Sean Thomas

It’s an interesting and unusual word, agentic. For a start, some language enthusiasts dislike it as a mulish crossbreed of Latin and Greek. Also, its etymology is obscure. It appears to derive from 20th-century psychology: one of its first usages can be found in a study of the infamous 1960s Milgram experiments at Yale University, when volunteers were persuaded to electrocute, with increasing and horrible severity, innocent ‘learners’ (actually actors). The experiment revealed that most of us would administer a lethal shock of electricity to an innocent human being, if only told to do so by a man in a white coat with a clipboard.

Ise, Japan They say of Japan that if you come here for a week, you want to write a novel about Japan. After a year, maybe a few essays. After a decade, a page. It is one of those countries which seems to get simultaneously more fascinating and opaque. Possessing an ancient monarchy is like having a Gothic cathedral in your back garden So it is for me, on this, my first trip to Japan in 30 years (I lived in Kyoto in the mid-1990s). This time around I have been doing prep by reading the early history of Shinto, the ‘state religion’ of Japan, an animist creed which sees the divine in everything – trees, rocks, lakes, rugby balls (really) – all in the form of kami – which can be spirits of place, mood or idea.

Such an awful lot of stuff is happening right now, even the keenest observer of social trends could be forgiven for missing a statistical milestone passed earlier this month. So here it is: at the beginning of October, it was revealed that, for the first time since the 1970s baby bust, deaths outnumbered births in the UK – meaning, in effect, that all of our population growth (about 680,000 for this year) came from immigration. The reason why is obvious. The boomers – i.e. people born during the great baby boom of 1945-1965 – are dying out, and they are not being properly replaced, thanks to a low total fertility rate (TFR, which equals ‘births per woman’). In England and Wales, TFR fell to just 1.49, far below the accepted replacement rate of 2.1.

I love driving. When I say ‘driving’, I obviously don’t mean crawling along the North Circular at 2.7 miles per hour, in a state of zombified inertia, mutinously wondering why Keir Starmer’s voice is so weirdly soul-sapping. And when I say I love driving, I don’t want to claim I’m any kind of petrolhead. I have no idea what a carburettor is, and the same goes for crankshaft, torque, drift, and understeer. In fact, I’m not totally sure what a petrolhead is. I wonder if we are overlooking a much smarter solution, which can be found in Phnom Penh No, when I say I love driving, I mean what I am doing now: speeding across majestic British Columbia in a massive great motor, eating up the North American miles on a proper North American road trip.

Tonight, the BBC will be broadcasting what is – to my mind – the scariest film ever made. Indeed, I would go further than that, I would say this movie is the scariest human artwork in any form – and that includes novels, plays, stories, the lot. This film beats them all, and by a distance. What is it? Of course, I’m not going to tell you that straight off, that would break all the rules of scary suspense writing. First, I want to examine the underlying questions: why do we like being artificially scared? And what makes a particular ghost story or Dracula remake genuinely frightening? The questions sound simple; they are not.

How many Spectator readers are aware that tiny Montenegro, that silver sixpence of south-east Europe, so long lost in the jumbled purse of geopolitics, has some of the deepest canyons in the world? Not many, I’d bet – we know the luscious Montenegrin Mediterranean coast, if we know anything. And I’d wager even fewer know that one such abyss, the Tara River Canyon, is one of the fastest watercourses on the continent. I’d imagine no one at all, including me until five seconds ago, knows that the longest stretch of rapids on this giddying torrent is called Borovi. It’s like Utah hooked up with Iceland, somewhere in Sicily, and brought a friend from Dartmoor I only know this because I’ve just fallen in.

In Cambodia, everybody is looking forward to Bon Om Touk. If your Khmer is a bit rusty, this means the mid-autumn New Moon Water Festival, celebrated in late October. This fervent, noisy, firework-banging festival has multiple, colourful meanings. For a start, it marks the end of the endless summer rain – which turns everyone’s laundry mouldy and gets a tad annoying. It also marks the moment when the fertile Tonle Sap river, which rolls through the sprawling, youthful, trafficky, heat-struck, palm-shaded, jacaranda-adorned, busy-yet-languid, skyscraper-sprouting city, does a handbrake turn.

Family holidays always carry a risk of dismaying revelations. Suddenly you are thrust together, 24/7, over many days, in a way only matched by Christmas (which is equally perilous). And so it was that, after ten days of driving around Provence and Occitanie, from Arles to the Camargue to the mighty Gorges of the Tarn, my older daughter this week suddenly said: ‘Why is Britain so hideous?’   The outburst was clearly prompted by the comparative beauty of France. My daughter is 18 and her only prior experience of France was grey wintry Paris in a boring school trip, so she was probably expecting more of the same dreariness.

Of all the places to witness the circus parade of modern French history, you can do a lot worse than the tiny town of Espalion, in the beautiful department of L’Aveyron, in the south of France. Because there are few destinations more unchanged than L’Aveyron, and this extremely French place is where I saw the opening of the French Olympic Games, in an al fresco brasserie. And this is where I sensed a weird unease. No one booed, no one catcalled, no one mocked. They sat there, sipping cold bière, and at times they vehemently cheered and laughed. Yet they also appeared a touch confused, and, I suspect, this is because they thought – like the rest of the world – ‘this is quite often a load of bollocks’.

I am sitting in a little bar overlooking the jaunty marina of Trinité-sur-Mer, on the opulent south-east coast of Brittany. My Kir Breton is cold, fizzy, sweet and rubescent. Everyone around me is swigging Sancerre and cidre as the sun slowly nods below the green, southerly Celtic hills. The water glitters, the pretty people parade, the douceur de vivre is palpable. If you look at what has happened to Paris and Marseille, you can see how this can easily go wrong, how France’s good fortune can be squandered I've been here in Brittany five days, having got the ferry over from Portsmouth. And, quite frankly, the difference in life quality has been stark.