Bees

Why is it so hard to hire a car?

My passport and driving licence sat on the counter but the girl stared back at me, repeating her demand. ‘I need your DVLA check code,’ she said. I told her I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was on about. ‘I need your DVLA check code,’ she said again, doing her best ‘computer says no’ stare. The Sixt rental office was in the atrium of the Hilton Hotel Gatwick, which for some reason had been heated to something like sauna temperature. I had walked what felt like a mile, pulling my wheelie suitcase, because Sixt wasn’t in the main car-hire area near the terminal exit, and hadn’t warned me

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight

Caspar Henderson writes beguiling books about the natural world, full of eyecatching detail and plangent commentary. His Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st-century Bestiary came out in 2012. A Book of Noises is a worthy companion – a pursuit of auditory wonders, a paean to the act of listening and a salute to silence. Item: the music of the spheres. (The planets’ orbits, proving unideal and elliptical, suggested to the musically minded astronomer Johannes Kepler an appropriately sad, minor-keyed leitmotif for the Earth, where, he felt, misery and famine held sway’.) Item: the world’s loudest sound. (The asteroid Chicxulub that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago; also an

Confessions of a hypochondriac

My neighbour had a surgical procedure and keeps telling me about it. Every time she starts, I shout ‘No! Please stop!’, because I’m squeamish. At the risk of distressing anyone else who is squeamish, I do need to say that she had her eyeball injected, because of what followed. Three people in four days – so having your eyeball injected must be no more unusual than having your hair cut A day after visiting my neighbour and having to cover my ears as she explained her eye op, I bumped into a lady I know outside church and when I asked after her husband she said he was going into

Is beekeeping left-wing?

‘Zip my head in,’ he said, after climbing into a white jumpsuit with a mesh helmet. It was a beekeeper’s outfit, but the effect was less apicultural and more like the scene in E.T. where the special agents in biohazard suits come for the alien. The builder boyfriend was struggling with the zip around his neck so I made sure it was shut. He then fussed with the arms and legs so much, worrying about gaps, that in the end I used gaffer tape to tape his wrists and ankles. ‘Now you look like a Teletubby,’ I said. ‘Foot the ladder, will you?’ he asked. The BB had come home

A Radio 3 doc that contains some of the best insults I’ve ever heard

A recent Sunday Feature on Radio 3 contained some of the best insults I have ever heard. Contributors to the programme on the early music revolution were discussing the backlash they experienced in the 1970s while reviving period-style instruments and techniques. Soprano Dame Emma Kirkby remembered one critic complaining that listening to her performance was ‘as about as interesting as eating an entire meal of plain yoghurt’. Another critic, writing in Gramophone, pronounced the strings of the new ensembles ‘as beautiful as period dentistry’. Those strings were mostly made of animal guts. There was, as one of the musicians interviewed recalled, ‘a DIY atmosphere’ to the movement, which developed alongside

We must all become Doctor Dolittles and listen to the wisdom of animals

One day the writer and artist James Bridle rented a hatchback, taped a smartphone to the steering wheel and installed some webcams in order to make his own self-driving car. Armed with software cut-and-pasted from the internet, his aim was to collaborate with the AI he’d thus devised and travel to Mount Parnassus, sacred to Dionysus and home of the Muses, ‘to be elevated to the peak of knowledge, craft and skill’. Just try telling that to the traffic cops. This batty project had a serious point. Bridle wanted to subvert the idea that we cede control to our dismal robot overlords every time we plug co-ordinates into the GPS.