How ‘kindness’ became big business

In those moments when I most fear that the West is on the skids, I find it helps to make a list of end-time signs, phenomena that indicate decay, like sparks along a piece of faulty wiring. So far my list goes like this: NFTs; babyccinos; liver-flavoured ice-cream for dogs; the fashion for encouraging children to cut off their genitals; the fact that Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, thinks it deeply wrong to talk them out of it; freak shakes; Heinz ‘pink’ sauce; gannets dead all down the North Sea coast; swearing six-year-olds still in nappies (says my teacher friend in the North-East); risking nuclear war over Ukraine; the TV show Is It Cake?

My latest and favourite end times sign is buried in the minutes of a recent meeting of the London Ambulance Service NHS Trust board, in a section about the plight of call handlers. Both 999 and 111 are, as you might expect, in a desperate state. Staff are over-stretched, stressed and resigning at a frightening rate. The response, I read, is to send them on a ‘kindness workshop’, run by a private firm called A Kind Life. Frontline staff have themselves expressed concern that if they’re away for training days, it will inevitably endanger people’s lives, the minutes say. The minutes do not record that senior management are terribly worried. So patients may be dying because staff are attending kindness lessons. Isn’t that somehow so very 21st century?

For a start there’s the increasingly popular idea that almost any problem, however entrenched, can be solved by a workshop or training course. This is part of the general global takeover of HR. Training courses are their stock in trade. Then there’s the eccentric notion that the sort of training poor NHS workers need is not medical know-how, but behaviour training. Be a better person, be less prejudiced, and all will be well. Be less racist and you’ll miraculously be able to insert a cannula or diagnose a child with sepsis.

I know it sounds mean to be down on something as innocuous sounding as a kindness workshop, but this isn’t just a one-off idea. A Kind Life is employed by NHS trusts around the country. Its founder and guru, a man called Tim Keogh, talks proudly of ‘years of work with 35,000 NHS staff’. And you have to remember that kindness in this context isn’t an act so much as a set of beliefs.

Take this example from an American East Coast company offering kindness training to university staff: ‘How do we identify and overcome some of the most abrasive forms of incivility within our various communities and work towards building an ethic of care?

‘Through this workshop, we will not only identify how lateral violence manifests and is maintained by a colonial mindset, but more importantly we will explore ways to liberate ourselves from this cycle of oppression and build a more healing workplace.’

Did you think that to be kind meant to go out of your way to help someone? I’m afraid, in workshop world, that’s a very passé definition. The golden rule of the new corporate kindness is always to be kind to yourself first. Any impulse towards self-sacrifice is a grave error of moral judgment. Tim Keogh agrees. ‘Be kind to yourself, that’s the first step,’ he tells clients, and I see this makes sense from a business point of view. Rebranding kindness as wellbeing is an easy sell, and customer feedback means repeat business.

I feel bad singling out Tim Keogh. I’m sure he’s nice enough. He looks very C of E: evangelical smile, just a touch of hangdog. Tim looks like the sort of man who sometimes thinks about getting a tattoo of Charlie Mackesy’s boy and horse but doesn’t quite dare. And I’ve never attended A Kind Life workshop, so what do I know? But then… the sheer horror of its website.

‘We co-create values and behaviours,’ explains A Kind Life online. ‘What people want to see when you are at our best. The behaviours that don’t work for people. Using their words and experiences. Making it easier to notice, role model, speak up and appreciate.’

Is that ‘role model’ as a verb? What’s wrong with full sentences? Are they somehow unkind?

And what in the name of all that’s holy does it mean for people to ‘want to see when you are at our best’? I suppose it’s a typo. I hope it’s a typo. This sort of drivel fills page after page. I don’t think it’s just packaging. I think this is the actual substance of the ‘kindness’ course. It’s what they offer.

Since the 1980s it’s been compulsory for anyone in any form of consultancy to have their own set of acronyms. A Kind Life has BUILD: ‘Behaviour, (understand), Impact, Listen, Do Differently.’ You can judge a company by the quality of its acronyms. On the upside, I suppose, if you were a frontline medical worker sent to stare at this insane gubbins on PowerPoint for a day, catheterising patients would seem like a relief.

A Kind Life seems to be a spin-off of a company called April Strategy, founded by another Tim – Tim W. This Tim calls himself a senior adviser to leading global organisations on growth strategy: ‘Tim began his career in international brand management and marketing with Unilever followed by ten years in a strategic marketing consultancy.’ It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that if you follow the money back to its source, almost every company offering kindness training or trying to raise corporate awareness is, in the end, making a profit for some Tim from Unilever. Look for the word ‘boutique’ as a giveaway.

Who can blame the Tims? Selling kindness is big business these days, a real growth industry across the West, and particularly popular in medical settings. It’s just a mystery, another end times sign, as to why anyone thinks that the sort of men and women who choose to train as medics need lectures on kindness by people with a background in marketing consultancy.

If you’re going to make it up, please make it up better: Eiffel reviewed

Eiffel is a romantic drama purporting to show how a passionate but forbidden love inspired Gustave Eiffel to design and build the Eiffel Tower. The producers say that, by merging fact and fiction – the romance is a fiction, more or less – they hope to create ‘the French Titanic’, which is aiming rather high, if not way, way too high. The love affair is tiresomely humdrum – if you’re going to make it up, please make it up better – plus the stakes are too low, particularly as the Eiffel Tower never hits an iceberg, does not sink, and nobody dies. Although you might, a bit, from boredom.

This is handsomely produced and undemanding in the manner of, say, one of those Sunday-night TV period dramas like Mr Selfridge. It stars Romain Duris as Eiffel, the brilliant engineer who, at the start of the film, has just returned from New York. Did you know he designed the inner structure of the Statue of Liberty? The facts here are genuinely fascinating – did you know that, once the tower was built, the writer Guy de Maupassant loathed it so much he ate lunch at its restaurant every day as it was the only place in Paris where he didn’t have to look at it? – but, alas, this is Gustave Eiffel as lover first, genius engineer second, which is a mighty pity. He has returned to Paris where he has been invited to submit a design for the 1889 opening of the Exposition Universelle. A métro station, that’s his plan, as it will be useful and will endure. His mindset isn’t changed when two engineers from his company show him their idea for a 200-foot wrought-iron lattice tower. ‘Ugly, ugly, ugly,’ he declares.

But then he is reacquainted with Adrienne Bourgès (Emma Mackey), his great love who he was forbidden to marry in his youth as her parents disapproved. The flashbacks show them falling for each other in Bordeaux against glorious sunsets but in the intervening two decades they’ve both married although his wife has died, so he’s now widowed with five children… Hang on, given Mackey’s age (26), wouldn’t she have been six back in Bordeaux? There’s a casting difficulty here, but let’s press on. Meeting her again, we are led to believe, sets him aflame and puts him in the mood for a grand and impressive romantic gesture. Goddamn it, he says, in effect, I will build that tower and I will make it 300 feet, the highest structure in the world!

The film is directed by Martin Bourboulon, and the performances are generally solid but the characterisations are basic. This Gustave Eiffel is not just a sexy dreamboat; he’s also a terrific guy. He is kind to his workers, cares about the common man and fights for what he believes in even if I was always wondering about all those children back home he never seems to see (aside from his oldest daughter, Claire, who actually becomes his assistant). Was there ever an Adrienne Bourgès? The filmmakers say yes, but I took a deep dive and if there was she never played any important part in Eiffel’s life. So what are we watching? Or what are we attempting to watch without dozing off?

The engineering aspects are genuinely fascinating. The bolts replaced by rivets, the sandboxes, the hydraulic issues. But they’re shoved aside to focus on the central relationship which can’t happen for reasons, I have to say, that never even seem that insurmountable, which makes it hard to buy. Meanwhile, the suggestion at the end – that the A-shape of the tower was inspired by Adrienne’s name – doesn’t make sense when you consider that the initial idea wasn’t Eiffel’s. That’s what you’ll be thinking as you leave, as well as: even if it had been his idea, what if she’d been called Zoe? He’d have had his work cut out then.

A victory of the imaginatively crafted over the conceptual: In the Black Fantastic reviewed

‘These artists are offering other ways of seeing,’ says Ekow Eshun, curator of In the Black Fantastic, and from the moment you push open the Hayward’s heavy swing doors you see what he means. Outside, a world of grey utilitarian concrete; inside, a vibrant crew of invaders from planet Zog glittering like Technicolor Pearly Kings in bright carapaces of beads, sequins and buttons.

The kind of thing a nimble-fingered alien might come up with if his spaceship crash-landed in a haberdashery department, Nick Cave’s ‘Soundsuits’ make Ziggy Stardust look Earthbound (see below). Brought up with seven brothers by a single mother in Missouri, Cave learned early how to pimp hand-me-downs and his suits are exquisitely tailored. Slightly larger than life to accommodate performers – he’s a former member of Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater – when standing vacant they have the benign presence of tutelary spirits. Cave made his first after seeing footage of the LAPD’s beating of Rodney King that sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Feeling vulnerable as a black American male, instead of rioting he constructed a protective shell. The handful of examples gathered here is a tiny sample of the more than 500 he has made since. They’re called ‘Soundsuits’ because of the noises they make when worn; when silent, they make a visual splash.

Cave is one of 11 artists from the African diaspora who have each been given a room to themselves in which to reimagine our imperfect world in pictures. There are mercifully few words. Tabita Rezaire’s film installation ‘Ultra Wet – Recapitulation’ (2017) suggesting that ‘sexuality is a construct’ is as preachy as this exhibition gets, and Sedrick Chisom’s titles – ‘The Wholly Avoidable Death of Mighty Whitey, The Last Drunk Dionysian Hero, AKA The Wholly Tragic Birth of Fragile Narcissus’ (2020) being one example – as prolix.

Chisom lets his titles talk over his images; Wangechi Mutu believes in the power of art alone ‘to imbue the truth with a sort of magic… so it can infiltrate the psyches of more people, including those who don’t believe the same things as you’. Her visual language is surrealism, the favoured lingo of psychic infiltration: she sticks it to the man with collage. Snipping pages out of porno mags and engineering manuals, she cooks up a bitches’ brew of monstrous cyborgs, attacking the objectification of black women by vandalising western myths of female beauty. The results are terrifying from a distance, worse from close up when you see eyes and lips implanted with breasts and buttocks and gaping mouths crammed with machine parts. Francis Bacon would have approved; she too has taken inspiration from illustrations of diseases in medical textbooks.

