Bits #12
Things to read, watch, listen to, mull over
Back once again for the recommend master1 - a little earlier in the week as I’ve switched around Tuesday’s essay and Friday’s Bits. I have something I want to write about for the main letter this week and NDA dictates that it cannot be done before Friday!
It’s a hefty cultural smorgasbord today: personal writing, interviews, a rip-roaring documentary, a podcast worth listening to 3 times, vintage shops to bookmark. As ever, the most delicious stuff is ↓ the paywall 🍝🍜🍖 Here’s a tantalising quote from David Olusoga, to tempt you under:
“It seems very likely that Shakespeare was not a nice person: I don’t care! It doesn’t matter! God, the idea that you would withhold from yourself the works of [Dickens or Shakespeare] because of their personal frailties is just ludicrous.”
If this cuts off on e-mail (nb: the substack app is a much nicer reading experience!) click on ‘view entire message’.
Things I’ve been thinking about this week:
It turns out, you aren’t being ripped off for a flat white. (Unless you’re paying over £5, and then you definitely are.) Once you factor in the cost of specialty beans + milk + wages of barista + coffee farmer’s labour + rent, utilities and equipment, “between £3.50 and £4.50” is a fair price to pay, Tom Saxon of Batch Coffee Club tells The Guardian, for a piece on the fair price of 14 every day items, including jeans, butter, olive oil and red wine
You’ve heard of the glass ceiling, but have you heard of the sticky floor? c/o Grazia, it refers to when women get ‘stuck’ in low-paying jobs, typically due to maternity leave(s), care obligations, working part-time. Having kids makes you more efficient imho, because you’ve got less disposable hours - so let’s get some baking soda on that floor, stat
We are in a hot sauce boom2 and now Brookyln Beckham has launched one. (The taste? Not bad.) BB says he created Cloud23 because he saw “a hole in the market”. A market which currently boasts…. over 700 hot sauce brands 🆒
We had a family debate this weekend about how many stomachs a cow has: mum said 7, my sis said 8, I (for once) got it right with 4 and I’ve been thinking ever since about what those 4 stomachs could be for humans: savoury (mealtime), sweet (pudding), snack (which can happen when full of both mealtime and pudding, but still have has space for after dinner nuts, crisps, wontons) and…? Suggestions vital for the 4th
There’s a feline version of the XL bully - a hairless Sphynx bred with a short-legged Munchkin - trending on social media. Unlike the dogs, these funky looking ‘bullycats’ aren’t prone to violence, but they face so many health issues they don’t live past the age of 6. Don’t breed ‘em, don’t buy ‘em
Bridget Jones is having a new moment with Gen Z, author Helen Fielding told The Cheltenham Literary Festival:
“They're the first generation who have gone through seeing the world fall apart [with the pandemic]. So they're quite fragile, and they're quite open about their emotions…And they're very sort of cosy, and they're very supportive of their friends, and they're quite funny, and they like to wear bunny ears, and they like to wear slippers and pyjamas and have all these little rituals and ways of taking care of themselves and loving their friends.
With Bridget, it was about the gap between how you feel you're expected to be and how you actually are - this idea that whatever you're like, it's not quite good enough and there's something you've got to fix. And for them, it's a million times worse because they go on TikTok and they're looking at people who are filtered, and they're looking at all these impossible things that they're supposed to be, and they're still worrying about their bodies.
This is anecdotal. I'm not a sociologist. But they're still worrying about their weight and what they look like - is it right, is it wrong, should they have a Brazilian butt lift or what? But at the same time, there's an another layer of feeling guilty because of the body positivity movement. So they also feel a failure for even thinking about whether they're the right shape. So it's complicated for that generation."
I can’t say parts of that aren’t pretty depressing. It’s almost 30 years since Bridget Jones and her weight-tracking diaries came out; you’d hope that things might have improved, rather than escalated to butt lifts and buccal fat and the boundaries around who can and can’t be body positive. But as a massive Bridget Jones fan (listen to mine and Bobby’s Book Chat ep on it) I’m not sad that she’s reaching a whole new generation.
