John Sturgis | The Spectator columnists & writers

The sweet and sour sides of growing up in a Chinese takeaway

Angela Hui was born into a life of service: Chinese takeaway service. Her parents had fled mainland China, where they experienced borderline starvation under the communist regime before arriving as exotic newcomers to provincial South Wales in 1985. There they become part of a Chinese diaspora, financially sustained by dozens of family-run takeaways dotted across the Valleys. The Huis set up in Beddau, a former pit town of 4,000 people that was still struggling socially and economically after the then recent closure of the mines. They call their restaurant Lucky Star. Hui’s mother is always trying to find ways to invite good fortune but as with most of her other attempts, the choice of name doesn’t prove especially fortuitous: running the takeaway will be almost as hard a life as the coal face had been for their new neighbours.

Where’s our world cup?

There was that frenetic drama of the last day of the Premier League just a fortnight ago - City down, Liverpool in, City up, Liverpool out! Then we had Real Madrid further chipping away at Liverpool’s quadruple ambitions, leaving them with a mere double, closely followed by Nottingham Forest clinging on against Huddersfield to finally get back into the Premier League. Then on Wednesday night Ukraine caused delight everywhere in the world except Scotland and Moscow to set up a play off this Sunday against Wales for the last available World Cup slot. But after that…nothing. Some people, to misquote Kenneth Wolstenholme, aren’t on the pitch - it’s all over. Just when we should be settling down for a glorious summer of the very best sporting event that there is, a football World Cup, we aren’t.

The tiny Greek island beloved by Athenians

Hydra is where well-heeled Athenians go for weekend breaks. It’s what Long Island is to New Yorkers, or Île de Ré to Parisians. For, while Corfu is a 12-hour ferry ride away and Santorini six, Hydra can be reached in as little as 1hr20 on the regular scheduled boats out of Athens. And – unless you own your own yacht – there’s no other way to get there: there’s no air or heliport, there aren’t even any cars. We tacked a day trip to Hydra onto a weekend city break that was otherwise full of the classical antiquity you'd associate with Athens. Greece's capital has, in the Acropolis and sister sites, arguably the greatest tourist attraction in the world but it’s not the easiest city to negotiate and tends towards the frenetic: it has a population north of three million, most of whom at any one time seem to be talking loudly, whereas Hydra’s permanent residents number barely 2,000 and are altogether quieter.

How a royal disagreement over a penny revealed Edward VIII’s vanity

A rare penny piece goes on sale this month for 20 million times its face value – quite the mark up. But it’s the backstory to the coin’s creation that is arguably the most interesting aspect of the sale – because of the insight it gives into the frosty relationship between George VI and Edward, whose sudden abdication put his brother on the throne. The story begins in 1936 with a dispute over the small matter of a hairstyle. While plunging the government towards a constitutional crisis through his relationship with the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, the notoriously vain Edward was also concerned about how he might look as loose change. And his concerns became clear in a number of discussions that autumn with the Royal Mint around the artwork for the new penny piece that would bear his profile.

The lost art of browsing

The paperback’s cover showed a woman and man walking down Ludgate Hill towards Fleet Street with St Paul’s behind them and a red double decker passing to their right, dressed in the office fashions of the post war years. It looked like a still from an Ealing Comedy. A friend posted the image on his social media because he liked the look of the Fontana edition which he had found on his father’s shelves. It was a copy of London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins. Most people seeing this would immediately start thinking of the fifties but for me it had rather different associations, triggering intense memories of the 1990s. This was because I had spent many hours over several years of that decade trying to find a copy of this very book.

Why Wordle won’t last

My name is John Sturgis and I am a Wordle addict. It’s not quite heroin or crack cocaine but it did have me hooked within minutes of trying it. And I have been chasing the high that those first hits gave me ever since. Or at least, I was a Wordle addict. Just two weeks ago I was confidently predicting that this was a hobby that I would keep up on a daily basis until I went to the grave. I was completely sold. Today that seems a much less likely scenario. Wordle was invented by a British geek, Josh Wardle, working in the US tech sector, the game’s name a wordplay, natch, on his surname. He launched it for family and friends last summer and went public in the autumn.In those distant days of three months ago he had under 100 daily players, according to backstory legend.

