOCK, £240, AMAZON.CO.UK

Are you looking to cut down on your screentime? How about improve your sleep? Or make your morning wake-up slightly less onerous? This handsome bedside companion claims to help you achieve all of this and more. It’s an all-in-one bluetooth speaker, alarm clock, white-noise generator and nightlight with a slew of features to help you unwind. The device claims to use a “two-phase system that mimics your body’s natural waking process” to help you feel like you haven’t woken up during an air-raid siren.

DALI IO-8 HEADPHONES £599, PREMIUMSOUND.CO.UK

LOEWE WE. HEAR PRO SPEAKER X KYLIAN MBAPPÉ, £249.99, LOEWE.TV

For the audiophile in your life, consider these headphones from Dali. They offer incredibly rich and balanced sound, best-in-class noise cancellation, 35 hour battery life, and they’re so beautifully constructed they will even complete your winter wardrobe.

What better endorsement could you ask for than that of France and Real Madrid star Kylian Mbappe? These branded speakers from audio heavyweight Loewe offer punchy but precise sound and come in a range of funky colours to brighten up Christmas morning.

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MARSHALL EMBERTON III £159, MARSHALL.COM

This portable speaker is a great gift for those who love listening to music on the go. Packing a mighty 32 hours of playback, it’s a hard-wearing, great sounding device from the king of speakers that’s waterproof, dust-proof and sounds absolutely brilliant.

ASTELL&KERN ACTIVO P1 £399, AMAZON.CO.UK You may think the stand-along digital audio player had gone the way of the dodo but this excellent device from Astell&Kern has other ideas. It comes with its own AMP circuit and bags of high-res sound tech to keep audio nerds happy for years to come.

APPLE WATCH ULTRA £799, APPLE.COM/UK

PLAYDATE HANDHELD CONSOLE £204 (INC SHIPPING), PLAY.DATE

The latest version of Apple’s super high-spec smart watch is the apex of the sector, offering the brightest display of any Apple product, 36 hours of battery life, and more fitness features than you will ever use. It’s the best Apple Watch yet and it’s a thing of beauty.

The Playdate is a rare thing, a new console from a small developer designed to play stripped-back, retro-style games. It immediately stands out for its exceptional build quality and dinky, palm-of-the-hand size. There are also tonnes of games to keep you going for years.

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GIFT GUIDE

ACQUA DI PARMA MANDARINO DI SICILIA £147 FOR 100ML, CULTBEAUTY.CO.UK

CREED QUEEN OF SILK £165 FOR 30ML, CULTBEAUTY.CO.UK

Evoke the charm of the Italian Mediterranean with Acqua di Parma’s Mandarino Di Sicilia, a fragrance capturing the zest of sun-ripened Sicilian mandarins, layered with warm musk and floral tones. Fresh, radiant and sophisticated, this scent will transport Sicilian elegance to every moment.

Experience the addictive allure of Creed’s Queen of Silk, a sumptuous fragrance that layers delicate florals with warm, opulent amber. Inspired by the elegance and richness of silk, it envelops you in a timeless scent, exuding sophistication and charm – perfect for date night.

ESCENTRIC MOLECULES MOLECULE 01 £115 FOR 100ML, CULTBEAUTY.CO.UK

KAYALI LOVEFEST BURNING CHERRY £73 FOR 50ML, CULTBEAUTY.CO.UK

Escentric Molecules’ 01 scent is a unique, minimalist fragrance built upon a single note: Iso E super. Adapting to your skin, it creates a subtle yet captivating aura that’s fresh and woody – an elevated ‘you’ in a bottle.

This Burning Cherry scent is an irresistible blend of sweet raspberry, rich cherry and smoky woods, with hints of nutty praline and patchouli. Perfect for the autumnal season, as well as evening wear, this warm fragrance wraps you up in a sophisticated blanket that lingers beautifully.

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JO MALONE GINGER TEA BISCUIT £124, CULTBEAUTY.CO.UK

LE LABO SANTAL 33 £170 FOR 50ML, CULTBEAUTY.CO.UK

Jo Malone’s Ginger Tea Biscuit is a warm, comforting fragrance that blends sweet biscuit and soft tea notes with a fiery ginger kick. Perfect for cosy afternoons and winter getaways, it will give you a sense of homely warmth of delightful sweetness.

Le Labo’s Santal 33 is a rich and smokey blend of cedar, sandalwood and muted spices, evoking both warmth and mystery. Ideal for cosy winter evenings and the festive season, this iconic scent leaves a lasting impression.

CHARLOTTE TILBURY MORE SEX £130 FOR 100ML, CULTBEAUTY.CO.UK

MAISON MARGIELA REPLICA: ON A DATE £120 FOR 100ML, CULTBEAUTY.CO.UK

Charlotte Tilbury’s Scent of a Dream ‘More Sex’ is bold and hypnotic. It blends an array of floral and citrus notes on a base of sultry musk. Destined to captivate, it is the perfect scent to add a spray of allure and confidence to your date night.

Capturing the magic of a romantic evening in the French vineyards, this scent blends ripe blackcurrant, warm rose and earthy notes of patchouli. Envelope yourself in an atmosphere of timeless romance as the name suggests: best worn on a date!

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GIFT GUIDE

DRO!D FOOD VACUUM, £310, BIPOD.IT

It may look like a pair of binoculars but this nifty little gadget could revolutionise the way we plan meals and store leftovers. It’s essentially a powerful handheld vacuum that comes with a range of purpose-built bowls.

All you have to do is plop your meal in the bowl, shut the lid, slot in the vacuum and suck the air out of the container. Maker B!pod reckons you can store food for five times longer than if you’d just left it in the fridge.

It’s also excellent for marinating, which they say happens 81 per cent quicker.

SMEG DIGITAL SCALES £129.95, SHOP.SMEGUK.COM

TORMEK T-1 KNIFE SHARPENER £330, SHOP.TORMEK.COM

If you’re buying for the the kind of person whose kitchen is a sanctuary and every item must be carefully vetted, this funky and useful set of scales from Smeg should do the trick. It comes in three colours – blue, black and turqoise – to match the kitchen in question.

If you’re as particular about your knives as we are, the Tormek T-1 Kitchen Knife Sharpener is a must-have.

Easy and intuative to use, it effortlessly restores blades to their original sharpness with its precision-guided system. A great gift for any kitchen wizard.

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WUSTHOF SANTOKU KNIFE FROM £139, WUSTHOF.CO.UK

Brighten the kitchen drawers or countertop with this classic Santoku knife, a style of chef’s knife specific to Japan.

It has a nimble blade and improved balance to perfect the cutting process so you can cook with the precision of a focused sushi chef.

Ideal for everything from herbs to meat, the knife is crafted by German family-owned knife company Wusthof, established 1814.

HEXCLAD FRYING PAN £179 HEXCLAD.COM

KNODOS CRAFTS ESPRESSO KIT £194.22, ETSY.COM

These are Gordon Ramsay’s favourite pans for a reason. The raised hexagon design is there to give a proper sear while the inset areas are filled with non-stick material, making clean-up easy. They’re perfectly weighted and look fantastic.

Should you find yourself buying for an espresso fiend, this knock box and tamping station, designed to work with 54mm espresso machines, will go down a treat.

It includes a tamper, knock box, dosing funnel, puck screen and distribution tool – and it’s gorgeous.

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GIFT GUIDE

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Whether you’re attending an office party, having an intimate get together with friends and family, or looking for a Christmas gift, SIMON THOMSON has the seasonal spirits suggestions for you 1. THY BOG DANISH WHISKY £67.50, THEWHISKYEXCHANGE.COM

3. LEIPER’S FORK BOTTLED IN BOND £75.75, THEWHISKYEXCHANGE.COM

Denmark is famed for its beechwood smoked bacon, and that familiar wood-smoke permeates Thy’s single estate, organic whisky. Oloroso and PX sherry casks delicately layer in flavours of shortbread and sultanas. Wonderful neat, but if you’re planning a Christmas brunch, it will immediately improve your Bloody Mary with a trace of pigs in blankets.

Leiper’s Fork champions pre-prohibition whiskey making traditions. With a grain bill including corn, rye, and toasted malt barley, and using a sweet mash and pot still distillation, this Tennessee whiskey is not what Jack Daniel’s has conditioned us to expect. It won the prestigious Masters Medal at this year’s American Whiskey Masters. Upgrade your eggnog.

2. MOSSBURN 12 YEAR OLD DOMAINE DUPONT £71.95, MASTEROFMALT.COM

4. BANKHALL BRITISH SINGLE MALT £24.25, THEWHISKYEXCHANGE.COM

Coming from Blackpool, this innovative single malt takes inspiration from Irish and American production methods. The spirit is triple-distilled and aged in a mix of ex-Bourbon, ex-sherry, and new American white oak casks, resulting in a reasonably priced, versatile whisky that has sufficient fresh flavour to drink straight, but brings depth to cocktails that call for Bourbon.

Distillers and blenders Mossburn have released the second entry in their exciting Cask Collaboration series, finishing a Speyside blended malt in French oak Calvados and Pommeau casks, sourced from Domaine Dupont in Normandy. The result is a warming apple crumble of a whisky, with a dollop of vanilla cream. Christmas perfection.

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5. THE SINGLETON 14 YEAR OLD AUTUMN WALK £155, MALTS.COM

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2006 17 year old refines and heightens the rich caramel and raisins of an assertive Pedro Ximenez. This is a “Christmas cake whisky”, but it isn’t dense, or loaded with nuts and candied peel.

Fantastic as a digestif.

The Singleton range has been characterised by bright, fruity whiskies, but this latest addition to Diageo’s Single Malts Special Releases 2024 collection steps away from the house style to a “drier, spicier type of flavour”. Judicious use of Pyrenean and Spanish oak adds notes of bitter orange and pepper; an enticing alternative to conventionally Christmassy whiskies.

