I decided to walk from Athens to Byzantium — Constantinople, the medieval Queen of Cities, lately Istanbul. I had a little red tent and a vision of noble penury that evoked the ghosts of Cyriaco of Ancona (d. 1452) and Paddy Leigh Fermor (d. 2011). My girlfriend said she'd join me later. The lines that now smudge my map look more like the flight of a woozy bluebottle than the traces of a man with a plan. My earliest memories of the trek are melancholy.
Boris Johnson, Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper suggests, is understood to have a personal interest in rewilding, ‘recently gifting his father beavers to release on his own Exmoor estate’. I started at the word gifting like a horse shying at a plastic bag caught in the hedge. Why didn’t I like it? My first thought was that there was a perfectly good word, giving. My second was that gifting is an obtrusive case of verbing a noun. Thirdly, it belongs to a kind of speech adopted by copywriters for luxury cruises and retirement homes. In 1996, Robert Burchfield in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage said that gift as a verb was ‘best avoided’, as it had fallen out of favor with speakers of standard English.
I’d been looking for well over a year for what I consider to be the most perfect Japanese-made piece of Americana there is. Scouring the internet on any given day turns up maybe 15 or so available, most in various states of disrepair. It’s the object of desire for most any red-blooded millennial male that salivates over things like dive watches and waxed-canvas jackets. The Toyota Land Cruiser FJ60. When the COVID pandemic hit, the used-car market exploded as city-dwellers looked for ways to escape a dreary existence in 500-square-foot apartments. What do you do when you can’t be inside? Load the family into the cruiser and head west, of course. National parks saw record-setting numbers of visitors.
For the past seven and a half decades Western politicians have been exhorting voters to ‘believe’ or ‘have faith’ in democracy. They should have been addressing themselves instead. The unpleasant truth is that 20th- and 21st-century politicians on the right have never believed that constitutional democracy based roughly on the American model could ever satisfy the masses by giving them the material loot and freedom they expect, while those on the left have always thought it does not go far enough in granting themselves the power and authority they require.
