-
AAPL
213.43 (+0.29%)
-
BARC-LN
1205.7 (-1.46%)
-
NKE
94.05 (+0.39%)
-
CVX
152.67 (-1.00%)
-
CRM
230.27 (-2.34%)
-
INTC
30.5 (-0.87%)
-
DIS
100.16 (-0.67%)
-
DOW
55.79 (-0.82%)
Just how hot has it got in the UK?
Hot topic
Last week’s Barometer detailed past UK temperature records. Those were broken by this week’s heatwave. On Monday a new Welsh record was set when temperatures hit 35.3˚C in Gogerddan and on Tuesday England measured a new high of 40.3˚C at Coningsby in Lincolnshire.
Source: Met Office
Inn crowd
The World’s 50 Best Restaurants released its 20th annual listing of top dining spots around the globe. Italy and Spain have the most with 6 each. Denmark, France, Japan, Peru and the US have 3, while Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Mexico and the UK have 2.
Source: The World’s 50 Best Restaurants
Pop around
Queen became the first band to sell seven million copies of one album in the UK. As many as a quarter of households may own their 1981 Greatest Hits album. The rest of the top ten, in descending order:
Abba, Gold 6m
The Beatles, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 5.3m
Adele, 21 5.3m
Oasis, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? 4.9m
Michael Jackson, Thriller 4.5m
Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon 4.5m
Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms 4.4m
Michael Jackson, Bad 4.1m
Queen, Greatest Hits II 4m
Border farce
The Scottish government paused its Ukrainian visa sponsorship programme because it couldn’t cope with demand. Some 700 refugees are to be housed in a disused cruise ship. Where in the UK has taken the most Ukrainian refugees?
Sponsorship scheme arrivals:
Total / Per 100,000 pop.
England: 53,997 / 95
Scotland: 8,234 / 151
Wales: 3,976 / 125
N. Ireland: 335 / 18
Source: Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities
Fuel to the fire
Wildfires in Spain produced 1.3m tonnes of carbon emissions in June-July, according to the EU’s atmosphere monitoring service. Average hectares of vegetation and forests burned from wildfires in Spain per decade:
1960s 52,054
1970s 169,053
1980s 238,789
1990s 159,875
2000s 105,047
2010s 96,593
Source: Spanish Ministry of Environment
What’s behind Africa’s love affair with country music?
Kenya
Life in the poorest continent is so hard you get a lot of knowing laughs with the joke: ‘What happens when you play a country and western song backwards? Your wife comes home, your children suddenly respect you, you get sober and your dog wakes from the dead.’ In Kenya and other parts of Anglophone Africa, country and western music is a cultural obsession for both young and old. ‘We all relate to the problems they sing about,’ says Jeff Koinange, host of the wildly popular Smokin’ Country radio show on Kenya’s Hot 96 FM. ‘Four hungry children and a crop in the field – this is everyday life for us Africans.’
Every couple of months Koinange and star singer Sir Elvis (real name Elvis Otieno) perform country music shows in small provincial towns, pulling in thousand-strong audiences who line-dance in Stetsons, cowboy boots, denim and big buckled belts. ‘If six-shooters were legal they’d be waving those around too,’ Koinange laughs.
‘It sounds surreal, but Kenya is a rural country, much like the southern states of America – and our experiences are a carbon copy of what they sing about,’ Sir Elvis tells me in a Texas drawl. His biggest hit, ‘Loving Man’, is the story of a country boy seduced by the city lights who finally goes home to his family, God and paradise in the prairies, ‘’cos all he’s got is in the farm’.

It’s been like this since ‘Waiting for a Train’ by Jimmie Rodgers hit Africa in the 1920s. In Kenyan villages, they sang in tribute to ‘Chemirocha’ – a half man, half god whose trousers fell down when he yodelled. In South Africa, the folk singer Rian Malan tells me, ‘the Afrikaners were a struggling underclass like the characters in the songs and so those themes of overwhelming odds and praying to the Lord for salvation spoke to them deeply’.
Like the soundtrack for an African Grapes of Wrath, Malan says Afrikaans folk music meshed with country, in maudlin lyrics about train wrecks, orphans left behind, deathbed apologies to mama and the boredom of farm life interspersed with hangovers and Sunday morning coming. Or as the former Nairobi NPR radio correspondent Gwen Thompkins put it beautifully a few years back: ‘The allure of country music in Africa is its iconic characters – the gamblers and the highwaymen, the hand-wringing mothers and the cocksure sons, the Rubys, the Lucilles, the Jolenes, the grievous angels and the folks who just ain’t no good.’
White Kenyan farmers simply identified more with American cowboys than with the Beatles
Come the early 1960s, country had put down such deep roots in the continent that Jim Reeves briefly moved to South Africa, recorded an album in Afrikaans and starred in a local movie, Kimberley Jim. As a boy in Kenya, my cattle-ranching parents wore cowboy hats and suede jackets. They listened to ‘Adios Amigo’, and around the campfire on safari Dad sang Bob Mallin’s ‘There’s Only Five Bullets in My Old Six-Shooter’. I guess white Kenyan farmers simply identified more with American cowboys than the Beatles and western counterculture.
Meanwhile in South Africa, Malan’s parents became devoted to ‘Warm and Tender Love’ by Percy Sledge, who to their surprise turned out to be a black man. Raised in Banana Hill outside Nairobi, DJ Koinange would play the vinyls with his mother and siblings. ‘We took turns with the needle if a song needed repeating until we knew all the words.’ Everybody trooped down to Shankar Dass & Sons, the record store in central Nairobi, to buy newly pressed 45s and 33s by Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers and even homegrown singer Roger Whittaker.
Black Africans here are still fiercely proud of Whittaker, to whom they have given a Kikuyu nickname, ‘Waithaka’. Incredible, when you think that as a young man Whittaker served in the colonial forces that fought the Mau Mau before independence. But whether you’re white or black, if you’re from these parts you’ll weep every time you hear his greatest anthem:
My land is Kenya, so warm and wild and free You’ll always stay with me here in my heart My land is Kenya, right from your highlands to the sea You’ll always stay with me here in my heart, here in my heart…
Soppy nostalgia, you might say. But like country music, life here is full not just of love and brawling in the mud and the blood and the beer – but true tragedy and conflict too. In 1989 a gang of robbers raided the Nairobi home of Whittaker’s parents, who were in their eighties. They tortured his mother and murdered his father.
The black country-music enthusiasts I speak to are genuinely puzzled when I ask how it is that country could be so popular among Africans, given that it first arrived on the phonographs of colonials and is still performed mainly by white singers for white folk, at least in America. ‘Country has no borders,’ says Sir Elvis. Koinange reckons country really took off among black Kenyans when JFK organised a famous ‘airlift’ of gifted young Kenyans to attend university in the USA from 1959. Why, I ask, didn’t they come home to Africa playing the blues, or jazz, or later, Motown? Koinange explains that men like Barack Obama Sr didn’t go to Chicago or Detroit, where they’d have heard jazz and blues – they wound up in Hawaii or the flyover states, attending small Christian colleges in provincial towns where the music scene wasn’t quite so cool or contemporary.
Radio is big here, and before the FM days all Kenyans were raised on the state broadcaster’s Saturday morning country programmes. These days shows play black US country singers Kane Brown and Darius Rucker alongside Don Williams and John Denver – but Kenny Rogers’s ‘The Gambler’ remains a top request. Wealthier fans at Koinange’s Smokin’ Country shows buy their Stetsons and buckles online from Arizona. Poorer Kenyans find denims or boots in local markets selling mitumba, or second-hand clothes, imported from the West. Mitumba clothes most of Africa today – Kenya alone imports 185,000 tons of it. Across Africa it’s up to four million tons.
Malan says country works in Africa because ‘it’s accessible and easy on the ear. The singer takes trouble to enunciate the words and there’s no such thing as a minor chord. Nothing abstruse, nothing Wagnerian and especially no sign of self-pity.’ It’s also music for God-fearing conservatives, which evidently resonates with Africans who adore famous country singer Cleopatra Methula for her Dolly Parton voice in the land of eSwatini, to the shores of Lake Victoria where Sir Elvis strums his guitar, to the Nigerian hubbub of Port Harcourt, where Ogak Jay Oke croons ‘O my Jesus’. Koinange says: ‘I’m happy to see young people turning away from all that bongo and jump music. They’re sitting down on a hay bale in their Stetsons, having a beer or a whisky and listening to some good country music.’
My debt to Boris Johnson
Back in 1997 when I was narked on by a fellow journalist (Simon Walters, currently of the Times, then of the Express) for taking class As on the Prime Minister’s press plane, I sought to restore my reputation by giving an interview to a maverick young libertarian on the Telegraph. Boris Johnson wrote up our encounter favourably, along the classic out-of-Alexander-Pope-by-way-of-William-Rees-Mogg lines of ‘Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?’ and ever since then I’ve found it hard to think altogether badly of him. Anyway, leaving the country last week, and with it a Tory party as self-obsessed and self-deluding as any junkie, it occurred to me it was time to return the favour: I’d like to use the pages of another of Johnson’s former bully-pulpits to invite him to grant me his first interview after he leaves office in September. I only lied about my heroin use to the editor of the Guardian (and who really cares about that?), while he lied about his partying to the entire nation, so any potentially exculpatory piece will necessarily be longer and more complex. On the other hand, I’m a rather better writer than him en mon avis du moins.
Not least of the shocks the Johnsons will face in the future is how to cross borders with their beloved Dilyn, now that he can’t go by diplomatic bag. Our own Jack Russell is rather older (indeed at 15, positively valetudinarian) and has accompanied us to France several times, but not since Brexit – and not since I got rid of the family car. How should we effect this difficult transition? Eurostar is anti-canine, and it transpires it’s impossible to take a dog on any of the ferries as a foot passenger except Newhaven to Dieppe, which would entail the poor old fellow being alone in a cage for four hours. Instead, we engaged the services of Mo, an Iraqi Kurd now resident in Folkestone, who picked us up from the station in his minivan, drove us on to the Eurotunnel rail link, then off again and to the TGV station at Calais-Fréthun. As ever, passing the miles (and then the kilometres) of razor-wire that defend Fortress Britain felt deeply uncomfortable to me. Mo, on the other hand, was so inured to the minatory sights that he snoozed his way beneath the Channel, even as some of his fellow former countrymen, women and children were probably preparing to cast off from the Calais shore and risk their lives to join him.
