Toothpicks are disgusting in public – and now they’re flooding the red carpet

There is plenty about modern life to cause celebration and aggravation in equal measure. Thankfully, old hand Christopher Howse and young gun Guy Kelly are here to dissect the way we live now...

Lots of famous people I have never heard of have been chewing toothpicks as they stand on bits of red carpet. There is someone who calls herself Princess Gollum and looks like it. A toothpick is seldom out of her mouth.

These, then, are chewing toothpicks (like cooking sherry), not picking toothpicks. Princess Gollum may not, like her inspiration, rob nests for chicks to eat, but if she did she wouldn’t be seen a couple of hours later trying to hoick a stubborn bit of sinew out of a gap between molars.

Chewing toothpicks are indistinguishable from wooden cocktail sticks, without which no cube of cheese could ever have been coupled with a chunk of pineapple. Forty years ago at the Italian end of the Coach & Horses, minor gangsters used to chew on wooden toothpicks. Those toothpicks went with Brylcreem, grey shoes, tinted glasses, moustaches and, by an irony, bad teeth.

I wonder whether such toothpicks were an urban substitute for the sprigs of thyme that men would keep between their jaws when going for a stroll to the edge of the village back in Sicily. They belong to a different world from the tiny brushes mounted on spark-plug-shaped handles that keep teeth not only spick but also span.

It is, however, disgusting to catch sight of someone wielding an interdental brush on a train or in a café. The user might attempt to conceal the manoeuvre behind their hands, but that merely draws attention to the peculiar angularity of their upper limbs in the act.

I don’t know whether Boots also sells teeny-weeny spades for people to pick their noses more effectively. Nostrils became a popular area for diagnostic probing during the coronavirus outbreak, and some people have grown contrarily fond of exploring their own miniature potholing complex.

I can imagine Princess Gollum posting memorable images on Instagram with one or two nose trowels left carelessly at the pit-head, like Miss Marple’s gardening tools lying unattended in her trug at St Mary Mead as she listens at the hedge to a most interesting snippet of conversation.

It’s not a sentence I write often enough, but thank you, Christopher, for alerting me to the existence of ‘model, visual artist and internet sensation’ Princess Gollum. Because how’s this for an explanation of toothpicks’ comeback?

‘A toothpick couldn’t be a more perfect accessory to sum up where we are at this moment,’ she said in March. ‘It’s so small but sharp, minimal yet loud, and fun to fixate on while making a statement. I love seeing a modern woman in a full face beat, waiting for her car to pull up with a toothpick in her mouth and no cigarette to put out.’

Small but sharp! Minimal yet loud! That very specific situation involving women and cars, which must only occur at the taxi ranks outside all-you-can-eat BBQ restaurants! Precious words, Gollum.

My main interface with toothpicks comes in late-night taxis after weddings, when I realise I have 132 in each suit pocket, such is the heinous canapé/bin ratio at those events, and, forgetting where they came from, start to panic that I’ve drunkenly mugged the Borrowers’ athletics team of their javelins.

How and why they look cool dangling from a lip is a mystery, so I googled it. Apparently Charles Forster, a 19th-century Bostonian, hired Harvard men to eat at restaurants and ask for toothpicks after their meals, complaining when there were none. Forster would visit the restaurant the next day, selling you-know-what.

They came to be an essential end to any meal, offered with the bill. Soon, people would linger outside with their new status symbol. This morphed into every hard man in town looking like they’ve just golloped a cocktail sausage and now can’t find the recycling.

Yet it’s the only personal hygiene practice you can complete in plain view. People publicly cutting their nails ought to be tasered. If somebody began rubbing a pumice stone over their feet on the Thameslink I’d call the British Transport Police on 61016. See it, say it, escort him to prison, please.

But toothpicks escape opprobrium. I guess it’s like the people’s princess said: a toothpick couldn’t be a more perfect accessory to sum up where we are at this moment.