The taste of freedom
Michael Wigan says that British farmers and consumers would be better off – and better fed
Society
Saturday
Land of the free
Paul Robinson says we can learn a lot about decency and independence from plucky Canada You’ve probably heard that story about the Inuit having 50 words for snow? Well, the sign of a genuine Canadian is that he has 50 words for doughnut. When a glacial wind is howling through Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat and it has been dark for five months in Tuktoyaktuk, Canadians head for Tim Horton’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Robin’s Donuts, Country Style, Coffee Time, Baker’s Dozen, and all the rest of them. When it comes to the perfect doughnut, Canada is the unquestioned world leader. In the less important matters of world politics and military strategy,
A question of loyalty
Brussels When push comes to shove, I think I know which side Neil Kinnock is on. Eight years in Brussels – as propriétaire of Boris Johnson’s crummy old digs at 76 rue van Campenhout – have not really gone to his head. Yes, he appears dutifully on the BBC as vice-president of the European Commission to justify persecution of the Metric Martyrs, while spitting off-air at the madness of hounding a Newcastle grocer for selling bananas by the pound. Just as dutifully, he once upheld the Labour policy of British withdrawal from Europe, against his better judgment, waiting until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 before committing his
They love to hate us
We are going through one of those horrible and debilitating periods in our history when we are convinced that everybody hates us. Racked with grief, we may even begin to hate ourselves – and thus climb into bed at night praying that we might wake up as Turks. Or Irishmen. It is partly the Eurovision Song Contest. For years we have foisted jaunty, sub-American pop pap on our European neighbours and watched as they lapped it all up, imitated it and vomited it back across the North Sea with Scandinavian or German accents. The more inane our pop exports, the more the Europeans loved them; hence that memorable high-water mark
Television creates terrorists
Driving through the streets of Baghdad last week, I was struck by the number of satellite dishes for sale everywhere. After years in which the appliances were banned by Saddam, freedom is sprouting all over the skyline. There is still an almost total absence of local media, so that Iraqis know nothing of what is going on in their own country except by rumour. But those who can afford a dish are eagerly beginning to learn about the world. They can get the BBC, CNN and even the Fox Channel; though these are not, alas, the only ones they are watching. Unless we are careful, we are about to lose
Friday
Ancient and Modern – 30 May 2003
As the forces returning from duty in Iraq know best of all, important though amazing technology is, the camaraderie and morale of the unit make the crucial difference. The Romans knew this, too, and took steps to nurture the right frame of mind in their soldiers. First, punishments and incentives strongly affected personal behaviour. The penalty for sleeping on watch, failing to obey orders or abandoning weapons in battle was to be clubbed to death. But the soldier who performed well was congratulated and rewarded by the general in front of the whole army, while victory usually meant a distribution of booty among the men, often worth a very great
Saturday
Mind Your Language | 24 May 2003
My husband has just been to a professional conference in La Rioja. Why do doctors feel they confer better in places renowned for wine? I was allowed along for the ride, although it meant that even when we had a delicious dinner (those bream with gold-painted noses and bits of animals that would make Digby Anderson’s heart glow) it was to the accompaniment of conversation about ventilation and macabre things done with butterflies. There was a poor Chinaman at a neighbouring table with never a grain of rice to be had unsteeped in milk and cinnamon, and I began to experience the sense of the alien that he must have
Portrait of the Week – 24 May 2003
Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, sent Cabinet ministers a 2,500-page dossier on the Treasury’s assessment of the five economic tests applicable in deciding if Britain should join the euro-zone. The ministers were then invited in one by one for ‘trilateral’ talks with the Chancellor and Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. The Cabinet’s decision is to be announced and the mountain of documentation published on 9 June; if the recommendation is to join, of which there is no predictable chance, there will be a referendum. Mr Blair wants Britain to enter the zone, and the press was full of stories about his tussle with Mr Brown. Some
Diary – 24 May 2003
Channel 4 outdid itself in ignorance with the dumb, grandiosely titled The 100 Greatest Film Stars of All Time. We tuned in eagerly, expecting to see a cross-section of legendary stars from the 1920s to the present day in fabulous movie clips, and what did we get? Several dozen ‘talking heads’ purporting to be movie ‘experts’, interspersed with extremely truncated footage of some surprising stars, accompanied by scurrilous and unnecessary gossip. Granted, many of the heads did know of what they spoke. Nicholas Hytner and other directors, producers and actors were erudite and interesting, but the editors of magazines such as Jack and Hot Dog, not to mention the assorted
Feedback | 24 May 2003
Comment on The reek of injustice by Emma Williams (17/05/2003) Whilst I commend Emma Williams’ for painting a graphic picture of the hardships endured by the Palestinian population, she is wrong to suggest that Israelis are deluded over this fact. Unlike that of its neighbours, Israel’s media is diverse and objective allowing a clear perspective of the conflict. I myself have watched numerous documentaries on Israeli television chronicling the suffering of the Palestinians. Far from being deluded, Israelis view the current quagmire in terms of a trade-off, for as harsh as the reality is, the IDF’s tactics have (to a measure) succeeded in bringing the Intifada under control. Therefore whilst
Stanford Smarts
