This article is taken from the November 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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Small Poppy syndrome

Up to Yorkshire to housesit whilst my friend the campaigner goes on a trip to DC. Actually, the house requires very little attention: the real responsibility is looking after my friend’s dog Poppy. I’m used to my own dog, Jessie — who, being an elderly labrador retriever, is both sturdy and stoical. Poppy is a chihuahua mix and has quite a different personality. 

Where Jessie wolfs down every meal (and anything else she can sniff out), Poppy is only interested in human food: I have to trick her into eating by miming stirring a portion of my own dinner into her kibble. A walk with Jessie is a peaceable amble with lots of breaks for sniffing; with Poppy, a walk means constant ball throwing, and any relaxation of the ball-throwing pace is punished with a barrage of yaps. 

Poppy is, simply, a dog who knows what she wants. Whilst I’m watching TV one evening, she starts barking to get my attention. She leads me to the thing she wants: it’s my own bed, which she would like me to get into so she can go to sleep. 

We compromise by returning to the sofa and snuggling under the heated blanket — with Jessie, bemused but cosy, curled up next to me. I just hope she isn’t taking notes on her small friend’s approach to human management.

* * *

OAPs, STDs, OMG

Whilst I’m keeping my friend updated on things in Yorkshire, she’s sending me the news from DC. Never mind political corruption: according to the public health advertising around the US capital, it’s sexual corruption that’s the big issue. 

One advertising hoarding warns that “Eye Syphilis is Serious” across an image of a distraught-looking face (you have to hope the model got a bonus for the shame). Another shows a loved-up older couple, with the slogan “STDs are Timeless”. It’s enough to make you wonder what America’s political class is getting up to. 

Then, the news breaks that independent presidential candidate slash animal corpse botherer Robert F Kennedy, Jr (age: 70) has become embroiled in a scandal involving New York magazine political correspondent Olivia Nuzzi (31): after meeting him for a profile, their relationship became “personal” but “not physical” according to Nuzzi. RFK, Jr denies any impropriety. 

He also denies involvement with a further three women with whom the website Mediaite alleges he had romantic relationships. Still, with so many rumours of an old and (given his anti-vaccine commitments) medicine-resistant politician getting busy, maybe the public health authorities of Washington have decided to take pre-emptive action.

• • •

Plant-based riot

Before the trip up north, I have another journey to make, schlepping from Bath to London for the last of the summer parties. It’s a journalist-heavy affair and I shouldn’t be surprised when, a few days later, I find some of my sparkling conversation immortalised in a fellow guest’s Substack. 

Esther Walker (in The Spike) writes that she spent a while talking to me “about the great luxury of being able to drive yourself, on your own, to the garden centre”. And though I’d love to pretend that this is a misleading sample of my incisive and witty chat, that is indeed what I put on a nice dress and spent three hours on a train to talk about. Perhaps I’d be better off staying at home with my plants.

* * *

When 4 = 5 

Back in Bath, there’s a production of Nineteen Eighty-Four at the Theatre Royal, and a critic friend invites me along as his plus one. It’s a good adaptation — Keith Allen (father of the singer Lily Allen, but best known to me for his early career turn as a dismembered corpse in the film Shallow Grave) makes a convincingly sadistic O’Brien. 

Orwell’s novel has become a touchstone in the backlash to the kind of postmodernist identity politics in which what is real matters less than what is felt. People like to do the bit where O’Brien, torturing our hero Winston Smith for his disloyalty to the party, holds up four fingers and demands that Winston not merely says but truly believes there are five fingers. It’s become an emblem of resistance.

But Winston only resists so far. In the end, under O’Brien’s torments, he surrenders his own perception to what O’Brien wants. He truly sees five fingers. Winston Smith is a warning that anyone, even those who see themselves as the heroic defenders of reality, will believe absurdities under the right kind of pressure. Funny how people tend to memory-hole that part.

• • •

Conversation piece

I haven’t seen Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis yet, and it’s fair to describe my hopes as minimal. Coppola hasn’t made a great film for a very long time, and I’m not convinced this “America reinvented as ancient Rome” folly with a two-hour-plus runtime is the one to turn the tide — though it might be a fittingly grand way to end his career, now he’s 85. 

But I did go to the cinema to see one of the films from his imperial phrase: wiretapping thriller The Conversation, which has had a re-release for its fiftieth anniversary. In a dazzling excess of talent, it originally came out the same year as The Godfather Part II; in a tremendous example of art anticipating life, that was also the year Nixon resigned over Watergate.

It’s the story of Harry, played by Gene Hackman — a “bugger” (as Americans can apparently say without laughing) dragged into a fatal conspiracy by his snooping. If a film can be perfect, this one might be. You can’t please everyone, though. As I left the cinema, I heard a man smugly tell his date: “Interesting concept … Not sure about the pacing.” I seethed for days. Just as for Harry in the film, eavesdropping was its own punishment.