The real difference between rugby and football fans

England's rugby match against Australia at Twickenham last Saturday was my first visit to the home of English rugby in 42 years. During my school days, football was not only third best after rugby and cricket but frowned upon. I quickly rebelled, rejecting what I saw as the establishment sport and falling for the illicit populism of the round ball. Since that day I estimate I have been to something like 700 football matches, principally at West Ham where I’ve had season tickets for most of the last 30 seasons. So what is it like to be a football fan at the rugby? First off, Twickenham’s transport links make Wembley look like Piccadilly Circus. Which idiot decided to site the home of British rugby next to a light industrial estate in zone 5, not even on the tube system, a long walk from the tiny overground station hopelessly ill-equipped for tens of thousands arriving at once? And don’t even think about trying to park nearby.

The simple pleasures of sloe gin

The gin craze of recent years has reached a scale that would have horrified Hogarth. You can now buy strawberry, raspberry, rhubarb, blueberry and lime gins in supermarkets. For me, though, there is only one flavoured variety worth bothering with: sloe gin. Where the rest are novelties, this is a staple dating back to the early 19th century. Sloe gin is everywhere — Buckingham Palace even launched a line this year. But it is the easiest thing to make at home and there’s something very pleasurable about the ritual of doing so. Folk wisdom suggests you should go foraging for sloes in the days after the first frosts — by which point they won’t ripen further but haven’t yet dried up — which means from mid-late October through November.

The secret to restoring old records

It’s a kind of alchemy, transforming worthless clutter into pleasing and valuable collectors’ items, a slow but gratifying process all but forgotten in the modern age. I first learned it from the woman who ran a second-hand record store in my hometown, Tunbridge Wells, from the late seventies to the early nineties, where I misspent much of my youth and most of my pocket money. Fiona, a hangover from the hippie era, with her whispered husky voice and the endless extraordinarily-thin hand-rolled cigarettes that perhaps explained it, first imparted this lesson in around 1982. I speak of the lost art of fixing warped records. Anyone who has vinyl albums in any number will have them: those discs so wonky that the outer edge sends the phono arm jumping so that if you want to play them at all you have to put the stylus down closer to the centre than the outer edge.

An ode to London’s closed restaurants

Leg of lamb à la ficelle: 'First, inherit an ancient stone farmhouse lost somewhere in the hills of the Luberon, then string up a leg of young lamb over a smoky wood fire...' As I chuckled over this sardonic intro to a recipe in one of my favourite cookery books of recent years, Sardine by Alex Jackson, my laughter quickly died as I realised that not only will I never inherit such a farmhouse — but I’ll also never again go to the restaurant that launched the book. Sardine was one of my best-loved London restaurants of the last decade, tucked away in an unlikely and not especially salubrious corner behind a drive-thru McDonald’s in the unfashionable hinterland between Old Street and Angel. But the cooking was sensational: southern French and Basque stuff done with consistent flare at not, for London, especially high prices, with a great wine list.

Latitude 2021: the long-awaited taste of freedom

There was a palpable feeling of freedom in Henham Park, Suffolk over the weekend - as masks disappeared and social distancing was replaced by dancing. For a blissful 72 hours, Covid was all but forgotten as Latitude became the first major festival to return in nearly two years. And even if the cost of that freedom was £6.00 for a pint of not-quite-cold Carlsberg in a plastic cup, it still felt worth paying for this three day party in a field. As Katherine Ryan put it: 'I feel so free! The only way I could feel freer was if I was Britney Spears and I just heard my Dad had died.' That sense of freedom may have been enhanced for some: the Saturday night headliners, The Chemical Brothers, appeared to have inspired some in the audience to reach for pharmaceutical assistance and the resulting dancing was quite lively.

Are we on the verge of forgetting Amy Winehouse?

