Matthew Parris

Earlier this month, a curious report caught my attention. Apparently there exists no rigorously established evidence that electric shock therapy, or ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), works. At all. In Electroconvulsive Therapy for Depression: A Review of the Quality of ECT versus Sham ECT Trials and Meta-Analyses, Dr John Read, Professor Irving Kirsch and Dr Laura McGrath have shown that the therapy, commonly administered for severe depression, has not (despite claims) been shown to have any significant positive effect, ever. It can be dangerous, carrying a small risk of death and a higher risk of serious memory loss, yet (the authors say) more than a million people worldwide are undergoing this therapy today, for no proven benefit.

I couldn’t disagree more with Sir Keir Starmer (it was ‘completely wrong,’ ‘it shouldn’t have been done in that way’) or with Boris Johnson (‘if people wanted the removal of the statue there are democratic routes which can be followed’). No, there was something magnificent about the sight of the Bristol mob throwing into the harbour the statue of a man whose trade was notorious for throwing sick slaves with no monetary value into the sea. 1890s Britain raised that statue.

My partner, Julian, hovered at my shoulder on Friday as I tapped out my Times Saturday column (about travel quarantine). I’d slipped in a paragraph with my own thoughts about the transmission of Covid-19. ‘Cut the lot,’ he said. ‘You’re not an epidemiologist. Nobody’s interested in your theories.’ This was probably good advice so I put my own thoughts on hold. Until now. Because something’s still nagging me. I know I’m not an epidemiologist, but silences speak loud in science, and from those experts put up for media interview I notice a curious silence — a silence on what feels like a most important report and, from their interviewers, a timidity about pressing them. The question the experts should be asked is about London.

My research assistant, John Steele, is also a songwriter. A friend emailed him with the lyrics of a Fleetwood Mac number. These days Google often appends emails with a shortcut to save you typing your own answer by suggesting one or two likely responses. In the Fleetwood Mac lyric a former lover wonders whether her ex can see her reflection in the snow-covered hills. Google’s suggestion was ‘No’. Musicians have pondered some of life’s most profound questions, so John and I tried posing a few in emails, to see Google’s suggested response. Some were hilarious. If only David Bowie were here to know that ‘Yes!’, there is life on Mars. To Freddie Mercury’s ‘Is this the real life?’ the suggested answer is ‘Yes’.

Locked contentedly into the rhythms of farming life and digging for lead on its Derbyshire Peak District slopes, the village of Eyam lay blissfully unaware of what was about to hit it, and propel it into the history books for ever. The Viccars family, the Reverend William Mompesson and his family, Elizabeth Hancock and her six children, 350 villagers at least… none had any inkling. London existed in most minds only through talk in the public house, stories from travelling merchants and perhaps the first periodicals beginning to circulate in England. The metropolis was half a world away, a foreign place, a foreign culture. News of the plague we now call bubonic will at first have been more of a curiosity than a concern.

There must be a quote from Shakespeare for this, but so far I haven’t found it. It’s the way we all of us contrive to see in cosmic events the evidence, the signs and portents, for what we already believed even before the cataclysm had occurred. These are the days of miracle and wonder, sang Paul Simon… The way we look to a distant constellationThat’s dying in a corner of the skyThese are the days of miracle and wonderAnd don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t cry… Somehow there never was a plague, earthquake, flood or epidemic that was not also a sign that the human race must mend its ways according to wisdom we had long recommended, even during less extraordinary times.

Something about the word ‘bomb’ has always thrilled me, and I know why. No school today. In the 1950s we lived in Nicosia, Cyprus, when the island was a British colony and Greek Cypriot terrorists were trying to kill us. Our house was near a big army camp and our Cypriot neighbours were friendly, so home felt protected. It never occurred to me, just starting school, that proximity to the military was not a guarantee of security; and it never occurred to Mum and Dad that our neighbours had a small bomb factory, later discovered underneath their chicken house; so indoors seemed safe. But outdoors was different.

A week of remembrance marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz last month had me thinking hard about what we mean by Evil. ‘Evil’, that is, when used with a real or metaphorical capital letter. You cannot join discussion of the Holocaust without hearing the word again and again. And indeed, what other words are available when we want to express complete horror? ‘Regrettable’? ‘Immoral’? Such vocabulary won’t do the job. Only ‘wicked’ and ‘sinful’ come anywhere near, and all are allied with what Evil, as a proper noun, tries to capture. ‘Evil’ eschews any notion of understanding or explaining, and sits uneasily with the idea of rectification, compensation or apology.

It was a clear and icy night at home in Derbyshire last week. I love these times and, before bed, stepped outside to stand on the lawn in the moonless pitch-black and take it in. All at once the dark was pierced with an awful scream. I was not greatly alarmed — the rural night is full of strange noises — but stood there, puzzling out what it might be. The scream, almost human, was repeated, and its provenance seemed to be moving from one side to the other of the field adjacent to ours. Could it be a fox? Vixens do make some blood-curdling cries during the mating season but does that start as early as January? Or might it be a fox’s victim — a hare or rabbit, perhaps, fighting back as the poor creature was carried off — or even an owl’s prey?

We’re closing 2019 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 4: Matthew Parris on sexuality and gender: Long-suffering Spectator readers deserve a seasonal break from yet another Remoaner diatribe from me. My last on this page, making the outrageous suggestion that the populace may sometimes be wrong, is now being brandished by online Leaver-readers of my Times column as proof that I am in fact a fascist; so there isn’t anywhere much to go from there. Instead, I turn to sex. There is little time left for me to write about sex as the thoughts of a septuagenarian on this subject (I turn 70 this year) may soon meet only a shudder. But I have a theory which I have the audacity to think important.