This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Last week, at the Betsey Trotwood, in Farringdon, my brilliant and wonderfully camp friend Tommy leant across the table and asked in a hushed tone if I’d noticed that “there has been something of a vibe shift?”
What he meant, he went on, is that the teenagers he teaches classics to (at one of London’s most academic schools) have all of a sudden started wearing knitwear and are reading Evelyn Waugh. He even had a boy tell him recently that although he is probably best described as “Battersea Jewish” by birth, he has started to identify as Anglo-Catholic. Tommy told him that such are the times we live in, you can identify however you like.
At Christmas, I caught another friend, a long-time vegan zealot, with their finger in a piece of tiramisu. When I noted their transgression they shrugged, told me that they were drunk, and they simply wanted it. Something has changed. I’m not sure it’s the “new normal” so much as it’s just a reversion back to some degree of the sensible.
For me the high tide mark was when a young sound designer walked out of a theatre adaptation of a chapter from my first book. She had discovered that I write about hunting. It wasn’t, she more or less said, that she had a problem with me or anything I do; it was more that other people might disown her. Some months after that, I said to my literary agent that I quite wanted to start working in book publishing. “Oh, you’d be brilliant,” she replied sweetly, but added that she didn’t see it would be at all possible — nobody wants to appoint “straight, white, middle class men” anymore.
What I’d like is for everybody to feel like they can do whatever they want to do
And yet, here I am two years later, working in commissioning books on everything from hedgelaying to northern food culture to Protestant dissent. And I do it all without having my pronouns in my email bio, something that really does make me a minority in publishing.
I absolutely understand that for a long time, guys like me had it good. But the past decade or so has been a weird one. No arts council funding if you don’t tick the boxes, dissuaded from jobs in the arts (have you thought about law or insurance or estate agency?), and please don’t talk about hunting.
The trouble though when it comes to puritanism, is that in the end nobody feels safe. People weaponise ethics and eventually realise that the very stuff they’re spouting might be used against them. It’s all quite DPRK — one moment you’re in the party and the next you get a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Or more likely, you get cancelled over on Twitter.
These days (as of about fifteen minutes ago anyway), when a writer or somebody calling themselves “a creative” asks if I hunt, I know that what they are after is a piece of venison or more frequently, they want me to take them out deer stalking. I’ve currently got a novelist, a poet and a literary critic down on my list to take along with me on the deer job, just as soon as my wedding is done and dusted. From being a borderline pariah, I am now facilitating the vibe shift.
In a totally serious way, we exist in a strange moment. We can’t go back to how things were, when identity politics was at its very worst, and I don’t want to see people feel again like they are verboten for shooting roe deer or whatever. No more stage left walkouts please. What I’d like is for everybody to feel like they can do whatever they want to do. More diversity in wildfowling clubs, read Evelyn Waugh if you fancy it, and as for veganism, well, it never made much sense anyway. Up with the roe deer loin and down with the imported avocados. Common sense hacks out again.
