Are we ready for the metaverse?

Facebook has rebranded itself as Meta and last month chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of 10,000 jobs to help build the ‘metaverse’ — a concept so radical nobody yet knows what it really is. People in the media tend to describe it as ‘a 3D version of the internet’. Facebook describes it rather vaguely as a network of ‘virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren’t in the same physical space as you’. Some suspect it might actually be hell.

The term metaverse first appeared in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, in which future humans distract themselves from economic collapse by submerging themselves in a parallel virtual reality world. The contemporary meaning appears to be a little different. Rather than a simulation we tap into only for entertainment, like a VR game, the metaverse is what happens when that simulation and the real world merge entirely.

Imagine you’re out walking, enjoying the splash of autumnal light in the oak trees. You decide to show your friend the view. You call her, and, thanks to your augmented reality goggles, her lifelike hologram bursts into existence in front of you. She, meanwhile, is at home wearing a headset too and thanks to the metaverse ‘mirrorworld’ can suddenly see exactly what you do. The mirrorworld is a full-scale, real-time, three-dimensional digital replica of the entire planet, right down to the last millimetre, recreated by hundreds of thousands of drones and millions of microscopic cameras planted in every street (as well as in everyone’s headsets of course), all scanning and refreshing the landscape.

After admiring the sun-bright leaves for a moment, your friend wonders what the same landscape looks like in winter. Instantly, your headsets transport you back to a digitised blizzard from February. Then, waving your hand over a tree, you trigger a hyperlink that tells you all about oak trees or the exact location of England’s other oak woods… Brrrring! Your boss is calling. So you say goodbye to your friend, select a digital suit for your avatar that you bought the previous week with bitcoin, and boot up the mirrorworld of the office meeting room.

None of this exaggerates what Facebook — and other companies — have in mind. Our current experiments in virtual reality will, they believe, evolve into a sophisticated digital ecosystem, whose tentacles will poke back into our real world at every seam — headsets, phones, watches, headphones and smart devices of all kinds. We might do our supermarket shop virtually and then have products delivered by drone. We might overlay our cities with digital, clickable street art on every wall.

Over the course of any given day, we’ll find ourselves at a hundred different points on the infinite spectrum between the wholly virtual and the wholly analogue. We might dip into some simulated fantasy game populated entirely by digital alien creatures, then ‘bring back’ one of these creatures into our augmented ‘real world’, before ‘locking’ the creature temporarily in our TV while we take off our goggles to shower. Moving between the various levels of immersion will be seamless, to the extent that we’ll no longer think of the synthetic and the real as distinct realms.

There are technical hurdles, of course. In April, Zuckerberg tweeted that squeezing supercomputers inside glasses frames was the greatest challenge of our age — ‘the key to bringing our physical and digital worlds together’. But assuming such problems can be overcome, the metaverse promises (says Zuck) to spark a ‘fourth industrial revolution’: an almost endless range of new economic opportunities in the virtual realm.

Technological progress towards this goal is astonishing. Google’s Project Starline has already made three-dimensional holographic video calls a reality by using next-generation photo-booths. Nomoko is attempting to create an accurate ‘digital twin of the world’, using drones equipped with high-resolution cameras (Nomoko claims that just ten of these drones can map a city the size of Zurich in a single day). Microsoft’s Flight Simulator has already replicated whole chunks of the planet, including, according to the writer Matthew Ball, ‘two trillion individually rendered trees, 1.5 billion buildings and nearly every road, mountain, city and airport globally… all of which look like the “real thing”, because they’re based on high-quality scans of the real thing’. It also includes real-time ‘twins’ of actual weather conditions and commercial flights. As for fantasy worlds, Epic Games’s Unreal Engine is making photorealistic landscapes and human avatars possible at the click of a button.

But surely there’s still one insurmountable hurdle: no matter how good VR headsets get, won’t the digital realm always just lack the fundamental physicality of reality?

Here we are, admittedly, entering the realm of sci-fi — but there are at least two ways round the problem of physicality. The first involves specially designed machinery that acts as a physical substitute for the real thing. We’ve already seen crude attempts at mimicking contact over long distances, such as CuteCircuit’s ‘Hug Shirt’, and Lovotics’s ‘Kissenger’, which promises to replicate the thrill of a good snog by ‘imitating and recreating the lip movement of both users in real time using two digitally connected artificial lips’. Isn’t it possible to imagine, then, a graphene thin exoskeleton that simulates the warm throb of Mediterranean sun against our skin?

The second solution would be neural implants — perhaps something like Elon Musk’s Neuralink — that trick us into perceiving sensations that aren’t there: you and I might sit in the same virtual pub, each eating synthetic protein cubes that the chips in our brains trick us into believing are scampi from a shared platter.

Quite how far all this stuff can go depends on where you think the physical limits are. Is Google’s Ray Kurzweil right that, by the end of this decade, ‘normal eating’ will be replaced by nutritional ‘nanosystems’? Who knows? But it’s likely that the metaverse will revolutionise our lives long before then — and not, of course, all for the good.

Many risks are well-documented: the prospect of ‘fake’ avatars, digital stalkers, authoritarian surveillance states. But worst will be the dissolution of internal privacy. We tend these days to think of privacy in terms of data — who has the right to know what about us. But privacy has a second meaning: freedom from disturbance — having ‘peace and privacy’.

And it’s hard to see how even our innermost thoughts can be fortified against the metaverse. Author Patricia Lockwood once wrote: ‘If I look at a phone first thing, the phone becomes my brain for the day.’ Such a concern will soon seem a quaint relic from a time when the internet still existed on actual devices — physical objects we could pick up and put down, and even occasionally turn off. Before long, if metaverse enthusiasts are right, every cubic centimetre of the world will pulsate with digital information: hyperlinks, adverts, tips, reminders.

The writer Paul Kingsnorth likes to quip that ‘civilisation is three days deep’ — that is, it takes three days without technology ‘simply to experience the world around you with genuine human attention’. The metaverse would preclude such a possibility.

Opting out altogether, though, will likely prove impossible — as unthinkable as abandoning electricity is today. You couldn’t simply choose to visit an actual shop, because they wouldn’t exist. Why pay rent on a physical store when you can simply offer a virtual one and require customers to ‘try on’ digital replica garments? Purchases will be delivered by drone from warehouses.

Perhaps, nostalgic for the old days, we’ll live in augmented reality, in quaint virtual villages with virtual pubs, while around us, in actual fact, the unaugmented world becomes a sea of warehouses, server farms and drones.

Can such a fate be avoided? It’s hard to see how. Though it’s Zuck making the headlines, the metaverse is the organic result of millions of decisions all of us are making right now. We can only hope our individual human selves can somehow survive their absorption into the metaverse’s hive-mind.

Is it worth gambling on supermarket wine bargains?

Rich men often look out for bargains. I suppose that is why they are rich. But there can be problems. Occasionally bargains fail to live up to their name. It would not be easy to find a single bottle of le Montrachet for £600, yet a friend of mine once bought a whole case for that sum. He forgot the wise old adage: ‘If something sounds too good to be true, it is probably neither.’ Not one of his 12 bottles turned out to be drinkable.

On a lesser scale, my friend Geoffrey fell victim to Waitrose. He and Louise invited me to lunch and the pièce de résistance was boeuf bourguignon. Before that, there was a brief tasting. ‘Try this,’ he said, proffering a glass as I arrived. Judging by his tone, it was not going to be a treat. The nose suggested thinness, and that was not misleading. The wine was insipid. In fact, it took the ‘sip’ out of insipid. Trying to be as complimentary as possible, I said that it was wine, not vinegar — but barely drinkable. Geoffrey concurred and sentenced the bottle to clean the sink pipes.

‘Cost three quid at Waitrose,’ I was told. ‘At that price, I felt I had to try it, especially as they call it “Good ordinary claret”.’ That is cheek, because Berry Bros also markets a good ordinary claret, for rather more than three pounds. But it drinks up to its name. If you never have a worse glass of wine, consider yourself spoiled.

These days, supermarkets’ wines are usually reliable. They employ expert buyers and drive hard bargains with the producers, giving them large orders, but not allowing much of a profit margin. They also use wine as a marketing device, seducing customers by offering low prices. The other year, Tesco’s had a St Joseph for £4.95. Not the best St Joseph I had ever drunk, but excellent value as a quaffing wine.

Waitrose should know better — though what should one expect from an outfit which sacked William Sitwell as a magazine editor just for joking about vegans? (Hardly necessary, one might have thought, when they are already a joke in their own right.) William suggested that they be force-fed meat. A kindly fellow, he probably wanted to do them a favour.

As I write, the world’s vegans are converging on Glasgow, where the globe’s problems are giving Joe Biden and Boris Johnson sleepless days. Glasgow has changed in recent years, since the days when ‘vegetable’ meant chips — with everything — and vitamin C was a class A drug. But culinary sophistication is still a minority sport.

There is an excellent restaurant, the Ubiquitous Chip, which does not live up to its name. In the late 1980s, enticed by reports about the Ub Chip’s wine list, I once gave Roy Jenkins dinner there. The reports about the wine were well-founded. There was a Pétrus for under £100, a bargain even back then. I gave Roy the good news. He protested that despite his reputation, he was happy to drink modest wines. I am told that he often said that, and never meant it. As I remember, it was as good as it should have been.

Thinking about French wine makes one uneasy. The grenouilles are not behaving well at the moment, trying to make life awkward for our fishermen and easy for illegal immigrants. As they have a trade surplus with us, while we are being generous in allowing them any fishing rights in British waters, there must be scope for retaliation.

A wise observer said the other day that as soon as Macron is re-elected, the problem will be solved in a trice. But May is a long time to wait. A trade war would be in nobody’s interests. At a time when it often seems that what can go wrong will go wrong, this does not mean that it will not happen. ‘That sweet enemy’: it may be time to delete the ‘sweet’.

The urgent case for net zero

Earlier this year, a report from climatologists around the world made it clear that climate change is happening now and that it is almost entirely a result of human behaviour. This is not a controversial conclusion and it is not hard to explain how the report’s authors arrived at it.

First, independent observations — from the ocean to the atmosphere, from poles to tropics — all show rapid and significant warming over the past century, particularly over the past few decades. Human activity has simultaneously caused a 50 per cent increase in carbon dioxide concentrations, a more than doubling of methane concentrations, and the appearance of multiple synthetic gases, all of which are potent greenhouse substances.

Who is responsible? Over the past 170 years, carbon dioxide emissions have been led by the United States, followed by China, Russia, and the UK in eighth place. It’s worth noting, however, that UK emissions have fallen faster since 2010 than those of any other major economy.

Even before the warming was distinguishable from the weather, scientists had predicted these increases in greenhouse gases would have some profound effects, namely glacier reduction, the warming of the Earth’s surface, ocean temperatures increasing and sea levels rising.

Scientists have looked at what else could be causing global warming — the sun, volcano eruptions, wobbles of the Earth’s orbit, ozone depletion, air pollution and deforestation. But when it comes to the plus 1ºC global trend in warming, only the human-caused effects — the greenhouse gases, moderated partially by cooling from air pollution — fit the evidence.

The global warming we’ve seen so far is contributing to extreme weather worldwide. Heatwaves are becoming more frequent and more intense; rain is falling harder by about 7 per cent for every degree we warm; and when there are droughts, they are becoming more intense, with decreases in soil moisture 10 to 30 per cent greater. These shifts are being recorded in most of the places where the data is good enough. The changes in Arctic sea ice (more than 40 per cent loss in September compared with the 1980s), mountain glaciers (280 billion tons of ice loss per year in the past decade which is unprecedented in millennia) and the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets (which combined are losing more than 400 billion tons of ice every year) are large and significant at only 1ºC warming.

Future ice loss and ocean warming (and hence rising sea levels) is assured, since the system is far out of energy balance. This means that more heat is absorbed by the Earth than lost. Projections of temperatures and rainfall suggest that, under a wide range of plausible scenarios, further warming is guaranteed. These changes are happening now, not in 20 or 50 years, and not to our grandchildren, but to us.

Some might be wary of basing decisions on climate models — especially given the problems forecasting the pandemic — but it’s important to realise that most outcomes depend on the overall trend and not the fine-scale details of any given model. The track record of climate models going back to the 1970s shows they have skilfully predicted the trends of the past decades.

However, the models forecast one important effect that isn’t very well recognised: how much we warm from now on is a simple function of how much carbon dioxide we emit. At the point when our emissions are balanced by our removal of carbon dioxide (this is what ‘net zero’ is), global warming will pretty much stop.

The topic of discussion in Glasgow is on how we can get to ‘net zero’. The rapid rollout of renewable energy and improving electrical grids, as well as cutting methane leaks and reforestation, are vital in the short term. Meanwhile, more speculatively, advances in nuclear energy and the greater use of carbon capture and storage are possible in the medium term. Many of these transitions will cost money, although there are many benefits (in air quality, public health and crop yield) that will result in savings in avoided costs to health and human life — even before we assess the avoided damages from climate change itself.

The price of inaction is becoming more apparent. Hurricane Ida broke all records for rainfall intensity in the north-east United States, with insurance damages reaching £20 billion. Costs of adaptation are also growing: the project to protect Venice using flood barriers has topped £5 billion but is still not complete, and the Thames flood defences are projected to reach more than £3 billion through to 2050, and more than £10 billion by the end of the century. These are just efforts for two cities, but there are many changes that we will simply not be able to adapt to.

Some will take solace in the noisy rainfall records of a town in Sussex, or the sea level in Sweden dropping due to the loss of ice sheets 20,000 years ago, or poorly measured extreme temperatures in Death Valley in California. But those refugia for climate smugness are as endangered as the coral reefs and tropical glaciers. The latest United Nations report showed that the global changes are making themselves felt locally, and the denial of the changes and their causes is increasingly untenable. This should not paralyse us — it should shock us into action.

From the archive: the nature of Japan

From ‘The rule of taste’, Anthony Thwaite, 6 March 1959: The society of aristocrats, connoisseurs, wise men and heroes which was the Japan of Yeats’s imagination did exist. It was capable of moments which combine, in the true spirit of Zen, extraordinary aesthetic perception with what looks like plain flippancy. This is revealed, for example, in the anecdote which Sir George [Sansom] tells about the Emperor Shirakawa, who had summoned a stricken old campaigner to the Palace to tell the story of his campaigns. ‘The old soldier began, “Once when Yoshiiye had left the Defence Headquarters for the fortress at Akita, a light snow was falling and the men…” at which point His Majesty broke in and said: “Stop there! It is a most elegant and striking picture. Nothing more is needed.” He gave the old man a handsome present and sent him away.’ Such a story may seem a long way from the spirit of Bushido or the Rape of Nanking; but it tells one something equally important — indeed, more important — about the nature of Japan.

Would the ancient Greeks have agreed that children are born evil?

The ‘social mobility tsar’ Katharine Birbalsingh has suggested that children, born evil, ‘need to be taught right from wrong and then habituated into choosing good over evil’. The Twitter mob is equally certain that all children are born ‘good’, and it is their environment that spoils them. Ancient Greeks, ignorant of St Augustine, did not think that this was a simple either/or question but that moral capacity was determined in many different ways, depending on e.g. age, sex, status, intelligence, chance, fate (etc.) — and nature.

Greeks thought the gods had little to say about the question, since myth did not suggest they were our moral superiors, though that did not stop gods intervening in a man’s life if they so chose. Best therefore to acknowledge them with offerings. What Greeks did find fascinating was that man-made laws and customs must have originated at some time in the past and wondering how customs/laws/usages/conventions (nomos) related to the all-powerful world of nature (phusis).

Democritus argued that e.g. it was phusis for man to procreate and rear young, but nomos for him to expect some return from it. Herodotus thought that nomos largely determined national differences.

Another Greek suggested that the Scythians’ phusis was one thing, but had they grown up in Greece, Greek nomos would have remodelled them. Pericles suggested that Athens’s unique man-made culture and constitution gave it its special strength.

On the other hand Greeks were perfectly happy to argue that ‘nature matters most, for no one by giving a good upbringing to what is bad can make it good’; however, ‘teaching is similar to nature: it changes the tenor of a man and so determines the way he grows’ (so teaching can in fact change one’s nature); but ‘it is always grievous when a man deserts his own nature and does what it is not appropriate to it’ (so one’s nature is not an all-powerful controlling constituent of one’s being).

The Greeks could not determine the origins of moral capacity either, but at least they understood its extreme complexity.

Are there more over-seventies or twenty-somethings behind the wheel?

Another minute

Addressing COP26 in Glasgow, the Prime Minister claimed it was ‘one minute to midnight’ in the fight against climate change. How many warnings have we had?

— ‘We have a small window of time in which we can plant the seeds of change, and that is the next five years’ James Leape, WWF international director-general, 2007

— ‘Our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control’ Prince Charles, Copenhagen climate summit, 2009

— Our ‘last chance to avert dangerous climate change’ Earth League, 2015

— ‘We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN’ Guardian, 2018

A changing climate

How have our attitudes towards climate change evolved over the past decade?

Very or fairly concerned 

2012 65%

2013 66%

2014 68%

2015 66%

2016 70%

2017 71%

2018 74%

2019 80%

2020 76%

Not very or not at all concerned

2012 35%

2013 33%

2014 31%

2015 33%

2016 29%

2017 27%

2018 23%

2019 19%

2020 22%

Source: BEIS

The use of land

Has leaving the Common Agricultural Policy changed land use in the English countryside? Thousands of hectares

2016

Total agricultural land 9,520

Rough grazing 399

Arable crops 3,857

Cereals 2,617

Oilseeds 571

Potatoes 104

Horticulture 136

Permanent grassland 3,760

Woodland 370

Outdoor pigs 10

Farmland left unfarmed 143

2021

Total agricultural land 9,374

Rough grazing 399

Arable crops 3,746

Cereals 2,692

Oilseeds 313

Potatoes 103

Horticulture 131

Permanent grassland 3,558

Woodland 382

Outdoor pigs 12

Farmland left unfarmed 160

Source: Defra

Behind the wheel

The Queen was spotted driving in Windsor Great Park. The percentage of over-seventies with a driving licence has been rising, with a huge increase last year.

1975/76 15%

1991 32%

2000 40%

2010 57%

2019 67%

2020 77%

More over-seventies now hold a driving licence than 21- to 29-year-olds (72%)

Source: Department for Transport

The enduring power of Japan’s doomsday cults

It is now 26 years since the doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyu (‘supreme truth’) carried out the worst domestic terrorist attack in Japanese history. Led by their leader Shoko Asahara, Aum released sarin gas on to the Tokyo subway, killing 13 and injuring 6,000. It remains the only time a weapon of mass destruction has been deployed by a private organisation. The details were sickening: one woman had to have her eyes surgically removed because the nerve gas fused her contact lenses on to them.

Despite Asahara’s execution in 2018, the death cult has (somehow) survived, changing its name to Aleph and spawning two splinter groups. Aleph is small but appears to be in rude health, with 1,650 members, considerable cash reserves and several properties. It reportedly attracts hundreds of recruits, mostly young men, every year.

Last week, Aleph was suspended as an organisation after refusing to hand over information about its assets to the Public Security Intelligence Agency. The order bans it from using its own facilities, recruiting new members, obtaining land and buildings and receiving donations, for six months.

It’s unclear how similar Aleph is to Aum. But it is staggering to many here in Japan that an offshoot of a murderous doomsday cult is still in business, and even growing. The cults are something of a diagnostic tool for the health of Japanese society: their existence proves that Japan’s problems aren’t being remedied by traditional institutions.

Understanding the complex yet enduring appeal of cults in Japan requires historical background. When emperor worship came to an abrupt halt at the end of the second world war, it created a vacuum into which came the first significant wave of new religious groups. Religious organisations were given tax exemptions which, in a time of great financial hardship, also made them attractive.

A second wave of religious cults arrived in the ‘bubble’ era of the 1970s and 1980s. Easy money and a dizzying pace of change upset the natural order. Society drifted towards amorality and decadence. The lonely, disorientated out-of-towners who had been lured to the big city by the booming economy were easy targets. Gurus offered them a sense of belonging and spiritual succour. This was the fertile ground within which Aum grew.

Aum’s appeal was more specialised than other cults. It recruited from the elite: Tokyo university graduates, lawyers, doctors and businessmen, who, perhaps burdened by the guilt of their success in life, were persuaded to hand over wealth to a charismatic messiah offering salvation from an imminent apocalypse. The leader was an obvious fraud. Asahara began his career peddling a snake oil known as Almighty Medicine (in fact just tangerine peel in alcohol) for $7,000 a shot to the terminally ill. George Orwell, who said that ‘some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them’, might have recognised the dynamic.

Many heavyweight Japanese writers, from Haruki Murakami to Kenzaburo Oe, have focused on the phenomenon of Japan’s cults. The disturbing conclusion is that people joined Aum to reject a ‘system’ in which everyone has a clearly defined but severely limited role. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote that fascism succeeded because it ‘so terrifyingly took care of [the 20th century’s] problems’. The same could be said for Japan’s cults, which still offer an immediate answer to the bewildering consequences of modernity.

Today, there are as many as 2,000 cults operating in Japan. Most are linked in some way to the traditional Buddhist and Shinto faiths, whose teachings are so vague that they are infinitely accommodating. The majority are harmless, and some are not really cults at all but fronts for criminal activity. Others are tax dodges.

The most significant is Soka Gakkai, a Buddhist religious movement based on the teachings of the 13th-century Japanese priest Nichiren. Supporters would recoil at the suggestion that they are members of a cult, but many Japanese people feel distinctly uneasy with the influence the group now wields. Soka Gakkai is deeply embedded in Japanese society: its political party, Komeito, is a junior partner in the current government. Many Japanese see Soka Gakkai as a radical movement deserving of suspicion.

Japan has had three prime ministers in the past two years. Meanwhile debt continues to rise, the birth rate continues to fall, and technology promises emotional surrogacy. Cultish groups like Aleph aren’t followed by the majority, but yet they still occupy a significant place in Japanese society. This week’s stabbing and arson attack on the subway by a lone assailant dressed as the Joker from Batman was a traumatic reminder for many of the horrors of the Aum attack and yet another symptom of the sclerosis that has left many in Japan feeling adrift.

Why I didn’t get a hug at COP26

COP26 is not your typical power summit, because world leaders, NGOs and hacks are all in the same scrum. Outside their gilded fortresses politicians reveal different habits. John Kerry has the most purposeful stride, eyes rigid to the front, refusing to acknowledge the melee. Macron gives an impromptu press conference at the drop of a hat: he always has an articulate opinion to share, though his macho minders manhandle anyone who gets a little too close. Trudeau is predictably generous with his flirtatious smile. And Modi is the most huggy, which I hadn’t anticipated. He hugs everyone. Except me. I was particularly struck by his warm embrace of Luxembourg’s PM, Bettel. It felt like a symbol of this whole sprawling, dizzying affair: a country teeming with aspirational people putting the squeeze on a tiny country overflowing with surplus capital.

COP is a world away from the immediately preceding G20 summit in Rome, which was held in Mussolini’s modernist EUR district, and where the 20 assorted duci were separated from us hoi polloi with fascist rigour. I tell you one thing though about the G20 autarky: food was free, plentiful and yummy (the vitello tonnato was particularly good), whereas COP26’s is not even up to Pret standards, and the sausage rolls run out fast. When it comes to summits, perhaps benign dictatorship has its good points.

The portable loos in the vast Glasgow conference centre are an unfortunate example of what’s wrong with the British economy. There are far too few of them, and an army of latex-glove-wearing men armed with disinfectant and J-cloths wipe them down after every use. It is the most horrible and arguably the most important job here. But this is what happens when too little is invested in kit — in this case, decent loos and more of them — and instead we rely on cheap labour. This is the UK’s low productivity, low-wage structural flaw in a nutshell. It’s not the showcase for hi-tech, capital-rich Britain that Johnson wants.

I simply asked the question ‘When and why did Boris Johnson become an eco warrior?’ and the social media pile-on was instantaneous — from those who don’t believe it and the rest who don’t want to. Like it or lump it, the Prime Minister has absorbed his climate-change briefs and is serious about it. On global warming, he is not the something-will-turn-up chancer we all thought we knew. Okay, so he seemed to be resting his eyes when sitting in the plenary next to the saintly Attenborough, though Downing Street is adamant he was not power-napping. But if he was, and nodding off at a summit or a lecture is a crime, then I’ll be doing time for ever.

More surprising is the eccentricity of the classicist PM’s retelling of ancient history. I interviewed him at dawn in the Colosseum, because he wanted to scare us that climate change could do to us what the Visigoths did to Rome. ‘The Romans thought they were going to go on for ever,’ he told me. ‘Then wham in the middle of the 5th century. They hit a complete crisis. Uncontrolled immigration. You have the Dark Ages.’ That ‘uncontrolled immigration’ line puzzled his officials. ‘We don’t know where that came from,’ said one. I know it has been a long and tiring few months, but the arguments for leaving the EU and for the end of the Roman Empire aren’t quite the same.

Johnson rarely looks as chipper as when he engages in a bit of banter with the French President. That’s presumably why he resisted bashing France after the French impounded a fishing boat. Instead, on a Union Flag-decorated private plane to Rome, the PM told us hacks that there may be others with ‘an interest in somehow creating disharmony between the UK and France’, but they were not doing it in his name and surely not in the name of his pal ‘Emmanuel’. Later, when Johnson learned that French PM Jean Castex had written to the EU Commission President saying it was important for all to see the UK would suffer more pain outside the EU than in, he looked mournful and puzzled. It’s quite a performance.

Ever since writing my first thriller, The Whistleblower, I have a new helper in my day job — its anti-hero central character, the journalist Gil Peck. Reviewers have jumped to the conclusion that he’s my evil twin. I admit nothing. But when wondering what to ask a politician or how to land a scoop, I think ‘What would Gil do?’ and I do the opposite. Well, usually.

Portrait of the week: Fishing friction, Greta’s singalong and terror in Tokyo

Home

Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told delegates to the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26) in Glasgow: ‘It’s one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock and we need to act now.’ He left the conference the next day. British companies would have to publish plans on reaching net zero by 2050. India said it would reach net zero by 2070. Greta Thunberg, aged 18, stood in Govan Festival Park leading a chorus of ‘You can shove your climate crisis up your arse’ to the tune of ‘Ye cannae shove yer grannie aff a bus’. ‘None of us will live for ever,’ the Queen said in a video message: ‘The leading role my husband played in encouraging people to protect our fragile planet lives on through the work of our eldest son Charles and his eldest son William. I could not be more proud of them.’ She had been advised to rest from all but light duties for a fortnight; she would not attend the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall on 13 November, but it was her ‘firm intention’ to be at the Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph the following day.

Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, repeatedly said that she would not roll over. She was referring to a row with France over fishing rights, after a scallop boat was impounded at Le Havre. George Eustice, the Environment Secretary, said it had been released; but it hadn’t. Jean Castex, the French Prime Minister, said in a letter to Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, that the EU must demonstrate in this dispute that there was ‘more damage to leaving the EU than in remaining there’. Widening the points of disagreement to the Northern Ireland Protocol, Maros Sefcovic, a European Commission vice-president, said he was ‘increasingly concerned’ that the UK government would ‘embark on a path of confrontation’. Two trains crashed in the Fisherton Tunnel near Salisbury, seriously injuring a driver and leaving 13 with minor injuries. The Isle of Wight’s Island Line reopened after ten months.

In the seven days up to the beginning of this week, 1,097 people had died with coronavirus, bringing the total of deaths (within 28 days of testing positive) to 140,558. (In the previous week deaths had numbered 934.) Numbers remaining in hospital rose in a week from about 8,300 to nearly 9,000. The Commons transport select committee said that the introduction of smart motorways should be halted. Jes Staley resigned as chief executive of Barclays after his relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein was questioned. Kathleen Stock resigned as a professor of philosophy at Sussex University, where she had faced a campaign to have her sacked for believing in the significance of biological sex.

Abroad

The total in the world reported to have died with coronavirus reached 5,010,198 by the beginning of the week. The Chinese government urged families to stock up on essential supplies; no reason was given beyond the need to be prepared if a lockdown was announced. At Onda in the Valencia region, where Covid restrictions had been lifted on a bull-running event, a man was gored to death. The former Fifa officials Sepp Blatter, 85, and Michel Platini, 66, were charged in Switzerland with fraud, which they denied.

President Emmanuel Macron said he knew that Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister of Australia, had lied to him about the Aukus submarine deal; Mr Morrison then released a text message from Mr Macron suggesting that it was he who had lied. President Joe Biden of the United States returned home to find that the Republican candidate, Glenn Youngkin, had been elected as the governor of Virginia. After Facebook announced that it was changing its name to Meta, Hebrew-speakers pointed out that the word meant ‘dead’. A high-rise building under construction in Lagos collapsed, and dozens were missing in the ruin. After six weeks, the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma continued to spew lava and spoilt banana plantations with ash.

Officials in Addis Ababa called on residents to prepare to protect their neighbourhoods after the Tigray People’s Liberation Front claimed it had captured two cities 250 miles away. More than 20 were killed in a gun and bomb assault on a military hospital in Kabul; the Taliban government blamed Islamic State affiliate IS-K. A 24-year-old man wearing a Joker costume wounded 17 on a Tokyo train and set fire to the carriage.

The flaw in Britain’s net-zero plan

The COP26 summit is unlikely to be an outright flop. There has been no shortage of drama, with speakers seeming to compete with each other to see who could use the most histrionic language. Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, went so far as to compare the attending leaders to Nazi appeasers. He later apologised.

Some progress, albeit small, is being made. A hundred countries have been persuaded, some on the promise of sweeteners worth £14 billion, to sign a pledge to end deforestation by 2030. Brazil, the most important of all, is among them. India has agreed, for the first time, to set itself a date for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions — although its target, 2070, is two decades beyond what the United Nations would have liked. Most leaders at Glasgow will be dead by then.

One thing is unlikely to have changed by the end of the two-week conference. For all the pledges made and aspirations expressed by countries around the world, Britain will remain one of a tiny handful of countries to have turned its carbon-reduction pledges into law. Almost all the others will do as they have previously done and allow themselves some wriggle room. Pointedly, China’s short-term carbon-reduction targets are expressed ‘per unit of GDP’ — emphasising that it has no intention of sacrificing economic growth on the altar of tackling climate change.

This leaves Britain with a very serious problem: what to do if some of the technology which will be required to reach net zero disappoints? It is very noble to want to set an example to the rest of the world by legally committing yourself to eliminating carbon emissions. It will not look so clever in, say, 15 years’ time if we are still struggling to store copious quantities of energy generated on sunny and windy days for sunless and becalmed days when our wind farms and solar farms are generating next to nothing.

The Prime Minister insists there is nothing ‘hair-shirt’ about his decarbonisation plans, yet for this to be true he would need technology that has not yet been invented and no one really expects to be any time soon. Technology does often surprise on the upside — nobody could have predicted the scale of the computing revolution we have seen in recent years. It can also disappoint. Half a century ago, nuclear fusion was seen by many as the answer to all our energy needs, providing almost limitless quantities of energy at next to no cost. Yet had we wagered our future on its success at that point, closing down all alternative sources of power, we would now be living in the dark.

In 2019, parliament waved through the net-zero target without even a Commons vote. MPs relied at that point on an estimate by the Committee on Climate Change that achieving net zero would cost in the order of £1 trillion by 2050. Two years on, the Treasury says it cannot put a figure on the costs — and no wonder, when much of the technology which will be required either doesn’t exist or has yet to be scaled up. All we can be sure about is that the policies so far announced, such as banning new gas boilers by 2035, will cost households many thousands of pounds — both in buying alternative heat pumps and in insulating homes to make them effective.

It is highly improbable that other countries will choose to make their people poorer, or colder, in order to meet arbitrary carbon reduction targets. Even Germany — seen by many as one of the more enlightened countries in tackling climate change — has signalled its intent by responding to the spike in global gas prices by upping coal-burning. Like Britain, it had been phasing out coal, but it will not do that at the price of leaving the country short of affordable power.

What our own government needs — but there is scant sign it has yet — is a Plan B in the event of decarbonisation technology failing to advance in the way that is hoped. Specifically, is Britain prepared to relax the 2050 deadline if it becomes clear that to proceed means undermining our remaining heavy industry and causing severe economic hardship? So far, the government has not attempted to answer this question. For now, its main agenda seems to be to up the rhetoric of doom, so as to argue that there is simply no alternative to achieving net zero by 2050 — that to fail to do so would be to lay waste to the Earth and the economy likewise. This is hyperbole, deployed to conceal the lack of a clear plan.

