Trending on Twitter

A choppy couple of days on the internet. Plus the best and loveliest piece about food you'll read all week, another TV rec, and my next question about dogs...

Is Blake chewing a stick??

I went out for dinner last night with a couple of old journalist friends. (We are old friends; they are not old. Well, they’re my age.)

‘Are you alright?’ one of them asked when I arrived, ‘Andy said you were trending on Twitter.’

‘Was I?’ I replied. I knew that the Telegraph column I’d written on Saturday had gone down badly on certain parts of Twitter and I’d received quite a few messages from strangers on Instagram saying that if only we’d had a revolution like the French then my family would all be dead. I also went on Radio 2 yesterday lunchtime and chatted about it to Jeremy Vine, but I hadn’t realised I’d been trending. Twitter, I’ve realised at these moments, is best avoided.

Our waiter appeared. Would we like a drink?

‘Yes, could I have a glass of red wine?’ I said, quite quickly. ‘Are they 125 or 175?’

‘125,’ he replied, so I said I’d start with that and then probably have a second one fairly soon afterwards.

HERE is the column I wrote. I suspect it’s partly one of those ‘please read the piece, not just the headline’ things. As I said to my pal Jeremy on Radio 2 yesterday (HERE you go, I’m on about 30 mins in), I don’t actually call Gen Z ‘lazy’ in it once. Nor do I mention the word ‘nightmare.’ Journalists don’t write the headlines on their articles (Times writer Hugo Rifkind has the disclaimer ‘I didn’t write the headline, though’ actually in his Twitter bio), but these days *slightly* inflammatory headlines are often stuck on pieces to make them do just this - go wild on Twitter. Going wild on Twitter tends to mean more clicks, more traffic, more advertiser money.

What I say in the piece is that Gen Z know their rights, that they’re only obliged to work the hours they’re contracted for, and are exercising those rights. I ask whether some people my age feel aggrieved about this because we’re jealous that Gen Z are more boundaried and self-assured than we were at the same stage. I say that some of my female friends, in particular, feel saddened that they didn’t try to have more of a work-life balance in their 20s because they’ve potentially missed out on meeting someone and having children before now. Perhaps, I wonder, Gen Z won’t suffer burnout like some of my friends have.

Others somehow seemed to think I was belittling the work that doctors or teachers do. V baffled by this in particular. I wasn’t?! I specifically mentioned those in medicine and teachers in my piece as heroes who definitely DO work more than their contracted hours.

I also wrote that I worked pretty hard in my 20s, and that I reckon this isn’t a bad idea if you have ambition, and I included a few quotes from others on this thorny subject, but again, at no stage did I call anyone lazy, or entitled, or a nightmare.

Obviously, because I have the world’s silliest name and am often deemed to be the most privileged journalist in Britain, this has infuriated lots of people. There seems to be this idea that because I’m privileged, I couldn’t have worked hard. Or even worked. That I haven’t struggled and don’t know what work is. I don’t believe the two are mutually exclusive, though. Course, it depends what your definition of struggle is. Absolutely fair point, I’ve never grafted in a coalmine, but - aware that I’ve been so incrrrrredibly lucky in life - I’ve put in some hours in various newsrooms so that, hopefully, nobody would ever think ‘Jesus, she is an idle toad. And what is up with that accent?’

A lot of assumptions have been made about me and my family in the past couple of days, and a lot are fair. Private school, tick. Unbelievably silly name, tick. My dad has a title, tick. But quite a few are less true. Some slammed me for being a ‘banking heiress’. Ha! I wish! If I was a banking heiress, I probably wouldn’t be sticking my neck out in newspapers for a living. I don’t have a trust fund. I live in a *slightly* leaky flat in Crystal Palace. Or technically ‘maisonette’, for the sticklers, but the word maisonette makes me gag a bit.

Anyway, you put yourself out there and you have to take the consequences. I get it. Big girl pants on, as a former editor of mine used to say. But I do think sending messages about my family ideally being murdered and the guillotine are quite mad. This is not an original observation but it’s so peculiar how you can have a relatively open and civilised chat about this kind of subject in person, as we did on R2 yesterday, and yet people threaten all sorts behind the anonymity of the internet.