In Mutu’s ‘The Screamer island dreamer’ (2014), the mythical Nguva who haunts the East African coast in human guise luring unsuspecting victims to their deaths is shown in her true colours as a spiny sea monster with prehensile teeth champing to drag her prey to a watery grave. Sirens are a theme; it must be something in the water. Chris Ofili relocates the myth of Odysseus and Calypso to Trinidad – where he now lives – island home of the music that shares a name with the nymph of Ogygia. Reimagining Homer’s enchantress as the fishtailed African water spirit Mami Wata, he depicts her in a series of recent paintings in sinuous clinches with a black Odysseus. In a life-sized bronze he gives the Annunciation similar treatment, envisaging the Angel Gabriel’s visit to the Virgin Mary as an erotic coupling of horny supernatural beings. If it’s meant to shock, it doesn’t; it just looks kitsch. Take away Ofili’s elephant dung and there’s not a lot left.

Ellen Gallagher’s room feels like an aquarium with windows on to magical underwater worlds. Her monumental watercolour series ‘Watery Ecstatic’ conjures a coral-coloured aquatic ecosphere aglow with mysterious marine life forms, the watercolour saved from wishy-washiness by the addition of crisp detail in precision-cut paper. Her 2019 series of large oils, ‘Ecstatic Draught of Fishes’, has a paler palette of greyed pinks and greens dispersed in clouds of scintillating bubbles. Taking Turner’s ‘Slave Ship’ as a starting point, it envisages the unborn babies of drowned pregnant slaves learning to breathe underwater and wandering the ocean floor as silvery wraiths evoking African Fang figures.

In a quieter register than the rest of the show, Gallagher’s imagery reverberates for longer. Like Cave’s ‘Soundsuits’, her paintings combine exquisite facture with oblique meaning, representing a victory of the imaginatively crafted over the conceptual. It’s the general absence of post-modern irony from this exhibition that makes it such a tonic; for an enervated western audience, that’s fantastic in itself.

Should you grass on a neighbour who breaks the hosepipe ban?

We know many water companies are themselves guilty of profligate waste through unrepaired leaks. So to snitch on a neighbour, who is making a comparatively tiny personal contribution to the drought, seems petty.

But we are only human and it is hard to watch your flowers and vegetables wither and die while your neighbour is still drenching his own produce with gay abandon.

If you have a smart water meter you might be more careful about over-use as Big Brother is watching you. Candy, a wife and mother of three in my nearby town, showed me her own bill for water use. It announced that her total water use was 93m³ between January and July 2022. The bill declared: ‘That’s the same as about 372,000 cups of tea, OR 1,240 showers OR 1,163 baths.’

‘So I would be wary of using a hose during this drought,’ Candy told me. ‘Because I feel the meter would catch me out.’

But those without smart meters often believe they are special cases. One profligate waterer still using a sprinkler system when I went to her garden for drinks last week said: ‘I thought we were short of vegetables in this country and anyway all my family prefer showers to baths so we can use that saved water to keep the vegetables alive.’

Another woman in Worcestershire argued: ‘Well I have chosen not to have children – so I think I am perfectly entitled to use as much water as I want.’

Yet every little helps, as the supermarket slogan goes, and if every individual would restrict their water use, then the sum of the saving would be greater than the whole of its parts.

But as a concept, ‘Every little helps’ is hard to drive home into resistant brains. Think of all the caravan park punters who refused to restrict their use of wet wipes. The owners begged people not to flush them down their toilets but each holiday-maker thought they were a special case – even though it had been explained that the parks were not on mains water. Once the owners began to spend more on drain engineers than they were taking from punters, they had to close the parks down.

When it comes to residential water wastrels, the digital age is bringing out the school sneak in too many of us. Go online and you can anonymously name and shame the offenders to your water company or the local authority, even supplying video evidence secretly filmed on your phone.

Much better to go quietly along to the profligate neighbour and hiss conspiratorially that you’ve heard there is a hosepipe enforcement officer doing the rounds locally. Then nod and wink supportively as they rush to turn off their sprinklers or stop filling their paddling pools.

And what if you have your own tip-off , i.e. you learn that some neighbour who you thought, after lockdown bonding, you were on good terms with, has taken it on themselves to dob you in? Rise above it and pretend it never happened.

A recent survey shows that Londoners are the least likely to grass on their neighbours while Scottish residents are the keenest. Could this be because city dwellers are less in touch with the land and less able to think through the consequences of proper drought?

Whatever the reason, my blanket rule is: do not snitch. And similarly don’t lay yourself open to being snitched upon. A lifelong feud with a neighbour is many times worse than a temporary drought.

How to save money: switch to cash and reprogram your boiler

We’ll find out shortly whether official statistics agree with economists surveyed by Bloomberg who say UK GDP probably shrank by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter. But at an uncomfortable moment when we know things can only get worse, looking backwards doesn’t help and nor does holding out hope for a miraculous ‘emergency budget’ in September. As for forecasting beyond that, it’s almost too scary to contemplate. Better to shun economists and politicians and focus instead on facts that tell us what’s happening now – such as data from Barclaycard – and things we can do keep our own budgets in balance.

Spending on ‘essential items’ was up by 7 per cent in July year-on-year, says the card company, but on utility bills by 44 per cent and on fuel by 30 per cent – a pretty good sketch of the state of inflation. The average supermarket transaction fell but the frequency of visits rose, as shoppers switched to ‘need-to-buy’ rather than fuller trolleys. Hospitality and travel showed a decline from June and three out of ten respondents say they aim to spend less on ‘social plans and days out’ – but 71 per cent, four points down from a year ago, are still confident they can live within their means.

So that’s where we stand on the downward slope – and here’s another clue. The Post Office handled a record £801 million of cash withdrawals in July, up 20 per cent from a year ago, as more people turn to cash as a budgeting tool – an interesting reflection on my argument (9 July) that the shift to cashless payment is itself an inflationary factor. In fact I’d urge everyone, especially the card-happy young, to switch to notes and coins so you know what’s left in your pocket.

And while I’m in the mode of Martin Lewis the ubiquitous ‘money-saving expert’, here’s another tip. Ask someone clever to reprogram your boiler to use less gas. Mine had been chugging away for years on the same setting (a bit like Treasury fiscal orthodoxy) because I had no idea which buttons to press. Now a friend has radically reset it, I suspect I’m £1,000 a year better off.

Late mistake

Sir Chris Gent was a titan of the previous corporate generation as the boss of Vodafone who began the new century by completing a record-breaking £110 billion takeover of Mannesmann of Germany, to create the world’s largest mobile phone business. He was compared by the Daily Mail at the time to John D. Rockefeller and was unlucky to be eclipsed by Lord Browne of BP for the title of ‘most admired’ UK business leader. He went on to be chairman of GlaxoSmithKline, a top-ten pharma multinational – and having first met him as an upwardly mobile computer manager in the 1970s City, I watched his advance with some fascination.

But now, at 74 years old and long out of the limelight, Gent is back in the news, having been fined £80,000 by the Financial Conduct Authority for disclosing insider information in his last job as chairman of the FTSE 250-listed medical equipment maker Convatec, from which he retired in 2019. Sensitive news about the company’s finances and its chief executive’s retirement was revealed to two of Convatec’s shareholders ahead of announcements to the stock market – but Gent has said he acted on advice and that the FCA ruling confirmed ‘I made no gain personally’.

A late mistake, it seems, in a bold career that did more than most to put British business on the global map. I think we might give him the benefit of the doubt.

Next job for Sir Nick?

A big welcome back to former deputy prime minister and Lib Dem leader Sir Nick Clegg, who is relocating to London from California while continuing in post as ‘president of global affairs’ at Meta, the parent of Facebook. A part-time return to UK politics looks unlikely, but this silken communicator can surely hope to pick up a couple of FTSE 100 non-executive directorships to bolster his Meta salary. One company in need of his special skills might be Glencore, the Swiss-based commodity trader that’s an embarrassingly big winner from the war in Ukraine, having announced a doubling of first-half profits to $18.9 billion and a fat pay-out to shareholders on the strength of resurgent coal sales as the world switches dirty power stations back on for fear of freezing this winter. If Clegg can go on earning millions defending what I recently called the ‘heartless monster’ of Facebook, he could surely come up with a case for tossing net-zero targets into coal-fired furnaces. And who knows, we might one day hear eco-sceptic prime minister Liz Truss echoing her predecessors Cameron and Brown: ‘I agree with Nick.’

Hot sauce

‘Bring mustard,’ said a puzzling text as I was about to board my flight to Bergerac (Jet2 this time, as efficient as Ryanair but a lot friendlier). ‘Why?’ ‘None here!’

On the scale of current crises, this is a miniscule one – but a neat parable of the clash of unforeseen market forces. Dijon’s famous condiment, essential to a good vinaigrette, has disappeared from French supermarket shelves because mustard seed supply has been afflicted by extreme weather – wet winter and late frosts in Burgundy, fierce heat in Canada – and war in Ukraine, driving wholesale prices to six times normal levels, on top of other production cost increases.

But there’s better news for Brexiteers burning bangers on high-summer barbecues: Colman’s English mustard, made largely from East Anglian seed, is still available in most grocery shops. Sadly, however, that’s partly because demand for it is falling as our tastes become more foreign.

The Grocer reports that sales of the patriotic yellow product fell 13.9 per cent last year to £11.9 million, while overall sales under the Unilever-owned Colman’s brand were overtaken in the UK sauce league by Nando’s blow-your-head-off concoctions from Portuguese Mozambique. Can nothing stand still in this turbulent world?

The death of saving

I was intrigued to learn from Tom Daley – that young man who became famous for jumping off a platform into some water – that homophobia is a ‘legacy of colonialism’. The Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, begs to differ. He believes that it is homosexuality which is a legacy of colonialism and had been brought to his benighted country by effete whitey – and so he may well think Tom is indulging in the disagreeable act of ‘whitesplaining’.