Glasgow was supposed to mark the moment when the rest of the world shifted towards sharing Britain’s sense of urgency on climate change. Yet for all the progress which has been made this week, there is little sign that other countries are prepared to go along. People want to know: how can net zero be reached without trapping millions of people in poverty? There is still no answer.

The healing power of champagne

The day after Catriona was fitted with a plaster cast and crutches, her elder sister arrived from the UK for a rare visit. Marigold is also on crutches. Diabetes. Which left me as the only able-bodied member of the household, though an ethereal one.

I try daily ‘to run with determination the race that is set before me’ (Hebrews 12:1). Champagne helps. Our seasonal neighbour Professor Brian Cox has pointed me to a website specialising in getting the produce of small family-run champagne houses to your doorstep within 48 hours at a considerably cheaper price than the local supermarket and very decent it is too. I have a half-bottle at breakfast.

‘Glass of champagne, Marigold?’ I asked her at a quarter to nine on the first morning of her visit. ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘You’re only young once.’ One seldom encounters anyone as unintellectual as Marigold and she talks continuously. I like her enormously. I poured us out a glass each of Fermier Giles 2013 and settled back.

Marigold has plenty of excitement in her life, all of it online. Last year, for example, she fell in love with an impoverished young Nigerian masquerading as a prosperous Canadian businessman with a temporary cash-flow problem. Fortunately, before the money transfer went through, the scales had fallen from her eyes. ‘I saw red, I can tell you. I gave him what for.’ ‘What did you say to him?’ ‘Oh, I really told him. “Pardon me,” I said. “But aren’t you ashamed of your deceitfulness?”’ ‘And what did he say to that?’ ‘He passed me on to one of his friends. And this friend tried to get money out of me as well, for his education, he said. I’ve got to say he was a lovely lad and I might have sent him some. But he asked me for a ridiculous amount.’

Since then she’s been involved online with old television cowboys, including the remaining cast members of the late-1960s TV series The High Chaparral. She showed me on her phone a photo of a craggy-faced octogenarian wearing a Stetson. This old cowboy actor had taken a shine to this woman living near Redcar (which is the diabetic capital of the UK, I read the other day). They spoke often on Zoom. ‘Shouldn’t you take your hat off when speaking to a lady?’ she’d said to him the first time. He sent a signed photo and invited her over to New Mexico, to an airport hotel. ‘Suddenly, I smelled a rat, Jeremy,’ she said. ‘And when he told me he was also having an affair with his well repairer, I distanced myself. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m just not that sort of a woman.” And then one of his old girlfriends got in touch and she tried to get money out of me too.’

‘Another glass of champagne?’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t really,’ she said. ‘You’re on holiday,’ I said.

Having resiled from the dwindling — three regular cast members passed away during the pandemic — but still sexually active High Chaparral veterans’ association, she ventured online again, this time to find out who she was. She is Catriona’s adopted sister and had always believed she was of Indian heritage. At school in Paisley she was bullied terribly because everybody else thought so too. So she sent off some spit and some money and discovered that she was 40 per cent Navaho.

‘Jeremy, I can’t tell you how pleased I was. I have always felt that I might be part Native American Indian. I have always felt an affinity. So I wasn’t surprised. But we’re all such a mixture when you get down to it.’

‘Rubbish!’ I said. ‘I’m not. My sister did one of those spit tests recently and it came back that she was 96 per cent Essex and 4 per cent Scandinavian.’ ‘Well, I have to say, Jeremy, that that is highly unusual,’ she said primly.

Our champagne transcendence lasted until about midday. At three o’clock, after a siesta, I shepherded Catriona and her sister down the path. We were driving over to Professor Cox and family to sample his latest champagne consignment. Hobbling and staggering and bristling with crutches, we looked like a remnant of the retreat from Mons.

Once Marigold fell down and badly grazed her knee. I offered a forearm to haul her back upright but strength failed me at a crucial point and down she went again. It was the weight of our two champagne bottles that she had insisted on carrying in her pretty little canvas backpack that had unbalanced her, she said.

‘Did you bring your swimming costume?’ I said, changing the subject. ‘Brian’s pool is still open.’ And lying on the path among the jagged stones she went into this long-winded explanation of why she had finally decided, after a considerable debate with herself, to leave her swimming costume at home.

The tyranny of the visual

In 1450, the Duke of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro, became monocular after losing vision in his right eye following a jousting accident. In order to improve the peripheral vision of his left eye, he had surgeons cut off the bridge of his nose. In Piero della Francesca’s 1472 portrait, the Duke is depicted in profile, so we can see that an equilateral triangle of flesh and bone has been chopped from what must have been an elegant aquiline beak.

I have been more fortunate. In the past year I’ve had four operations at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London to repair a detached retina that made me blind in one eye. I didn’t have to cut off my nose to spite my face and improve my vision. What was impossible in the 15th century has become routine in the 21st. I’m one of 6,000 or so Brits this year who have this surgery. My surgeon Georgios Varakis has patiently repaired what he poetically calls my posterior starfold. He has drained fluid from my eye, filling it first with silicone oil, then gas, then lasered it to create scar tissue to repair retinal tears and installed a synthetic lens. Lovely drugs have dulled what would otherwise have been awful pain: during one op I happily chatted to Georgios about Christmas goose while he burned my retina with laser probes.

Looking at Piero’s painting made me think about the fate of those who had retinal detachments before 1921. They were doomed to lose their sight. Then, a century ago, Swiss ophthalmologist Jules Gonin invented so-called ignipunctures. The procedure involved using a sharp stick — like the one that had done for the Duke of Urbino’s right eye, but much, much smaller — to restore vision, rather than destroy it. And it did: millions around the world should be grateful to Gonin for pioneering eye surgery that has since developed using laser and cryogenic freezing techniques.

Millions, too, should be grateful to a pair of British men. In the skies over Winchester on 15 August 1940, Hurricane pilot Gordon ‘Mouse’ Cleaver lined up behind a Junkers Ju 88, but his plane was raked with machine-gun fire destroying its window, and making acrylic shards stick in his eyes. The Hurricane burst into flames but, though burnt and bleeding, Cleaver flipped the plane upside down in order to fall out of the cockpit and then parachuted safely to the ground. After 18 operations, Mouse still had plastic splinters in one eye. His doctor, Harold Ridley, noted that these splinters had no effect on his sight, nor did his body make an effort to expel them. This gave him an idea: plastic lenses might replace defective cataract lenses and restore vision. On 29 November 1949, Ridley implanted the world’s first interocular lens. The pseudophakia that Georgios installed to replace my natural lens was a consequence of Ridley’s insight.

One morning earlier this autumn, I was strolling on London’s South Bank with my newly attached retina and plastic lens to see some art. My left eye does not have the acute vision I had formerly, so I find myself squinting to read or study details. I was wondering what it would be like if I had lost my sight entirely. When Gloucester is blinded in King Lear, Regan adds her own cruel twist: ‘Go thrust him out at gates, and let him smell his way to Dover.’ If he were a dog, he might have been able to do so; humans are less skilled in smelling. Even if we cannot see, we are tyrannised by the visual. Our language is rich in visual metaphors; our science overwhelmingly discovers through looking; and when we can’t see — inside the atom or into the distance — we still think in visual terms. No one ever sniffed out the existence of a star. As an arts journalist, I’m forever looking at things before I write about them. Dover? I couldn’t smell my way to Waterloo.

At the Hayward Gallery a new exhibition of British contemporary painting made me appreciate as never before how lucky I am to see. Room to room I went, squinting the while but often feeling like applauding. That said, the first picture I saw in the show stopped me in my tracks. ‘The Captain and the Mate’ by Lubaina Himid depicts an imagined scene inspired by a real-life tragedy. In April 1819, a French slave ship called Le Rodeur was crossing the Atlantic when disease swept through the fleet making all 60 slaves and all but one of the crew blind. Himid depicts two African men holding each other for comfort in the middle of the painting, and below left two African women in a tender embrace. I squinted to read Himid’s note next to the work. ‘I was struck by the horror of the incident, but also by the dread of losing sight, especially as a visual artist.’

