This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Defying a pervert
Coming through Zurich airport, I was flashed in the ladies’ loo by a man in a skin-tight beige bodysuit and a dodgy Chelsea facelift. It was emphatically not a unisex bathroom, but at first I wasn’t too bothered to see a bloke dressed as a woman in there.
I actually felt a bit sorry when he asked me in a chummy voice which of two lipsticks suited him best (note to aspirant women, we don’t actually go up to random strangers by the sinks and come on all 12-year-olds’ sleepover) and merely resigned when he asked me if his bra was showing. But then he took his penis out.
“Oh love,” I thought, “You’ve really, really picked the wrong day.”
Call me intolerant, but when returning from giving evidence in a case of attempted rape at the Supreme Court of Switzerland the absolute last thing I want to see is someone swinging their dick in my face. There are moments when it might be correct to rehearse a carefully calibrated argument about trans rights, but I find empathy easier when someone isn’t waggling their testicles at me in a space reserved for women.
As it was, he didn’t get the reaction he was hoping for. When security arrived there may have been a moment’s doubt as to which of us was the threat, but not it’s my fault he’d picked on the angriest woman in Terminal A.
And what if I hadn’t already been exhausted and furious — what if I were a child or a disabled woman who couldn’t move quickly or just maybe a woman who wanted to have a pee in peace? That we have all of us at some point to tolerate such behaviour, so constantly, so relentlessly, is bad enough, but that we are expected to pander to it is obscene.
Why was I so afraid of appearing a bigot, or even a Trump supporter, that I couldn’t say, politely but firmly, “I think you’re in the wrong bathroom, please leave”?
How quickly we have internalised the belief that to point out the glaringly obvious is not only cruel but aggressive. I assume the man was just a random perv, but the ease with which he was able to lurk in the loo is troubling.
* * *
Heresy of a more soothing kind at the Palazzo Contarini, which hosted a Proust lecture and concert as part of the Alliance Française’s Francophone Week. The audience gasped as Proust scholar Patrice Boyer dared to suggest that the master’s poem on Mozart in Portraits de musiciens failed to rise — quelle horreur — above banalities. Hostilities were suspended during David Bismuth’s recital of works by Schumann, Chopin and Gluck, the three other musicians Proust portrayed, but the reception divided into two muttering camps. I was just delighted to have a trot on my hobby horse — mentioning Proust to English people usually feels embarrassingly pretentious, but the French seem to take admiration for the Search for granted.
Even before he was the world’s most successful podcaster, historian Tom Holland was a brilliant performer. I remember seeing him give a talk on Dynasty, his fantastically racy book on the Roman emperors, at the Chalke History Festival, and he was mesmerising. I wish I had his gifts, but I mostly became a writer because I’m terrible at talking to people and sick with nerves at the prospect of doing so in public. Imagine my glee when, having dutifully agreed to give a lecture on Elizabeth I for International Women’s Day, the thanks and counter-thanks of the committee went on for so long that the speech had to be cancelled.
• • •
Most Venetians do their best to avoid the nylon tsunami of Carnival, but a few still take it seriously, as I discovered when a neighbour gave a very smart Mardi Gras party. My friend had sent off for two dinosaur costumes, but, when we turned up in our garish green onesies, it was painfully clear that we hadn’t got the memo.
The other guests were in exquisitely elaborate hand-made costumes, ranging from a whimsical Marge Simpson-meets-Marie Antoinette to a 19th-century matador in crystal sequins and a lady in a fairy-light crinoline cage who was otherwise naked. Appalled contempt was the general vibe, and we scuttled off with our Amazon tails very much between our legs.
* * *
Pretty in pink
Cortina is a huge building site at the moment, frantically preparing for the 2026 Winter Olympics, but a mountain weekend is always wonderful. It feels ridiculously lucky to be able to jump on the bus and be on the piste in less than two hours.
The settimana bianca, the half-term holiday which Italians devote to skiing, had just finished, and we had the mountains to ourselves, as well as the intensely luxy spa at the Rosapetra Hotel. Watching the sun set over the prawn-pink Dolomites from the outdoor sauna was the perfect antidote to the alarms of the Zurich excursion, as was the venison T-bone at the preposterously pretty Ristorante Lago Pianozes.
A new Cortina discovery was the art collection at the Hotel Corona, which has been owned by the Rimoldi family since the early 1900s. The hotel’s charm is perhaps slightly faded, but the paintings, which include works by de Chirico, Morandi and Savinio, are a revelation. The other half of the collection is housed in the Modern Art Museum, but seeing them in situ, even between the coffee urn and an elderly fax machine, made them all the more luminous.