Palo Alto Twenty-five minutes by taxi going south from San Francisco, Palo Alto is the home of Stanford University, the school where brainy types who wish to make lotsa moolah spend their formative years. There is something about Stanford smarts that infects even football players, American football, that is. As some of you may know, American football is supposed to make one dumb. Players bump heads, and the harder one bumps one’s head, the more money one makes. The only player on the field who does not block or tackle – unless there’s an emergency – is the quarterback. He’s the one who leans over the centre, is given the
Getting away with it
A friend at our karate club, Colin, does bondage and ‘water sports’ pictures and sells them to a web porn site called ‘After Midnight’. When I spoke to Sharon in the pub the other night she said she’d done a shoot for him. She was pleased because the £75 he paid her had gone towards her latest tattoo – a cheeky cherub fluttering across her groin. Colin thinks he’s an artist so there were no ‘beef curtain’ (Colin’s expression) shots or anything gross like that, said Sharon. He simply trussed her up, gagged her with industrial-strength gaffer tape, lit the bedroom scene for a chiaroscuro effect and snapped away in
Your Problems Solved | 24 May 2003
Dear Mary… Q. I am shortly to take the stage at a certain literary festival. I always enjoy talking afterwards to those readers who have brought along their copies of my book for me to sign. One thing which grates, however, is the inevitable presence, always at the very top of the queue, of a book dealer with an armload of copies which will soar in value with the addition of my signature. How can I overcome the uncharitable feelings I experience on these occasions and sign the books with good grace? Name and address withheld A. You could emulate the stance of another top author who takes satisfaction, as
Lessons from Toby
Malindi After five years in the writing, my book The Zanzibar Chest is coming out in July. Based on the advice of my friend Toby Young, whose New York memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People has been such a success, I realised I had to make every effort to promote it myself. Toby lives in Shepherd’s Bush. I live on a ranch in Kenya’s remote Laikipia plateau, where we don’t even have a phone. I saw this was going to be difficult. ‘Think of some news hooks,’ Toby advised by email. But whereas he had stories of cocaine-snorting celebrities in Soho’s fashionable clubs to generate newspaper publicity, I
Quick-fix solutions
Here’s a random sample of my postbag: an invitation to a mixed exhibition of nine artists’ interpretation of ‘focus’ through painting, photography, digitisation and computer manipulation; notice of a show of photo-text, photo-document and photo-juxtaposition-cum-montage pieces about HIV and place; and the press release for an installation of scarlet mobility scooters which is supposed to be ‘a reflection on age, youth and contemporary Britain’. Clearly Britain is in a bad way. A watered-down conceptual art is the current orthodoxy. Much of what looked new and radical when it first emerged in the 1960s is now being run past us again, and it’s limping badly. And so much of it is
Public-sector fat cats
Anyone organising a protest against fat-cat pay should bear in mind the experience of a group of gas customers who recently attempted to take a 40-stone sow called Winnie to the AGM of energy company Centrica in Birmingham. She was to sit on the pavement before the press cameras and be fed a bucket of swill to symbolise the supposed corporate greed which has pushed up gas prices by 12 per cent in two years. What the organisers had failed to take into account was the bureaucracy now involved in handling a pig. First, the protesters were made to apply for an animal-movement licence. That hurdle overcome, it then transpired
Banned Wagon | 24 May 2003
Stephen Byers has an apology to make. Not, sadly, for telling porkies or mismanaging the railways. He wants to apologise for going to the World Trade Organisation’s conference in Seattle in 1999 and doing his bit for free trade. He now says he was misguided. Now that he has been ‘meeting farmers and communities at the sharp end’, he has concluded that free trade isn’t such a good idea after all. ‘The way forward,’ he writes in the Guardian, ‘is through a regime of managed trade in which markets are slowly opened up and trade policy levers like subsidies and tariffs are used to help achieve development goals.’ It isn’t
‘I let go of life’
A purple-coloured Korean saloon was gaining on us fast as we zigzagged the wrong way up the motorway. My toes ached as I forced the accelerator into the floor. The jeep gamely shuddered and rattled as the exhaust dropped off, the whine of the engine turning into a desperate roar. When I was growing up, my mother had always insisted that passengers in her car clench their buttocks to squeeze a few extra miles out of the tank. It often seemed to work. Now I was cramping my backside for dear life – literally. Groaning with fear, I couldn’t get more than 90mph out of the coughing jeep. The purple
Growing old gracelessly
My parents died quickly and hygienically, without any sort of precursory illness. I have no siblings, aunts, uncles or cousins whose descent into sordid infirmity might have obliged me to visit them. I have a small platoon of children, it is true, but they all live with their mothers and have saved me from childhood mewlings and pubescent messiness. As a teenager and famed walker of hills, I piled humiliations on the heads of less robust friends, but at night I would steal across the fields in search of a private latrine pit. In my last summer before university I spent months hefting cast-iron dustbins full of wet ash for
British churchmen back Mugabe
It is remarkable for Britain to be visited by a saint. But that was surely our good fortune last week, when Pius Ncube, the Archbishop of Bulawayo, passed through London. This gentle and soft-spoken former goatherd is a man of great holiness. In a country where churchmen have kept quiet, Ncube has consistently spoken out with extraordinary courage and firmness against the near-genocide that Robert Mugabe is visiting upon the Zimbabwean people. Week after week, from the pulpit of Bulawayo Cathedral, Ncube uses his sermons to make a Christian protest against the torture, intimidation, rape, murders and forced starvation that are part of the daily rigours of Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF