Comment
A good old-fashioned dinner party in Notting Hill (1999)
Bring back the dinner party
Some time in the past decade or so, say Cleo Watson and Sophia Money-Coutts on The Poshcast, the dinner party fell out of favour. This was partly to do with it being seen as the pastime of the “north London metropolitan elite”, and partly to do with the seemingly collective decision to turn supper from something that happened on plates sitting around a table to something eaten in tracksuit bottoms from a bowl on the sofa. Anyone still championing the joy of hosting was soon shut down by the rise of influencers showing off elaborate meals and “ghastly tablescaping” online, which made people think having a few friends over for dinner needed to be a mammoth task. Rather than a simple lasagne prepared in advance, dinner parties nowadays tend to involve some fiddly-looking Ottolenghi spread and the host wanging on about “how long their chickpeas have been soaking”.
It’s not just getting together for dinner that we’ve lost, says Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times, it’s general interactions. We no longer go to the cinema, preferring to stream films at home. We don’t go to bookshops; we have books delivered through our letterboxes. We don’t talk to supermarket cashiers because we do self-checkout, and we no longer even need to chat to our taxi drivers because Uber offers a “no conversation” option. People talk about the “sweet relief of cancelled plans”, or of JOMO, the “joy of missing out”. In a strange inversion of tradition, older people are now more likely to socialise outside the house – at the theatre, the pub or even just the post office – than their twentysomething grandchildren who scroll away at home. This can’t be healthy. In arranging the modern world around frictionless self-isolation, we’ve lost the very thing that makes us human: connection.
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Property
THE TOWER HOUSE This three-bedroom home was once a Cornish engine house and still has its original tower, says The Guardian. Spread over five floors, the house is made up of an open-plan kitchen and dining room with arched openings and a woodburning stove, a cinema room, a snug, three double bedrooms and a large family bathroom. The kitchen opens on to a timber terrace with a sunken hot tub and views over the valley. Outbuildings in the 0.6 acres of grounds include a studio, a workshop and a car port. St Austell Bay is 15 minutes away. £895,000. Click on the image to see the listing.
Heroes and villains
Hero
Navy Moores, a three-year-old boy from Kendal, who has climbed all 214 of the Lake District’s Wainwright fells. He and his walking-mad family completed the challenge over five months, covering a total of 510.85 miles and a combined ascent of 224,883ft. After finishing the challenge by climbing Scafell Pike on Sunday, Navy had just three demands: a Nutella-covered pancake, an episode of Paw Patrol and a bike ride.
Villains
Birmingham city council, for accidentally giving away a primary school. Officials signed the wrong form when selling a former caretaker’s cottage in 2013, transferring ownership of George Dixon Primary School to a care home company. The council realised its mistake in 2024 and has asked for the school back, but the care home firm – which also had no idea about the transfer – is so far not playing ball.
Villain
Yuanyuan Sun, a Chinese fitness influencer with over half a million social media followers, who has been disqualified from the Berlin marathon for using a bike. The 30-year-old finished the race in what she said was a personal best of 4:53:46, but photos have since emerged of her hitching a ride with a cyclist. She has apologised, saying she felt “unwell”.
Villain
Santiago Schnell, the provost of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, for using AI to write a Washington Post column railing against students for using AI. Schnell acknowledged in a statement that he used chatbots as “assistive tools”, but downplayed their role in his writing. Pangram, an AI-detection service, determined the statement to be “100% AI-written”.
Villain
A mysterious graffiti artist who has been plastering the walls of a Newcastle suburb with bizarre messages about celebrities. The neatly written missives include: “Sharon Osbourne doesn’t wash out her recycled plastics”, “Lorraine Kelly is barred from Wetherspoons for stealing cutlery”, “Danny Dyer Smokes Parma Violet vapes”, and “Alison Hammond puts all her shopping through self service as loose bananas”.
Comment
Christa Pike in an earlier court appearance
Enough of these bungled executions
Christa Pike, who brutally tortured and murdered her school classmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995, doesn’t deserve a shred of sympathy, says Robert Gebelhoff in The Washington Post. But that doesn’t make her bungled execution in Tennessee last week, in which two lethal injections failed to kill her, any less repulsive. Pike said her arm felt as though it was “about to burst open” – an indication that the injections hadn’t reached her bloodstream but seeped into the surrounding tissue – and could still be heard snoring 40 minutes later, at which point she was rushed to hospital. Her lawyers say she woke up six days later, shackled to a bed, “angry and confused”.
Pike is far from alone. More than 7% of all executions in America between 1890 and 2010 were fumbled. As recently as May, the attempted killing of another Tennessee inmate left him “wincing and groaning” as a physician struggled for an hour to find a vein. The doctor later admitted he hadn’t placed a central line in more than a decade and had no current hospital privileges. Scarcity of doctors willing to carry out executions isn’t the only grim aspect of this “shameful” business. The majority of drug manufacturers refuse to supply pentobarbital for lethal injections, so states often resort to far less regulated parts of the pharma world where there’s no way of knowing whether dodgy chemicals might cause unnecessary suffering. Such an “abysmal execution record” should be enough to make even the most avid supporters of this inhumane policy think twice. The US stands virtually alone among developed nations in killing its own citizens. Let the “ghastly government-sponsored” attempt to kill Pike be a wake-up call.
The Knowledge Crossword
Life
Archer in his London penthouse in 1996. Ian Cook/Getty
The political Houdini with a gift for “inaccurate précis”
Jeffrey Archer, who has died aged 86, lived a life so colourful it “rivalled his thrillers”, says Alan Cowell in The New York Times. A “political Houdini”, he survived many vicissitudes, including having to step down from parliament in 1974 after a dodgy investment bankrupted him, and a 2001 prison sentence for lying in a libel case against the Daily Star – which he’d won – over whether he’d slept with a prostitute. But in spite of his tumultuous record, Archer remained a Conservative darling. Margaret Thatcher called him the “extrovert’s extrovert”, Princess Diana asked him to stay with her the day she was divorced, and countless celebrities and politicians attended his famous London penthouse parties where he served “Krug champagne and lowly shepherd’s pie”.
Born in 1940, Archer took after his fraudster father in his penchant for what his wife, Mary, described as a “gift for inaccurate précis”. He lied about his father being awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal, persuaded the well-to-do in America that he was an Eton-educated doctor, claimed in Who’s Who that he attended Brasenose College when he actually went to a teacher-training college loosely affiliated to Oxford, and falsely described himself as a research graduate on his marriage certificate. His greatest success was his writing career. Though the critics sneered at his prose, Archer wrote thrillers that people loved to read – his debut novel Kane and Abel sold more than a million copies in its first week alone, and his lifetime sales passed a staggering 320 million. “I always say to people if you fall on your backside, get up and try again,” Archer once said. “You’ll fall on it again but you’ll get up again. Get on with it.”
🤣🖼️ Archer’s penthouse, which jutted out over the Thames with a direct view of the Palace of Westminster, was stuffed with works by the likes of Monet and Lowry. When I attended a charity event there, says Damian Whitworth in The Times, and asked Archer where I could find the loo, he gestured down the landing and boomed, for all to hear: “Down there, past the Picasso.”
Weather
Quoted
“You will never be happier than you expect. To change your happiness, change your expectation.”
Bette Davis
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