Andrew Watts | The Spectator columnists & writers

What happened when I took my son to Drag Queen Story Hour

The nice young man in the library had told us he was worried about protests when I booked tickets for Drag Queen Story Hour. We only began to hear the chants halfway through the show; they drifted up from the courtyard in front of St John’s Hall, the council building that houses Penzance library, through the window behind where my son and I were sitting. They got louder and louder – the children started looking round, puzzled, and the drag queen gesticulated at me to close the window. It took me a few moments to realise what the gestures meant – I had assumed that it was what they call ‘vogueing’ – but I eventually pushed the sash closed. But not before I heard what they were chanting: ‘Drag! Is! For! Everyone!’ It had been clear when we arrived that the counter-protestors outnumbered the protestors.

Sick jokes: why medics need gallows humour

Most jobs have their own joke books. If you’re outside the job, you don’t get the joke — and if you do get the joke, you’re on the inside; which is what the jokes are for. (It’s the same with all comedy: some, if not most, of the appeal of Stewart Lee is in being the sort of person who finds Stewart Lee funny.) But some jobs have joke books which, from the outside, are not just unfunny but actually offensive. Usually the most stressful jobs, those that involve the rawest emotions, have a gallows humour that is thought to relieve that stress. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. Or have to go to therapy. It’s been a mixed week for this sort of gallows humour. On the one hand, the final controversy that brought Dame Cressida Dick’s resignation was a report of jokes between officers at Charing Cross police station.

My year-long battle with the parking profiteers

I had been cross enough about having to go to Sennen Cove. Aside from the fact that I don’t care for the place — what is the point of a Cornish beach if the sand is too coarse-grained for sandcastles? — I resented the fact that I would not even be able to park near the place I hated. The car park on the beach is full from nine in the morning; I would have to drive up to the town — which is so far away that some of the houses aren’t even second homes — and walk. Furiously I bought a ticket, chucked it in the car and marched down the cliff to the beach. When I returned to find a parking fine on the windscreen, I was, I admit, not in the holiday spirit. I assumed that sending a scan of the ticket to Armtrac, the parking company, would resolve matters.

Spectator Out Loud

Wolfgang Munchau, Andrew Watts, Hannah Tomes

19 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Wolfgang Munchau, Andrew Watts, Hannah Tomes

19 min listen

On this week's episode, we’ll hear from Wolfgang Munchau on the political situation in Germany. (00:49)Next, Andrew Watts on his year long battle against a parking ticket. (11:01)And finally, Hannah Tomes on her love of Baileys. (15:33)Produced and presented by Sam HolmesSubscribe to The Spectator today and get a £20 Amazon gift voucher:www.spectator.co.uk/voucher

What will become of Jamaica’s Maroons?

Jamaican police entered farms in the village of Accompong in August to destroy ganja crops. The village chief, carrying a rifle, drove them away. ‘This is a gross disrespect and violation of Maroon territorial jurisdiction,’ said the chief, on his Instagram. Richard Currie talks a lot about sovereignty: he was elected colonel, or chief, on a platform of taking back control. A breathless profile in the Jamaica Gleaner refers to him as being like a cross between the hero and villain in Marvel’s Black Panther, but Accompong, with its 788 inhabitants, is no Wakanda. For nearly 300 years it has been more like Asterix’s village in Gaul, holding out against a hostile Empire. Some history. The year is 1739. Jamaica is entirely occupied by the British.

Our fascination with treehouses has deep roots

You can’t (and probably shouldn’t) design a treehouse. Treehouses should grow organically, in every sense: they must be made of wood, obviously — one definition of a treehouse is that it is a tree holding its dead friend — and the footings for the platform must be the knots or branches that are footholds when climbing the tree. Besides, it is only when you are halfway through building that you can work out where you need to fit round branches and add noggins — unless you build it between the trunks of two separate trees, or use some sort of 3D mapping software, both of which sound very much like cheating. So there wasn’t any masterplan behind my son’s treehouse. I bought some 2x4s in the first lockdown — timber merchants were the only shops open — and fitted them together in my head and the tree.