In Paris, the heatwave was gathering in intensity – while the storm clouds were massing over the pretty head of the President. In 2017 Larousse added the term ubérisation to its storied dictionary, defining it as ‘The challenging of an economic model by a new player offering the same services at lower prices, carried out by self-employed persons rather than employees, most often via internet reservation platforms’. At the same time – according to a mass of communiqués unearthed by the Guardian and now widely reported in the French press – Macron was using his then ministerial position to try to open up the formerly closed shop of French minicabbing. He’s now defended his actions on the grounds that for young people from the banlieues the choice is between neoliberalism and selling narcotics. An invidious one, no doubt – and an assertion which underscores the significance of another neologism: ‘to macron’, which is apparently entering Ukrainian and Russian lexicons, and means ‘to show a lot of concern and talk but do nothing’.
With the heat engendering a plague of flying-ant-sized candidates for the Tory leadership back in London, we headed counterintuitively south to Provence at 240kph in a train with twice the speed of any in Britain. There’d been warnings of buckled rails, but as Laurence Sterne so presciently observed: ‘They order these matters better in France.’ Bastille Day found us at Crillon-le-Brave, a picturesque hilltop village on the flanks of the Mont Ventoux massif, and 40 kilometres from Lacoste in the Luberon, the historic family seat of the De Sades. France’s most famous eponym was, of course, among the handful of ne’er-do-wells who were ‘liberated’ from the prison on that fateful day in 1789 – and he went on to repay the favour by becoming a revolutionary judge and arranging rendezvous for a fair few of his fellow aristos with that ultimate sadist, Madame Guillotine. The national holiday may have involved the only en marche Macron can now invoke: a massed military parade in the Champs-Élysées, but in Crillon-le-Brave (named for one of Henry IV’s generals), the Mairie was hosting an exhibition of photographs depicting the mistral wind made by my friend Rachel Cobb, whose family have a long association with the village. One of Rachel’s images, printed on silk, showed a close-up of trees so buffeted they have become port en drapeau – ‘flagpole-like’ – it made a beautifully naturalistic banner, and a counterpoint to Europe’s miserable slide into nationalism.
Portrait of the week: Record-breaking heat, a summer of strikes and a warning for snake-owners
Home
In the contest for the leadership of the Conservative party, Jeremy Hunt and Nadhim Zahawi were the first of the eight contenders to be eliminated, followed by Suella Braverman, Tom Tugendhat and Kemi Badenoch. After two televised debates, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, the frontrunners, refused to take part in a third, which was cancelled. The debates were bitter and accompanied by negative briefings. Lord Frost said he had ‘grave reservations’ about Penny Mordaunt, and had ‘had to ask the PM to move her on’ when she was his junior during Brexit negotiations. After parliament rose for the summer two names were to be put before party members in a postal ballot. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, removed the Conservative whip from Tobias Ellwood when he failed to support the government in a vote of confidence it called in itself, which it won by 349 to 238.
A temperature above 40°C was recorded in Britain for the first time; it reached 40.3°C at Coningsby in Lincolnshire. A number of houses burnt down at Wennington, on the Essex-London border. The Met Office had issued a ‘red extreme heat warning’, which it invented last year; schools closed early; hospitals cancelled appointments; the RSPCA warned snake-owners to be ‘extra vigilant’ lest their enlivened pets escape; Network Rail told passengers to travel only if necessary and the East and West Coast mainlines closed. Railway workers in the RMT union will strike on 27 July and 18 and 20 August. Train drivers belonging to Aslef agreed to strike on 30 July. Communication Workers Union members at BT are to strike on 29 July and 1 August. Royal Mail workers voted to go on strike. Another 330 migrants arriving in seven small boats in the Channel brought the total for the year to more than 15,000.
The annual rate of inflation rose to 9.4 per cent in June, from 9.1 per cent in May. The government accepted the recommendations of pay review bodies for the NHS, police and teachers in full: more than a million NHS staff in England would get a rise of at least £1,400, with lowest earners getting up to 9.3 per cent. Michael Gove, the former levelling-up secretary, said: ‘There are some core functions – giving you your passport, giving your driving lessons – which are simply, at the moment, not functioning.’ The percentage of people testing positive for coronavirus rose to one in 19 in England and one in 16 in Scotland (from one in 25 and one in 17 a week earlier), according to surveys by the Office for National Statistics. Over-fifties will be offered a Covid booster this autumn.
Abroad
Funerals were held for 24 people killed when Russian missiles hit the city of Vinnytsia, in west-central Ukraine far from the front lines. Five bodies were found in the rubble of a house shelled by Russia in Toretsk, in the Donetsk region, and another person died in hospital. The Ministry of Defence in London said Russia was using mercenaries from the Wagner group to reinforce front lines in Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelensky suspended the head of Ukraine’s spy agency and the prosecutor general (both of whom parliament then voted to dismiss), saying that more than 60 former employees were working against Ukraine in Russian-occupied areas and that 651 collaboration and treason cases had been opened against law enforcement officials. Russia fined Google 21.1 billion roubles ($373 million) for failing to restrict access to ‘prohibited’ material about the war.
Russia’s Gazprom invoked force majeure for a shortfall in gas supplies in June to German customers; fears grew in Germany that the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline from Russia would not be reopened after the end of its annual maintenance this week. President Vladimir Putin of Russia visited Iran, where he met President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who had offered to try to arrange grain exports from Ukraine. The 17th-century Shah mosque in Isfahan was found to have been damaged during restoration work on the dome.
President Joe Biden fist-bumped Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during a visit to Saudi Arabia, having visited Israel on the way. High temperatures and wildfires affected Spain, Portugal, France and Greece. Drought left 20 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia at risk of starvation. Sri Lankan MPs chose Ranil Wickremesinghe, the prime minister, as the country’s new president. Two people in Ghana died from Marburg virus and 98 were quarantined. CSH
With everything working properly, this would have been a lot of fun: Grange Park’s La Gioconda reviewed
There are composers who are known for a single opera, and there are operas that are known for only a single aria. But to be a 19th-century Italian opera composer and to be remembered solely for your ballet music – well, that’s a bit special. As the orchestra tiptoed into the ‘Dance of the Hours’, in Act Three of Grange Park Opera’s production of Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, the audience sighed with recognition. There were a few giggles, too. Ten minutes later, as the ballet slammed to its finish (without a note of actual – y’know – singing), they exploded into the loudest ovation we’d heard all night.
It was probably always going to happen. The choreography (Sarah Fahie was credited with ‘Movement’) was amusing: two gender-bending dancers in floaty orange frocks played out a larky courtship. It climaxed with a pillow fight and, like I say, the audience went mad for it; or at least they went mad for the only really indelible melody in the whole three-hour drama. Nothing wrong with a knockout tune, of course, and perhaps it’s just Ponchielli’s misfortune that the solitary take-home banger in La Gioconda – and arguably his whole career – is an atypical bit of decorative sparkle in what is actually a pumping, lust-driven gothic thriller set in a death-haunted Venice.
If you can rely upon a critical mass of ticket-buyers who are simply along for the Bolly, you can afford to take risks
That wasn’t the only thing working against Stephen Medcalf’s production – though the most serious problem on the night that I saw it was beyond anyone’s control. La Gioconda demands charismatic singers in each of six principal roles, and it got them at Grange Park – Ruxandra Donose quivering with ardour as Laura, Elisabetta Fiorillo generating an unnerving aura around the blind, hunched figure of La Cieca, and above all, Amanda Echalaz burning up the stage as La Gioconda, a Venetian street-singer with an indomitable heart. Pale and impassioned, her voice had the flashing, blinding dazzle of a strobe light.
It was no one’s fault that Joseph Calleja, playing Enzo (the third corner of the Laura-Gioconda love triangle), had succumbed to post-Covid vocal strain. We were warned that he might only be able to ‘mark’ the part; and Calleja duly fed his ailing larynx through Ponchielli’s shredder so that the show could go on. But unavoidably, with an opera like this, everything functions at a lower wattage when the tenor lead is not at full power – a sort of musico-dramatic brownout, not helped by slightly scrappy orchestral playing (Stephen Barlow conducted).
Discount those problems, and there was an enjoyable grand guignol extravagance about Medcalf’s staging: a high-camp melodrama played out on semi-abstract sets from some Hammer-era studio soundstage. Green marble steps glinted dully; gold curtains swathed the stage and a ship’s rigging became a spider’s web, on which a black-clad (and dark-voiced) David Stout (Barnaba) lurched towards his prey while the sadistic inquisitor Alvise (Marco Spotti) cackled and swirled his cape. With everything working properly, this would have been a lot of fun – certainly enough to upstage that unsinkable ballet. Let’s hope they revive it in a future season.
Meanwhile, credit to Grange Park Opera for presenting La Gioconda in the first place, and for giving us Janacek’s Mr Broucek last month. The traditional swipes at the gussied-up, picnic-munching audiences who attend summer opera festivals overlook one crucial point. When you can rely upon a critical mass of ticket-buyers who are simply along for the ride (or at any rate, for the poached salmon and Bolly), you can afford to take artistic risks. It’s a lesson that orchestras learned the hard way when their historic subscription base evaporated a couple of decades ago. Summer opera companies have created a workable alternative in almost the same time. Let ’em drink fizz, if their presence means that aficionados get to hear The Wreckers, Die Tote Stadt or Margot la Rouge.
Or, indeed, revivals of the quality of Louisa Muller’s production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. My colleague Alexandra Coghlan was very impressed by its first outing in 2019, and while the cast has changed, the overall impact is still compelling – whether the atmospheric set (no door in Bluebeard’s castle ever swung open with quite such semi-sentient menace) or lighting designer Malcolm Rippeth’s ongoing game of wits with the fading daylight that streams through the sides of Garsington’s glass-sided theatre. Mark Wigglesworth draws sinister bird cries from the Philharmonia Orchestra, the children (Maia Greaves and Ben Fletcher) are self-possessed without a hint of preciousness, Helena Dix (Miss Jessel) oozes on stage like some monstrous fungus and Verity Wingate, as the Governess, sings and smiles with sunlit, chiming sweetness. Until, that is, we get to the end of Act One and we’re shown – with chilling directness – that she really has nothing to smile about, at all.
This lot should be sent to prison too: Where the Crawdads Sing reviewed
Where the Crawdads Sing is based on the bestselling book (by Delia Owens) that I picked up from one of those three-for-two tables at Waterstones and always thought I’d read but for some reason never did. I can’t now say the film’s not as good as the book and send everyone involved to prison, which is a pity, as that was most satisfying. (See last week’s review of Persuasion.) Still, it’s always interesting to find out what they’ve done with a book you haven’t read and, based on this, it was a lucky escape. The film is so cliché-ridden there’s a point where an entire courtroom gasps and I laughed. Not proud, but it was beyond my control. Could I send everyone involved to prison anyway? For cocking up a book I haven’t read?