Before she became associated more with tragedy than comedy, there was a joke which went: ‘What’s Amy Winehouse’s favourite tube station?..High Barnet’. Not the best joke admittedly and one that required a degree of knowledge of rhyming slang - but it did anchor the beehived chanteuse and the borough she came from together in the popular imagination. I should be clear from the outset that I’m a fan. For me she was the last great pop star. Back to Black is one of the best albums of all time and she isn’t remotely out of her depth in that dead-at-27 club alongside Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin et al. Even if she was out of her depth in life. It seems strange then that ten years on from her terrible death - the anniversary falls this Friday - there is, in Barnet itself, practically no sign of her ever having existed.

We still believe: Could England win Qatar 2022?

Here’s a two-pointer pub quiz question: who was Bunny Austin and when, where and why did you hear his name mentioned annually until 2012? The brilliantly-named Bunny was, for an agonising 74 years of hurt, the last Briton to reach the final of the men's singles at Wimbledon. He didn’t actually win it in 1938, like the better known Fred Perry had three times earlier in that decade. But his name came up in commentary and sports reports without fail every year for decades, in late June or early July, whenever the last Brit was knocked out or, on heady occasions, when one reached the quarters or even semis. Tim Henman must curse his name to this day. The reason he fell out of the national conversation was that in 2012 Andy Murray finally broke the hoodoo and won a semi-final, consigning Bunny from annual fame to indefinite pub quiz obscurity.

Jess Phillips is wrong about football’s double-barrelled surnames

As the nation went football mad last week, nowhere was there a more stark expression of the ‘I’m-new-to-this performative fandom’ phenomenon than in Westminster. We were treated to the Prime Minister wearing an England top over a shirt and tie, Jacob Rees-Mogg bizarrely recreating the John Barnes ‘World in Motion’ rap and so on and so on. But amid this stiff competition the MP who most – unwittingly – revealed their apparent real lack of interest in or knowledge of the beautiful game was Labour’s Jess Phillips. ‘My youngests question for tonight “why do footballers never have double barrelled names?”’, she asked. Phillips no doubt intended to score a culture wars point by contrasting the humble origins of the wildly popular ‘boy from Brent’ Raheem Sterling and his teammates with the likes of Rees-Mogg.

The joy of blue plaques

This week saw the unveiling of the latest English Heritage blue plaque. It marks one Caroline Norton, a 19th century writer celebrated for her pioneering legal battles against her drunk and violent wastrel of a husband which resulted in some of the first legislation to enshrine women’s rights. The plaque is at Chesterfield Street, Mayfair, where, in 1877, the always-unlucky-in-love Norton died just three months after marrying again. It’s a riveting story that deserves to be told yet, relatively, Mayfair doesn’t really need any more plaques - like Chelsea, Bloomsbury, Hampstead and the like, it’s already dotted with them. You can go on blue plaque walks there. But Southgate, where I live, has none. Whitehouse Way is a small, fairly unremarkable street in the north London suburbs, close to the outer reaches of the Piccadilly Line.

The tabloid art of the ‘knobbly monster’

Here be monsters, knobbly monsters. A ‘knobbly monster’ is tabloid newsroom slang for that tricky second reference in copy to your subject when you’ve already used the obvious or only word for it. The term originated, so the story goes, in the late nineties or early 2000s when a quite possibly well-refreshed Sun hack was working on a sensational account of a fatal crocodile attack. By his fourth or fifth paragraph he was groping for an alternative way of describing his deadly protagonist. He settled on describing it as ‘a knobbly monster’. And a legend was born. The golden greats from the high period of the oeuvre include: Advent calendars: The festive time-markers Badgers: The monochrome plague spreaders Beavers: The furry tree-munchers Bed: The horizontal sleeping surface Cellulite: The dreaded dimply-thigh syndrome Darth Vader: The heavy-breathing Jedi turncoat Egg: The yolk-based product Hand-grenade: The pineapple-shaped munition Leotards: The skintight one-piece torso garments Piers: The beloved sea-based buildings Polar bears: The ambling shaggy white beasts Santa Claus: The red-jacketed festive gift-bringer Viagra: The trouser-bursting tablets Wombles: The furry litter pickers Woolly mammoths: The long-vanished giant hairy jumbos Those are the hall of fame entries.

