And Finally

Q. I’m an artist and work from home painting people’s pets from photographs. While working I take a lot of FaceTime calls from friends, with my phone on a stand. My problem is that my husband is in the racing world, and when they glimpse him in the background they want to ask him for tips. How can I say “Sorry he is too busy” without sounding rude? – Name withheld, Newmarket A. FaceTime offers “portrait mode” which blurs the background while keeping you in focus. Tap the screen, then the effects option, then “enable portrait.” While this will not fully hide background objects, it makes details harder to see.

Films nowadays often come with advance warning of “smoking,” “partial nudity,” “drug use” or something called “language” (presumably to prevent alarming people unaware of the invention of the talkies). Yet language can be triggering. I know that from watching the BBC as a child, when two linguistic absurdities drove the seven-year-old me practically insane. One was the Blue Peter habit of referring to Sellotape as “sticky-backed plastic,” a phrase unspoken by anyone else in any other circumstances, except in parodies of BBC children’s programs.

Q. Like many women of a certain age, I’m “on the pen.” I’ve lost about 20lb on Mounjaro, which I judge to be enough. However, the friend who urged me and many others to try it has lost more than 60lb. Not only does she have the dreaded Mounjaro face – deeply lined – but she wears short, sleeveless dresses that reveal arms and legs that are, bluntly, not those of a 20-year-old. Mary, I have always felt that tight garments are both unflattering and vulgar. I am also anxious because this well-meaning friend has become a subject of private mockery for turning herself from a voluptuous size 18 beauty to a haggard size 10. How can I tactfully suggest that she needs a bit more flesh? – C.P., London NW1 A.

Regular readers of this column will be familiar with my promoting an idea called a “Paceometer.” Rather than presenting speed in, say, miles per hour (distance/time), it presents speed the other way round, in minutes per ten miles (time/distance). Created by the cognitive scientists Eyal Peer and Eyal Gamliel, the Paceometer shows something which is mathematically trivial but completely nonintuitive. Quite simply, the faster you are going already, the less time you save by going 10mph faster still. Accelerate from 20 to 30mph and you save ten minutes on a ten-mile journey. Accelerate from 70 to 80mph and you save just over a minute.

In 1956, three British MPs encountered a group of Swiss politicians in the bar of the Hotel Flüela in Davos and after a few drinks challenged them to a ski race. A timed slalom contest took place the following day, with the three-person Swiss team beating the Brits by a combined four seconds. Not willing to take this lying down, the MPs insisted on a rematch the following year and thus was born the Anglo-Swiss Parliamentary Ski Week, which celebrated its 70th anniversary earlier this month. I heard about it from my friend Dan Hannan shortly after I became a peer, and immediately put my name down, imagining it to be a massive freebie. Not so.

Q. I went to stay in the new house of a close, but not very close, friend. She put me in a charming room, but it was above a really noisy boiler that kept randomly firing up throughout the night. In the morning, when the husband asked me in front of the breakfast table if I had slept well, I told him about the boiler. I could tell from everyone’s faces that he and the other guests thought I had been rude to mention it. But if I had not said something, the next guest put in that room would be up all night just like me. What else could I have done, Mary? – Name and address withheld A. You could have used the following method. Asked had you slept well, you could have gushed: “Like a top. Such a comfortable room!

I once asked my friend, the engineer Guru Madhavan, why engineering faculties at most universities were outliers in containing more than a small minority of conservatives and political moderates. He explained it in a single sentence: “In engineering, you are peer-reviewed by reality.” ‘Legal’ thinking now precedes ‘engineering’ thinking rather than the other way around In any field where you are judged more by the quality of the outcome than the quality of your argument, there is a limit to the extent to which you can adhere to some all-encompassing ideological world view. If a bridge falls down, it is not a good bridge. The opposite is also true: in real life, if something works, you don’t always need a theory to explain why.

Late March marked the fifth anniversary of the publication of the report of Lord Sewell’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities (CRED). In spite of a suitably diverse group of commissioners (or perhaps because of that), it refused to blame “systemic racism” for the underachievement of certain ethnic minorities in the UK. It didn’t dismiss that hypothesis entirely, but concluded that other factors – class, geography and family background – were more important. This analysis (supported by lots of data) did little to protect the commissioners from the fury of the woke left, who denounced them for ignoring historical injustices.