Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2024 - Issue 97 i The Rake

It’s Christmas time, and as the lyric suggests, there’s no need to be afraid. So shall we let in light and banish shade and think of the goodness we can find within our orbit: the innocence of children or grandchildren peeking up the fireplace in the hope of a glimpse, taking a break only to ask the really serious question at hand, about the number of houses Father Christmas needs to visit per second to complete his rounds. The neighbours’ decorations. Carols on the radio. And heirloom ornaments and family traditions that remind us of Christmases we used to know. I am lucky at Christmas time, as I am married to the greatest of Christmaphiles. My wife cares deeply about the house being just so over the holidays (there’s an…

There’s a diverting clip on YouTube from Judy Garland’s T.V. show, sometime in the early 1960s. A somewhat abstracted-looking Garland introduces “one of my most talented friends”, to reveal Mel Tormé in a snappy tux and frilly dress shirt, shimmying across a set liberally sprinkled with Honda motorbikes, some of which are adorned with imperious-looking models decked out in extravagant white ensembles of the ‘If-Liz-Taylor-as-Cleopatra-shopped-at-Biba-for-her-big-day’ variety. The song is Comin’ Home Baby, a loungecore classic familiar to modern listeners from its use in everything from The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (a T.V. outpost of the Marvel universe) to Nissan ads. Tormé might resemble a sallow Borscht Belt crooner assuring his baby that, wild oats presumably sown, he’ll be manifesting on the doorstep any minute, but the way he slides…

Deck the halls with drams of whisky, fa la la la la… yeah, you know the rest. Now that the weather is turning cold (or, if you’re in the U.K., replace ‘is turning’ with ‘has turned’), we find our tongue’s booze-buds longing for amber waves of fermented grain. Or at least I do. As big a gin and martini lover as I am, it seems that when the temperature falls, my desire for more warming drinks tends to overtake my love of bright, clear, spirit-based cocktails. An elegant rocks glass with a small (or, depending on the day, not so small) pour of single malt in the bottom, lazily swirled and sipped next to a roaring fire (or clanking radiator if you’re in New York City) seems like the very…

by david flint wood I’m sitting down to write this in the house I’ve lived in for nearly 30 years — pretty much half of my life — on an island in the West Indies measuring only three miles by half a mile. The house is a white stucco villa sitting in a good-sized garden with more than 200 tall coconut trees, many of which I’ve grown from baby coconuts — a real point of pride. The room has wide planked floors and a fireplace for burning casuarina and driftwood in the winter. It is partly lined with books that I covered in Manila paper years ago, as a way of passing the time and to take my mind off a passing hurricane. The windows are open and the ocean…

Jet travel really ought to be filed under ‘miracles we take for granted’. What, after all, could be more romantic, more thrilling — more impossible-yet-doable — than being whisked through the air to far-flung destinations in a comfortable lounge-like setting in which food and wine is served, and doing so at roughly 40 times the speed that the steamships of yore once took to make the same journeys? In the 1950s, the world was still startled by the very idea that one could suddenly journey unfathomable distances to culturally alien shores in the time it once took to cross our relatively minuscule island of Britain by car. And so the culture around aviation — including the way people dressed for it — lived up to its extraordinary reality, especially when…

David Flint Wood was born in London and went to St. Paul’s School, where he had the worst exam results in the history of the institution (founded: 1509). His English master told him, “I don’t see university in your future, Flint Wood. What I do see is a life of blonde women, drophead cars and ten-pin bowling… Good luck with that.” David has lived on Harbour Island in the Bahamas for nearly 30 years with his wife, India Hicks, and their five children. They put down roots at Hibiscus Hill, where David planted 200 coconut trees and built and restored some cottages they now rent out to help with the bills. In the meantime, he has been asked to decorate and design other people’s homes — his work for Brooke…