The problem with Desert Island Discs

It should be the basis for new playlists, exciting discoveries, the leftfield, the overlooked, the forgotten gem. But too often these days listening to Desert Island Discs is akin to being stuck in a minicab with the radio locked to Golden Greats FM, where the hits just keep on coming. It’s not so much that many guests have bad taste but that they have no discernible taste at all, their choices plucked almost exclusively from the canon of the bleeding obvious. It’s Exile on Mainstream Street. This week the otherwise estimable and charming novelist Maggie O’Farrell flirted with greatest hits territory with among the better known output of Radiohead (The Bends) and The Cure (Lovesong) before finally going there in earnest: Nina Simone’s Feeling Good, that latter day staple of X Factor auditions and de trop karaoke singers.

The viral appeal of the aubergine

It seems at first an unlikely ingredient for global domination - particularly if, like me, you first encountered it as an unappetising squidge at the centre of a badly-made seventies moussaka. While the actual aubergine - the palpable purple signature ingredient from said retro Greek bake - remains a relatively minor player in the western larder at least, its visual representation, the aubergine in emoji form, has broken out of the virtual veg box. The text symbol for aubergine since it was first created, in Japan, in only 2010, has been visually depicted more times than any other fruit in the history of the world to date, maybe even more than all the others combined (For pedants, like the tomato, the aubergine is technically a fruit rather than the vegetable it’s culinarily generally treated as).

Parents should stop complaining about World Book Day

Every year, at the same time, they come – great flocks of them. Squawking, squabbling, screeching. Never mind the first cuckoo call or the sighting of the earliest swallow, there is no more reliable metric in modern Britain for the arrival of spring than parents moaning about their children having to dress up for World Book Day. What started in the mid-nineties as a fairly innocuous celebration of all things children’s lit, has somehow in the quarter century since evolved into an annual festival of epic parental whining: ‘it’s too commercial’; ‘too demanding’; ‘too expensive’; ‘too tacky’; ‘too much’. These are all, I concede, to a degree, reasonable criticisms. Personal anecdotal experience suggests that at least half of all children insist on going as characters whose literary credentials are decidedly dubious, existing in book form only in novelisations and comic books: Spiderman, the various Disney princesses, the Star Wars galaxy, Minions.

The Netflix sommelier: what to drink while you watch

Are we there yet? No, not a child on a long drive (remember those?) but me every day of last week as I struggled to stay strong towards the closing stages of Dry January. Yes - finally we are there: the sunlit uplands of 1 February. Having spent the best part of a month dry, it’s fair to say I have done a good amount of reflection on the subject of alcohol and abstention thereof. No, not about how awful I’ve realised drinking is and how I now plan to stop drinking forever - none of that nonsense. I was thinking more about how it’s made me realise once again quite how much I love wine. Now that January is over, here are my best wine and 2021 telly pairings to make the rest of lockdown fly by:The Serpent The Serpent (BBC) The popular crime mini series set on the Hippie Trail demands an ostentatious tropical fruit-noted new world Sauvignon Blanc - why not the original and best known of the style, Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc, 2019, (Sainsbury’s £23.

We have Charlie Chaplin to thank for the blockbuster

The pandemic has hit the film industry for six - but there’s a precedent to suggest that it can come back stronger. Because that’s what Hollywood did after the devastation of the Spanish Flu a century ago. As that killer virus was still ravaging post-WWI America, a great auteur was at work on a project that would change everything. This week sees the centenary of the result - the first ever movie blockbuster. 21 January 1921, was the US release date of Charlie Chaplin's first feature film, The Kid. Never mind the endless present-day stress about if and when anyone will ever get to see the 25th Bond film; it’s small beer compared to the significance of The Kid to the 1920s and their subsequent roaring. It’s almost impossible to conceive now what a global media event this movie was: the then biggest name in cinema spending an almost unheard of $250,000 on a staggeringly ambitious project that became an instant global smash.