8. GLENFARCLAS 15 YEAR OLD £74.99, DRINKSUPERMARKET.COM

Speyside distillery Glenfarclas is famous for its sherried malts, of which the 15 year old is a superb example. Bottled at a slightly higher ABV than most of its stablemates, it carries more butterscotch, more marzipan, more cinnamon, and more gentle peat smoke, for a properly decadent fireside dram.

6. REMY MARTIN XO COGNAC £184, THEWHISKYEXCHANGE.COM

Brandy isn’t just for flaming Christmas puddings, and Remy Martin XO isn’t just brandy. This Cognac has similar flavour and intensity to the most Christmassy sherries, but without the syrupy viscosity or cloying sweetness. An XO Cognac old fashioned with chocolate bitters should be a fixture of the holiday season.

9. A GOOD OLD-FASHIONED CHRISTMAS WHISKY £79.95, THEWHISKYEXCHANGE.COM Every year The Whisky Exchange releases a Good Old-Fashioned Christmas Whisky, festively packaged, and brimming with properly Dickensian flavours (think the end of A Christmas Carol, not the beginning of Oliver Twist). The 2024 edition is a warming, sherryaged, Speyside single malt, full of marmalade and seasonal spices.

7. TOMATIN 2006 17 YEAR OLD PX EDITION £134.95, HOUSEOFMALT.CO.UK

Highland whisky-makers Tomatin are showcasing the effects of sherry casks on whisky, and their

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S ECT I O N H E R E

WATCHES

A VISA IN BLUE Grab a slice of ceramic magic from Tudor. ALEX DOAK salutes the watch ticking straight out of Red Bull F1’s pitlanes at four revs per second

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hile Rolex bows out of Formula One, vacating its seat for TAG Heuer as F1’s overall timekeeper, the sister brand to ‘The Crown’ of Geneva continues to ride shotgun with Red Bull. And appropriately enough for Tudor watches, it’s with Red Bull’s own sister team, ‘Visa Cash App RB Formula One’ – formerly ‘AlphaTauri’ from the 2020 to 2023 seasons, and before that ‘Toro Rosso’.

The good news for Tudor’s ardent collector base is that the ceramic watch worn by the constructor’s two pilots

– Oz’s legendary Daniel Ricciardo and younger Yuki Tsunoda from Japan – is now available on Civvy Street, complete with a racy Visa-blue dial that thankfully doesn’t try to squeeze-on the team name.

True to the future-forward spirit of F1, the ‘Black Bay Ceramic Blue’ that Ricciardo and Tsunoda wear in the paddock and at HQ in Faenza, Italy is relentlessly test-driven. Not only by Tudor’s crack QC team in Switzerland, or even by the ‘COSC’ facility down the road, which certifies millions of watches per year for ‘chronometer’ precision, but also by the Federal Institute of Metrology or ‘METAS’.

Its own ‘Master Chronometer’

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certification was developed in cahoots with Omega and is an open-source specification. This is refreshingly democratic for the cagey world of Swiss watchmaking, at least until you realise what it really takes to pass muster: nothing less than maintaining nearflawless accuracy using metal micromechanics resistant to 15,000 Gauss of magnetism. An MRI scan in other words, where ‘anti-magnetic’ is usually a spec’ afforded to a watch that can survive proximity to a fridge door seal.

As the model name implies, Tudor’s tiny engine is mounted within a lightweight chassis of its own, forged from matt-black monobloque ceramic. So anyone can now shop for a Bull in china.

Above: The new Vacheron Constantin Club 1755 at 45 Bond Street; Inset: The new ‘BR 03 Horizon’ from Bell & Ross

WHAT’S TICKING? The latest goings-on in the world of haute horlogerie, from an ‘artificial’ horizon to a Bond Street penthouse with views of many horizons GET CONSTANTIN

Switzerland’s most venerable watchmaker has cut the ribbon on a new member’s club (of sorts) high in the treetops of Mayfair. Named after the watchmaker’s founding year, ‘Club 1755’ is a so-called ‘experiential space’ for clients of Vacheron Constantin to convene, located a few doors down from its 37 Old Bond Street boutique. It will also host a rolling calendar of installations – inaugurated this summer by seven Nick Hornby sculptures exploring the intersection of classical horology and art.

For a brand steeped in tradition, Club 1755’s series of lounges, bar and – unusually for Bond Street – a roof terrace all feel surprisingly contemporary.

Vacheron Constantin continues to reassert itself as the more ‘Latin’ contemporary to Geneva’s other grande dame, Patek Philippe. Objects have been handpicked that celebrate British craft too, such as marquetry backgammon boards courtesy Alexandra Llewellyn.

Even more unusually, Vacheron UK’s inhouse master watchmaker Celine is lucky enough to call the club her new office.

Previously working from the basement at no. 37, her workbench is now flooded with natural light. Should they be unimpressed by whatever art is on display, VIP clients can ‘watch’ their own kinetic work of art being serviced or repaired, glass of claret in hand. l Club 1755, 45 Old Bond Street W1S 4AG, vacheronconstantin.com, by appointment only

DASHING CHAP

On the quiet, Bell & Ross has phased-out their circular pilot watches launched in 1997. In their place, the titular Messieurs Belamich and Rosillo have proven it really is hip to be square. Their entire, Swiss-made catalogue now apes the quadrangular format of every screwed-in fighter-jet cockpit instrument.

It’s no gimmick, since the French Navy’s aces really do rely on Bell & Ross’s nononsense, monochrome timepieces at Mach 1. But being French, there’s always room for whimsy and you’re looking at it (right): the latest in a long line in literal interpretations of a pilot’s dashboard.

The ‘artificial horizon’ that inspires 2024’s 999-piece special allows spatial orientation for a pilot, where the actual horizon might not be readable, especially at night or in cloud. Thanks to a vertical-axis gyroscope, the pilot can always control the aircraft’s attitude and tilt, combining a ‘floating’ spherical illustration of the earth overlaid by the silhouette of the aircraft. The new ‘BR 03 Horizon’ (£4,300, bellross.com) necessarily flattens things, but how?

The outer dial graduation indicates the aircraft’s lateral tilt angle, while the centre one shows the pitch. The large white hand indicates the minutes, the large

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striped hand marks the seconds and a large central arrow indicates the hours.

Readability is one of the primary concerns and, true to form, Bruno Belamich, Bell & Ross’s creative director has ensured there is still function in its form.

HERO IN A HALF SHELL

In parallel to its growing presence on the padel court (mostly in Spain where the sport has overtaken tennis), Certina continues its valiant CSR efforts in another blue world: that of the sea turtle. The Swiss watchmaker unveiled the new DS Super PH1000M STC, dedicated to its partnership with Sea Turtle Conservancy (STC), based in Florida since 1959.

They’ve worked together since 2017 to help fund the protection of sea turtles and their natural environments. But this is no badge-slapping exercise: the special-edition watches are utterly fabulous SCUBA-diving throwbacks with unbelievable pricetags. Inspired by the historic DS SUPER PH1000M from 1970, the latest funkadelic timepiece features a teal dial with orange accents and luminous indexes, driven within by 80-hourpower-reserve self-winding mechanics. Throw in 1,000 metres’ of depth resistance and you have quite the package at just £885.

WATC H E S From left: Chef Tom Sellers wearing his Audemars; DJ Carl Cox with his beloved Zenith; Comedian Jerry Seinfeld with his Breitling; Astronaut Don Pettit with his Omega

ON THEIR

WATCH What do Michelin-starred chefs, top DJs, comedians and occasional residents of outer space all have in common? They all need a good watch to do their extremely specific work. ALEX DOAK takes a look at the most talented people with quality on their wrists 60

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he corner of Berkeley Street and Piccadilly.

You couldn’t get more ‘Mayfair’ if you tried. So you can hardly blame top chef Tom Sellers for trying to land a spot there and then, after six years’ negotiation, succeeding.

“It’s an unbelievable site,” he says about the location of his third restaurant, Dovetale, at the top of the 1 Mayfair hotel. A two-Michelin-starred chef still in his mid-thirties, the Nottingham boy is a figurehead for his generation of tattooed, ‘intense’ young men carving things up with ne’er a starched tablecloth in sight.

Indeed, FX’s fictional TV chef of the moment ‘bears’ an eerie resemblance to Sellers, right down to formative stints with Thomas Keller and René Redzepi.

Dovetale is a major career milestone, but it was Restaurant Story in south London’s Bermondsey that elicited another milestone for Seller: a

wristwatch. It’s a very personal talisman that, it transpires, is the default choice for many talented people operating under pressurised circumstances.

The then-26-year-old Seller plumped for a green-on-green ‘Hulk’ Rolex Submariner. “Yes, green is my favourite colour,” he explains, “but if you’re a ‘watch person’ you know it’s also an expression of yourself, and an expression of heritage and craft. Like serving up a classic, well-executed dish.”

It’s no secret that, ever since, Sellers has moved from Rolex to being a ‘friend’ of Audemars Piguet, becoming its Bond Street premises’ VIP caterer. This affords for the chef a “huge opportunity to see how a family-run institution like AP ticks”.

It’s facile to compare the intricate components of a mechanical watch to the machinations of a starred kitchen.

But, satisfyingly, Sellers’ description of how he and his team stay in sync paints Restaurant Story as a timekeeper in itself.

“We have one big clock in the kitchen,”

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he says. “The irony is, though, that if you stand in my kitchen at any one time, you’ll know the time without it. I know that if napkins are being folded over there, it’s probably between 10 and 10:15 in the morning. If red wine bottles are being opened and decanted in the dining room, then it’s around five.”

