Sean Thomas

Yeah, I know, ridiculous. Cambodia? How can that be the best country in the entire world? For a start, most people can’t place it on a map. This includes close relatives of mine who are studying geography at A Level. They know all about the Marxist topography of urbanism, but Cambodia, err, um, is that near Africa? Also, Cambodia?? Isn’t that the country that suffered a fearsome Maoist genocide within living memory, with a quarter of its population dying by execution, torture, famine and disease, and the rest left so hungry they resorted to eating giant spiders roasted in tomato powder? The landscape is agreeably green, the jungles are often untouched, the islands can be Edenic (but primitive) Well yes, it is.

It’s difficult to remember a time before climate change – a time when our daily discourse, our newspaper front pages, endless movies and TV documentaries, and Al Gore, Greta Thunberg and Sir David Attenborough (Peace Be Upon Him), were not lecturing us, sternly and constantly, about the threat to our planet from the ‘climate emergency’, the melting of the ice caps, the levelling of the Amazon jungle, the failure of the Gulf Stream, the desertification of Spain, and the complete and total cessation of snowfall in Great Britain, apart from the regular occasions when it snows.  In fact, if you are under 30 you may not even be aware that there was a time when we didn’t vex about Anthropogenic Global Warming.

When they come to write the history of the AI revolution, there’s a good chance that the writers will devote many chapters to the early 2020s. Indeed, such is the pace, scale and wildness of the development, it is possible entire books will be devoted to, say, what happened in the last week or so. This is happening now, not in some dystopian future If you’ve not been paying attention, let me talk you through it. On 15 February Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Demis Hassabis, the head tech bro at DeepMind (the London-based AI company bought by Google in 2014) announced the launch of Gemini Ultra 1.5 Pro. It may sound like a slightly superior razor-blade, in truth it is a very serious machine. To demo Gemini 1.

In 1988, I lived on the backpackery Khaosan Road, Bangkok, in a hotel which offered heroin on room service. It went like this: in the morning, you padded down the teakwood stairs to the little kitchen and you asked the pretty Thai girl for breakfast – scrambled eggs, bacon, ‘extras’. Ten minutes later the same sweet girl would arrive in your room and graciously set down your tray, with scrambled eggs, orange juice – plus two straws of China White heroin, neatly paired on a saucer.

It’s one of the hoariest cliches in popular culture: that every fading generation must, in flailing anger at its own imminent irrelevance, turn on the next generation and say, ‘your music is dire’. From the crusty judge contemptuously asking ‘who are these Beatles’, to the middle-aged outrage surrounding the spitting and pogoing Sex Pistols, to the Tory MP who expressed his horror at the Beastie Boys and Run DMC for ‘mocking disabled children in Montreux’, it is an established human tradition. And of course, it is always nonsense. It turns out the next generation has music of equal brilliance, passion, vivacity, excitement. Pop music once commonly expressed joy, love, energy, freedom, and happy sexuality Except, perhaps, this time.

Even in the long-shadowed depths of winter, Sicily can be a seductive place. From the hushed, hidden and time-polished marble piazzas of intricately lovely Ortygia, to the White Lotus out-of-season treats of ‘so pretty it hurts’ (Ernest Hemingway) Taormina, this blessed island has for obvious reasons been attracting invaders and colonisers for thousands of years. Indeed, enigmatic remains at Cozzo Matrice, near the lake of Pergusa – where Hades abducted the goddess Persephone – suggest Sicily might boast some of the oldest built human settlements on the planet.

It’s one of the greatest puzzles of the universe, and one that has vexed humanity ever since we first gazed at the stars and thought of other worlds. Is our Earth the sole place that harbours life, or might it be found elsewhere, among the trillions of planets, star systems and galaxies? As Arthur C. Clarke put it: ‘Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

It’s hard to believe that only five years ago the word/acronym AI was barely seen outside the science pages, and even then solely in the most speculative way: as something that might happen, in a few decades, maybe, if you’re the dreamy type. But also maybe not. Now there literally isn’t a day that goes by without some new AI revelation/epiphany/scare story.

As a travel writer, you soon learn that there are countries which, when you mention them, elicit a polite smile of incomprehension, which says: er, where’s that then? Laos is a classic example. Also Kyrgyzstan. And maybe Eswatini. But can it be true that there are chunks, regions, entire departments of France that conjure the same puzzled stare? Oui, my Spectator reading friends, c’est vrai: and that place is Lozere. France may be the single most touristed country on earth, the one country the whole world knows, yet for the last few weeks, when I’ve told people I’m off to do a French travel piece in the department of Lozere I’ve been confronted with flat incomprehension, then embarrassingly incorrect guesses: is it in Brittany? Is it an overseas island?

Remember the lockdowns? I wish I didn’t, but I do. Especially that insanely grim third lockdown, the winter one, which went on and on and on and which bottomed out, for me, as I did my one allotted weekly walk along the Richmond riverside, in freezing horizontal drizzle. I made sure I had a thermos cup of mulled wine in my hand as I debated with my one permitted friend whether we were legally allowed to sit on a bench together. In the end, we decided best not and trudged further into the sleet. They may give you an extra chance of thyroid cancer – or not (though for me the much more proximate likelihood of liver failure makes that fairly irrelevant) I’ve learned many things from lockdowns, one of them is: that I am never locking down again.

It was about a year ago when my dying father, diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, turned to me and said ‘Sean, can you get me some heroin?’. For a moment – understandably – I wondered if he needed this ultimate painkiller for some fairly ultimate pain, but he didn’t look like he was in agony. And when he followed that up, with a puzzled frown, and the remark: ‘Or maybe some opium, or weed, I’d like to try them,’ I realised that this was nothing to do with analgesics. Dad wanted some psychotropic fun. Dying is not recreation, it’s annihilation.

I don’t know about you, but I love a bit of topical reading when I go abroad. That’s why, in my last week of travelling between lush, green, untouched Cambodian islands, I’ve been immersed in apposite books like Julia Lovell’s Maoism: a Global History, and Frank Dikotter’s The Cultural Revolution. So far, I’ve been pleased with my choices. First, they are properly appropriate: one of the reasons Cambodia’s islands are so untainted by tourism, or even inhabitants, is because the ultra-Maoist, Chinese-funded Khmer Rouge evacuated all the occupants and forced them into deadly labour on the mainland. Also, the books are truly astonishing, perhaps in a consoling way.