Fortunately, I attended the screening with someone who had read it. She described it as ‘one up from trash, like Bridges of Madison County’ and was invaluable because there were so many narrative gaps I needed filling in even if the answer was always the same: ‘There’s a lot more on that in the book.’ So why wasn’t it in the film? No idea. This tells the story of Kya (a painfully earnest Daisy Edgar-Jones) who, abandoned as a child, has brought herself up in the swampy wilderness of North Carolina and is charged with the murder of her ex-lover. She is meant to be a creature of nature but looks, I have to say, like an Instagram influencer on her way to Zara. Or maybe Anthropologie.
Kya is meant to be a creature of nature but looks like an Instagram influencer on her way to Zara
The murder victim is chisel-chinned Chase (Harris Dickinson), one-time star of the school football team who had wooed Kya but then turned toxic. Every character is either good or bad with no shades in between. When Chase’s body is discovered, Kya, who has always been ostracised, is immediately accused. Represented by a kindly lawyer (David Strathairn), she recounts her life in the courtroom, while the jury gasps and we spool back in time. Much is told by voice-over, which is kind of cheating.
Kya had been fending for herself since she was a little girl. Her father was a physically abusive drunk so her mother and older siblings all walked out. Really? Your mother and brothers and sisters would leave you, a six-year-old, in the care of a violent man? I couldn’t buy it but, as I was told, ‘There’s a lot more on that in the book.’ She attends school for a day but is called ‘a swamp rat’ so never returns. Nature is her teacher along with a local boy, Tate (an especially hammy Taylor John Smith), who helps her to read and write. Eventually she becomes a best-selling author of naturalist books, which requires a suspension of disbelief the size of which you may never have encountered before.
The only adults who show Kya any concern are Jumpin’ (Sterling Macer Jnr) and Mabel (Michael Hyatt), the black couple who run a store. This is the 1950s and ’60s, so you’d imagine they’d have their own problems but here they exist solely to serve the hot white girl who is meant to be feral but always looks so crisply laundered.
All the relationships are simplistic – I had to check it wasn’t a YA novel – and it’s clunkily directed by Olivia Newman. You never feel Kya’s connection to her environment, even though I’m guessing that should be of utmost importance. For a film about what it is to be wild it’s incredibly tame. Plus you don’t even encounter any crawdads. I probably conflated crow and jackdaw in my mind so assumed they were birds but I have just looked them up. They’re crayfish! And they sing? Apparently, there’s a lot more on that in the book.
Why we should all be dropping acid
Many years ago a man on the end of my cigarette stole my soul. Mr Migarette (for such was his name) wore a tall hat like the one in the Arnolfini Marriage portrait, he smoked a pipe and no matter how often I tried to flick away the glowing fag ash, his evil grinning features remained intact. I have never taken LSD since.
But having watched How to Change Your Mind, I think I may have done the drug a disservice. After four or more decades in the wilderness, lysergic acid is now being rehabilitated as a miracle cure for all manner of conditions from cluster headaches to alcoholism and depression.
LSD was isolated by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann while investigating the properties of ergot (the rye fungus which in the Middle Ages caused outbreaks of a madness known as St Anthony’s Fire). One day in his laboratory, he began hallucinating and realised that he must have absorbed the substance through his fingertips. Intrigued, he followed up by taking a stronger dose, which led to a mind-blowing bicycle journey in which he glimpsed the secrets of the universe.
LSD is now being rehabilitated as a miracle cure for conditions ranging from cluster headaches to depression
Hofmann lived to 102, long enough to see the magical discovery that had been vilified and proscribed by the Nixon administration rehabilitated by respectable researchers who recognised its beneficial properties. Perhaps those who’ve been freaked out by a really bad trip will remain unpersuaded. But it seems that LSD’s bad rap is partly the result of government propaganda (ersatz scientific studies insisting it causes foetal damage, etc.) and partly because people misuse it.
This makes sense to me. When I did LSD in the early 1990s – it generally came in strips of blotters with pictures of Batman and the Joker, red dragons or a purple om symbol – I tended to drop it before a party. This invariably led to situations where I’d be tripping my face off with a handful of likeminded souls in milieus where the majority of those present were straight. Inevitably one tended to get weird looks or alarmed rejection from those not under the influence, which only exacerbated one’s sense of isolation and paranoia.
The key, according to researcher and presenter Michael Pollan, is ‘set and setting’. That is, you need to be in a comfortable environment (setting) and you need to be in a relaxed, positive state of mind (set). You only have to look at film footage of events like Woodstock to realise where the hippies got it wrong. Imagine dropping acid in a crowded, muddy field surrounded by gurning freaks and terrifying toilet facilities. Actually, I’ve no need to imagine it: I once started tripping during the Happy Mondays’ set at Glastonbury in 1990 and became convinced that the music was chasing me, so fled all the way from near the front of the stage through a sea of weird faces, up to the hill to the rear.
For this, we can in part blame Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychiatrist who urged the hippie generation to ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’. But perhaps the bigger villain was Augustus Owsley Stanley III (curiously unmentioned in the documentary), the amateur chemist who flooded the market in late 1960s California with inexpensive, high-quality LSD, often via concerts performed by his friends the Grateful Dead.
At about the same time, in projects like MK-Ultra, Pollan describes how the CIA was testing LSD’s potential as a military mind-control weapon which would render the enemy incapable of fighting. He suggests that when the hippie dream turned sour (partly as a result of all that LSD) it was because of a ‘CIA experiment gone horribly wrong’. Unless, of course, as some have argued, it actually went horribly right: by this account, LSD was cynically used to derail the peace movement by flooding principled, serious, articulate opponents of the Vietnam War with a deluge of spaced-out, flower-toting love children.
Whatever the truth about LSD’s murky past it is now back on the menu and mostly healing rather than harming. One moving case study presented in the documentary was that of a 23-year-old man who suffered serial cluster headaches (which he described as like having a red-hot icepick driven into his brain) so bad that he’d seriously contemplated suicide. But having enrolled on an LSD study programme at a Swiss clinic, after a year in which he had not known a single day without pain, he enjoyed five days in a row pain-free.
It has been a long time. But I’m sorely tempted.
A showstopper is at the heart of this winning show: Dulwich Gallery’s Reframed – The Woman in the Window reviewed
Themed exhibitions pegged to particular pictures in museum collections tend to be more interesting to the museum’s curators than to the general public. But with Reframed: The Woman in the Window Dulwich Picture Gallery is on to a winner, as not only is the particular picture a showstopper, but the theme opens up a whole can of feminist worms.
Whether it’s her pensive pose, her idle fiddling with her necklace or the shy look in her shadowed eyes, Rembrandt’s ‘Girl at a Window’ (1645) is impossible to walk past. Scholars continue to bicker about her status. Serving wench? Kitchen maid? Prostitute? Rembrandt’s lover? Whoever she was, hers was the face that launched a thousand paintings of w-in-ws after Rembrandt’s pupil Gerrit Dou took up the motif and Dou’s pupil Gabriel Metsu followed suit. But the theme goes back a long way before Rembrandt. The earliest windows to appear in art in a fresco at Mycenae dating from the 15th century BC have women at them, and the earliest window in this show is a 9th century BC ivory panel from Nimrud with the head of a woman – possibly one of the ‘sacred prostitutes’ Herodotus writes about – framed in it.
The theme of this show opens up a whole can of feminist worms
The connection of windows with the sale of sexual services is as old as the oldest profession. On a 4th century BC bell krater from Paestum, a hetaira pops her head out of an upstairs window to be bunched with apples by a priapic old man up a ladder. Before the development of the shop front, a large part of day-to-day business was conducted through windows, and to avoid confusion women whose bodies were not for sale were expected to keep them out of sight. But when the window offered her indoors the only pre-screen form of visual entertainment, the temptation to lean out of it was strong. Islam solved the problem with the perforated screen; Christianity urged self-restraint, with less success. The 15th-century Franciscan preacher St Bernardino denounced the woman who ‘when she hears a horse does straightaway run to the window’, but who could blame her?
An exception was made in art for the Virgin Mary, who appears at a window in the guise of ‘fenestra coeli’ in a charming painting by Dirk Bouts. And during carnival, apparently, anything went. The frontispiece to a carnival songbook by Lorenzo de’ Medici shows a bevy of Florentine beauties hanging out of windows being serenaded by male window-shoppers below. Florentine rules for women were unusually strict, but that didn’t stop Botticelli posing the ‘Lady Known as Smeralda Bandinelli’ (c.1470-80) at her casement in a diaphanous robe looking suspiciously like a negligee. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who acquired the picture in 1869, painted Jane Morris as ‘La Donna della Finestra’ two years later.
Protestants were less concerned about window gazing than gazing at Catholic devotional pictures like Bouts’s. Luther advised praying with eyes fixed on the sky – presumably through windows – while expressing disapproval of female ‘windowpeepers’; a woman, he thought, should be ‘like a nail driven into the wall’ where she could better ‘look after the affairs of the household’. Women posed in windows were presumed to be no better than they should be well into the 19th century. ‘The Woman at a Window’ (1871-2) in a Degas painting owned by Sickert was modelled by ‘une sorte de cocotte’ who was so hungry during the siege of Paris that, the artist told Sickert, he paid her in meat ‘which she fell upon and devoured raw’. Sickert reused its contre jour effect in his own ‘Woman Seated at a Window’ (c.1908-9), while making her profession obvious by stripping her down to her embonpoint.
The implication of availability persisted into the modern era. True, Picasso’s weepy ‘Femme à la Fenêtre’ (1952) is not exactly inviting, pressed up against the pane like a trapped bird; it was year nine of his abusive relationship with Françoise Gilot, who was on the point of flying the coop. But it’s only when women artists take up the theme that the meaning shifts. The woman in Isabel Codrington’s ‘The Kitchen’ (1927) stares out of a wintry window with a loaf, an unplucked chicken and a two-thirds empty bottle of Kirsch on the table behind her: she might as well be a nail driven into the wall for all the pleasure she’s getting from window-peeping; the prospect has driven her to raid the liquor cabinet. In Catherine Engelhart’s businesslike self-portrait, ‘The Artist in her Studio’ (1894), the window’s only purpose is to light her work. She has her back to it.
Male artists, though, still need re-educating. Of the two women in Jeff Wall’s staged photograph, ‘A View from an Apartment’ (2004-5), one is leafing through a glossy magazine while the other is ironing napkins. Ironing napkins! Even Gerrit Dou had a more liberated view of women. Screw the ironing board; bring back the clavichord.