This ‘workplace-as-wristwatch’ dynamic plays out across many disciplines beyond hospitality, with the one constant being an actual watch worn by their practitioner. It’s a status symbol for those who’ve made it, a literal totem of their particular craft’s timely nature. Plus, something that’s useful. Or not...

“Truth be told, I don’t think I’ve ever realistically used my Zenith Defy’s chronograph function for something specific. Does anyone, really?”

This sentiment is echoed by Britain’s living legend of electronic music, DJ Carl Cox, a man who has long suffered the ‘watch bug’. Cox is a proud latter-day member of the Zenith family, with a

WATC H E S

100-piece turntable-inspired watch bearing his name.

“That said, activating the stopwatch is a lot of fun. Hands spinning at 1/100th of a second is a lot faster than my eyes can keep up with! Every time I start it, I’m amazed by the speed and sound.

“I also love engines,” Cox adds, as a nod to his CC Motorsport passion projects, “anything from an old banger or a Mini to a Superbike or a Ferrari. But on a smaller scale, watches are even more personal, with a story behind each one.”

‘Timing is everything’ goes for music, but far more famously for comedy.

Appropriately, Jerry Seinfeld is never knowingly not strapped to a Breitling chronograph: “I would never go anywhere without a stopwatch,” he told GQ in May. “I time everything.” If the mâitre d’ in a restaurant says ‘We’ll have it ready for you in five minutes’ you better believe Seinfeld will be reaching for the start button on his Navitimer’s timer.

The same ‘click’ of a chronograph proved less pointed and rather more poignant for Jack Swigert aboard Apollo 13 in 1970. It meant he could time the 14-second fuel burn required to align their ‘successful failure’ of a mission’s re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. The astronaut was using Omega’s answer to Breitling’s Navitimer and Zenith’s El Primero, the ‘Moonwatch’ Speedmaster, which NASA had tendered, tested and ‘qualified’ for the Apollo programme.

But what few realise is how the Speedie’s modern-day ‘X-33’ LCD-display incarnation has proven just as crucial to NASA’s recent orbital exploits, while remaining just as personal to its practitioner.

At the time of writing, Don Pettit was on the cusp of returning to the

Left: DJ Carl Cox browses records wearing his Zenith watch; Below: The makeshift watch-repair table made by NASA astronaut Don Pettit to fix his Omega in space

International Space Station (ISS) for a third time as NASA’s oldest serving astronaut, at 69 years of age.

“The X-33 has a titanium case and has acoustical vents in the back which means the alarm is really loud... the loudest alarm I’ve ever heard from a wristwatch.

[It’s] great [in] orbit because you’re living in a very noisy environment.

“So what broke..?”

Over 20 years ago and only recently shared on Pettit’s Instagram account (mostly featuring his incredible astrophotography), this vented caseback

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needed to come off for an unusual bout of field repair.

“Omega have now fixed these issues, so this watch I’m wearing is a newer model,” Pettit says, brandishing his X-33 towards the webcam from quarters at ‘Star City’, Moscow. “But most functions are operated via the crown, which you use a lot, always pushing the crown to change functionality. So this broke, fell off and got lost.

“All these bits float around and then get stuck on filters... You have to clean the filters once a week, cos all this junk accumulates in them. And it was like, ‘wow! I found the bits for my watch. I can actually repair my watch!’”

The video may look like a YouTube tutorial, but Pettit filmed it long before social media as we know it. He needed to fix his watch, since the Columbia space-shuttle disaster of 2003 had grounded the ISS’s resupply chain for over two years. And fix it he did: with tweezers, a Leatherman multi-tool and double-sided tape to stop the tiny parts floating away.

“After my watch-repair video downlinked to Mission Control, the maintenance people at NASA started to think: ‘Let’s take our boxes apart and fix them on orbit. Astronauts aren’t aren’t just bulls in a china closet.’

“I proved we had dexterity… that we could do fine repair work on spaceship.”

It’s (almost) a million miles from the DJ booth of Space in Ibiza, or the heat-lamped pass of a London kitchen.

But what clearly shows is how 40-odd millimetres’ worth of wristworn timepiece can assume such myriad purpose, both personal and professional.

WOMAN’S HOUR LAURA MCCREDDIE-DOAK

LOOK EAST

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Japan is taking on Switzerland as a place of watchmaking excellence, with a little help from Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro

ext year the sell-out stage adaptation of Hayao Mizyaki’s tale of two girls, a catbus and a forest spirit, My Neighbour Totoro, will transfer to the West End. This year Spirited Away, another Studio Ghibli classic about a girl, a bathhouse for gods, and a boy who turns into a dragon, was staged at the London Coliseum in Japanese with surtitles. On television recently we’ve been transported to feudal Japan in Shōgun and experienced the seedy underbelly of late-90s yakuza-run Tokyo in Tokyo Vice.

Trendy sorts who used to carry Daunt Books bags now have the distinctive blue covers of Fitzcarraldo editions of translated Japanese novels tucked under their arm.

Where children of the 1980s and 90s, looked to the US for our cultural diet, young people today are far more likely to seek their inspiration from Japan. By the same token, whereas watch writers of my generaiton looked to Switzerland, eyes are now trained upon Japan.

Granted Japan’s presence in the UK market isn’t a new thing. Seiko has been available here since 1971, the G-Shock and Baby G craze engulfed the 1990s and for a time you couldn’t hit a hipster in Hackney that didn’t have a gold-plate digital Casio on their wrist.

But this feels different. Grand Seiko arriving on these shores in 2010 opened non-Japanophile watch collectors’ eyes to the idea that Japan wasn’t all affordable automatics and cheap quartz. These watches were, and still are, made in a similar way to the Swiss.

However there’s an emphasis on nature, and on that typically Japanese quest for perfection that is ultimately unattainable: dō. Its dial names, for instance, are taken from the landscape as seen from its Shizukuishi Watch Studio in the Iwate District as it passes through the 24 tekki, or seasons. It brings a spirituality to watchmaking that seems to have been somewhat lost in a Swiss industry that increasingly prioritises robotics and super-efficient production.

As a generation of twentysomethings who fell in love with Studio Ghibli became of watchbuying age – and also of an age to show these films to their children – (I’m talking about myself here) brands such as Seiko leveraged that nostalgia with Ghibli limited editions. Cannily choosing deep-cut films such as Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, it parlayed the IYKYK element of discovering Ghibli at a time when you could be sniffy about watching them in dub, making these limited editions even more desirable.

Obscure manga characters have also started appearing on watches from Swiss brands, which means that Switzerland does at least have one eye on what is happening trend-wise.

What practical effect, if any, this will have on Switzerland is not yet evident but the mere fact that the chief exec of Tissot is parlaying a childhood love of manga into his brand’s watch design shows that even the Helvetians aren’t impervious to Japan’s cultural takeover. l Laura is a leading watch and jewellery writer

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WATC H E S

TIME Do you know the watch your favourite singer wears? LAURA MCCREDDIE-DOAK delves into this decades-old relationship

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ack in 2014, former AC/DC manager Michael Browning published a book called Dog Eat Dog, detailing the five years he spent from 1974 taking the band from raw, young outsiders to stadium fillers. In those early days, he had two pieces of advice – don’t wear a watch and never take public transport. In an interview with Daily Mail Australia for the book’s launch he explained his anti-watch stance. “I always felt whenever I saw someone I really liked as a rock star like Jimmy Hendrix or Mick Jagger, they didn’t wear a watch. In fact, whenever I saw a rock star wearing a watch, psychologically it made me think they’re as constrained about time as I am, it didn’t sit well with the image. So, I made sure [AC/DC] never wore watches, that was one of my rules.”

Browning would certainly have something to say about today’s musicians, who not only regularly take to the stage wearing a watch, but who also have collections that generate column inches from awe-struck watch enthusiasts. There’s Ed Sheeran, whose collection is worth a reported $8m (£6.3m), and spans everything from a £207 Swatch x Omega MoonSwatch to the Richard Mille RM 38-01 “Bubba Watson” Tourbillon, which is for sale on Chrono24 for the bargain price of £2,026,015.

Jay-Z has amassed a fair number of showstoppers throughout his career. In 2021, he was the first person spotted wearing the Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711 with the Tiffany blue dial, which was made in collaboration with the iconic New York jeweller. He also has a selection of Richard Mille’s, most of which are priced over £1m; a Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime, the most complicated watch in the brand’s arsenal; and a custom Hublot Big Bang, gifted to him by Beyonce in 2012. At the time, it was reportedly worth $5m and is set with 1,282 diamonds, including more than 100 carats of baguette-cut stones, and took 40 months to make.

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Elvis Presley with his Hamilton Ventura, which he famously wore on the set of Blue Hawaii

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WATC H E S

And you need only type “John Mayer” into Hodinkee’s search bar to see how many times he pops up to talk about how many watches he owns.

All these examples might make this relationship seem like a new phenomenon, and while the scale at which these people collect is new, musicians taking an interest in timepieces isn’t. Miles Davis had a Breitling Navitimer and was also photographed in a yellow gold Rolex DayDate. Chet Baker wore a Cartier Tank, Duke Ellington also had Tank but his was a rather interesting jump hour called a Tank à Guichet, as well as owning Patek Philippe Ref. 1563 Split Seconds chronograph. Elvis Presley made the Hamilton Ventura famous by wearing his own model on the set of Blue Hawaii and John Lennon’s Patek Philippe 2499 is legendary because no one knew where it was until recently. The issue of its ownership is now the subject of an ongoing lawsuit, whose verdict is currently in the hands of the Tribunal Fédéral, Switzerland’s Supreme Court.

There should be a ruling soon on whether it belongs to Yoko Ono or an undisclosed man, known only as Mr A, who says he legally bought the watch in 2014.