However, it is possible, if not likely, that both Tom and Yoweri are correct – after all, it is difficult to be homophobic if you have around you a complete absence of homosexuals, as I have discovered since moving back to the north-east of England. Tom made his comments on the occasion of the newly woke Commonwealth Games, where organisers have encouraged sports men and women to speak out against political injustices and that ‘the more fictitious or imagined your adolescent drivel and woo woo about victimhood, the more we will applaud it’. Actually, the organisers didn’t quite say the last bit even if, listening to Tom, that is precisely what it seems that they said. Organised sport (as opposed to just running away very fast from a cheetah) is also a legacy of colonialism, so perhaps we should boycott all of it. Especially if they keep kneeling down or whining.

Tom’s interesting observations were reported on the BBC News, but the main story was about what is going to happen when we can’t pay our fuel bills this winter. Almost all the discussion has been about the crisis facing the poorest households, and I don’t doubt it will hit them hard. Almost no airtime, however, has been devoted to the effect price rises will have on small businesses – nor have there been demands for help for this sector from the opposition and the BBC. And yet it seems to me this is where the crisis will be most keenly felt. I wonder how many will go under, and to what degree this will contribute to our plunging into a recession. Yet it is hardly ever discussed. Up where I live, in the homophobia-free wastelands of County Durham, several shop and business owners have suggested they will have to give up the ghost – especially those in the food and services sector.

The focus remains on the poor, however. On Radio 4’s Any Answers I heard a very elderly Brummie talking about his own situation. He had called in to make the simple point that tax cuts were not of much use to him because his state pension was his only income and therefore he paid no tax. So he was living on about £10,000 per year. The presenter tried to prise out of this old cove a sob story. What will you do when the cold weather hits, she asked. The gentleman replied that he would ask his relatives to buy him a warm jumper and that he had some savings put aside for a rainy day. He might also keep the heating on only in his bedroom. Isn’t that terribly sad, the presenter asked, confining yourself to one room? Not really, came the reply.

To suggest that more of us should adopt this chap’s stoical approach is considered callous and ‘victim shaming’. Except, of course, that this man is one of those ‘victims’. Three things struck me, listening to him. The first was an understanding on his part that life has its ups and downs and that one should take the rough with the smooth. He did not believe that he had a beholden right to succour from the state when financial difficulties visited themselves upon him. Second, he was confident that his – presumably extended – family would help him out, even if it was just to buy a jumper. And third, he had saved some money precisely in case something like this happened. In all three cases this man was reflecting the mindset of a certain generation. Making do without complaint, relying on the family and saving money. Subsequent generations would find such a mindset utterly alien: for them, things can only get better and if they don’t the government should bail them out. Families are an encumbrance rather than a resource. And save money? Why on earth would anyone do that?

Apparently buy-now-pay-later schemes are mushrooming, given our rapidly increasing cost of living, and can now be utilised to purchase a takeaway pizza. For many, I suspect, this ‘pay later’ notion means ‘pay never’ or ‘pay whenever I can’ which also means ‘never’, in which case the debts will continue to accrue and their position will just get worse and worse. Personal debt in this country stands at £1.75 trillion, up by more than £68 billion from last year – an extra £1,294 per person over 12 months. The average credit card monthly debt is £2,197 – and the really bad stuff hasn’t happened yet. More pertinently, perhaps, 41 per cent of Britons have insufficient savings to tide themselves over for just one month, while the Yorkshire Building Society reported that almost one fifth of the population has less than £100 in savings. Bear in mind that this follows more than one year of lockdown in which – theoretically, at least – considerable amounts of money could have been saved, assuming one had an income during that time. But somehow, over the years, the obvious virtue of saving money is no longer obvious to a majority of the population.

Perhaps this is because they think that nothing bad can ever happen and if it does then the government can help them out. It is a strange and deluded mindset. That elderly Brummie was brought up in a time when you didn’t borrow in order to buy stuff, you saved and waited until you had enough. That patience and lack of acquisitiveness no longer exists among younger people – it has been expunged and replaced with a pitiable hopelessness.

Water woes: who’s to blame for the shortages?

For residents of the London borough of Islington whose homes were flooded this week by a burst water main, Thames Water’s decision to announce a hosepipe ban the following day must have come across as a sick joke. Just a few days before the flood, the company sent out an email asking its customers to be a ‘hot spell hero’. ‘Every drop you save really is another drop more in your local river or reservoir.’ But Thames Water seemed unable to follow its own advice: five million litres of water were lost during the leak.

The episode neatly encapsulated much of what is wrong with Britain’s water industry: crude, 1940s-style rationing on the one hand and a failure to prevent much of the product leaking away on the other. Last year, Thames Water lost 600 million litres a day – 250 Olympic pools’ worth of water. Over England as a whole, three billion litres of water are lost a day: a fifth of the total supplied.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way when the water industry was privatised by the Thatcher government in 1989. It was promised that privately owned water companies would unleash a wave of investment, and that they would introduce competition, reduce consumer prices and make the industry more responsive to demand.

It is hard to see how any of these objectives have been fulfilled. Nor, indeed, has the water industry become as private as critics feared. Thames Water, which services 15 million people, is still largely owned by public sector entities, just not entirely British ones. Among its largest shareholders are the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, the UK Universities Superannuation Scheme and sovereign wealth funds of China and Abu Dhabi. Almost 10 per cent of Thames Water is owned by the Chinese government.

What happened to the promise of investment? In the 1990s, it seemed to be being fulfilled. Since then, however, investment doesn’t seem to have flowed quite as well as the dividends. Spending on infrastructure has dropped from an average £5.7 billion a year (in today’s money) in the 1990s to £4.8 billion in 2020/21. Bills have increased in real terms by 31 per cent but £72 billion has been paid to shareholders. The industry regulator Ofwat refutes these figures, saying they are affected by a change in accountancy practice, yet its own figures show investment pretty flat for the past 20 years.

Clearly the promise of a great wellspring of extra money has not been delivered. There has been a lot of spending on improving the quality of water discharged from sewage works into watercourses and on some distribution projects such as the Thames Ring Main, which pumps drinking water into London. But no substantial reservoir has been constructed in England since the Kielder Water dam was completed in 1981. Part of the reason we have pictures of empty reservoirs is not that we are in a worse drought than 1976 (the Environment Agency has yet to declare a drought, though may do so later this month if it doesn’t rain), but that while demand for water has increased as the population has grown, capacity to store it has not.

Thames Water did propose a reservoir at Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 2006, plans for which were opposed by the Environment Agency on the grounds that it was not needed. It has remained on hold ever since. Proposals for a national water grid have similarly come to nothing. In 2006, the Environment Agency scotched the idea, saying it would cost £15 billion to build a pipeline capable of bringing 1,100 megalitres a day from the North Pennines to London, and that building reservoirs would be more cost-effective.

All ambition has drained away from an industry which, between Victorian times and the 1970s, built a system of remarkable dams and pipework to transport water long distances. Somehow, a far-poorer country than modern Britain managed to build the Elan Reservoirs in the 1890s to transform sanitation in fast-growing Birmingham.

The result of the failure to build reservoirs is that we are pumping ever more water from groundwater. The Environment Agency now reckons we are extracting 700 million litres a day. Over time, this will cause the water table to fall. Even if water companies succeed in tackling leaks, we are always going to struggle if we can’t store enough water.

Inevitably, current water shortages have been blamed on climate change – the standard get-out clause for any government or public authority failing in the provision of public services. Yet Britain is getting wetter. The Royal Meteorological Society’s recent State of the Climate Report revealed that summer rainfall 2012-21 was up 15 per cent on the period 1961-90 and winter rainfall up 26 per cent. There is plenty of water to capture if we had the means to do so.

There are also alternatives to storing water. In 2010 Thames Water opened a desalination plant in Beckton capable of producing 100 million litres of water a day. It was designed to cater exactly for times like these, yet it has mysteriously been closed for maintenance, leading to doubts about whether it will ever be fully used. Thames Water has suggested that it is too expensive to run.

But in a genuinely privatised water market, consumers would be able to choose whether they wanted to pay more to keep up their consumption in times of drought, and we would have surge pricing to determine whether or not to turn on desalination plants. Yet three decades after privatisation water companies operate as localised monopolies.

Moreover, half of homes still have no water meter. For these households, the marginal cost of consuming water is zero. It’s not hard to see why the water industry isn’t very interested in fixing this situation. If we all had water meters, it would be far easier to introduce competition. The local monopolies would be destroyed.

Water policy in Britain works on the assumption that consumption of water is a bad thing. The Environment Agency’s National Framework for Water Resources imagines that average daily consumption per person will fall from 143 litres now to 110 litres by 2050. Ofwat sets targets for water companies to reduce their customers’ consumption, which they try to achieve through giving us idiots’ advice such as ‘Refill your paddling pool or hot tub less often’ or ‘Don’t wash your hair every day’. It is not going well. Last year, not one company hit its target.

If a company can’t encourage customers to use more of its product, or persuade them to switch from other providers, the only way it can grow its profits is to charge more for the same thing – difficult when prices are regulated – or to slash costs. No wonder, then, the reluctance to invest in new infrastructure other than that required to meet regulator demands. And even then, this is at times ignored. Southern Water, a significant stake of which is owned by the Chinese tycoon Li Ka-shing, was fined £90 million in July last year for negligently dumping sewage on nearly 7,000 occasions.

Water companies are seen by some as an example of the evils of capitalism. But this isn’t real capitalism. It involves the greed element, but without the competition to ensure corporate power is balanced with consumer power. Britain’s water companies combine some of the worst elements of both the public and private sectors. We have highly paid executives, such as Thames Water’s chief executive Sarah Bentley, who receives a basic salary of £750,000 as well as an annual bonus of up to 120 per cent of her salary. Yet these executives are employed to do little more than perform the role of civil servant.

It’s a cosy business but it isn’t helping to keep the water flowing. Meanwhile, consumers must endure infantile messaging, rationing and the pernicious suggestion that we should grass on our neighbours. We are little further forward than the patronising advice from Labour’s minister of drought in 1976, who told us he was saving water by sharing a bath with his wife Brenda.

