The Sunday Times February 13, 2022 V2 27
COMMENT
I ate my first steak for 18
years the other day. It tasted
weird but not unpleasant. If I
had had it with triple-cooked
chips and a béarnaise sauce it
would probably have been
exceptional. But everything
is chaotic and last minute at
my house, so I had it with a
few squashed field
mushrooms and some
ketchup.
Like most of my family, I’m
not a vegetarian, but my ex
was, so I gave up red meat in
- I remember eating a
lasagne in front of him and
feeling bad, so I resolved to
remove lamb and beef from
my diet.
Changing my eating habits
Holy cow! Steak tastes
good after 18 years of veg
back then was easy and has
probably added several years
to my life. I started eating
more vegetables and pulses.
Hummus, veggie curry, tons
of dal, lots of prawns and
fish. And not once did I crave
a burger or a steak. I
wobbled once when my
mum brought out a whole
roast curried lamb, but I
didn’t give in. And I always
had Nando’s.
Now I just have my own
tastes and beliefs to live by,
so, apart from pork, I am
going to eat everything.
Steak and chips, lamb and
spinach curry — the world is
my kebab. With a side of
lentils.Red roses and
unread emails
Does anyone enjoy Valentine’s
Day? I’ve been an angsty
schoolgirl, single, a
girlfriend, a wife and now
single again. And I’ve always
hated it.
While I sit here opening
PR emails about car
insurance linked to February
14, in Barcelona you
exchange books and roses. In
Valencia on St Dionysius’s
Day everyone joins a huge
parade and you give your
beloved tiny marzipan fruits
and vegetables tied up in a
silk scarf. Sadly that’s in
October, but it sounds better
than an overpriced set menu
in a restaurant full of couples
studying their phones.NEWMAN’S
VIEW
Aasmah Mir
Week ending
business looking at people
and buildings until I went into
a shop and the woman
behind the counter asked me
for an emailed receipt. “Oh
ha-ha-ha-ha — I don’t have my
phone!” She looked baffled
and slightly disgusted.
I slunk home and picked
up my phone, hoping to
prove a point — that the world
hadn’t fallen apart. But of
course it had. Four urgent
work emails, a few missed
calls from my mum, followed
by texts in capital letters —
“WHERE ARE YOU? PLEASE
CALL ME!” — and, worst of
all, three missed calls from
my daughter’s school. I will
never go out phoneless again.Sometimes you look up from
your phone and realise
you’ve spent a whole hour
staring into the abyss. Your
screen time is a bit like your
weight or how much alcohol
you drink every week — often
underestimated and always a
bit of a grim shock.
So I decided on a day off
to leave my phone at home
and just go with the flow. I
travel a lot by bus and never
use my phone there anyway. I
like to look out of the
window, because I’m boring
like that. And also because
everyone else is staring at
their phones and it feels like a
zombie movie.
I smugly went about myLeave the phone at home, I thought.
What’s the worst that can happen?
lAdele loves being a
woman, as she said at last
week’s Brit awards, and so
do I. Although I think I
loved it a bit more in my
super-strong thirties. I
could hold a plank for
Britain and run six miles.
These days I have to be
kinder to my knees, but I
love to lift weights and
pretend I’m at the
Olympics, letting out a
beastly “Grooooo-aaaaah!”
as I push the bar above my
head. My periods are like
Asian relatives — you never
know when they’re coming
and what mood they’ll be in
when they arrive. But I
don’t feel the need to fill
awkward silences, be self-
deprecating or tolerate
people just talking about
themselves any more. Be
warned: I am woman —
don’t be a bore.Sea? I thought all Wags and
their associates never went
anywhere except Marbella.
We further learnt that
Vardy, wife of the footballer
Jamie, had accidentally sent
a slew of texts to Rooney’s
lawyers anyway, in which she
described her rival as “a
nasty bitch” and “stupid
cow” who “deserves
everything she gets”.
Reading the texts — “That
c*** needs to get over
herself! That’s falling out
material” — is like plunging
into an abandoned script for
Footballers’ Wives circa- More, please.
It is, after all, a terrific bore to de-hay
one’s hair even partially or to put down
one’s whole gin and tonic. She is now
constantly being dragooned into press
meet-and-greets, when she hates travel
and has to be begged to dress up —
another sign of good character. When
she visited America in 1999 with all the
official-trip folderol, she was “pissed off
by the whole thing”, according to a US
charity executive who worked with
Charles.
Sasha Swire, a former MP’s wife, tells
us that David Cameron found it
“increasingly difficult to understand”
what Camilla said when he was prime
minister, as she would “lean over” and
“mutter” as if she always had “the end of
a fag sticking out of the corner of her
mouth”. Attagirl — being unintelligibleWhat is the best excuse
you’ve ever come up with for
losing something?
The convention is that you
claim it “disappeared down
the back of the sofa”. But
Rebekah Vardy’s friend and
agent Caroline Watt doesn’t
seem to have got the memo:
she told a court last week
that her phone, containing a
great deal of kompromat
relating to Vardy’s case
against her fellow Wag
Coleen Rooney, “regrettably”
slipped out of her hands and
... into the North Sea.
