Letters: What happened to bells on bikes?

Jesus wept

Sir: Sam Dunning’s brilliant exposure of the corrupting links between Jesus College, Cambridge and the Chinese Communist party (‘Centre of attention’, 5 February) raises the question of how the college can be rescued from its current leaders. Their virtue-signalling gestures (the Benin bronze, the Rustat memorial etc) have already prompted many of us alumni to delete Jesus from our wills. But this association with vile tyranny is altogether more serious. Perhaps an academic boycott might bring the Master and Fellowship to their senses. Certainly something must be done to save this ancient Christian foundation from its present role as an agent and support of manifest evil.

Francis Bown

London E3

Passing the bullet

Sir: Jeremy Clarke writes of injuries sustained but long ignored by veterans of the Great War (Low life, 5 February). I was a trainee doctor in London in the early 1960s and at that time it was still quite common to see these little old barrel-chested veterans of the trenches. When X-rayed, they often displayed a variety of military hardware within them of which they were quite unaware. Some of this metal needed surgical removal but occasionally it passed per via naturalis. A nurse (now my wife), witnessing such an event, reported a satisfying clang as the bullet hit the bottom of the urinal!

Adam Lewis

Radlett, Herts

Treasure trove

Sir: I can relate to Laurie Graham’s conundrum around sorting out what to keep and what to discard (‘Small matters’, 29 January). I have a loft full of baby clothes, favourite toys, cards of all sorts, nursery drawings and now, bits and pieces from my parents’ house. I’d just like to add a cautionary note to Laurie’s desire to clear the decks so the next generation doesn’t have to. We cleared my family home when my father died in 2020 — just before lockdown began. My parents had bought the house in 1964 and my father had started to clear out an old shed that needed to be demolished, the old caravan rotting in the garden and the boats that hadn’t been sailed in well over 40 years. Luckily for me, though, he didn’t get to the old rusted tin in the other shed… the tin that contained a stash of letters my mother wrote to him when she was in France in 1948/49; the letters in the run-up to their marriage in 1950, when she was teaching in a school in the Lake District; and the letters she wrote to her mother from the boat and from Australia when they travelled there to live (for 18 months) in 1956. This is an absolute treasure trove that has given me immense pleasure to read and transcribe.

It has to be said that not everyone in the family sees these letters as I do, and some felt that I shouldn’t have read them. But for me, it’s been an absolute joy, giving me an insight into their early relations, a view of France still emerging from the war, and an understanding of a girl of 20 struggling to work out if this young man really did love her or not. If he’d remembered they were there, I think he would have thrown them out, and I would have missed out on this beautiful window into their world.

Moira Throp

Solihull, West Midlands

Mellow yellow

Sir: I found Gus Carter’s piece on daffodils (‘Notes on…’, 5 February) absorbing, particularly his description of their unusual spiritual roles in various societies. But it contained one significant omission: the part daffodils played in the early 19th-century Romantic movement. The flowers inspired one of Britain’s best-loved and memorable poems, a masterpiece and embodiment of the Romantic era: William Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’. ‘Fluttering and dancing in the breeze’, daffodils’ mesmerising beauty was captured poetically for eternity, symbolising rejuvenation and joy — attributes to be as much valued this spring as then.

Peter Saunders

Salisbury, Wiltshire

What you’ve got

Sir: The ineffable Rod Liddle, when writing about the BBC, quotes Joni Mitchell’s famous line ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’ (Books, 29 January). Very true, but ten years earlier than Ms Mitchell the Presley doppelgänger Ral Donner made the same point even more entertainingly via his hit single ‘You don’t know what you’ve got (until you lose it)’. It’s still available on Spotify.

Tim Rice

Hambleden, Bucks

Road to nowhere

Sir: Toby Young’s dismay at the new Highway Code rules and the apparent bias against car drivers is understandable (No sacred cows, 29 January), but I think he misses one important point. We are not one category of road user but many. So sometimes I’m a motorist, sometimes a cyclist and sometimes a pedestrian. What we need on our roads is mutual respect, not tribalism.

Paul Larsmon

Burbage, Wiltshire

Bring back bells

Sir: In Julie Burchill’s article ‘Get out of my way’ (29 January) she didn’t mention the lack of bells on modern bikes. When I was a child in the 1950s, bells were considered so important that our local bobby used to check ours. Recently, as I walked down a country lane with two friends, all was quiet when we were suddenly overtaken by three bicycles, which gave us a real shock. Had one of us by chance stepped out further into the road, we would have been run over. We had no idea they were behind us. No voice, no bell, no sound. This is dangerous.

Jane Mounsey

Malmesbury, Wiltshire

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After Covid, Kenya’s flower industry is gearing up for its next challenge

The alpine slopes of Kenya’s extinct volcanoes are the floral equivalent of Bordeaux. It’s there that the roses grow for the world’s weddings, funerals and Valentine’s Day bouquets. The higher the altitude, the larger your flower head, and roses raised in the shadow of Mount Kenya’s glaciers, or on the vast caldera of Mount Elgon, come in a dazzling spectrum of colours, petal shapes and scents.

In normal years, billions of blooms fly out of Nairobi, destined for everywhere from Shanghai and Riyadh to Melbourne and Slough. But in 2020, the roses bloomed in vain.

The world’s skies emptied of aircraft in March 2020, and Kenya’s rose growers threw away mountains of flowers that could not be exported. Workers took armfuls of roses home — but job layoffs followed the collapse of business and many workers drifted home to villages and back to the soil. To lift the spirits of slum dwellers, Nairobi’s governor distributed bottles of Hennessy, which he described as an anti-virus throat sanitiser.

I worried that the industry wouldn’t recover, but in fact the speed with which it bounced back was astonishing. For the rest of the pandemic, rose growers like Tim Hobbs on Mount Kenya did a roaring trade. ‘Flowers became a proxy for seeing people — thinking of you, wish we were together,’ says Tim, who supplies the likes of Wild at Heart, Simon Lycett and the Real Flower Company. Next-day flower deliveries quadrupled. Bob Andersen, who grows 80 million roses a year on a Mount Elgon farm his family has had for a century, sent huge numbers of roses each week to Russia, some of them travelling nine days across Africa, then by plane to Holland, then by truck to Novosibirsk on Siberia’s mighty river Ob.

Flowers are peculiarly gratifying to give and to get: there’s the elation of being given them, seeing them open, thrive, fade and then die. Even throwing them away is satisfying.

In January 2020 we sent my Aunt Beryl flowers from Kenya for her 92nd birthday. In May that year, she died in a Sussex hospital alone with none of us allowed to visit her. Like many families, we haven’t been able to gather loved ones to say goodbye to her properly yet, and her ashes are still at the undertakers, but when we can, we’ll buy more flowers.

Kenya is gearing up for a global tsunami of funerals, memorials and weddings. Bob tells me that for two years his Charmant (the farm’s champagne-tinted rose variety, once wildly popular at European nuptials) found no buyers — but with the global riot of weddings planned for this year, the problem with roses will be the huge demand.

And as the world wakes from hibernation, the spectrum of different national tastes for roses is unfurling once more. Russians love a dark, almost black red rose and all good Russian schoolchildren take roses to their teachers in September. Europeans like a brighter red. Japanese like pink; the Arabs and Kazakhs go garish. In Norway they shun yellow, which symbolises jealousy. The Chinese like anything unusual, such as the spidery Hashtag, which Bob says has petals like Virginia Wade’s petticoats. The English will return to buying pastels and what Tim calls ‘nude palette’ colours — khakis, wild moss and dusty greys. The thing I value most is scent, because I miss it so much after entirely losing my sense of smell when I had the virus last year. Sadly, I’m told that roses with a lovely smell have more delicate petals, which kills them in transit, while growers admit that scent is sacrificed in favour of colour, opening shape, stem length, vase life and productivity.

This Valentine’s Day and for the different international Mother’s Days that follow, the big challenge for Kenya’s horticulturalists is China’s hogging of the world’s airfreight and reefer container capacity to shift car chips and electronics. Freight bottle-necks and shocking inflation on things like fertilisers mean flower margins are leaf thin, but Bob says that even if there are hard economic times ahead, people will splurge money on roses. ‘It goes like this: “Sorry love, we can’t go on holiday this year, or buy the 70-inch-screen TV, and I’m not buying you a new car — but here’s a bunch of flowers.”’ As for 14 February — according to my rose-growing pal Pete Viljoen (whose family has been in Africa since his Huguenot ancestors arrived in 1672): ‘You’re still going to have to keep your wife happy with flowers since you’ve already bought flowers for your mistress.’

A longer-term challenge is the growing obsession with climate change. Younger generations may not yet be able to afford or wish to buy as many roses as older people like me, who don’t care and still don’t believe that there are 57 genders, but everything is apparently about to change. To grow a rose in Europe during the winter burns six times more carbon than raising it in tropical Kenya, where jobs help millions to avoid starvation; yet there are ever more complaints about flying roses around the globe. Eco-conscious millennials are the buyers of the future and so it makes sense to invest in new technologies which mean that you can refrigerate your roses in a cryogenic gel and ship them by sea. Bob tells me that henceforth all his roses will be selected for sea-freight tolerance and no more will be flown.

Pete spends much of his time talking about healthy soils that require fewer fertilisers and chemicals, and about creepy crawlies that provide natural solutions to pests. Tim holds forth about pig manure, earthworms and something called frass, which is the faeces and other gunk generated by black soldier fly maggots.

Around his farm Bob has built a hospital and several schools. He has funded 800 young Kenyans from local families to study at university. I have never once thought about the carbon it took to fly a rose to me, but these rose men are furiously planting forests and constructing fields of solar panels and hydropower, while building great reservoirs to capture water from rain running off their greenhouses so that they never need to extract from a river or a well. Bob, who is an aviator, says that roses will soon be flown around by hydrogen-power engines. Kenya’s flower sellers are nothing if not adaptable.

Portrait of the week: Queen Camilla, a cabinet rejig and NHS waiting list warning

Home

In a message for the 70th anniversary of her accession, the Queen said it was her sincere wish that ‘when that time comes, Camilla will be known as Queen Consort’. She signed the message: ‘Your servant, Elizabeth R.’ Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that the government would pay energy suppliers to discount bills by £200 in October, but customers would then have to pay back £40 a year for five years. People living in houses of the A-D council tax bands would receive a £150 rebate. The regular Ofgem energy price cap adjustment meant that a typical household would pay £693 extra a year, a 54 per cent rise. Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, was asked whether the Bank was asking workers not to demand big pay rises, and replied: ‘Broadly, yes.’ The Bank doubled interest rates from 0.25 per cent to 0.5 per cent. Spectators chanted ‘RSPCA’ at the West Ham player Kurt Zouma after a video had shown him kicking his cat.

Jacob Rees-Mogg became minister for Brexit opportunities, with a seat in the cabinet. He was replaced as leader of the House by Mark Spencer, who was replaced as chief whip by Chris Heaton-Harris, who was replaced as minister for Europe by James Cleverly. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, appointed a new chief of staff, Steve Barclay, already Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. This was meant to cheer up MPs after Martin Reynolds (who had sent out the invitation in May 2020 to ‘bring your own booze’) resigned as the PM’s principal private secretary; Dan Rosenfield, the chief of staff, went; Jack Doyle had to go as director of communications; and Munira Mirza resigned as head of policy, mentioning the ‘scurrilous accusation against the leader of the opposition’, Sir Keir Starmer, made at Prime Minister’s Questions, of ‘failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile’. She was replaced by a Tory MP, Andrew Griffith, and the new director of communications was Guto Harri, late of the BBC. Brandon Lewis, the Northern Ireland Secretary, ruled out assembly elections before 5 May despite the resignation (as a Democratic Unionist protest against the Northern Ireland protocol) of Paul Givan as first minister, which brought the loss for Michelle O’Neill, of Sinn Féin, of her position as deputy first minister.

Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, said that numbers waiting for NHS treatment (one in nine people in England) would increase for a time as Covid dwindled. GCSE and A-level exams this summer would be graded more generously than in pre-pandemic years. In the seven days up to the beginning of this week, 2,630 people had died with coronavirus, bringing total deaths (within 28 days of testing positive) to 158,243. (In the previous week, deaths had numbered 1,926.) Numbers with Covid remaining in hospital fell from about 16,000 to fewer than 14,000. Police gave Sir Keir Starmer sanctuary in a car when anti-vaccination protestors mobbed him. Bamber Gascoigne, who presented University Challenge from 1962 to 1987, died aged 87.

Abroad

President Vladimir Putin of Russia received President Emmanuel Macron of France for talks in Moscow at opposite ends of an absurdly long table. In Washington, President Joe Biden received Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and said that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline would be halted if Russia invaded Ukraine.

A state of emergency was declared in Ottawa, where lorry drivers continued to block streets in protest against compulsory vaccination for any who wanted to drive in from the United States. The protest took on a wider object of opposing state interference. The total in the world reported to have died with coronavirus reached 5,751,883 by the beginning of the week. The United Kingdom fell to 30th place in the world in the proportion of deaths to population, with 2,312 per million, compared with Peru’s 6,138 and 2,771 in the United States. Eighteen people were rescued after being stranded on an ice floe in Lake Erie.

Some athletes complained that it was too cold at the Winter Olympics in China. Peng Shuai, the Chinese tennis star, said that there has been a ‘huge misunderstanding’ over a social media post in November in which she claimed she was forced into having sexual relations with a former Chinese party leader. ‘I never said anyone sexually assaulted me,’ she said in a tightly controlled press conference. In Morocco, crowds thought that Rayan Oram, a five-year-old boy who had fallen 100ft down a ten-inch wide well, had been saved by rescuers who had dug down to reach him; but they could only recover his dead body.

Are the Winter Olympics suffering the effects of climate change?

No snow

The pistes are covered with artificial snow and the hillsides are bare. Are the Winter Olympics a victim of climate change?

— Skiing events at the games are at Yanqing and Zhangjiakou, north-west of central Beijing. Both have arid climates where a remarkable proportion of rain falls in the summer. Yanqing averages just 10mm of rain between December and February, Zhangjiakou just 11mm. London averages 160mm in the same months. Temperatures in the Chinese resorts have been well below freezing this week. The real snow has not melted — it never fell in the first place.

Source: meteoblue.com

Jab done

What was your risk of dying of Covid, vaccinated or unvaccinated, between July and December last year? Units are deaths per 100,000 person-years and compared people who had received a second dose with those who have not had a first dose. Includes only deaths involving Covid-19.

After 2nd dose | Unvaccinated

18-39 | 2 | 12

40-49 | 8 | 63

50-59 | 21 | 205

60-69 | 64 | 500

70-79 | 180 | 1,009

80-89 | 510 | 2,468

90+ | 1,167 | 3,237

Source: ONS

Staying civil

Which government departments have the greatest number of senior civil servants?

Cabinet Office 950

Foreign and Commonwealth Office 550

HMRC 470

Public Health England (now defunct) 410

Ministry of Defence 290

Home Office 280

Department of Health and Social Care 260

Department for Work and Pensions 230

Department for Education 220

Defra 210

Department for Transport 200

Ancient pubs

Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, outside St Albans, claimed to be the oldest surviving pub in England, closed after failing to recover from the pandemic. Some others which make the same claim: Old Ferry Boat Inn, Holywell, Cambridgeshire, claimed to date from 560 ad; Porch House, Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, 947; Bingley Arms, Bardsey, West Yorkshire, 953; Royal Standard of England, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire (claims to be in Domesday Book, 1086, under a different name); Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, Nottingham, 1189.

Bring back communion wine

The Church of England has always been clever at producing theology to suit itself. If we don’t start protesting, we may never get communion wine back again. Too many risk-averse clergy have discovered how efficient, hygienic and cheap it is just to give us a wafer each. They explain it away by reminding us that ‘Christ is sacramentally and equally present in both the bread and the wine, so if you receive only one, nothing is lacking’.

‘But it’s so unfair,’ I want to hiss at the presiding priest when I see him or her having a sip of wine ‘on behalf of the congregation’. ‘It’s one rule for you, another for us.’

How docile we’ve all become, as we tramp forward via the hand sanitiser to receive our Styrofoam-like circular wafer from the outstretched fingertips of a silent administrator, then walk back to our pew, chomping self-consciously as we go. What a prosaic, dismal and antisocial process it has turned into.

By that time in a Eucharist service — about 11.50 a.m. on a Sunday — I’m longing for a slug of sweet wine and the warm feeling brought on by its alcohol content. This is what Jesus intended, for goodness sake. ‘Drink this, all of you.’ Not just one of you.

