This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Doing shots

Most of the invitations I get through my work are to webinars about post-Brexit politics (snore). So when I receive an email asking if I’m free to go on a whisky-tasting trip, I say yes quickly, before the PR can change her mind. 

And so I find myself in the Highlands, thoughtfully sniffing my way through the varieties on offer at the Balblair distillery. I decide I like the 18-year-old best and begin to hold some very informed thoughts about the effects of time on flavour; the next day, I have some even more informed thoughts about the effect of the 18-year-old on me.

There’s no time for self-pity on the morning after, though, because we’re scheduled to go clay pigeon shooting. It’s my first time with a gun and, whilst I’m unconvinced that firearms and hangovers are an ideal mix, I discover that I love it. I apparently have an “excellent gun mount” (who knew?) and my instructor encourages me to “keep shooting, lassie”. By the end of the session I’ve even managed to take down a few of the targets — and, alas, an unfortunate duck that got in the way.

* * *

Playing the fame game

I only get to spend a few days back at home in Bath, because the following weekend, my daughter and I are joining the great female migration to Wembley for Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. 

Our trek from the south-west commitment pales in comparison to the mother, daughter and aunt standing next to us who’ve come all the way from New Mexico: one of the older women confides that she’s wearing a back brace under her sequinned rainbow dress to help her last out the marathon three-and-a-half hour show time (not including the support acts).

I’ve been surly about Swift’s bloated new album, but edited down to a live set, the songs come to life. Swift herself has never been better: confident, playful, holding 90,000 people in the palm of her hand. Then, the big surprise of the night, when she brings her American football player boyfriend Travis Kelce out on stage for a dance skit. 

He beams in the crowd’s adulation and I think: yes, these two belong together. Aside from their private bond, which only they can know, they are both absolute geniuses at being famous.

• • •

Sixth sense

The next day we go to the National Portrait Gallery to see the Six Lives exhibition about Henry VIII’s wives. Now here are some women who could have used Swift’s nous about image management. I hadn’t realised before this exhibition how little visual evidence Henry retained of his executed queens Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard — the doomed child bride who wore the crown for little more than a year before she was beheaded at 18 for adultery. 

In the room of the exhibition devoted to her, there seem to be more pictures of her lovers than there are of her. Her portrait was never painted in her short life, and no uncontested likenesses of her survive. The reason she fascinates now is the same reason she barely exists in the record: because she came to such a sticky end at such a dreadfully young age.

You can tell a lot about someone from their favourite Henry wife. The greatest warmth at the moment is for Anne of Cleves: rejected for being less attractive than her portrait, she was granted an annulment and a healthy pension. In modern parlance she “lived her best life”. But I struggle to join the acclaim. What’s the point of risking your life by marrying monstrous Henry if you weren’t in it for the statecraft? My faves are the politicians: scheming Boleyn and Henry’s sixth wife, clever Catherine Parr, who both remade England in different ways.

• • •

Mean business

I like the 2004 movie so much I’ve devoted my upper left bicep to a tattoo in its honour, so it’s no surprise that I enjoyed the Mean Girls musical that’s just arrived on the West End from Broadway. 

I went to the gala performance, held on a Wednesday evening. One of the rules of the Plastics (the tyrannical clique at the heart of the story) is that “on Wednesdays we wear pink”, and the audience was a joyous sea of fuschia, bubblegum, magenta and blush — all sipping on the obligatory rosé prosecco.

My date for the evening was a politico friend, on the cusp of being swept into the madness of the new Labour government (“should we be privileged to serve,” she added, touching wood every time the subject came up) and the evening was a welcome respite from her work. Then again, maybe a show about briefing, scheming and jostling for position wasn’t all that much of a break. Regina George, queen bee of the Plastics, could easily make the grade as a Westminster power broker: the Morgan McSweeney of North Shore High School. 

* * *

Hog in the limelight

My parents seem well settled into their new home — same village, fewer bedrooms, closer to the pub.They’ve been working hard to draw wildlife to the garden. Part of the lawn has been left as a meadow for the insects to feast on, a flower bed by the drive is being converted into a buffet for butterflies, and the bushes are thronging with small birds.

But they hadn’t seen a hedgehog until I spotted one snuffling its way across the patio on a recent visit. “We don’t have any dog food for it!” cried my mum, as aghast as if a human guest had arrived and found the wine rack empty. In desperation, she turned to the cold cuts shelf of the fridge: “Can hedgehogs eat tongue?” They cannot — too salty — but the visitor forgave the lack of refreshments. She has been back several times since.