A magnificent farewell: Stornoway, at Womad Festival, reviewed

The greatest pleasure of writing about pop music – even more than the free tickets and records, nice as they are – is seeing some tiny, as yet unnoticed act and being dazzled by them, then taking every chance you can to wang on about them until other people start to feel the same. Music writers tend not to have many opportunities to do something good – alas, Nick Kent did not expose the thalidomide scandal; it wasn’t Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs who got to the bottom of Watergate – but it’s truly gratifying when a band you have championed rises from the toilet circuit, even if they never make it to the stadiums.

I first saw Stornoway, a folk-pop group from Oxford, bottom of the bill in a pub basement in 2009. Gosh, they were terrific – songs that oozed melody, unusual and unselfconscious lyrics, and plenty of shy charm – and I thoroughly abused my position editing the Guardian’s Friday arts section to mention them in the paper as often as I could. I got hold of a CD of their demos and played it in the car so much that the whole family fell in love with them.

Stornoway didn’t get to the stadiums, but they did get signed to the revered indie label 4AD. They released a debut album that went silver, followed it with three more, and filled theatre-sized venues. Then, in 2017, they split, peacefully and with goodwill. So it was a surprise to see them on the bill for Womad, the annual shindig for all things world music. It turned out to be a one-off – well, a two-off; there was a warm-up show as well. They were opening a tent stage on the festival’s last day, traditionally the least forgiving slot – a hungover audience, in greenhouse conditions, who’ve had to drag themselves from their tents.

You’d have thought this was a headline show: Stornoway were magnificent, and clearly bowled over by the response. They deserved it. The songs have not been diminished by time or familiarity. ‘Fuel Up’, a sombre reflection on ageing delivered from the perspective of a young adult, was gorgeous melodically, but also, as one fellow music writer noted to me the other day, had a lyric so good you might never repeat it in your career: ‘Curled up in the back of the car/ Nine years old you don’t know where you are/ And your head’s on the window, your eyes are just closed/ There’s a voice in the front and a hush on the road.’ Anyone who doesn’t feel a rush back to childhood from those words was never a child. Or they travelled by private jet.

The arrangements and melodies were perfect, complemented by wonderful harmonies that located the unlikely midpoint between the Beach Boys and the Watersons. It was highlight after highlight – ‘Get Low’, ‘Farewell Applachia’, a concluding ‘Zorbing’ that saw the crowd yelling for an encore, until the stage manager came out and said they couldn’t mess up the schedule. If this was their last ever show, what a way to go. My wife and I emerged from the tent with eyes blurred by tears.

Simply Red’s outdoor show in the grounds of Hatfield House in Hertfordshire was less emotionally complicated. It’s so easy to dismiss Mick Hucknall as another purveyor of sleek saloon-car pop, but he’s far more than that. This was a set of perfectly crafted songs, played by a band drilled fit to troop the colour. At 62, Hucknall’s voice is so well preserved it’s a miracle, and it felt lovely to be in a crowd who really didn’t care about coolness or the next big thing, and just wanted to dance and drink and feel young.

Still, Hucknall made his points. His group isn’t called Simply Red because of the colour of his hair, and despite this looking like a crowd who might have a lot of time for Liz Truss, he slipped in his socialism – ‘Come To My Aid’ came early in the set, as did ‘Your Mirror’. ‘Money’s Too Tight (To Mention)’, the Valentine Brothers cover that was his breakthrough hit in 1985, closed the set, and seemed more relevant than at any time since then.

I don’t think anyone noticed, to be honest, and I’m not sure Hucknall minded. Interviewing him in these pages a few years back, I called him ‘Britain’s greatest underappreciated pop star’. I think that’s true, critically, but everyone at Hatfield Park appreciated him. We left as the park had all but emptied, a group of women ahead of us clutching on to each other to stay vertical. ‘Iiiiiiiiiiiiii … wanna fall from the stars,’ they caterwauled, joyfully and tunelessly, ‘straight into your arms.’

The magic of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo

Drag isn’t what it was. Pantomime dames, character actors and any number of sketch-show comedians had fun dressing up as harridans or movie stars (check out Benny Hill’s unforgettable Elizabeth Taylor) but those old-school travesti turns have been out-camped by a more unsettling performance style that women are finding increasingly hard to take. Directors and commissioning editors tread very carefully when it comes to ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability but women, it seems, are still fair game. The trampy excesses of the modern drag wardrobe, the cartoonish, almost spiteful exaggeration of female features – haystack wigs, F-cup prosthetics, the whole ‘womanface’ box of tricks – doesn’t feel like an homage any more but a misogynistic send-up, reducing the very notion of ‘female’ to something tawdry and synthetic.

A big man in a tutu and tiara ought to arouse the same unease but somehow Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo manage to bypass drag’s difficulties. The company was conceived almost as a private joke in 1974, performing in off-off Broadway lofts and they are still on tour nearly half a century later, perpetuating a style of ballet that died out long before most of the current company were born. Rigorously rehearsed, thriftily but authentically staged and meticulously observed, the Trocks are home to the grandest and funniest ballerinas in captivity.

I have been watching the Trocks for 35 years and, despite their demon-queen maquillage, their portrayals are affectionate, even innocent, with none of the seedy, sex-worker vibe inherent in a 21st-century drag act. Next month the 16-man troupe will arrive in the UK for an eight-week, 11-city tour but back in May they were paying a flying visit to Spain and Portugal, adding Zaragoza to the 600 cities they have conquered.

Zaragoza’s pretty old Teatro Principal, with its red plush upholstery and gilded, cherubed ceiling, is the perfect setting for the swans and sylphs of the Trockadero repertoire but the city has no real tradition of ballet-going and Spain’s belt-and-braces Covid regulations – they wanted masks on the beaches at one point – meant that box office was initially slow-moving. Backstage the mood was anxious. ‘In theatres of this type the acoustics are great for the audience but we don’t hear much that’s happening in the house,’ says Joshua Thake. ‘When the pre-show announcement happened, I turned to a colleague and said: “Is there anybody here?”’ In fact, the full house was giggling away happily. The Trocks always take care to add local colour to the bogus cast changes on the tannoy and the dig at Les Grands Ballets de Botorrita (a nearby hick town, pop: 498) got a nice big laugh before a step had been danced.

Earlier that day the company was taking class on stage, getting to grips with its dimensions and factoring in the 4.5° gradient of the floor which does wonders for sightlines but plays havoc with a dancer’s equilibrium. ‘Make friends with the rake!’ shouts ballet master Raffaele Morra, former Trock ballerina Lariska Dumbchenko. Morra is running through a brand-new enchaînement, a string of familiar steps shuffled into a totally new order for that day’s class. He ‘marks’ what he wants from them – pas de bourrée, pirouette, attitude – and the watching dancers echo his feet with their hands, muttering the names of the moves, committing the long sequence to memory almost instantaneously. Dancers, like gymnasts and martial artists, have a premotor cortex adapted to this extraordinary skill: see one; do one. Alicia Markova had an eidetic memory for movement, so much so that Diaghilev choreographer Léonide Massine once took her to a flamenco show, then made her dance it back to him, step for step.

There are no tiaras or tutus in rehearsal and there is nothing girly about the usual laundry basket of practice gear until the dancers start peeling off layers and one chap reveals a ruched pink bra (‘He’s gender fluid,’ explains a voice, helpfully). Even in rehearsal the eye is caught by new signing Takaomi Yoshino who trained at St Petersburg’s prestigious Vaganova academy – ‘probably the finest technician we’ve ever had,’ marvels Tory Dobrin, artistic director for the past 30 years. Yoshino (Varvara Laptopova) is quietly boring a hole in the unfamiliar floor with a tornado of triple and quadruple fouettés but even he is upstaged by the physical comedy of Robert Carter (Olga Supphozova) whose body seems to shrink and expand at will: hunchback one minute; swan maiden the next.

The Trocks’ genius is their ability to appeal to all levels. Balletphobes are easily won over by the sheer lèse-majesté of having a great hairy six-footer in a Fonteyn role but, once softened up by gurning and slapstick, even the most tutu-averse punter will marvel at the sheer skill involved, underpinned by thousands of hours of graft. There are a few sly parodies of Balanchine (Go for Barocco) and Jerome Robbins (Yes, Virginia, Another Piano Ballet) but the core repertoire is a sanctuary for old warhorses of the art form no longer seen in the West: Esmeralda; Pas de Quatre; The Little Humpbacked Horse – and the cross-dressed ballerinas do their upmost to inhabit these works in the grandest imperial manner, stealing only from the very best.

A Trock isn’t trying to be a woman, he’s trying to be a ballerina. For the uninitiated the word is a synonym for ballet dancer but serious balletgoers use it very sparingly – and usually in the past tense – to describe the artists of a bygone age. Scratchy old films of the greats – Ulanova, Kolpakova, Plisetskaya – are scanned by Dobrin’s divas for foibles and mannerisms and reprocessed as comedy. The centrepiece of every mixed programme is the old gala staple ‘The Dying Swan’. Anna Pavlova’s four-minute weepie is transformed into a comic tour de force by a Trock on spavined pointes, unpacking three pillows’ worth of loose feathers and shamelessly milking the curtain calls.

These dancers simply aren’t cut out for the chorus. In 2017 a former Trockadero ballerina embarked on a bitter (and ultimately unsuccessful) dispute with the company alleging transphobic discrimination and harassment. English National Ballet, eager to signal its inclusivity, promptly made space at the barre and the ex-star spent a sorry season in the back row of the female corps de ballet – the words ‘sore’ and ‘thumb’ sprang to mind.

Scratch a Trock and you find a man who figured out early on that the ballerina had all the best lines. Duane Gosa, aka Helen Highwaters, came late to classical dance after years at performing arts school. ‘There was a lot of catching up to do and I wasn’t really wanting to be a male ballet dancer, being behind somebody and making sure that they looked good. I wanted the spotlight.’ Like every ballet school bunhead, his dream is to tackle Odette: ‘She’s really dramatic but it’s so silly: she’s a bird. It’s already ridiculous.’

