What will this period of austerity mean for the new-year diet? I don’t remember calorie-counting being part of the Dunkirk spirit. The rise of the stew and the triumph of the onion evoke country heartiness rather than urban jogging. Sushi and smoothies smack of fallen Notting Hill. Even the Charles Saatchi egg diet looks picky in a recession.
Anyway, the new year diet is unseasonal as well as culturally confusing. Who feels like salad when it is dark and cold? And if we are to stay at home rather than go out spending money, why deny ourselves the pleasure of baking?
And yet, if we don’t get into shape now, how do we stop the climate of decline? When should we abandon our wounded, homely comforts and limber up again for the race? The British, from the Queen downwards, have a sneaking regard for the culture of the recession. We like having the excuse to wear the same coat for ever and to rediscover oxtail. A friend of mine overheard a cobbler telling a customer gently that he was not sure he could mend his shoes, and that he might consider a new pair. “But they have lasted me for 40 years,” wailed the gent.
I think it culturally significant that the American edition of Reader’s Digest this month features a toned blonde woman and her 13-point plan for weight loss. The British edition I edit has Nigella Lawson, buxom in white satin, imploring the reader to try her new recipe for cupcakes. Is this more evidence to suggest the US is in a better place to throw off the recession than the British? After all, reinvention is part of the American dream.
I am not sure that the concept of hunkering-down cosiness exists in New York, as it does in London. My holiday outing with my teenage daughter was to see the singer Adele at the Roundhouse in Camden. Adele came on stage wearing a vast cardigan and holding a mug of tea.
Some critics reproached her for lack of glamour, but there was something defiantly British about her refusal to be made over. She did not clutch at the air as she sang, or bend double with apparent stomach cramps, in the manner of packaged X Factor winners. As her mostly female fan base shouted “We love you Adele”, she launched into melodies with the firepower of Nina Simone and pulled her cardie even closer.
This is a very good time for ghost stories, and I settled in front of the BBC’s Crooked House with a thrilling sense of expectation. Sadly, although it had many of the right elements, it was not quite scary enough. Part of the trouble was budgetary. In the first part, in which an 18th-century self-made man moves into a substantial manor, the drama relied on the implausible domestic social history that he had no servants and, indeed, only one living room.
Yet the theatre production of The Woman in Black, almost in its 20th year in the West End, proves that you do not need lavish props or special effects to terrify audiences. Susan Hill, whose novel it is based on, believes that the key to the traditional ghost story is suspense and atmosphere.
Hill writes for children, too, and it interests me that children’s writers can be much more frightening for adults. A newspaper I once worked for sent its learned and childless obituaries editor to see a Harry Potter film, which he pronounced almost unendurably frightening. I have just watched the Dr Who special through my fingers, while a three-year-old boy sat calmly next to me.
I also caught the wonderfully nasty production of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea at Battersea Arts Centre, a series of Hilaire Belloc-style scenes of deranged gingerbread men and innocently murderous girls in an Edwardian nursery. The parents came out shaking their heads: “There were children in there.” The children smiled knowingly, at their shared joke with the actors on stage.
One social consequence of the economy is that the nuts and bolts of money have become the talk of dinner tables. Where it was once dull or vulgar to talk about money, now mortgages, pension plans and shares make exciting conversation. Perhaps it is because financial discussion no longer involves boasting. It affects almost everyone, although from different perspectives, and everyone has an opinion. Even Joan Collins has reinvented herself for a Sunday newspaper as an economic commentator of unintentionally hilarious plodding seriousness.
What makes the crisis so widely enthralling is that housewives worked out what was going on, where highly paid financial advisers did not. At dinner the other day, I sat next to an elegant, elderly lady and complimented her on her pudding recipes. She brushed this aside and gave me her micro-view of the banking crisis. A couple of years ago, she had asked her bank if her share portfolio could allow her the swift withdrawal of cash, in the event that she or her husband should die. Her bank’s response was curiously slow and reluctant. Suspicious, she removed her money and eventually watched the fall of the Royal Bank of Scotland with no surprise.
I wonder if the economy is partly responsible for the success of the comedian Michael McIntyre. Just as companies are rebranding themselves as safe and decent rather than glamorous and dangerous, so there is nothing sulphuric about McIntyre. He is not edgy or cruel or surreal. He smiles good-naturedly and tells jokes about losing pens, or Friday motorway traffic or men and their lofts. He is the Peter Kay for the southern middle classes.
In this kindlier, rather chastened climate, a conventionally bracing new-year diet definitely feels all wrong. Fortunately, a letter has arrived from the Prince’s Trust.
It is about this year’s “Namibia Challenge”, by the Women’s Leadership Group. This involves a 100km desert trek in the spirit of female camaraderie. Craftily, it wraps up a feminist charity jaunt as an alternative diet.
“It will be both physically demanding and highly rewarding,” the letter reads, “a great way to honour those new-year’s resolutions and kick-start a new fitness and training regime.” It also recalls Victorian adventure and piety; it is fitness for a spiritual purpose; it is walking for victory! It is the diet for our times.
Sarah Sands is editor-in-chief of British Reader’s Digest