Speaking of the 90s (it’s almost like I’m a millennial3) I was howling at Absolutely Fabulous: Inside Out. For the unfamiliar, Ab Fab was a national telly treasure in the UK that ran for 5 seasons from 1992-1995 about Edina, a needy showbiz PR with heinous fashion taste played by Jennifer Saunders and Patsy, an ex-model turned fashion director and chain smoker played by Joanna Lumley. They are bolstered by Edina’s straight-laced, despairing daughter Saffy, a withering Mother and a ridiculous PA, Bubbles. “I turn the crap to credible, the dull to delicious” shouts a drunk Edina clad in a neon cat-suit, to her stony-faced mother and daughter.
Inside Out is a total delight to watch - funny and nostalgic and full of delicious gossip about making Ab Fab: Saunders never finished her scripts on time; in a particularly constipated review, The Times declared that the sitcom would never take off; the BBC’s then Head of Comedy said he’d “never found drunk women funny”. (To which comedian Meera Syal whispers in response: “he’s not lived”.) Ab Fab was all about women - men were only ever accessories, or trimmings - and the 99.8% male BBC, notes presenter Kirsty Young drily, didn’t always get it.
I didn’t actually realise it came out so early - I remember loving it in the early 00s, which must have meant it re-ran and re-ran. In the words of Ab Fab script editor, comedian Ruby Wax: “Was it 30 years ago? I’m going to faint”. Nor did I realise that it was based on a sketch by French and Saunders. French took some time out to raise her daughter and so Saunders asked Lumley, who was overjoyed - as a former model, she was always cast as the dreary girlfriend, never the funny one. Patsy was a former model, but she was unhinged and outrageous - Eddy’s enabler - and has partied so hard, explains Lumley, that she has about two brain cells left.
Ab Fab was (mostly) satire and the celebs couldn’t get enough - cameos included Whoopi Goldberg, Elton John and Kate Moss, who emerges sodden from the Thames in the 2016 movie with a fag and a glass of champagne. There was a young Idris Elba, a luxuriantly-haired Tom Hollander, Richard E. Grant, Helena Bonham-Carter. “Did we overact the whole way through?” Lumley asks Saunders, as they re-watch clips. “Yes, we did”, replies Saunders happily. The two of them spend a lot of the doc snorting with laughter. My husband said it was like listening to Dolly and I record an episode of The High Low. “I’d have done it for free” says Lumley gravely and Saunders agrees.
Inside Out aired on Gold, and you can watch it on Sky catch up, or Now TV. I can’t seem to find a trailer, but here’s an interview from Graham Norton when the film came out, where Lumley and Saunders talk about making the pilot. If you are too young to have watched it/ heard of it and can find the means to buy it - treat yourself. It is daft and outrageous and utter magic.
A few minutes after finishing Naoise Dolan’s piece on how George Orwell became the metaphor for everything, I came across this t-shirt on Instagram. She’s not wrong! Dolan is best known as a novelist, but she is also startlingly good on the malleability and misuse of language - her piece for What Writers Read on Schott’s Miscellany4 was one of my favourite entries. In this lively, blisteringly smart piece for The FT, Dolan notes that despite the British writer5 dying almost 75 years ago, he is name-checked in the newspapers every single day.
“How is it that Orwell has become the single answer to so many questions, in so many different subjects, for so may people? His name conjures an amorphous idea of fairly play and “common sense”; his spare prose supposedly brings cool nonpartisanship to a world of impassioned blusters… A single word, “Orwellian”, evokes the great man’s foresight about the dangers of an overweening nanny state, a censorious far left or whatever else may be getting your goat that day.”
What is humorous - or aggravating, depending on your sensibilities - notes Dolan, is that Orwell is used as literary poster-boy for both right and left. For the right, he is a warning against immigration, “the myth of an uncorrupted English”; for the left he is a “liberal” figure, whose Englishness stands for “cosmopolitan globalism.” So which is it - if, either? Nolan is particularly funny on Christopher Hitchens, whose 2002 book she credits for the Orwellian mania that ensued. “[Hitchens] is the worst sort of wingman - one who puts you off the guy who could have chatted you up just fine by himself.” It almost makes me want to give Animal Farm another go.6
I recently wrote about how hooked I was on Couples Therapy, mentioning that I had yet to listen to Esther Perel’s wildly popular pod, Where Should We Begin?