Monday
The Office for National Statistics has published its annual survey of baby names in England and Wales. Oliver remains top of the boys’ popularity chart for the eighth consecutive year, while Olivia heads the girls’ ranking for the fifth year in a row.
Over the last 10 years, Ivy has risen 221 places and has now – along with Rosie – entered the top 10 for the first time. Grace and Freya are the ones to drop out of the top 10. Arthur and Noah both remain popular, having risen 200 places in the past two decades to become top five names.
Archie – probably due to Harry and Meghan – makes it into the top 10 at the expense of Charlie. There’s a message for Archie’s grandfather there: it’s the first time Charlie has not been in the top 10 for 15 years.
Making it into the top 100 for boys for the first time were Otis and Milo, while only Maeve broke through for the girls. Jupiter is ranked 3,848th with four boys having been given that name. That many.
Obviously the main interest of the data, though, is what it tells you about your own family. When we named our children, my wife and I deliberately chose ones that had no family connections and would not risk them asking “what the hell were you thinking?” when they grew up. So far, so good: Robbie ranks 513th with 73, while Anna comes in at 89th with 574.
John isn’t quite so far on the way out as I imagined. 361 parents picked the name, leaving me in a solid 150th position. But it looks as if time is up for my wife. For the second year in a row, no parents have named their daughter Jill. She’s in danger of disappearing. Not that she cares. She says she’s never liked the name.
Tuesday
It seems I may have to eat humble pie. When the government first proposed a Festival of Brexit three years ago, I was one of many to make fun of the idea. Just how would we be celebrating?
Anything involving theatre, music or comedy was out of the question as most artists would refuse to take part having found that leaving the EU has made it harder for them to get work abroad. So what are we left with? The Great Escape projected on to the White Cliffs of Dover? An unbuilt bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland? A theme park made up of all those lorries queuing to complete the paperwork to cross the Channel?
Actually, scrub the last one, as there are no lorry drivers so the theme park would be empty. But we now have been given a rough idea of what to expect next year for Unboxed. Note that any reference to Brexit has been removed from the title. And instead of being a chance to wallow in nostalgia, the festival sounds as if it has been dreamed up by a bunch of space cadets who have taken too many drugs.
There will be 10 projects in total, ranging ranging from a 10km scale model sculpture trail of the solar system in Northern Ireland, to a decommissioned North Sea offshore platform in Weston-super-Mare which will be transformed into a public art installation.
Other treats include, so we are promised, a “magical forest” in the heart of the city, a DreamMachine, Galwad – a machine that allows you to go 30 years into the future – and Tour de Moon, a festival in collaboration with our lunar satellite. Let’s hope the moon doesn’t pull out at the last minute due to artistic differences.
Whether it’s all worth £120m is another matter, but the festival is being run by Martin Green, who oversaw the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, and it sounds a great deal more fun than was initially promised. So for the moment, count me in.
Wednesday
There was a telling moment just as Rishi Sunak stood up to give his budget speech in the summer. For obvious reasons, Boris Johnson had spent the previous 30 minutes not wearing a mask as he was answering – or rather, not answering – prime minister’s questions and Liz Truss, who was sitting close by on the government front bench, had followed his cue by also not wearing a face covering. But when PMQs was over, Boris reached into his pocket and pulled out a mask.
When Truss saw what he had done she momentarily looked horrified before slipping on a mask of her own. You don’t get to be foreign secretary by having principles of your own. But what is it with Tory MPs and masks? While almost all opposition MPs cover their faces in the chamber, almost no Tories did until today – the day after an order had gone round making masks compulsory for everyone except MPs. This was enough to shame some Tory MPs into wearing them – MPs pleading exceptionalism is never a good look – but even then at least half of the Tories refused.
Do they really believe Jacob Rees-Mogg’s nonsense that Conservatives don’t need to wear masks as they get along better with their colleagues and you can’t catch Covid from your friends? Or is it that they think masks are an unnecessary restriction on civil liberties? My guess is that other factors are at play. The first is a desire to make the UK look like a country where everything is perfectly normal – even though infections are running at 40,000 per day – during the two weeks of Cop26. The second is a fear that wearing masks in public places would be tantamount to admitting that plan B was needed. Even if it was.
After all, who wouldn’t wear a mask if there was even the off-chance of stopping the spread of Covid to someone who is clinically vulnerable? And there will be hell to pay from me if the net outcome of the mask refuseniks is another lockdown over Christmas. My daughter and her husband have just booked their flights to the UK.
Thursday
One of the more unexpected pleasures of having adult children is discovering they have interests that overlap with my own obsessive tendencies. Earlier in the year, our son told us that he had bought himself a second hand deck and was now collecting vinyl.
At the time I didn’t think much of it, other than to say it was a pity I had got rid of all my old rock LPs in the early 1980s when I discovered opera. But a seed had been planted and when we were in Norfolk on holiday for a few days in the summer, I couldn’t resist the local vinyl store. It was like going back in time. Not just the act of thumbing through the records – it used to be a Saturday morning ritual to go to the local record shop – but the LPs themselves.
Here were many of the records I had once owned myself and it suddenly dawned on me that I could start my collection all over again, only this time passing it straight on to Robbie. It would be a way of giving him something that had meaning to me and which I had previously thought I had missed out on.
So I started out with Led Zep II, Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell. Robbie was thrilled so the next time we went to see him in Brighton we went out record collecting together and came back with Songs of Leonard Cohen. This is one of my favourite albums of all time and now it’s also one of Robbie’s. He recently sent me a text saying he’d been playing it a lot and how amazing it was. I was touched. It felt like a genuine connection had been made. He even bought me a book of Leonard Cohen’s poetry along with some beautiful bookends he had made for my birthday.
All that’s left for me now is to wean him on to opera. I’m going to try this Christmas and if it works then I will finally have found a home for the three-dozen full-length boxed set recordings I’ve hung on to since the 1980s.
Friday
It probably escaped your attention that Spurs won a game of football this week. A 1-0 away win to Burnley in the Carabao Cup. It didn’t pass me by totally, though I must confess to being secretly relieved to find out that the game wasn’t being shown on live TV as it would save me 90 minutes of pain.
I just knew in advance that the best we could hope for was a scrappy win in a dreary game and reading the post-match reports that seems precisely what both teams delivered. This is a worry. In the past, Spurs have been an ever present in my life and I would have fretted about not being able to watch the full game. Especially during times when I’ve suffered poor mental health – and I would like to thank all those who wrote to me after my previous column: it meant so much to me – having Spurs in my life gave me a structure. There were games taking place, no matter how bad I was feeling, and I would be watching them.
Better still, no one would expect anything of me. It was a lifeline of sorts. Now, not so much. And I think it’s the club’s fault as much as my own. I’ve watched most games this season and it just feels that the players don’t really know what they are supposed to be doing and aren’t that bothered to find out. It’s hard to really love a team that doesn’t love itself.
It’s not the crap football that upsets me – I’ve seen plenty of bad Spurs’ sides – it’s the lack of passion. I’m not even that bothered to be missing this Saturday’s home game against Manchester United – normally an unmissable fixture. The game got moved for the TV schedules and I’d already booked to go to see La Traviata at the Royal Opera. That really is unmissable, as it’s got the superb Cuban-American soprano Lisette Oropesa in the title role and she’s one of the world’s best.
Do give it a try. It could change your life. I’ve checked and there are tickets still available for Saturday – and future performances – ranging from £11 upwards. Just make sure you book a night when Oropesa is singing as there are two different casts.
Digested week, digested: It’s war with France!