“I would say that the passion for watch collecting among some musicians can be attributed to several key factors, which go beyond mere financial capacity or the desire to own luxury items,” says Raymond Weil boss, Elie Bernheim.

Raymond Weil as a brand regularly collaborates with musicians or their estates to create limited editions (including a Freelancer AC/DC edition).

“Musicians, by their very nature, have a profound appreciation for art and craftsmanship. The intricate design, precise engineering, and the history behind each timepiece resonate with their own pursuit of perfection in music.

Both music and watchmaking involve a deep understanding of timing, precision, and creativity.”

One thing that stands out is that many

of the musicians who collect watches are men. Rihanna is one artist with a serious list of timepieces to her name. She famously approached Jacob & Co to make her a watch choker in 2023 ahead of the Louis Vuitton show, ending up with a Brilliant Flying Tourbillon fitted with a bespoke black leather strap worn around her neck. She also wore a Jacob & Co Brilliant Northern Lights in red for the Superbowl the same year. In the past she has also sported Cartier, Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Chopard. Alicia Keys apparently has a couple of Piagets and a Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso, but by and large, women, both in music and in real life, don’t collect on the same scale as men.

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Left: Richard Mille RM 38-01 “Bubba Watson” Tourbillon owned by Ed Sheeran; Main: AC/DC, whose manager Michael Browning famously banned them from wearing watches; Below: The Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711 with Tiffany blue dial, as first worn by Jay-Z

This is partly because watches are among the few signifiers outside of clothing that men have. Women have many ways to show who they are and how much they earn – bags, shoes, jewellery. Men have watches. The brands they choose says a lot about them. You can’t argue that people looked at Sheeran differently when he appeared on stage wearing a Patek Philippe. Not such a scruff now.

Another part of the appeal of collecting, according to psychologists, is about acquiring knowledge rather than just ‘things’. To a person buying their first watch, the language and jargon can be confusing. But learning the difference

between a chronometer and a chronograph, or how a co-axial works, can be as seductive as buying the watch itself. Just read what Sheeran said in an op-ed for Hodinkee back in 2019: “I knew nothing about Patek, but soon found myself in a rabbit hole of the internet, finding out more and more about them.

And then I met John Mayer – who steered me this way and that in collecting, educating me on all things horology. He told me about vintage stuff, about things with a Tiffany stamp, brand history, pieces uniques. The list goes on.”

Bernheim put a romantic spin on all this: “Musicians express themselves through their music, and they also use

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watches as a form of personal expression,” he says. “A carefully chosen timepiece can reflect a musician’s personality, style, and even their journey.

Each watch tells a story, much like each piece of music they create. Watches are sentimental objects that mark significant milestones in musicians’ lives as well.

Whether it’s a watch acquired to celebrate a successful album release, or a gift received to commemorate a personal achievement, these timepieces carry emotional weight.”

In other words, musicians buy watches in the same way most of us do, they just have the readies to buy more. Unless you’re AC/DC, of course.

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TRAVEL

S ECT I O N H E R E

T I L L CA by E M A N IT S

The Palazzo Talìa in Rome has been designed by Luca Guadagnino, the Italian film director behind Call Me By Your Name and Challengers

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ome to the great and good of Rome throughout the 16th century, the Palazzo Talia in Italy’s capital has been redesigned as a boutique hotel, with much of the interior by the lauded Studiolucaguadagnino, the design firm set up by film director Luca Guadagnino.

The signature suite as well as the public spaces have been reimagined by Guadagnino, celebrating the finest Italian craftsmanship. Guadagnino’s team say the bar, restaurant and spa facilities “seemlessly marry” the building’s historical opulence with “contemporary allure.”

When it was functioning as a palace, the building welcomed nobles and high ranking clergy until it shuttered in 1999.

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Now welcoming visitors, the pièce de résistance is the top floor suite, with a 66 square-metre terrace and peach wood panelling. Another centrepiece is a floral carpet running throughout the palace, guiding guests towards the central staircase and Magna Hall, where famous 18th century frescoes hang. The worlds of film, travel and design unite in one of the most exciting openings of the year. l palazzotalia.com

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FINDING GOLDFINGER IN THE ALPS As the best Bond film ever made turns 60, ADAM BLOODWORTH pilgrimages to Andermatt in Switzerland to recreate the car chase. In an Aston Martin, naturally. Photos by TOBI STIDOLPH

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here’s a secret to cracking the Swiss reserve – take a stroll on their highways. The Furkapass, straddling the cantons of Uri and Valais in the heart of Switzerland, is a gorgeous drive, but you get another perspective entirely on foot. It was a Saturday and the irate drivers of vintage Porsches honked in disbelief; the arms of wealthy weekend trippers thrown to the air in anger as we strolled the tarmac. Pissing off the Europeans: it was a good start.

We hiked the mountain road that curls like spaghetti falling into the bowl of Andermatt, the mountain village at the base of the valley. On foot, the Furkapass appears to perform an optical illusion, the bends in the road contorting like a dancer’s body.

It feels far more remote than it should given we’re a five-minute roar of the Aston from our Alpine guesthouse, where an autumnal jamboree of venison loin and pumpkin soup was waiting for us (sod skiing, autumn in the Alps is bliss).

Alpine passes – the Swiss term for roads that go up and over the mountaintops – traverse the landscape like strawberry laces dangled over the raggedy peaks.

Motoring enthusiasts spend a week in Andermatt, where evergreen pine forests are threaded with Evian-fresh waterfalls that meander to open planes where cowbells jangle around the necks of sedate bovines. This is spectacular, picture-postcard Switzerland. Drive to get lost; pull over somewhere so remote that no-one could hear you scream.

It was the area’s otherworldy quality that captured Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman’s attention for the filming of Goldfinger, the Bond film marking its 60th anniversary this year. A lifetime later, it remains the best 007 outing (fight me) and has one of the most iconic car chases. Bond is pursued by the vengeful Tilly Masterson as both follow Auric Goldfinger to his gold vault depository. The scene was shot at the Furkapass in 1964; Goldfinger in a Rolls-Royce, her in a Mustang, and Sean Connery debuting the DB5, earmarking the beginning of the franchise’s enduring relationship

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with Aston Martin.

Connery spent four bleary nights in Andermatt. Reports reveal that the Scottish star hit the hay at three o’clock in the morning after drunken nights and was up for make-up at seven, leaving the hotel to arrive on set by eight. One night he was wheeled around the otherwise sleepy village in a shopping trolley that upturned and fell in a ditch. Long brown hairs entangled in his bed found by cleaning staff at the Hotel Bergidyll appear to confirm reports of his infidelity (Connery was married to the actress Diane Cilento at the time).

Walking could only last so long. A lifelong Bond nerd, I was driving a special edition of the Aston Martin DB12, released in a run of 60 to celebrate the film’s anniversary. Opened in 1866 for horsedrawn postal services, the first motorcar traversed the Furkapass that runs from Hospental to Oberwald in 1921. The round, pebbledash bollards featured in Goldfinger remain along the track that’s still occasionally single-lane despite the spike in traffic, a sign of how little changes around here.

I’ve brought the DB12 to freshen things up: Connery couldn’t have imagined opening up this four litre V8 twin-turbo engine on these straights. The car’s updated suspension and enhanced stability – aided by the gold side strake in homage to the film – make me the comfiest driver ever to have taken on these formidable bends. And the smuggest, too.

We go in mist, in rain and, finally in squint-inducing sunshine (more on that later), parking on the corner where the car chase was shot to admire the view of mountains and metalwork. There are nerdy add-ons: the same Silver Birch paintwork is here as it was on the DB from the film, now not road-worthy and yours for just £2.75 million (it comes with all the gadgets in the movie, including revolving

Connery couldn’t have imagined opening up this four litre V8 twin-turbo engine on these straights

Clockwise from top left: The Aston Martin DB12 Adam drove; Adam recreating the iconic Sean Connery pose; The famous Hotel Galenstock on the Furkapass; Bond even has his own street here

number plates). Stepping out to take a picture on the new Canon EOS R8 then dropping back into the carbon fibre seats to feel the 800Nm of torque is, like Bond himself, the sort of presence that needs to be experienced rather than described.

By 1964, Connery and Bond were in their heyday, riding high on the success of low-budget franchise kick-offs Dr. No and From Russia With Love. For Goldfinger, it was right place, right time: MGM bosses were convinced of the franchise’s appeal, and splashed out. It is, in every way, the best Bond outing. Its narrative arc offers the most blissful ride (I could put a car pun in here but Bond would be ashamed), the best villain, the most memorable girls, the prettiest views, a snappy runtime so you

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aren’t shifting in your seat. Shirley Bassey!

Death by gold paint! Miami! Preceding the baggier Thunderball, the precursor to the end of the Connery era (by the time he got to You Only Live Twice the Scot had mentally checked out), Goldfinger harks back to the halcyon days of Bond and was the film that established 007 as the man we know today.

It’s impossible for millennials like me to imagine the mood in the room when the picture was released, but watching Goldfinger as a lifelong obsessive is like rewatching your parents’ wedding video; it is the best you can do to inhabit a formative era that must have been so much fun.

The Pinte Pub&Club in Andermatt closes at 1am, forcing us to have an earlier night than Connery would have approved of, but I consoled myself by falling into the very same bedroom at the Hotel Bergidyll. Room 20 was where Connery got his four hours of kip a night.

The teal-tiled bathroom remains the same, as does the wooden slatting on the walls. The owners recently performed a light renovation on the building, and the room now features photos of Connery posing on the Furkapass. It’s for the fans but not in an overbearing way. Tania Mallet, who played Tilly, was next door in

the smaller room 21 and the duo shared a balcony. Sitting out there over a nightcap, you wonder whether Mallet emigrated for more space (though her locks were blonde, not brown).

