Letters: why AI may be a force for good

Parris review

Sir: Matthew Parris (‘Coutts, Farage and the trouble with choice’, 29 July) omitted to mention the initial, fundamental and obvious matter of the breach of client confidentiality committed by Dame Alison Rose, who he says should not have resigned. This is surely the gravest offence any bank official – let alone the head of NatWest – can commit. Yet he puts her resignation down to a ‘silly media storm’, which was actually started by the BBC, to whom the client information was given. Further, his article relates mostly to the discretion which institutions such as banks have in choosing who to admit. But this issue wasn’t about a client’s admission to the bank, it was about expelling one for his ‘views’. Parris’s column did, though, raise questions about what we know about the kind of clientele our own banks have. How do we know who banks with our bank? How could we find out? Would it matter? And what could we do if it did?

John C. Batey

Oxford

Evasive procedure

Sir: Matthew Parris makes a fair point about the freedom of businesses to select their customers. What is not acceptable is their refusal to give truthful reasons for their actions – often declining to communicate at all. This evasiveness is frequently justified on bogus grounds of security, confidentiality or commercial sensitivity.

Anthony E. Kedros

Oxford

Cry Woolf

Sir: I was gratified on reading James Delingpole’s review of University Challenge (Arts, 29 July) that it isn’t necessarily cerebral atrophy which has reduced my ability to answer the arts-based questions. However, I must take issue with his casual dismissal of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway as ‘unreadable’. This short masterpiece is a jewel in Woolf’s crown. When I offered it up to my reading group many years ago, the ensuing debates sizzled and soared.

Linda Willby

Thornton Le Dale, North Yorkshire

New kid on the block

Sir: A couple of points about Rod Liddle’s latest (‘Intersectionality is a dud’, 29 July). Firstly, his definition of intersectionality – I thought it meant the existence of more than one minority attribute (or ‘protected characteristic’) in a person or group. Second, Matty Healy is demonstrably not ‘thick as mince’. He is rather clever and funny and a very naughty boy, who has presumably managed to get all the attention he wanted for his onstage snog in Malaysia. Now everyone has been reminded of him and his ‘awful band’ the 1975 (who are actually pretty good). I suspect this is a veteran provocateur being a little jealous of a newer one.

Elizabeth Street

London W1

Relatively speaking

Sir: James W. Phillips and Eliezer Yudkowsky’s dystopian views on artificial intelligence made for thoughtful reading (‘We need to be terrified for our lives’, 15 July). But I take issue with one of their comments: that ‘most scientific discoveries in history were done by individuals like Albert Einstein’. Einstein himself acknowledged his debt to his predecessors, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell. His theory of relativity presupposed familiarity with the Michelson-Morley experiment on the absence of evidence for ether drift. Relativity itself was in the air at the turn of the 20th century, in the work of Einstein’s friend Hendrik Lorentz, and the theorising of Henri Poincaré. No scientific discovery is made completely out of the blue, but always depends on a hinterland of prior knowledge, acquired by the labours of many other people. That is the secret of humanity’s success: linguistic and social co-operation. This, I think, gives us a glimmer of hope that AI will not prove a catastrophe, but may well become a boon.

John Grabinar

Beer Sheva, Israel

Binary thinking

Sir: I much admire Rory Sutherland for his radical thinking, but I do wonder if, when discussing cars (The Wiki Man, 15 July), he does not fall into the binary trap. Why not the best of both electric technology and the internal combustion engine: namely the pure hybrid? I get 67mph from my Corolla, and the ingenuity of regenerative braking means that when powering up the battery system there is no call upon an expensive grid system, subsidised green energy or, if driving in Germany, brown coal. OK, the compromise does not get rid of hydrocarbons completely, but then the emissions target is not absolute zero.

David Starkie

Andover, Hampshire

Derby football

Sir: I am sorry to disappoint Sam McPhail (‘Own goal’, 29 July), but in the league where I watch football (National League North) there’s no danger of supporters following players rather than their club. At the end of last season we – Boston United – lost three long-standing and respected players to Buxton, but when we play them in the first game of next season loyalty to our club will of course come first. And had the players moved in the opposite direction, I am confident that Buxton fans would react in the same way. We non-leaguers are not swayed by money or fashion.

David Whittle

Oakham, Rutland

Striking difference

Sir: Mary Wakefield writing about ‘action short of a strike’ (‘There is no plan! You’re on your own!’, 22 July) brought to mind the West Indies in the 1970s, when the baggage handlers at Port of Spain airport in Trinidad exercised a rather more charming ‘withdrawal of enthusiasm’.

Matthew Robinson

London SW9

Write to us: letters@spectator.co.uk

The Premier League’s sleeping pill problem

The footballer Dele Alli was applauded recently after he spoke of his sleeping pill abuse. ‘It’s a problem not only I have. It’s going around more than people realise in football,’ he said during a filmed interview with Manchester United’s former captain Gary Neville.

It’s not the first time we’ve heard this. Footballers are ‘taking too many sleeping tablets and painkillers’ and addiction is becoming a ‘big issue’, former pro Ryan Cresswell warned last year. (He said his own addiction left him ‘gripping on for dear life’.) He claimed the problem is affecting stars at the very top level: ‘For me, it started with one after every game… to one a day to two a day and then I knew I was addicted.’ Former Liverpool goalkeeper Chris Kirkland also revealed his addiction battle earlier this year and warned that many players were hooked on painkillers. He confronted his own problem in 2016, but relapsed during lockdown.

During his interview with Alli, Neville sympathetically admitted it was ‘not unusual’ to be offered sleeping tablets during his playing career (he retired in 2011): ‘You’d be offered one the night before the game, always, because a player might not sleep because of the build-up and the adrenaline, and also sometimes after a game.’

The problem is growing. In 2020, the Professional Footballers’ Association released the concerning results of a survey of mental health problems in the game. Nine per cent of respondents were experiencing difficulties with damaging addictive habits. ‘[It’s] much wider than people realise,’ Oxford United’s former psychotherapist Gary Bloom told the BBC earlier this month.

When you look at the lives of professional footballers, is it any wonder they sometimes come unstuck? They have usually been focused on the game since childhood, sacrificing much of their social and personal lives, before being thrust into the limelight, often while barely adults. This places them under incredible strain; it’s no surprise that some aren’t equipped to deal with the pressure, wealth and fame.

Leaving school early means footballers often lack informal support networks and groups of friends outside the sport. The training regimes are relentless; the expectations immense. Whereas nearly half of professional cricketers and rugby players went to private or grammar school, 90 per cent of professional footballers are state-educated. They are also – more than in any other elite sport – likely to be from the lowest socioeconomic groups. With this comes higher rates of substance misuse, violence, trauma and abuse. Alli discussed this when he shared details from his childhood: he was molested as a child by a friend of his mother and forced to deal drugs.

Of course, this isn’t all footballers. Being poor or leaving school early doesn’t mean struggle must follow. But it’s telling that, despite repeated warnings of the problems, there’s been no real outcry, no public condemnation of the authorities for not doing more to tackle the issues, no public outpouring of sympathy that could result in any meaningful change.

It’s hardly surprising that, for some footballers, the body and mind are whipped up into such a fervour that they struggle to relax before and after playing. Imagine the build-up to a match, the roar of the crowds, the rush of adrenaline. Then it’s finished, and they are expected to go home, put their feet up and doze off, despite the stress hormones still coursing through their veins.

As a psychiatrist, I’ve seen this issue first-hand. I’ve had patients who were actors with the same problem – they build up to a performance, the intense focus, the audience cheers and claps. Then they go home to the silence of their homes, the lights off. But their minds are still in a whir. Who wouldn’t reach for a stiff drink or three, or a sedative? A cup of chamomile tea doesn’t cut it. The peaks are too high, the troughs too low.

One former patient was a star tennis player and they, too, told me of the immense pressure leading to an addiction to sleeping pills. The constant tournaments, touring, different time zones, pressure from sponsors and so on. How do you turn off? How do you get a good night’s sleep before a match?

We’ve all had the night before an exam when we can’t sleep. Or the buzz after doing a presentation when you go home but can’t switch off. Imagine that constantly. Isn’t sleeping pill addiction a response to a world that is never quiet? Then there is the under-reported issue of cocaine use among footballers. Sleeping pills, after all, are often used to recover and come down after partying.

Getting hooked on sleeping pills and painkillers is not only the preserve of people in the public eye. There’s also a silent epidemic going on in society. In February, NHS data showed a record one million people in the UK are prescribed insomnia medication each year. The pandemic also caused a particularly noticeable rise in sleeping pill use among the young.

Years ago doctors dished out Valium and other benzodiazepines (‘mother’s little helpers’ as they were cruelly dubbed) to the worried well and not-so-well. They were sold as a panacea for everything, but the reality turned out to be a horror show. They are highly addictive: I’ve often sat in front of former addicts who have said they are far harder to get off than heroin. Many people refer to detoxing from them as a ‘die-tox’ because the symptoms – such as insomnia, violent shaking, sweating, hallucinations, crippling anxiety and panic attacks – are that bad. In a tragic twist, when people stop taking them, their initial anxiety typically returns but far worse, a term called ‘rebound anxiety’. This worsened anxiety can then become permanent.

Benzo drugs have been gradually replaced by Z-drugs (such as Zopiclone) that at first seem to offer a perfect night’s sleep without the downsides. However, they can be just as addictive and potentially harmful. Despite these pitfalls being known, it hasn’t stopped their popularity: two in every 100 adults in England were prescribed at least one Z-drug in 2021. It is these drugs that many footballers are currently hooked on.

As well as sleeping pills and sedatives, many Britons are addicted to opiate painkillers (footballers are particularly vulnerable to painkillers because of the wear and tear they put their bodies through and the injuries they suffer as a result).

Painkiller addiction is not a small problem. One million people in England were prescribed opioids for more than three months last year, according to the most recent NHS data. This is despite government advice warning of ‘an increased risk of dependence and addiction’. You only need to glance across the pond to America’s fentanyl battle to see where opioid addiction leads.