Don’t try to theologise me out of my right to both kinds. With only a dry wafer for sustenance — a food item as far removed as can be from anything resembling a holy supper — I feel decidedly short-changed. I miss the whole ritual of kneeling on the oblong velvet cushion in front of the High Altar, waiting for the wafer and the wine to come along, administered with beautiful words spoken to each of us. I love watching the slowly rotating chalice, wiped after each sip with the purificator, otherwise known as the ‘holy hanky’.

Does that seem a revoltingly germ-spreading procedure now? Will we ever dare to drink from a shared cup again? Or will we start having to use separate disposable shot-style glasses as the Methodists and Baptists do, risking the theological disaster of discarding the sacred dregs into the bin?

Some clergy have, to give them their due, worked hard to find a way to get wine into our mouths. There’s a theological war raging on C of E forums about whether individual shot-style glasses are theologically sound. They’re not, say staunch Anglicans. The common cup is essential. Jesus didn’t pour from his cup into the disciples’ separate goblets. Some churches have resorted to pipettes as a way of keeping the ‘common cup’ going in a hygienic way. They provide their own, or they ask congregation members to bring a sterilised pipette or syringe with which to extract a sip from the chalice.

Is this really necessary? I was relieved to be assured by the Revd Sue Kipling, who worked for years as a scientist at Imperial Chemical Industries and has examined polished metal under an electron microscope, that a well-wiped silver chalice is pretty much germ-free and we should not be frightened of drinking from one. (Avoid ceramic chalices, she says, as they’re not as easily cleaned of germs.) Meanwhile, she has developed a method of intincting wafers with a drop of wine and drying them out in the bottom oven of her Aga. This works well if you’re administering communion in care homes, she says.

I chatted to Abraham Overvoorde, director at Grace Church Supplies in Hull, who told me that sales of communion wine are going up again after a terrible dip. (He’s kindly offering Spectator readers a 10 per cent discount.) In the depths of the 2020 lockdown, he said, sales of alcoholic communion wine were down by 95 per cent on normal levels. Now, they’re down by ‘only’ 65 per cent.

Meanwhile, sales of non-alcoholic communion wine went down by 65 per cent and are now down by only 15 per cent. Who on earth is drinking non-alcoholic communion wine, you might ask? Isn’t it a rule that it’s meant to be ‘the fermented juice of the grape’? The answer is that many are now going for the non-alcoholic option, especially in the USA, and they carried on drinking it at home during lockdown Zoom Eucharists. Grace Supplies sells pre-filled non-alcoholic communion cups with a wafer attached; you peel off the top film to get to the wafer, and the second film to get to the ‘juice’, rather as with a Müller Corner.

Talking to clergy, I dare to hope that the tide is turning. While many cathedral deans and chapters are still clinging to the wafer-only option, other priests and churchwardens are daring to move forward.

‘We’re having a parochial church council meeting to discuss it this week,’ Father Andrew Walker, parish priest at St Mary’s Bourne Street in London, tells me. ‘We’re thinking of giving the congregation a choice of going to one or both altars. There’ll be a standing station at the High Altar where they’ll be given the wafer, and then, if they like, they can walk over to the Altar of the Seven Sorrows where they’ll kneel and receive the wine from the chalice.’

My plea is that by Maundy Thursday, on 14 April, churches will have got their act together and we will be back to the old normal — just in time for the Last Supper.

The ancient problem of unscrupulous ‘doctors’

Yet again ‘doctors’ with no qualifications have been found advertising dodgy but expensive products and treatments, in this case, injections of unregulated Botox variants to remove wrinkles. Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) inveighed against such practices 2,000 years ago.

Romans had a love-hate relationship with the Greeks, and medicine was no exception. In his massive Naturalis Historia — a 36-book encyclopaedia of the animal, vegetable and mineral world — Pliny acknowledged the enormous influence of Greek medical theory, i.e. that health required a balance between the four bodily liquids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) and their many associated ‘powers’ in matching groups of four (e.g. heat, cold, wetness, dryness; air, fire, earth, water; spring, summer, autumn, winter, etc).

But that, he argues, was no match for practical, proven Roman remedies (forget theory) supplied by nature herself, ‘available everywhere, easily discovered and costing nothing’. And off he goes at enormous length, singing the virtues of herbal medicine and of letting the divine power of Natura have its way.

By contrast, for Pliny, the complexity of Greek theory simply encouraged doctors to ‘hunt for popularity by means of novel remedies’ with the result that ‘the art of medicine changes daily and is constantly given a new look; we are carried away on the hot air of those clever Greeks’. Because of the trust placed in these doctors, such experiments were encouraged, and the cost to Romans, Pliny claims, was in their lives (‘only a doctor can commit homicide with such impunity’), while ‘the precious things of nature have been quite lost’.

The motive behind all this, Pliny goes on, was money. He quotes the vast sums made by ‘unscrupulous practitioners out to make a quick profit’, with which ‘each customer is promised a new lease of life — at a price’. The result was a culture that ‘allowed good men to give authority to the worst, while stupid people were convinced that nothing could be considered beneficial unless it cost a fortune’.

Are we quite out of these woods yet?

How I’d write your perfect speech

For many of our clients we are a dirty secret. Phone calls regularly begin with variants of: ‘Can you guarantee discretion?’ But there’s not a dealer, pimp or even a Botox clinic in sight. We write speeches.

Traditional taboos are fast disappearing. Personal trainers, moisturising creams and therapists are shared between friends. It is socially acceptable to plan your wedding with a professional and outsource every-thing from the flowers to the invitations. But the groom is about as likely to reference his speechwriter as his affair with the chief bridesmaid.

Our client meetings are arranged in dimly lit pubs and distant cafés, far from the prying eyes of spouses and friends. My colleague Dolan met an Arab princess on a park bench in Battersea. Dave took notes in a lorry park off the M6. I had a very enjoyable coffee with a client preparing for his wife’s 60th, until she spotted him through the café window and waved. Thirty seconds later he introduced me as a photographer.

Many clients, of course, find my company, Great Speech Writing, through the ‘Relax, we’ll write it for you!’ ad that I’ve run in The Spectator’s classifieds for 15 years. Some clients are genuine glossophobes, dreading their moment in front of the crowd. Others are up against impossible deadlines. Barristers are not alone in wanting to surpass high expectations. Many just can’t get started because they know the pool of jokes online has run its course. A wedding can no longer be ‘so emotional that even the cake’s in tiers’.

Often, a client comes with a specific concern. Divorcees can struggle to navigate the maze that is flattering their second spouse at a wedding reception in the presence of grown-up children from the first. We call this challenge ‘the Boris’. A representative for the president of a large African country called to explain that he had read the script for an address to the nation written in-house and was pacing around his office in a state of blind panic. Could I jump on a plane that evening?

Brilliant people with extraordinary ideas need to translate them from the technical into the understandable. CEOs who dazzle around a boardroom table need help because they don’t want colleagues to know that they tremble at the prospect of a town hall. One, rather touchingly, asks his PA to diarise our meetings as ‘life coaching’. Another, who could probably have done with some life coaching of his own, has asked for help with a hat-trick of groom speeches.

On one call I’ll never forget, Jack, a wonderful Australian gentleman, rang from Sydney airport, en route to Nairobi. ‘Hello mate. I’m going to email you a bunch of notes I’ve made about my mum. Could you think about turning it into a speech while I’m in the air?’ We did just that, penning a ten-minute eulogy that wove together various aspects of what had clearly been an eclectic, eccentric and fascinating life well lived. I called him that night and the following morning to make last-minute edits. He didn’t pick up and I worried that we hadn’t met his expectations.

Jack called a week later to thank me for the eulogy. I asked how it had gone. ‘Sorry mate. I think you misunderstood. She’s not dead. I just thought we’d put something on paper just in case.’ He called three years later to ask for a few minor edits to reflect her passionate defence of the Australian coal industry in her final years.

There’s no lack of demand for a great speech. But what’s the recipe? The ingredients are, fortunately, no different in business, politics, fundraising or at Aunt Dolly’s 90th.

It needs to be relevant. We have all sat through embarrassing, ill-judged, rambling and over-emotional speeches delivered by drunken best men, infatuated newlyweds or teary parents. We’ve seen the blank looks, raised eyebrows and attention drifting at conferences. That can be avoided by putting the audience first. A seminar full of techies has little in common with a gathering of potential investors. A traditional, cross–generational reception in the bride’s parents’ garden requires a different nuance to a dinner on the stag do in Ibiza. Surprisingly, this realisation comes as a lightbulb moment to many.

