Andrew O’Hagan

My mum believed, with justification, that young people use material things to fool themselves into thinking they’re living their best life. (‘You can’t take it with you!’ was one of her favourite phrases.) If you’re eighteen now, obsolescence just tells you how much you’ve grown. Nobody with an iPhone13 secretly craves an iPhone6, not even for reasons of nostalgia or perversity.

 It was a festival of Nike socks, North Face joggers, Calvin Klein T-shirts and scooped up hair. It wasn’t a Glasgow I’m accustomed to seeing. The hall was littered with pumpkins, baskets of apples, a trolley with three geese sticking out of it. There was a lot of glitter, hand sanitiser, and a samovar of tea. The show would open at the King’s Theatre in less than a week, yet the atmosphere was all laughter and promise.

Joan Eardley’s paintings show decrepit buildings and startled faces, but also something more essential – movement, stillness. We see the spirit of young lives caught in meagre surroundings, but there is something there beyond likeness or representation.

To write a book for money is a forgivable exercise – Fergie, from a certain viewpoint, has never done anything in her life that wasn’t for money – but the chief horror of her book is the way she wishes, at every turn, to make this banal roman à clef an advertisement for her secret virtue. If her former husband, the Duke of York, with whom she still lives and whom she defends, had not been accused of repeatedly abusing a 17-year-old girl, one might find her protestations of decency hilarious.

On London buses, the passengers no longer speak to one another. They speak on their phone, often using a different sort of voice. Most are silent behind their masks. Only the gangs of school kids offer hope for the vitality of the language: they don’t muck about, patter-wise, and they don’t spare your blushes, curse-wise.