Tall, dark and handsome, his fellow Trock, Joshua Thake, ought to have been a natural Siegfried but his lean lines meant that auditions went badly when he finished his after-school training with Boston Ballet School: ‘I felt that they were looking for a linebacker, football aesthetic type of body.’ Straight ballet gets accused of ‘body fascism’ but the Trocks sidestep all that. Technique and comic timing are all that matters and the bulk of their jokes are height-related, with pint-sized porteurs struggling to lift their Junoesque partners and dancers cast outrageously against type. Thake was born again as Eugenia Repelskii (‘a ballerina whose pungency is undisputed’). ‘He never does anything the same twice,’ admits Dobrin. ‘But he is so creative I don’t care.’ Despite being more than 6ft 6in on pointe Thake hopes one day to tackle Amor in Don Quixote. It’s usually danced by a pocket ballerina, but after more than ten years in Trockland he has an unwavering faith in the company philosophy, size doesn’t matter: ‘That’s the Trockadero magic.’

Bridge | 13 August 2022

To paraphrase E.L. Wisty, the late, great Peter Cook’s alter ego, ‘Some people are born lazy, some become lazy and some have laziness thrust upon them.’ If you are any of these, there are going to be some contracts that you could make but don’t. I speak from years of experience!

The more we play, the better we become at recognising patterns and we instinctively know how to play many hands. But even for the best players, hands do come along where the only way to find the right line is to play it through in your head, all the way to the end.

This hand stumped an international player, when he didn’t put enough work in. Would you have done any better? (See Diagram)

N/S certainly didn’t leave anything unbid; when North found out about his partner’s solid Spades and the ♣K, he pushed all the way to the reasonable grand.

West started with a traditional trump lead – and now it’s time to go to work! You can either stop here and work out the winning line or, if you’re feeling lazy, jump to the explanation.

At the table, South cashed the King of Clubs at trick two, and followed up with putting -50 on the score card. In effect, it made dummy’s Clubs good ‘too soon’. The line – as you have no doubt spotted – is a Diamond to the Ace, back with the ♣K, ◆ruff, ♣ruff, ◆ruff and another ♣ruff. Needing a 4-3 break in Clubs, we now have two winners in dummy for our Hearts, and can draw trump and claim.

There is nothing speedy about speedy boarding

When my black passport arrived in the post, I decided to take a trip.

I’m not a good flier, so the absence of foreign travel for three years had to be making my fear of flying potentially insurmountable. A one and a half hour flight to Cork felt manageable. The builder boyfriend had already been over to have a look at this farm we’ve had our eye on.

Incidentally, I know this passport is meant to be dark blue, but it’s not, it’s black. And to make it more alarming, the picture of me inside it is bright orange.

I had slapped cheap make-up on my face and was wearing an orange T-shirt when I went to a booth by the checkout at Sainsbury’s which turned out to have a Day-Glo orange seat. Consequently, I look like an Oompa Loompa.

The passport office accepted this, however, so when my funereal new passport arrived I decided I would look at this farmhouse the BB had declared magical but wrecked, and we would make a decision on whether to emigrate, a couple of Brexiteers crawling back into the EU with our tails between our legs because we can’t afford a farm in our precious Britain.

My suspicions were correct because once I got to the airport I became horribly feared up by the crowds and the queuing. The BB checked me in using a blasted app on my phone because there was no one at the budget airline check-in desk, and he deposited me by departures.

Then began the shouting of the guards as I joined the heaving masses snaking around the dividers. ‘Keep moving! Keep moving! Close the gaps!’ It was hideous. I marched dejectedly forwards, sweating with panic about the liquids that might still be in my bag. On the other side of the scanners, in order to get to the gate, I was forced to walk a complete circle through the entirety of duty free where women with plastic faces tried to force perfume on me. Had it always been like this?

I had not paid for speedy boarding, because I did remember that much. I sat and waited in comfort with six other passengers as more than a hundred people stood queuing to get on the plane because they had paid extra. I noticed there was no corridor attached to the plane by the gate. I fancied they were being allowed to try and jump across. Some were becoming so desperate, I suspected, they were attempting to bridge the gap with makeshift rope ladders. Some were quite possibly bungee-jumping across. Others simply jumped into thin air, I imagined, breaking their legs on impact, then attempted to crawl up the landing gear.

After 45 minutes, the six of us who had not paid extra were invited to comfortably board the plane.

I had also refused to pay extra to choose my seat, resisting countless automated messages telling me random seat selection would make me extremely unhappy.

But my random seat turned out to be in the extra leg room, one of the best on the plane. As I sat down, a handsome young Spanish steward bent over and asked me and the two passengers either side of me: ‘In an emergency are you willing to assist us in evacuating the aircraft by pulling the handle on the door?’ I worked out that was what he said afterwards, because his accent was so thick it wasn’t immediately obvious, but we knew what he meant because he pointed to the alarming illustrations on the seatbacks in front of us, so we all just nodded.

He moved to the next row, also by the emergency doors, and repeated the same sentence, upon which the elderly Irish lady behind me turned to her daughter and said: ‘What’s that, Maria?’ And her daughter said: ‘You have to pull the handle, Mammy, to open the door.’

‘Good God, Maria,’ said the lady, ‘I couldn’t open that door.’ ‘You won’t have to, Mammy. You just have to say you will.’

But the lady would not lie. She told the steward: ‘I couldn’t do it but my daughter here will. It’ll be no problem for her.’

The steward sighed. ‘I’m sorry but you all three have to agree, otherwise you have to move seats.’

‘Mammy! Just say you’ll pull the handle because if you don’t we’ll have to move and I’m loving this extra leg room!’

So the lady said yes she would and the steward went away. The engines began to warm up, and I started muttering my prayers, and lining my hands up on the seat arms to make them straight enough to ensure the plane didn’t crash. And then I heard the lady behind me ask her daughter: ‘So when do we have to open the door?’

How I found perfect happiness

The view from the upstairs window was of other large and secluded houses perched on other still-green Surrey Hills. I spent six days here. Every day the owner would go to London leaving me alone with two rare and valuable prick-eared, six-toed house cats called Tio and Luna.

The only instructions I was under concerned these low-slung, vividly marked cats. Under no circumstances were they allowed outside except on a lead. I was to be especially careful not to let them slip out between my feet when I opened the front door. A well-rehearsed system of ‘air lock’ door opening and shutting, if punctiliously observed, rendered the possibility nigh on impossible. Every window must be kept shut, including upstairs windows, to prevent a break for freedom over the rooves and down one of the iron drainpipes.

The pair certainly looked athletically capable of such a feat, having Scottish wildcat and some sort of lynx near-ancestry and that extra climbing toe. However they appeared resigned to their palatial prison, even content. There was an electric water fountain in the kitchen, which their refined sensibility preferred to still water in a bowl. Scattered about the patterned wood-block floors were various toys, lures, puzzles and scratching posts to occupy their minds. Toys and puzzles could never replace murder and torture for a pastime, and these cats partially sated their bloodlust by indefatigably stalking, killing and eating any flying insect that was foolish enough to make its presence felt, no matter how small or inoffensive. A paltry kind of sport, one would think, for highly bred killing machines, and I for one would have liked to have seen with what lightning reflexes or sadistic aplomb they would have handled something more worth their while, such as a rash or insouciant mouse.

How much exactly they had set the owner back I never found out. Several grand each, I gathered, which is far more than I am worth, and I accorded them due deference. Not only was I worth less but I am also less well bred. Moreover, I was an interloper in their solid Victorian interior half an acre. Nevertheless they both appeared to like my company and I, a noted lifelong cat hater, warmed to theirs. This volte-face might have been due to an ineradicable streak of social snobbishness in my ill-bred nature.

I altogether enjoyed my week alone in that high-ceilinged, airy house. With my fingertips I can feel a hardish mass developing above my left bosom, which is where the sharpest intermittent pain is now centred. I cup my breast in my hand when I cough, sneeze or laugh. Standing or sitting quickly tires me out. But lying down is fine. And a French painkiller or two easily numbs the pain. And the view from my bedroom bow window across the countryside had the burgeoning, romantic quality of one of C.F. Tunnicliffe’s illustrations for the Ladybird book What to look for in Summer. I found perfect happiness looking out for hours at a time and watching the light change on distant green wood and yellow stubble, while the mind drifted, pleasantly free on its terminal-illness licence from anxiety and striving. From the house owner’s library I had chosen Roy Jenkins’s fat biography of Churchill. I read it once before with pleasure. This time, Churchill’s great energy mocked my own dire lack of it and I could read only a page or two at a time before letting the paperback drop and returning my diffuse attention to the pleasant view.

Perhaps the greater part of my popularity with Tio and Luna stemmed from a misapprehension that I was all day patiently watching for trapped flies on the windows, bought in as an extra high-summer pair of eyes. Occasionally one or the other would pop in while on patrol and glance at me as if to say, ‘Seen any yet? No? Well, keep up the good work.’

Finally the great glad morning. The taxi to the airport was booked. The flight to France was going ahead. The new passport had come. My son, with his two sons in the back of the car, said he was five minutes away.

‘I’ll be standing outside in the road to guide you in,’ I said.

I performed the airlock procedure but the front-door lock obstinately refused to give way, in spite of all pleas and insults. I ran to the kitchen door, which was to be opened only in emergencies. The cats were basking a yard away. Could I slip out without releasing five figures worth of exotic pedigree cat into the Surrey Hills? I could. Could I open the electronic gates from the inside? There was a large green button. The doors swung back. My boy’s tyres crunched the beach pebbles. The back doors of his old Beamer swung open, my dear lads were in my thinning arms. Our holiday had begun. Joy!

The curse of the jet-ski

An F. Scott Fitzgerald biographer by the name of David S. Brown refers to America’s promotion of deviancy (my words) as ‘the great post-Appomattox launch toward materialism’. I liked that line and was thinking about it as I left the boat in the early morning and walked into an almost perfect Greek village square for a coffee. There were some French people blabbing away with their usual hand gestures, Greeks discussing politics at high volume, and then an American couple, both quite attractive, each with a Mac in front of them and absolutely impervious to anyone or anything in their immediate surroundings.

Talk about a launch towards materialism. The two of them never once looked up from their screens. They remained totally glued, expressionless, to that demon plastic – or whatever it is that screens are made of – and failed to look up even when a Greek woman got into a shouting match with an Austrian lady who had taken her chair. In the meantime, they were occupying a table in the café that would have changed hands about three times had it not been for those two extremely annoying Americans. The owner of the café shrugged his shoulders when I told him to ask them to vacate the premises.