A great speech should be punchy and clear. Great speakers tend to deliver around 120 words per minute. We are regularly asked to look at a ‘ten-minute’ draft written by a client containing 5,000 words. The never-ending story about a couple’s first trip to France culminating in him making a flawed grand gesture may be replaced with something brief and punchy: ‘For any single men in the room… there’s a key lesson we can all take from this couple’s first holiday together: you are unlikely to impress your new girlfriend… by approaching the smartly dressed chap at the entrance to the Hotel de Ville in Bordeaux… and asking to book the honeymoon suite.’

You’ll notice that was written for the spoken word with ellipses denoting pauses. Remembering that one is writing a speech, not an essay, is crucial. Great content with poor delivery (something we still refer to as a ‘Gordon’) is as unlikely to work as the opposite (a ‘Clegg’).

Most of all, it’s important to start writing knowing what you are trying to achieve. Asking how you’d like a member of the audience to describe the entire speech in a single sentence is a brilliant place to start.

For the speechwriter, the key is to ask the right questions — which means more emotion and less fact. Clients compare our sessions to therapy. They open up about frustrations and anxieties, hopes and dreams, fading memories and failed relationships. That perspective allows us to write in their voice, ideally at the very top of their game, with regular requests for something in the style of both Obamas, Muhammad Ali or Sir Ken Robinson. The aim is that when it all comes together, a speech they have commissioned and rehearsed is more authentically theirs than anything they could have written on their own.

At a recent dinner party, a solicitor we’ll call Bob asked what I did for a living.I explained briefly, and he reacted with a chuckle of amusement and disbelief, the sort of response to which I long ago became accustomed. He then asked loudly and incredulously if people really paid for that type of thing.

Three days later the phone rang. ‘Hi, it’s Bob here. We met on Saturday. Would you be interested in helping me with a speech for my boss’s retirement party?’ He paused. ‘I assume that no one needs to hear about this?’

When did artists become the mob?

‘The mob’s going to want a chicken to kill and they won’t care much who it is,’ wrote John Steinbeck. ‘Why don’t people look at mobs not as men, but as mobs? A mob nearly always seems to act reasonably, for a mob.’ I’ve been thinking about those words in recent days as more ‘cancelled’ headlines fill the news. I was a co-founding member of the band Mumford and Sons, which I quit last year. I praised a book critical of far-left extremism in the United States and all hell broke loose, so I decided better to leave my band and save my bandmates the trouble. Better that than stay and self-censor. Now that I am on this side of the parapet I thought I should use my voice to identify the totemic difficult taboo topics that we can’t talk about. That’s why I have launched a new show, Marshall Matters, on Spectator TV: I’ll be talking not to politicians but to musicians, artists, composers, comedians, everyone in the creative industries, and encouraging them to speak freely at a time when many feel they can’t. You’ll have heard about the Jimmy Carr joke about gypsies and the Holocaust. It was distasteful, deliberately so, and I won’t repeat it here. What is strange is that it was broadcast more than a month ago online, yet the fuss has erupted only now. Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, who is pushing the online safety bill, called the joke ‘abhorrent and unacceptable’, adding ominously: ‘We don’t have the ability now, legally, to hold Netflix to account for streaming that. But very shortly we will.’ You don’t have to find Jimmy Carr funny to be alarmed at a politician sounding so authoritarian.

The word ‘Stalinist’ is overused but I take it seriously from the likes of Ignat Solzhenitsyn. He was born in Moscow just before his father was exiled for publishing The Gulag Archipelago. Now a pianist and conductor, Ignat tells me about the parallels he sees between the Soviet Russia his family fled and the culture war we have now, a world in which ‘problematic’ remarks are reported to the authorities. ‘As soon as a view that somehow ranges outside an increasingly narrow orthodoxy is expressed,’ he says, ‘it must be not engaged with, not defeated. Not exposed for the foolish or retrograde view that it surely is: it must be reported so the “appropriate” authorities can deal with it. This is Stalinist.’

In another episode, I speak to the songwriter Don McLean, now 76, who has similar concerns. ‘People are a bit drunk with power,’ he tells me. ‘We’ve cancelled God, we’ve cancelled religion, we’ve cancelled civility, we’ve cancelled the English language. In a sense isn’t that what “American Pie” says? Isn’t that the day the music died?’ Music, comedy, satire, conversation: there’s a lot at stake.

I believe in more speech, not less. The arts industries are quickly ossifying in orthodoxy. Dissenters are punished. For me it was far-left extremism. For the podcaster Joe Rogan it is going rogue on Covid. Those who happen to agree with dissenters learn to zip it. And so develops a culture of compliance. What is most disturbing, to me at least, is how freedom of expression has become an unpopular concept among those whose careers are meant to be about expressing themselves. It is musicians, comedians and actors all over the world who have been lining up to take aim at the once indomitable Rogan over his amazingly popular podcast. Rogan felt obliged to apologise and some of his older episodes have been scrubbed. The British comedian Stewart Lee — who I’m proud to say included me in this year’s Pedal Bin list of people he doesn’t like — is leading the charge to have Rogan removed from Spotify on this side of the Atlantic. ‘Artists big and small can band together to do something to change this where the money men won’t,’ he says. What a strange way to think about the role of the arts in society.

There was a time when creatives — the likes of Steinbeck — understood mobs for the evil that they were. Today, the mob — in its Twitter incarnation — is marching across the internet swiping clean all that it disapproves of. And it is led by the great artists of the day. As with any mob, eventually they turn on their own. It’s not always ‘the left’ — whatever that means now — that demands censorship. Supposedly conservative commentators do it too. The actress-turned-TV panellist Whoopi Goldberg is currently serving a temporary cancellation for uttering the flagrant flapdoodle that the Holocaust was ‘not about race’. No doubt by the time you read this, several other similar stories will be generating clicks all over the place. ‘Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect,’ Mark Twain wrote. I hope my new show will help people do just that.

Bridge | 12 February 2022

You may not have heard of Sue Johnson but she could be the fairy godmother bridge needs right now. Not only does she go into primary schools to introduce young pupils to mini-bridge, she’s also the producer of the New Tricks videos which can be seen on YouTube, giving bridge much needed exposure in the virtual world. ‘Battle of the Partners’ pits world-class players against their own regular partners with some fascinating results. I urge you to watch. Today’s hand is one where the partnership could not have taken more divergent paths.

While his esteemed partner passed the hand out, our Declarer not only opened the bidding but also jumped on his second go. He then had to swap seats with his robot partner and try his hand at 4 Hearts on a trump lead.

Thinking it was very nice of the (robot) opponents to play out the trump suit for him, he ducked in dummy and won in hand. He went to dummy in Diamonds and played a Spade towards hand, but East robot cleverly ducked, so West could win and play another trump. At last it was time for Declarer to take stock, but whichever way he tried it came to no more than nine, and he eventually went one down.

A little planning from the start might have done the trick(s). You can’t really get ten tricks on a cross-ruff, so Clubs have to be established. This means preserving entries to hand. Win the lead in dummy, play Ace and ruff a Club. Re-enter hand in trumps and ruff another Club, and claim 11 tricks.

The dark world of illness influencers

I have heartburn. I probably have heartburn simply because both my parents also had a lot of heartburn, and I have treated it the same way they treated it, with antacids. But lately, with all the sleep disruption and discomfort, I tried to get rid of my heartburn and regretted it. I didn’t talk to my doctor, however, because the last time I tried to schedule an appointment the earliest she could see me was in six months. Instead I went to the internet.

I was told to change my diet, so I changed my diet. Still had heartburn. I was told to cut out red wine, so I cut out red wine. Still had heartburn. I was told to add preventive measures such as lime juice, so I mixed lime juice with seltzer every morning. Still had heartburn. I let my osteopath dig her hand between my rib cage and apply so much pressure that it left a bruise, I tried intermittent fasting, I propped myself up with an extra pillow. I still had heartburn.

Luckily I had been here before with various discomforts and difficulties, so I knew the golden rule of how to use the internet to treat your own health problems: do not go on to the forums. I mean, I peeked, and learned that probably what I had was actually a ‘leaky gut’, which I am assured is a very real phenomenon even though I feel like if my guts were really leaking I would be dead. There were very expensive potions, very restrictive diets, and very invasive treatments to ‘heal my gut’.