Downstairs, some rather odd artwork of Connery and Mallet hangs on the walls of the lobby, which retains the same brick-built chimney that was there in the Goldfinger era. Back then, this public space was used for the production crew and Connery was known to stand here to make long calls back home.

Next door in the restaurant, one booth where Connery is pictured raising a glass with wild, bleary eyes still remains, though the Bergidyll’s days as a live music and nightlife hotspot are long gone. Today the restaurant is a much more subdued affair – one octogenarian lady, whose parents ran the Hotel Belvédère on the Furkapass, keeps the Goldfinger era alive, coming in almost daily for her evening meal.

But dressing in my dinner jacket – hung in the very same wardrobe where Connery must have put his – was starting to feel like a pastiche. Bond would have hated that, so we left the Bergidyll for the hulking new Chedi Andermatt across the road, a glistening sign of Andermatt’s contemporaneity.

At an elevation of 1,437 meters above sea level, the ski village is a crossroads at the heart of Switzerland. Once sidelined by the bougier St Moritz and Gstaad, Andermatt is undergoing an explosive redevelopment after a 55 per cent stake in the slopes was acquired by US mountain resort company Vail Resorts. The tourist board are promoting one cohesive Andermatt, but really the town is warping into two halves: the historic centre’s traditional Alpine style architecture, and the new high-rises a short walk away.

The Radisson Blu hotel and private apartment complexes soar up like any London newbuild. Their sale to

international buyers who pop in once or twice a year has irked locals, many of whom, like the lady who dines at the Bergidyll, have been in Andermatt for the best part of a century. She’s not unusual, Andermatt is the sort of place people are born in, leave for a bit, then return to for their final years: touchingly, the three children who sell Goldfinger Alpine roses in the Furkapass scene still live in the village; my tour guide is good friends with one of them. Now in his seventies, he remembers the filming well.

At the Chedi, a spectacular resort hotel that feels slightly out of place in the village, there was more venison and pumpkin soup.

On a Sunday night the restaurant must have had over a hundred covers, many of them business tables; the independent restaurants in town were dead.

On our final morning, we had a pootle around the heated outdoor pool where we

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stared up at the mountain peaks and all their unforgiving angularity. We had planned to spend our last hours in this style, doing literally nothing other than flailing about with some expensive bubbles, both pool and stomach-bound.

But then the sun came out – finally – and we had to visit the Furkapass one final time, a ten minute drive away, to bid it Uf Widerluege. The craggy heathland by the roadside gleamed a bleached yellowy-green and the rock shone in tens of shades of graphite. All of a sudden, for one final time, we were blissfully lost. l Enquire about the Aston Martin DB12 Goldfinger Edition at astonmartin.com or call 01926 644644. The new Canon EOS R8, used to shoot everything on this page, is £1,699; store.canon.co.uk. To book the hotels Adam stayed at visit hotelbergidyll.ch/en and chechediandermatt.com

S ECT I O N H E R E

here on mull, we celebrate creativity and are expressive in nature.

This is evident in the colourful houses of Tobermory, framed by the rich and dramatic landscape of our beautiful island. This passion for art in nature, isn’t just reflected in the harbour waters, but in the distinctive spirits we craft here at our coastal distillery. Everything we make is an expression of the rich palate that our Hebridean home provides.

Originally our ‘Tobermory 15 Year Old’ release, these spirits have spent up to 11 additional years in Oloroso casks at our Hebridean distillery.

The result is an exploration of time, craft and exquisite whisky. tobermorydistillery.com 74

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HOWLING AT THE

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FULL MOON

t’s 2am and 24 degrees in Pattaya, Thailand.

In a field outside of the city, groups of people are shouting and laughing into loud hailers then replaying the subsequent sounds through the dozens of stacked-up speakers. The noise created could accurately be described as an infernal racket. But it’s a human racket: the incredible sound of hundreds of people expressing themselves through sound, the gathering together of ordinary noises, turned into an entertainment spectacle. It could only be Wonderfruit.

The festival, launched ten years ago by Pranitan “Pete” Phornprapha and Thai musician Montonn “Jay” Jira, features the sorts of tech-art crossover projects Glastonbury couldn’t dream of. The Polygon Stage is Glastonbury’s Gas Tower given a glow up: a mind-blowing 360 experience with sound that goes beyond the functional, placing speakers in a circle and having people stand inside to create artworks made of noise. Designed like a giant nest, twirls of metal inlaid with speakers spiral above your head, radiating warm neon lights that pulsate in sync with the DJ. At sunrise a track featuring an electronic crescendo plays as the first shards of light stray above the horizon; not quite sunrise, more that special moment an iota before, when

the black begins to dim. Under the Polygon Dome, some carry on dancing, but most stand and stare up at the installation, the dancefloor morphing into something worthy of the Tate.

At Wonderfruit, full bottles of spirits are displayed on bar tops to show off the drinks available but no one snatches them. It’s partly because the vibe matches the country’s sun-and-sea image, partly because no-one’s binge drinking, and partly because no one’s a tosser. Weed is legalised and that makes the dancefloor a warmer and more gently expressive place than any pumpedup club in the UK. It’s also too hot: you can’t be bothered necking a load of spirits in this heat. This is shoulders-down partying without the barging about, without the huge headliners, and without the commercial stages enticing you to buy sugary drinks. Multiple venues encourage punters to lay on beanbags like they’re at a sound bath. It is beachfront relaxation but with something to do: surely the solution to all South-East Asia naysayers who lambast the idea of ‘laying around doing nothing’.

There are yoga classes and installations recreating traditional Thai houses and workshops with sound, as well as beautiful lakes to swim in. Activities go on all day and all night; after sunrise, special sets

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Thailand’s reputation for hedonism is tied up with the Full Moon Party, but the locals have set up far cooler events. ADAM BLOODWORTH parties until dawn in the surprisingly relaxed and arty atmosphere of Pattaya take place at a stage with staggering views of the nearby mountains.

It started with the Full Moon Party. The event began as a birthday bash under the full moon in the mid-1980s on Haad Rin beach at the southerly tip of the island of Koh Pha-ngan. During those halcyon days, the event was a jamboree for expressive thought, the sort of place where the people brave enough to go back-packing in the pre-commercial era could come together to look at the stars.

Even by 2000 when Danny Boyle’s The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio hurled Thailand’s hippy culture into the limelight, heralding a new era of mass tourism, the Full Moon Party was relatively underground. But by the mid-noughties it had become something more cynical; thefts became common; stages collapsed; attendance for the one-night event spiked from hundreds to tens of thousands. These days the tabloids write stories about it. The Full Moon Party has turned into a students’ union transposed from regional England to one of the prettiest places in the world.

But through osmosis, some of the people searching for hedonism began building a new party scene. They are often collaborations between locals and the country’s expat community.

Many move there because of the nation’s utopic

reputation, but these expats have reacted to the over-commercialism of the Full Moon Party and islands like Koh Pii Pii, where the first thing you’ll see when you get off the ferry is a McDonald’s, by forging new creative paths. The results combine boundary-pushing experiments with music and technology with utterly stunning locations.

After Wonderfruit we drove east from Pattaya back to the capital. After four hours in the car we reached the chaos of Bangkok, where thousands gather hundreds of metres up in skyscrapers for rooftop parties. On the streets, the bronze of the temples competes in the colour stakes against tuktuks splashed in magnificent primary blue, and there’s the stench of durian fruit from the market. But we sleep before an early rise: a taxi towards the province of Trat near the Cambodian border.

At Laem Sok Pier, on the Lae Sok Peninsula, a fiery seafood soup, then the ferry towards the island of Koh Mak for the Fly To The Moon Festival. The island is small and not at all touristy. The boat is full of expats who have travelled down from Bangkok. I’m with friends who live in the country and when we board the 100-person ferry, they know a third of the boat. Many are in their forties and fifties, and for one reason or another, have chosen an alternative life away from the conventional

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Above: The Polygon Stage at Wonderfruit Festival near Pattaya; Below: A giant lantern hangs above the crowd at this arty gathering

pressures of the UK. Here it is rarer to hear conversations about children and traditional heteronormative set-ups; it’s more common to see people from different age groups mingling. For anyone who feels a little out of place in London, these authentic Thailand events provide a refreshing blast of unconventional thought.

On Koh Mak, there is one cash machine.

It often runs out of money. There is no 7 Eleven, the popular supermarket chain, on the islands, and just one major concreted road runs around the circumference. You can walk across it at its skinniest point. We were staying at the By The Sea resort and walked over to Koh Mak Fantasia hotel to kayak out to Ko Kham, a close by island with a deserted luxury hotel complex and a lagoon. The annual Fly To The Moon Festival takes place at three remote beaches across the island and has the homemade feel of the UK’s Secret Garden Party. Elaborate stages are built under exotic treetop canopies skirting remote bays. There are hundreds (not thousands) of attendees, so it’s house party vibes but in paradise, and that’s not hyperbole. The intimacy means friendships form, something vanishingly rare at public events. One stage was a massive pirate ship, another a camp-looking dragon with loads of heads.

All were about four elaborate dance moves away from the beach and the sea.

On Koh Mak, we got into a routine: laze on the beach all day then head to the festival to watch the sunset while sitting on the jetty, then dance until 2am before

On Koh Mak, we got into a routine: laze on the beach then head to the festival to watch the sunset while sitting on the jetty

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laying for a few hours on the dewey grass before rising again for the pilgrimage to sunrise. Partying in Thailand requires commitment: the culture is to arrive at sunset and stay until sunrise, and with the lunar calendar staying the same all year (sun up at 6am, down at 6pm), you better wear comfy shoes. By 7am people who used to have formal jobs in the City were sharing kayaks with new friends and paddling away from the shore, finding a moment’s peace to take in the night that had been.

