Society

I’ve always loved English swimming pools. I can’t help it – I am a pool-fancier. The lumpy feel of the blue lining beneath pale feet; the peculiar, chlorinated smell of the pool hut where you do the knicker trick; the scratchy pool towel, the near-collapsing deckchair by its side; the greying sky overhead. There’s the swimming, too, but that’s not what gets me. No, the English pool is a particular social idea, a knowing nod to vulgarity, a paradis artificiel in our rainy climes. Chips Channon, an early adopter, knew it when he insisted on putting in a pool at Kelvedon in 1937, as did Viscount Astor when he went

One of the quietly profound pleasures of travel is renting cars in ‘unusual’ locations. I’ve done it in Azerbaijan, Colombia, Syria and Peru (of which more later). I’ve done it in Yerevan airport, Armenia, where the car-rental guy was so amazed that someone wanted to hire a car to ‘drive around Armenia’ that he apparently thought I was insane. Later, having endured the roads of Armenia, I saw his point – though the road trip itself was a blast. Recently I rented a motor in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where they were slightly less surprised than the Armenian had been, but nonetheless gave me lots of warnings and instructions, chief of which

Writing in a lesser organ, Matthew Parris wondered whether most ancient Greeks ‘really, sincerely, did believe in their bizarre pantheon of gods’. Belief in a single god was at that time limited to two peoples: Jews and Zoroastrians (and Egyptians once, briefly). To everyone else, perhaps the sheer variety of the world, the extraordinary generative power of nature and the impossibility of making secure predictions about anything suggested a multitude of powers at work. Since it was obvious that earth and sky combined to control nature – man’s only resource – it was not unreasonable for the ancient Greeks to see those features as the first two gods and then,