Spectator Life

Usually when I start listening to a true-life podcast, I don’t know how it ends. That’s not the case with The Smuggler, BBC Radio 4’s new investigation into people smuggling. Across ten episodes, its Orwell Prize-winning presenter, Annabel Deas, tells the story of ‘Nick’, on the face of it an unlikely protagonist. Nick is white, English and a former soldier in the British Army. He’s also a friend of mine. We met in jail in 2021 and have stayed in contact ever since. So I know Nick’s story. I even know how it ends. Despite all this, I found myself absolutely gripped by The Smuggler. This is partly because it’s such a fascinating, and timely, topic. Migration is rarely out of the news. Keir Starmer keeps promising to ‘smash the gangs’ and ‘stop the boats’.

We’ve been through a lot as a nation over the past few years. Watching politicians debate scotch eggs, finding out (without wanting to) how Prince Harry lost his virginity, Just Stop Oil’s tomato soup tantrums… so sometimes an event arises that makes you ask yourself: has this all taken a larger toll than we realised on our collective psyche? Are we, in fact, having some kind of national nervous breakdown?  The answer would appear to be a big, fat, pig-shaped yes, given the ‘breaking news’ announcement on ITV’s Good Morning Britain this week that Peppa Pig matriarch Mummy Pig had given birth to her third piglet, Evie. https://twitter.

I was belatedly baptised last week in the Church of England, and though Christians are enjoined to show compassion to sinners and forgive them their trespasses, my eyes do not fill with tears at the plight of 18-year-old Bella May Culley from Middlesbrough. Bella currently finds herself in Prison No. 5 in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi after she was accused of smuggling drugs into the country. The prison is described in British media reports as decaying and dangerous, but which, from the pictures, looks tough, austere and simply furnished – no worse than one might expect of correctional facilities in the Caucasian republic.

Rend your cheeks and rub ashes into your hair; for that most elegant, elusive of punctuation marks – the semicolon – is, if not yet quite dead, at least fairly close to being on first name terms with St Peter. Research from Babbel, a ‘learning platform’, shows that usage of the semicolon in texts has plunged by 47 per cent over the past two decades. I would be more surprised if the Pope turned out to be Catholic. These days, students struggle with commas and apostrophes. How can the poor milquetoasts be expected to grasp the finer usages of semicolons? This is all a terrible shame. Good punctuation is a balm for the soul. As punctuation (or ‘pointing’, as it used to be called) orders sentences, so this relates to the order of mind, body and the universe itself.

Two of the top ten stories on the BBC news feed yesterday concerned the travails of leading rap and hip hop stars in different kinds of trouble in the United States. In one case, the 55-year-old rap singer Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs – one of the biggest names in the business – is on trial in New York facing charges of assault and sex trafficking, which he denies. The trial is only the latest in a long line of legal actions Combs has faced over the years, in which he’s been accused of offences of sexual violence. In the second case, a 32-year-old hip hop star called Tory Lanez was rushed to hospital in California from a prison near Los Angeles after being stabbed 14 times by a fellow inmate.

It’s unlikely you’ll find a sorrier-looking pair of hiking boots than mine. As a result of my Camino addiction, the backs of my boots are literally crumbling, while the fronts have split open like a French baguette. They look like prime candidates for the hiking boot version of assisted dying – to put them out of their misery. But on my last pilgrimage, and in recognition of my complacency, I began treating my boots like royalty. I applied leather grease at the end of each day, packing them with newspaper to draw out the moisture. In short, I put those boots before all else. They are lasting far longer than I thought possible. These boots got me thinking about my recent experiences of palliative care: three cases in as many months at the start of the year.

Consulting a website on my phone recently, I was struck by how painful it has become to use the internet. All I wanted was to read some local news and check the spread of a power cut in my area. Instead, as I scrolled, I was assailed by interruptions from integrated adverts which – in the best case – wanted eagerly to tell me about the charm and usefulness of a new BMW. In the worst case, I was urged to consult some lawyers immediately because I had been mis-sold an insurance or financial product in the past and was due an enormous payout, if only I would contact the least credible-looking advocates in the country.

In a recent diary for The Spectator, the editor noted that many of the world’s leading tech companies have names inspired by The Lord of the Rings: Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Mithril; Palmer Luckey’s Anduril. ‘J.R.R. Tolkien has a curious hold on the minds of Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters,’ he wrote. Well, they’re not the only ones. If I had founded a company I probably would have called it Anduril too. While less odd teenagers spent their money on CDs or football boots, I used to have a life-sized replica of the Elvish sword hanging above my bed. I, like the tech bros, was a LOTR obsessive. A super fan. I still am. Tolkien was a genius and I have read his books many times over.

