Forget the Middle East – come and see my ballroom

“Champers”, “holibobs” and other words I’d ban

When Kate Garraway described something as “flabbergasting” on The Celebrity Traitors last week, fellow contestant Tom Daley pulled such a sceptical face I wondered whether he might suffer eye strain, says Sophia Money-Coutts in The Daily Telegraph. It reminded me of Notting Hill, when Julia Roberts gets the giggles at Hugh Grant muttering “whoops-a-daisy” – a “charming if old-fashioned” phrase I’d put up there with the glorious “okey dokey”, which harks back to a time of milkmen and the wireless. But much like Daley, there are plenty of phrases that make my teeth itch.

Almost any derivative of husband – “hubby”, “the hubster” – makes me want to “move to the Moon”. Likewise “wifey” and the use of “Mama bear” and “Papa bear”, which become even worse when used by one parent to refer to the other: “Sweetie, I don’t know where your shoe is. Go find Papa bear and ask him.” Referring to dogs as “furbabies” should be discouraged, as should people talking about their “holibobs” or wanging on about their “lived experience” – if you have experience of something, “that implies you’ve lived with it”. Since it’s looming in the calendar, here’s a reminder that “Chrimbo” is unforgiveable. On Christmas day, you may uncork a bottle of champagne. “You certainly won’t open a bottle of fizz or bubbles or champers.” (If it’s Cava or Crémant or something else, own up and “call it by its name”.) And you may eat roast potatoes, but certainly not “roasties”, which is “infantile and twee”. Finally, politicians constantly fluff the old “less and fewer” issue. Recent months have been all “less boats” this, “less taxes” that. It’s “fewer”, you morons. “No wonder we’re in such a pickle.”

The sexbots killing romance

Chatbot romances have been bubbling away for years, says Parmy Olson in Bloomberg. In 2017 Replika launched a “friendship bot”, which experienced soaring growth when users figured out they could use it as a “virtual girlfriend or boyfriend”. Today, users of Elon Musk’s Grok can chat to two “hyper-sexualised” manga characters, and adverts for AI girlfriends litter social media. Dating-themed chatbots get 88 million monthly visits and an incredible 30% of all prompts being pumped into general-purpose AI assistants like ChatGPT today are romantic or sexual. In other words: sexy bots are a “confirmed money-maker”. So it’s no surprise that OpenAI boss Sam Altman is cashing in. From December, “verified adults” will be able to use ChatGPT to generate “erotica”.

This is a tragedy, says Rowan Pelling in The Independent. Gen Z is the least sexually active cohort of young people since records began in 1990, and this is only going to make things worse. Online porn has already proven to be addictive, particularly to young men, and has frightened many teens and twentysomethings away from “true intimacy”. It’s all too easy to see how these “lonely, sex-starved” kids will get hooked on ChatGPT’s phoney, porny dialogue and forget how to deal with a “real, tricky, flesh-and-blood woman”. And what does it do for the notion of love? In nostalgic moments, members of my generation rifle through old love letters. What are this lot going to do? Scroll through screenshots of their “sex talk on WhatsApp”? How romantic.

From enigmatic sultans to Chablis on the beach

Long overlooked by commercial tourists, Tangier has always been a “refuge” for a certain type of person, says Christopher Garis in Air Mail. As Princess Ira von Fürstenberg once said: “I love Tangier because it mixes the up-here with the down-there, and nothing in between.” The white-painted city is more accessible than ever, thanks to the new high-speed Al Boraq train connecting it to Casablanca in a crisp two hours. But unlike its rather-too-popular neighbour Marrakech, Tangier remains blissfully below the radar. “Sometimes,” says Belgian designer and Tangier regular Philip Vergeylen, “the greatest luxury is the ability to get away from too many people and too much noise.”

The Mediterranean port town has attracted an eclectic crowd for centuries. After the Portuguese occupation in 1471, it was handed to England in 1661 as part of the dowry of Queen Catherine of Braganza for her marriage to Charles II. When Samuel Pepys arrived a few years later, he wrote in his diary that he’d found “nothing but vice” in the whole place: “swearing, cursing, drinking and whoring”. Some 20 years later, the English “sacked and fled” Tangier, but in the late 19th century the English journalist Sir Walter Harris (an inspiration for Indiana Jones) wrote about the city’s enigmatic sultans, reviving its identity as a “cocktail of glamour and intrigue”. Pioneers in the 1950s like the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton were soon followed by socialites like Paul Getty and the fashion muse Loulou de la Falaise, before making way for the hippies and beatniks (William S Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch at the hotel Tangerinn). Today, the smart set are back, flying in for the late winter months to loaf, socialise, watch polo and enjoy oysters and Chablis on the beach. But don’t tell anyone.