The problem with the Pride flag

Last month, the Pride flag was updated by the Intersex Equality Rights UK campaign group — the simple rainbow was not considered inclusive enough for intersex people. Other pressure groups had already added stripes for black people, brown people, trans people and people with Aids. The Gay Pride flag first flew 43 years ago this week. It was sewn by the American gay activist Gilbert Baker, who performed under the drag name of ‘Busty Ross’, claiming kinship (of a sort) with the 18th-century Quaker upholsterer Betsy Ross, who sewed the first American flag. Baker had been asked by Harvey Milk, the most famous openly gay politician in America, to design a flag for the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. Mass movements need symbols: until then, the only symbol the gay community had was the pink triangle and Milk thought, not unreasonably, that it was time to stop outsourcing their visual branding strategy to the Nazi concentration camps.

Spectator Out Loud

Max Pemberton, Andrew Watts, Ysenda Maxtone Graham

20 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Max Pemberton, Andrew Watts, Ysenda Maxtone Graham

20 min listen

On this week's episode, Dr Max Pemberton explains that while just as many people are seeing their GP as before the pandemic, something has changed. (00:55) After, Andrew Watts argues that you shouldn't buy a second home in Cornwall. (09:15) Ysenda Maxtone Graham finishes the episode, lamenting the loss of indoor singing. (14:00)

A second home in Cornwall is nothing to be proud of

Last week there was a public toilet for sale on the coast of Cornwall. The Kent-based auctioneer called it ‘an exciting and rare opportunity’, although its video tour of the property did not even undo the padlock on the security door. It was on the market for £20,000, which was a bargain — the last exciting and rare toilet block to be auctioned in Cornwall went for five times its asking price, even though it didn’t have as nice a view. It did, however, have windows. It’s undeniable that the property market in Cornwall is overheating. The backlash to the toilet auction was such that it was withdrawn from sale, but house prices in parts of the county are increasing at double the national average. Property searches have gone up 140 per cent in two years, and last month a bungalow in Port Isaac sold within five minutes of the listing going online.

Why people have sex in graveyards

The oldest churchyard in Torquay is being used by people openly having sex and sunbathing nude in broad daylight. This was how it was reported in the local newspaper, of course — ‘broad daylight’ is a phrase that is only ever used by subeditors trying to make things sound more depraved. (Who sunbathes except in broad daylight?) It was not the first such report since the pandemic began: in June, a couple were witnessed coupling in Brandwood Cemetery in Kings Heath, Birmingham; police were called amid concerns over public indecency, and fears that they may not even have been from the same household. A few weeks earlier, another pairing was witnessed in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalene, Sutton-in-Ashfield. It is tempting to assume that these cases are a product of the pandemic.

The Edition

The Covid trap: will society ever open up again?

44 min listen

The Edition

The Covid trap: will society ever open up again?

44 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Audio Reads: Douglas Murray, Paul Dolan, and Andrew Watts

19 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Audio Reads: Douglas Murray, Paul Dolan, and Andrew Watts

19 min listen

On this week's Audio Reads, Douglas Murray advises Labour to get a new attack line, now that the Conservatives have become the party of the NHS. Professor Paul Dolan, a behavioural scientist at the LSE, ponders what would have happened had the pandemic started in Sweden, rather than China. And Andrew Watts says - if Brexit talks are scuppered because of fish, shouldn't Brits at least eat more of it?

Britain’s strange aversion to seafood

Last week’s Brexit negotiations, conducted by video conference, failed to come to an agreement on fisheries. Michel Barnier, the EU negotiator (and former French fisheries minister), insisted that continued European access to British territorial waters was a prerequisite of any deal, and David Frost, his British counterpart, replied that this was ‘incompatible with our status as an independent coastal state’. If there is going to be no deal as a result of fishing, as seems increasingly probable, we are going to have a lot more fish to eat, but we’re also going to have to eat a lot more fish. For an island surrounded by fish, Britain has never really been keen on seafood. Never: an analysis of skeletons from a Pictish burial ground in Scotland, published a couple of weeks ago, showed that the Picts ate beef and pork but no fish, despite living in what is now the fishing village of Portmahomack.

The Edition

Back to Brexit: will the transition be extended?

36 min listen

The Edition

Back to Brexit: will the transition be extended?

36 min listen

Will Brexit make Valentine’s Day flowers less expensive?