The joy of volcano-chasing
Katia and Maurice Krafft were both born in the 1940s in the Rhine valley, close to the Miocene Kaiser volcano, though they didn’t know each other as children. They met on a park bench when they were students at the University of Strasbourg, and from that moment on, according to their joint obituary in the Bulletin of Volcanology, ‘volcanic eruptions became the common passion to which everything else in their life seemed subordinate’. They married in 1970, formed a crack team of volcano-chasers, équipe volcanique, and set off to get as close as they possibly could to the very edge of every fiery crater, to collect samples and data and just to be there, ecstatic with the enormity of it all, like a pair of mad moths drawn into a candle flame.
‘Maurice and Katia were always the first ones there when a volcano erupted,’ says Sara Dosa, the writer and director of Fire of Love, when we meet in Trafalgar Square. ‘They very strategically developed a network of people around the world who would call them as soon as the seismograph started to move. The more we learnt about them as characters, the more I think we fell in love with them, didn’t we?’ Dosa looks at her co-producer and co-writer, Shane Boris. ‘They were just so wise and hilarious and philosophical and idiosyncratic.’
‘Volcanic eruptions became the common passion to which everything else in their life seemed subordinate’
Fire of Love isn’t the first film to feature the extraordinary Kraffts. Some of the silent footage they shot, of dancing walls of fire, and of Katia calmly walking beside boiling rivers of lava has appeared before – most notably in Werner Herzog’s 2016 documentary Into the Inferno. In the Herzog doc the Kraffts are a sideshow, playing second fiddle to the grave, awesome forces of nature and the grave, awesome forces of Herzog himself. What Dosa and her team have done is to make the Kraffts the stars. ‘The real genesis of the project came when we read a sentence in a book that Maurice wrote: “For me, Katia and volcanos, it is a love story,”’ says Dosa, ‘and we thought OK, it’s a love triangle. Let’s make a love triangle movie.’
Dosa and her team spent the 2020 lockdown scouring the archives, sifting through all the 16mm footage the Kraffts shot and about 50 hours of footage of Maurice and Katia from TV shows from the 1970s and ’80s. ‘The 16mm footage didn’t have any sound, so the TV footage meant we could observe their banter and that really allowed us to get into their personalities,’ she says.
Maurice and Katia were exceptional personalities, together and apart – charming and funny but both tough as nuts. At one point in Fire of Love Maurice sets off across a lake of flesh-eating post-volcanic acid in an inflatable dingy. Katia just rolls her eyes, the same way I do when my husband forgets the milk. At another, the skin on Maurice’s shin actually melts and blisters in the volcanic heat, though he’s too busy filming to notice. Both Kraffts find this amusing. In her quieter way, slight, bird-like Katia was just as steely. ‘Should I tell the wall of death story?’ Dosa asks Boris. ‘I realise I’m going on a tangent here,’ Dosa says, ‘but when, I think, Katia was about 15, a fair came to her village and there was one of those rides that was called the Wall of Death and it was a motorcycle that spun horizontally and she hopped on it and was the only one to successfully ride it and became the talk of her town.’
The Kraffts might sound like thrill-seekers, but they weren’t. They were serious scientists and perhaps no one has ever done more to educate the world about the dangers as well as the beauty of volcanoes: ‘Merci, Maurice et Katja, mercy pour tout ce que vous avez donner!’ read a note pinned to their door after they died. But one of the inspiring things about this magical film is that it reminds you that scientific inquiry, joy and an almost mystical sense of wonder can, maybe should, go hand in hand. Boris says: ‘There are certain kinds of scientists throughout history who have felt this way. Feynman, for example. Maurice and Katia were just like that. For them, their contact with volcanos was the highest experience and they had a desire to always be around that and to be around it together. There is something so profound and deep and also so tragic and lonely about that.’
Dosa turns to Boris: ‘Hearing you say that, it reminds me of a sentence that has always kind of haunted me in a book that Katia’s mom wrote. She wrote about how, when Katia went to Iceland in 1968 with Maurice and their other friend, Roland Haas, she came back in love with volcanos and the world, so inspired, so committed to this new pathway for life but there was something about her that seemed melancholy. It haunted me because I felt she was changed. I really feel that they both had this transcendent revelatory experience, and after that there is no going back, you can’t help but go towards that and that’s kind of how they chose to live their life.’
There are two different sorts of volcano: the red ones, overflowing with glowing gore from beneath the Earth’s crust, the volcanoes of nightmares and of six-year-old art, and the more deadly grey ones that erupt in a mushroom cloud of scalding smoke, ash and rock. It was the grey sort that got Katia and Maurice in the end. They were caught in the great blast, a pyroclastic flow that rolled out of Mount Unzen in Japan on 3 June 1991, and once you’ve seen Dosa’s dreamy, joyful film it seems hard to imagine that they could have gone any other way. ‘When I die, I want it to be at the edge of a volcano,’ Maurice is said to have said.
On 7 June, four days after the eruption, an article in the LA Times reported that investigators had found and identified the charred remains of the 37 people who’d died on Mount Unzen that day. The bodies of the two Kraffts were found closest to the crater’s rim, it said.
Mario Draghi’s fall and the death of Italian left-wing populism
So, another unelected Italian government is collapsing, and the putatively pro-democratic media are all calling it a ‘dark day.’ In many ways, it is. Mario Draghi’s resignation (his second in the space of a week and this time for real) is bad news for Brussels and the Eurozone. The war in Ukraine was the catalyst for Draghi’s fall as it tore apart Italy’s left-wing populist party, the Five Star Movement. That, in turn, destabilised Italy’s government. The Russian media will be ecstatic: first Boris, now this.
But it is a great day for Italy’s leading right-wing populist party – the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) – which is now in a very powerful position. Fratelli d’Italia continues to top the opinion polls and its leader Giorgia Meloni looks set to become Italy’s next prime minister. It’s an astonishing change of fortunes for a party that received just 4 per cent of the vote in 2018.
At the next general election, which could take place as early as September, it is likely that Brothers of Italy – in coalition with its traditional allies the Lega, led by Matteo Salvini, and Berlusconi’s party Forza Italia (which these days polls about 8 per cent) – would get enough seats to form a government.
None of this was meant to happen, according to the mainstream media and their experts. But the experts didn’t understand what the war in Ukraine would do to European politics.
Francis ‘End of History’ Fukuyama summed up the prevailing view back in March when he wrote on his website that the war in Ukraine would be a hammer blow to right-wing populists because their leaders had treated Vladimir Putin as an ally in their culture wars to defend traditional values and had thus acted as his useful idiots.
In Italy, however, the war has delivered what looks like the coup de grace, not to right-wing, but to left-wing populism. Last month, the left-wing Five Star movement split into two parties over whether to send arms to Ukraine. Its leader, Giuseppe Conte, and the majority of its MPs and senators, do not agree with sending weapons on the grounds that this will merely prolong the war uselessly.
Such views reflect a widespread opposition in Italy to America and Europe’s involvement in the war in Ukraine (prompted by a knee-jerk hatred of America), as well as cynical selfishness given that 40 per cent of Italy’s gas comes from Russia. There’s also an ingrained Italian pacifism which is partly a reaction to the country’s fascist past. A majority of Italians consistently oppose sending arms to Ukraine, according to the polls.
But Five Star’s founder Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s Foreign Minister, believes it is Italy’s duty to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian invader. This is the official line of the Draghi government even though in practice Italy sends fewer arms to Ukraine than tiny Latvia whose population is similar to Milan’s.
So Di Maio and 51 of 5 Stelle’s 155 MPs, plus 11 of its 72 senators, quit Five Star to form a new party called Insieme per il Futuro (Together for the Future). Di Maio told a press conference: ‘We needed to decide on which side of history we wanted to be on — with those on the side of Ukraine which has been attacked, or on the side of the aggressor, Russia.’
Before the split, Five Star had the most MPs in Parliament. Now, the radical-right populist Lega has the most. But even before this schism, the alt-left Five Star was already in a sorry state. Just four years ago it got more votes than any other party at the general election (32.7 per cent), formed a coalition government and became the most talked about populist party in Europe.
In 2013, during the campaign for the first general election Five Star contested, its founder Beppe Grillo, a raucous, bearded comedian who is a Latino version of Billy Connolly, promised ‘if we get into parliament we’ll open it up like a can of sardines, we’ll let you see all the stitch-ups… where the money goes, where the contracts go, we’ll let you see everything… So stealing will be difficult, because when you put reflectors in there the thieves become as good as gold.’
His slogan was Vaffa! – eff off, roughly speaking – to everything, it seemed, except wind farms. His dream was to replace parliament with direct democracy on the internet. He built the movement which was run like a cult by delivering high voltage rants to packed piazzas and on his website, which attracted millions of followers. His was a movement, not a party, he insisted, because parties – like parliament – are corrupt. He instructed his followers – for that is what they were – to refuse to speak to the media for the same reasons. He swore blind that Five Star would never form a coalition with anyone else and withdrew from the frontline to play the role of guru.
Slowly but surely, it all began to unravel. Five Star’s politicians began to talk to the media. It became a party. And as it did not have enough votes to govern on its own, it agreed to take part in a coalition government with the unelected Conte, a law professor, as prime minister. Initially Five Star formed a coalition with its arch enemy the radical-right Lega and then once that had collapsed with its other arch enemy, the post-communist Partito Democratico, which also collapsed, and then finally, in February 2021, with both these arch enemies together, in Draghi’s emergency national unity government.
That Five Star agreed to participate in such a government led by Draghi – the ex boss of the EU’s Central Bank and ex director of Goldman Sachs, who is the epitome of Davos Man, and the Euro Establishment – shows just how far the party had travelled. It was only ever populist in words, never in deeds. Its one concrete achievement has been the introduction of automatic unemployment benefit for an unlimited period which had never existed in Italy. Previously, only people with full time contracts who lost their jobs received unemployment benefit and only for a limited period.
Nowadays Five Star is polling only 11 per cent and has lost 8 million voters since 2018. At local elections last October and in June it was virtually wiped out. What we are seeing in Italy is the death of left-wing populism.
Look at Five Star very beautiful Virginia Raggi, who swanned in from nowhere, aged 38, to be elected mayor of Rome in 2016. Five years later, with wild boar roaming the streets amid the uncollected rubbish and buses going up in flames, Raggi did not even make it to the second ballot. In Turin, where the outgoing mayor was another young Five Star woman, the party got just 9 per cent of the vote compared to 30 per cent in 2016.
