Digested week: If I can't watch Spurs I'll have a good cry at the opera

Monday

With so many more people taking holidays in the UK this year – I’m told the Lake District was rammed last week – I can’t help feeling that publishers have missed a trick to cash in on the lockdown experience. Because my wife and I are going to spend two weeks in Norfolk in a self-catering home with different sets of friends and we’ve realised that we have no idea of the expected safety requirements. So a book explaining the necessary etiquette could have saved us a great deal of potential embarrassment as almost everyone I know has different standards and there are so many possibilities for falling out with friends. In fact, almost everything is fraught with danger. How do you know neither you nor your friends have coronavirus when you arrive at the holiday let? Obviously there is no hugging, kissing or shaking hands but should you insist that everyone arrives with a recent negative test certificate? That’s just the start though. Then there are the issues of wearing masks indoors when you’re less than 2 metres apart, not to mention the eating and washing arrangements. Does everyone have their own shelf in the fridge for their private stash of food or do we all take a chance and eat from the same Lurpak tub? And what if you have to share a bathroom? Can you enforce a 20-second handwashing routine to make sure the taps are Covid-free? The most difficult conversation, though, might come at the point where you collectively decide that a holiday spent trying to avoid one another is just no fun at all. At which point, you either all say “sod it” and start behaving more or less normally or you draw lots to see which family gets sent home.

Tuesday

Much to Boris Johnson’s disappointment – the whole point of trying to install Chris Grayling as the chair was that he was the one person who could be trusted to lose something – the intelligence and security committee’s report into Russian interference in UK elections was finally published. It made for uncomfortable reading for the government, having established firm links between politicians and Russian money. But what most stood out was the government’s complete lack of curiosity to find out just how far Russia had penetrated the UK’s public life. It had already been established that Russia had tried to interfere with both the Scottish referendum of 2014, the US presidential election of 2016 and the UK election of 2019 but it never seemed to have occurred to anyone – either in the government or MI5 – that Russia might also want to stick an oar in the EU referendum. Instead, everyone had decided not to look for any evidence of wrongdoing and on the basis of doing nothing had concluded no interference had taken place. Presumably, Vladimir Putin had given personal assurances to the Conservative government that his spies and bots were far too busy interfering in other elections that year to bother with the Brexit vote. Needless to say, Boris’s first move was to try to discredit the report, saying there had been no smoking gun. Primarily because no one had looked for a gun. He then said he thought it would be a good idea if every country gave each other a list of their spies to make it easier to keep tabs on what everyone was up to. What could possibly go wrong?

Wednesday

For one week only, author Mark Dawson found himself at No 8 in the Sunday Times top 10 bestseller lists with his thriller The Cleaner. Largely because he had noticed he was in 13th place in the midweek rankings and gone out and spent £3,600 on 400 copies of his own book from a shop in Salisbury. His mistake was then to let everyone know what he had done in a podcast, saying that he had bought the books in order to satisfy orders from overseas. Even though it might have been more cost-effective for him to have bought the books from his publisher at the author’s discounted price. When this came to the attention of Nielsen Bookscan, the company that monitors the bestseller lists, Dawson was retrospectively stripped of his place but denied trying to game the system. Still I can’t help feeling a little bit sorry for him over how this looks. There can’t be an author out there who hasn’t at some point wondered if it might be possible to somehow improve their ranking to get a coveted spot in the top 10. Because once in the bestseller list, you start getting reviews, bookshops start giving you more prominent displays and sales take off accordingly. Indeed there is a story – possibly apocryphal – of a very rich first-time author who, 20 years or so ago, spent £100K on 10,000 copies of his own book, which had been pretty much ignored on publication as its subject matter was somewhat eclectic. The book subsequently topped the bestseller charts and the author got a massive amount of free publicity from newspapers keen to profile and review him. Thereafter the author became a household name – at least in literary circles – and his subsequent books all became bestsellers without him having to give them a helping hand. That initial £100K could have been the best investment he ever made.

Thursday

The coronavirus has been very kind to some people. At one point this week, Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO, woke up to find he was £10bn richer than the day before. Quite what he made of this unexpected windfall – if indeed he paid much attention to it at all, given his overall net worth is close to £150bn – I’ve no idea. Though I dare say he might have spent a few minutes wondering how to avoid paying any tax on any of it. I’ve no idea what I would do if I were to find myself £10bn richer. My guess is that I would earmark some money for home improvements as I’ve no desire to move – I hate change and we’ve lived in the same place for more than 25 years – and parts of the house are beginning to look a bit tatty. Plus my wife has her eye on our son’s bedroom, where my exercise bike is now parked, for her studio and I would like to redesign the house so that we had more space for our collection of pots and a proper library for our books. I’d also quite like to buy a much bigger, ultra high-definition television along with more ceramics and books, as my wife might not be quite so against the idea if I was a billionaire. After that, I think I’d be a bit clueless. It would be nice to splash out on friends and family, but even getting to spend £5m would present me with a major challenge. But you can never be too careful, so I’d probably like to hold on to another £995m as rainy day money. As for the other £9bn, I think I’d have a lot of fun giving it away to charities and arts organisations that I care about. Which is one of the many reasons I’m never going to be the kind of person who winds up £10bn richer overnight.

Friday

As predicted last week, I have renewed my Spurs season tickets though I can’t say I did so with any great sense of excitement. Partly because watching Tottenham hasn’t been much fun this season but mainly because the club – like all the others – has no idea when fans will be allowed back into the stadium. There was talk in their email of maybe allowing supporters to enter a ballot to attend games if clubs were allowed to reopen the ground to a much-reduced capacity, but even that didn’t exactly inspire me with hope. Because what I’ve come to realise ever since the Premier League restarted behind closed doors is that it hasn’t really been the football I’ve missed. Sure, watching a game on TV being played in an empty stadium has been better than no football at all, but it’s been a fairly soulless experience. At times I haven’t even got that excited when Spurs have won. More just a feeling of, “That’s nice, I suppose.” It’s the companionship and friendship of Matthew, Richard, Alexis and others that I’ve really been missing. The sense of shared disappointment and joy. The catching up with what they’ve been up to over the past 10 days or so and the cathartic pleasure of a group moanathon. What I’ve also realised I’ve badly missed is the emotional power of live classical music. Its power to heal parts of me that I didn’t even know were badly wounded. So I am thrilled to report that tomorrow, the wonderful and ever-inventive Opera Holland Park has assembled a stellar cast of singers and I am going to a socially distanced live concert. I’m not exactly sure how the whole performance will be managed – I’ll be taking my mask, just in case – but I can confidently predict there will be tears. Mine.

Digested week, digested: Boris the Not-So-Brave