Newspapers’ features pages are a treasure trove of unusual news items and somewhat of a welcome break from the depressing developments plastered on the front page.

A few features articles follow, along with other items from magazines, all from the summer of 2023.

The ‘boomerang smoker mum’

Britain’s middle-aged mothers are returning to an old pastime: smoking.

On July 16, The Telegraph‘s Lucy Denyer wrote about ‘The rise of the boomerang smoker mum’, featuring a photo of her with this caption:

Lucy is one of a number of ‘boomerang smokers’, who thought they’d chucked the habit only for it to come back.

She explained the nostalgic allure of cigarettes:

It was the sunshine that did it. Something about the warm summer afternoon, a buzz of conversation in the air and the prospect of an evening with friends in the garden ahead sent me into the newsagents to come out with something I haven’t bought for a good 15 years or so: a packet of cigarettes.

Or rather, a packet of tobacco, some rolling papers and a lighter – because something about the prospect of a cigarette felt far less transgressive if it was a roll-your-own number. I was never a heavy smoker.

Social smoking, mostly – nights out with friends at university and in my 20s; out to dinner, in the days when people still considered it acceptable to smoke indoors and light up after the cheese course.

I stopped when I had children, didn’t smoke at all for years … Until that evening a couple of months ago and my illicit purchase. 

More mothers with older children feel they can now return to one of nature’s greatest stress busters (emphases mine):

I’ve had perhaps one a day, usually completely sober, often as a means of escaping from the office for a few minutes, and to deal with the escalating stress levels of a house move that involves two new schools for my children. I’m not the only one.

As I hit my mid-40s, I’m suddenly noticing a whole plethora of similarly aged women who have taken up again a vice they thought they’d ditched years ago. “I’m 56, I’m starting a new career, I’ve chopped my hair off – and frankly sometimes I feel like a cig, so I’m going to have one,” declared one acquaintance last weekend at an evening party in a friend’s garden, where a surprising number of middle-aged women were puffing away.

“I always have Sobranies, Silk Cut or a packet of Vogue Menthol Slims to hand for whenever I fancy,” admitted another friend – who, it should be noted, sings semi-professionally.

“In fact, I’ve literally just gone to the effort of buying the Vogues online – they source them from the Baltics or somewhere – and I had to buy six packs as only bulk purchasing was allowed. You can have a pack if you like!”

I’ll probably take her up on it. There’s even a name for us midlife restarters: we are the boomerang smokers, who thought they’d chucked the habit but who’ve seen it come back to them.

And frankly, as vices go, it doesn’t seem that harmful – the odd gasper at a party is surely better than a line of coke, or popping some unknown pill after dinner.

… frankly, right now I find that having a quick smoke is a fast and effective stress reliever. 

“Smoking has a really good effect on me and chills me out unbelievably,” agrees one friend, who has only recently started smoking again and is now enjoying two or three rollies a week. “After a long, tough day and dealing with children, I want to sit down and relax – and these days a gin and tonic doesn’t do it but a cigarette does. It’s an instant hit, and when I’ve got loads to do it’s not going to wipe me out and stop me being able to do all that stuff like having a few drinks would do.”

We also agree that, now we’re out of the intense young child-rearing phase but our offspring are not yet quite into the independent young adult stage of life, we’re juggling heavy work and family loads, and running several different calendars in our heads simultaneously, so having a cigarette feels like much-needed “me time”.

“Just sitting in the garden in the five minutes before school pick-up, maybe watering the plants, with a cheeky cig – it makes me feel like I’m doing something for me,” says another friend.

“It’s a bit sad, I know. I think this is my midlife crisis.” I know how she feels. Hopefully we’ll all grow out of it soon. In the meantime, I’m nipping outside to roll up a cig.

That is why many women smoked in the 20th century, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a quiet, solitary break for mums at home.

Ethical questions surround avocados

On August 19, The Telegraph‘s Roland White asked ‘Air miles, drug cartels and dead bees: is it time Millennials gave up their avocado on toast?’

He is old enough to remember when the avocado was a novelty fruit in Britain. Today, he says:

Even in the steadfastly old-fashioned Wiltshire village where I live now, my children have avocado on toast for breakfast.

However, eating Avocados presents an ethical dilemma:

… this week there was a new development in the world of avocado worship.

Amazingly, drug cartels have become involved with avocado growing:

After news that Mexican drug gangs have been profiting from the business, the London-based El Pastor chain of Mexican restaurants announced that it was offering “cartel-free” avocados, guaranteed to be untainted by crime and mob violence. The El Pastor supply chain is monitored to ensure that no money gets to the drug-runners.

Avocados are referred to as “green gold”, with farmers in Mexico being forced to take up arms to defend themselves against drug cartels. It is fast becoming a “conflict commodity” like blood diamonds from Africa. In fact, so lucrative is the fruit that Mexico – by far the world’s largest producer with control over 30 per cent of global production – is dedicating ever more acreage to avocado plantations. But with greater spoils comes greater threat from organised criminal gangs who extort protection fees from farmers …

But it’s not the only country mining the wildly profitable avocado seam. Colombia – already engaged in mortal combat with cocaine cartels – has seen its avocado production skyrocket, so much so, that it’s now the world’s second largest producer. Much of south and central America is in on the game – for the UK and much of the EU, the Hass avocados in supermarket aisles most likely hail from Peru – but this devotion to avocado farming does have devastating ramifications. 

However healthy and lauded avocados are, growing them is not necessarily environmentally friendly:

… Illegal deforestation and logging comes naturally in attendance as an increasing amount of land is cleared to meet the breakfast demands of wealthy westerners …

Aside from violence, racketeering and deforestation, in 2015, New York Magazine reported that so much water is required for Chile’s avocado plantations that the rivers and groundwater stores are being drained faster than they are being replenished. Across the Americas and up to California (the US being the 13th largest producer), the water demands of avocado farming are causing some to call the practice unethical.

We learn about the history of this creamy tasting fruit:

The avocado certainly took its time to reach us. It was known in central America as far back as 10,000 BC as the ahuacatl, which became a euphemism for testicles (in much the same way as we say “plums”). The Spanish explorer Martín Fernández de Enciso is credited as the first European to sample the fruit. “That which it contains is like butter,” he wrote, “and is so good and pleasing to the palate that it is a marvellous thing.”

Despite this enthusiasm, the avocado wasn’t exactly an instant hit. “The fruit’s popularity was slow to spread, only being cultivated in the US at the end of the 19th century,” says the Larousse Gastronomique. “It did not reach French recipe books until the 1950s”.

We British had to wait until 1968 before avocados became widely available. It was a time when the country was opening up to new foods, partly under the influence of writer Elizabeth David. Among the imports she championed was the avocado.

Millennials made the fruit their own:

Nobody has embraced the avocado more than the millennial generation, born between 1981 and 1996. Perhaps they were influenced by the 1982 children’s book Avocado Baby, in which an avocado diet gives the young hero almost Popeye-like strength.

According to the Hass Avocado Board, a US-based marketing group, millennials spend 5 per cent more on avocados than any other group; 80 per cent of millennials bought an avocado at least once in 2018.

Strangely, the ethics behind avocado growing does not seem to bother them:

And it is here that we must reluctantly enter the divisive and somewhat baffling world of the culture wars. Millennials are renowned for their political activism, but a rigid devotion to social justice and a fancy for avocado on toast (which can set you back around £14 at some cafés) is not entirely compatible.

There are another environmental issues here, too.

Bees have to be shipped in to pollinate the plants:

In September last year, Piers Morgan was in typically robust form as he skewered a representative of Animal Rebellion. Billions of bees, he said, are flown into California to help pollinate avocado crops, and many of them die. “Billions of bees get slaughtered so you can have your avocados,” said Morgan, denouncing the “total hypocrisy” of the campaigners.  

Then there are the air miles required for transport:

And let’s not forget that an avocado in the UK must first be transported across the globe. A 2017 study by the Carbon Footprint Ltd consultancy claimed that a pack of two avocados had an emissions footprint of 846g of CO2 – double that of 1kg of bananas.

Australians have said that millennials would be able to save up to buy a home were it not for the amount of money they spend on avocados:

Australian property developer Tim Gurner made headlines in 2017 by suggesting that more youngsters could afford property if they didn’t have such expensive tastes in food.

“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” he said.

He was echoing remarks by the Australian author and demographer Bernard Salt. “I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more. I can afford to eat this for lunch because I am middle-aged and have raised my family. But how can young people afford to eat like this? Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go towards a deposit on a house.” In response, young hipsters said they were spending money on avocado treats precisely because they would never be able to buy a home.

