Our 91-year-old 'Uncle Cliff' Jones has been awarded the MBE in the King's Birthday Honours for services to Welsh football. A close and proud clan, we are bursting. Many recall the Welsh wizard during manager Bill Nicholson's 'glory, glory days' of the 1960-61 season when Tottenham Hotspur clinched their historic 'double', the first club in the 20th century to win the League Championship and the FA Cup in the same campaign. Cliff's transfer from Swansea Town to Spurs in 1958, the year he played against Pelé in the World Cup, had rendered him the most expensive player in history. It was the second time our family, which boasted eight professional footballers, had achieved this. When our Great Uncle Bryn was sold by Wolves to Arsenal in 1938 as Europe teetered on the brink of war, fans burned down the Molineux goalposts in protest.
Another Welsh winger prompted fury when he accepted his own MBE in June 2022 as part of Her late Majesty's Platinum Jubilee Birthday Honours. Enraged by its 'colonial connotations', nationalists urged Gareth Bale to decline. The word empire, to many, evokes the era of colonial dominance over which we must forever feel ashamed. Protesters miss the point. Our constitutional monarchy governs in name only. Britannia hasn't ruled waves in many a year. But the spirit and values of what it means to be British – whether English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh – are built on bygone glory. They are reflected in the Honours system designed to uphold and reward endeavour and excellence. Ambition and perseverance by the few are for everyone to celebrate. Their achievements elevate us all.
Homo sapiens is an endangered species. Planet Earth has never felt less secure. Acute climate upheaval, military and cyber warfare, pandemics, unregulated artificial intelligence and more have led to global disarray. In threatening times, how can a mere medal matter? I'd argue that it matters more. Look at what it represents. Democracy and principles. The rule of law. Traditions and rituals. Pomp, circumstance and everything else that defines our unique way of life. To be British in the late 2020s is to be part of a rich multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith nation naturally beset by challenges but which on the whole, far from having gone to the dogs, remains stable. Celebrating diversity, maintaining standards, cherishing our eccentricities, tolerance of differences and respect of personal liberty: all are reflected in those little ribboned metal gongs. One of which our beloved Cliff and dear Joan, his wife of 71 years, will soon rock up to Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace to collect. Such tokens are clearly not our only hope of survival. Would that they were. But in turbulent times, they do stand for hope. We must cherish them.
I boarded a bus at Victoria this week, the driver of which was temporarily absent. 'Tap in, you have to tap in!' yelled a blazered gentleman. I have the kind of pass you don't tap in with. I flashed it at him. 'Just wondering,' I muttered, 'who died and put you in charge?' He turned puce. 'Shut up! Shut up!' he erupted, 'I don't have to sit here and listen to this drivel!' You bet I reminded him he'd started it. 'Go away, just go. Away!' he boiled. Incapable of backing down and apologising, he treated us to a cataclysmic meltdown to make the altercation seem my fault. We happened to alight at the same stop. Trotting behind him along Piccadilly, I couldn't help noticing that I, at five feet three inches, was half a head taller than him. I nodded. Small man syndrome. There's a lot of it about.
Andrew Castle is kind, competent and knowledgeable. As a broadcaster and presenter, he is the classic safe pair of hands. And our former number one men's singles player knows his game. A Wimbledon commentator for 23 years, he has long been one of the elements of tennis coverage I look forward to. Relaxed, unfazed, un-pushy, he never tries to upstage the box's more famous faces and voices. When it comes to tennis, we want strawberries. In other words, we want what we've always had. I mean, I'm still getting over Sue Barker. The BBC offered Andrew a demotion from next year. He quit, and the idiots let him go. I knew him and his wife Sophia personally for some years, while our children attended the same school. He's just the same off-screen as on. Dependable. Amusing. There. What more do they want: strawberry jam on it?
Not even the hardest heart failed to crack at Jeremy Clarkson's suffering. The sight of the usually gruff, at times bombastic presenter and farmer, 66, reduced to fear and grief as he shared his 'aggressive' cancer status in the finale of his Clarkson's Farm Season Five was unbearable. How brave to have sacrificed dignity so selflessly. Addressing every male yet to have their prostate checked, he demanded, do it – because you wouldn't want to end up like him. His words are the starkest reminder. So much in life feels vital until we fall ill. Which is when we realise only one thing ever mattered. Health may not be everything. Without it, everything is nothing. All we can do for Jeremy is pray.
Nicola Peltz Beckham, 31, wears an expression in Yiddish tattooed across her ribs. It reads 'family first'. Most of her moves over the past five years have contradicted it. Depriving her 27-year-old nepo-baby husband Brooklyn of his estranged but loving family does. The couple's heartless remarks about his little sister Harper after she tried to see him in LA recently does too. Now, the billionaire's daughter and actress (seen anything she's been in? I haven't) has declared her brother Bradley to be her 'favourite human in the entire world.' Brooklyn – mate. Go sit somewhere quietly and think about what she just said. Will the prodigal son soon be begging heartbroken David and Victoria for forgiveness and wending his way home? Or will he hire a ghost to write his tell-all tome and hammer in the final nail? A friend of mine has just written Brand Beckham, an explosive book publishing this August. Brooklyn will want his right to reply. Let the games begin.