Often these drugs are prescribed as pain relief but then doctors, too stressed and pressured to conduct a medication review that might question why the patient is still taking them, give them out on repeat prescription. People with emotional or psychological difficulties find that these painkillers don’t just numb physical pain, but their emotional pain. They continue to take them but soon become physically hooked. I have spent years working in drug dependency clinics seeing first-hand the misery they cause.

To its credit, the NHS is trying to deal with the problem. Last year, the National Institute for Health Care Excellence (Nice) suggested GPs offer an app-based treatment for insomnia in place of sleeping pill prescriptions. But there are still far too many patients who are on repeat prescriptions that never get reviewed. And if they eventually are, most doctors have little experience of how effectively to detoxify patients from benzos, Z-drugs or painkillers. They go far too fast, the patients start to experience withdrawal and either change doctors or buy the drugs from the black market, internet or private sector.

Part of the problem that’s specific to footballers, I suspect, is the vast amount of money in the game. Footballers have the means to access private healthcare, where doctors are more likely to hand over prescriptions to the  paying punters. NHS doctors are generally twitchier about the risk of addiction, abuse and misuse of such pills nowadays and tend to have checks and balances in place to ensure safer and more responsible prescribing.

But that doesn’t mean people don’t get around that. I’ve had a number of patients over the years who have confided in me that their GP became concerned about their overuse of these kinds of medications, so they simply went private with no questions asked. A saunter down Harley Street and you can almost always find someone who will give you what you want – for a price.

Other professions that have uncovered problems have tackled them head-on. Vets used to have very high addiction and suicide rates and a number of their professional bodies have worked tirelessly to understand and address this. The construction industry has done the same. Yet little is being done to address the issue footballers are facing, despite so many players speaking out about the epidemic of addiction and misery.

It’s not as if the professional sporting bodies are poor. Where are all those high up in the industry who surely have a duty of care to these young men? Can they not spare any time to glance up from their balance sheets and profit reports to see what’s going on? There’s something rather tragic at the heart of the beautiful game.

RNC ups qualification requirements for second GOP debate in California

The Republican National Committee is increasing the requirements for presidential candidates seeking to qualify for the party’s second debate next month at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. 

Candidates will need to reach at least 3 percent in two national polls or one national and two state polls in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina or Nevada to qualify for the September 27 debate, according to Politico. For this month’s upcoming debate in Wisconsin, candidates only need to hit 1 percent to qualify. The RNC has also increased the total number of donors from 40,000 to 50,000 with 200 individuals in at least twenty states. The polls must be “conducted with large sample sizes and by firms that are not affiliated with any of the candidates.”

So far seven candidates have qualified for the first GOP debate to be held August 23 in Milwaukee — former president Donald Trump, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley. Although he has reached 3 percent in national polls, former vice president Mike Pence still has not met the donor threshold. 

Trump has remained noncommittal about attending the debate despite leading the pack in fundraising and polling. “You’re leading people by fifty or sixty points, you say, why would you be doing a debate?” Trump said on Fox News in July. “It’s actually not fair. Why would you let someone who’s at zero or one or two or three be popping you with questions?” 

Were the new debate qualifications to be rolled out sooner, most of the top candidates would still meet the polling requirements. All except Burgum have polled above 3 percent nationally in the latest Morning Consult Poll. Polls taken in mid and late July show that each of the top seven candidates have also reached 3 percent percent in at least two early nominating states. 

With the increased donor requirements, it is possible that candidates continue to get more creative with their fundraising schemes. So far, Burgum has given $20 gift cards in exchange for $1 donations and Ramaswamy’s campaign has pledged to give donors 10 percent of the total amount of money they raise.

Gloves, tea strainers and a game of Monopoly… how the Great Train Robbery unfolded

We don’t know if the two teenagers who attempted a train robbery in Scotland this week knew that it was the 60th anniversary of the most famous one in British history. Given their failure – nothing was stolen and the charges include ‘malicious mischief’ – it seems unlikely. Either way, the train robbery of August 1963 remains secure in its title of ‘Great’.

Why did it fascinate us so much in the first place? Partly it was the zeitgeist timing (that year also saw Profumo, Beatlemania and JFK’s assassination); partly the amount stolen (£2.5 million, worth more than £40 million today); and partly the narrative of ‘plucky underdogs vs the police and banks’ – the last of whom were insured, except the Midland, which disdained the idea and so lost £500,000.

But mainly the robbery received its adjective because it’s a great story. The gang brought the train to its 3 a.m. halt in the Buckinghamshire countryside simply by placing a glove over the green signal light and attaching a battery to the red one. ‘Pop’, the retired driver brought along to shift the train to Bridego Bridge, where the cash-laden mail bags would be unloaded, couldn’t work the handbrake. The gang had already had their doubts about him. Told that one of the Land Rovers they were using was stolen, he replied: ‘You can go to prison for that sort of thing.’

Back at their hideout, Leatherslade Farm, the 15 robbers counted the money – mostly £1 and £5 notes, which is why it weighed 2.5 tons. When they reached £1 million, everyone paused to savour the sight. Charlie Wilson danced around singing ‘I Like It’ by Gerry and the Pacemakers. Some gang members played Monopoly with the cash. But their leader, Bruce Reynolds, felt a deep ‘emptiness’. Truly it is better to travel than to arrive, though the Royal Mail probably felt differently about their train.

A shopkeeper in nearby Brill displayed a notice saying ‘old banknotes accepted’. In 1965, with some robbers still on the run, PM Harold Wilson hatched a plan to render their haul worthless by reissuing every banknote in Britain. (Officials persuaded him this was impractical.) Long before then, though, many of the gang had been caught. Underworld gossip provided early leads; further clues came with the discovery of Leatherslade. Among the items left behind was a tea strainer, which made police suspect a woman’s involvement (‘Few men would think of such a thing’). But soon they were aided by fingerprints on a ketchup bottle and – oops! – the Monopoly board.

It’s now commonly accepted that three members of the gang remained unconvicted due to lack of evidence. For most of the robbers, however, the tale ended badly. Ronnie Biggs became a celebrity after escaping from Wandsworth prison (his training as a builder helping him to estimate the height of the wall from the number of bricks). But on his return from Rio four decades later, he was made to serve a further eight years.

Perhaps the saddest story was that of Buster Edwards (played on screen by Phil Collins), who ended up running a flower stall outside Waterloo station, before committing suicide in 1994. Two of the wreaths at his funeral were in the shape of trains.

The dangerous cult of ‘toxic parents’

Complaining about ‘toxic parents’ has been a viral hit on TikTok with videos on the topic racking up several billion views. Only one of those views is mine and there won’t be another because it was like peering through a window into a cross between a padded cell and a charnel house.

In video after video, boys and girls across the English-speaking world – aged roughly 15 to 25 – share the trauma of what they’ve had to endure, courtesy of their terrible mothers and fathers. Many children suffer at the hands of the people who should protect them, but in this case what the kids find intolerable would, to anyone sane, look like normal, even responsible, parenting.

It is, for example, toxic, painful and shaming for parents to criticise clothes or behaviour, the teens agree. One 15-year-old films herself traumatised, barely able to speak. Her dad had said her T-shirt was too revealing, it turned out. ‘I can’t believe it. It’s so inappropriate. I feel unsafe.’

What makes me feel unsafe is when children start to talk like HR professionals.

For older kids, the ones who’ve moved away from home, a toxic parent is one who comes over to their flat uninvited, or tries to clean the house, or tuts, or gives unwanted tips on how to bring up grandchildren. These are all a ‘violation of boundaries’, I’ve learnt, and if a parent can’t respect your boundaries, why then it’s only sensible to excise them from your life. And this is where the trend takes a turn towards the dark, where the tide of self-pity becomes a collective decision to cut contact. It’s all framed in such a horribly lighthearted way: Time out for toxic parents! Go no contact! You need space to heal! It’s as if giving up your family is like giving up dairy, or a sort of colon cleanse.

‘My mum says: “You can’t tell me I don’t get to see my grandchild” Oh but I can!’ Smiley face. Is it really more ‘toxic’ for a grandmother to be a little intrusive than it is to sever her contact with your child?

There are stories of actual abuse on the ‘toxic parent’ forums, but they’re lost in the swirling current of everyday self-pity – and not altogether welcome. Who wants to hear from kids who’ve been assaulted when you’re trying to pretend criticism is abuse?

My generation is often told we take the younger ones too seriously, but this isn’t just playful chat. All the online talk of cutting contact with parents correlates with real statistics. Karl Pillemer, a professor at Cornell University, studies estrangement rates and he says they’re rising across the West. In 2020, he says, some 27 per cent of Americans over the age of 18 were estranged from a family member. ‘There is a sense among younger people today that if the relationship is aversive, they have the ability to get out of it.’

My sense is that they’re not simply getting out, so much as being pushed. Every child online who makes a tentative complaint about their parents in public is instantly surrounded by a gallery of ghouls pushing them to leave home: ‘Don’t stick around – you’ll never heal in that environment.’ One TikTok teen said: ‘Aren’t all parents toxic?’ Ghoul: ‘Most parents are toxic tbh and it’s your generation’s job to cut them off. It’s easier than you think to go no contact!’ Smiley face.

I found one influencer, Eva, who advises teenagers to find holiday jobs and start saving so that they can flee their families more easily when the time is right. Don’t try to talk anything through with your parents, she cautions. They’ll only try to stop you leaving.

What makes adults want to lurk about online encouraging kids to abandon their families? Is it sadism? Boredom? Satan? On Quora, the question and answer website, I read a conversation between a 13-year-old girl and an older, anonymous adult. The girl was worried her mum might be a Terf (a believer in biological sex) and wondered what to do about it.

‘I’m worried about you,’ said the new friend. ‘Your mother’s views are toxic.’

‘But my mum is the best person I know,’ wrote the girl. ‘I love her. I just don’t love her beliefs.’ The friend wasn’t buying this. ‘These people are well practised at seeming nice and hiding their true natures. I’m not sure it’s safe for you to be around her.’

These people.

