Joy Lo Dico: Don’t take away the freedom of Generation Mobile

Generation Rent howls about not being able to afford a home. But in the absence of time spent choosing nice sofas or investing in a new kitchen, and in a desperate bid to escape your lodgings, you go out. You take a train to Peckham for a night out, knowing Uber will get you back. You go away for weekends in Krakow, you take jobs where you can work from anywhere. When your possessions amount to a jumble of Zara clothes and an expensive phone, you make yourself rich in experience instead.

Putting aside the rights and wrongs of Uber and TfL, the decision to revoke the cab firm’s licence felt like an attack on a kind of freedom of movement. Before, the choice was mainly between black cabs, for those with expense accounts or a reckless attitudes towards their overdraft, and waiting for a night bus at Trafalgar Square. Uber arrived as point-to-point travel, easy and cheapish. The physical boundaries of commute times and last trains melted away.

After the TfL decision came Theresa May’s Florence speech, another reiteration that we and the EU are in splitsville. That hurts in the same spot. It isn’t just having holidays or friends abroad, or booking an AirBnb for immersion. Being citizens of the EU meant a generation could play with the idea of moving lives, freelancing from your favourite place in Europe, of falling in love and never leaving.

Not having your own bricks and mortar means the responsibilities of previous generations have not arrived. As Boris Johnson noted with anxiety in his Daily Telegraph article this seems to be a group of people with trans-national allegiances. But if you haven’t been able to buy a little patch of British soil, why would you feel so wedded to your country?

There will still be cabs in London, there will still be holidays and lives to be led abroad. But the two create a narrowing of horizons for those who turned the negatives of Generation Rent into a positive: that of the acquisition of experience via nomadic adventure. They are Generation Mobile. Brexiteers may talk about freedom from Brussels but this was a generation exercising their own freedom, that of movement through London, Europe, the world, the internet, without the burdens of identities fixed by possession and place. Once the world was your oyster. Now your Oystercard is your world.

We’ve lost Colin to la dolce vita but we can steal stars too

Arrivederci Colin Firth, who has checked in for Italian citizenship. There goes one of our finest ambassadors for stiff Britishness, seduced by the land of beautiful light and long lunches. How can he ever play Mark Darcy again with a healthy Italian tan and the swagger of a man who has discovered la dolce vita?

It is at moments like these, when national pride is crushed, that the British should launch a counter-offensive. I suggest the Foreign Secretary be dispatched with a bunch of roses to persuade Isabella Rossellini to come over to our side. The Prime Minister should ring up Toni Servillo, the suave star of La Grande Bellezza — the decadent hymn to Rome — and try to persuade him of the architectural virtues of the Tower of London and Canary Wharf. Gina Lollobrigida must be offered the part of the landlady in the Queen Vic.

Serbia seems to have understood the trick, handing Ralph Fiennes a passport after he filmed Coriolanus there. Why can’t we do the same? Oh yes, that old thing called British reserve.

Grenfell victim’s fitting arts legacy

Today, a new scholarship scheme will be announced in honour of Khadija Saye, a young, promising artist whose work was spotted at the Venice Biennale by then Tate head Nicholas Serota and who had been invited into Julia Hobsbawm’s Names Not Numbers family, a network of established figures and bright young minds, in 2015.

Saye had been due to give an address to the NNN conference today at Jacob Rothschild’s Waddesdon Manor but the young British-Gambian was one of the many who did not survive the Grenfell Tower fire. These new scholarships from Names Not Numbers aim to create similar pathways for others. Out of that tragedy comes a legacy, not just of her art, but also of opportunity.

Germany knows it ain’t broke…

Continuity: that’s the one thing Germany does very well, as does its Embassy in London, which flings opens its doors for a party at every opportunity, whether it’s storming through to the World Cup final again or holding a more or less predictable election.

Also reassuring is that, at every party I’ve attended at its Belgrave Square home, the Embassy embraces its own stereotypes — there are always sausages on the grill and beer flowing from the taps. As the fourth election victory for Angela proves, if it works, don’t change anything.