Comment
England fans at the World Cup earlier this month. Joosep Martinson/FIFA/Getty
For once, let’s be proud to be English
However hard I’ve tried to ignore the football World Cup, says Simon Heffer in The Telegraph, some things have proved unavoidable. Among them is the pleasing willingness of many teams to embrace their nation’s history, even if parts of that would, “by today’s standards”, be deemed controversial. Most obvious are the Norwegians, who have joyfully celebrated their Viking heritage without any mention of the conquest and pillage – “it was 1,200 years ago after all, and bygones are bygones”. Napoleon’s threat to the peace of Europe didn’t prevent a French midfielder donning the warmongering emperor’s favoured hat after a victory over Paraguay. After one of Egypt’s wins, Mo Salah dressed proudly as a pharaoh.
And then there’s England, where any embrace of “Englishness” is deemed not just embarrassing – we’re an oppressor nation, we’re told, and must wait a few millennia more for forgiveness – but “divisive”. While flying the Saltire in Scotland or the red dragon in Wales remains a glorious “display of national pride”, local councils in England have criticised or banned people from shimmying up lampposts to hang St George’s flags. This is absurd. The flag’s very purpose is to unite, and its existence, along with England’s history, is something of which there is “very little need to be ashamed”. So ahead of these final stages, as long as the national side may last, I hope our players and fans will belt out Jerusalem, swathe themselves in the flag “like crusaders of old” and, in their foreign fields, think of fish and chips and best bitter, while they “swell with pride at belonging to their great, old country”.
🥂❄️ One thing I miss in England’s World Cup campaigns these days is the WAGs, says Georgina Elliott in The New Statesman. Back in 2006, in the sleepy German town of Baden-Baden, the players’ wives and girlfriends guzzled vodka Red Bulls, pink champagne and pear Bellinis, and climbed on to tables to dance and belt out karaoke. Coleen McLoughlin (now Rooney) flew a spray-tan technician out with her and spent £57,000 in an hour of shopping. Victoria Beckham packed 60 pairs of sunglasses and complained about being treated worse than a dog when her flight was delayed. Abbey Clancy was sent home early after photographs were leaked of her snorting cocaine. Today’s WAGs, by contrast, post “sedate smorgasbords” of beauty routines, outfits of the day, children’s birthday parties and non-alcoholic drinks. It’s less tabloid hoo-ha, more “conservative-coded trad-wife”.
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India Sutra
Jaipur Literature Festival with Abir Mukherjee & friends
12-22 January 2027
Abir Mukherjee’s novel A Rising Man opens in 1919, in the uneasy aftermath of the Amritsar massacre, as Captain Sam Wyndham – widower, war veteran, opium-fiend – arrives in Calcutta to join the Imperial police. Abir describes Calcutta as “a fascinating city, unique in many respects and in the 1920s, it was the premier city in Asia, as glamorous and exotic a location as anywhere in the world”. Abir's books chart the shifting relationship between Britain and India as the latter struggles for independence. In January next year – for the third time – Abir and I will be leading a tour through India, exploring the history and literature that led to where India is today. This time we shall be incorporating Jaipur Literature Festival and staying at a restored palace on the country's eastern coast. We hope you can join us.
Contact Bertie for more details: [email protected].
Property
THE COACHING INN This five-bedroom former coaching inn in Holton, Suffolk, now has a large oak-panelled extension, says The Guardian. On the ground floor, a beamed kitchen and dining area opens on to the garden, with a snug to one side and steps up to a sitting room with a log burner and library in the original inn. Two further floors hold the bedrooms, an office and a studio, and there is a separate annexe with one bedroom. Outside is a dining terrace, wildlife pond, wildflower garden, geodesic dome and timber workshop. The market town of Halesworth is a short drive; Southwold is a quarter of an hour. £775,000. Click on the image to see the listing.
Heroes and villains
La Pelosa beach: all booked up. Getty
Villains
Italian officials, who have decided to cap visitor numbers at more than 20 of the country’s top public beaches with advanced booking systems. Cala Goloritzé, a sheltered sandy cove on Sardinia, is letting in just 250 people a day, while the island’s famous Pelosa beach is already fully booked until mid-September.
Villain
An English football fan who sparked an international search after losing contact with his family on his way to the US for the World Cup. Michael Hewitt lost his phone, which contained his travel documents, during a stopover in Barcelona. Rather than finding a way to let his relatives know he was safe, he spent the next 10 days making the most of the Spanish city, watching the England games in bars. The British Embassy in Spain eventually tracked him down to his hotel, where he was apparently “blissfully unaware” of his family’s anguished search.
Villain
A runaway bull that charged on to a cricket pitch near Newcastle, leading to the match being cancelled. The unnamed animal escaped from a farm about a mile away from Burnopfield Cricket Club, and despite extensive efforts to get him off the field – including, at one point, bringing a comely cow to seduce him – he wouldn’t budge. Club director Martin Oswell said it was “quite funny” at first, but ultimately ruined what was shaping up to be a “really, really good game of cricket”.
Hero
Trish Patterson, an amateur runner from Hampshire, who has become the fastest woman to complete the Three Peaks challenge entirely on foot. The mother-of-two scaled Scotland’s Ben Nevis, England’s Scafell Pike and Wales’s Yr Wyddfa – running between each one – over five days and 21 hours. She covered 425 miles and more than 10,000 metres in elevation, sleeping for just 90 minutes each night.
Books
What Holden Caulfield got right
For decades, says Lily Meyer in The Atlantic, any American with even vague pretensions to seriousness listed The Catcher in the Rye among their favourite books. JD Salinger’s classic tale of adolescent alienation, published 75 years ago this summer, is “canonically about phonies” in the way Moby-Dick is canonically about whales. Its teenaged narrator and protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is obsessed with the idea that the world revolves around – and handsomely rewards – frauds and fakers of all kinds. When the book came out, it was seen as a radical repudiation of the 1950s dream of personal fulfilment through shallow material success. Today, you hear much less than you used to about Holden Caulfield. But his attitude has never been more needed.
Holden is “against selling out, against Hollywood, against acting, against siding with hotshots, against favouring anyone for their style or wealth”. He is against any form of attention-seeking, grumbling to himself in a nightclub: “If I were a piano player, I’d play it in the goddamn closet.” Today, his moral rigour feels refreshing, given our culture is marked by an “unsettling mix of cynicism and heedlessness”. Instagram content creator is a popular career path; politicians and podcasters model an ethos of “resentment, dominance, and 15-minute fame”. When did it become unremarkable for the president of the United States to declare, in the context of war with Iran, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation”? And what about Clavicular, the streamer who claims he’s been left infertile by testosterone injections taken in a quest to make himself as handsome as possible? Both aim to attract attention in the moment, with little regard for what may come next. “Holden yearns for the reverse.”
The Knowledge Crossword
What to see
Buckingham Palace’s Picture Gallery is re-opening this summer after a “once-in-a-generation” re-hang, says Laura Elston in The London Standard. The number of masterpieces in the 47-metre-long gallery, which has been spruced up with new emerald-green silk damask walls, has nearly doubled from 63 to 120 – a process that required a whopping 875 hours of meticulous hanging. Among them are works by Rubens, Caravaggio, Vermeer and Rembrandt, along with A Rough Dog by George Stubbs, believed to show George IV’s rather large hound, and the 2023 red-hued portrait of the King by Jonathan Yeo. From 9 July to 27 September, tickets available here.
Weather
Quoted
“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night, and in between does what he wants to do.”
Bob Dylan
That’s it. You’re done.
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