Monday
Props to Rebecca Loos, who, three weeks after the release of the David Beckham documentary on Netflix, can hold her peace no longer. Speaking to the Daily Mail, with a quivering, controlled anger and air of “can you believe this guy?”, the 46-year-old flags the weasily way in which Beckham avoids the topic of their alleged affair 20 years ago. Or as the former England captain puts it: “some horrible stories that were difficult to deal with”.
The documentary is still lodged at No 1 on UK Netflix and is a strange combination of very good indeed – four hours of expertly tailored and grippingly told television – and a total celebrity puff piece. So diligent is the hagiography that I devoured the whole thing in a couple of sittings and came away thinking I’d got the Beckhams all wrong. OK, so David’s Guy Ritchie-style lord of the manor stuff is a bit embarrassing. But for the most part he seemed self-aware, bashful and funny.
The first Loos knew of the programme, meanwhile, was when her phone lit up and the hate mail resumed. When allegations of the affair surfaced in 2004, Beckham denied the whole thing, in effect calling Loos a liar. In the documentary, it has been noted, he doesn’t repeat that denial. Instead, he talks in the passive voice about what the “stories” did to him, how they left him “feeling sick every day,” and how hard the episode was on his marriage. “It was the first time that me and Victoria had been put under that kind of pressure,” he said and went on to detail the pain of watching his wife suffer, even though, as Loos points out, drily, “he’s the one that’s caused the suffering”.
There is no pushback from the interviewer on any of this. Nor is there mention, anywhere in the documentary, of the millions Beckham took from the Qataris for the World Cup last year, an effective two fingers up to the gay communities who’d always supported him. That he’s a brilliant footballer, a marketing genius, and a hugely impressive and ambitious man is indisputable. That he is also, perhaps, a tiny bit of a douchebag clearly wasn’t something it was expedient for the film-makers to explore.
Tuesday
Let’s look to more blameless idols, in this case, Major “major eye-candy” Johnny Thompson, No 3 in this year’s Tatler Social Power index, who this week was promoted by King Charles from regular to super equerry. The major, who is 40 and a member of the 5th Battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland, first came to prominence in footage of the Queen’s funeral last year, when he cheered up mourners by looking more as one might imagine James Bond in a kilt, and less like an actual member of the royal entourage.
From his Tatler entry, we learn that Thompson “wields his unique brand of quiet, charming power”, within palace walls, and may be spotted elsewhere, “at the coronation, or on the opening night of the Berntson Bhattacharjee Gallery in Fitzrovia, for example, to which he wore a bunny tie and charmed India Rose James”. Nobody knows what this means, except, perhaps, the sleeper cell it is intended to activate, but in the meantime Major Johnny’s cheerful demeanour and wholesome outline promises to enliven even the dreariest of royal events.
Wednesday
During a campaign rally in Derry, New Hampshire, Donald Trump asks the crowd a rhetorical question. “There’s a man, Viktor Orbán, anybody ever hear of him? He’s probably, like, one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world. He’s the leader of Turkey.” Trump then passes on his intelligence that Orbán shares a border with Russia.
Orbán is, obviously, the leader of Hungary; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the president of Turkey; and neither Hungary nor Turkey shares a border with Russia. By Trump’s standards, these mix-ups were mild. Elsewhere this week, the former president referred to the Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt as a “red-haired weirdo,” and special counsel Jack Smith as “deranged”. Pratt, who made his money in cardboard, has said that Trump blabbed national secrets to him, including the exact number of nuclear warheads carried by some US submarines. “I mean, he’s an odd duck,” concedes an Australian friend, familiar with the Pratt family. “And look up his mother, Jeanne Pratt. Oof. She’ll give you a fright.”
One might feel sorry for the Pratts were it not for their billions (their fortune originates with Pratt’s father, Richard, who makes Trump’s family life almost look functional). As it is, there is something delicious about the spectacle of Trump training his bully mentality on other members of the otherwise cosseted billionaire class.
Thursday
Researchers at Massachusetts general hospital find that hot yoga, butt of a thousand jokes, is helpful for depression, after 50% of adults in an eight-week clinical trial experienced a drop in symptoms. The participants did an average of two 90-minute bikram yoga classes a week at a temperature of 40C (105F) and those suffering from moderate to severe depression had a significantly greater reduction in depressive symptoms than participants who didn’t do the yoga, researchers found.
This is, of course, great news if the findings hold, offering a relatively cheap and easy intervention for a serious illness. For anyone who has actually taken hot yoga, however, it appears utterly mystifying. The sweat, the smell, the likelihood that loosened muscles will encourage cockiness in the form of mad flexes you will pay for the next day – it’s hard to regard it as a remedy for anything.
Friday
It’s Halloween weekend, with its annual slow climb to hysteria followed by rapid anticlimactic collapse. As usual, there is pressure on parents to hand-make imaginative costumes, the equivalent of home-baking for the PTA fundraiser. And, as usual, I have not hand-stitched two pillow cases and a bed sheet together to make a Wednesday Addams or a Weird Barbie costume. Instead, I have ordered two monstrous products online: an inflatable dinosaur and an inflatable Among Us costume – huge, obnoxious, battery-hungry and loud, with fans that drown out the screams from the sugar rush. They are, like the fluorescent gummies and candy corn to be harvested on the night, gross, mildly offensive and precisely in the spirit of the occasion.