I meet Ariyon Bakare at the bar of the Soho Hotel in central London on a cool October morning. It’s the week that marks his 30th year as an actor, a career in which he has performed alongside the likes of Jude Law and Warren Clarke. He’s had roles in The Dark Knight and Life as well as the critically acclaimed T.V. show His Dark Materials. But despite his long and varied C.V., and the numerous interviews he’s done over the years, he approaches ours with a refreshing zeal. Bakare, a former dancer, turned to acting early on and never looked back, picking up roles in British staples The Bill, Casualty and Holby City before landing a long-running gig as Dr. Ben Kwarme in Doctors. Television work has proved his…

I’ll begin, if I may, with a statement that might spark a public burning of issues of The Rake akin to the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria, with Julius Caesar’s bronze-clad troops replaced by the dreadlocked saboteurs who, in lieu of any other life purpose, play nemesis to the Countryside Alliance. Here goes: the sum total of animal suffering represented by a row of well-stocked supermarket freezers exceeds, several times over, the sum total of animal suffering accumulated by the passing of every Bilsdale Hunt since George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, established ‘La Chasse’ in Yorkshire in 1668. And I’ve never seen an animal rights protester outside Lidl. How frustrating that my red-coated, moustachioed masters talk so fervidly and eloquently of class war posing as altruism without…

We are forever being told that cars and ‘timepieces’ go together like a horse and carriage, and brands galore have jumped on that bandwagon in the hope of benefiting from the cross-pollination between automobiles and horology. But with an automotive background that began more than a century ago — with its ‘Time of Trip’ dashboard chronograph designed in 1911 for use in cars and aircraft — Tag Heuer (then just Heuer) can probably lay claim to a more legitimate link to four wheels than any other watchmaker. From the 1930s its ‘Autavia’ dash clocks were the go-to timepieces for ‘AUTomobilists and AVIAtors’, but it was after Jack Heuer took over as head of the company in 1958 that it became indelibly associated not just with motoring but with motor sport…

Being an artist is hard. Not that I would know from personal experience — in fact, if you’d asked me until fairly recently, I would have spoken purely in objective terms. I would have said that I was aware of how few artists scrape together a living, that it’s a career choice of men and women who have an inalienable talent and have chosen to take a risk. My mind has been changed by artist Hugo Wilson. He is tall and handsome, has an enormous smile and a fabulous speaking voice, and he is more of a hugger than a handshaker. This ebullient man convinced me that being an artist is not for the faint hearted. From such a calm, gentle soul spring collisions of colour and meaning, and it…

’Tis the season for round-ups. ‘Best trainers of 2024’… ‘Best face creams of the year’… I always find myself scrolling the lists not only for trainers but sports bras (it’s strangely hard to find supportive structures that I can breathe in), but it is difficult to trust an online article that is full of affiliate links. You can rest assured that I live and breathe my libation calling. If I tell you about a wine, I do so with the utmost sincerity and an optimism that you will share in the enjoyment I have had. I am skirting around the fact that it is the most wonderful time of the year. As readers of The Rake, I have faith that you will already have a respectable wine collection. If that’s…

FOUNDER Wei Koh EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Tom Chamberlin tom@therakemagazine.com ART DIRECTOR Rob French rob@therakemagazine.com ART EDITOR Kim Lang kim@therakemagazine.com MOTORING EDITOR Simon de Burton VIDEOGRAPHER Hash Rifai RAKE AMBASSADOR Matteo Mango CHIEF SUBEDITOR Stephen Wood CREATIVE DIRECTOR Brandon Hinton brandon@therakemagazine.com LIBATION CORRESPONDENT Georgie Fenn SARTORIAL CONSIGLIERE Shary Rahman RAKE HOUND Bandit Koh FASHION DIRECTOR Grace Gilfeather grace@therakemagazine.com DIGITAL EDITOR Andrea Buzzi andreabuzzi@therakemagazine.com TRAVEL EDITOR Farhad Heydari CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Nick Foulkes RAKE HOUNDS IN VALHALLA Brando & Gracie Koh CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Alain Gafundi alain@therakemagazine.com PUBLISHER Allegra Rifai allegra@therakemagazine.com PUBLISHING COORDINATOR Brigita Baniunaite brigita@therakemagazine.com HEAD OF E-COMMERCE Lucie Harriman lucie@therakemagazine.com FINANCIAL ACCOUNTANT Anto Wilson anto@therakemagazine.com HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGER Yvonne Koh yvonne@revolutionmagazines.com HEAD OF RETAIL Shaun Gordon shaun@therakemagazine.com HEAD OF OPERATIONS Kasia Rakowska kasia@therakemagazine.com Internationally Licensed Editions THE RAKE JAPAN CO. LTD. PUBLISHER Shigetoshi Oshiro oshiro@therakejapan.com THE RAKE JAPAN CO. LTD. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Kentaro Matsuo matsuo@therakejapan.com THE RAKE CHINESE EDITION PUBLISHER…