Now I know it’s none of my business, but this was hardly a launch toward materialism. It looked more like a storm, a typhoon of blind greed. Mind you, could they have been writing the great American novel? I doubt it and am willing to bet the boat I’m on that it was all about moolah and nothing more. It was, to say the least, dehumanising. Two tables away from them were three old Greek men, with their white moustaches and their caps, sort of leaning on their walking sticks. They each spoke in turn, with silences in between. Small children ran in between tables, women in black passed by without a glance, the French and Italians continued their singsong ways. I just stared at the Americans wondering what had taken place to turn people like those two into soulless automatons. Was it arrogance, self-importance, or lack of understanding of our European culture? And then I thought of Yomi du Roi’s sister.

Yomi was my wife’s childhood, and best, friend until her recent death. She came from an extremely old and good family and was also very rich. Her sister, Princess de Merode, had the bad luck to be targeted by some hoods and have her Paris flat raided. She was tied up and asked where the jewels were. They addressed her in the informal ‘tu’. Her answer was short and to the point: ‘D’abord c’est “vous”, ensuite c’est “Madame”.’ (‘To begin with you address me using the formal “vous”. After that, it is “Madame”.’) And the bad guys followed her instructions, addressed her in the formal vous, and left with all the loot after untying her. Now that’s what I call sticking with protocol despite the inconvenience.

What does this have to do with that provocative display of ethnicity by two Americans clicking away at their damned machines in the middle of a beautiful square oblivious to everything but the mouse pad? Nothing, I guess, because the past means zilch to them, whereas the Parisian hoods robbed the princess but respected the authority she represented.

And now to matters nautical. If God were to grant me one wish it would be to ban the world’s most useless item, the jet-ski. People with a lower IQ than their age master the device on the first try. All it does is pollute and annoy with its noise, and it also kills swimmers and fish alike. Horrible superyachts carry them and even more horrible people use them non-stop. No bay is safe from these pests and the morons who ride on them. Please God, grant me my wish before I shoot one of these pests and end up in the pokey.

Sailing from the edge of Christendom that is Patmos, and heading west, we hit very high winds and extremely rough seas. My son, a great sailor, and the crew put up a storm jib and the mainsail, and battled angry waves all day. I watched the sea crashing on the bow, like something only Poseidon would allow. Thinking back, I haven’t sailed through such a storm since crossing the Messina Straits in 1971 on my first Bushido. That was 51 years ago and we had a knockdown. A sailor went through the skylight and a Soviet troop ship going by whistled at the blonde who was panicking on board.

This time around it was all family. Everything was hunky-dory, and I had to drink a bottle of white and half a bottle of vodka to get a buzz. A wife, a granddaughter and a son on board do not for a dramatic cruise make. We finally made it through the centre of the storm and on to Skinousa, a charming isle inhabited by around 200 people, with one taxi, a few wonderful tavernas and a very pretty Albanian waitress posing as a Greek who my Romeo son immediately went after. There were a few horrors anchored in the bay: triple-decked, refrigerator-like super-yachts, probably making for Mykonos and taking refuge there. I left early and headed for Paros, Kea and then Koronis. We’ve survived winds that would rip the horns off a cuckold (a French expression), and we’re in a very good mood because Romeo failed with Juliet, hence he’ll stick to crewing.

Brown burns Starmer

Outriders are all the rage these days in British politics. Liz Truss has Kwasi Kwarteng and Lord Frost: Rishi Sunak has Dominic Raab and Mark Harper. They act to deliver the messages their candidate can’t, launching attacks, fighting fires and speaking home truths. So it’s no surprise then that Gordon Brown, the Giffnock grouch, is now unofficially performing that role for Sir Keir Starmer, his beleaguered successor as Labour leader.

Brown is close to team Starmer, and performs the role that John Major did for David Cameron in the coalition years, acting as a trial balloon to test how ideas will land. The cost-of-living crisis has been a tricky challenge for Labour: their supporters demand more action but Rachel Reeves and the self-proclaimed ‘sensibles’ preach prudence. So it’s been left to Brown to act as tight-rope artist, floating a package of affordable measures to see how they land in the media.

Unfortunately, his latest effort in today’s Guardian backfired on Starmer somewhat. Brown’s piece begins ‘Time and tide wait for no one. Neither do crises. They don’t take holiday and don’t politely hang fire.’ Yet Sir Keir is, er, in fact currently on holiday – as is half of his party. Given that Labour have repeatedly accused Boris Johnson and Nadhim Zahawi of being ‘missing in action’, will Keir be cutting short his holiday to set out his own measures?

Don’t count on it: Starmer’s big belated speech won’t take place before Monday, at the earliest. How many more ‘rare’ interventions can we expect by Brown before then? And what does it say about his successor that the former PM is now being dubbed the ‘real’ Leader of the Opposition instead?

The high life of stonemason James Preston

The impact had shattered the churchyard path. Chunks of asphalt and mortar lay in the surrounding grass. Just next to the path, like a broken chess piece, lay the remnants of the church’s 150-year-old spire. A few hours earlier, it had stood at the very top of the church, towering over the churchyard. Mercifully, the Victorian construction had fallen to earth rather than through the church roof. For reasons now lost, St Thomas’ in Wells is one of the very few English churches with a spire to the north-east corner.

The list of people one can call for such emergencies is not long. In the event it was 37-year-old James Preston who picked up the phone. Preston is a stonemason and steeplejack whose work has seen him dangle from almost all the historic buildings you’d find in the Ladybird Book of English History: Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Stonehenge, Longleat, the Radcliffe Camera and Whitby Abbey, to name but a few.

The spire’s fall, captured on video by a neighbour, took place at the height of Storm Eunice in February. When I meet Preston six months later, he shows me the workshop where the new spire is being made and takes me to St Thomas’ church itself. A 20-mile drive intervenes, and Preston – stubbled and tanned – tells me about the various stone varieties of the West Country. Geologically speaking, we’re at the bottom of a band of oolitic limestone that curves, via Oxford and Bath, all the way up to York, formed during the Jurassic period when much of the Cotswolds was under tropical seas. Look closely at the fine Georgian townhouses in Bath or the little Gloucestershire weavers’ cottages and you’ll see ancient shells and the fossilised remains of ancestral starfish. Bath stone is ‘a soft oolitic limestone’ – ‘oolitic’ meaning ‘egg stone’, referring to the spherical grains of which it is composed – ‘but then we’ve got Hamstone, and Doulting stone, and then you get rubbles. Historic buildings in this kind of area are generally soft limestone, with Bath stone features and maybe Lias rubble walling,’ says Preston.

Limestone is soft, crumbly and warm-hued, quite unlike the more austere Portland stone, to which we owe much of central London. Casual viewers can spot these types of stone, but Preston has a connoisseur’s eye. As we approach Wells, he points out buildings made with Doulting stone, the kind of which St Thomas’ is made. ‘Doulting is an oolitic limestone,’ says Preston, ‘but it’s more orange, and it’s coarser.’

He describes the different mortars used across Britain. They once varied according to local geology, then became brutally standardised in the postwar period, causing damp in buildings where impermeable mortar sealed in moisture. Preston and his colleagues pay close attention to the original mortars, disaggregating them so they can work out their ingredients en route to imitating them. ‘If you go around London, you can find buildings with tiny white [mortar] joints. You go somewhere else, and they’ll be pink, made up of pink sands, or red.’

Preston sees architectural subtleties where other humans would not. ‘I’ve been doing it for a long time,’ he says. He’s been working in the field since he was 16, when he left school to join the same firm he works for two decades later.

What kind of 16-year-old leaves school to become a stonemason? ‘I don’t know!’ he says. ‘It’s weird.’ School, he explains, ‘wasn’t really for me. I’m not a not-academic person, but I’m not really a sit-down classroom-learning type. I’ve always been practical with my hands, mending things and wanting to do things by hand.’

He found he enjoyed the geometry of masonry and its demand for precision. Put through college as an apprentice with Sally Strachey Historic Conservation (he still works for the company, known as SSHC, today), he learned to carve humans and animals, and also to cut a block of stone with an accuracy of one millimetre. This discipline is called banker masonry. ‘The tolerance is one millimetre in one direction, because if you’re still too high, you can take it down. Whereas if you’ve gone too low, there’s nothing you can do about it.’

Preston’s skill as a stonemason neatly dovetailed with another skill of his: climbing. As a teenager, he’d been a hobby climber; in his twenties, working at Farleigh Hungerford Castle for SSHC, he realised that the team had left a blanket at the top of a high wall. Rather than set up the scaffolding again, Preston used ropes to make the climb himself. His career as a modern-day steeplejack had begun – a career that has since led him to abseil down Buckingham Palace and to climb towers and spires otherwise untouched by human hands.

Done with care, he says, rope climbing is safer than working from a scaffold. But it’s still thrilling. ‘I love climbing church spires,’ he says. ‘As you progress up a church spire, the mass of what you’re climbing becomes smaller and smaller, and so you’re more and more exposed as you get up. It reduces up to nothing, and it never ceases to be exciting.’

And then there’s the reward at the top. ‘The views are something you can’t match, and very few people will have seen them. Climbing spires is the best thing, for sure, about working in rope access, or working in historic buildings.’ His favourite view is from Wakefield Cathedral, which has the tallest spire in Yorkshire.

Preston turns his van into a country lane, and we arrive at the workshop. It’s a converted farm building, open to the elements. Outside it stand two spires: the old one, which is grey, weathered and pieced together from lichen-coloured rubble; and the new one, which is sleek and cream-coloured. (It’s Doulting stone, Preston says; my unsophisticated eye does not detect much orange, but he says different beds of the same stone can come in different colours.)

Preston had to piece together the old one, having taken its constituent chunks back to the yard, in order to work out the dimensions for its replacement. ‘We spent a couple of days just sticking bits of stone back together to try to work out what it’s supposed to look like,’ he says, as we inspect the two spires in the sunshine.

Between the spire and the weathervane will be placed an ornamental component: a finial stone. Its three-dimensional floral form was carved by Preston, faithful to the shattered original, over four days. It’s standing on a workbench today, ready for its one-way trip to St Thomas’.

Before we leave, Preston shows me the yard-long steel bolt that, in the mid-1990s, had been implanted into the spire. The intention was to keep the spire secure, but the engineers hadn’t reckoned for wind speeds as high as those brought by Eunice. The bolt, thick as an exhaust pipe, has been bent into a C-shape by the force of the fall. Preston and his team will have to leave a more durable spire than the one they found, which they will do thanks in part to a better-designed stainless-steel tie-down rod. ‘We never intend to have to redo work in our lifetimes,’ he says.

On our way to St Thomas’, we drive past Wells Cathedral, another of Preston’s former projects with his team at SSHC. Above the famous astronomical clock on the north transept are several subtly cleaner panels of stone, put there by Preston and his team.

Stonemasons like to grumble about their industry. They cite the poor pay, the long drives, the contrast between the harried contractors and the unhurried in-house cathedral masons, of whom there are still a few groups. Despite his job’s shortcomings, though, Preston counts himself as privileged. On cathedral roofs, he sees grotesques put there for God’s amusement and nobody else’s; and seeing him climbing up spires like some sort of action figure delights and thrills his five-year-old son, Blake. ‘I think we’re lucky,’ he says. ‘I really do.’

There will always be plenty of work. The misguided postwar mortaring keeps stonemasons busy. Old buildings cope well with high temperatures, but if the Met Office is correct in its prediction that climate change will cause a higher frequency of wind storms, then the damage caused by Storm Eunice will be repeated several times this century.

We’re sitting on the low wall that borders St Thomas’ churchyard. With my hands resting on the wall’s top edge, I can feel the crumbling Doulting stone of which it’s made. We crane our necks to see the decapitated spire. Some time in the coming weeks – SSHC keeps the precise date quiet, lest spectators distract the climbers – Preston and his workmen will install the new spire.

They will do it with the help of a large crane, and they will just have to hope that their modern methods last the centuries. As Preston muses in the workshop, in 200 years’ time stonemasons might curse their forebears (‘21st-century idiots’) who went round putting stainless steel into our ancient buildings.

I took my son to Drag Queen Story Hour

The nice young man in the library had told us he was worried about protests when I booked tickets for Drag Queen Story Hour. We only began to hear the chants halfway through the show; they drifted up from the courtyard in front of St John’s Hall, the council building that houses Penzance library, through the window behind where my son and I were sitting. They got louder and louder – the children started looking round, puzzled, and the drag queen gesticulated at me to close the window. It took me a few moments to realise what the gestures meant – I had assumed that it was what they call ‘vogueing’ – but I eventually pushed the sash closed. But not before I heard what they were chanting: ‘Drag! Is! For! Everyone!’

It had been clear when we arrived that the counter-protestors outnumbered the protestors. There were one or two unsmiling women holding A3 placards – ‘This is not pantomime! It’s political indoctrination!’ – surrounded by a larger number of local activists. I recognised several from the Labour party stall which, every couple of weeks, displaces the street drinkers from the corner of Greenmarket outside BetFred; one was the Labour candidate in the last election. These activists took up most of the pavement, forcing my son and me on to the road until one of the bored-looking policemen told them to let us squeeze past. Some carried full-sized flags. ‘This one’s the non-binary flag,’ one of them patiently explained.

Most of the counter-protestors wore face masks. I am not sure why there is a correlation between supporting LGBT rights and Covid risk-aversity, except, perhaps, the signalling potential of both, but muffling their chants did mean we got through most of story hour without disturbance.

The fact was, the original protestors – and I am pretty sure they were not far-right, white nationalist thugs as we had been promised – were wrong. Drag Queen Story Hour was very much pantomime: the drag queen came into the room backwards, so that the children quite naturally shouted: ‘Behind you!’ Far from being hypersexualised, Aida H. Dee wore unflattering bell-bottoms, and was not even wearing women’s shoes. Can you really trust a drag queen who finds high heels uncomfortable?

If anything, there were more sexual references in the pantomime at Wimbledon Theatre last year, although it was Dick Whittington. The only indoctrination came right at the end, when we were taught how to say a drag queen ‘Goodbye-ee!’. The children, who had been excitedly roaring, karate-chopping and dabbing as instructed, did not copy this as enthusiastically as their parents.

I had gone to the Drag Queen Story Hour expecting to be underwhelmed. Its own social media gave the impression, from photographs of the drag queen with excited parents and baffled children, that this was something that was laid on to satisfy the self-congratulation of the parents. Its YouTube channel has the drag queen Tia Kofi reading a story without even doing the voices. I cannot say that self-congratulation was entirely absent from the grown-ups at the event – who, again, outnumbered the children – but Aida H. Dee was a perfectly competent children’s entertainer. One child, the moment the story started, ran away in fright to join her mother at the back of the room; but one child always does. The rest enjoyed themselves, loudly.

As the council and, in identical wording, the Drag Queen Story Hour’s own publicity materials kept reminding us, Aida H. Dee is a published children’s author. Aida H. Dee is indeed a published author: The Three Goats United, which Aida read, is published by Drag Queen Story Hour UK (founder, owner and director: Aida H. Dee). It’s not a terrible book: it tells in rhyme (or near as dammit) the story of three goats, one brown, one black (at this point the drag queen made slightly too much eye contact with the only black family in the library) and one – get this! – pink. They are threatened by a wolf (white) but manage to escape by defecating on his head. There may be some subtext in there, for anyone prepared to undertake a close reading, but I don’t see how it feeds into, as the council claims, educating and informing residents in Cornwall about the harm and damage hate incidents have on us all.

I asked my son what he had thought of the show. He liked it, he said, and the drag queen was just as good as the dame in Dick Whittington. The dame, however, had thrown sweets into the audience, which the drag queen, much to his disappointment, had failed to do. My son then reminded me of my promise of a ‘cut’ of my fee for this piece. I always respect the hustle.

It’s time for Tory socialism

The Conservative leadership contest has descended into a low-tax auction, which is not a good thing. The implication is that the Conservatives think government should be minuscule at the very moment when private enterprise is letting us down – the energy companies are raking in cash and spending it on stock buybacks – and the state seems to be on its knees.

We live in a country where it’s become widely accepted that if you call an ambulance, it won’t show up for several hours; the borders are wide open; social care is under-funded; and the police have ceased investigating certain crimes. If anything, this is a moment to rediscover an older Tory tradition of state-building.

Call it One Nation, paternalism or, if you’re feeling cheeky, Tory socialism – a philosophy, not a doctrine, because it begins by rejecting economic dogma, even materialism on the basis that man does not live by bread alone. Its genius is that it makes culture the engine of policy. Liberal conservatives start by saying ‘how do we grow the economy?’ – to make us rich and give us freedom. Tory socialists begin with ‘what kind of society do we want?’ – and then choose the economic strategy to produce that aim. Personally, I’d like strong families, the chance to exercise my talents, a thriving civil society and a vibrant sphere of leisure and art.

Now, it’s conceivable that the way to get this involves free markets and tax cuts, but sometimes the state can be a helpful actor. Take agriculture. I want a countryside populated with family farms, because they provide my food, manage my ecology and keep us all grounded in the soil. For this, they need markets, low tax, low regulation etc. But given how low returns can be, they might also need subsidies – and to protect them from foreign competition, they might require an aggressive tariff.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Tories were the party of protectionism, just as they were of social reform. In 1926, Stanley Baldwin responded to the energy crisis of the time by improving the laissez-faire market with a National Grid, connecting 122 power stations with 4,000 miles of line and cable (to reduce popular resistance, the pylons were given a majestic appearance intended to evoke ancient Egypt).

Today’s constant search for the new Mrs Thatcher is irritating because it jettisons the decades of history that came before her, which teach us that the Conservative party has survived by identifying what the voters want and giving it to them – regardless of method – and that its genius is to adjust and modernise the country while giving the impression that nothing has changed at all. To quote Michael Gove, himself paraphrasing Charles de Gaulle, Conservatives identify ‘a certain idea of Britain’, and then embody it.

By Tory socialism, I mean an approach to politics that puts the spiritual before the economic, and which situates the human being within a community that is shaped by tradition and custom. What this brand of socialism has always rejected is social conflict, be it the class war of Marxism or the race/sexual battles of identity politics. It is also anti-puritan (fox hunters have no time for face masks or cigarette bans) and anti-egalitarian, because Tories favour hierarchies (God save the Queen!) and they revel in excellence (Britain should have the best racing drivers, ballerinas and horses, and we should spend a sizable amount of the budget trying to win as many Guinness world records as possible).

At the heart of the pursuit of excellence is beauty. We would swallow new towns being built if they resembled Bath or Rye, and I might even tolerate HS2 if it were designed to look like a British steam train, not a Soviet monorail, with a decent restaurant serving good wine. All this stuff might seem small but it is hugely important: Tory socialists are elitist populists in the sense that they want the people to have the very best. And that includes the best state: probably doing a little bit less, but much better.

A big problem with the Conservative party is that since Maggie it has been infected with the idea that the state is always bad and the private sector always better, and while this is often true – we distrust Whitehall for good reason – it has also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We have run down parts of our state apparatus financially and reputationally, such that the finest people no longer choose to work in medicine, social work, teaching or the civil service.

This is reflected in politics, where much of my generation has chosen to stay away. Previous Conservative cabinets contained men mentioned in despatches. That experience of war was not merely character-building: Harold Macmillan learnt the techniques of administration from serving in the Ministry of Supply, covering industrial planning and the management of raw materials, skills that were no doubt later applied to his house-building bonanza. Labour and Tory ministers helped rebuild the UK after the second world war because they knew how to get things done, expertise that was slowly lost, delegated or privatised.

Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are office-holders of distinction and either would be a good PM, but they are also the last shout of a cohort, steeped in Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, that assumes their overall task is to get out of the way.

Of course, critics of my argument will argue that the Conservatives have pulled off some big social reforms in the past 12 years, particularly Universal Credit and academies, and that Sunak oversaw one of the largest welfare programmes in history, aka furlough. Boris Johnson won a landslide in 2019 with a pitch that was a mix of jam-for-everyone levelling-up and cultural conservatism, and the present tax burden is sky-high in a bid to bankroll the NHS. It is telling that the party’s elite have only gone hell-for-leather Thatcherite when trying to court the vote of their members, but I suspect it doesn’t appeal to all the members and, more importantly, it is a misunderstanding of what conservatism is at root.