In a desperate attempt at renaissance, Conte last week deliberately – it is certain – provoked a crisis for the Draghi government when Five Star Senators refused to take part in a vote last week on a welfare package. The pretext was their objection to a clause in the package authorising the mayor of Rome to start construction of an incinerator to tackle the city’s chronic rubbish crisis.
Draghi immediately tendered his resignation even though his coalition won the vote without Five Star’s support. President Sergio Mattarella refused to accept his resignation and Draghi agreed to report back to parliament this week. In theory he could govern without Five Star but he refuses on the grounds that his government was formed as a national unity government to tackle the Covid emergency.
Conte no doubt bets that the only way to recuperate his party’s lost votes is to abandon the Draghi government, however late in the day, and return Five Star to its origins as the scourge of corrupt elites and saviour of the planet. It is surely too late.
Meanwhile, as Italy’s left-wing populism collapses, support for right-wing populism – in the shape of Brothers of Italy – continues to grow. True, the other right-wing populist party, the Lega, has seen support collapse from a high of more than 30 per cent at the 2019 European Parliament elections to 15 per cent now. But it is not Salvini’s support for Putin that has lost him consensus. It was his decision to abandon the first Conte government in 2019 in a doomed attempt to force a snap general election which he thought he would win – followed by his participation in the Draghi government.
Brothers of Italy, in contrast, has reaped the benefits of remaining in opposition. It was the only major party to refuse to participate in the Draghi government on the not unreasonable grounds that it is yet another Italian government led by an unelected figure (five of the last seven Italian prime ministers were not elected politicians when appointed). The last elected Italian prime minister – in the sense of being the leader of the party which got the most votes at a general election – was Silvio Berlusconi, who resigned in 2011. That grim statistic is a terrible indictment of the state of democracy in Italy.
The European Union can’t fix its gas problem
Over a 20 year period, former German chancellors Gerhard Schroder and Angela Merkel, handed Russian President Vladimir Putin a vice-like grip on Europe’s energy security.
Schroder, who enjoyed a well-publicised bromance with Putin, oversaw the start of Gazprom’s Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline. With unseemly haste, soon after he stepped down as chancellor, Schroder became chairman of Nord Stream AG’s shareholder board.
Schroder’s successor Angela Merkel — the Russian speaking daughter of a Lutheran pastor who joined the East German communist youth party in her teens — was equally accommodating.
She oversaw the development of Russian gas projects in the face of opposition from her Nato allies and particular the United States, who tried to warn her off putting German industrial interests before those of European security. She could not have served Putin better.
The result is that Russia contributed 155bcm (billion cubic meters) in EU gas imports in 2021, some 45 per cent of the total. By the end of this year the EU optimistically plans to reduce this amount by 102bcm. High-cost import substitution using LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) will account for most Russian gas replacement; it is hoped that wind, solar, and other eco alternatives will make up the rest. The maths is simple. Even on a best-efforts basis, the EU will be short 53bcm this year.
At this point of maximum risk, Russia’s warning last month that it would have to shut down Nord Stream 1 for essential repairs spread panic at the European commission. This week Putin fanned fears by intimating that the 50bcm capacity pipeline might not reopen.
In response, the EU commission called for a voluntary or possibly a legally mandated cut in gas consumption of 15 per cent by all EU countries. In economic terms, this plan is apocalyptic.
As of this morning Russian supplies, albeit at lower levels, have resumed, but Putin could still shut off the supply at any time.
Against this background it has been asked whether Central Asia, which has vast gas reserves, can provide the EU with the hydrocarbons it needs. The quick answer is that in the short term it cannot.
Gas infrastructure typically takes more than five years to build. Building of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) which connects the Caspian Sea gas fields of Azerbaijan with the heel of Italy provides a smidgen of hope. But the current capacity of 10bcm is inadequate to replace Russian supplies.
Unhappily TAP transits such unstable countries as the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, Putin friendly Turkey, Bulgaria (which is in conflict with North Macedonia), Greece (Turkey’s forever foe), and Albania whose ambitions to incorporate Kosovo into a Greater Albania adds spice to Balkan volatility.
TAP could become a greater source of EU energy if the vast Central Asian gas fields of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan could be brought on board. They cannot. Kazakhstan is already hooked into supplying its 15bcm per annum of gas exports to China. Meanwhile, the progressive new government in Tashkent, Central Asia’s major city, has announced that it will cease gas exports because its needs its 53bcm per annum gas production for Uzbekistan’s rapidly expanding domestic market.
In theory, Turkmenistan, which already exports 35bcm per annum, provides the EU with its best medium to long term hope for Central Asian supply. The recently discovered Galkynysh field, the world’s second largest, has boosted Turkmenistan’s reserves to 4 per cent of global gas resources. It already supplies China via the 1,100-mile CNPC (Central-Asia China Pipeline) that traverses Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan before connecting with the Chinese gas grid in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. But Turkmenistan, a hermit kingdom whose ruling family makes Kim Jong-un’s look normal, needs to diversify. A plan to build a pipeline via Afghanistan and Pakistan to India is already well advanced.
However, there are probably insurmountable problems to the linking of Turkmenistan to TAP. For 25 years Turkmenistan has been stymied in its plans to build a pipeline across the Caspian Sea to TAP’s pipeline head in Baku, Azerbaijan.
On spurious ecological grounds Russia has thus far used its littoral rights in the Caspian to block this route to European markets. In short therefore, leaving aside the unstable geopolitical issues of the southern route pipeline supply of Central Asian gas, in any useful timeframe this region cannot provide solutions to the EU’s gas problem.
The answer of course lies under the EU’s feet. The German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources estimates that Europe’s recoverable shale gas reserves amount to a staggering 14 trillion cubic meters – more than enough supply for the 21st Century. To develop this resource would take five to15 years.
Will it happen? Unlikely. The EU’s state media, like the BBC, is in thrall to the eco-fanatics who deny the scientific evidence that fracking is a completely safe technology. Until the EU political establishment stands up to its media and Greta Thunberg et al, Europe will be subject to the tyranny of the unsavoury states that dominate global gas supply.
My revealing phone call from Ben Wallace
My phone buzzed and rang while I was doing the horses until I thought, fine, I’ll call the Defence Secretary back. I sat down on a picnic chair by the muck heap and dialled.
He was extremely courteous. He just wanted to point out that he really didn’t want to be Prime Minister. The profile I had written of him was very good, he said, but the one thing he wanted to put me straight on was, well, the whole premise of the article. He didn’t want the top job, no matter what I had heard.
I told him my sources were impeccable. He didn’t need to be so modest. But he insisted people had got him wrong. He really, really didn’t want it.
He’s a nice chap, Ben Wallace. I could tell as much from talking to him. He said he had my number because we had spoken before. It must have been a while back. I have so many people in my phone from the days when I was clattering in stilettos around the corridors at Westminster being a political correspondent that I’m amused to look through my contacts now. As I scroll through, it even says ‘Carrie Tories’. I’m sure Mrs Johnson has changed her number since she gave it to me when she was working as a press officer, but wouldn’t it be funny if I dialled it and she answered.
‘Hello? Carrie? Hi! It’s me! You gave me your number and said to call if I had any queries. Well, I have a few. Let me see… there’s actually quite a long list of things…’
I won’t do that because it’s just my luck she might answer and I couldn’t face it.
But Ben Wallace is a lovely chap. And even though I hate it when people call me to complain I do think it’s good, plain dealing and as much as I’d like not to get told off by government ministers in the morning while I’m trying to do the horses, I thought I would, because it’s only fair.
So I answered and he got going with the whole ‘I don’t want to be Prime Minister, no really I don’t’ thing and I let him go on for a while and then I said words to the effect of: Look, don’t think me rude, but I’ve got two stables to muck out. Can I cut to the chase?
I pointed out that a lot of former Boris fans like me were aghast – at everything, really. The illegal parties, the lefty environmental nonsense, the endless Carrie-fication of reshuffles and strategy and policy-making.
The consensus was that, much as we felt sorry for Boris, people were starting to talk at dinner parties. I don’t go to many but I was at one the other month and the rotund Tory grandees around the table were tearing out the few strands of hair they share between them.
Had he considered, therefore, that even though he didn’t want the top job, things had gone beyond what he wanted. Maybe he should just get used to the idea that Tory members liked him so he needed to stand.
But his reply was that he really wasn’t going to. And I didn’t quite believe him, although now I suppose I do, because with the contest up and running, Ben Wallace has been true to his word and ruled himself out.
That’s a shame, because once we had finished debating whether he really didn’t want it, what we then went on to talk about was my favourite topic.
Because having heard me say I was doing the horses, he started talking about the countryside, and the problems I’ve been having keeping livestock on the disappearing fields and farms of Surrey.
He seemed to care. He said the government needed to put the word farming back into Defra. What a shame he’s not standing, then, because I don’t suppose any of the others give two hoots about what rural people think about issues outside the Westminster bubble because inside the bubble they’re all too busy discussing the merits of the plant-based burger they’re eating for lunch at some trendy London eaterie.
I’m willing to bet none of the contenders are going to talk about our country being in the grip of a virtue-signalling cult of veganism that is contributing to the already perfect storm of problems sending our farmers out of business so that ever more of our meat and milk is coming from abroad.
I would sum up the Boris Johnson era thus: what Carrie wants Carrie gets. Rewilding, that was her thing.
And now the pair of them are being set free from Downing Street to roam the political wilderness, you could say she’s got what she wanted.
Dear Mary: How do we say no to a neighbour who wants to use our pool?
Q. I was billeted for a party in Norfolk with a couple previously unknown to me. They were more than welcoming but quite formal – hence I felt awkward about asking them if they could change a £50 note so I could leave £10 for their cleaner (it was all I had in my wallet). It seemed a bit of a crass thing to ask of this particular elderly couple. Having come from the station by taxi, I had no car of my own so couldn’t drive to a cashpoint. There were no other guests staying in the house. There were no shops within walking distance and I was getting a taxi back to the station. I agonised and ended up leaving nothing. Should I have left £50 in the circumstances? What else could I have done, Mary?
– M.L., London SW10
A. Your hosts would not have thanked you for leaving the disruptive amount of £50. Since you were in Norfolk, however, you would have been within walking distance of at least one impressive church. It would have been quite in order for you to say you were going to take a look and could they change your £50 note because you would like to leave something in the collection box. If they had no change then you would just have had to enclose a £10 note with your thank-you letter, which you would have posted the minute you returned to London.
