When was the last time a piece of technology made you happy? Truly happy, so satisfied with the experience that you immediately wanted to repeat it? For me it was last weekend, in a pub toilet, using an Excel Xlerator hand dryer. This unbelievably powerful bit of equipment sorted out my mitts in less time
On a visit to my old school not long ago, I found myself confronted by my former PE teacher, now the deputy head. She fixed me with an icy glare. ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘I’ve forgotten my note.’ The icy glare froze completely so I explained: ‘You remember? I’m the one who came to every
When the International Criminal Court (ICC) was set up ten years ago, it was meant to make the world a safer place. The Court and the various UN war crimes tribunals were supposed to pursue and punish war-criminal dictators as a warning to all the others. The idea may have been a noble one but,
Two hundred years ago, the creepy Revd Thomas Malthus would take to his pulpit to rail against the copulating lower orders. Author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Malthus was one of the first promoters of the overpopulation thesis. If people — especially poor people — didn’t stop having so many babies,
Twenty-five years ago, in a windowless Levantine oubliette, my wrist and ankle were bound with chains, but my imagination soared. Among my many daydreams was a reunion a quarter-century hence. The guests at this illusory affair were to have been my captors. There were times when I envisaged our encounter as real, and others as
Britain has been at war in Afghanistan for over a decade. Many Britons now take it for granted that its country’s intervention in Afghanistan has failed and when Nato troops pull out in 2014 they will leave behind a volatile and unsettled state that could easily plunge into a civil war — much worse than
Earlier this year the Education Secretary Michael Gove suggested that primary school children ought to learn a poem by heart. Even if the teaching unions had not objected I would have needed no further convincing. I was converted to Gove’s idea years ago, by Terry Waite. Having haphazardly discovered poetry on my own at state
It started in America. The Midwest has for weeks been suffering what is now the worst drought in living memory. Prices for maize and wheat have soared by 50 per cent and the G20 will next week decide whether to call an emergency meeting to discuss what the United Nations believes could be a repeat
In the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, there’s a picture that, last time I looked, was curtained off. A couple of Japanese girls came out from behind the curtain, stuffing their hands into their mouths to stop the giggles. I went in to see the cause of the girly mirth and there it was, Gustave Courbet’s
Acid is back. For the first time since the 1960s there are signs of a rekindling of serious interest in psychedelic drugs — conferences, clinical tests, and a full-blown study is planned, with human subjects. LSD belonged to history — to grizzly-haired hippies and travellers, the ‘counter culture’. Now, an informal alliance of psychiatrists, therapists
Anybody hunting for Britain’s lost summer need look no further than Iceland. I spent last week there salmon-fishing, in torrid sunburn conditions caused by a northward shift of the Atlantic jetstream which means that the place has scarcely seen rain since spring, and not many salmon. I failed to hook a single fish, which caused
The prominent story of London 2012 has been that of a country which was once an underachiever in the Olympic games but which, through sheer hard work on the part of its athletes, has hauled itself to the top of the medals tables, producing in the process one of the most dramatic world records in
Britishness was supposed to be finished, its last flickering embers to be snuffed out by Alex Salmond when he holds his 2014 referendum on breaking up the Union. The London Olympics, the Nationalists claimed, would be the last at which the Scots, English, Welsh and Northern Irish would be teammates. The Scots, supposedly on the
Considered historically, debt and fat are twin phenomena. Thirty years ago neither was a problem; today, they are two crushing burdens on the western world. Britain has a trillion pounds of debt. A quarter of our population is obese. If you were to remove the excess fat from our bloated citizens and put it on
Recently, I took my baby daughter to the park. When I pulled out a bottle to feed her, some nursing mothers a couple of picnic blankets away stopped their conversation to gawp. They exchanged derogatory looks and clutched their suckling children closer to their bosoms. The message was clear. The sooner I left, the better.
It’s hard to tell which is the more absurd over-reaction to Pussy Riot’s 51-second performance of political and religious blasphemy in Moscow’s St Saviour’s Cathedral in February — that of the Russian state or that of the western media. It should go without saying that the treatment meted out to the three retro-punks — five
Near Damascus ‘Remember: what we do, we do for God,’ said the rebel commander to the huddle of his men at the foot of the mountain. They divided up their ammunition. They had so little — one clip’s worth was shared between two Kalashnikovs. They set off, a line of men stretching into the dark,
Amazing how many cycling experts came out of the woodwork last week, wasn’t it? Normally most of us couldn’t tell one end of a bike from the other, but give us an Olympic road race six days after Bradley Wiggins wins the Tour de France and all of a sudden we’ve got pelotons coming out
Beijing There is no mistaking the place. It isn’t just the crowd of men and women sitting on the steps of the small official building; it’s the way they look as individuals. Once you’ve come across a group of petitioners in China, you can always spot them again. They are usually middle-aged or elderly and
Quite soon, it will be impossible to ignore the fact that a revolution is taking place. You’ll look up one day and the skies will be full of flying robots: pilotless drones or UAVS (Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles) — all programmed to carry out different tasks. There’ll be security drones circling shops, streaming video back to