Any florist will recognise the look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to buy flowers. Some of them try to make it easier for you. I used to go to a splendid florist in Ealing who talked to me about rugby for no less than five minutes each visit. But most florists are more interested in flowers than people, and let it show. For some reason, you’re never allowed to write the card yourself. You have to dictate it, endearments and private jokes and all, while a couple of women who remind you of your mother lurk in the background. My colleague Rory Sutherland believes that this is the point, that buying flowers is something men don’t like doing, so it is a mild human sacrifice which signals intent, a commitment device.

Is Monopoly feminist?

I’ve been playing a lot of Monopoly recently. My son got his first grown-up set for Christmas and, even after time has increased the entropy of his Lego sets and Scalextric, this is the present he still pulls out. I have no objection — why wouldn’t I break off from completing my tax return to watch someone else squirm at income tax? — but his mother is doubtful about the game’s message. She has already forbidden the card game Old Maid on feminist grounds (‘You shouldn’t be stigmatised for not being in a couple!’); should we really be teaching him the fun side of capitalism? One of Fidel Castro’s first actions on seizing power was to ban the game and have all sets in Cuba destroyed. The government of Hungary, less strictly doctrinaire than other communist regimes, licensed an adaptation called Gazdálkodj Okosan! (Budget Prudently!), which may sound joyless but had chance cards like: ‘Go to the cinema! The films are instructive and entertaining.

It’s possible to talk to children about politics without leading them in one direction

My six-year-old son announced, from the back of the car, that he was backing Boris Johnson. My wife, who’s voting Lib Dem, was horrified, accusing me of indoctrinating the boy; I resisted the temptation to film a video and post it on Twitter, to be retweeted by Tories and hate-tweeted by others accusing me of brain-washing, even child abuse. But when we questioned our son it soon emerged that he had heard — whether from a news report, or from his parents talking — that Boris Johnson was in favour of cake and in favour of eating it, and this was very much a policy he could get behind. It’s easy to assume that any political opinion expressed by a child must be the result of indoctrination, but it’s not true. While all political scientists know the best way to predict someone’s voting preference is to look at his or her parents’ voting preferences — or, if there is disagreement, at the mother’s voting preference — the mechanism behind it is unclear.

Learning the ropes

My school owned a boat. And not some dinghy or fibreglass pleasure craft either: Jolie Brise — the name was always, of course, pronounced ‘Jolly Breeze’ — is one of the best-known tall ships in the world, three times winner of the Fastnet race, a pilot cutter so famous that she has a pub named after her. (A Wetherspoons, admittedly, but that counts.) It was only after I left that I realised that this was unusual: especially for a former direct grant grammar school in Wiltshire, about as far away from the sea as you can get in England. There were two sorts of master at Dauntsey’s in the 1980s: the younger ones, who had postgraduate diplomas and pedagogical theories and career paths, who might actually describe themselves as teachers; and proper schoolmasters, men who had fallen into teaching at some point in the 1950s or 1960s (as in the Molesworth cartoon of Mr Gabbitas and Mr Thring trapping a young graduate and leading him into captivity) and were still there 30 years later.

Have I got talent?

The contestants for the 13th series of Britain’s Got Talent, the variety show which starts on Saturday, certainly showed variety: next to me in the queue underneath the London Palladium are small children, a singer boasting about knowing Robbie Williams’s dad, and a Chelsea Pensioner in full Scarlets. A young researcher tries to put us at ease: ‘Have you come far?’ The Pensioner stares at her. ‘From Chelsea,’ he barks. Britain’s Got Talent is event television, the sort of show audiences still watch live and talk about, on Twitter or even while sitting together at home — it’s like Question Time for ITV on Saturday nights. And like Question Time, there is some element of contrivance: as the QT audience can, shockingly, include political activists, those shots of long queues of people waiting to be auditioned are actually often of the audience.

Michael Gove might not know much about mid-50s swingers, but I do

At this week's cabinet meeting, Michael Gove said that MPs hoping for a better deal from Brussels were like “mid-50s swingers” waiting for Scarlett Johansson to turn up to one of their parties. Amber Rudd, the work and pensions secretary, added “Or Pierce Brosnan”. But while the casting choices were up for debate – David Gauke added that they were expecting Johansson to make her cameo on a unicorn – no one at the cabinet meeting asked what Gove, 51, knew about mid-50s swingers parties. Now I do know about mid-50s swingers parties. I went to one. Killing Kittens Silvers is a club for “the sexual elite” over 45, with, according to its press releases, “attendees from all walks of life, including celebrities, politicians, opinion leaders, the rich and the beautiful”.