Blindness and the rape of slavery are thematically yoked together by Himid. But here’s the thing: what I saw in Himid’s painting isn’t only visual; I can almost feel the tenderness of the two couples as they hold each other. Many painters achieve such synaesthetic transfer. I can almost taste Cézanne’s apples and pears, feel the embroidery on the ‘Laughing Cavalier’s slashed sleeves. But the eyes still have it: to get those sensations at all, vision is necessary. Upstairs at the Hayward I admire Rachel Jones’s glorious picture (with its bizarre title) ‘lick your teeth, they so clutch’. Jones says she wants the experience of viewing her paintings to involve ‘feeling with your eyes’ as if her pictures are for the whole body, for a democracy of senses.

I wandered further along the Thames to Tate Modern where Anicka Yi’s new installation in the Turbine Hall is trying something different. She wants us to feel with our noses. She is an artist who tells me she hates visual art and instead works in the medium of smells. ‘I sculpt the air,’ she says. To that end she has floated giant airborne cephalopods, with long, squid-like arms in this cavernous space, each one of them drawn to human heat and each one emitting evocative scents to do with London’s past — be those the aromas of spices used to ward off the Black Death; Precambrian period marine scents; prehistoric vegetal decay; the stench of the Industrial Age, ozone and coal smoke.

The pathos of Yi’s installation is that I and most other people I’ve spoken to don’t have sufficiently sophisticated noses to detect these wafting, fragrant sculptures. We remain in thrall to the visible even if our vision is blurry. Even if, perhaps, we are blind, we still think in visual metaphors. There is no democracy of senses for humans; just a tyranny of the eye. Until we have prosthetic noses or can share dogs’ olfactory experiences or the nasal sophistication of the best oenologists, olfactory art, I suspect, will have limited appeal.

The genius of Caveh Zahedi

365 Stories I Want To Tell You Before We Both Die is a podcast that experimental filmmaker Caveh Zahedi started at the beginning of this year. Each episode is a short story, ranging from six minutes to 30 seconds, told directly to the audience. Zahedi has been a quiet star of the American indie scene for decades. His films are almost always autobiographical, and his podcast, with episodes titled ‘My Least Favorite Person’ and ‘My Therapist Insists I Tell Suzanne About the Prostitute’ and ‘What Richard Linklater Said To Me About Why I Was a Failure’, is no different. The subject matter ranges from past sexual experiences, failed film projects and parenting to run-ins with famous people, and his ex-girlfriends.

If Zahedi can be called a superlative artist, it is in the category of openness. The Show About the Show, his television show that has a cult-like following, is a docuseries with a seemingly simple premise: each episode is about the making of the previous episode. It depicts his life with an intensity — and intimacy — that is unmatched even in the age of reality television. Zahedi’s insistence on showing himself smoking weed with his students on set — because it happened — results in his near-termination from a professorship at the New School. The pressures of reenacting their entire life on camera pushes his wife to pursue an affair, and eventually she divorces him and takes the kids — only after Caveh has directed a sex scene between her and the lover. Zahedi’s most acclaimed film, 2005’s I Am a Sex Addict, tells the story of his ‘compulsive honesty’ and addiction to paying for sex as he prepares to embark on a third marriage, freed from his addiction.

365 Stories is no less honest than his other work. It does, however, stray from his work as a director, in which he (or his onscreen persona) usually stays buoyant, even chipper, in the face of tragedy. On the podcast, Zahedi allows himself to mine even the most mundane stories for their woeful core. Frequently, at the end of a story, he finds himself in tears. In more than one episode he details tracking down an ex-girlfriend to try to reconnect after one of his many divorces and being rebuffed. After discussing his estranged older sister who he realises cares for him through small acts of affection, Zahedi begins weeping, reminding himself to tell her for the first time that he loves her in case she should suddenly die.

One entertaining genre of story Zahedi likes to tell is ‘run-in with major artists’. In one episode, Paul Auster detests a translation Zahedi did of a book by Maurice Blanchot. In another, Zahedi recalls asking the playwright Amiri Baraka to write a play for his anti-apartheid student group at Yale. His request is granted, and he directs the play, but then loses the sole copy. In one of the best episodes, Zahedi gets stage fright while accepting an award for ‘Best Film NOT Playing at a Theater Near You’ and stands frozen on stage, which makes Bill Murray erupt into laughter from the crowd. In another, artist Laurie Simmons is on the panel for the Rome Prize, which he wins because her daughter, Lena Dunham, loves his films. He then feels hurt when Dunham gets famous and stops returning his emails. When people have access to the famous and powerful, they often do not tell these kinds of stories for fear of being excluded from their world. Zahedi has no problem with this. He’s interested in how the famous and powerful make him feel, more than in their fame or power, which is refreshing, and almost brave.

The revelation for Zahedi at the end of many episodes is that, more than anything, he is searching for connection. But listening to the podcast, you wonder whether Zahedi really deserves this. He is, by his own admission, cruel — a bully, a coward and self-involved. It can occasionally feel almost sadistic listening to this bumbling narcissist describe his experience travelling through the world, knowing (because he tells us) that he truly is alone.

Like Alan Bennett but less funny: ‘night, Mother at Hampstead Theatre reviewed

’night, Mother is a two-hander that opens like a comedy sketch. ‘I’m going to kill myself, Mama,’ says Jessie. She’s cleaning a pistol and loading it with bullets. ‘I’ll shoot myself in a couple of hours.’ The pair live together in a lonely farmhouse, and Jessie wants to make sure her mother will be able to cope after her death. She tours the kitchen explaining where the fuses and the cleaning materials are kept. Mama, who doesn’t seem unduly alarmed, offers to phone her son and get him to thwart the suicide attempt. ‘I’ll just have to do it before he gets here,’ says Jessie.

This is an intensely dramatic set-up which ought to be either gripping or hilarious, or both. Somehow it lacks punch. The script, by Marsha Norman, has the kind of homely wit that we associate with Alan Bennett. Jessie suffers from epilepsy which has prevented her from pursuing a career. She failed in telesales because ‘I didn’t even make enough money to pay the telephone bill’. And she was dismissed from a hospital gift shop: ‘I made people real uncomfortable smiling at them the way I did.’

Mama is adept at observational comedy too. She has a best friend, Agnes, whose clumsiness is legendary. ‘She’s burned down every house she ever lived in.’ The accidental fires became a local attraction. ‘One time she set out porch chairs and served lemonade.’ Agnes also has a passion for exotic birds which she purchases with borrowed money. ‘She’s still paying on the last parrot she bought.’ That’s a great line. But the danger is that these quirky off-stage characters will become more interesting than the personalities in the story. The viewer starts to wonder if the clumsy Agnes will show up and try to grab the pistol from the suicidal Jessie. But no, it’s just a mother and daughter circling each other for 90 minutes. The script is nearly 40 years old and today’s audiences expect more narrative complexity. Although it’s funny and moving at times, it isn’t funny or moving enough.

The ushers at the press night of PRIME_TIME handed out earplugs to the audience. ‘It’s a noisy show,’ they warned. They should have given us a blindfold too. This spectacularly ugly caper is about Jeff Bezos and his space programme. The action takes place in a scruffy warehouse scattered with Amazon boxes and surrounded by cheap plastic drapes. Two half-naked women enter, garishly lit, while a soundtrack thrashes out the kind of raucous techno beat that makes dogs whimper. The women pick up baseball bats and vandalise the Amazon boxes while yelling abuse at Bezos. They condemn his baldness, his excessive fortune and his phallomorphic space rocket. And though they insist that he has a fixation with his penis they seem unaware that this obsession is theirs, not his.

Time and again they yell the same trio of questions at Alexa, Amazon’s robot: ‘Alexa, why is he so bald? Why is he so rich? Why is his rocket shaped like that?’ These are interesting issues, of course, but Alexa fails to supply informative answers. Baldness is caused by genetics, hormones and ageing. Bezos’s wealth arises from millions of contracts agreed freely between Amazon and its customers. And the shape of his rocket owes more to aerodynamics than to human anatomy. However, the women have no interest in listening to answers only in bawling out their questions at top volume and enjoying the noise of their poisonous militancy. A psychiatrist would recognise them as violent offenders: they’re stupid, angry, amoral, and not averse to using force if necessary.