So by now I am very familiar with the patterns of fraud examined regularly on the podcast Maintenance Phase. People don’t feel well. They are stuck between contradictory and misleading messaging about their bodies. They find it difficult to access authoritative information or assistance, and they fall prey to people who ultimately don’t want to heal them, they just want to sell them something. In some cases, it’s just a dumb diet some celebrity has promised will help them lose weight. And sometimes you find someone like cancer influencer Belle Gibson saying you should not get chemotherapy but that you should heal your tumours with fruit instead.

Hosts Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon really dig into the history of various fads and cons, showing how shallow and new our understanding of nutrition and health really is. We are baby-stepping our way into some basic knowledge about how best to feed and care for our bodies, but we are fully confident that each tiny bit of new information gleaned is correct.

In a recent episode about the emphasis on protein in the diet, Hobbes and Gordon uncover the story of kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition that can kill children being raised in areas with food scarcity. It was initially misunderstood as being a problem of not enough protein, which was used to market baby formula and other expensive supplements. And the focus on protein covered up the real issues, which was access to food in an area of extreme income inequality and colonial control.

They also delve into the truly dark region of illness influencers, who mostly gather on Instagram to tell you how bee venom helped treat their Lyme disease or how celery juice cured their cancer. Figures such as Belle Gibson thrived — and got book deals and credulous television interviews — despite peddling dangerous nonsense (and never actually having the cancer she claimed to have self-treated). These cheats and liars sell snake oil to the unwell, dissuade them from pursuing treatments that might already work, and get quite rich in the process.

Eventually we will all lose our battle, whether fought in hospital or in online forums, to keep our bodies safe and well, and we will die. Which is why I like Synodus Horrenda, an irregular podcast about death and dying, and how death culture has changed throughout the years.

It’s hosted by Ryan Nyburg with a kind of mordant wit and a charming growl as he tells stories of the dying, the dead and the actively rotting. I particularly liked his series on the deaths of tyrants, relating the stories of what happens after the death of a loved and feared leader.

Whether it was the madcap scramble for power that followed the humiliating end of Joseph Stalin or the truth behind the mythologising of madman Nero, Nyburg tells his stories with great care. And compassion, sometimes, if the figure deserves it.

One of the most exciting hours I’ve spent in ages: Turnstile at O2 Forum Kentish Town

Even leaving aside its origins as prison slang, punk has always meant different things on either side of the Atlantic. Forty-five years ago, in New York, no punk band sounded like the next one: the only thing that linked Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Suicide, Blondie and Television was that they played the same club, CBGB. Over here, by contrast, punk was rapidly codified into people shouting angrily over buzzsaw guitars. These days, it can seem as though the opposite applies. It’s the American punks who stick to a formula, while in the British Isles, the punk label seems to apply to any band with a guitar and a modicum of attitude.

Both Turnstile (from Baltimore) and Fontaines D.C. (Dublin) have been called punk. And they have about as much in common as trifle and shepherd’s pie: from a distance they might look roughly similar, but up close there’s nothing to tie them together. Turnstile are one of those bands for whom precision and discipline are everything — they put one in mind of those stories about Black Flag in early-1980s Los Angeles, rehearsing for hours on end every day regardless of whether they had any gigs coming up. Fontaines D.C., by contrast, are slovenly (not sloppy; their rhythm section is electrifying), and have a very distinct air of being too cool to care hanging over them.

Turnstile have come through the American hardcore punk scene, hardcore being a genre built on velocity and rage, but they’ve became rather more than yet another band of lightspeed thrashers. Their third album, Glow On, was one of the triumphs of last year, attracting attention from outside the insular hardcore scene, and propelling them to two big and rammed London shows. It had all the energy and aggression of hardcore, but with extra invention and melody.

Their show in Kentish Town was simply one of the most exciting hours I’ve spent in ages, which was curious in itself given how much there is about Turnstile I would normally hate: proximity to rap metal; sportswear on stage; half-speed breakdowns, where everyone does that headbanging from the waist thing; the singer having his own little kit to do extra percussion on (no song, ever, has been improved by a singer tapping away at a couple of little drums. That’s just science. I’m pretty sure Sage would back me up on it).

It certainly helped that the singer —Brendan Yates — was absolutely magnetic. He certainly fits the muscular template of hardcore punk, as he was keen for everyone to see once he took his top off. But he was no musclebound lunkhead: he was more like a ballet dancer or an ice skater (at one point he did what I think was a double Salchow across the stage). He spent as much time performing genuinely elegant leaps and bounds, his hips swivelling with every step. It was an unexpected complement to the force of the music.

And how forceful that music was: precise, hectic and thrilling. At their best — and most ambitious — Turnstile sound like they are trying to remake ‘Kashmir’ by Led Zeppelin as a 150-second song. They crammed 24 songs into an hour, as if trying to break the land-speed record, but the precision meant every chord change hit the target, no matter the speed. I should say that if you have no taste for hardcore’s machine-gun attack, Turnstile will not be for you. The friend who came with me left after 20 minutes, but I like to think he was the only QC at the Commercial Bar who went to see a hardcore band last week.

On paper, Fontaines D.C. are much more up my street. On stage they weren’t. One problem is their second album, A Hero’s Death, which got rave reviews but to me sounded very much like a victim of second-album syndrome. I’d bet a tenner that most of it was written on the road, because it sounds to me like a record where no one was really thinking about songwriting so much as finding grooves and then finding things to go on top of them. I don’t think it was coincidence that the two most thrilling moments in their set at the Dome — a small show to raise money for War Child; they can headline Ally Pally — were two songs from their first album. ‘Hurricane Laughter’ was all feverish intensity, ‘Boys in the Better Land’ has a simple chorus hook so carefully deployed it hit much harder than it had any right to.

It’s not that Fontaines D.C. aren’t good. They plainly are. I like them plenty. But there was a stark contrast on consecutive nights between a group playing with the complete conviction that the hour they are on stage is the most important hour of their life so far, and one radiating an air of doing the audience a favour. I’ll happily go to see Fontaines D.C. again, but I’ll run to see Turnstile.

A tangle of nonsense from the sloppy Caryl Churchill: A Number, at the Old Vic, reviewed

A Number, by Caryl Churchill, is a sci-fi drama of impenetrable complexity. It’s set in a future society where cloning has become possible for those on modest incomes. A Cockney father reveals to his grown-up son that he’s a replica of his older brother who died, aged four, in a car crash that also killed his mum. The son reacts with anger and bafflement. But Dad soothes him with happy news. The boy’s DNA was stolen by a gang of scientists who created 20 more copycat zombies, and these replicas are now scattered across the globe. Dad plans to cash in by suing the boffins for £5 million.

No sooner has Dad finished this yarn than he admits it’s untrue. The mother didn’t die in a car crash and the timeline he gave was incorrect. At which point the poor playgoer starts to wonder what fresh hoaxes are about to be pulled by this sloppy and amateurish dramatist. The son (played by Paapa Essiedu) meets his cloned brother (also played by Paapa Essiedu). We don’t see the meeting because there’s only one Paapa Essiedu. The boys argue. Violence is in the air. One Essiedu kills the other and the script turns into a murder mystery.

But not for long. Dad hops over to the US and meets a third cloned son (played by Paapa Essiedu). The American lad is a friendly buffoon whose dimwitted chatter is presented for comic effect while his solemn English father listens with an air of long-suffering superiority. (NB: Americans rightly loathe that kind of British condescension.) As for the father’s court case against the evil boffins, that’s forgotten. The murder of Paapa Essiedu by Paapa Essiedu is quietly sidelined. And then comes a suicide (Paapa Essiedu again), which barely affects those who are close to the victim.

But the gravest problem with this tangle of nonsense is the lack of action on stage. It’s just an hour of four blokes bickering and moaning about stuff that happened decades ago. Churchill wants to dabble in several genres at once — science fiction, whodunnit and courtroom drama — but she clearly has no interest in any of them. And if the dramatist doesn’t care, who else will? The script, very brilliantly, uses the kind of fractured dialogue that imitates the pauses and missteps of real talk. But her skill disguises the fact that no character says anything valuable or interesting. The viewer is beguiled by the naturalism of the conversation and forgets that this broken idiom can’t deliver insights or wisdom. Anything that’s worth saying has to be expressed in fluent, quotable language and not in the halting, jumbled shards of everyday chitchat. It’s bizarre that we revere scribblers, like Churchill, who can’t write a single sentence that anyone would want to repeat.