I did have a second glass of wine last night, and then a third. But they were only 125ml.

Picture of the week

A Christmas lobster tree

A seven-tiered TOWER of lobsters. Isn’t that quite eye-popping? It was this pic which first drew my attention to this brilliant piece by the brilliant Lauren Collins in the most recent issue of The New Yorker. She’s written about a French buffet, perhaps the most indulgent and extravagant (although curiously not expensive) all-you-can-eat buffet in the world, called Les Grands Buffet. It features but is not limited to: a tower of lobsters, nine types of foie gras, the biggest cheese platter in the world (The Guinness Book of Records have verified it), and dozens of French puddings including something called a trou normand or Norman hole (!), which is a shot of Calvados served over apple sorbet and said to help ‘counteract’ the sensation of a full stomach. Sure. There is apparently an antique scale the size of a grandfather clock by the entrance so you can weigh yourself beforehand (should you so wish), and the four dining rooms are all decorated in different styles. In one of them, eg, lemon trees are planted in wooden boxes originally designed for the gardens at Versailles. The whole thing sounds almost like an immersive piece of theatre. New Yorker pieces can feel quite long to anyone these days more used to reading shorter, snappier stuff designed for our feeble attention spans, but I *really* recommend settling down to read this slowly and wallow in the deliciousness of it all. I’m immensely greedy and LOVE a buffet so I was naturally obsessed with every detail, but it really is a wonderfully evocative piece of writing. Reservations for Les Grands Buffet open a year in advance and if anyone fancies a jolly to Narbonne, just north of Perpignan, I’m game. It’s a smidgen over 59 euros a head, which you can practically spend on lunch in Pret now.

Recommendation of the week

Ripley. My god. I felt quite put off when I read a miserable review of Netflix’s new eight-part series last week, but settled in to watch it over the weekend anyway and, well, that review, imho, couldn’t be more wrong. It’s terrific. Beautiful. Engrossing. And so tense! Paul and I binged six episodes in two days and I kept covering my eyes with my hands and pulling my jumper over my face because I couldn’t bear the slow agony of certain scenes. Imagine an eight-hour Hitchcock. It feels a bit like that - in a good way. I grumbled a lot about it being black and white before watching it. What’s the point in making a series set in Italy if you’re going to get rid of the sun-drenched colour etc etc? But actually it only adds to the Hitchcockiness. And Andrew Scott is - as usual - mesmerising. How does he do *all that* with his face? The range of his expressions is extraordinary, and there’s a lot of time when it’s just him on screen, in silence, and yet still it’s totally captivating. WATCH IT. Here’s the trailer if you fancy a little taster.

Nonsense Question of the week

How do we feel about raw dog food? (I warn you, this may be the first of many, many dog questions on here.) I don’t mean for humans; I mean for dogs, obviously. I wrote last week about getting a dog, which I haven’t yet, but a man did come and have a look at fixing my garden fence on Saturday so the process is in motion. In the meantime, I’ve been reading India Knight’s wonderful WONDERFUL book, The Goodness of Dogs. If you are thinking about getting a dog, or have recently got a dog, or even have a hankering to get a dog in the future, can I recommend it? It’s out of print but you can get it on Kindle, or secondhand copies, and it’s such a cheerfully-written, immensely informative, FUNNY and moving book, so long as you don’t dwell on the story about the tapeworm.

There’s a section about raw food which was especially enlightening because I didn’t know that was a thing. IS it much better? IS it wayyyyy more expensive than, eg, kibble? I’m worried that by asking this question in advance I’m already exhibiting signs of becoming a mad dog lady (‘Oh no no, Monty only eat bits of steak that I hand feed him’), but I genuinely hadn’t come across this debate before and didn’t know it was controversial. Raw dog food thoughts welcome below.

PS. That said about working hard and putting the hours in, I’m off to New York on Thursday for a few days, so next week’s newsletter - potentially a NEW YORK SPECIAL - is going to land in your inboxes next Thursday instead of Tuesday if that’s alright. Thrillingly, I’ve bought a new neck pillow after some of your recommendations the other week, so I will report back regarding its efficacy…