Q. A local divorced man, who used to be a tennis coach to my husband, has started coming to use our pool. He comes too often and stays for too long. He always texts or rings to ask before he turns up – and I always say yes because I am so embarrassed for him that he could be so insensitive as to ask so often. He always thanks me when he leaves and says what wonderful, generous friends we are. His behaviour means I often don’t want to go to the pool to water the plants because he is there. How do we put a stop to this without hurting his feelings? – Name and address withheld
A. Next time he asks, reply by text that you have had to replace the chlorine with a salt-based cleaning system and the engineers have therefore advised you to limit the number of swimmers. ‘It’s such a shame,’ you can add, ‘but I’m afraid we’re putting family first.’
Q. Almost everyone we know has been invited to the 60th birthday party of a very old friend whom we haven’t seen much of since Covid. How can we discreetly check whether our exclusion from the list is a mistake or whether they have actually gone off us?
– E.H., Edinburgh
A. Have another mutual friend text them to say that you have asked them to dinner on the night in question so she assumes you haven’t been invited? Or is this a mistake?
Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?
In the grim locked-down winter of 2021, I drove three hours to Wales where I sat in an isolated cottage and wrestled with a memoir I could not figure out how to write. While I was there, my mother sent me a link to a two-page personal essay she’d published in a tiny but venerable magazine called the Literary Review of Canada. It was entitled ‘This Story is Mine’. After a preamble about feminism and #MeToo, she cuts to the chase: ‘In June 1964, a few weeks before my thirteenth birthday I was raped by a man old enough to be my father.’
My mother then went on to tell her life story, or the story she understands to be her life. It’s a story I’d heard many times before, one she’d published other versions of in other places.
The story is this: from the age of 12 to 15 my mother had a sexual relationship with a much older man – her riding instructor, a man I’ll call the Horseman. He was 45 and married with four children of his own, two of whom were older than my mother and attended her country school. When my grandfather discovered the relationship, he grounded his eldest daughter for two weeks and banished the Horseman from the club and the county, but unbeknownst to him the affair continued in secret. My mother and her father never spoke of it again. When my mother was 16 she met my father, a handsome boy from the wrong side of the tracks. They were engaged at 18 and married at 21. She had me and then my sister in quick succession. Twelve years into my parents’ marriage, my grandfather died and my mother bolted, leaving us, her family, behind for a glamorous life in the city.
After my grandfather died, my mother said she ‘didn’t have to pretend to be a “good girl” any more’. Thus Mum later put it to me, and anyone else who would listen. The trauma inflicted by the Horseman justified her decision to leave her children. This is how her victim narrative worked.

My mother’s story, the one about the Horseman, was not just a sordid family tale, it was presented to me as the origin and explanation for everything – the keystone in the arch of our life. Most importantly, it absolved my mother of everything. The Horseman isn’t my father, but my mother made it clear that had it not been for him I would not have been born. That’s how powerful and complicated stories are, especially in families of writers. This is what my own book is about, and this is why my mother ended the piece by accusing me, her eldest daughter, of appropriating her story – stealing it shamelessly to use as titillating ‘material’ in the upcoming memoir, the one I was trying and failing to write. She ended the piece with a plaintive cri de coeur, one so characteristic of her voice it has rung in my ears ever since.
‘I have not led a blameless life. I own every mistake I have made – every one. I feel my daughter’s pain as if it is my own… but I will say this vigorously and directly as I can: This story, this one, is mine.’
But is it? Stories, like families, like cultures, are by definition shared. In isolation they simply cease to exist. Stories reverberate and intersect, they flow into each other and, in the case of my family, form a tangled knot. Once told, a story cannot be rebottled, countermanded back into a secret. You cannot tell your daughter your victim narrative over and over again, effectively raise her to see the world through the distorted prism of your own trauma, then say: ‘But wait! It’s my story to tell.’
Within certain clearly defined limits (plagiarism, privacy laws, defamation), any story is anyone’s to tell.
When my husband Rob, who is also a writer and journalist, read my mother’s piece, he deadpanned: ‘Well, that’s an interesting turn of events.’ I gave a hollow laugh. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was.’
After hanging up the phone, I reread my mother’s piece and as I did so my nausea lifted, replaced by a sensation of overwhelming relief. It was the relief of knowing that I was now finally free to write the book I wanted and needed to write.
Because here is the truth: in accusing me of stealing her story, my mother was also doing something far more complicated and covert – she was giving me permission to write it. Like me, like Rob, like many members of our family, my mother is an experienced journalist and writer and she knows exactly what’s possible or not possible to print. By writing that piece, the one in which she accuses me of stealing her story, she was also waiving her anonymity, casting off her Jane Doe invisibility cloak. On the surface she was crying ‘No!’ but under the surface she was whispering: ‘Go on, Leah, I dare you.’
Now that my memoir is out, the question I get asked most often these days is whether my mother is alive. Yes, I say. Alive and well. The second is whether she’s read my memoir. Yes, I say, again, I sent her a first draft. She had one change and has since then refused to speak to me or my children. At this people look alarmed. I know what they’re thinking, a few people have asked me outright: what kind of daughter tells her mother’s abuse story without her consent?
Here is my answer: the kind of daughter who was raised by my mother.
My mother’s story was presented to me as the explanation for everything – the keystone in the arch of our life
My mother is not a normal mother, she is a writer who broke all the rules. I became a writer too, then broke all the rules in turn. I don’t pretend to be normal, but then again what family is?
Is the world ready for another Trump presidency?
Is Donald Trump going to run in 2024? And if he does, will the world go even more completely crazy? These are questions that almost nobody wants to answer. Many of us are in denial. President Trump broke something in the global political psyche the first time round, which is why so many commentators struggle to admit the obvious: that, by the end of January 2025, Bad Orange Man could well be back in the White House, trolling the universe.
The last, best hope of liberal sanity is that Trump will decide not to stand again. He is 76. He knows that running for the White House, and then being president, is one of the most stressful and exhausting things any human being can do. ‘He doesn’t want to end up like Biden,’ says a Republican operator who knows Trump well.
Then again, Trump is in better shape than poor Biden was four years ago. Friends say he’s a picture of health. ‘He thinner, fitter and he’s in remarkably good spirits,’ says Nigel Farage, who has been making regular pilgrimages to the Donald’s residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. ‘So yes, absolutely, I think he will run. Why wouldn’t he?’
For people in denial, it’s obvious why he wouldn’t. He was the most divisive president in living memory. He lost an election and refused to accept the result, and his incendiary and bogus claims of electoral fraud led to the scenes of 6 January last year, when a mob of his supporters broke into the Capitol building in Washington, DC.
None of that matters to Trump. In his mind, history has already vindicated his record, and (here’s the really challenging part for any fair-minded person) he’s not altogether wrong. Under Trump, the American economy performed well. Inflation was at 1.4 per cent when he left office; gas (petrol) at $2 a gallon. Under Biden, inflation is at 9.1 per cent and a gallon of gas costs more than $5.
Trump was much reviled on the world stage. In hindsight, however, his foreign policy looks quite impressive, especially when set against Biden’s. He regularly rebuked the Germans for empowering Vladimir Putin through their reliance on Russian hydrocarbons. Look today at the war in Ukraine and Europe’s disastrously high energy prices. Was he wrong? He also pressured Nato countries into upping their defence spending, brokered the Abraham Accords between Middle Eastern states, and reoriented America’s grand strategy to tackle an increasingly belligerent China. None of that was stupid.

Last week, Biden went to Saudi Arabia to beg for oil and appears to have been ignored. The Saudi royals aren’t crazy about his moral grandstanding against their ‘pariah’ kingdom. Trump, by contrast, this week hosted a Saudi-funded golf tournament at the course he owns in Bedminster, New Jersey. He never lets ethical concerns get in the way of the bottom line – or smooth relations with people who can help him.
Given Trump’s sense of his own historical importance, and his confidence in his superhuman abilities, it’s hard to see why he would let a mortal consideration such as age disrupt his destiny. Last week, he gave his strongest hint so far. ‘People want me to run,’ he said. ‘In my own mind, I’ve already made that decision.’ Then the kicker: ‘Do I go before or after? That will be my big decision.’ He meant before or after the midterm elections in November, which the Republicans are widely expected to win.
If Trump announces he is running for the Republican nomination, he’ll be almost impossible to stop
A normal presidential frontrunner would wait for those results before declaring. Trump isn’t normal. His success in politics comes from defying expert wisdom. ‘My hunch is that he’ll go for it before, and possibly very soon,’ says Farage. One of his close lieutenants, Devin Nunes, former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, came to London this week to launch Truth Social, Trump’s new social media platform. ‘I don’t think anyone knows,’ he said, when asked if Trump would declare ahead of November. ‘Conventional wisdom says he won’t, but Trump has never cared about that.’ He may even perform his big reveal on Truth Social in the coming days – in part to give his nascent technology platform a ‘yuge’ publicity boost. That would be very Trump.
If Trump announces he is running for the Republican nomination, he’ll be almost impossible to stop. ‘You’ve got someone who won 71 million votes last time, who controls Republican fundraising efforts, and who still in spite of everything dominates the media landscape,’ says Nunes. ‘Who beats that?’
There’s a lot of buzz around Ron DeSantis, the 43-year-old Republican governor of Florida, who has been catching Trump in some polls and raising enormous amounts of money as he cruises towards near-certain re-election in his state in November. He’s popular because he has mastered the Trumpy art of winning by making opponents go mad. Yet he isn’t as widely despised as Trump, at least not so far. ‘DeSantis can pitch himself as an “all of the good Trump, none of the bad Trump” candidate,’ says one Republican strategist. ‘He can also, given his age, present himself as “Trump but you get two terms”.’
Those inside Trump’s orbit are less convinced. ‘The Democrats, those who oppose Trump, and the media are trying to lure DeSantis into a run,’ says one operative. ‘But you have a death wish if you are a Republican running against Trump.’ DeSantis is a highly ambitious man: why would he want to get into a vicious primary fight against Trump – one he has little chance of winning – and risk becoming another Ted Cruz, someone who was the Republican future once?
Insiders say it’s far more likely that DeSantis will be picked as Trump’s vice-presidential nominee. ‘I don’t see that he won’t do that,’ said Farage, meaningfully. Following that train of thought, President Trump could end up doing what experts thought Biden had planned for Kamala Harris – win back the White House before making way for his DeSantis in 2028.
The other Republicans hopefuls look hopeless. Pence, Trump’s vice-president, appears certain to run. He is admired outside of the MAGA sphere for having refused to support Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 result. As a result, however, Pence now can’t give a speech to any large crowd without being booed and called ‘traitor’ – such is the brutal power of Trumpism. That leaves the optimistic senator Tom Cotton (‘America’s Steve Baker – trust me, I know them both,’ says Farage); the no-hoper governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan; and the establishment darling Nikki Haley, who appeals to America’s lower classes about as much as Tom Tugendhat does to Britain’s. Arguably the biggest Republican threat to Trump comes from Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state, a highly intelligent figure who is now much thinner than he was and says he is willing to challenge Trump. But he’s barely registering on current polls and Trump would have fun ribbing him as ‘lightweight’.
Another often-touted possible is the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the most influential media voice on the right who is duly loathed by the left and centre. He visited Iowa last week, the state in which the first Republican caucuses will be held in January 2024, and gave a typically punchy speech about Republican leadership. ‘You need to be really wary of candidates who care what the New York Times thinks,’ he said. When asked if he would be back in Iowa next year as a presidential hopeful, he said: ‘God knows what the future holds.’ That’s not a denial. Still, as Carlson admits, it’s hard to see anybody stopping Trump.
There have been endless reports of ‘Trump fatigue’ among conservatives. It’s mostly wishful thinking. The New York Times recently published a poll that, according to the paper’s headline, showed ‘half of GOP voters ready to leave Trump behind’. Closer inspection revealed something different: the survey asked respondents who they would vote for in a Republican primary consisting of five candidates. Trump scored 49 per cent, DeSantis 25 per cent, and Ted Cruz a distant third on 7 per cent.
It’s often said that Trump’s political endorsements have lost their potency of late, because some of his acolytes have failed at the ballot. Yet any fair analysis of this year’s primaries shows that the vast majority of Trump-endorsed politicians are winning. The next big test for Trump’s preferred candidates is the Arizona primaries on 2 August. Blake Masters, running for the Senate, has already seen his popularity surge after Trump gave him his blessing. As Nunes puts it: ‘If it’s true that Trump endorsements no longer matter, why do they all still come begging?’
Another Republican source suggests that Trump might be less motivated to run if, as is increasingly expected, Biden doesn’t stand for re-election in 2024. ‘The revenge factor is strong,’ he says. ‘If you take that away, the chances of Trump standing diminish.’ Others scoff at that idea. ‘No sane person thinks Biden is running,’ says a source close to Trump. ‘I don’t think that will be a factor.’ After some thought, he adds: ‘I suppose Joe Biden isn’t sane.’
Senior Democrats are beginning to let their despair over Biden be known. There’s also clearly panic at the lack of decent candidates who might conceivably replace him in 2024. Harris polls even worse than him.
Democrats insist, a little too eagerly, that a Trump re-run is their best shot at winning again. It is true that Trump disgust will always be a powerful driver of votes. In a survey this month, 50 per cent of registered voters said they thought that Trump’s ‘attempt to overturn the 2020 elections’ was ‘a crime that he should be prosecuted for’. Republican strategists do worry about Trump’s stubborn refusal to submit over 2020: he says he’s writing a book on the subject called Crime of the Century.
That said, a substantial chunk of the American public – some 40 per cent, according to polls – believes that Biden’s victory was illegitimate. These voters do not necessarily go along with Trump’s outlandish claims of fraud. But Trump’s defeat left a sour taste, coming as it did amid the fog of Covid and after a massive expansion of mail-in balloting. It’s also undeniable that Big Tech companies tried to sway the outcome: most outrageously in their suppression of the scandalous Hunter Biden laptop story.
Besides, never underestimate the Democrats’ ability to turn advantage into weakness. America’s governing party has spent the past few weeks conducting Congressional hearings into what happened on 6 January. The inquiry is blatantly one-sided – Trump calls it ‘the Unselect Committee’ – yet its findings are written up breathlessly as incontrovertible proof that Trump orchestrated an attempted coup. As the hearings go on and on, the public, in as much as they are paying attention at all, see just another faintly ridiculous attempt to prosecute Trump. After Russiagate, Ukrainegate, the impeachments and investigations into his finances, Americans surely have ‘Trump inquiry fatigue’.
Which prompts another question: who is madder, Donald Trump – or his enemies?
Hornets aren’t the villains they’re made out to be
There’s surely not a more despised creature in Britain than the hornet. They have long been viewed as yellow jacketed killers: wasps on steroids with Hannibal Lecter tendencies. Unlike bees, a member of the same insect family, you’d be hard pushed to find a friendly portrayal of a hornet (with the exception, perhaps, of Watford FC’s mascot). Yet hornets are misunderstood villains.
Like bees, they are important pollinators. What’s more, the fact that hornets are carnivores (bees are not) means they feed on many of the species of caterpillars and flies that destroy plants and crops. One of their main food sources is the nectar from ivy. They help pollinate this extremely important plant, which provides berries for mammals and birds as well as a dense evergreen canopy for nesting and home to insects.
Yes, their stings are far more painful than those of ordinary wasps, but they are far less likely to harm you. Like most animals, they attack to defend themselves or for food. (Though it’s worth noting that hornets can sting repeatedly, and if they are killed near a nest they release a pheromone that alerts other hornets to the danger and activates them to attack.)
There are 22 species around the world. We get the European hornet, Vespa crabro, whose range goes as far as Siberia but who is not found above the 63rd parallel. Asian hornets, which are noticeably bigger, are responsible for dozens of deaths a year in China; they have been spotted in France, the Channel Islands and occasionally on our mainland in recent years. This migration has led to plenty of tabloid ‘killer hornet’ headlines, conjuring up visions of 1970s B-movie horror films. Recent news reports have warned that this summer’s hot weather could herald the arrival of the latest batch of Asian hornets from France, where five people have died because of stings.
Despite all this, hornets have admirable qualities. They can fly for distances of up to 60 miles and at speeds of 25 miles per hour. That endurance is said to be down to the jellylike goo produced by hornet larvae which is commercially available as a ‘miracle’ product. After winning the marathon gold medal in the 2000 Olympics, Japanese runner Naoko Takahashi put her success down to ‘hornet juice’.
And if mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery, the hornet is winning on that front too. Among its imitators are the appropriately named hornet mimic hoverfly and the hornet moth, both stunning impersonators that can be found in British gardens and are designed to ward off birds and other predators worried about getting stung.
Hornets’ nests are made of chewed up wood that becomes paper-like to allow it to be manipulated to create miniature architectural masterpieces, constructed in hollow trees or occasionally under shed roofs or in chimney breasts.
It may take some time for hornets to be as welcome in gardens as bees, but with greater awareness of the good they do, they could – and should – one day be considered the gardener’s friend as well.
The ever-shifting language of ‘culture wars’
‘Come on, old girl,’ said my husband as though encouraging a cow stuck in a ditch, ‘you must know.’ It was because I’d asked him in the far-off days of last week what woman meant, just after Rishi Sunak had said: ‘We must be able to call a mother a mother.’ Penny Mordaunt, Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch then tussled in a hate-crime triangle on television over who said what, when about people self-identifying in a gender.
Such matters are said to belong to culture wars, which we had thought an American phenomenon. Culture wars acquired their name only in the 1980s. Since then we have grown used to language (as part of their armaments) changing rapidly. Politically incorrect began as something assumed bad; then politically correct became a shorthand for the false and absurd. Politically correct was overtaken by woke. This grew in popularity thanks to the refrain ‘I stay woke’ in Erykah Badu’s Master Teacher (2008) (‘What if it were no niggas / Only master teachers? / I stay woke.’) But soon it became impossible for most British people to use woke without irony. The thinking behind it was instead derided as wokeness, wokery or wokeism.
Doubt is also more widely being cast on the assumption that gender can be changed by self-identification so as to require a change in sex-linked terminology (woman instead of man, he instead of she). But the Equalities Act 2010 had confusingly used the term transsexual person to someone undergoing or even proposing to undergo gender reassignment.
When asked at the General Synod this month ‘What is the Church of England’s definition of a woman?’ the Bishop in Europe (as it happened) said there was ‘no official definition’, as it had been ‘thought to be self-evident’. Yet the C of E can by law only marry a man to a woman.
And now politicians fear to say what a woman is, caught between the lines of a culture war, not knowing whether to call a self-declared trans woman a woman or a man; whether to say shibboleth like the Gileadites or sibboleth like the Ephraimites. It matters: the book of Judges tells us 42,000 Ephraimites were killed. Will the next prime minister be a Gileadite or an Ephraimite?
When did cheerfulness get so miserable?
We’ve all met the sort of facetious oaf who orders any non-giggling woman to ‘Cheer up, love, it might never happen’. As Timothy Hampton grasps, enforced cheeriness feels about as much fun as compulsory games. His invigorating book about the quest for true cheerfulness in literature and philosophy dismantles the various ‘prosthetic or counterfeit’ versions of the real thing that bullies, bosses, self-help gurus and household tyrants inflict on their victims. Jane Austen’s heroines, as he shows, chafe against the elevation of cheerfulness into a ‘social norm’. It suffocates them like stays: ‘Thou shalt be cheerful, at least if thou art woman.’
For sound reasons, the prospect of cheerfulness fails to gladden many modern hearts. When that epic grouch Theodor Adorno asked ‘Is Art Cheerful?’, his answer was no surprise. In Adorno’s stricken 20th century, ‘any gaiety in art’ implied ‘an avoidance of the pain of history’. Good cheer had withered into a fake fix peddled by self-improvement merchants, ‘an affective tool that can reconcile you to drudgery’ – or even a breakfast cereal with, aptly, a hole in the middle (General Mills launched Cheerios in 1941).
Jane Austen’s heroines, as Hampton shows, chafe against the elevation of cheerfulness into a ‘social norm’
So Hampton, a professor of literature at Berkeley, has serious work to do when he sets out to rescue the legacy of cheerfulness from beaming charlatans and genial thugs. His study spans more than half a millennium of literary, philosophical and theological examples, from Julian of Norwich to Scott Fitzgerald, with a closing tribute to the genius who redeemed cheerfulness from kitsch: Louis Armstrong.
This isn’t a study of grander conditions such as hope, optimism or even happiness. Neither is it just a gloss on Stoic notions of equilibrium (euthymia and tranquillitas), though good cheer might stem from a well-balanced life. Hampton quotes Spinoza: ‘Cheerfulness cannot be excessive; it is always good.’ But the very fact that it ‘lives on the edge of… more intense emotions’ may make it invisible. Besides, the intellectual smart money has always invested in its perennially on-trend antitheses: melancholy, accidie, despair, ennui, Weltschmerz and their tribe of glum kin.