Leadership is much misunderstood. There are those who feel that when they are given power they can wield it as if a bludgeon, but the paradox of leadership is that leaders should be servants over whom they have authority. No one understands this better than the army officer, specifically the British Officer. The moment the Officer began his training, he understood this philosophy of service — service not only to the nation but to the institution he serves. The beret of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst shows the cypher of the monarch with a ribbon underneath carrying the academy’s motto, ‘Serve to Lead’. By the time the Officer takes the King’s Commission, the motto will be second nature. This is daunting for a young man who commands 30 soldiers in…

There are certain things we will never see again: Leicester City winning the Prem. Silhouettes like a De Tomaso Pantera rolling off the production line. And Maggie Smith. Yes, Dench, Caine, Mirren and McKellen are still with us for now, but when the West End’s lights were dimmed on October 1, it signalled not just the curtain closing on a life (not to mention a hell of a mixed metaphor) but an epoch. Smith was the last celluloid tendril connecting what was once called cinema to the movies to the streamers. Long before she was the granny everyone wished they had, Smith took home a best actress Oscar as the sexually unapologetic titular character of 1969’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In 1978 alone she was Bette Davis’s duplicitous…

The phrase ‘Hollywood photographer’ feels more than a little tepid when it comes to Greg Williams. We’re talking here about a man who, behind the scenes on 150-plus movie sets, has trained his camera on stars including Joaquin Phoenix, Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt, Idris Elba and Timothée Chalamet; who has shot four Bond franchise posters; and whose access to the Baftas, Golden Globes and Academy Awards has yielded a treasure trove of semi-candid moments with the A-list elite — part reportage, part portraiture. Williams’s Hollywood Authentic (hollywoodauthentic.com) magazine is precisely what its name implies: a platform that gets to the heart of film performers’ true selves, in the process adding finer brushstrokes to the existential realities behind their onscreen performances. So what links Williams — who worked as a photojournalist…

When the editor of this magazine asked me to compile my favourite 10 watches of 2024, I approached the task with an equal measure of excitement and fear — not unlike that feeling you used to get at school when it was time for your exam results. That is because it has been a busy year in the watch industry, despite the return to normal pricing conditions following a few pandemic years of unsustainable frenzy. The rise of micro brands, shaped watches, and a ferocious battle for the world’s thinnest timepiece between Bulgari, Piaget and Konstantin Chaykin has also seen previous limits shattered. First up is the Rolex Deepsea. Before we linger on the Deepsea, an honourable mention must go to the Daytona Le Mans, a watch that stunned us…

They say that when an establishment receives three Michelin stars, it shows that it’s worth travelling over land and sea to enjoy the degustatory pleasures therein. Diners were well within their rights to visit Tokyo just to see Jiro-san before his well-earned retirement, and, until the end of this year, may do the same in Copenhagen to experience Noma. If there is any criticism of this guide, and there is plenty, it is that the proponents of this way of thinking have hijacked a useful benchmark. So when one says, “It’s worth travelling to London solely to visit Birley Bakery and its recently opened neighbour, Birley Chocolate shop” — and people would be quite right to say it — others will scrutinise the opinion by looking to see whether they…