Confessions of a failed royal reporter

Half a lifetime ago, I was, briefly, an occasional royal reporter – and watching The Crown, season four has revived memories of that inglorious chapter. It began with my one and only encounter with my favourite Crown character, Princess Margaret, on a sweltering July evening in 1997. I had arranged a trial night shift on the Evening Standard, starting at 5pm, which only allowed me ten minutes to get from my day job at the Old Bailey across London to their offices in Kensington, by bicycle, in 90-degree heat. I arrived breathless, only for the news editor to spin me straight back out, saying I had just five minutes before I needed to be in Regents Park, prompting another frantic ride across the scorching city. The event I was late for was the opening of an exhibition of interiors at which 'Margot' was to be the superstar turn.

The weird world of Masterchef

‘What’s that earthy flavour in the sauce?’ ‘It’s a black Himalayan moss which monkeys find an aphrodisiac.’ If 2020 has been the weirdest year the modern world has known, that was well and truly reflected in Masterchef, The Professionals. Because this year's series, the 13th annual, dispensed with its own unwritten rules. For years the received wisdom had been just to cook some meat or fish in a modern European style with traditional pairings. If you wanted to be dangerous you might put a square of dark chocolate in the sauce for your venison but even this was usually considered de trop; if you wanted to be playful use popcorn. The nervous hopefuls would be herded in and set a ‘skills test’ while being asked if they had been ‘classically trained’.

Roald Dahl was vile, but it would be a pity to cancel him

Where the Chilterns rise over Roald Dahl's family home, which is now a museum, diggers are at work, tearing up the beech woods that inspired one of his greatest books, Danny the Champion of the World, to clear a path for HS2. In the wider world, however, it is Dahl’s reputation that is being dug into. Dahl’s family recently issued a quiet apology for infamous anti-Semitic comments he made in interviews in the final years of his life. ‘I’m certainly anti-Israel,’ he said in 1990, eight months before his death, ‘and I've become anti-Semitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism’. Worse still, in another newspaper interview, Dahl claimed that ‘even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them [Jews] for no reason.

Robins have earned their cultural perch on Christmas cards

At the risk of sounding like Sid James in some late period Carry On, I currently have two birds on the go. One in the garden, one at the allotment, both real beauties — both robins. I’m smitten and I suspect I’m not alone. With much of the nation either working from home or on actual gardening leave, robins have become more familiar than ever. Most species of garden birds are horribly in decline (around 60 per cent of house sparrows, for instance, have been lost since the mid-1970s), but the robin has stubbornly stuck around in great numbers. While those other great survivors, magpies and pigeons, are brash and ungainly, the robin is a delicate little gem: magpie song is shrill, pigeon dumbly repetitive, but robin chirrups are a delight.

A vicious cycle: the problem with tokenistic bike lanes

There's an old joke from the nineties: The A1 walks into a bar. The barman says ‘Are you with him?’ and nods in the direction of the C1. ‘I'm not going near him,’ the A1 replies. ‘He's a cyclepath.’ Ho ho, how quaint – combining the novel idea of cycle lanes with the un-PC evocation of ‘psychos’. I mention this because the government's big non-Covid idea this autumn, the so-called ‘Green Industrial Revolution’, contains a key provision ‘to make our towns' and cities' cycle lanes worthy of Holland.' I broadly think this is a very good thing – as long as they don't waste any more money building tokenistic ones. Because a lot of existing cycle lanes are, to put it bluntly: dangerous, pointless or directionless rubbish.

Wishful drinking: pubs have always been good at bending the rules

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy has a running skit about the alehouse in his heroine’s home village where her father, and quite often mother too, disappear for hours at a time. People aren’t allowed to drink on the premises, so are strictly limited to ‘a little board about six inches wide and two yards long, fixed to the garden palings by pieces of wire’. But as the locals don’t like drinking while standing outside, they all head into the landlady’s bedroom and perch on her bed, chest of drawers and washstand while supping ale. And if anyone comes to the door during these sessions, the landlady, as she hurries to answer, repeats loudly her pseudo-legal disclaimer: ‘A few private friends I’ve asked in to keep up club-walking at my own expense.