Sean Thomas

I have arrived in Naples, Italy, after an arduous flight from a chaotic London Gatwick Airport. I’m settled in a glamorous top-floor apartment in the Quartieri Spagnoli – the romantic old ‘Spanish Quarter’ – where Vespas fizz over cobbles and laundry hangs across alleys like flags of endless surrender. Most importantly, I’m clutching my Apple AirPods 3 in their shiny new capsule. Because I’ve come here to do a grand, futuristic experiment using their much-heralded ‘live translate’ function. Does it really work as smoothly as Apple says? Can I actually slot them in my ears and have them translate the Italian speaker in front of me, in real time? Is it really like the sci-fi Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

I am in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. I am standing in a historic complex of madrasas and mosques, courtyards and dusty roses and I am staring at the “oldest Quran in the world.” It is a strange and enormous thing: written in bold Kufic script on deerskin parchment; it was supposedly compiled by Uthman ibn Affan, the third Caliph of Islam, who was murdered while reading it. And so it is, as I linger here and reverently regard the Book, while scrolling my phone for more fascinating info, that I discover the world’s oldest Quran is actually in Birmingham. Yes, that’s right, Birmingham, England. It’s probably in some obscure library, lodged between a thesis on post-colonial emojis and a flyer for Falafel Night.

No one is quite sure who invented the phrase ‘the shock of the new’. It may have been the American writer Harold Rosenberg back in the 1960s. Alternatively, it may have been the late, great Australian intellectual Robert Hughes, who used it as a title for a TV series. Whatever the answer, the phrase aptly captures a very human moment: when you encounter something so strangely and profoundly innovative you experience a visceral, emotional jolt. Those two thinkers applied the phrase to modern art, to the first jarring encounter with impressionism, Cubism, abstract expressionism. But it can also be applied, perhaps more appositely, to the first encounter with remarkable technology. Technology, in the famous vision of Arthur C.

I’m in an urban park surrounded by fast-food outlets: Taco Bell, the Golden Arches, KFC, Starbucks. The sound system is blasting out raucous rap music; all the men are in blingy sportswear, baseball caps, Nike shoes. I can see big shiny billboards advertising iPhones, Pepsi Max or the latest Marvel movies. In short, I could be almost anywhere in the world – Australia, Brazil, Germany – such is the power of American exports: soft and hard, cultural and consumerist, Coke to Tesla to Friends. And yet I know I’m in America, specifically in the SoFi Stadium, Los Angeles, because I’m about to encounter the one thing America has, peculiarly, not been able to export, not with any great success: American sport. And I want to work out why.

I am five minutes out of the Faroe Islands’ windy, stomach-churning airport when the world twists into legend. It looks like Lord of the Rings but more menacing. Ten minutes later it’s a nightmare of single-track tunnels – go slooooow – carved into the earth by crazed dwarfs with too much time on their hands. Five minutes after that it’s Tolkien again, but redrafted by a boozed-up Norse god: dramatic buttes crumble into the Atlantic, mad farmers are ploughing near-vertical slopes, and waterfalls leap joyously from enormous cliffs to dissolve into lacy surf 300 yards below. The land here feels tormented, as if the sky and the sea endured a bitter divorce and the cliffs are their broken children: jagged, furious and full of vengeance.

As we all know, only the best friends can deliver bad personal news. And so it was for me about six months ago, over a seafood lunch, that one of my closest pals gave me the ghastly tidings. My friend had just stayed in my small but fabulously located London flat for a fortnight, while I was travelling. He was suitably grateful, but less than effusive about the living conditions. After some humming and hahing, he got to the point. ‘Mate, your flat is a dump. Great location and all that, but eesh, when did you last do it up?!’ O for the gift to see our homes as others see them. Armed with this gift I went back to my beloved domicile, and realised, my God, he’s right.

I’m driving a dirt road in the wilds of central Sardinia. And I mean what I say by ‘wilds’. This rugged region in the sunburned Supramonte mountains was called ‘Barbagia’ by Cicero – i.e. ‘land of the barbarians’ – as even the Romans never quite managed to subdue it. Centuries later it became famous for bandits, kidnaps, local mafias – and casu marzu, the infamous ‘Sardinian maggot cheese’. I turn to my resourceful local guide, driver and interpreter, Viola, as she negotiates the olive groves and goat tracks. ‘Do you really think we will find casu marzu?’ My voice is slightly falsetto with tension. Viola turns: ‘I hope so, there is a pretty good chance. And maybe we will find something even more unusual…’ But first, let’s rewind 30 years.

Whenever Europeans feel inadequate in relation to America, and have a yearning to console themselves, there is one subject that always comes up: the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, i.e. gun law. Yes, the Yanks may be richer than us. Yes, a dockworker in Delaware can earn more than a British cabinet minister. Yes, America has a dynamic economy and the world’s most powerful military, with a huge lead in science, tech and finance. But remember: ‘in Europe we don’t have mass shootings.’ ‘British children aren’t taught how to dodge bullets.’ ‘You may have Silicon Valley, but we don’t have lunatics wandering around Tesco with AR-15s.’ This feels even truer right now, as America reels from a horrific assassination, by a shooter on a roof with a rifle.

There are opinion polls that are so striking they change history. Many Britons will remember the YouGov poll in September 2014. It was the first poll in the Scottish independence referendum campaign to show the Yes side ahead by 51 per cent to 49. That poll shocked SW1, panicked the Cameron government, and led to ‘The Vow’ – the last-minute promise of further devolution if Scotland stayed in the UK. And lo, ‘No’ scraped home, and Britain staggered on. Then there are polls that go beyond striking into ‘whoah, can that possibly be true?’ territory. Polls so unexpected they feel world-changing. The same company, YouGov, has produced just such a poll. It shows that religious belief among 18 to 24-year-olds has tripled in just four years, from 16 per cent to 45 per cent.

Have you ever heard of Duddies’ Branch? Chances are, you haven’t – because, firstly, its brief moment of fame came many years ago and, secondly, Duddies’ Branch does not actually exist. To explain: ‘Duddies’ Branch’ is the politely fake name given by an American anthropologist, Rena Gazaway, to a real and isolated settlement in a hollow of the Appalachian mountains (almost certainly in Kentucky). Herself born into ‘hillbilly’ culture, Gazaway spent many months of the 1960s living with the people of Duddies’ Branch. She later published her findings in a shocking 1969 book called The Longest Mile. What Gazaway encountered in that lost wooded ‘holler’ reads like dystopian fiction, even at a distance of decades. Most of the residents were functionally illiterate.