Either way, whoever wins, the next few years will be marked by economic collapse and environmental change – so the Conservatives are going to have to become a party of intervention and infrastructure, to build up what the academics call ‘state capacity’. In that case, they would do well to research their own history and turn disaster into opportunity by using it in the service of a traditionalist cultural vision.

I am honest about what I want. Pretty town centres where there are butchers and bakers. Churches christening a baby boom. Rewilded land and profitable herds. Safe streets, cradle-to-grave care, neighbours who check in on each other, docks building ships, and kindness, liberality, virtue. Use the state and market to such ends and Conservatives will be unbeatable.

Liberté, égalité, nudité: France’s new sexual politics

France is going through a sexual civil war. After the great carnal outburst of the free-loving soixante-huitards, some have reverted to abstinence and prudishness, while others are pushing sexuality to new extremes.

The crisis in French sexuality has exposed itself this summer as the clothes have come off. It’s not always a pretty sight, and not just because it isn’t true that French people don’t get fat. Major confusion on the shifting boundaries of corporal and sexual expression has grown into a peculiar conflict, exposing a national sexual neurosis.

On one side of this conflict is France’s army of traditional naturists: a largely aging clan who revel in the freedom, classlessness and wholesome pleasures of a nudity that they claim has nothing to do with sex at all. They are at war with libertines, voyeurs, exhibitionists, habituées of clubs échangistes and people from the dodgier ends of the internet, who have emerged from the shadows to disport themselves in the blazing sun and taken advantage of the season to turn many French beaches into what the appalled here call une baie des cochons. Traditional naturist camping sites and holiday villages are hiring security guards to watch out for dubious characters.

The naturism industry is said to be worth about €250 million to the French economy, although I suspect it’s really much more. It attracts tourists from all over Europe, including plenty of Brits. But the boundaries between traditional nude beaches and libertine beaches are sometimes blurred. Last month near Lyon, on a sandy lakeside, a 75-year-old traditional nudist became so enraged by a man, 46, masturbating in front of a woman that he pulled a carbine out of his beach bag and shot him dead.

Naturists are not only at war with the libertines but also now challenged by a cult within naturism calling themselves les nudiens, which seeks to normalise a state of liberty, equality and nudity in public spaces. Some are even attempting to rebrand exhibitionism as green. ‘We’re no longer motivated by health or sport but by ecology and the desire to live differently by shedding the dictates of society,’ explains one militant.

Museums in Paris have thrown open their doors to nudists and at least one restaurant has offered naked dining. A recent TV series, Naked, posited that nudity had become compulsory in France. It was awful but got gigantic ratings.

Les nudiens even have designs on one of France’s hallowed brands, the Tour de France. Several prefects moved last month to halt an unofficial Tour de France naked bike ride. The riders intend to rally hundreds of naked local cyclists wherever they go. The naturist establishment is not impressed.

Alongside the struggle between the various naked people, there’s a parallel struggle to control the nude economy. Traditional nudist venues have been almost wearily wholesome. Not so the quartiers naturistes that dot the coastline with naked nightclubs, naked supermarkets and massage parlours.

Libertine nightclubs have been attacked in Cap d’Agde, France’s largest nudist resort. Implausibly, this was attributed to arson by hardline traditionalists, ‘mullahs of chaste nudity’. More probably, it was the work of criminal gangs settling scores. A local police official has described Cap d’Agde as ‘the biggest bordello in Europe’.

In recent years, the growth in French nudism is claimed to have come not from the expected hordes of the aged and drooping but from the young. They are, according to the French Federation of Naturists, the majority of the more than half a million nudists who have swelled the ranks of the great unclothed in the past decade, with around a third now under 30. I frankly don’t believe this. The average age of naked people at Cap d’Agde appears to be 50. Over the past decade the number of French women willing to sunbathe topless has fallen by a third.

Whether or not the young are keen on getting it off, they are decidedly less enthusiastic about getting it on. Boomer sexual freedom has been followed by a new era of prudishness in which the youth appear to have swapped actual sex for naked selfies. Over the past 12 months, 43 per cent of France’s youth had not had sex; in the UK, it’s 25 per cent. The Swinging Sixties it is not. Yet three-quarters of French teenagers have admitted sexting. Millions of adolescents are teasing each other with nude selfies but holding back from the act itself. France has taken an almost Germanic turn: a growing proclivity for nudity united with a kind of sexlessness. It’s a peculiar reality, not unique to France but strange for a country so renowned for its carnal fixations yet now gripped by pornification as a substitute.

Sociologists and journalists are revelling in this. Le Monde says ‘boys are filled with anxiety, fear of shame and humiliation, the pressure of virility’. It’s not just boys or the young who seem terrified of sex, though. The new sexual politics and two years locked down have ‘stopped the fingers at the moment of unhooking the bra’, as they say here. Before Covid hit, French people claimed to be having sex six times per month, down from nine in 2007. They were not only having less sex, they told pollsters, but enjoying it less too.

If a topless Brigitte Bardot defined la révolution sexuelle, today the counter-revolution is defined by the burkini, which is absurdly banned almost everywhere here as an Islamist provocation. Given some of the spectacles on offer on French beaches this summer, there’s a case for making this modest head-to-toe swimwear compulsory for all.

So are the French still at it like rabbits, or have they reverted to the position of ‘no sex please, we’re French’? Probably a bit of both. Some seem more militant than ever in their carnal pursuits and they are highly visible, especially during this long summer. But many are becoming more prudish. What’s evident is if you go down to the beach this summer, you may be in for a big surprise.

Propaganda from the Russian Front: The People Immortal, by Vasily Grossman, reviewed

On its posthumous publication in 1980, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was widely compared with War and Peace. For all the novel’s many virtues, the comparison was hyperbolic. In one respect, how-ever, Grossman’s was the more remarkable achievement. Whereas Tolstoy wrote about historical events with the benefit of hindsight, Grossman wrote about ones that he had recently endured.

Life and Fate was the third of Grossman’s novels set during the Nazi invasion of the former Soviet Union. The first was The People Immortal, which, like the second, Stalingrad, is now available in an unexpurgated edition, superbly translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler. It covers a few days in July 1941 when, after their surprise attack, German forces had encircled entire divisions of the Red Army and ravaged villages in Belorussia and Ukraine.

Grossman, a correspondent for the military newspaper Red Star, witnessed many of the horrors. In April 1942, he was given leave to write a novel about life at the Front, which was published a mere three months later. Unlike the two subsequent novels, The People Immortal was intended primarily as propaganda. With the exception of Colonel Bruchmüller, who deplores the backbiting in Berlin and admires the Russian ‘character’, the Germans are presented as outright monsters, ‘smashing crosses in cemeteries… stepping on the throats of old women… ripping linen shifts from the bodies of breastfeeding mothers’.

Meanwhile, the Soviet people are depicted as defending their motherland in prose that swells like a patriotic chorus by Prokofiev:

And tens of millions of people rose to meet them – from the bright Oka and the broad Volga, from the stern, yellow Kama and the cold, foaming Irtysh, from the steppes of Kazakhstan, from the Donbas and Kerch, from Astrakhan and Voronezh.

Grossman demonstrates how members of every rank of the Red Army find new resources within themselves. Prime among them are Commissar Bogariov and Rifleman Ignatiev. The former, a professor at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, gains respect for the common soldier and regrets that he has ‘spent the last ten years behind books’. The latter, a womanising joker, proves to be a cunning tactician as well as fearless fighter. Not for nothing are the two men united in a bloody embrace at the book’s conclusion.

The Chandlers and the Russian editor, Julia Volhova, have reinstated many passages excised from the original by other editors, censors and Grossman himself, making for a richer, more complex novel. Its greatest strength lies in its authenticity, with several characters modelled on real-life figures and much of the description drawn from personal testimony. Grossman combines a journalist’s eye with a novelist’s empathy, his portrayal of men under fire matching that of Erich Remarque and Stephen Crane.

The publication of this new edition during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lends particular poignancy to Bogariov’s question: ‘Might this war be the last war of all?’ He wasn’t to know that it would be so brutally answered by his own compatriots.

Dear Mary: Can I ask our hosts to look for my husband’s tooth in the flowerbed?

Q. My 74-year-old husband was having drinks in the garden of some young clients when he bit down on an olive with a huge stone in the middle. He heard a crack and picked the stone out of his mouth – along with what he thought was a splinter of tooth – and threw the bits into the flowerbed. This morning his dentist told him he had thrown away a whole crown. While he could repair the crown, it will cost £500 to create a new one. Although I would have no qualms in asking someone of our own age to scrabble through a flowerbed looking for a 74-year-old man’s tooth, I feel that a beautiful twentysomething girl would be repulsed by the request. We live too far away to drive back and look ourselves. – Name and address withheld

A. Ring the girl and ask if she remembers the signet ring your husband was wearing on the night. Say that when he got home he noticed that the precious stone had dropped out of this ring. He now remembers flinging an olive stone into her flowerbed and wonders could it have come loose at the same time. Explain it is a very unusual white stone, carved from ivory. The ring was presented to your husband’s grandfather by The League of British Equine Dentists. Would she mind looking for it?

Q. For years I have taken clients to a charming Italian restaurant near my West End gallery. One of the kindly chefs recently discovered I have become diabetic and has started to turn up in the gallery with loaves of rye bread and foil trays of healthy meals made just for me. While I really appreciate her thoughtfulness, my wife has pointed out that since I have offered to contribute financially, it is an expense we could do without, to say nothing of the difficulties of transportation on the Tube. How can I tactfully curb these culinary additions?

– P.B., London SE14

A. Go to the restaurant and thank the chef for what she has done for your marriage. Say your wife has been given a new lease of culinary life thanks to these inspirational dishes and is now attempting to replicate them at home. There is no need for the chef to provide any more as your wife may be offended by their superior quality.

Q. May I pass on a tip to readers? My boyfriend used to always overfill my Nespresso milk frother and cause a mess and smell in my kitchen. So I just hid the frother lid and said I must have thrown it out by mistake. Then I showed him how to fill the frother just up to the tip of the whisk and how that works perfectly well without a lid, which it does. Problem solved. I want to wait till we are married before I start nagging him.

– Name and address withheld

A. Thank you for sharing this useful intelligence.