we must protect the jammy bastards

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! So as you know I am normal, and I think about frivolous things a regular amount. Back in February a friend came to visit me when I was in Marrakech and at some point we were walking around a museum, and then she ruined my life. We were having a pleasant chat and she mentioned this game she'd been playing with her colleagues.

The rule is simple: you are given the ability to travel to the past for precisely three months, and it is guaranteed that you will be able to return entirely unscathed. Because it wouldn't be as fun otherwise, any concerns about language, clothes and access can be waved away. Where and when would you go?

I couldn't think of anything else for the rest of the day. Hell, the question has now been haunting me for over six weeks. Where and when would I go? What an overwhelming premise. Still, I think I have now settled on an answer. I think. Maybe. Probably.

My starting point was Versailles, because I've been obsessed with it for as long as I can remember. As a child, I read endless books about it, not because I was drawn to the glitz and grandeur, but because the concept of etiquette fascinated me. I really, really loved that there'd once been a place where everyone had a very specific role to play, and all interactions were rigidly codified. It made me feel so happy and calm. It is, in retrospect, remarkable that it took so long for me to be diagnosed as neurodivergent, but that's beside the point.

As an adult, I read a book on French history which explained that Versailles, especially a few decades in, was actually quite a heroic mess. It stank and though there were some bathrooms, people would often piss in the corners of rooms, and there was nothing for all these aristocrats to do so they'd get drunk and play cards for hours on end, occasionally giving each other handies under the table, in full view of everyone. Versailles was beautiful but it was carnage.

My obsession returned. One of my great passions in life is to observe the ways in which power and claustrophobia can shape and distort the human psyche. It's why I covered Westminster for so long. I basically saw it as anthropology. It was fascinating. The French royal court would just be a cut above, though. Michael Gove has nothing on these random dukes battling it out to be in the general vicinity of the King as he undresses at night.

The only thing, of course, is that Versailles was in use for a good long while. Where else would I want to go? How would it influence my timings? The two places that sprung to mind were Venice and Russia. I love the former so much that I spaffed all my savings on going to live there for a few months, back in 2022. The latter is a slightly newer fixation, but has consumed much of my thoughts over the past few years, for obvious reasons.

Crucially, picking them allowed me to narrow down my dates. If one must go to Russia, then one may as well try to check in on the court of Peter the Great. There are some who would argue that going to watch St Petersburg come into its own would be the better idea, but I would respectfully disagree. I think that coming in reasonably early into his reign and seeing tsarist Moscow would be swell.

This helpfully gives us quite a neat timeframe. In, say, 1709, grumpy nobles have already been at Versailles for some time, Peter the Great is yet to schlep to St Petersburg, and Venice is beginning its long decline, though it isn't quite aware of it yet. Ideal. Ideal! That is the trip I would undertake in those three months. I would start in France then go down to the Adriatic then go all the way up to see my Romanovs.

Now, you may be wondering if I've also put a normal amount of thought into the travel times, and I'm delighted to tell you that I have. There isn't as much detailed information as you'd think online on carriage travel times across Europe in the early 18th century, but my broad guess is that, as long as I didn't spend too much time in any of my destinations, I would be a-okay.

I also think it would add to my jaunt: I'd spend a week here and there chilling with barons and doges, and the rest of the time merrily mixing with ye olde common folk. I'd have a bit of everything. Oh, the three months would be either April to June or May to July. I simply have no interest in visiting Russia in any season but summer, though I am a tad worried about crossing central Europe in late spring. I reckon it'd be fine though.

And that is all I have to say on that. I encourage you to also take this question and think about it a normal amount. I enjoyed it a lot.

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A column

I wrote about AI a few weeks ago and I said - threatened? - that I had more to discuss on the topic, and here we are. Today I intend to speak up for a small minority we rarely hear from; whose troubles are often cloaked in shadow, for their toil must remain hidden from the rest of society. Today I would like to talk about the plight of the jammy fuckers.

There were, for some time, in the 20th century, probably a bit before that too, and probably a bit afterwards as well, quite a lot of jammy fuckers about. They were writers and journalists; book editors and lawyers; academics, city boys, fashion girls and whoever worked in PR. I'm probably forgetting some of them, but do not believe this list needs to be exhaustive. Surely you get who I'm talking about here. You get that they all had different jobs and careers, but had something fundamental in common: a nice time.

Their hours were malleable but their pay was high, or at least respectable. Their lunches could be long and their expenses accounts would cover them. They had responsibilities, sure, but the quality of their day-to-day life meant that, well, whatever pressures they had didn't feel too suffocating.

I truly became aware of them when I worked on a newspaper's diary column, and earnt an amount of money I would describe as "downright insulting". Our jobs involved going to parties every night but we weren't allowed to expense even tube or bus journeys. One day we learnt, while doing some research, that the diarists who'd come before us were part of a team at least twice as large as ours, meaning that they only had to work half as hard as we did. We also discovered that the more senior members of the team used to have access to a chauffeured car. A chauffeured car!

Of course, our jobs were still reasonably jammy. We drank free booze several days a week, every single week. Mostly, we had to talk to famous people at parties and get them to say embarrassing things, ideally on the record though, if I'm honest, we weren't always that fussed about that. It was pretty great. It's a gig I was lucky to get a decade ago, as it just doesn't really exist anymore. My colleagues and I were, essentially, some of the last few dodos roaming the earth before the species skedaddled out of existence.