The problem with Edinburgh

Edinburgh. Why do comics do it? We almost invariably lose money. Even if you don’t pay for your venue, the cost of accommodation is astronomical — I’ve met Edinburgh natives who pay their annual mortgage with the rent for August. You could conceptualise it as a loss-leader; but there are 1,333 comedy shows this year, and a loss-leader that can’t lead to anything is just a loss. Yet comics still go up. Partly because, for three weeks, there’s the thrill of having a real job: instead of travelling for gigs, you’re at the same place at the same time every day. Partly because comedy is a serious business in Edinburgh: you wander around spotting your face on posters, and can almost imagine you are some kind of a big deal — and perhaps, for those three weeks, you are.

Cull the lawyers – there are too many for democracy to work

Last week the Daily Telegraph’s front page showed the 15 Tory MPs who had voted against the government under the headline ‘The Brexit Mutineers’. One of the first things pointed out was that two thirds of the group were lawyers. (In fact, only nine of the 15 are barristers or solicitors; a tenth is the son of a High Court judge, but in the hereditary meritocracy in which we live, that counts as the same thing.) This seemed to be taken as a point in their favour — who wouldn’t want our politicians to be sensible lawyers? Certainly, it contrasted with the disdain shown for journalist-politicians, like Michael Gove or Boris Johnson. Would we really rather our MPs were lawyers than hacks? Yes, some journalists do treat politics as a game, but it seems cruel to let people stand for Parliament only if they promise not to enjoy it.

Legal challenge

Duchy original

The Cornish nationalist party Mebyon Kernow (‘sons of Cornwall’) is not contesting any seats in the general election. Its leader of 20 years, Dick Cole, said its members were ‘exhausted’ after their local election campaign — it retained four councillors at ‘County Hall’ (Cornish nationalists always put County Hall in inverted commas, to avoid the inference that the Duchy is a mere county), and were only six votes shy of getting as many seats as Labour. It did not have the resources to fight an election so soon after 2015, when all its candidates lost their deposits. You might find it less surprising to learn that Mebyon Kernow is not standing than that Cornwall has its own party at all. It is true that the area has a distinct identity: its borders are older than those of any country in western Europe — but that is true of a lot of English counties.

In praise of pink Lego

There aren’t many toy companies that could make headlines in the business press merely by expanding their London offices — ‘Lego blocks out Brexit concerns’ — but Lego is not like other toy companies. Last week it was named the world’s most powerful brand by the consultancy Brand Finance; this week the second Lego movie is opening in cinemas; the University of Cambridge will shortly be appointing its first Lego professor of play. For a company that, a decade ago, was losing $1 million a day, this is a remarkable reconstruction. But Lego has spent those ten years regaining ‘belief in the brick’, according to its new British chief executive, Bali Padda: moving away from the instant gratification of computer-game-influenced, dumbed-down sets where most of the assembly work was done before the box was opened, and back to the basic bricks that are the reason Lego is loved by children.

Murder and politics

Six months ago an old friend of mine was murdered on his doorstep. This week his killer was sentenced to life imprisonment. In both cases, the first I heard of it was when someone I follow on Twitter posted a joke with a link to a news story. Both jokes were whimsical rather than callous — both were, in fact, musing on which Sunday evening television detective would most likely solve the crime — but whimsy in these circumstances feels like callousness. The tweets made me very angry. I read the reports of the trial. The murderer had made a spreadsheet of his potential victims, for robbery or kidnap, with their names in one column, planned modus in another and ‘reason’ in a third. The reasons varied — often it was ‘Tory’, at other times ‘scum Tory’.

Was my friend murdered for being a Tory?

Too, too shy-making

You might have thought that the last thing shy people need is a book about shyness: a large part of what makes us shy is our self-preoccupation and awareness of our own shyness. No social situation is more embarrassing — too, too shy-making — than someone pointing out we are shy: as if we didn’t know, as if that would help, as if, somehow, an increased consciousness of our self-consciousness would make us less self-conscious. Moreover, being away from home, I had to read this book in public — I removed the dust cover, of course, so no one could see what I was reading or be tempted to ask a question — in a succession of coffee shops. (I had to leave the first one when a stranger sat at an adjacent seat at the same table.

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