The Full Moon Party spirit endures. It’s just nowhere near Haad Rin Beach.

FREQUENT FLYER KYLE MACNEILL

PLANE WEIRD

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From TikTok videos played out loud to a crushing sense of ennui: how the airport broke my spirit

’m not a nervous flyer in the usual sense.

Being in a tin can at an altitude of 35,000 feet (that’s half the height of Gary Barlow’s son, for reference) doesn’t really get me rattled.

The rational side of me kicks in. You’re more likely to be hit by a car, or die from a coconut falling on your head, or catch some horrible flesh-eating tropical disease. Yeah, that feels better.

But questing through an airport gives me a terminal sense of dread, a turbulent anxiety, a deep-seated terror. I can never get the security scanner pose right, like a bad Hole in The Wall contestant. Last week, I found myself slumped on a departures chair in front of WHSmith’s where some lads set off a whole shelf of singing and dancing Christmas tree plushies.

It wasn’t always like this. When I was younger, I used to quite enjoy flying. I’d get excited about miniature plane food, buying a glossy mag and watching a trashy film on a tiny screen. As I got older, I was quite happy perusing Duty Free, dousing myself in enough sample perfume to last the entire trip, grabbing a cheap pint at the bar and sauntering onto the plane.

And it’s fair to say that airports and aeroplanes do still hold an air of mystery. Both are strange places caught between worlds; time and space are warped.

It’s why you get that uncanny feeling when you walk through an airport, caught in a jumbo limbo. I read a lot of Mark Fisher, who bangs on about liminality, at the pub and I recently went down a rabbit hole reading his history of service stations. Which is to say, I’m into this kind of thing.

But now, there’s an air of misery, too, from working your way through departures to being spat out the other side at arrivals. No wonder Airline is enjoying a revival on X; the last couple of years have seen endless delays, lost luggage, major cock-ups and e-Gate-Gate. I nearly missed a flight last year when

an airline worker, tape measure in hand, declared my bag was a centimetre too tall.

“Air travel affects how people behave,” writes Robert Bor in his catchily-titled book Psychological Factors in Airline Passenger and Crew Behaviour: A Clinical Overview (not exactly an airport novel). “Some people regress to an infantile stage of development [or] confide the most personal and intimate details of their life to a complete stranger.” Travel stress, too much booze, claustrophobia, low air pressure, clashing personalities and anxiety equals cabin fever.

This has really taken off recently. In the last few months alone, there have been scandals involving vodka-charged violence (Manchester to Ibiza); excessively loud rapping (Liverpool to Amsterdam); pissing in the cabin (Derby to Tenerife), fighting over a MAGA cap (Heathrow to Texas) and a handjob under a coat (Tenerife to Bristol). I’ve swerved anything quite that bad, but a stag do behind me practising their best “BOSH!” nearly sent me over the edge earlier this year.

Everybody hates those people who blast TikTok videos on the bus, but it’s the same for planes; people watching entire movies on board without headphones is now very much A Thing. Maybe rawdogging a flight is for the best.

I’m not misty-eyed about the ‘Golden Age’ of travel, when flights looked like luxury hotels and Concorde gave us supersonic runway glamour. Nor am I a fancy high-flyer or business lounge lizard; economy works just fine for me. I’m not asking for much. But, you know, maybe free water and not having to sit in the tuck-jump position would be a bit nice?

Perhaps, though, we can apply some blue-sky thinking and see the Herculean effort of catching a flight as something positive. Maybe one of those long-haul flights could be a greener train to the countryside instead.

Because Euston’s a laugh, right? l Kyle is a culture and fashion writer, and a man who has had enough of airports

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A DV E RTO R I A L

LONDON STANSTED MAKES THINGS POSSIBLE Why London Stansted is the convenient choice for anyone looking to get away for business or leisure

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ith an evergrowing list of destinations plus airport facilities and services that enable you to build the exact experience you want, London Stansted is just a short train ride away from the heart of the City of London, and from the historic city of Cambridge. Here is your essential guide to London Stansted and how it is the simple choice for your next getaway:

MORE POSSIBILITIES

London Stansted currently serves 30 million passengers a year, making it the fourth busiest airport in the UK and in the top 20 in Europe.

From Dublin to Dubai, Madrid to Marrakesh, passengers can choose from more than 200 destinations across 40 countries in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Stansted offers more scheduled connections to Europe than any other UK airport, including many destinations not available from any others.

This extensive and growing route network is provided by leading airlines including Ryanair, Jet2.com, easyJet, Pegasus and Tui, with world-renowned Emirates also offering double-daily flights to Dubai which allows passengers to access the airline’s global network of over 140 destinations.

THE SIMPLE CHOICE

No matter where you are travelling to, London Stansted offers all its passengers a simple and seamless experience, with everything you need all under one roof, from a fantastic range of shops, bars and restaurants in the departure lounge to a super-connected transport hub. So, if you want a family meal to start your holiday in style, a coffee with friends to relax before boarding or a quiet corner to

plug-in your devices ahead of your flight, we’ve got you covered.

EMIRATES LOUNGE TAKES OFF

Emirates has opened its doors to a new lounge at London Stansted with the airline investing more than £4m to design a spacious 900-square-metre lounge that can accommodate up to 125 guests, including First and Business Class customers, as well as Emirates Skywards members.

The airline has rapidly grown its services and presence at London Stansted since it first began operating in 2018, and now offers passengers from across London and the East of England 14 weekly flights to its hub in Dubai where they can also take advantage of over 140 onward connections to Asia, the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, Africa and Australasia.

Located near the departure gate and offering direct boarding to the aircraft,

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customers can look forward to a spacious lounge with new furnishings and dedicated seating areas to dine and unwind in before a flight. Customers can also enjoy a wide food and beverage selection, complimentary Wi-Fi, and shower facilities and amenities.

Emirates has partnered with Sussexbased Full Circles Farms, to roll out a “farm to table” food concept in its lounge, offering customers seasonal menus with fresh, organic vegetables and exquisite local dishes. Customers can also enjoy premium spirits and liqueurs, a selection of excellent wine, and a range of the finest Moët & Chandon champagnes.

Welcoming the new lounge, Gareth Powell, London Stansted’s Managing Director, said: “The opening of Emirates’ new world-class lounge is fantastic news for London Stansted and demonstrates the airline’s commitment to the airport and the wider region. The lounge boasts

one of the best views of the airport and will provide an experience of luxury and comfort for the airline’s First and Business Class customers.”

courses, including Emirates Golf Club, where the Dubai Desert Classic is held every year, Jumeirah Golf Estates, and The Els Club.

WINTER TRAVEL

THE ALGARVE, PORTUGAL

While the main summer getaway season has long passed, there is still plenty more on offer for those looking to head away in the coming weeks, whether it’s golf, skiing or just some winter sunshine thanks to the extensive choice of great value flights available from London Stansted.

DUBAI, UAE

Weather: 24°C-31°C Flight time: 7 hours Flights: £535 return with Emirates Golf: The Dubai Creek Golf & Yacht Club offers an exceptional golfing experience, featuring championship courses designed by renowned architects. Dubai also offers several world-class golf

Weather: 16°C-20°C degrees (Faro) Flight time: 3 hours Flights: Ryanair offers one-way fares to Faro from £15.99 Golf: Known for its pristine golf courses and stunning coastal landscapes, the Algarve is a golfers’ paradise. Among the golf courses in the region are Vilamoura, which hosts the annual Algarve Open, and Quinta do Lago Championship Course or Vale do Lobo Ocean Course.

Alternatively, if hitting the slopes is your idea of a perfect winter getaway, London Stansted has a huge array of options, whether you’re a seasoned pro or a novice to the slopes, so everyone can enjoy a winter wonderland escape.

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MORE TO COME

London Stansted is experiencing the busiest period in the airport’s history, with 30 million passengers passing through the terminal each year, and is the second busiest port of entry for overseas visitors to London.

To keep pace with increasing demand from passengers and airlines alike, it’s embarking on an exciting new chapter which will see more than £1bn invested in Stansted over the next five years, enabling the airport to connect more people and businesses in London and the east of England to even more global destinations, while welcoming millions more visitors to the UK. The centrepiece of the plans is a £600m extension to the airport’s existing terminal, which will create a bright, spacious environment, with more seating areas plus new shops, bars and restaurants to give travellers even more choice than they have today.

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A NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM Palazzo Previtera is a Sicilian guesthouse like no other. STEVE DINNEEN checks in for a stay at this “living museum” in the foothills of Mt Etna

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was sitting on my private terrace, glass of local Mt Etna Mascalese red in hand, when the air raid siren went off, its terrible drone bouncing off the rooftops and church towers below. This was troubling given my proximity to the world’s most active volcano, which last erupted as recently as July. But when a crowd of locals failed to run screaming from the doors of the sleepy 17th century town of Linguaglossa, I chalked it off as a false alarm. Instead, I went back to gazing at the kind of starscape you only find in remote, mountainous regions like this; venus and mars were recognisable with the naked eye and I spotted two shooting stars (I wished on them but they were probably only satellites).

The next morning Alfio Puglisi, the owner of the Palazzo Previtera “living museum”, told me the siren is in fact a call to mass from one of the local churches, designed to penetrate far into the vineyards and olive groves of this bucolic region of Sicily.

Linguaglossa was founded upon a lava stream in the mid 16th century and Puglisi’s ancestral ties to Palazzo Previtera date back almost as far, with his family residing there since 1649. Unassuming from the outside, with its quaint cornflower-yellow facade, it is in fact a vast, mazelike structure, filled with strange, looping corridors, vaulted basements and sprawling grounds. In 15 years of writing about some of the world’s most fancy and unusual destinations, I have never seen anything quite like it.