Next, their puerile rant takes a dangerous turn. They describe flying to America and making their way to a town where Bezos owns a home. (They name the town and reveal the cost of the journey.) They imagine breaking into his property and waking him at night. After torturing and killing him, they pack his body parts into Amazon boxes. At no point do they consider their actions wrong, let alone illegal. It seems extremely reckless nowadays to describe a homicidal fantasy in such specific detail. Had the target of this psychotic drama been a wealthy Briton, such as Stormzy or Lewis Hamilton, the producers would have faced a grilling from the authorities. The Barbican’s joint directors should ask themselves if they’re justified in staging a work that appears to advocate the murder of a named individual.

The same applies to the Royal Court, which in June hosted a drama about two angry pipsqueaks who hatched a plot to kill the American entrepreneur Kylie Jenner. Another publicly funded playhouse, Theatr Clwyd, produced a play in 2018 that explicitly considered the execution of Katie Hopkins. The commissioners of such work should be more circumspect. And the Arts Council needs to explain why it uses tax-payers’ money to fund dramas that condone terrorism.

A blisteringly bonkers first episode: Doctor Who – Flux reviewed

BBC1 continuity excitedly introduced the first in the new series of Doctor Who as ‘bigger and better than ever’ — presumably because the more accurate ‘bigger and better than it’s been for a bit’ doesn’t have quite the same punch. Still, Sunday’s programme was a definite, even exhilarating improvement on those of recent years. Since Chris Chibnall became the showrunner in 2018, thrills have taken a firm second place to solemn lectures on how the most dangerous monster of all is human prejudice. Yet at no stage here did the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) encounter some acknowledged hero of black and/or women’s history — and so allow us a self-satisfied bask in having risen above the bigotry of less enlightened times. Just like in its various pomps, it mingled spectacle, an impressive range of scary creatures and several memorable set-pieces with fast-paced, funny dialogue.

Granted, there was also a distinct feeling of a show with its back to the wall. Following July’s announcement that Chibnall (taking Whittaker with him) is leaving to make way for the messiah-like return of Russell T. Davies many Whovians are already looking forward to the bright new post-Chibnall future. But this rather overlooks the fact that the ancien régime has a series and three specials to go, with Davies not due to save the day until 2023. And in the meantime, it seems, Chibnall has resolved to come out fighting.

Certainly, from Sunday’s first scene onwards, he showed no sign of going gentle into that good night. The show began with the Doctor and Yaz (Mandip Gill) suspended upside down from a ‘gravity bar’ that in 79 seconds would drop them into a ‘boiling acid ocean’. Not that Karvanista, the creature responsible, was taking any chances. Prudently adopting a belt-and-braces approach, he’d also arranged for whatever planet they were on to be engulfed by ‘a nearby red star’.

Not unexpectedly, but still excitingly, the two women escaped. Even so, we hadn’t seen the last of old Karvanista (think Chewbacca meets Bungle from Rainbow.) Before long he’d abducted the Doctor’s soon-to-be new companion Dan (John Bishop) — a Scouser heroically unafraid of regional stereotyping — and whisked him into space with the Doctor and Yaz in hot pursuit.

Meanwhile… well, lots of things. The storylines piled up so unstoppably that, even in the first six-part Doctor Who series since 1979, Chibnall already appears to have his work cut out chewing everything he’s bitten off.

Why, for example, did we cut straight from that daring opening escape to the real-life tunnel-builder Joseph Williamson in 1820 Liverpool — and why was he talking (for the few seconds we saw him) about a coming cataclysm? Why was someone named Claire wandering the same city 121 years later, apparently adrift in time, but Who-savvy enough to recognise a Weeping Angel when she sees one? Who were the couple living in a nice suburban house in er, the Arctic — and why was the man reduced to a shower of glitter by an escaped monster called Swarm?

And these were only a few of Sunday’s vignettes left awaiting explanation as the Doctor faced a more immediate threat: the extinction of the entire universe by ‘the Flux’, which has the handy ability to ‘compromise the base levels of all structures’. (Cue lots of planets vaporising.)

Fortunately, when not trying to drop folk into acid, Karvanista wasn’t such a bad guy. Dan, it transpires, is the human he was assigned to rescue from the Earth before the Flux gets there, with his seven million fellow Lupari each taking one of the others. (Luckily, their spaceships are somehow Flux-resistant.)

If all this sounds a little unhinged, then that wouldn’t be deceptive. At times, in fact, the result smacked of the somewhat desperate recklessness of a showrunner facing extinction himself. Yet, for my money, Doctor Who is generally at its best when its imagination is at its wildest — which is unquestionably the case here. And if those many unexplained vignettes are baffling, they’re pretty intriguing too. Above all, there’s an infectious sense of everybody involved having something that’s been in short supply in Chibnall’s shows: namely fun.

Take the final scene — which took full shameless advantage of the fact that a six-parter allows for proper old-school cliffhangers. When I was a boy, these usually consisted of a bloke in tinfoil pointing a modified hairdryer and screaming ‘Die, Doctor, die’. Here, it was somewhat more spectacularly provided by the Tardis failing to outrun ‘the end of the universe’.

But then, just as it seemed as if Chibnall had belatedly learned his lessons, came the preview of next week’s programme, featuring a dignified black woman in the Crimean war saying, ‘Mrs Seacole to you’. Surely after such a blisteringly bonkers first episode, we’re not going to revert to the ponderous and pious history lessons?

This is how G&S should be staged: ENO’s HMS Pinafore reviewed

Until 1881, HMS Pinafore was the second-longest-running show in West End history. Within a year of its première it had broken America too; at one point there were eight competing productions on Broadway alone. The single most wrongheaded notion that still clings to Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas is that they’re somehow low-rent or parochial. They were blockbuster international hits, superbly written, lavishly staged and exported far beyond the Anglosphere. Pinafore was performed in Denmark as Frigate Jutland and in Vienna, Johann Strauss was driven off stage by the runaway success of The Mikado. In the words of the operetta historian Richard Traubner, Gilbert and Sullivan’s collaborations were ‘simply the best musical productions of the Victorian age’.

Cal McCrystal gets that, and his new production for English National Opera goes all out to put on a show. The curtain rises on a life-size quarterdeck and a chorus of dancing sailors doing silly things with mops. So far, so traditional; and the poster-paint colours and retro-chic cut of Takis’s sets and costumes evoke Osbert Lancaster’s designs for Pineapple Poll. But nothing here stands still. Cannons fire, seagulls swoop, and a superannuated chorus member dodders towards an endlessly delayed pratfall. McCrystal’s dizzying staging of ‘Never Mind the Why and Wherefore’ was one of those moments of gleeful, breathless comic invention that had me feeling — as in McCrystal’s Iolanthe in 2018 — that we were finally seeing G&S the way it is meant to be seen: virtuoso musical comedy, bursting with colour and drenched in laughter from a capacity crowd.

In short, it’s a cracking night out, and ENO is running it into December. Take your kids, take your opera-sceptic friends; take your sisters and your cousins and your aunts. Definitely don’t take the kind of bore who can’t stand wisecracking cabin boys (they’ve added one, and in fairness he’s terrific) or poop-deck jokes (McCrystal and Toby Davies are credited with ‘additional material’); who prefers to hear Gilbert’s original dialogue savoured rather than sent up; or who’s liable to grumble that McCrystal can’t hear a quiet, reflective aria without an urge to blow it sky-high with yet more knockabout.

Not that McCrystal’s interventions aren’t fun — the ship’s cat deserves a bow in its own right — but they felt particularly hard on a cast as good (and as game) as this. John Savournin, as Captain Corcoran, wears his baritone as stylishly as his uniform, and his rapport with Hilary Summers’s Buttercup gives the evening its heart. Egan Llyr Thomas (Ralph Rackstraw) has a dashing light tenor and the type of leading-man looks that pretty much demand a Poldark gag, which McCrystal duly delivers. Alexandra Oomens is a firecracker Josephine in a detachable crinoline, spooling out Sullivan’s mock-heroic coloratura in brilliant neon, and making the ensembles ping (Chris Hopkins conducts like it’s Mendelssohn, but in a good way). Then there’s Les Dennis as Sir Joseph Porter, who struggles to project when upstage, but blusters splendidly in his big patter song, and really owns his carroty sideburns and air of raddled self-importance.