The National Theatre’s vast resources have been placed at the disposal of Emma Rice for her adaptation of Wuthering Heights. And that’s the problem. Too much of everything. The story vanishes beneath a cascade of songs, dances, sound effects and distracting video clips showing clouds scudding across the Yorkshire moors. The actors wear hats made from twigs or sprouts of moss. Most of their costumes don’t fit. Barmy props built from vandalised chairs clutter the stage. Every dramatic moment is treated as a zany joke — like a Spike Milligan sketch without any gags. Even a mother’s death during childbirth isn’t treated seriously. Pity the poor performers.

It takes hard work to make a beautiful actress like Lucy McCormick seem sexless and unattractive but that’s the achievement of this show. She plays Cathy as a screeching, honking basketcase with crazy hair and tasteless, baggy clothes. Any sane man would sprint for the exit if she arrived at a party.

Her lover, Heathcliff, is an orphan from Jamaica adopted on a Liverpool dockside by old Mr Earnshaw. His nasty, bullying siblings treat him to numerous kickings. (The show is full of ugly violence.) Despite being raised in Yorkshire the young outcast clings to his Caribbean lilt and when he escapes from the family home he sets off in search of his fortune. Years later he returns in a blinged-up white-and-gold suit, still talking like Bob Marley. He’s turned into Heathspliff.

This role is superbly played by the handsome Ash Hunter who has a lovely voice and a powerful, smouldering stillness. Yet he’s the only one who brings any hint of the novel’s romance, wildness and mystery. The only other bright point in this barrage of Brontë-phobia is Katy Owen’s humorous turn as Isabella. Owen can deliver a ribald line with just the right amount of sauce — ‘I like to slide down the bannister because it tickles my tuppence.’ And she can bend her limbs amusingly which suggests that she could make ballet look funny. She’s a big find.

Staggeringly confident and powerful: After Love reviewed

As there are no stand-out films this week aside from Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Death on the Nile — is that the one where they all did it? Or is that the train one? — I thought I’d alert you to a film that may have slipped under your radar: After Love. It was released last year. It’s a small film, tiny. I don’t know what the budget was but it wasn’t $90 million. Yet it’s already won many awards, rightly, and has just been nominated for three Baftas and is staggeringly confident and powerful. I guess we’ll now never know who did it on that boat. Unless they all did it?

This is a first feature from English-Pakistani filmmaker Aleem Khan. It’s a beautifully restrained yet devastating exploration of love, loss, grief and identity wrapped up in a story that’s not just gripping but also — prepare yourself for a shock: ready? — wholly original.

The film stars Joanna Scanlan as Mary, a white Muslim who had converted to marry her husband, Ahmed, a ferry captain. They live in Dover and this opens with a happy domestic scene — they’ve just come in; she makes tea; the talk is of sag aloo and someone’s new baby — but then he suddenly dies. She retreats into stunned grief, listening over and over to a message he once left on her phone while she pretended to be out when friends or family call. Then, on sorting through his things, she discovers that the husband she thought she knew had a second life over in France. She now needs to find out: what is the exact nature of this betrayal?

She travels to Calais with Dover’s cliffs in her mind’s eye crumbling behind her, just as her own quiet certitudes are now crumbling. (Such visual metaphors are used judiciously and occur on only one other occasion when she imagines a ceiling cracking.) Across the Channel she meets Genevieve, a gregarious, sexy Frenchwoman (Nathalie Richard) who has a son, Solomon (Talid Ariss), and is moving house. Now we need to find out: will a relationship develop between these three? Can it?

Scanlan is extraordinary. I don’t know how many pages there are to the script but there can’t be many as much of this is about what isn’t said. There are long stretches of silence, carried purely by a performance that, without words, conjures up this woman’s pain and aloneness and confusion. I’ve made it sound depressingly bleak but, trust me, you won’t be able to look away. In one remarkable scene she stands part naked in front of a mirror and prises aside her sensible underwear (M&S, I’d guess) to inspect her own body. This tells us everything about another great loss she has suffered. The physical body is its own map. OK, it is somewhat depressing and bleak. But it stills stands: you won’t be able to look away.

The film evokes a landscape that feels authentic, born of experience, and in some ways it is. Khan’s own mother converted to marry his father and, like Mary, she first met him when she was 14. Although the story travels elsewhere, this was the starting point. Khan is also gay, so he had kept secrets himself, and everyone has a secret life here. Ahmed, Genevieve, Solomon and even Mary, who is mistaken for a cleaning woman and continues with the deception as it serves her purpose. So it has the ring of truth about it and you desperately want to know how it will pan out. It’s film of the week even though it came out weeks ago. It’s available at Curzon Home Cinema (£4.99) or on the BFI Player where you can sign up to a seven-day free trial. But do remember to cancel or you will be paying monthly for the rest of your born days.

The medical equivalent of The Responder: BBC1’s This is Going to Hurt reviewed

According to the makers, This is Going to Hurt is intended as ‘a love letter to the national health service’. If so, however, it’s certainly not a soppy one. Few non-British people who watch it will, I suspect, find themselves wishing they had an NHS of their own — where the mission statement could easily read: ‘We Aim to Muddle Through Somehow, Despite Everything.’

Adapted by Adam Kay from his own phenomenally successful memoir of life as a junior doctor, the programme opened with Adam (Ben Whishaw) realising he’d slept in. On the plus side, his journey to work wouldn’t take long, given that he’d woken up in his car outside the hospital, having been too tired to drive home the night before. Now all he had to do was rescue a woman with a prolapsed umbilical cord from the carpark, take her up to the labour ward in a non-stopping maintenance lift, prevent her from bleeding to death, perform an emergency caesarean — and he could get on with his day as acting registrar in obstetrics and gynaecology (or ‘brats and twats’ as it’s apparently known in the trade).

To his credit, Kay doesn’t always present himself as particularly likeable. He treats doctors even more junior than himself with Fawltyesque rudeness. He also takes a brusque line with any patients he doesn’t consider ill enough to be bothering him — although not, needless to say, as brusque as the one taken with him by the duly irascible consultant Mr Lockhart (Alex Jennings, channelling James Robertson Justice). Then again, as the chaos convincingly piled up, it became clear that This is Going to Hurt is the medical equivalent of BBC1’s police show The Responder — the author’s message being that a) no human beings can realistically be expected to do the job without suffering emotional damage, and b) we expect them to anyway.

At times, the first episode did stray into BBC piety. We were firmly reminded, for example, that public schoolboys are all ghastly — and, in the only truly clumsy scene, that racism is a bad thing. Happily, though, such moments were more than made up for by the crunching finale. Called in to do an emergency night shift after his day shift, Adam was soon faced with one of the patients he’d sneeringly dismissed earlier, who turned out not to have been faking after all. Worse, he opted to carry out a risky operation without calling in Mr Lockhart. And with that, both he and the audience suddenly understood that he’d been the one doing the faking, as his brashness and gallows humour gave way to the chastening awareness that his work really is a matter of life and death.

Also on BBC1 on Tuesday was Cheaters which, as an 18-part drama, might sound an intimidating prospect — except that all the parts are ten minutes long. In the circumstances, then, you could forgive the briskness of the set-up. One minute, Josh and Fola (Joshua McGuire and Susan Wokoma) were strangers at a Finnish airport arguing about who to blame for their flight being delayed until the following morning. The next, they were getting cheerfully drunk together in the hotel bar. The one after that, they were having the kind of sex only found (I hope I’m right in thinking) on screen: the kind where they slammed up against an assortment of bedroom walls while hungrily tearing each other’s clothes off — and without Josh even putting his trousers in the trouser press.

When morning came, he guiltily confessed that he had a girlfriend and Fola, less guiltily, that she was married. Back in London, they bade each other a sheepish farewell, before he headed for a bus and she for a taxi. But when they arrived in the same street at the same time they discovered not merely that taxis are no faster than buses — but (cliffhanger alert) that Fola and her husband had just moved in over the road from Josh and his girlfriend.

Of course, a fair degree of contrivance can’t be denied here. Yet, once it was in place, everything that happened next was not only believable, but also funny, tense, awkward (in a good way) and often rather sweet. When the show reconvened after the News for two more episodes, the pair returned to their respective partners with a firm resolution to ignore one another — along with the pesky suspicion that their night together had meant more that they’d ideally have wanted. And from there, Cheaters continued its nicely twisty progress, as Fola’s genial husband decided he liked the look of the couple opposite and invited them to a house-warming party…

At this stage, admittedly, it’s not obvious how the show can spin out the situation for another 15 instalments — but I’m definitely looking forward to watching it try.