Perhaps the trouble is that the prevailing social currents tug children in the same direction. Individualism has momentum. Once you sweep away collective belonging, family ties start to loosen too – and capitalism loves lonely souls. It can sell them weighted blankets to cry into at night. Then there’s the neo-Marxist cultists who consider it their duty to dissolve biological ties. All those anonymous adults chiselling children away from mothers are soldiers on the progressive battlefield. It’s famously hard to define a cult, but one reliable sign is an absolute determination to ostracise kids from family.

In June’s Cosmopolitan a young journalist, Fortesa Latifi, wrote an investigative piece on the phenomenon of family estrangement. The headline had a perky lifestyle tone: ‘Why so many young people are cutting off their parents.’ Fun!

The piece itself was more thoughtful. Latifi mentions that she is Albanian, the child of immigrants from Kosovo, and that she wouldn’t quite know who she was without her extended family, dysfunctional as they are. ‘Part of me wonders what my family would look like if we entertained the idea that we don’t have to love each other unconditionally. Another bigger part of me is deeply comforted that we will almost certainly always have one another.’

Hold that thought, Latifi! It’s almost as if she realises that families don’t have to agree all the time; that love isn’t exactly the same as affirmation.

What Andrew Bailey’s eyebrows can tell us about the NatWest scandal

Enough said about the fall of Dame Alison Rose; more than enough about the second coming of Nigel Farage. But one question remains: what happened to the Governor’s eyebrows?

In former times, the fate of errant bank chiefs was unequivocally a matter for the Bank of England. Careers were sunk or salvaged by a twitch of the governor’s supercilia. When Bob Diamond of Barclays was under fire in 2012 after the rate-fixing scandal and the Barclays board tried to save him by offering the head of chairman Marcus Agiusinstead, the then governor, Mervyn King, ordered Agius to unresign and fire Diamond – while the chancellor George Osborne denied any part, saying it wasn’t his job to decide who ran Britain’s banks.

Not so nowadays. The Bank of England was busy last week appointing former US Fed chairman Ben Bernanke to review its wonky forecasting and slapping more fines on Credit Suisse. But it refused to tell me anything about its role in the Rose affair. According to the Sunday Times, ‘sources insisted [NatWest] had sounded out the usual key players’ before it declared confidence in Dame Alison on the evening of 26 July – the oblique ‘usual key players’ suggesting, to my suspicious mind, that those sources also insisted: ‘Don’t mention the Bank of England.’

All of which frees me to surmise that NatWest chairman Sir Howard Davies (himself a former deputy governor) would not have issued his board’s pro-Rose press release with-out first running it past Governor Andrew Bailey or – if Bailey was up a mountain without a mobile – one of his three deputies. And if the Bank’s response was ‘Go for it mate, no sacking offence there, just hold your course’, it made no difference to Downing Street, which sniffed political advantage in swiftly sending word via the Treasury that Rose must go.

Off she went, at 1.30 a.m. – and one version says the ministerial hit was carried out without actually knowing whether the Bank was for or against it. Can that really be true? The Treasury had plenty of skin in the game as NatWest’s 39 per cent shareholder – but that relationship is supposed to be conducted at arm’s length, through UK Government Investments chaired by ex-Unilever executive Vindi Banga, to avoid any hint of political interference. Now, however, we have a major bank accused of politicising its choice of customers while politicians choose who’s fit to run it. And we have a Governor so diminished that no one cares what his eyebrows signal. Dame Alison’s fatal error, as I began to explain last week, was the least of the problems.

Weaker beer, pricier port

‘I’m the man, the very fat man, that waters the workers’ beer,’ sang Paddy Ryan long ago. Fat-cat brewers are currently seeking to preserve sales and profits by lowering the alcohol content in their beers in order to avoid higher duty under a new regime, announced by Rishi Sunak as chancellor in 2021 and effective from the beginning of this month, which will alter prices, product offers and drinking habits across the whole range of booze.

In essence, the higher the alcohol content, the higher the duty: hence weaker beer and cheaper prosecco but a sting on those who offer, or prefer, a stronger tipple. Craft gin makers – a flourishing small-business sector that deserves encouragement rather than tax-grabbing – are expected to suffer.

Likewise, sales of port, on which the duty per bottle, at 20 per cent alcohol by volume, rises from £2.98 to £4.28. Some may claim that as a victory against the shrinking patriarchy who still drink fortified after-dinner wines, but I say livery companies, high tables and aristocrats should start passing their decanters to the right in protest.

New lease of life

City A.M., the freesheet London newspaper for the financial sector, has found an unlikely new owner in THG – an expansive online retailer of cosmetics and dietary supplements, originally called The Hut Group and built into a billion-pound business by Burnley-born entrepreneur Matthew Moulding. Founded in 2005, City A.M. provided fresh reading material for Square Mile commuters, and under the editorships of Allister Heath and Christian May it added pungent free-market opinions. Covid and working from home almost did for it, but it survives as a 68,000-circulation print product from Monday to Thursday, digital on Fridays. I wish it well in its new lease of life.

Warming signals

The UK economy is ‘far too hot’ – says a pundit quoted in the Financial Times – for the Bank of England to halt its programme of interest rate rises. Under leaden skies it may not feel that way, but anecdotal observation suggests definite warming.

Up north, our annual Ryedale music festival was sold to the last seat, despite raised ticket prices, for the likes of saxophonist Jess Gillam and Korean violin star Bomsori Kim. And our Ryedale agricultural show was as busy as in pre-Covid years, despite rain-hit crops and fallen wheat prices. When I asked my chum who sells farm machinery why he wasn’t there, he said: ‘I sold 100 Ifor Williams trailers at the Yorkshire Show in Harrogate and I’m stuck in the office processing the orders.’

As for central London, I watch throngs of presumably unmortgaged youngsters spending freely in Seven Dials. In Soho I note the opening of Manzi’s, a seafood palace in the Wolseley group that was the fiefdom of Jeremy King and Chris Corbin until they fell out with their Thai shareholder, Minor International. Three years delayed, this mermaid-themed reimagining of a dank alleyway site is a multimillion-pound bet on an upswing beyond the inflation spike. It’s opulent but nothing like the original Manzi’s (1928-2006) off Leicester Square, whose shuttered Georgian building, recently a boutique hotel, still forlornly announces ‘Langouste Huîtres Moules’ – and awaits the next cash-rich optimist.

The trouble with wild campers

It’s not just bears that squat in the woods, as you’ll discover if you ever have the pleasure of a visit from wild campers. Other disfigurements to the land have included scorched patches of grass, which luckily didn’t become full-blown wildfires, branches severed from trees (presumably for wet firewood), stakes removed from young saplings (ditto), and the inevitable beer can and ‘disposable’ barbecue pyramid. I recently found a lacy, magenta-coloured bodice hanging from a tree, but that may have been left by an even wilder breed of camper.

So I have every sympathy for my fellow landowners who have the misfortune of eking out a living in the granite-strewn wastes of the Dartmoor National Park, where a legal challenge has just upheld the right to camp wildly, without permission.

Visitors can now camp overnight wherever they please, after the Court of Appeal decided that a right to ‘open-air recreation’ included setting up a tent and bedding down. As one campaigner from the charity The Stars Are for Everyone said: ‘Access to a night under the stars… now does not rely on the whims of individual landowners but is owned by ordinary people.’ As though those who steward the land are somehow not ordinary and that they exist to frustrate the lives of those who are.

In fact, few landowners would want to ban visitors outright; the warp and weft of rural living has always been enriched by a cast of hermits and eccentrics. In my childhood, there was an old lady named Miss Paulet who would roam the highways and byways in a gypsy caravan, pulled by a skewbald cob named Magpie that was nearly as old as her. She would occasionally call on my parents for a glass of sherry and a bath and once gave my father a piece of paper with the address of her next of kin scrawled on it – a marchioness with many acres of her own – in case she was found dead one day.

We have from time to time had tramps living in secluded parts of the estate and have had cordial relations with them. Here in Scotland, there is in fact a centuries-old tradition of cattle drovers, displaced Jacobites and other outdoor types camping pretty much where they please. There has never been a law of trespass, despite attempts by the newly devolved executive to pretend they had bestowed a ‘right to roam’. And most landowners were just fine with that, particularly as all sides tried to make it work, despite ever-increasing pressure from a growing population wanting access.   

Lately, however, camping etiquette has disintegrated. Rousseauism has taken hold of leftist imaginations in a way not seen since the 1840s. It expresses itself in the neo-romanticism of the rewilding movement and the land-reforming zeal of the Extinction Rebellion mob. Egged on by the likes of George Monbiot and Chris Packham, confrontational wild camping neatly combines both causes for any eco-activist wanting trouble. The national parks, which are increasingly trampling over their indigenous landowners’ rights and livelihoods, provide benign environments where a sense of entitlement can be flaunted. Unlike national parks in countries such as the United States or even continental neighbours like France, ours have always been settled. Farmers carved the mosaic of wild and agricultural land, which became so noted for its beauty that it was protected. They need to continue to manage the countryside.

The irony is that we are all supposed to be straining to halt the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis (see Monbiot, Packham et al). The woods now bristle with ‘regenerative’ cattle, posing yet another danger to campers turning up unannounced. Wild campers, who are by definition strangers, have no way of knowing whether the spot they have chosen to stake out is the last refuge of a natterjack toad or ghost orchid. If the authorities really thought about it, they would be supporting landowners and their attempts to channel the public on to paths and into campsites. Wildlife would then be disturbed as little as possible, and we would be less likely to suffer wildfires that turn our flora and fauna into atmospheric carbon.

Any wild-camping aficionado reading this will no doubt bristle with righteous indignation. They will be spluttering about ‘codes of conduct’ and ‘responsible access’. And yes, there are many who come and go leaving little more than a compressed patch on the grass where they pitched their tent. Every year, earnest young wild campers arrive on my land full of gratitude and assurances, brandishing shovels for, embarrassed cough, biological necessities. But even these well-meaning types have sometimes pitched under precarious dead trees, left standing for their benefits to the wildlife, which could have fallen at any time. Campers can avoid such dangers of the wild, if only they speak to landowners first.

The Ukrainian war is coming to Moscow

A few hours after Ukrainian kamikaze drones struck the proud towers of the Moscow City business centre, a Muscovite friend received a cold call from her insurance company. Would she like to upgrade her home insurance to include drone attacks, a chirpy salesman asked. Another couple of friends, out for a walk in the woods not far from Vladimir Putin’s country residence at Novo-Ogaryovo, were surprised to discover a pair of Pantsir-S1 mobile anti-aircraft batteries parked by the edge of a field, their warheads pointing warily towards Ukraine. A Muscovite journalist shares a new listing for bed space in an underground garage that he has converted into a bomb shelter.

In Russia’s capital, until recently cocooned from the consequences of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, this is the new normal.

Long-range drone strikes on Moscow began on 3 May when two small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) struck the roof of the Kremlin’s Senate Palace. In June, the elite dacha lands of Moscow’s Rublevskoye Shosse were hit; last month, so was a residential building just yards from the headquarters of the GRU military intelligence unit allegedly responsible for poisoning enemies of the state. Most recently, two UAVs slammed into the skyscraper in Moscow City that houses the Communications and Mass Media Ministry on consecutive nights. Implausibly, Russian officials have claimed that all these drones were in fact shot down and the damage was done by falling debris. But nobody quite believes them.

To the undisguised delight of pro-Ukrainian social media users, videos of the strikes often feature Muscovites screaming, swearing and generally panicking as the drones make their slow progress across the skies, followed by fireballs and loud detonations. After months of merciless Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities, those on Moscow feel like the most satisfying form of payback. And, tellingly, the Kremlin’s propaganda machine has downplayed or downright ignored the latest series of strikes on the capital. This suggests that, for the time being at least, the Kremlin senses the political danger if ordinary citizens start to feel unsafe in their beds.

Sowing doubt and terror in the heart of the enemy is, of course, the point of these attacks – just as Churchill’s decision to launch a raid on Tempelhof airfield in Berlin in August 1940 and America’s Doolittle raid on Tokyo in April 1942 were less about inflicting damage than waging psychological warfare.

Ukraine has been preparing for the drone campaign since last December, when the 23-year-old social media influencer Ihor Lachenkov got an unexpected phone call from Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence service asking him – as he put it in the New York Times – to crowdfund a ‘drone that can fly very far’. In May, standing beside GUR head General Kyrylo Budanov, Lachenkov revealed the first images of the Bober (‘Beaver’) UAV with a range of at least 310 miles. Other Ukrainian-made kamikaze drones include the UJ-22 Airborne and the Rubak. On 25 July, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal announced that Ukraine was planning a tenfold increase in its drone funding – from around $108 million last year to more than $1 billion this year.

The reason Ukraine has attacked Russian territory using only its own domestically produced drones is simple: Kyiv’s western backers fear that an attack inside Russia using Nato rocketry would be seen by the Kremlin as a casus belli to expand the war to Nato itself. Keeping the US out of ‘a kinetic war with Russia’ was one of the top priorities that General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, voiced in an early briefing to Joe Biden on Ukraine.

As a consequence, the US has refused to equip Kyiv with long-range rocket artillery, let alone cruise or ballistic missiles of the kind that Russia regularly fires at Ukraine. The Himars guided rocket artillery that America is providing has a range of just 50 miles, and so far Washington has resisted pleas to supply the 190-mile-range ATACMS which can be fired from the same launch system. In May, the UK was the first country to defy the US’s de facto ban by sending Storm Shadow missiles, which have a reach of 340 miles – and there have been reports that these have been used to target ammunition dumps in Russian-annexed Crimea. But firing a Storm Shadow at Moscow would be an escalation that even the often-reckless Budanov would be reluctant to make.

Openly admitting to responsibility for strikes deep inside Russia remains a taboo for Ukraine’s leadership, though Volodymyr Zelensky came close last week when he said that ‘gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia – to its symbolic centres and military bases, and this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process’. After another drone hit Moscow on Monday night, his spokesman Mykhailo Podolyak warned darkly that Russia should anticipate ‘more unidentified drones, more collapse, more civil conflicts’ – adding that ‘Moscow is rapidly getting used to a fully fledged war’.

The key question, as Ukraine opens up a new drone front against the Russian heartland, is whether the attacks will weaken or strengthen Putin’s war effort. Churchill’s 1940 Berlin raid angered Hitler into launching an all-out blitz on London and other British cities; the morale of the Japanese people was not broken by the Doolittle raid, nor even by the wholesale firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. Attacks on Moscow also reinforce the Kremlin’s narrative that Putin is fighting a defensive war against Nato aggression, not merely engaging in an imperial land-grab.

Several Russian friends of mine who claim to hate Putin and oppose the war responded to my questions about the strikes with various permutations of ‘Now we’re in this stupid war we have to win it’ or ‘We are hitting them, they are hitting us, both sides are as bad as each other.’ Twisted logic, for sure, and characteristic of the self-delusion of supposedly educated and worldly Muscovites. But, paradoxically, enemy strikes on Moscow are just the propaganda coup Putin needs as he widens the age of conscription in a desperate bid for more cannon fodder to shore up his failing war effort.

So far, the Ukrainian strikes on Moscow have not caused any deaths – unlike the appalling loss of civilian life caused by Russian attacks on Odessa, Kryvyi Rih and Kharkiv, to name only the latest. It would be unsurprising – and certainly consistent with their past cynicism and callousness – if Putin’s security agencies are planning to stage just such outrages against their own civilians in Moscow. Which leads to another question: what should Russians fear most – Ukrainian drones or their own leadership?

Why should Vikings be diverse?

I don’t always watch ‘Strongest Viking’ competitions on cable. But the other day I was channel-hopping and became mesmerised by one. Firstly because I wasn’t previously aware that such banality was possible on television. People really watch men trying to push a stone or pull a rope? This was new data to me. But I also stayed because I was struck by the sheer lack of diversity.

When the league tables flashed up, it transpired that the board was led by someone called Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, otherwise known as ‘the Mountain’ in Game of Thrones. Mr Björnsson is from Iceland, so there was a nice Icelandic flag beside his name. Then I noticed the rest of the league table. Without exception the top Vikings were all from Scandinavian countries. There were several people with unpronounceable names who had the Danish flag beside their names. Others had the flag of Sweden. My first reaction was surprise. My second was: ‘I’d give this competition about a year. Wait till the internet discovers it.’

I refer of course to the appalling cultural homogeneity of the Strongest Viking competition. For it is a truth of our age that everything must be diverse. And this was strikingly not.

There is a caveat I must add here. For naturally the rule does not operate if white people are not predominant. So far nobody with any wish for career longevity has tried to assail the National Basketball Association of North America for the distinct predominance of black chaps in their ranks. I have heard no calls for diversity to be introduced into basketball in general. And nobody seems to think that the NBA is for the chop unless they can increase their quota of white folks by next season.

But then it never does work that way round. Because that would be racist. Whereas attacking anything where there are ‘too many’ white people is, by the dictionary of our time, ‘anti-racist’.

Take the example of Straker’s in Notting Hill. Last week the owner of this pleasant-sounding restaurant, which opened last year, posted a photograph on social media with the caption ‘chef team assembled’. Thomas Straker had a fine line-up of restaurant help – (unfortunately for him) all male and all white. Social media soon turned his photograph into the usual dumpster fire.

‘Why aren’t there any female chefs?’ was one popular complaint, closely followed by accusations that the restaurant in question was a ‘white boys’ club’ – for the worst thing was the sheer whiteness on display. A female ‘drinks expert’ from ITV opined: ‘Too often we say, “It’s been proven time and again that diverse teams are more creative, productive and successful.” If every member looks the same and has the same background, you’ll find they’ll all think the same as well. Forming diverse teams is not only the right thing to do, it makes business sense too.’

I’m not sure what the drinks expert in question imagines goes on in a kitchen. Without diminishing the work of chefs, it is a kitchen we’re talking about here, not Bletchley Park. I like a piece of halibut as much as the next person, but I’m not sure how much inventiveness needs to go into the making of it. Would my piece of fish taste better if a ‘non-binary person’ had contributed to the making of it? I can’t see how. What would they do? Complain at the fish while it was cooking? And what ‘different thinking’ would occur if there had been a black chef in the mix? Isn’t that a bit racist? Or at least presumptuous? Almost as presumptuous as looking at a photo of white men and assuming they are all of the same class, background and life experience?

Still, that is how this era does think. So poor Thomas Straker, who just wants to run a restaurant in a period which has not been kind to his trade, is now having to fend off the dementors as though he was trying to start the Fourth Reich. Since he wants to keep his business, he has of course been forced into a grovelling apology, swearing that he is ‘absolutely committed to ensuring diversity’ and confessing that although he isn’t currently ‘achieving this’ he seeks to ‘improve’.

I wish his case was unusual. But it isn’t.

Last month, a minor Hollywood celeb put a picture online of their lunch table. Everybody at the table looked jolly happy. But that was because they couldn’t see the hurricane about to bear down on them. Because no sooner was the picture published than the internet discovered it and ‘anti-racists’ across several continents started berating the participants. The whiteness of the table was universally condemned. Experts gave advice on what to do if you are white and ever find yourself at such a gathering. The general conclusion was that you should either walk out or kidnap a passing non-white person and force them to eat with a bunch of strangers for picture credits.

Once again, I note that this only happens that way around. I have seen many photos from Africa, America, Britain and elsewhere of black people having a nice time. I have even seen photos of all-black workforces. But at no point have I seen people berating these folks for not having any white representation. It would seem a little arrogant to tell such a group to break it up, learn about people with different experiences and stop being so damn racist.

But then we also live in an era where a South African political party can hold a vast rally in a stadium, call for people to shoot white folks, and this is all in the normal run of things.

Perhaps this racism of the ‘anti-racists’ will go on a while longer. Perhaps it will go on in perpetuity. Some of us are of an age where we don’t care, but imagine being a young white person being brought up in this foetid atmosphere. And just imagine the resentment that will be brewing in anyone with any self-respect.

Bridge | 8 August 2023

It’s been more than 30 years since Zia Mahmood published his classic memoir, Bridge My Way*, and now – finally! – he brings us up to date with Bridge, A Love Story. It’s published next week, and having just binge-read an early copy, I can assure you that it’s every bit as brilliant.