He’s certainly not the problem, and perhaps it’s unfair to suggest that there’s a problem at all — or to suspect that on some level, McCrystal doesn’t quite trust the piece, and is trying slightly too hard to jolly it along. But why insert non-original music (even if the tap-dance routine it accompanies is an absolute zinger)? A decade-old zipwire Boris gag makes a limp substitute for the still-live satirical landmines that Gilbert planted in his libretto, and which McCrystal never really tries to detonate (a man loses his job and social position with a single misjudged word — it could never happen today, now could it?) Enough: this is a big, fun West End show and critics are paid to overthink things. Opera is a living art, and librettos and scores sometimes need updating. Thanks, ENO: point taken. Now do it with Wagner.

No visual surprises at Covent Garden, where Richard Eyre’s 1994 production of La traviata is on its umpteenth revival. It’s still in good shape, and Bob Crowley’s period designs make a pleasant break from the current fad for cold white boxes. But the big story this time is that Antonello Manacorda conducts Verdi’s score like it’s chamber music, Christian Gerhaher sings the role of Germont père with such subtlety that you can practically hear the old man’s mind changing mid-phrase, and that Lisette Oropesa is the Violetta of your dreams: spirited, dignified, and singing with the sweet, liquid lyricism of a blackbird before daybreak. Liparit Avetisyan (Alfredo) is a bit stiff, but he can thrill when he needs to, and anyway it’s Violetta’s night. I’ve rarely heard a Covent Garden crowd explode like they did at the end of Oropesa’s ‘Sempre libera’, and even more rarely with such good reason.

The Battle for Britain | 6 November 2021

Spectator competition winners: Beano acrostics

In Competition No. 3223, you were invited to supply an acrostic poem in which the first letter of each line, read vertically, spells DENNIS AND GNASHER.

A varied and excellent entry, which celebrated with gusto the Beano’s spirit of naughtiness and irreverence, also reflected how it has evolved to accommodate modern sensibilities. As Stuart Jeffries observed recently in this magazine, Dennis’s ‘bottom these days is rarely sore since corporal punishment is frowned upon and so he cannot be given his weekly slippering…’

William McGonagall, a regular fixture in the postbag at the moment, popped up again, this time courtesy of Frank Upton:

But he was nudged out by the winners, below, who snaffle £25 each.

Dennis was my boyhood hero Every Thursday, in the Beano; Naughty, nasty window smasher, Never far from faithful Gnasher. Imp and devil, tiny terror, Showering trouble on his father, Always up for something awful, Never spurning the unlawful. Dennis was a mayhem planner Good with saw and club and spanner, Not afraid of causing panic, Artful, vengeful, often manic. Scallywag in black and crimson He was engineer of arson. Ever the young mischief master Ready for a fresh disaster. Frank McDonald

Do not drub me with the slipper Even for my wicked deeds Never lash me with the leads Not attached to Gnasher, Gnipper     If you have a cane then burn it Snap your birch and trim your lashes Anything you use to thrash is Now illegal — you must spurn it     Don’t on this skin raise such welts Gnasher likewise — he’s protected No one needs to be corrected And you must retire your belts     Still you’re tempted? You must alter How you punish my infractions Each week though for satisfaction Really go and wallop Walter Bill Greenwell

Dad it was who took the Beano, Every week it made him roar; Not for him the wit of Wodehouse Nor the sharp satire of Waugh. It was Biffo and Lord Snooty Set Dad barking like a seal, All the family did their duty Nodding at each awful peal. Dad said Dennis was his favourite, Got a kick from all his japes, Never wolfed a strip but saved it, Always read it in the jakes. So, one day, I locked him in it, ‘Ho-ho!’ I thought he’d guffaw, Except — banged up bare a minute — Revenging, Dad destroyed the door. Adrian Fry

Dennis the rebel, he bursts off the page, Enduring for decades, yet still the same age, Noted for mayhem, with Gnasher beside him, No put-upon postie can ever abide him. In each strip of Beano it’s anarchy central, Skateboards and catapults, sends adults mental, Angus Young’s sibling, eternally wild, Noisy, chaotic, the devil’s own child, Demon-like pranks, he’s a battering ram, Gnawesomely epic and totally blam, Noisy and messy and spiky and scruffy, Anti the softies, the boring, the stuffy, Scoffs at authority, rule-breaking ace, Hair always spiky, iconic disgrace, Even the Royal Mail honours their menace Riotous, rampaging Gnasher and Dennis. Janine Beacham

Dundee is the home of jute and jampot: Exports on the river’s silvery tide. Now they celebrate their two-tone bampot, Nihilistic Gnasher by his side. In the crumpled pages of the Beano Seven decades pass of shock and awe, And the folk at DC Thomson see no Need to stress the letter of the law. Dennis flaunts his catapult and ammo, Gnasher’s sunk his canines in your bum. Never learns that red-and-black’s not camo, Always gets a skelping from his mum. Should he ever snatch a snog with Minnie, Holyrood will deem the strip a crime, End his reign of menace in Barlinnie Rehabilitating for all time. Nick MacKinnon

Dennis appeared in 1951, Embodying the virtues of his day. No post-post-War New Age had yet begun. Nasty and short and brutish still held sway. Instincts for pre-pubescent savagery Spiked angry as his blade-shaped tufts of hair. Assaulting softies was his destiny. No cane or slipper did the adults spare.     Dennis was lonely in his menacing. God looked down, saw his lack, and did provide Needed assistance for his Dennis-ing, A tripe hound mad and faithful by his side. So let us trust that when we’re at our worst, Hurling our toxic outbursts at the world, Even then friendlessness can be reversed, Real soulmate pirate flags can be unfurled. Chris O’Carroll

No. 3226: show time

You are invited to rewrite, in pompous and prolix style, any well-known simple poem. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 17 November.

2528: Not to Lose – solution

The unclued lights are all phrases in Chambers meaning ‘HURRY UP — or No T(ime) to Lose’.

First prize Andy Wallace, Ash Green, Coventry

Runners-up Val Urquhart, Butcombe, Somerset; Chris Edwards, Pudsey, Leeds

2531: Villainy

The unclued lights, two of two words, are of a kind.

Across

1 Eastern divine seen in pilgrimage returning to city (6)

7 Artillery piece shooting from side to side (6)

12 With respect to how ‘Looks’ might be clued? (9, two words)

15 Recorded in public register of the stars following bounder (9)

16 Drove off, having found specs in outbuilding (6)

20 Everton lead practice with life events of footballer (7)

21 Not entirely in bad taste but partly (6, three words)

22 Measures wagons surrounding acre (6)

24 Got off with cooked alibi in important accompaniments (8)

26 Perform – quiet, please – for money! (4)

27 Container, small but bottomless (3)

28 Over the hill? Nonsense! (3)

29 French department’s items for sale (4)

32 Place in ‘olland suits attacks of the shivers (8, two words)

34 Lily Maid wrapping French article in German one (6)

35 Top of icemaker missing from drinks cabinet in mosque’s pulpit (6)

37 Palmyrene queen – stoic with endless prejudice (7)

39 Keys to second-rate accommodation? (6, two components)

42 Adjusted menu prices, showing they have skill with figures (9)

43 Leading Grammy pair at beginning of awards for such persona (5)

44 Ornamental border in cells soap transformed (9)

45 Something added is a letter dictated (6)

46 Dandy creation from Stowe could be a German (6)

Down

2 The case involved reversion of property (7)

4 Give the go-ahead for a welcome, nothing more (7, two words)

5 Polite alternative to exclamation of grief? (8)

8 In addition, it’s part of the final solution (4)

9 Angered? That’s about right, it appears to be annoying (8)

10 Beginnings of new growth around infected oak tree (5)

17 Aluminium found in blood in abundance – in this Pussy? (6)

18 At which fellows served rotten food? (9, two words)

23 Jock’s cross, forgetting Latin work by Juvenal, say (6)

25 He’s paid for risky feats, double maybe (8)

26 Sack politician from Leeds etc (8)

33 Does it give one temperature, with dissipated zest and energy? (6)

36 Pot from ancient city found in pub (5)

40 Way to bid American company farewell, at last (4)

41 Band remains under stage, initially (4)

A first prize of £30 for the first correct solution opened on 22 November. 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. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery.