Clive Martin

Fad foods. Hinge pubs. Clive Martin witnesses the true dawn of organised fun.

A strange year for the country ran in sync with a strange year, personally, for writer Clive Martin: a summer of ElfBars, high street scrapes and confusion in mid-sized British towns that left him grappling with his own mortality.

You can try to resist Mark Zuckerberg’s dead-eyed insistence but there’s no escape from the metaverse. Your physical life is being swallowed by your digital life. Is it possible to avoid upgrading your human operating system?

Street art, hammocks, anything made out of bamboo. As Clive Martin found on a recent trip to Mexico, influencing is no longer just for the pros. It's now the standard model for travellers.

The pandemic caused the metro masses to flee for the sea. Some are returning in horror, their countryside fantasy destroyed, but many are staying to import their brand of everything. Now the locals are revolting.

Leatherings on the hard shoulder. Brawls on petrol station forecourts. From where Clive Martin is sitting, Britain is 
entering an age of great aggravation – recorded on cameraphones and uploaded for a new kind of gladiatorial thrill. Should we be scared?

A summer of demos saw anti-everything Covid protestors take to the streets. Is it a sign of classic, but harmless, Great British eccentricity? Or is it a darker oncoming storm of weirdness and worrying rhetoric that we should have seen coming?

Against all odds, the England team has found itself near-favourites for this Summer’s Euros. But what if (whisper it), England actually does go all the way?