Zia is still at the very top of his game, and the book fizzes with passion and energy. It’s full of funny anecdotes, snapshots of legendary players, hands galore, quizzes, tips and his views on everything from the best players in the world (no spoilers) to which conventions should be dumped (Gerber).

At 77, he doesn’t feel old, but he acknowledges the outward signs are there, such as the Scandinavian ex-girlfriend who used to send him the same message before every important final – ‘Play as well as you make love!’ – but who these days simply writes ‘Good luck’.

Above all, this is an enormously generous book. The acclaimed master of deception has chosen to share many of his deep-held secrets, and they are dynamite (look out for the one on pseudo-splinters). He never misses the chance for even the simplest false-card if it might send declarer astray. The book is full of examples. Here, Zia was West, partnering Andrew Robson:

Zia led the ♣️A then the ♣️K, ruffed. South cashed the ♠️K – and Zia followed with the ♠️J! Assuming a 4-1 break, South knew he could no longer draw four rounds of trumps and still ruff a heart. But his ♠️8 meant he could set up diamonds instead. He played a diamond to the ♦️Q and one back to the ♦️A, ruffed the third diamond ‘safely’ with the ♠️A, and returned to hand with the ‘marked’ finesse of the ♠️8. Zia of course won with the ♠️9 – one down!

* Available via Andrew Robson Bridge.

A farewell to alcohol

Some are saved by Jesus and they are sober. For others, drunkenness is as natural as love-making, roasted meat and weekend football. In northern Kenya we brew a honey mead called muratina; then there’s a millet beer and strongest of all is a moonshine, changa’a, which you can smell from several huts away and it tastes like battery acid.

Booze soaks into the corners of life in the village or the slum. I’ve been in places, on paydays for example, where the scenes resemble Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s tableaux of peasants committing all the seven deadly sins. A changa’a drinker isn’t just drunk, he’s catatonic with the onset of blindness. Late on Saturdays in the middle of nowhere you’ll pass a man tottering about, quarrelling with the night air, pointing and stumbling. In South Sudan they make an evil spirit from cassava that turns a man’s eyeballs bright pink.

I first got drunk on Inch’s scrumpy in Devon at the age of 15. I was among the last boys to be caned in Sherborne’s history after I consumed a bottle of whisky with a comrade who had to be stomach-pumped. At Balliol I was among those lucky undergraduates who fell into the Svengali-like grip of punk poet and gatecrasher Stephen Micalef, who made us drink great quantities of the stolen bottles of Bollinger he retrieved from the flowerbeds where he buried them in all the finest colleges. While at SOAS, I drank more than I served at the bar of the 100 Club on Oxford Street, where the bouncers were two broken-nosed twins known as Ugliness in Stereo.

The foreign correspondent’s life on the Africa beat was ideal for me, in the tradition of the Reuters man who said the water in Addis Ababa was so dirty he had to submit his expenses for cases of champagne. Here I was in the tropics, back in the days when working lunches included wine. While covering wars in Africa and the Balkans, I stayed sober while working hard, but drank a skinful as soon as I took leave. In Bosnia, downing a plum brandy was the only way to get a Chetnik officer to yield a few quotes.

The only times I got to dry out were during the long trips into guerrilla–held territory in Eritrea or South Sudan or Islamic Mogadishu, after which I always felt so fit and well. After events like Rwanda in 1994 none of us hacks thought to see a shrink. We got drunk – and this often did me a world of good. Once I did visit a military doctor whom I’d met in a lunatic asylum outside Kigali and after a brief chat we hit the pub together.

After I married and we started a family I still loved boozing, but by now we were on a farm in a remote corner of northern Kenya. When the hard liquor and Tusker beer ran out I’d resort to High Life, a cheap cooking sherry that made a superior cocktail. Or in desperation I hit the Settler Sauce, a jug of vodka and gin mixed with garlic and hot chillis that sat on our dining table and usually went into the soup. In the years when the farm came under quite regular assault from cattle rustlers or invaders incited by an alcoholic local politician, booze was a dependable release from the daily stress of driving through hails of bullets in an ambush, from dodging spears or rocks.

What good fun were those nights when we fired up a Super Warrior – nine parts gin, one part TruFru orange squash – or quaffed the honey mead of our ranching neighbour Gilfrid, who produced an alcohol so pernicious the hangover hit as soon as the golden liquid crossed one’s tongue. I’m an amateur compared with some of my friends, but sums on a napkin tell me that in 43 years I’ve drunk the equivalent of two medium-sized swimming pools full of wine or the equivalent.

I gave up abruptly three months ago today. I have not been to things like AA meetings, though one friend sweetly offered to introduce me. The only time I lapsed was after Low Life author Jeremy Clarke’s memorial at St Martin-in-the-Fields the other day, when I went to lunch with Taki and my friend Marcus at the Turf Club. That was a pleasant farewell.

Along with the hooch, I’ve given up coffee and suppers. As a reward to myself, I took up smoking again after two decades. I started on the box of Montecristo cigars kindly given to me by Nick Yale, an undergraduate friend of my son Rider. When I saw how quickly I was blasting through cigars, I switched to rolling tobacco, most of it stolen from my children. Rider says these days I shout less and I am no longer so fat. At last I sleep very well, but sometimes I regret that it’s all over.

I am escaping Surrey in the nick of time

As I slapped a rude note on a car parked outside my house, I realised that nature was taking its course. My transformation into a Surreyite was in danger of becoming complete.

‘If you have enjoyed using this private access track, then perhaps you might consider making a donation for its maintenance,’ I had snidely scrawled on a scrap of paper which I tucked under the wipers of the same Nissan crossover that always seems to be plonked there by some dog walker or other who can’t be bothered to drive further along the village green to park in the public car park.

Do I care? No. Of course I don’t. Was there plenty of other space? Loads. And yet I found myself writing this note. I watched my hand doing it as though I was inhabiting someone else’s body.

I stomped outside like a zombie and slapped the note on the car supposedly blocking the space next to my car where the builder boyfriend ought to be able to park his pick-up truck when he came home from a hard day’s work in this parallel universe I had stumbled into where this demonic thought had occurred to me.

I lifted the wipers and tucked the note underneath, making a harrumphing sound. And when a few minutes later another strange car pulled up outside my neighbour’s house – my neighbour who I don’t speak to – I scrawled another note. I’d got a taste for it now.

As a lady got out of her mid-range 4×4 and walked to the high street to do some shopping, perhaps meet a friend for a bite to eat in one of the cafés, I stormed out and slapped a note under her wipers.

Half an hour later I was upstairs when I heard the sound of children’s laughter outside. I raced to the bedroom window and saw a family getting out of their car to walk off on an outing with their rucksacks and pet dog.

Out came a square of paper and the note got scrawled again. ‘I am going to have to type this out and print off a load of them,’ was the strange thought that went through my head, as I realised what a mammoth task I was having, policing people’s behaviour.

Although I could tell on some level that I was losing the plot, I didn’t want to stop. This strange new creature was coming out of its chrysalis, and I wanted to meet it. What was it that I had become?

I marched forth again to push the note beneath the wipers.

A few hours later I heard them come back. The little boy shouted: ‘Look! We’ve got a letter!’ He sounded so happy I came to my senses. Ugh, I thought. I have become something quite horrible.

Luckily, it had rained so the note was probably obscured, a meaningless blur of watery ink, signifying nothing and giving no hint of the deranged motive that had led to it being there.

I heard the family get in their car and drive off. ‘Good riddance, parking in our residents’ spaces on our private access track…’ She was still in there, the mad, growling monster of a busybody inside. Later, she wheeled both her wheelie bins into the gap. They’re still there. She puts them out there every time the BB goes to work, or when I go out, to keep the space.

This is what seven years of living on a village green 45 minutes from London will do to you. So maybe only in the nick of time have I decided to go and live down a track in a remote part of Ireland, in a big, old rambling house, behind a huge gate, with the nearest neighbour a farmer and the only traffic the occasional passing tractor…

Before we can get there, however, we have to go through the conveyancing process, the box-ticking for which is far worse than I remember. Compliance is the buzzword. No one will believe anything unless it’s been compliance-ified.

The questions designed to make everything pass muster for all the rules and regs – this end, not Ireland – which seem to have weirdly proliferated since we left the EU are so petty-fogging there is almost no way to answer them.

Most of the buyer’s queries in the latest batch addressed to my solicitor concern a ‘risk-based’ independent electronic verification method by which he must prove, again, nine weeks down the line, that I really am who I say I am, and that I really am his client.

I suggested he reply: ‘Damn. You’ve caught me out. I actually have no idea who she is, or how she got her name on the Land Registry entry for that house. I wish I’d never set up this fake law firm to do international money-laundering.’

Greece’s age-old obsession with fire

While green Rhodes and greener Corfu burn away, arid Patmos remains fireproof because rock and soil do not a bonfire make. The Almighty granted some islands plenty of water, and other ones no H₂O whatsoever. Most of the Cycladic isles lug in drinking water from the mainland, and make do with treated unsalted seawater for planting. The Ionian isles have springs and rivers and also fires, some of them started by firebugs who hope to gain – I have never figured this one out – from the blaze. It’s all very confusing, especially as the temperatures are rising and the energy to party diminishes by the hour.

The Greeks have always been obsessed with fire. We worshipped Hephaistos, god of fire, and his temple northwest of the Acropolis was the scene of ferocious fighting between nationalists and commies back in 1944. I was eight years old at the time, but members of my family, including old Dad, made up for it. If anyone is interested, the good guys won with help from the Brits, and the bad ones retired to the mountains up north and eventually went over to the Soviet Union where they learned to speak Russian fluently. The winners chose capitalism and you can guess the rest. As a famous wit once remarked, had the commies won, he didn’t think Aristotle Socrates Onassis would have chosen the widow Khrushchev for a bride.

Never mind the witticisms, Patmos is as hot as it gets without the Hephaistian orgies that took place on Rhodes. However scary a fire can be, it is somehow less frightening when on an island: one can always plunge into the blue Mediterranean and give the god of fire an old-fashioned middle-finger salute.