Last month, Katy Perry became the first pop star to go to space. The Blue Origin flight took only 11 minutes and involved her singing to Planet Earth. She had no idea the planet would hate her on her return. Much of the criticisms included phrases like ‘waste of money and resources’; some even mentioned an ‘ongoing genocide’. She has defended herself in strange self-help metaphors, as the biggest pop stars are wont to do. ‘Through my battered and bruised adventure I keep looking to the light and in that light a new level unlocks,’ she said. ‘It’s so out of touch,’ said Lily Allen, who has since apologised for singling her out – there were five other women on the ship.

There are many reasons to like Kyrgyzstan. It has extraordinarily lovely women: some mad collision of Persian, Turkish, Russian, Mongol and Chinese genes makes for supermodels at every bus stop. It is safe, friendly, cheap. Its cities are commonly free of rubbish and graffiti (how does Central Asia do this, yet we cannot?). Despite these charms, it has few tourists. However, I can’t say anything positive about the cheese – because the cheese is dreck. Last night I went to the Globus supermarket here in downtown Bishkek and bought a sample of the local fromage. When I got it home, it was like chewing a rubber toy: tasteless, over-firm, banal. In the end I was reduced to smothering it in Sriracha to make it vaguely flavoursome.

It was conceived as a ‘people’s palace’ – and, as it turns 150 this week, Alexandra Palace continues to fulfil this brief admirably. There is something for everyone, and it’s not too sniffy about who ‘everyone’ describes. Hence the annual mayhem around the winter darts tournament, when everywhere between Muswell Hill and Wood Green is crawling with groups of very drunk men dressed as Smurfs, monks or the cast of Scooby Doo. The Royal Opera House this isn’t. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t more lofty, less populist offerings. I recall when Alexandra Palace’s theatre reopened in 2018 after an £18 million restoration, it debuted with an ENO production of the lesser-known Britten opera Paul Bunyan – hardly an obvious money-spinner.

The Royal Mail has issued a set of commemorative stamps to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day on 8 May. The ‘Valour and Victory Presentation Pack’ features ten men and women whose courage and determination, in the words of Royal Mail, ‘helped shape the outcome of the second world war’. Another criteria in selecting the ten was ‘diversity’. One or two curmudgeons on social media have muttered about ‘wokeness’, but that is unjust. For many decades, the valiant contribution of Indians, Nepalese and West Indians to the war effort was overlooked or, worse, airbrushed out of British history books.

Why do we allow our public spaces to be taken over by chuggers? Whenever I exit my office above Charing Cross station in search of lunch, I am immediately confronted by no fewer than three charity muggers – each decked out in a garish uniform promoting whichever charity they are being paid for that day. It is best to avoid eye-contact – otherwise prepare to be bombarded with a flurry of phoney scripted sales patter. ‘Didn’t we go to primary school together?’ Unlikely, I suggest, given our age difference. ‘Still, it must be a big school given you said the exact same thing to the fella five paces in front of me.’ I consider replying, but think better of it.

Saying that national generalisations have fallen out of fashion is an understatement. Stereotypes have become less common and less tolerated. But not all is unblemished improvement, and something of value has been lost. National generalisations – often misnamed racial – now veer close to thought crimes. A pity – national generalisations are a basic tool for making sense of the world, and for understanding how people’s backgrounds shape their values, character and culture. Abusus non tollit usum – that something can be misused does not mean it should not be used. As a man with a very limited range of anecdotes and conversational gambits, I frequently repeat myself. Handily, I work as a hospital doctor, supported by an ever-shifting cast of juniors and students.

The news that Terry Pratchett’s 2002 novel Night Watch has joined the ranks of the Penguin Modern Classics series may seem, to the Pratchett uninitiated, something of an eyebrow-raiser. Penguin has proudly announced that the book ‘which draws on inspirations as far ranging as Victor Hugo and M*A*S*H, is... a profoundly empathetic novel about community, connection and the tenacity of the human spirit’ and that it was ‘written at the height of Pratchett’s imaginative powers’. All this may very well be true. But many people, even those millions well disposed towards Pratchett, might be asking another question: why this book, and why now?

I learned recently that Mumsnet is 25 years old, and my immediate reaction was: who the hell is still using Mumsnet? And then I read that Mumsnet has nine million unique users every month, and my immediate reaction was: who the hell are these people? According to Mumsnet, they’re almost all women, but I don’t seem to know any of them. I’ve never used Mumsnet, and when I conducted some forensically accurate research, I struggled to find any friends who are well acquainted with it. One friend amuses herself occasionally with how middle-class the posts can be, with lots of queries about Eton and sneering at double-barrelled designer baby names.

In 1906, Sir Francis Galton observed a crowd at a country fair in Plymouth attempting to guess the weight of an ox. Nearly 800 people participated – from butchers and farmers to busy fishwives. Galton, ever the measurer of men and beasts, gathered the guesses and calculated their average. The result was startling: the crowd’s collective estimate came within one pound of the actual weight. This elegantly simple experiment is the founding parable of what we term the ‘wisdom of crowds’ – the idea that while individuals may be flawed, the collective judgment of a sufficiently diverse group is compellingly accurate. Galton’s experiment also became one of the great justifications for democracy.