It mystifies me that avocados are not grown in Europe. Surely, Spain’s climate would be conducive to avocado groves? Perhaps the environmental factors are too important to ignore and that’s why it hasn’t been done.

Vegan snacks: disappointing

I felt sorry for Roger Watson of Country Squire Magazine who wrote ‘Vegan Gaslighting’, published on August 9.

Here he was, on a train, readying himself for a long day of travel, only to meet with a disappointing railway snack box:

I was travelling between Hull and Manchester Airport recently on a TransPennine train. As I was in first class, and a trolley was wheeled on at Leeds, the trolley lady offered me a snack box. I was flying to Dublin from Manchester later that afternoon (not in first class) and I accepted along with a cup of tea.

Excitement mounted as I fought my way into the snack box past an array of tamper-proof stickers.

Would it be a ham and pickle sandwich along with a few chocolate digestives? Would there be cheese and biscuits, a scone and clotted cream? Would there hell!

Everything was ‘vegan friendly.’

Imagine my disappointment.

He reviewed the contents of snack box in detail:

There was a bag of crisps, but not proper salty crunchy ones made from potatoes which I thought, last time I checked, were suitable for vegans. There were some ghastly lemon (yes, lemon!) and herby flavoured corn chips, a bag of unadulterated peanuts (that one might feed a monkey with) and a flapjack (things were looking up) and a chocolate cookie.

I stored the flapjack for later consumption (an old habit from military field exercises) and downed the peanuts in one mouthful, imagining they had salt on.

The crisps were truly awful, tastelessness tinged with lemon and mixed herbs. They lacked any kind of satisfying crunch. They just snapped in two and, being salivary enzyme resistant, rolled about in the mouth, before painfully going down the hatch.

The chocolate cookies deserve their own paragraph. I think the mixture was three of sand, one of cement, half of sugar and a sprinkling of cocoa powder. They crumbled, but not in a nice way. Imagine smashing a brick and putting a handful of what results into your mouth. The only difference would be that the crushed brick would taste nicer and be twice (at least) as nutritious …

“The flapjack?”, I hear the astute remainder ask.

I thought there was not much that the vegans could do to spoil a flapjack. How wrong I was. A flapjack without butter is just oats and syrup.

Yuk.

Watson points out that vegan spreads and low- to no-alcohol drinks are standard fare now at business dos:

I attend receptions frequently in my line of business and, increasingly, we are assured on the invitation that all the food served will be ‘suitable for vegans’. Likewise, the alcohol.

He rightly asks:

Why is the strange preference for vegan food among an estimated 3% of the population dictating what the rest of the population increasingly has to suffer?

I can assume only that this is an ESG initiative, designed to make us ‘healthier’, somehow. Let’s not forget that most vegan offerings are UPFs, ultra-processed foods. UPFs often lead to obesity, because the body does not need to digest much, leaving one hungry after a short space of time.

Obesity: a modern history

On August 19, The Spectator‘s Theodore Dalrymple, a retired prison psychiatrist writing under a pseudonym, asked ‘Are we prepared for the end of obesity?’

He was writing about the new ‘miracle’ drug, the injectable appetite suppressant Ozempic, which, so far, has allowed those lucky few taking it to drop several pounds in weight a week. I am looking forward to finding out how much weight they put back on after they stop treatment.

In any event, Dr Dalrymple answered a few questions about obesity, ones I’ve had since childhood:

Sixty years ago, my biology teacher told me (so it must have been true) that after the war, some Americans were so delighted that the restrictions on food had been lifted that they ate capsules containing a tape worm so that they could eat to their heart’s content without getting fat. This, of course, revolted me, as it was intended to. I never forgot what she said.

Twenty years later, I was to see the future of the world, at least as far as obesity and type-II diabetes were concerned, on the island of Nauru. There, the inhabitants had suddenly become very rich, thanks to the mining of phosphate rock, and went from a strenuous subsistence to wealthy indolence in a matter of years. With nothing much else to do, they ate and drank enormously, grew fat, suffered from diabetes and died early.

This was the fate of much of the western world, give or take the indolence, especially, though not exclusively, in the English-speaking part of it. No doubt the relatively reduced culinary tradition of the English-speaking world made it susceptible to obesity because quantity had long been a substitute for quality where food was concerned. There has been a peculiar historical reversal also: where once an embonpoint was a manifestation of wealth, obesity became, at least statistically, a marker of poverty.

He ends his article with another childhood memory:

What of the cultural effects of a drug for obesity? In my childhood, my mother had a book by a man called Gayelord Hauser titled Eat and Grow Beautiful.

Eat and Grow Beautiful is available on Amazon. There is a tantalising lack of information about the book, editions of which were published in 1939 and 1953, but GoodReads says:

Dr. Benjamin Gayelord Hauser (1895–1984), popularly known as Gayelord Hauser, was an American nutritionist and self-help author, who promoted the ‘natural way of eating’ during the mid-20th century. He promoted foods rich in vitamin B and discouraged consumption of sugar and white flour. Hauser was a best-selling author, popular on the lecture and social circuits, and was nutritional advisor to many celebrities.

As for Ozempic — semaglutide — Dalrymple sees trouble ahead:

When the patent runs out, of course, the price will plummet, but other, even more effective drugs are said to be under development, that will be likewise expensive to begin with. But can it be very long before someone advocates the use of semaglutide prophylactically, in childhood? It is an appetite suppressant and it will prevent them getting fat. Is not prevention better than cure? At least a quarter of children in Britain are now obese: think of the misery and ill-health that could be forestalled by only one injection a week!

Demand for semaglutide in the private sector is bound also to rise, and woe betide any private doctor who refuses to prescribe it for his well-off patients living with obesity who can afford to pay for it themselves – unless or until its long-term use is shown to have deleterious effects. Then the patients will turn on their doctors with the full force of their tort lawyers; they will even say that their doctor did not sufficiently warn them of the one possible serious side-effect so far associated with the drug, acute pancreatitis, a dangerous and unpleasant condition. If, as so far seems unlikely, other serious side-effects come to light in the course of the years to come, the doctors or the drug company, or both, will be sued for lack of foresight.

Far better, then, to purchase a copy of Eat and Grow Beautiful.

This year’s Edinburgh Fringe cancellation

In 2022, long-time comedian Jerry Sadowitz found his Edinburgh Fringe gig uncermoniously cancelled.

This year, it was the turn of screenwriter and comedian Graham Linehan, who has been speaking out in the gender wars debate for the past few years.

Most Britons under the age of 70 have enjoyed Linehan’s television sitcoms, the most famous of which is Father Ted. I’ve seen most Father Ted episodes three times over the years, and they always raise a chuckle. That said, his Black Books is legendary. I’ve watched both series twice, often viewing multiple episodes during an evening.

However, Leith Arches decided to cancel Linehan’s gig, saying that they are an ‘inclusive’ venue, a way of saying he is on the wrong side of the gender debate. He was able to get it rescheduled elsewhere, but that venue also cancelled. In the end, Linehan performed at Holyrood, in front of the Scottish Parliament building.

On August 19, The Telegraph published his first-person report, ‘My cancellation has trapped me in one of my own sitcoms’:

There’s some steep irony in being a sitcom writer and then experiencing 48 hours where you feel like you’re living through an episode yourself. Five years ago, when I could still secure work in television, I took obscene delight in putting my characters through various forms of social torture. Now, I can’t help feeling that some sort of karma is playing out. Being a character in one of my own shows is not as fun as it sounds.

I was gearing up for a gig – only my fifth or sixth time trying to tell jokes in front of an audience. As someone more used to being behind the scenes, each gig shows me at the thin limit of my abilities as a performer, but I had some extra complications that made the experience even more fraught. The show had already been cancelled twice: first by a venue that was happy to advertise that it would be hosting a “cancelled comedian”, but then baulked when it realised exactly who that cancelled comedian would be; and then by our second choice. I heard about this second cancellation after I had cleared security at Gatwick. I was off to Edinburgh for literally no reason … 

Now, frazzled, I walked towards the stage, placed right in front of Holyrood on the orders of the brilliant feminist strategist Marion Calder for maximum symbolic value. I was met not with the glare of a spotlight, but an array of cameras and a soundtrack of passing cars. My live experience is limited, but this was hopefully the first and only time I would deliver a punchline while being circled by a pigeon. 

I tried to dive into my act, but the weight of the past few days – the past five years, really – hung over me. The shorthand of the issues at hand – the concerns over children’s health, women’s rights, fairness in sports, erasure of women – have become more familiar to me than any comedy routine …

I stepped off the stage. As a protest, it worked great. But as comedy, meh. And I am so very tired of protesting, and I miss comedy so very much.

The Telegraph‘s columnist Michael Deacon observed:

So, in the name of “inclusivity”, Mr Linehan was excluded. And, when he tried to take his show elsewhere, a second arts venue excluded him, presumably on the same grounds. He ended up with no choice but to perform his show in the street, in front of the Scottish parliament …

Such an attitude is chillingly authoritarian. But not only that, it’s impractical. Because if asked, I suspect, most people in this country would agree that biological males should not be playing women’s rugby, or taking part in lesbian speed-dating.

To be truly inclusive, then, arts venues will have to exclude most of the population.

However, most comedians in Linehan’s cohort have moved with the times, as it were. They’re still gainfully employed on television and on stage.

On August 22, scriptwriter Gareth Roberts explained it all for The Spectator, ‘The endless hypocrisy of the comedy class’:

Personally I find TV panel shows pretty unbearable. They’re like being at a student party full of lairy smartarses you don’t know, and probably wouldn’t want to. But now a clip from one has, in the journalistic parlance of our time, ‘resurfaced on social media’ …

This particular eruption from the deep comes from the Big Fat Quiz Of The Year 2008, the fourth edition of the annual Channel 4 institution … Jimmy Carr is the host, and the three teams consist of a variety of comedians and presenters: Michael McIntyre and Claudia Winkleman, Sean Lock and James Corden, and Dara Ó Briain and Davina McCall. 

2008 may seem like ancient history to the young, but all of these people – with the obvious exception of the late Sean Lock – are still around and still working. If anything, they are more prominent now. Interestingly, there are few visual clues, apart from the comparative youth of those featured, to suggest that this was filmed any time other than yesterday. A TV clip from 1972 would’ve seemed like an archaeological wonder in 1987, but everything on the cultural surface has seized up in this century. Under the surface it’s a very different story.

Because my, this clip demonstrates how the tunes of these people have changed. The question is about a man who ‘announced he was going to have a baby – but what was unusual about the whole affair?’ …

All the comedians on the panel joked about the absurdity of the situation. The article has the YouTube clip, if you want to see it.

However, said comedians stopped joking about things like that, which is why they are still performing and Graham Linehan isn’t.

Gareth Roberts continues:

What’s astonishing about this clip is that it’s proof that these people knew exactly what a woman was about five cultural minutes ago, and found the idea of pretending not to know hilarious.

Dara Ó Briain has been quite the empty space to his former friend Graham Linehan in this regard. James Corden (full disclosure, the guest star in two episodes I wrote for Doctor Who shortly after this) has been conspicuously compliant with every new and fashionable ideological wheeze, as we can see demonstrated here.  

At times in the last ten years, I have felt like I am going mad. People I knew or worked with in this milieu, who were far more un-PC than me, suddenly changed lanes, leaving me where I’d always been but somehow a pariah. Ironically, I was mocked in the noughties by colleagues for being a bit humourless about identity-based banter that I considered ‘nasty’ and bad form.

Now some might point out that times have changed. Oh indeed they have, and don’t we know it. But there are still two sexes, and no man can get pregnant. It is ludicrous to pretend otherwise, and ludicrous ideas are funny.

Of course, these people know this now, as they knew then. Everybody does. And this is the crux of this matter …

… some of these same people hooting and howling in this clip have gone far further than that. They swallowed the big bitter pill of genderism … Either they celebrated it, or they pretended not to see it. 

This is because a few years after this particular Big Fat Quiz, a small cadre of well-placed cranks, empowered by Californian tech giants, did a quick sprint through the institutions, public and private. The comedy ‘industry’ – supposedly so daring and edgy and outspoken – said nothing. Almost to a man, they merrily complied.

Wow. It would be great reading more about that. Who was involved from California? What did they say? This seems to be the root of ESG, doesn’t it?

I hope Gareth Roberts has more on that topic. I’m all eyes.

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Here ends the summer news many might have missed. It’s hard to believe that autumn is just around the corner.