The art of the high street

I can no longer remember when it was that high streets did not all look the same. The architectural writer James Maude Richards bemoaned the disappearance of local character from our shops as early as 1938, but even so he could include a plumassier, submarine engineer and shop of model transport in his winsome introduction to the high street. With the exception of some of the specialists, subs included, these were shops that could still be found in many towns beyond London.

Eric Ravilious did the illustrations for the book (which, alongside three of the original prints, is on show at the Arc gallery in Winchester from 18 February to 15 May). Ravilious depicted with characteristic charm the rows of model sail boats lining the windows of Bassett-Lowke, and the submariners’ diving suits — so otherworldly in their vast dimensions — and the exotic premises of Mr A. Pollard, who was also a furrier, with its pelts of leopard and bear dangling in the shop front and concealing the less edifying activities within (see p33). Pollard had experience of stuffing big game, though by the 1930s, his business was largely in the preservation of family dogs.

‘What makes a shop so exciting as a thing to look at,’ wrote Richards, ‘is, of course, the quantity of goods.’ He praised the sight of cheeses packed tightly into shop windows, and the patterns formed by like objects arranged in order. The whiff of fromage from Paxton & Whitfield, also captured by Ravilious, still hits you long before you see the rounds in the Jermyn Street window.

Cheesemongers and butchers aside, it is rare to find a crowded window after Christmas today, at least on the average high street. Minimalism, the vernacular of modern home furnishing, prevails over shop floors, too.

The homogenisation of high streets has had a direct influence upon the painting of modern cityscapes. By contrast with when Ravilious was working, the shops have become the least interesting things about the high street and are often therefore blurred out or left out of pictures altogether. Most high street scenes in modern gallery windows are characterised by an absence of legible shop signs. The colours of a Barclays or Oxfam may be recognisable, but there’s nothing to tell the tourist or the viewer of the future what function they served. Gazing through the glass of one gallery this week at a phantom high street with no names felt peculiarly meta.

Our high streets, as blank and uninspiring as they’ve become, are not beyond being celebrated in art. Consider the work of Richard Estes. The artist’s paintings of the American equivalent of the high street make even the shabbiest shops uplifting by making their architecture and signage the focus. In ‘Supreme Hardware’ (1974), signs for liquor, ‘supreme hardware’ and dry-cleaners loom over pavements piled with cardboard boxes for refuse collection. ‘Lunch Specials’ (2001) shows a bagel shop — croissants, muffins, deli also available — with a queue of people waiting to order. The door is jammed wide open across the gum-spattered sidewalk. As in many of Estes’s paintings, the picture plane is split vertically, so we see both inside the shop, and out.

Estes is sometimes described as a photorealist, but that is not quite right. His pictures are painterly, while capturing the streets of New York in highly veristic detail. ‘Times Square’ (2004) shows the crosswalk and bright billboards from several angles through reflections in window glass — a favourite Estes motif. If Edward Hopper invites you to pause and watch the couple standing aloof from one another at the bar or restaurant table, or to gaze at the solitude of the shop fronts on a Sunday morning, Richard Estes puts you down on a street right in the middle of things. There’s no standing still. No pondering one’s loneliness in the bustle. His paintings make you feel like you’re walking the city on a normal-to-good day.

Frank Auerbach, who at 90 is almost Estes’s exact contemporary, could hardly be more different in his approach to painting urbanity, but he, too, finds inspiration in the less obvious places. Often drawn to London building sites and the dynamic lines that cut across their chaos, he is best known for his energetic paintings of Camden, which he has captured at all times of day. It is perhaps telling that he has repeatedly approached Camden High Street with his brush, only to stop short of painting the main stretch of it.

His ‘Camden Theatre in the Rain’ (1977), featuring the junction between the high street and Crowndale Road, is a blaze of oranges and reds worthy of a Sicilian piazza at sunset. Mornington Crescent, where he’s had his studio since the 1950s, stands at the opposite corner of the high street and appears in his paintings as the centre of the world in its zigzag liveliness, like in Louis de Bernières’s play. The bleak central run of Camden High Street could certainly benefit from the Auerbach treatment.

I can’t help being wistful for the dreamy serenity of J.M.W. Turner’s series of watercolours and oils of the High in Oxford as well. The most famous of them, ‘High Street, Oxford’ (1810), looks north to Carfax Tower through the corridor of colleges lining the pavements. Dons in cap and gown wander among clergymen and women — the latter inserted ‘for the sake of colour’ — and look on as someone drops their precious fruit basket. This part of the high street remains more or less empty of shops. The composition needn’t be altered very much to capture the mood of the place today. It is a rare example of somewhere that has stood still.

Realistically, the modern high street demands not a Turner but a Hogarth to capture its human dimension. ‘Four Times of the Day’, four paintings by the artist reproduced as engravings in the 1730s, offer some depressingly familiar sights. A woman looks past the cads and drunks loitering outside a coffee house. A dead cat lies in the gutter in the region of Charing Cross Road while people eat pie off the ground. An insalubrious barber cuts his client while shaving him and the homeless shelter beneath his windowsill. Only the area around Sadler’s Wells looks in any way desirable but then, it has a cow, which is long gone.

An illustrated book of the modern high street would be duller and less uplifting than Richards’s and Ravilious’s offering, but there may yet be potential between the cloned shops and the closed shops, the spartan windows and the to-let signs, for a continuing series as candid as Hogarth’s and Estes’s combined. Who anyway needs a plumassier when we have Greggs and its chicken bake?

2539: Wider – solution

The six unclued lights and PLAYWRIGHTS (35/26) are FETCHER/Fletcher (13), CHILLER/Schiller (22), WESTER/Webster (34), MEANDER/Menander (38), PRIESTLY/Priestley (6) and COTEAU/Cocteau (12).

Title: cf. Thornton WILDER.

First prize Ronald Morton, Basingstoke, Hants

Runners-up Emma Staveley, London E3; Peter Marginson, Wilmslow, Cheshire

2542: Wider II

Nine unclued lights (all real words) are the names of 35A with one letter misprinted. The correct letters match those that will appear in the shaded squares.

Across

13 Plastic strap on spade? (10, two words)

14 Truly no rector is transparent (5)

15 Eucharist united a victim in pieces (8)

17 Polish glossy (5)

18 Clue upset Pat (3)

19 Alloy in metal ring nothing squashes (7)

20 Colette’s husband takes against physicist (7)

21 Save nice moose after injury (9)

24 Last of these goods are mine (3)

29 Bird shuns rook in trouble (3)

37 US city scours Delaware for trendy anthem (7)

38 Sound personal trainer good lord engaged (7)

39 Aunt from Santiago? (3)

41 Priest catches one fish, one that’s ferocious (5)

42 Scheme member with money in powdered pigment (8)

43 Put shortly, sun’s out and one’s outside (5, two words)

44 Red hen tall lark fascinated (10)

45 More stingy Arab never entertains (6)

Down

2 Kill flower with pointed tool (7, two words)

3 City imports most of cheese by aircraft (7)

5 Dope maybe corporal hid in tree (6)

6 Biting cold permeates hand (4)

8 Type of road a trailer roves (8)

9 Unwinding I do in remote folly (6)

10 Sugar inside fritter cat got at (7)

11 Lecturer denied aquiline cuckoo gets glanders (7)

16 Some impala eat side petals (4)

22 African soldier climbing Indian tree (4)

23 Gold brick rascal nicked (4)

24 EMI dealt with no-one by that name (8, two words)

27 Vertebrate from Armenia I comment about (7)

28 Short andantinos in lost works – they’re worth recording (7)

30 Very big chap snubbed merry Turk (7)

31 Sort of Champagne Charlie passing overhead (7, hyphened)

32 Pair dodge work (7)

33 Monarch in tight suit has slender neck (7)

34 Hard worker drops fine kitchen utensil (6)

35 Trustee plucked fruit for Virginia’s youngster (4)

36 A little pinnie happy Alice folds (6)

40 What field marshal holds court? (4)

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 28 February. There are two runners-up prizes of £20. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk – the dictionary prize is not available. We will accept postal entries again at some point. Apologies that there may be a delay in sending out prizes at present.

Download a printable version here.