I first came to Patmos when visitors – all on their boats, naturally – had names like Guinness, Guest and Goulandris. The town was made up of whitewashed stone houses clustered underneath the great St John monastery way up high, where the baddies could not reach. This was and still is called Hora, while the port below goes by the name of Skala. Hora and Skala were small in those days, with a few tavernas and people who all knew each other. Fifty-odd years later, as with middle-age spread, both H. and S. have grown exponentially, but the locals have somehow managed not to go Mykonian and greedy.

Patmos used to be visited by a lucky few because it’s much closer to Turkey than to the Greek mainland. That was then, however, and now daily overnight ferry services from Athens disgorge their cargoes and you can guess the rest. Still, Plateia is the main square and meeting place up in Hora, where the elite meet to eat and exchange gossip. Plateia is round, with a great outdoor bar on the higher end run by George and Maria, the two nicest people on the island, who are helped by Michael, equally gentle. That is where the tongue-tied so-called golden youths hang out, while the rest of the place has Mister Manolis as King, dispensing dinner tables like a benevolent pharaoh. Needless to say, George, Maria, Michael and Manolis are good friends and take great care of the poor little Greek boy when he’s under the influence.

And speaking of influence, Christos Zampounis, my Greek editor, has been given the credit, by those in the know, for a pro-royal swing of at least 10 per cent of the population after his pro-royal coverage on TV debates following the death of King Constantine earlier this year. As laconic as a Spartan, Zampounis asked the anti-royalists only one question: ‘Was he or was he not head of state?’ ‘Yes, but…’ were the answers. In spite of this, the King was refused a state funeral. I told my friend and editor something he knows quite well: we Greeks can be the tops at times, but also among the pettiest.

Otherwise everything was hunky-dory until my daughter decided to give a party in my house, rather than hers, for about 20 of her friends. Word got out and my 15-year-old granddaughter Maria asked me whether she could have a few youngsters drop by after dinner. While we oldies were dining in the garden, the youngsters came in and kept coming in and then they all disappeared. When the wife was going up to bed around 2 a.m. she noticed a long line of very young people coming through an opening and very politely saying thank you and goodbye. She counted around 50 of them. The young had all gone up to the terrace, taken bottles of vodka lined up for senior consumption, and whatever other liquor they could find, downed it, and then politely left thanking the wife. I never saw them as I was under the weather in the garden, but everyone got home safe, according to my granddaughter who has a telephone implanted in her ear. The only two to miss the festivities were Antonius and Theodora, aged four and two, my other two grandchildren who were sleeping at their mother’s.

A welcome antidote to UK crime drama: Netflix’s Kohrra reviewed

It has been quite some time since I’ve been able to bear watching UK crime drama. All right, I do cheat occasionally with series like the one featuring the delightfully grumpy, chain-smoking Cormoran Strike, but on the whole I can’t stand the mix of predictability and implausibility: all the goodies will be female and/or ethnic; the murderer will always be white, middle class and male; no one ever gets arrested for misgendering someone on Twitter because in the parallel universe of cop TV the police still actually think it’s their job to solve crimes.

So, your options are either to watch classic episodes of The Sweeney or to find a cop series from one of those countries where the old values still prevail. India, for example. Here – well, certainly in the Punjab, setting for Netflix’s Kohrra – you won’t find a rainbow-painted patrol car anywhere in sight. Instead, they trundle around in manly khaki-coloured Jeeps, dress in smart khaki uniforms, help themselves to bottles of whisky from behind the bar of dodgy clubs they’re investigating and encourage witnesses to be more helpful during interrogation by squeezing them hard on the testicles. This is pre-Macpherson report policing at its most vauntingly unreconstructed.

Sometimes, you wonder if our heroes Balbir (Suvinder Vicky) and Garundi (Barun Sobti) push things a bit too far in their zeal to see justice done. The series opens with the discovery of a body in some fields. So what’s the first thing they do? Beat up the hapless fellow who accidentally found the body (while seeking a quiet place to shag his girlfriend). And then, when that doesn’t work, they round up all the known drug addicts in the area, drag them to the police station, get them to strip to their underwear and thrash them with sticks, just on the off chance that it was one of them that dunnit.

This is one of the things I love about foreign TV: trying to make sense of the alien cultural parameters. With Japanese and Korean TV, for example, I’m sometimes at a loss as to whether any given scene is supposed to represent high comedy or heartrending tragedy or some satirical variant somewhere in between. In the case of Kohrra, it took me time to work out with which characters our sympathies are meant to lie. Garundi, the grizzled detective’s young sidekick, for example, is clearly a wrong ’un by modern UK crime drama standards, what with his uncouthness, rule-bending and thuggery. But in Punjabi terms, you gradually come to realise, he’s just a bit of a lad who knows how to get things done.

And to be fair, he does seem to operate in a culture where nobody, anywhere, wants to help police with their inquiries. The body found in the fields belongs to an NRI (as expatriates – Non Resident Indians – are known), Paul, a London-based lawyer murdered on the eve of his arranged marriage. But no one wants to give any information that might help: not his parents, not his bride-to-be, not his fiancée’s thwarted lover, a disgruntled DJ who has posted a rude rap song on social media about what he thinks of his ex’s new man… Hence the need for all the testicle-squeezing.

Gradually, as is the way with this genre, regardless of what country you’re in, we learn that everyone is harbouring a terrible secret. And probably, by the time they’ve all been unravelled, the murder will make sense. At the moment – two-and-a-half episodes in – we’ve learned that Paul’s dad (a devout Sikh, as most of the characters are) never forgave his son for cutting his hair when he was living in Britain as a schoolboy; that there’s something dubious and significant about the white best man Liam (who has gone missing since the murder); that there is much bitterness involving family land disputes; that the bride is a bit of a gold-digger, understandably thrilled to have landed a mate rich enough to take her on honeymoon to Machu Picchu and give her a life – as so many middle-class Punjabis clearly covet – beyond the backwaters of northern India.

But for me, at any rate, all that labyrinthine plotting is incidental to the local colour: the dilapidated squalor in which poorer Indians live (basically a mattress in a dingy room), the extravagant domestic violence, the routine chai-drinking and that fantastically delicious-looking samosa (so much crispier-looking than you get over here), the attitudes to sex, the junior police girl with her addiction to her iPhone and rich puddings, the Mahindra truck drivers, the small-business owners, the casual anti-white racism, the snobbery and aspirations, the care and perfectionism that go into putting on a turban.

Created by a well-established team, Gunjit Chopra, Sudip Sharma and Diggi Sisodia, arrestingly shot with a grimy, in-your-face immediacy, well acted and authentic (the lead characters are based on real-life cops observed by Chopra), this series has been a number-one hit in India. But it really deserves a much bigger circulation than that.

Bizarre and outdated: Word-Play at the Royal Court reviewed            

The Royal Court’s new topical satire, Word-Play, opens with a gaffe-prone Tory prime minister giving a TV interview in which he commends Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. The Downing Street press team suffer a meltdown as they struggle to draft an apology or a retraction. Opposition parties try to profit from the blunder and the PM’s words spread across the globe and earn him praise from various authoritarian governments, led by China.

This opening scene makes sense only if the British prime minister is a white male named Boris but the author, Rabiah Hussain, hasn’t troubled to update her script in the light of recent developments. The result is a topical play that feels like ancient history. Hussain seems unaware that Powell’s speech, made in 1968, led to his dismissal from the shadow cabinet by Ted Heath. And apparently no one has told her that Heath was the prime minister who later welcomed Asian refugees after their deportation from Uganda by Idi Amin. Her show prefers the fanciful idea that Powell represents mainstream Conservative politics and she wants to commemorate and even to preserve racism, as if it were a virtue.

The script is arranged as a heap of disconnected sketches that might be performed in any order. There’s a scene in a Romford sitting room involving a couple of Essex dimwits who repetitively praise the ‘wonderfulness’ of Britain. Next, we move to a north London dinner party where four rich migrants of Asian heritage start to swear and scream about Bangladeshi cuisine. Next, the actors sprawl around on bean bags, texting each other and exchanging meaningless remarks. Then, in an interactive scene, three performers eating ice creams take up spare seats in the auditorium and praise the quality of the Royal Court’s confectionary supplier. (Presumably that’s an in-joke for the benefit of the ushers.) It was at this point during a preview performance that two brave audience members broke for the exit and quick-marched across the stage and out into the street.

The moral confusion of this bizarre and outdated show crystallises in a Pinteresque scene set in a Home Office detention centre. A British migrant from east Africa is separated from her baby daughter and subjected to emotional torture by officials who themselves belong to ethnic minorities. After accusing her of terrorist sympathies, they bombard her with questions about English history taken from the ‘Life in the UK’ booklet that helps migrants pass the British citizenship test. What is being suggested by this dotty scene? Apparently that Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman are ardent Powellites who fill the Home Office with sadistic British migrants and instruct them to harass their fellow ethnic minorities in the name of white supremacism. This clueless production reveals an alarming truth about the Royal Court: no one there knows a thing about Britain’s history or culture, or about the present realities of politics.

Southwark Elephant has received a touring musical about a little-known 19th-century adventuress. Annie Kopchovsky was a Latvian Jew whose family emigrated to America when she was little. In her twenties, already married with children, she was approached by two businessmen who offered her $10,000 to cycle around the world. She promptly abandoned her family and set about winning the cash.

The show covers the highlights of her trip but many of the details are left unexplained. We never discover how the businessmen found Annie or why they offered her so much money to circle the globe on a bike. They refused to cover her expenses, or even to offer her an advance, so she had to earn cash along the way by giving lectures in subjects she knew nothing about. The programme notes fill in the gaps and reveal that Annie was a creative and mercurial character who loved to adopt fictional identities. At various times, she posed as a doctor, a lawyer, a Harvard graduate and a friend of European royalty. This explains the show’s opening scene which is set in the office of a tabloid newspaper where Annie works as a star columnist. From here, the story unfolds in a series of flashbacks but the script ought to have begun at the beginning rather than at the end.