It’s far too personal and outlandish to be a hotel – there are only three suites in the main building and a couple of villas in the grounds – but to call it a B&B feels woefully inadequate. It feels like nothing more than a mad, eccentric aristocrat’s home at which you are an unlikely guest, which is exactly what it is. As you wander its various lounges and annexes and libraries (of which there are three, one containing a first print-edition of Thomas Aquinas), you’re hit by a riot of colour and texture. Paintings of Puglisi’s family, some dating back hundreds of years, hang wherever you go, stark and serious against the hand-painted wallpaper and tiles and ceilings. Every surface of every room is full of... stuff. Carved knick-knacks, quill pens, ceramics, religious ephemera. There’s an incredible, tiny vaulted chapel, complete with mobile confessionbooth. You could lose days exploring the place.

Outside are olive trees and vines and enough outdoor space to make you feel you have the place entirely to yourself. For my first two nights I slept in one of the villas – a wonderfully snug wood and stone building

with a private terrace where the housekeeper will bring your breakfast. I then decanted, alongside my growing collection of local wine, into the main building’s Norma suite; more painted tiles and ceilings and a wrought iron bedframe inlaid with an image of the Virgin Mary.

Did I mention there is a functioning gallery, open to the local population of some 5,350 people, but mostly for the appreciation of guests? There is. Not only that, there’s a huge former hazelnut warehouse over the road that serves as a dedicated installation space for the artist in residence. Puglisi, an academic who lectured in economics before returning home to run the guesthouse, is an enthusiastic patron of the arts, sponsoring artists to create site-specific installations. I got chatting to Hanna Burk, the Austrian upcoming artist in residence, over a pasta-making class hosted by the housekeeper – she was scouting the location, sleeping on a fold-out bed in the warehouse while she plans her exhibition for next year. We ended up chumming along to a wine tasting at Emilio Sciacca Winery a short hike into the hills, alongside another pair of residents, which is a great way to learn about the local tipple and make friends with your fellow guests.

Linguaglossa itself is a beautiful little town, a warren of cobbled alleyways and churchyards far enough from the tourist trail to feel refreshingly authentic. Booking a table at one of the trattorias or osterias, you find yourself entirely surrounded by locals as you demolish yet another bowl of the regional pistachio pasta.

You would be remiss to come this far into the foothills of Mt Etna without venturing to the top and Linguaglossa is also home to Guide Vulcanologiche Etna Nord, which organises excursions to the summit.

Clambering aboard a huge 4x4 bus you’re deposited close to the highest crater – there are dozens of craters – and hike down the otherworldly, moon-like terrain, which changes from fine, black dust to craggy volcanic rock and eventually becomes verdant forest, occasionally interrupted by the searing ooze of the more recent eruptions (the remnants of a tourist encampment can be seen poking out from the lava mid-way up the volcano).

And there is no better place to retire after your exertion than the quiet grandeur of Palazzo Previtera, this improbable living museum that immediately feels like the home you always wished you had. l Rooms at Palazzo Previtera start from £140 a night – to book go palazzoprevitera.com; To book a Mt Etna tour through Guide Vulcanologiche Etna Nord to to guidevulcanologicheetna.it

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Left to right from top: One of the living rooms at the absurdly textured Palazzo Previtera; The living museum’s altar; the view from the terrace at one of Previtera’s villas; One of three libraries at Previtera; A crater atop Mt Etna; A sheep skull spotted on the volcanic rock

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M OTO R I N G

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YOU’VE GOTTA ROLLS WITH IT The Rolls-Royce Spectre is the height of refined sophistication – but what happens when you drop it at the centre of a continent-wide super-storm?

IAIN MACAULEY finds out

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t’s chucking it down in the airport pick-up zone, the soundtrack a cacophony of announcements, slamming doors, rat-a-tatting wheelie-suitcases, flapping umbrellas and the dull drone of aircraft taking off and landing.

The waiting Rolls-Royce’s door closes behind me, and, cosseted inside a shell of black and Tango-orange, things are dramatically different.

Rolls-Royce enjoyed record sales in 2023, with around 6,000 cars wafting out of its Sussex factory.

“Factory”, though, doesn’t do it justice. Where I come from – “upp narth” – the mind’s eye image of a factory is a grim, belching thing filled with clanking and hissing machinery.

By contrast, the place Rolls-Royce employees simply call “Goodwood” – a reference to the historic race circuit nearby – is more like a members’ club crossed with a hi-tech university research department. Words like “craftsmanship” and “artisanal” spring to mind.

I wanted to discover the secret to Rolls-Royce’s success: is it just the vehicles, or something more ephemeral? Conveniently, they had a couple of cars available for me to drive through Germany and Austria. It would be rude not to.

I was greeted at Munich Airport by a gaggle of relaxed Rolls-Royce people, informally but smartlydressed in chinos, polo shirts and the sorts of casual jackets for which you scour the internet but can never find. Sadly the weather was not on the same page. Central Europe was victim to devastating floods this autumn and Bavaria was reeling from the extreme downpour as I exited the airport.

I’d be driving a Rolls-Royce Spectre, base price:

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£330,000, give or take, although like most Rolls-Royces, the cost at delivery is closer to £420,000 once personalised. “It looks so angry”, said one nearby Brit, pointing out its horror movie slit-eye driving lights. And, had it been any other car, you’d have taken a startled step back when you spotted the garish orange interior but Rolls somehow makes it look like the most natural thing in the world.

Had I been in a basic rental car, I’d have stayed in the car park until the storm passed. But extreme circumstances lay bare people, organisations and products; predictably the Spectre wasn’t ruffled by this climactic Armageddon. Indeed, the world outside feels like it barely exists – it’s simply a backdrop to the hermetically sealed world inside the Spectre. The word “cocoon” is in every Rolls-Royce design brief. “A Rolls-Royce is a place where you go for calm,” more than one employee confidently told me.

Clockwise from above: The striking tango and black interior, which only Rolls-Royce could get away with; The sleek but imposing profile of this monstrously big vehicle; Iain takes to the driver’s seat; Detail shots from inside

lll

Back in the day, 80 per cent of RollsRoyce owners sat in the back.

Today 80 per drive themselves

Rolls-Royce and electric power were made for one-another: all its new cars will be electric by the end of 2030.

With 577bhp and 664lbft of torque, stomping on the accelerator would no doubt yield something akin to a SpaceX launch. If you really must know, it takes this behemoth a terrifying four seconds to reach 60mph, roaring on all the way to 155mph v-max. And with a battery range of around 290 miles, there is little range anxiety.

“A Rolls-Royce is not a racing car,” says Dr Phil Harnett, the Dublin-born Rolls-Royce head of future product.

Ironic: he spent nearly a decade as an engineer with F1 teams. But he’s right:

beyond a brief exploration of its dynamic capability, you soon settle into an easy rhythm when driving the Spectre. The pedal seems to be tuned for elegant rather than explosive acceleration, becoming more responsive with speed.

This car is all about what’s in reserve; there is no hooligan rev-counter, rather a dial telling you how much power you have to spare. It rarely seems to indicate that you’re using more than around 15 per cent of what’s available.

“The power reserve dial is almost psychological,” says Harnett. “That’s why we have powerful engines. Knowing that you have that reserve just gives you the

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room to relax. It’s also relevant to the suspension. It’s so capable. Some of the professional drivers take the cars around the Goodwood circuit and they’ll have people in sports cars trying to keep up – and they won’t be able to. But our clients will never do that.”

Back in the day, 80 per cent of RollsRoyce owners sat in the back, and, had they taken to the driver’s seat once in a while, may not have been entirely convinced the steering wheel was connected to anything. But in the 2020s, 80 per cent of Rolls-Royce owners drive themselves. And these cars are very good to drive, at least until you reach a

potential parking space. lll

I’m based at the Rosewood Schloss Fuschl Hotel, near Salzburg. It’s 400 years old, magnificent, and just reopened. When pushed, a value of “less than €100 million” was put on its restoration.

I take in the row of Spectres and Cullinan 2s, all set against the picture-perfect lake.

Cullinans can carry off some surprisingly garish colours. Sure, some come in discreet blues and blacks, but others come in extravagant reds and greens.

Having earlier driven a Cullinan 2 up into the roads surrounding the lake, I

experienced its effortless on-road competence. I took the opportunity to be driven 200km back to Munich’s airport in the rear of a higher-spec “Black Badge” Cullinan in “Morganite” - a sort of strawberry pink.

The design spec is called “Disruptor”, which is apt. The car is powered by an enormous 591bhp, 664lbft, 6.75 litre, V12 petrol engine. The Rolls-Royce driver demonstrated its – and his – ability to make progress at a rate that seemed at odds with the serenity in the cabin.

Other drivers tend to give way when they feel the growing presence of a Cullinan looming in their rear view mirror.

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Meanwhile, I gazed up at constellations: you can specify a roof lining depicting a pinprick star map of the night sky – any date you want – including the odd shooting star.

This may sound laughably opulent but it’s difficult to be cynical, because a Rolls-Royce is authentic. This car is not pretending to be anything except absolute luxury, aimed squarely at its target market of incredibly wealthy people.

I met former chief exec Torsten Müller-Ötvös just before his retirement in 2023. He clearly had a vision for RollsRoyce when he took over in 2009; it permeated through the business, and will continue to do so under new boss Chris Brownridge.

Arriving back at Munich Airport, the driver opens the rear door for me. I’m immediately removed from the calm, assaulted by the stares of people wondering who I am. Egressing that Cullinan into the gaze of curious observers feels better than I’d like to admit.