Spectator competition winners: Gulliver’s Day Out and other literary prequels

In Competition No. 3235, you were invited to invent a prequel to a well-known work of literature and supply an extract from it. In a stellar entry, Nick MacKinnon, Sue Pickard, Max Ross, Bob Trewin and Lorna Wood all shone, but the £25 prizes go to the following:

Believing it never to be my Fortune to travel in future Years, my Profession holding me fast in Respectability, I betook myself to London to discover what Strangenesses I might encounter in the Manners and Dispositions of People. Finding them of indifferent Stature and unwholesome Airs, yet was I minded to visit their Great Parliament, both for my Private Education but also thereby in hope of acquiring a great Tale as Souvenir, one to make my Name. Their Place being over-manned, as with hogs at a water-trough, and all making such Clamour, I could only coin them as Yahoos, each endeavouring to out-shout his Fellow. One tow-headed ruffian was the butt of rude banter for mighty Partying, though in truth I saw him no more than a poor Clown. This being ample to assure me of the Inanity of Humanity, yet I wonder if the whole World is belike. D.A. Prince/Gulliver’s Day Out

That’s my new husband painted on the wall, Ferrara’s duke; so dignified! I call myself blessed; his duchess, his blushing bride. His gaze on me is constant, filled with pride, his every thought for me, gifts rich and fine, his honoured name, nine hundred years, is mine. He never stoops to ask, for he can see my happiness. Sunsets, each orchard tree, my mule, the terrace, cherries, bring such joy, sir, ’tis all one! Sweet speeches I employ to show my gratitude, and with each glance my pleasure grows. In time, I hope, perchance he’ll have my portrait painted, his dear wife; Fra Pandolf’s brush will grant me lasting life. My image by the duke’s, mere feet apart, my loving smile immortalised in art. Janine Beacham/‘My Last Duke’

There was a time, before I set my toes In Derwentwater, when, not uncontent, I swam alone, in a more private place. Sequestered and confined this was, yet seemed To my as yet untutored mind the world, For I, not long progressed from happy meet Of seed and egg, knew no more than this space Wherein I thrived in amniotic peace. And there strong intimations came to me Of harmony with all created things. Alone yet never lonely there, I heard The wordless poetry that was the beat Of a maternal heart. To me unknown Was language then, and yet I found a way To speak my deepest feelings, for I flexed My little legs and gave almighty kicks. George Simmers/‘Prelude to “The Prelude”’

Basil Hallward flourished his sketchpad. ‘Crude, perhaps, but I think I have the gist of you, Dorian,’ he said. ‘It’s little more than a line drawing.’ ‘Indeed,’ Sir Henry Wotton drawled from the chaise lounge, ‘it is a considerable abridgement of what we see before us. But I favour abridgements; they offer so much more than the full account.’ ‘Basil has not even troubled to give me earlobes.’ ‘You’ll find they are inessential in a gentleman,’ Sir Henry proclaimed, authoritatively. ‘Basil, I entreat you to paint the full account Sir Henry so disparages.’ ‘I shall be delighted. But what is to become of my sketch?’ ‘Dorian must have it for the wall of his downstairs closet,’ Sir Henry decided. ‘Visitors, seeing it there, will imagine him less vain than he is.’ ‘Curling and discolouring in the musty air,’ Dorian smiled, ‘it will soon become unrecognisable.’ ‘Artistic, almost,’ sighed Sir Henry. Adrian Fry/The Sketch of Dorian Gray

I know whose sleeping pills these are. He keeps an ample reservoir, And wouldn’t mind if I supplied Myself with maybe half the jar.   Tonight I’ll take a little ride, And when I’m ready, open wide, Oblivious to snow and hail, And toss my pilfered pills inside.   And if I lose my nerve and fail To down the dose, I will avail Myself of poetry, in lieu Of verity, and change my tale.   I’ll claim I didn’t follow through Because I still have much to do, And say it twice as if it’s true, And say it twice as if it’s true. Alex Steelsmith/‘Stopping By a Medicine Cabinet on a Snowy Afternoon’

‘What do you see in this painting, Sophie?’ ‘Matchstalk men and matchstalk cats and dogs…’ ‘Look closer. Lowry’s crowd scenes are nothing short of a 1st-century AD Where’s Wally featuring the Holy Family!’ Langdon proceeded to mansplain how Joseph took his family to Salford following their escape to Egypt, returning there alone following Herod’s death. ‘Do you notice Joseph is hardly mentioned after the return to Galilee? Yet here he is hidden in Lowry’s masterpieces. Joseph’s secret “Priory of Greater Manchester” survives to this day, despite the ruthless efforts of Opus Dei. Notice how many seasonal names are associated with the city: Noel Gallagher, Gabriel Jesus, Angel di Maria, Cristiano…’ ‘The Hollies?’ ‘It’s no coincidence! Draw a line on this map, between Jerusalem and Salford.’ ‘It’s — a straight line!’ ‘Exactly. Now look at the redhead with pigtails.’ ‘It’s not…?’ ‘A three-year-old Mary Magdalene!’ ‘Childhood sweethearts?’ ‘Watch this space, Sophie…’ David Silverman/The L.S. Lowry Code

No. 3238: fighting talk

You are invited to supply a poem about a literary feud. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 23 February.

The battle of the sexes

One tradition at the annual Gibraltar Masters is a high-spirited skittles match played in the evening between teams of men and women, dubbed the ‘Battle of the Sexes’. In 2020, to much amusement, the women won a playful miniature after the flamboyant 3…f5 quickly backfired: 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bc4 f5 4 d3 fxe4 5 dxe4 Nf6 6 Ng5 Qe7 7 Bf7+ Kd8 8 Ne6+ Black resigns.

This year, Gibraltar hosted a real ‘Battle of the Sexes’ event with a £100,000 prize fund. It featured the unusual Scheveningen format where players in teams (ten women and ten men respectively) faced each member of the opposing team over ten days. The teams (with one reserve on each side) were carefully selected to ensure a balanced match. They included both Ravi Haria, England’s newest grandmaster, and Jovanka Houska, the nine-times British women’s champion, alongside 20 other nationalities with players from every continent.

The women raced out of the blocks with two 6.5-3.5 wins in the first two rounds. But by the halfway mark, the men had nearly caught up, and they carried that momentum to the finish for a narrow 53-47 victory.

Two moments caught my eye in the sixth round. In this position, the pawn on g2 looks poisoned, so White hopes to castle and launch an attack on the Black king. But Marie Sebag had seen further:

Eric Rosen–Marie Sebag (see diagram above left)

Gibraltar Battle of the Sexes, January 2022

22…Bxg2! 23 Qg5+ Kf8 24 Qxg2 Qxe5 Suddenly, White is in desperate trouble. Now if 25 Rc2 Qa1+ 26 Bd1 Re8+ 27 Ne4 Rad8 wins material, or 25 Ra2 Rac8 and the loose Be2 still precludes castling. 25 Rb5 Qc3 26 Rd5 26 O-O Rxd2 27 Qf3 offered slightly more hope, but Black should win. Nc7 27 Rxd8+ Rxd8 28 O-O Qxd2 29 Qxb7 Qxe2 30 Qxc7 Qg4+ 31 Qg3 Qxg3+ 32 hxg3 Rd3 33 Ra1 a5 34 a4 Rd4 A pawn up with a dominant rook, the rest was easy for Sebag. White resigned at move 66. Later that day, Bobby Cheng was struggling to convert his extra pawn for more than 30 moves, until the last move, 77…Bc7-d6 allowed a little trick. It calls to mind the ‘star flights’ theme, which often appeals to composers of chess problems.

Bobby Cheng–Gunay Mammadzada (see diagram above right)

Gibraltar Battle of the Sexes, January 2022

78 Rf3+! Each king flight allows a winning knight check. Retreating to e6 or g6 allows Nd3-f4+ followed by Rxc3, while 78…Kg4 79 Nf2 is mate! And finally: Ke4 79 Nf2+ Now 79…Kd4 defends the rook, but 80 Rxc3 Kxc3 81 Ne4+ picks up the bishop. So Black resigns

Puzzle 689 uses the ‘star flights’ theme. It belongs to a set of four problems: the symmetry of the position entails a different first move depending on whether the White king starts on g4 (as in the diagram), or e2, or a6 or c8.

No. 689

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Touw Hian Bwee, Schakend Nederland 1976. The first move allows Black’s king to run in any of four directions, with a different mating response to each one. What is it? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 14 February. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address.

Last week’s solution 1 Qxa7+ Qxa7 2 Nc7 mate.

Last week’s winner Alex Hotston, Brampton Abbotts, Herefordshire