Annie is played by a sensational performer, Liv Andrusier, who embraces the role with a kind of crazed ebullience. It’s impossible to stop watching this huge and radiant performance. Her colleague, Katy Ellis, plays a variety of parts with tremendous skill and panache. The pair seem to have an unspoken understanding and they collaborate like seasoned Vaudevillians who’ve been in the business for decades. It’s rare to see stage chemistry that burns with so much unforced energy. The beautiful sets, by Amy Jane Cook, offer a host of neat devices and visual tricks. Well worth a visit. If you do a bit of homework first, you’ll love this firecracker of a show.

The problem with pop-literary collaborations

‘We all secretly want to be rock stars,’ the 2022 Booker Prize-winning author Shehan Karunatilaka said recently. By ‘we’ he meant novelists, and he was more or less right.

Most authors want to be rock stars, just as many rock stars aspire to bookish credibility. The former crave a whiff of glamour and instant gratification; writing offers precious little of either. Musicians seek gravitas and some wider recognition that they possess the tools to extend their literary genius beyond three verses and a killer chorus. Both parties tend to discover that they do what they do as a day job for a good reason.

‘There are very few things I’ve regretted more than deciding to write a full-length novel,’ Steve Earle told me, prior to the publication of his 2011 novel I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive. ‘It’s so damn hard.’ Morrissey – a remarkable lyricist in his day, however dim and distant that day might be – tried his hand at long form fiction and came up with the abominable List of the Lost. Bob Dylan’s Tarantula, meanwhile, isn’t really the stuff of Nobel Prize winners. Other musicians have fared rather better. Nick Cave, Willy Vlautin, Josh Ritter and Colin Meloy have all carved out credible alternative careers as novelists. Mat Osman – bassist in Suede, brother of the billion-selling Richard – has recently joined the fray.

Fair enough. As Karunatilaka suggests, the equation works both ways. The proud possessor of five guitars, drum kit and keyboards, the Sri Lankan novelist is a veritable one man band. Though he has yet to unleash his music on the public, plenty of his peers have, even if few have carved out an entirely convincing alternate career. The glaring exception, of course, is Leonard Cohen, a Canadian poet and novelist who turned to making music in the late 1960s as a means to pay the rent and, all things considered, did fairly well out of it.

In 2010, Nick Hornby made an album with Ben Folds, Lonely Avenue, on which Folds wrote the music and Hornby the words. This make sense for the musician. Lyrics are the hardest, most time-intensive part of the songwriting process; why not franchise it out? It worked for Elton John. The late Iain Banks – who perhaps came closest to writing the Great Rock Novel with Espedair Street – was another aspiring muso, with a home studio where he wrote and recorded all the songs attributed in the book to the fictional band, Frozen Gold.

The poet laureate, Simon Armitage, has a group, LYR, which tours and records. Val McDermid, Christopher Brookmyre and other thriller writers gig frequently as the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers. Ian Rankin sings in a band called Best Picture. ‘Tell you what,’ he once said. ‘I wish I could move like Jagger.’ You sense that these projects are fired by a love of music rather than any serious career aspirations.

Rankin, McDermid and Hornby are involved in a new album by Mull Historical Society. In My Mind There’s a Room was written by the band’s Colin MacIntyre in collaboration with 13 authors, their number also including Sebastian Barry, Alan Warner and Jacqueline Wilson. Each was commissioned to write about a room of special significance, which MacIntyre then turned into a song. (He’s a published author and playwright, so the exchange of labour seems equitable.)

For once, the meeting of pop and literature feels relatively unforced. One benefit of the methodology – each writer contributes only one song, and has a theme to work with – is that the diversity of lyrical approaches and styles seems to have suggested a more varied musical palette than might otherwise have been the case. James Robertson’s ‘Seeds’ lends itself to the kind of slightly cheesy piano stomper Billy Joel used to write with deceptive ease. ‘1952’ has a crackling urgency that aligns with Liz Lochhead’s words of youthful self-discovery – ‘In a room with my own view, who needs Virginia Woolf’ – without feeling overly reverential to the source. ‘Panicked Feathers’ is a very Hornbyesque tale of silly-sublime suburban adolescent revelation set to tangled indie-rock. Left to his own devices, it’s unlikely MacIntyre would have come up with the chorus line of ‘cocky little gits’.

The best tracks just sound like good songs. The worst excesses of ‘literary’ lyrics – florid overwriting, lack of economy, tortuous references and metaphors – are absent. Musically, a tendency towards floaty impression is also largely avoided and when it isn’t, the more abstract sounds work well on Jackie Kay’s ‘Meltwater’ and Barry’s ‘Kelshabeg’. Oddly, perhaps, in the end it’s not the words that stand out but the music. Perhaps there’s a lesson in there for Karunatilaka.

Beautiful and illuminating: Radio 4’s the Venice Conundrum reviewed          

The playwright Carlo Gozzi marvelled at ‘The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both men and women turned into monkeys’ in 18th-century Venice, and Jan Morris, visiting in the 1950s, did likewise. It would be more than a decade before Morris went under the knife, but already he was contemplating a transition more permanent than any he observed at carnival time.

The Venice Conundrum, which aired on Radio 4 on Sunday, knitted together Morris’s most famous travel book with Conundrum, the story of his sex change, completed in the 1970s. I had my doubts about how well these two works would sit together, but the dramatisation was not only beautiful, but also hugely illuminating of Morris’s psyche as a traveller caught between two worlds.

Shortly before arriving in Venice, Morris had flushed the oestrogen pills he had been prescribed down the loo and resolved to try to live as a man. His biggest fear was that the hormones might affect his talents as a writer. We really felt his anxieties, for no sooner did we hear them expressed in Conundrum than the narrative shifted and we were listening to one of his most exquisite passages of writing from Venice. It was not his body so much as his mind that he felt was in jeopardy.

The two texts alternated in such a way as to highlight the similarities Morris discerned between himself and La Serenissima. Venice was ‘the outsider’, ‘founded in misfortune’; ‘a complicated place’, ‘enmeshed in contradictions and exceptions’, a place of ‘brazen individualism’ which Morris declared to be ‘always feminine to me’. Not all of these sentiments are self-referential in the texts, but for the purposes of the drama this did not matter. Robin Brooks did a stellar job of weaving the material together, and the subtly inquiring voice of Edalia Day, a transgender spoken word artist, felt just right. The music overlaying the Venetian sections was also lovely. It all added up to an hour of dreamy radio.

Birmingham, the so-called Venice of the north, was the setting of Stewart Lee’s foray into British surrealism, also on Radio 4 this week. Where The Venice Conundrum floated on beauty, The Balsall Heath Bohemians revelled in its own grittiness, Lee slurping ill-manneredly at his tea and perching in the pub where the art movement first ‘mushroomed off’. The Brummie group included Conroy Maddox, a bespectacled collagist with a peculiar artistic interest in nuns; Emmy Bridgwater, an Edgbaston automatist; and Desmond Morris, the great zoologist and painter.

The interviews with Morris, now aged 95, were the highlight of the rather varied half-hour. As a student, he famously left an elephant skull in a doorway on Birmingham’s Broad Street, sparking widespread confusion. While zoology became his chief profession, Morris enjoyed many years of artistic mischief-making before Maddox and chums co-authored a manifesto which, as Lee put it, ‘was a signpost on the long and winding road up their own arses’. Morris couldn’t accept it and the group dissolved.

As entertaining as it was to listen to Lee playing the parlour game consequences and visiting the artists’ old watering holes, I came away with a shaky understanding of what made this group of surrealists tick, and why they should matter to people other than Cold War Steve, a Birmingham artist we were expected to have heard of.

Where Are You Going? is, as podcasts go, pretty self-explanatory. Producer-presenter Catherine Carr wanders around cities with a microphone and recorder stopping people to ask where they are going. The dialogue that ensues between her and each stranger typically fills a ten-minute episode.

It won’t surprise you to learn that the most willing talkers aren’t always the most interesting. Some of the best episodes start awkwardly, with the interlocutor audibly puzzled as to what this woman could possibly want from them, and understandably suspicious. Recently, Carr visited Reykjavik, where she pulled someone aside and insisted on seeing what was in his shopping bag. The gentleman, clearly flustered, gingerly divulged that he worked for the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. What did he work on at the weekend? Hesitates. ‘Not even a hint?’ she asks. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

Some listeners may blanch at such prying (one poor stranger is asked what he’s doing in the pharmacy), but Carr has such an easy way with people that you can’t help but warm to her methods. The manner in which she draws out the family story of a Pakistan-raised post-office worker in Windsor is wonderful. You may never blank a stranger again.

As art it was terrible but the pre-teens loved it: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, reviewed  

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) began as a joke in 1984, a parody of the superhero culture of the time. It was originally a comic book but the stories have since expanded into toys, TV series and films, both animations and acted. The films have grossed more than a billion dollars and are likely to go on grossing down the generations of pre- and early teens. I am telling you all this because I have only just found out and I have never before seen any other TMNT products.

The latest – Mutant Mayhem – is an animated film. It is drawn in a style that suggests the animators were angry as they worked, perhaps because it is set, like all the stories, in an extremely dangerous New York City.

The turtles – Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello and Raphael – mutated into garrulous and ultra-violent teenagers after contact with something slimy in the city’s sewers. They speak a mix of the LA dialects of Surfer and Valley – kowabunga, their battle cry, is pure Surfer – and they have become earnest young defenders of all that is good in their city. Unfortunately quite a lot that is bad in the city also seems to mutate and the teens’ goal here is to defeat Superfly (voiced by rapper Ice Cube), who has mutated, first into a big vicious insect and then into a huge vicious insect.

From a mutant’s perspective, Superfly isn’t all bad, he is just on the hard right. Sure, he wants to exterminate all humans, but only to make a better world for mutants. He doesn’t understand why all mutants don’t agree. The turtles are soft left; they think they can make a deal with humanity and live together in peace.

This is, in fact, a back story. TMNT fans will already know all about this, including the wise but, in this version, irritating rat who brings up the crew. They call him ‘Dad’. The back story thing is archly acknowledged in the script. ‘Maybe this dude is part of our long tragic back story,’ says one turtle when confronted with yet another mutant.

