Friday afternoon in Clapham Junction, and two well-to-do white boys are swaggering down Falcon Road to Al’s Place Cafe. “He’s got bars, no?” says one, talking about some musician or other. “Nah g, allow. Paigon. Nehgateeve XP.” Off they shuffle …
In defence of Brits Abroad
Shagaluf. Ayia Napa. Marbella. Beefa.
Scouring maps of southern Europe like a Napoleonic general, the Brit Abroad plots his summer holidays. He seeks abandon, hot sun, cold beer and cheap 20-packs of Camel Blue. Territory selected, he readies his armoury: …
How Habitat made Britain’s middle class
An elegantly dressed woman is polishing her nails, looking into the camera with a kind of feline arrogance. Before her on the dressing table lies a beautiful pair of hairbrushes, while in the background a young man is making the …
Farewell to my Princess Diana dog
My dog Maisie bore a striking resemblance to Princess Diana. Looking across at her one evening, she shot me a look and I saw it. With those beseeching big eyes, she was a dead-ringer for the People’s Princess in that …
Why American cities are squalid
The Thursday before Christmas, I woke up in downtown Sofia, leisurely drank a coffee, and jumped on a metro that took me directly to the airport. In less than an hour, I was at the gate for my flight to …
Why sneer at Wetherspoons?
Until I walked across England, from Liverpool to Hull, I’d never heard of Wetherspoon. I certainly had no idea that, as a well-educated person, I was supposed to be scornful of the chain of pubs. When I discovered it, I …
The happy dysfunction of Dover
Three hours after landing at Heathrow, I was in Chaplins, just off Dover’s Market Square, 15 yards from a sign proclaiming: “Here while searching for his Aunt Betsey Trotwood, David Copperfield rested on the doorstep and ate the loaf he …
Blue-collar workers are our only hope
Amid all the hysteria, technological wreckage and gallons of spilt ink, artificial intelligence’s most potent legacy is yet to be discerned. As we enter the fourth industrial revolution, everyone from the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab to 61% of Americans …
Peter Thiel has launched a class war
“We’re building a city,” Dryden Brown declared last June, with the air of a man unfazed by the enormity of his words. “We’re building a city from scratch. Somewhere in the Mediterranean.” Brown, who has spent years explaining to investors …
The last hope for English cricket
The furore over the “spirit of the game” suggests, misleadingly, that there is indeed some such thing in contemporary cricket. But take a closer look and it becomes apparent that the much-fetishised “spirit”, a code of honour about as anachronistic …
McDonald’s made me a Marxist
There is a saying at McDonald’s: “‘tits on tills’ — boys in the kitchen, girls on the counter.” The idea, as a 22-year-old former worker described in a recent BBC report, is “to put attractive people at the front”. Human …
Greece was destined to burn
My grandmother had the theory that, as we get older, our mind subconsciously cleanses our memories of myriad misfortunes, leaving a sanitised version of the past for us to feel nostalgic about. The optimism of remembrance, she called it. Little …
The dawn of the Bohemian Peasants
It is a drab Wednesday in April and I am sat naked in a transparent plastic shed. Tucked away in a forest near the sleepy town of Uckfield, a woman starts to hit me in the face with some birch …
The Asian-American class war
In the metropolises of the West, shops that sell bubble tea — or boba, as it is commonly known — have proliferated over the past few years, a microcosm of the boom in East Asian cultural exports. At the same …
The fantasy of dating a Republican
More than 20 years before the advent of Tinder, an MTV show called Singled Out offered an unwittingly prescient insight into the dangers of algorithmic dating. The premise was simple: a dating pool of 50 potential suitors milled around in …