The North Sea? Why was
she anywhere near the NorthPotty-mouth Vardy is straight
out of a trashy TV script
You’d be mad not to want a battleaxe
like Nadine or Camilla on your team
Camilla Long
Nanny! Nanny! I don’t like
these strange little people
T
hatcher always said: if you want
something said, ask a man, but
if you want something done,
ask a woman. Take Nadine
Dorries — such conviction and
gritted determination. Would
a man have defended the
prime minister with the same
dogged devotion?
For more than two weeks now the
culture secretary, usually in some kind
of brightly coloured attack crew neck,
has been religiously telling us that it is a
waste of time to be angry with Boris
Johnson over “Zoom quizzes” and “crisp
packets”. On Thursday there was yet
more screaming when she told a
journalist, with Nursie-like intensity,
there was “absolutely” no situation in
which she would not support the prime
minister, except, perhaps, if he “kicked a
dog”. I’m sorry, but I loved it.
But it’s funny, isn’t it, how the
shriekers on social media fail to grasp
the correct meaning or impact of any
political event? How many of them,
sporting #feminist or #bekind hashtags
in their biographies, don’t see the irony
in mocking a working-class woman for
being “thick” or embarrassing, or
shaming her by saying that she’s in love
with Johnson or drunk.
My inbox told a different story: many
friends secretly divulging that they find
her approach hilarious. They love her
because she is stubborn and shameless;
her refusal, for example, to wear even a
hint of a veil in Saudi Arabia is “iconic”.
It’s not entirely a compliment; more a
mark of stunned respect.
We have a huge weakness for “iconic”
women in this country. Horny-handed,
stony-faced executive battleaxes who
think nothing of dismissing their own
children as “left-wing Islington
snowflakes”, as Dorries has. We feel we
really know them: they speak to us
clearly and unpretentiously in plain
language, taking their cues from things
they’ve seen and heard, rather than
from books or dead old men, like Jacob
Rees-Mogg. Margaret Thatcher was one
such woman. And then there is my
favourite, the Duchess of Cornwall.
Camilla is one of those redoubtable
gin-choffing, fag-munching, fully
indestructible types I feel I know so well
I could accurately describe her reactionto almost anything, including what she
thought the moment she was told she
would be upgraded from Princess
Consort to Queen Consort after the
death of the Queen.
“Oh don’t be so bloody stupid,” is
what she will have snorted on sighting
Charles’s tiresome, flowery press release
— his soppiest yet. Perhaps she might
have stubbed her cigarette out on the
cheesy one-liners — “darling wife” — or
rolled her eyes at his constant need to
refer to her as a “steadfast support” as if
she were a trusty labrador.
There has been much patronising
debate over whether Camilla “deserves”
this honour, but that is the same old slut-
shaming snobbery. Never mind if she
deserves it; the question is, do the royal
family deserve her?
She has, after all, been the only one of
them to spend a single minute listening
quietly to Charles’s views on
architecture and ecology (“darling wife,
shall I learn to plait sea grass?”). She has
been viciously snubbed, attacked, called
ugly — by Charles’s own family — made to
scuttle round the back of parties, or
simply stay hidden, even until quite
recently, when it was Charles who ought
to have got the lion’s share of the blame
for what happened with Diana.
What I like most about Camilla,
though, is that she never appears to have
wanted any of it. She would have far
rather stayed in the country, sleeping in
the same bed as the dogs, than pick her
way around Highgrove, a weird little
spotless museum to Charles: “I can’t
touch a thing,” she told friends. She still
keeps a separate house.The look Nadine
Dorries gave
Boris Johnson in
the Commons
became a meme,
but who wouldn’t
want to inspire
such dogged
devotion?and unavailable to bores is the chicest
way of retreating from any situation.
It is almost comical that Charles’s
former mistress is now one of the
family’s most valued players: the royals
are in such a dire state, all the talent now
has to be recruited from outside. Camilla
will be rolled out, like Kate, to protect
the Firm from endless Snafus of its
incompetent, cavilling men.
Only two days ago Andrew was
revealed as a “constant sex pest” by a
masseuse who visited him at Royal
Lodge in 2005. He allegedly asked her if
she liked “taking it up the arse” and later
offered her a cup of tea as some kind of
chat-up, only to discover he didn’t know
where the kettle was. How many visits to
rugby stadiums or charities will Camilla
have to make to distract from that?There is something I would
describe as “nanny rage”, an
affliction that grips high-
flying, selfish and entitled
professionals when they
realise they will have to look
after their own children for
more than five minutes.
Some couples will do almost
anything to avoid the tedious
task of parenting their own
children — even be escorted
off a plane by armed police.
I can only imagine the
sheer rush of undiluted fear
when the barrister Charles
Banner discovered British
Airways had downgraded his
children’s nanny from
business class to economy
on a flight to Turin two
weeks ago.
How were he and his wife
ever, ever, going to be able to
look after their two youngchildren for the whole 120
minutes?
Yes, yes, I know he was
technically in the right to
expect a business-class seat
when he had paid for it. And,
yes, overselling is a
despicable practice. But is
this really the hill this man
wants to die on? His children
found “the process of
leaving the plane confusing
and upsetting”, he claimed,
after the captain called the
cops to remove his
“disruptive” passenger.
The real question is why
the nanny was in business in
the first place. Why didn’t
Banner do what professional
jet-set arseholes traditionally
do and bang the staff and
the children back in cattle
class while they quaff
champers up front?We have a
weakness
for ‘iconic’
women in
this country