No matter what anybody thinks about its cars and what they represent, Rolls-Royce knows its market, stays true to it, sees its clients as friends and family, is completely and utterly engaged with them, and does not deviate in the slightest from its intent to unapologetically develop, engineer and provide the best. No storm in the world could dent that.

B O O KS

A

A SHORT TRIP TO OUTER SPACE Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning Orbital is just 136 pages. ANNA MOLONEY asks why the novel is getting shorter and shorter 88

t 136 pages, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital is the second shortest book to ever win the Booker Prize – a fact that will be hailed by those of the opinion that brevity is a sign of excellence. “Unless a writer is superb, I don’t think it’s enough to go wuffling on,” novelist Beryl Bainbridge, herself nominated five times for the Booker for her sparse prose, once said. The sentiment is one that humbles the author: your reader’s time is precious, don’t waste it. It’s fitting, then, that Orbital is a book so much about time.

Orbital’s premise is one that suggests an adventure of grand proportions: a novel following the lives of six astronauts aboard a spaceship. But barely a centimetre thick and unashamedly plotless, this is a novel of ideas over action. Our astronauts are not swashbuckling explorers but observational scientists; and our mission not rocketing to the moon but rather a series of stable orbits around the earth to collect data. When one of the six, Anton, finds himself crying, he quickly catches the four droplets of his tears before they float away. “They’re not to let liquids loose in here and they’re all fastidious about that,” the narrator informs us.

In Orbital, life in space is governed by routine but, above all, timekeeping. Our space-hurtling heroes have a strict early bedtime and set tasks that must be completed daily. Aboard the earthorbiting ship, time is warped: a single day brings sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. Tethering themselves to the 24-hour day is a crucial means of tethering themselves to earth. “Look often at your watch to anchor your mind,” the astronauts are told in training. “Keep a tally each day when you wake, tell yourself this is the morning of a new day.

Be clear with yourself on this matter.”

It’s a message that should land easily.

After all, time-warping is not so foreign a concept to a reader; how many claim to lose track of time when absorbed by a good book? Psychologists call it tachysensia, the experience of a temporary distortion that makes time feel like it’s speeding up. But Orbital, in its very form, is a novel that fights against this. Set over a single day, the book is divided into 16 chapters, one for every 90-minute orbit aboard the ship. Like the astronauts, the reader’s mind is anchored to the clock.

And just as well, for the 21st century reader is busy. No wonder short books have become so beloved. According to a study of New York Times lists, the average length of a bestseller fell by 51 pages between 2011 and 2021, declining from 437 pages to 386.

The probability that a book of over 400 pages would enter the best-seller list decreased by 29.5 per cent in the same timeframe. Within publishing, 300-350 pages, or 80,000-100,000 words, is

Above from left: Samantha Harvey, whose novel Orbital is the second shortest book to ever win the Booker Prize; The new 400-page book by Alan Hollinghurst

considered the sellable sweet spot.

It’s a far cry from the novel’s Victorian rise, when they came fat by design. Writers were paid by the word but there was also a genuine desire for reading to take up time. Reading fiction was a pursuit of the leisure class (the naturally time-rich), while serialisation (the publishing of novels in instalments) meant novels were designed to be consumed over much longer periods. Original readers of Charles Dickens’ 608-pager The Old Curiosity Shop, for example, had no choice but to read it bit by bit in weekly instalments released over a 10-month period.

When the ship carrying the final instalment arrived in New York Harbor in 1941, readers crowded the wharf, shouting “is little Nell dead?”.

The modernists came next, however, and the novel was cut down to size. Long and elaborate prose was scorned as unskilled. For Hemingway, one of the 20th century’s most revered and most economical writers, adverbs as a whole were condemned – of use only to the lazy to prop up their imprecisely chosen verbs.

But the association of merit with brevity is perhaps just a lucky strike for the 21st century reader, timepoor and attention span-stricken as we are. It seems more likely that our dwindling attention spans rather than our esteem for sparse prose is driving our preference for slimmer reads. Meanwhile the increasing association of reading with productivity – as opposed to pleasure – means we welcome the gratification that comes with reading lots of books and tallying them up. Significantly for audiobooks, a form which can handily be consumed while doing the dishes or walking to work, longer reads are, conversely, more favoured.

The shortest book to win the Booker, pipping Harvey by a thrifty four pages, is Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore. Following a group of restless houseboat dwellers, it is also a novel about leaving land. Perhaps that is fitting. Floating, whether on water or through space, is a comfortable place for the reader of fiction, who too is opting to escape from reality’s hard edges. It’s a shame, then, as the novel becomes shorter and shorter, that we are forced to come back to earth so soon.

SOME BOOKS ARE BIGGER THAN OTHERS

For those who like doorstop-thick books though, fear not, with this year also bringing a new Alan Hollinghurst novel. Most known for his 2004 Man Booker Prize-winning Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst’s latest literary offering is another first-person coming-of-age novel about gay Britain, and it’s my favourite book I read all year.

Our Evenings follows the life of Dave Win, a queer, halfBurmese actor, from his childhood in the 1960s to the present day. It’s an overtly political novel, with Hollinghurst acknowledging the choice of timeline – from when Britain first tried to join the EU in the 1960s to Brexit and its aftermath in the 2020s – was no coincidence.

Like Orbital, this is also a book overwhelmingly about time; in Our Evenings, however, the tick of the clock is far from regular. Instead, the novel starts slow and gathers pace exponentially, jumping forward in bursts towards the end.

When a sundial featuring the Latin inscription ‘sensim sine sense’ is first encountered in the novel, it is fitting that the reader, like Dave, has to wait to find out what it means. It is only towards the end of the novel that the translation is given: slowly without sensing it we grow old.

“It’s a book about youth, which, before you know it, has turned into a book about death,” Hollinghurst told The Bookseller. It’s a powerful approach; Dave is an old man by the end, but I couldn’t help but still picture him as the young boy we first spend so much time with. Indeed, nor can Dave himself. Late in the novel, he describes watching “an elderly couple grappling with a focaccia sandwich” in one of the new vegan cafes that’s sprung up in the provincial village of his childhood home. He watches sympathetically, before realising they’re a couple of years younger than himself.

In the Hollinghurst world, the devil is in the details. In another passage our narrator reflects on the dance played at society parties; “‘Well we mustn’t keep you from your admirers,’ they said, and went off to the buffet, leaving me all alone.” It’s the incidental anecdotes that often make up the novel’s most biting moments. I would have happily read 400 pages more.

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THE LAST WORD ALEX DYMOKE

HOW TO WRITE A KILLER WEDDING SPEECH Forget your delivery and embrace your nerves – the least slick speeches are often the most moving

T

he other day, at a birthday drinks at a musty little pub in Borough, a friend pulled me to one side.

“You got to help me, man,” We have been friends for decades and this man is always getting into scrapes. Alarmed, I braced myself for a request for money, legal help or relationship advice. “I’m giving a speech next week, for a friend’s civil partnership. I’m terrified”.

My friend is articulate and witty, so I said what I always say: wedding audiences are drunk and jolly and will laugh at literally anything. Find a spare two hours, turn on aeroplane mode and write.

Stuff will come. “OK” he said and gulped down a mouthful of Guinness.

But my soothing words didn’t do the trick. The next day I got a WhatsApp. “Im struggling here”.

So I called him, and delivered a pep talk. Here is a version of what I said.

First, tell a story. When giving a speech about a person it’s tempting to use lots of adjectives like “kind” or “generous” or “funny”. These fall flat because they’re abstract and unspecific and too commonplace to really mean anything to anyone.

It’s the classic advice from creative writing courses: show don’t tell. Don’t list a bunch of attributes or traits — tell a story in which these traits come to life.

Second, revel in detail. Most of what you say will be forgotten, but vivid images lodge in the mind.

So paint a picture. Especially at the beginning and end. Open with a vignette that expresses a fundamental truth about the person. And adorn it with sensory information. What were people wearing? What could you see, smell or hear? There is humour to be wrung from specificity; observant descriptions can function as jokes. Detail gives life to writing. It’s why I opened this column with “musty little pub in Borough”. It’s why New Yorker pieces open with, “on a Sunday day in [somewhere], [someone] did [something]”?

Third, don’t worry about saying everything.

People are complicated and multifaceted. Any speech that covers every aspect of a person would be too long, boring and disjointed to hold an audience’s attention. So choose depth over breadth. Say one thing and say it well. And make sure that thing isn’t obvious. Try to say something original about their character. Reveal something.

Fourth — and really this is the only thing you need to worry about — don’t worry. Don’t fret about giving a hugely polished speech. Don’t get hung up on whether it’s “good” in some objective sense. It’s fine if your voice wavers. And it really doesn’t matter if you’re visibly nervous. In fact, visible nerves often make a speech better. Giving a speech is a generous thing to do and it only seems more so when the speaker is manifestly stepping out of their comfort zone to give it. It’s why the least slick speeches are often the most moving.

There are few sights more stirring than watching a speaker overcome their nerves in real time and gallop triumphantly toward a peroration, applause ringing their ears. It happened at a wedding I went to recently. The father of the groom was nervous. As he took to the mic, the paper fluttered in his trembling hands. His voice wobbled so much at first it was hard to make out what he was saying. But it was well written and sweetly self-deprecating and soon the audience were laughing along. The first chuckles were offered up out of encouragement, but they steadied him, and soon the room was rocking with laughter. The speech told a lovely story about the groom’s life — but that transition, from paralysing fear to commanding performance, is a kind of story in itself, and a thrilling one.

I saw my friend the other day, and asked how it went. “Nightmare,” he said. A mishap with a car meant he arrived with no suit. He had to cobble together an outfit at an hour’s notice. And the speech? “Oh it went great. Standing there in these bizarre clothes… it made it even funnier.” l Alex is a senior writer at The Draft

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