Metaphysicians and visionaries distrust cheerfulness as a transient, superficial quality – neither grounded in a stable state nor a key to transforming change. Exactly so: that’s what makes it valuable. It ‘bridges and mediates’ between interior and exterior selves. Its power works from the outside in. Forget your ‘essential’ nature or disposition. As Madame de Staël wrote: ‘What one does to please others ends up shaping what one feels oneself.’ This ‘performative’ aspect of cheerfulness Hampton reads not as a taint but a blessing. No one need be innately cheerful. Act it and you become it.
Its meaning, though, has evolved across time. Hampton tracks a conceptual journey from the outward demeanour of the Middle Ages – the face you showed the world – through Renaissance ‘rituals of hospitality’ to the cheerful philosophies of Montaigne, Hume and Nietzsche. By Calvin’s time, he explains, injunctions to good cheer could have a coercive edge; demands to see a happy face became a ‘policing tool’. In contrast, Montaigne in his Essays pursued ‘gay and social wisdom’ as a cautious sceptic who cultivated private freedom in a violent world: ‘He brings his own bridle to the paddock.’ David Hume praised its ‘contagious’ force: a cheerful guest will light up a roomful of grumps. But Hampton sees the clubbable cheer of the Enlightenment as a social glue for privileged groups, ‘clearly and firmly in their own element’ – or else a behavioural straitjacket for restive women in Austen’s age.
Later, the canny cheeriness of Dickens’s upwardly mobile heroes – and several rogues – indicates that the quality has become ‘a virtual job requirement for the low-born, ambitious personality’. For the Victorians and their heirs, cheerfulness grabs advantage and pays dividends. Industrial capitalism makes smiley faces mask toil and fear. Hampton charts an epidemic of wheedling jollity, from the first scouting manuals (a Scout ‘must never go about with a sulky air’) to Norman Vincent Peale’s mega-selling The Power of Positive Thinking. A blizzard of folksy uplift gave ‘spiritual and psychological cover to an ideology of economic warfare’. Still, Nietzsche and his poetic disciples raged against the machine, seeking their ‘gay science’ in disruptive style and defining art as a ‘cheerful practice’.
Hampton writes muscular, often subtle, suitably high-spirited prose. This compact book on an enormous theme inevitably resembles more of a patchwork than a panorama. It still manages to make Erasmus, Shakespeare, Adam Smith and Louis Armstrong – who confected his own ever-ebullient persona and ironically performed it with ‘subversive self-delight’ – live together, cheerfully, on the same page. And if the current pandemic did not quite (as Hampton’s peroration hopes) lead to ‘a reinvention of cheer’, it did prove our enduring need for a low-cost, open-access virtue that ‘offers no political programme’ – yet can ‘transform the moral self’.
The sweet and sour sides of growing up in a Chinese takeaway
Angela Hui was born into a life of service: Chinese takeaway service. Her parents had fled mainland China, where they experienced borderline starvation under the communist regime before arriving as exotic newcomers to provincial South Wales in 1985. There they become part of a Chinese diaspora, financially sustained by dozens of family-run takeaways dotted across the Valleys. The Huis set up in Beddau, a former pit town of 4,000 people that was still struggling socially and economically after the then recent closure of the mines.
They call their restaurant Lucky Star. Hui’s mother is always trying to find ways to invite good fortune but as with most of her other attempts, the choice of name doesn’t prove especially fortuitous: running the takeaway will be almost as hard a life as the coal face had been for their new neighbours.
The takeaway will be Hui’s nursery, playroom and, when she is barely out of infant school, her work station, where she is expected to toil from 5 p.m. until late at night, forgoing a social life and doing whatever homework she has on the counter top.
The takeaway will be Hui’s nursery, playroom and, when she is barely out of infant school, her work station
Her parents and older brothers are either cooking, in a cramped kitchen hot with smoking woks and deep-fat fryers, or out delivering in the Welsh rain.
Angela is front-of-house, as it were, on the physical front line between the Hui’s private home behind her and the public area leading back to the high street outside. She answers the phone – her parents never feel confident in English and rely on her as translator – and warily greets the walk-in punters, many of whom are tipping out of pubs and are consequently drunk. On one occasion a drunk trying to reach across to steal a can of cola topples over and takes all the lucky house plants with him; this is not good feng shui.
Her mother attempts to grow something from home – shark fin melons, a kind of squash – in their unpromising back garden. When they are almost ready to harvest, some youths kick their gate open and smash the fruits for fun.
There’s also, inevitably, racism. Even a regular customer will call them ‘Chinks’ in a row over a few pence. It can become menacing. The family doesn’t involve the police on these occasions. Instead their deterrent is Mr Hui waving a meat cleaver. He’s dextrous enough to wield two at once, like some Cantonese gunslinger.
Having been motivated to get to Europe to escape hunger, Hui’s parents subsequently surround themselves day and night with food. When they’re not cooking, on their one day off, they head to Cardiff to stock up on Asian supermarket ingredients before going to eat someone else’s Chinese food – at a dim sum restaurant where extended family and other takeaway owners convene each Sunday afternoon. Even their solitary annual holiday, to see relatives in Hong Kong, is an extended shopping trip from which they return with suitcases stuffed with ingredients and kitchen kit.
The familial relationships are characterised by conflict, food serving as peace offerings: both her parents are what are now called feeders. During the endless family rows you mostly side with young Angela. Until, that is, she gets into her teen years and starts drinking, colouring her hair, sneaking around and listening to some dreadful goth-emo bands, at which point you do start to see her furious parents’ side. But the family’s story has moments darker than those provided by goth guitar groups, not least in Hui’s portrayal of her parents’ often toxic marriage.
The food passages provide welcome relief. Chapters are bookended by recipes, for takeaway staples like spring rolls and prawn toast but also for off-menu items enjoyed by the family alone. I was particularly taken with Chinese steamed eggs, a kind of savoury set custard that’s as light as a soufflé.
Takeaway is a personal history, compellingly told, but it also tells a universal story. ‘Thousands of Chinese takeaways were born after waves of migration,’ as Hui puts it. ‘From China’s communist revolution to the Cultural Revolution… I am just beginning to understand the depths of my parents’ goal to move across the world for a better life for their children.’
Now the restaurants that those migrants of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s established are starting to close down – as Lucky Star finally does in 2018. By then Hui has left the takeaway and Wales, too, setting up as a journalist in London where she writes for fashionable millennial titles like Vice and gal-dem. One can’t help thinking she might have done better by her parents’ dearly held ambition for her long-term prosperity had she followed her brother’s career path into the electronic gaming sector rather than journalism. But then we might never have had this rather charming memoir.
The folly of garden cities
In his 1981 autobiography A Better Class of Person, the playwright John Osborne described an encounter he’d recently had with an actor who’d bought a house in Finlay Street, Fulham for £15,000. Osborne, having lived on the same street in the 1930s when properties there changed hands for £300, was astonished by the sum. Yet, as Simon Matthews notes in House in the Country, £15,000 was then only 3.5-3.75 times the average national earnings, while to buy a house on Finlay Street today you’d need £2,136,667 – which works out at 69 times the current average annual salary. In the light of the government’s recent proposal of a ‘benefits to bricks’ scheme to ‘reinvigorate the council housing Right to Buy programme’, this book is timely, offering a decent primer on how we’ve ended up where we are when it comes to housing.
Matthews begins his survey in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, when food riots erupted over the inflated price of grain in Ely and Littleport in Cambridgeshire. He ends by considering issues such as land registers and government subsidies to stimulate a rebirth of the kind of social housing provisions that successive Conservative and Labour postwar governments were committed to before 1979. Along the way, he examines the emergence of paternalistic model villages like Saltaire and Port Sunlight, and philanthropic urban estates sponsored by the American banker George Peabody. The first of these estates was built in Shoreditch in 1863, followed two years later by the first local authority-owned housing in the UK in the form of Corporation Buildings on Farringdon Road.
Matthews is concerned about the general turn against inner-city dwelling in Britain in the late Victorian period and into the 20th century. He argues that a view took hold, propagated by house builders of varying stripes and public intellectuals such as John Ruskin and William Morris, that it was ‘better to leave high-density urban environments and reside in properly planned semi-rural (or suburban) locations’. Such sentiments ultimately resulted in a boom for developer-led Tudorbethan estates, and their legacy is that environmentally unsustainable semi-detached suburban homes which will never answer our housing needs continue to be proposed and built. The Chinese city of Shenzhen, which is 50 per cent denser than London, is more to his taste.
Matthews’s bête noire is Ebenezer Howard, the London-born parliamentary stenographer and Congregationalist whose 1898 book Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform was republished four years later as Garden Cities of Tomorrow and formed the basis for the development of Letchworth in 1905 and Welwyn Garden City in 1920. To a certain extent, House in the Country becomes a kind of protracted tussle with Howard and his utopian theories. Matthews believes that Howard and his many associates and disciples, especially Frederic Osborn, the chairman of the Town and Planning Association and assiduous lobbyist for the creation of new towns after the second world war, have had a thoroughly malign influence on British housing policy for the past 100-odd years.
Howard was referred to as ‘Ebenezer, the garden city geyser’ by George Bernard Shaw. The playwright was a fellow member of the Zetetical Society and one of the more vocal critics of Howard’s schemes in the free-thinking circles in which both men moved. All said and done, he appears an ‘otherworldly crank’, to use Orwell’s preferred term. He served briefly as the personal secretary to the bombastic Victorian preacher and phrenologist Joseph Parker, who imbued him with a sense of religious destiny after reading his head and instructing him to become a preacher. But weak lungs took him instead to America, initially to a smallholding in Nebraska to live off the land. When that failed he dusted off his shorthand and moved to Chicago, which was then known as ‘the garden city’, after its greening up in the reconstruction following the great fire of 1871. There, in 1876, he had a memorable encounter with the popular spiritualist Cora Tappan, who said she saw him at the ‘centre of a series of circles working at something which will be of great service to humanity’.
It is likely that while in Chicago Howard knew about the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and his English partner, Calvert Vaux, and their plans for Riverside. This was to be America’s first purpose-built commuter suburb, spaciously laid out beyond Chicago’s inner-city grid on a two-square-mile area of land along the Des Plaines River. But one of the greatest influences on Howard’s subsequent thinking was a work of science fiction: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. A utopian portrait of a futuristic Boston in 2000, it roused William Morris to pen his medievalist alternative, News From Nowhere, as a riposte. Howard was no less a romantic visionary, and on paper his basic outline was almost wholly impractical. But there were many idealists back then. Matthews notes that in 1907 Howard treated a delegation from that year’s Esperanto conference to a tour of Letchworth.