New York humans react badly to mutants. But one doesn’t. This is April, a nerdy-looking, big glasses wannabe journalist, whose career is held back by her habit of vomiting with anxiety in front of TV cameras. To the turtles she is a miracle in that she doesn’t run away screaming when she sees them, she just shrugs; this is after all New York. She turns out to be the key that unlocks the new world order.

All four turtles fall in love with her, becoming a bunch of goofy, aw-shucks teens in her presence. Very nice, but how…? No, I won’t go there.

April is the second-best character; all the others are a kind of blur, though perhaps not to TMNT cognoscenti. The best character is the city of New York.

As this was all dreamed up in the early 1980s, I assume the city in the 1970s had the sewers from which the mutants sprang. It was a dangerous place and I am told it is in decline once again. Superheroes – the turtles and others – emerge to save New York because it so obviously needs saving. Residents are terrified of what emerges from the darkness but turn into a grateful mob when it is the turtles who emerge from the sewers. April the Nerd has triumphed.

NYC is what gives the film its striking visual style. The dark, ruinous city vs the glow of hope that is four cuddlesome turtles from, of all places, the sewers.

But considered as cinematic art, Mutant Mayhem is pretty terrible. Like all action movies, it consists of a number of violent fighting scenes, punctuated by frequently comical plot scenes. But fight scenes must be clear enough to tell their own stories; in Mutant Mayhem they are just chaos. One of the first plot scenes shows how the turtles rob supermarkets. It’ s quite funny and quite good, but the rest are just weak.

It’s not made for me, of course, it’s made for pre- and early teens and their parents. At this screening they seemed to be having a good time so, in fairness, I just murmur ‘kowabunga’ as I sidle off into the urban chaos that is Leicester Square.

An absolute romp framed by dutiful tut-tutting: Semele at Glyndebourne reviewed

If directors will insist on staging Handel oratorios as if they’re operas, it makes sense to pick Semele, which is practically an opera already. Under George II, opera was banned in London theatres during Lent (too exotick, too irrational), so Handel slipped his best material past the authorities by presenting it in concert format, set to biblical stories. Possibly by 1744 he was getting a bit careless, because there’s nothing remotely biblical about lovely, pouting Semele’s 24/7 shagathons (‘endless pleasure’, apparently) with King of the Gods and all-round studmuffin Jove. Handel’s sometime collaborator Charles Jennens denounced Semele as ‘no oratorio but a bawdy opera’: all the tunes, double the outrage.

It’s fun, in short, and that presents an opportunity and a problem for Adele Thomas, director of this new staging at Glyndebourne. The opportunity: Semele has a musical richness and variety that Handel often denied himself, and a plot (the libretto is based on Congreve) that’s as sly, as playful and as genuinely raunchy as the old Saxon ever really got. The problem? Even the most imaginative directors can struggle to shake the delusion that their job is didactic – that they’re duty-bound to send us home with a clunking ‘but seriously’ sitting like a lead weight on an otherwise enchanted evening.

That was the weirdest thing about Thomas’s Semele – the dutiful tut-tutting that framed an absolute romp. Act One plays out on a slagheap against overcast skies. Fair enough; we’re contrasting mundane reality with the splendour of love, Olympian-style. But Act Two’s heavenly love nest is an equally grotty brownfield site, this time with undergrowth. By the end, Thomas has the chorus succumbing to a collective nervous breakdown and Semele’s buzzkill sister Ino (Stephanie Wake-Edwards) angrily resisting her heaven-sent wedding. True, Semele has come to a sticky end, and a director can lose their Bold Feminist Reimagining licence for even hinting that marriage might be a positive outcome. Still, if the music says it’s a happy ending, bet on the music.

Mostly, though, this production leans into the mischief, the sonic splendour and Handel’s sensuous relish in melody and emotion. Semele (Joélle Harvey) and Jove (Stuart Jackson) descend from heaven in a bed of flowers, he yawning in post-coital torpor (he keeps his specs on for sex); she pealing out her hymn to pleasure in all the flushed, sunny radiance of Harvey’s succulent soprano. Jove wears a yellow zoot suit as they frolic in the weeds. Meanwhile Juno (Jennifer Johnston, dressed like a peacock, with Flash Gordon headwear) gurgles with pantomime malice as she plots their downfall with her sidekick Iris: played (in a dazzling bit of casting) by the Venezuelan male soprano Samuel Marino, whose voice is as fluid and bright as his movements are balletic.

The singing hits the spot throughout – from the moments when Johnston reveals her full vocal majesty to the grumpy, half-mumbled aria of the sleep-god Somnus (Clive Bayley, sounding velvety) and the exquisite control and delicacy with which Jackson all but whispers the final phrases of Jove’s great love song ‘Where’er You Walk’. The chorus bounds athletically over some particularly gnarly writing and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, under Vaclav Luks, is nimble, silky and never imposes. Musically and dramatically, this felt like a Semele with its heart (or at least, its hormones) in the right place. Every century has its conventional pieties. Handel understood that, and in Semele he made them the dull-but-necessary entry price to a garden of delights. On the evidence of this staging, I suspect that Thomas understands it too.

Vaughan Williams also hesitated to call his 1951 music drama The Pilgrim’s Progress an opera. He preferred the term ‘Morality’, though he wanted it staged in a theatre rather than a church; and having witnessed this gallant attempt to present it in Gloucester Cathedral as part of the Three Choirs Festival, I’m with him on that. British Youth Opera performed in front of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a rudimentary semi-staging by Will Kerley. No problem there as long as the cast are well characterised and passionately sung, and from what I could make out from the back of the nave Ross Cumming, as Pilgrim, delivered on both counts.

Beyond that, the Cathedral’s sightlines and acoustic scotched closer engagement, leaving us to bathe in a luminous wash of orchestral and choral sonority (the Festival has a particularly sweet-sounding Youth Choir), marshalled with purpose and obvious love by the conductor Charlotte Corderoy. It sounded gorgeous but with the words largely indistinguishable it couldn’t really be called opera. In fairness, the Festival printed the full libretto in the programme book; but the thing is the size of a small telephone directory and the cathedral lighting is dim. I’ve nothing but respect for this most venerable of festivals; but guys, it’s 2023. There are these things called surtitles.

‘She had no neutral gear’: Lindy Dufferin remembered

In 1957, when my dear godmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (1941-2020), was 16, she began her diary. The granddaughter of the Duke of Rutland and daughter of Loel Guinness, an MP, financier and Battle of Britain pilot, Lindy Dufferin had a gilded childhood. Her entries as a teen are like no other: ‘Randolph Churchill [Winston’s son] was staying the night here… It was most embarrassing because Randolph was very drunk…’ In October 1957, she was in Paris: ‘The Dutchess [sic] of Windsor came… I did a show of Rock & Roll. It was all great fun. Bon Soir!’

But, amid all the luxury, a note of seriousness enters – there was art, too.

That autumn, she went to stay with her mother in Coughton, Warwickshire. There the artist Paul Maze (1887-1979), an Anglo-French painter known as ‘the last of the post-impressionists’, came to stay. He did a drawing for teenage Lindy of his house in Twyford, which she stuck into her diary. It was the first of many great artists she and her husband, the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, would collect over the years. So began Lindy’s unique life as art collector, artist, patron and entrepreneur.

Sheridan Dufferin set up the Kasmin Gallery with John Kasmin in New Bond Street, where they held the first David Hockney show in 1963. Hockney painted and drew Lindy and Sheridan several times. Hockney’s most famous painting, ‘A Bigger Splash’, hung in the Dufferins’ London house. ‘It had been bought by Sheridan when the film director Tony Richardson turned it down,’ Hockney tells me. ‘[Richardson] had had it delivered to his house on Egerton Crescent, kept it for a week and then decided he hated Hollywood. Lindy knew it wasn’t about Hollywood at all. The painting cost them £800. They owned it for many years and when Sheridan died, it went to the Tate.’

Lindy was a considerable painter in her own right. She was taught by Oskar Kokoschka and Sir William Coldstream. In more than 20 shows, in London, Dublin, Paris and New York, she developed a broad range of styles, from realist to cubist to abstract. Her greatest influence was the Bloomsbury artist Duncan Grant, whom she met in 1958. She was 17; Grant was 74. She learned from him at Charleston, the Bloomsbury epicentre in Sussex, for the following decade. At Clandeboye, the Dufferins’ ancestral home near Belfast, Lindy created the Duncan Grant room, filled with her collection of his paintings, his portrait of her and hers of him.

‘She loved telling the story of their meeting as a “coming home” and of finding her father figure,’ says Catherine Goodman, artistic director of the Royal Drawing School in London. ‘She was deeply connected, through her love of the natural world, to the English/Irish Romantic tradition of landscape painting. Jack Yeats, William Blake, William Nicholson, Ivon Hitchens and John Craxton were her touchstones.’

The Dufferins collected all those painters and more, including Lucian Freud, once married to Sheridan’s sister, the novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood. Sheridan, conscious of the memory of his ancestor, the 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, Viceroy of India, collected 19th-century Indian Company paintings.

And, all the while, she developed her own painting style, particularly when it came to depicting her champion cows. Her friend Tom Stoppard says: ‘I caught her at the best moment in her cubist cow movement before she took it too far!’

Clandeboye became a kernel of art, literature and music. Vikram Seth came to stay. Robert Lowell gave a recital. She set up the Clandeboye Music Festival with Barry Douglas, one of Britain’s great pianists. It will take place this month. And Van Morrison regularly came over to Clandeboye from his home in nearby Cultra. ‘There was often a gathering with a few people at Clandeboye,’ says Sir Van. ‘We did some songs. Hannah Rothschild [the writer and daughter of Lord Rothschild] was here singing some back-up. She was pretty good.

‘Lindy was kind enough to let me use the Banqueting Hall for rehearsals and recordings. We recorded several things there – it’s got good acoustics. And I had three birthday parties there.’

What a restless, questing mind my godmother had – and what a place she and Sheridan occupied in the art world for 60 years. As Stoppard put it, ‘She had no neutral gear.’