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Why China’s nostalgia industry is booming
Cindy Yu has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Nostalgia is a thriving industry in China. I first noticed this while walking around Nanjing last summer. There were shops with names like ‘Finding Childhood’ or ‘Childhood Memories’, selling sweets and toys that had long been discontinued. There were posters of TV shows and celebrities from the 1980s and 1990s. The customers were like me – misty-eyed millennials, often women, looking for their lost childhoods. ‘Oh my god, remember that!’ We relished every moment.
The shops have sprung up suddenly in the past two years, mostly catering to my generation, who spend more on high-street tat than our elders. But older Chinese have been seeking nostalgia too. They get their hit from remembering a more rural way of life. Villages on the edges of cities have been renovated for the urban day-tripper and designed to feel tranquil, agrarian, evocative of a China before Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. Wealthier urbanites buy up rural cottages there for second homes, as if they can buy back their own pasts.
Chinese nostalgia exerts such a pull because the past people yearn for has disappeared so quickly
Social media has no end of ‘trad’ content. There’s a huge market for rural influencers who grow their own food and cook from scratch on wood-fired stoves. Some are young people who say they’ve become burnt out by city life. Last year’s hottest TV show, Blossoms Shanghai, is set in the 1990s and shot mostly in sepia tones.
There’s nothing uniquely Chinese about yearning for the past. Populists everywhere have found nostalgia a helpful emotion. Vote Leave had ‘Take Back Control’; Donald Trump had ‘Make America Great Again’.
But whereas western countries might lament their relative fall in power or economic dynamism, the same can’t be said for China. If anything, China’s ‘good old days’ are now – the country is more powerful than it has been in centuries; living standards, life expectancy, education rates are higher than at any time in history. So what’s there to be nostalgic about? How can today’s Chinese be nostalgic about a poorer, harsher time?
The obvious answer is that most people are nostalgic about their past. Those with happy childhoods look back on a less stressful, more innocent age. But even those who had a more gruelling time may have bright spots of happiness they recall fondly. When my mother thinks of the 1970s, it’s not the Cultural Revolution she remembers, nor the fact that her siblings had been sent to different relatives when her parents were imprisoned. Instead she remembers how happy she was foraging for wild veg with her sister and climbing trees with the local boys. She reminisces about ‘the simpler times’.
Chinese nostalgia, I think, exerts such a pull because the past people yearn for has disappeared so quickly. The economy is 120 times bigger than in 1978, the year Deng’s reforms began. There are hundreds more cities now and hundreds of millions more people living in them: cities like Shenzhen, the 13 million-strong metropolis built on the site of a town of 300,000, bulldozed in the 1980s. It’s hard to find a street anywhere that looks the same as it did 50 years ago.
A few years ago, my family revisited my grandparents’ first home, on a state-owned farm where they worked in a commune and where my mother and her siblings grew up. That way of life is gone now, as is their house and the farm – all derelict. My grandmother’s contemporaries had, like her, moved into city apartments and spent their days looking after grandchildren. The fields and tree-lined dirt road to the nearest town had been dug up, but the new homes that were meant to be built there hadn’t yet been started. It had been like that for a while, we were told.
The changes are more than just material. In the words of one Chinese blogger: ‘As the economy got better, the affection between people has gone.’ The migration to anonymous mega-cities cut community ties and boosted crime; you could no longer rely on a neighbour for last-minute childcare or leave your door unlocked. With increased wealth came more corruption and inequality. Neighbours became envious of each other and competed. Success in school, work or even marriage could be life-changing not only for yourself, but for your children. ‘At least when people were poor, we were all poor together,’ a Chinese businessman once told me.
Some lament the spiritual hollowness of modern life. Communism offered something to believe in, as religion had done before that. Without either, people feel empty. So some Chinese speak about a crisis of meaning; a vacuum left by the death of ideology. It may be why the incredible economic boom of the 1990s coincided with a national revival of Tai Chi, the semi-religious meditation practice.
So what do the nostalgic Chinese do when they can’t find a trace of their childhood homes or the streets they grew up on? They seek out shops peddling memories. They escape to the countryside. They listen to retro music from Taiwan and Hong Kong, the stuff that was popular before music from the mainland caught up. Some even travel to North Korea, which was booming as a tourist destination until the pandemic hit, with 120,000 Chinese visiting in 2019. On return, they write online that ‘It’s just like China in the 1970s!’ They mean it as a compliment.
But like scratching an itch, the indulgence is unsatisfactory. Spend too long in the childhood shops and you’ll notice the goods are overpriced and tacky. The supposedly tranquil countryside spots are Potemkin villages with shiny visitor centres, car parks big enough to cater for twice the village’s population and trendy coffee shops that certainly weren’t there in the 1970s. And behind every rural influencer, there’s almost certainly a small gaggle of city-based crew armed with professional lighting and kit.
Porcelain-painting during the French revolution
People don’t accumulate stuff any more. When the late Victorian houses on our street change hands their interiors are stripped of all decorative features and the walls painted white, unrelieved by pictures: if their Victorian owners returned as ghosts, they would go snow-blind. The Victorians’ passion for accumulating stuff was close to an addiction, and no one accumulated it like the Rothschilds. But the Rothschilds didn’t stop at objects; they also collected exotic animals, especially birds. All the Rothschild chateaux and mansions boasted aviaries – and Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild’s Waddesdon Manor was no exception. Six years after its completion in 1883, a rococo aviary manufactured in France was installed in the garden: a family photograph shows Ferdinand feeding a scarlet ibis, a boater on his head and a bird whistle between his lips.
Painting exotic birds on porcelain wine coolers during a revolution might send anyone a little mad
It was a fashion started by European sovereigns; collecting exotic birds is not a cheap hobby. In 1884 Ferdinand spent £150, the equivalent of £20,000 today, buying birds from London Zoo; the bird food bill in a later account book comes to £421. But during the first world war the cages were turned over to rabbits, and when the house was bequeathed to the National Trust in 1957 the aviary was derelict. Restored and restocked with birds in 1966, its award-winning breeding programme for endangered species has since made it one of Europe’s smallest registered zoos. When I visited, a keeper was feeding a day-old hatch of Asian fairy-bluebird chicks a mousse of blended papaya.
The Rothschild passion for birds has inspired Waddesdon’s summer exhibition, which has brought together bird-themed objects from the collection with a paper trail of ingenious sculptures by Andy Singleton. A cut-paper version of the Rothschild’s peacock pheasant – first described by Ferdinand’s naturalist nephew Walter – peeks out from the vegetation in the Conservatory, while recreations of the hoopoes, pompadour cotingas and rosy-faced lovebirds decorating the Sèvres dessert service made for Russian count Kirill Razumovsky flutter over the table in the dining room.
When Ferdinand acquired this service, its painter was known only by his crescent moon mark. Then in the 1990s a dealer riffling through the wicker baskets at an auction at Paris’s Hôtel Drouot found a folder of uncatalogued bird drawings with handwritten notes which he guessed must be related to Sèvres. He bought it for a song and sold it to French porcelain expert Bernard Dragesco, who noticed that the handwriting matched the signature ‘Louis-Denis Armand, 9 July 1749’ on a palette bowl in the Sèvres Museum collection. The ‘Crescent Painter’ had acquired a name and, thanks to his notes, a fascinating character.
A selection of Armand’s drawings from Dragesco’s collection – along with examples of the porcelain they decorated – is exhibited here for the first time. Specialising in birds, Armand was Sèvres’s top porcelain painter, attracting commissions from clients like Madame de Pompadour. Despite their stylisation, his drawings are full of life: in a courtship dance illustrated on a wine bottle cooler from the Rohan Service the male bird, sporting a blue crest like Marge Simpson’s beehive, struts his stuff while the blushing female balances bashfully on one leg. A ‘sweet avowal’ was how he described this interaction.
Mostly unrelated to artistic matters, Armand’s notes range from childhood reminiscences to orders for cotton handkerchiefs, grumbles about his health – he suffered from dizziness and phlegm ‘so thick it suffocates me’ – and complaints about his treatment by his employers. But most riveting are his references to contemporary French politics. One drawing is annotated: ‘10 August, St Laurence’s day 1792. The revolution of the Tuileries in Paris is what has caused the suspension of the executive power.’ A note on another reads: ‘But no, says Marat, you are not debased, all the… friends of liberty will make it a duty to visit the prison of Châtelet and demand the release of Saint-Huruge, one of their most zealous defenders.’
The Marquis de Saint-Huruges was arrested during the Terror of 1793, so both these notes must have been written after Armand left full-time employment at the Sèvres manufactory in 1788 following a dispute with the management.
At the peak of his 40-year career he commanded substantial fees – he was spared a pay cut imposed on his fellow painters because he was ‘so precious and unique in his genre’ – but he struggled to keep his imagination in check. ‘No sooner have I imagined something, than I want to see it executed,’ he confessed in one note, ‘and unfortunately I have so many ideas that they damage each other’; the result was that people dismissed him as ‘a madman, an imprudent fool of no consequence’. He was clearly cursed with an artistic temperament. Still, painting exotic birds on porcelain wine coolers while a revolution is in progress might send anyone a little mad. I’m not sure I’ll ever look at a piece of Sèvres porcelain in quite the same way again.
Please stop making Alien movies
In the Alien films, a xenomorph is a monstrous, all-consuming life form that exists only to make more and more copies of itself. Once the first xenomorph appears, it’s only a matter of time until all those gleaming chrome walls will be covered in creepy black goo and the humans suspended lifeless from the ceiling in webs of slime with their chests ripped open. The xenomorphs are not curious about the world. They don’t care that they’re in a spaceship in the middle of outer space. As far as they’re concerned, we’re all just warm bodies in which to incubate their young. The only thing they want to do is make more and more and more and more of themselves.
When a franchise has exhausted its own central metaphor, surely it can’t limp on for much longer
Anyway, Alien: Romulus is the seventh film about these particular monsters. According to the producers, the film takes the franchise ‘back to its roots’. So we get a group of grimy crew-mates piloting a big rust-bucket of a spaceship who pick up an extraterrestrial stowaway and end up having to use their wits and courage to survive as it gobbles them up, one by one.
And it’s not a bad film. It’s nicely creepy, the special effects are good, the acting is perfectly serviceable. In fact, I could give you a normal review of Alien: Romulus, but just writing this is making me feel a little crazy. It’s not a bad film, but it’s also a direct copy of a much better film that already exists. That film is called Alien, and it came out in 1979. It had Sigourney Weaver in it. It hasn’t vanished. If you have a Disney+ subscription or a torrent client, you can watch it tonight. Why have we made it again? What’s the point? Why have we spent the past 45 years – which is longer than I’ve been alive – making seven different versions of the same film? What on Earth is going on?
People do like to repeat things. Young children, in particular, like to watch the same film over and over again. Lately, mass culture has been treating us all like a bunch of overgrown children, and it’s not like we’ve done much to suggest they’ve got us wrong. Freud thought children repeat things because they’re trying to process trauma. G.K. Chesterton had a sunnier view of it: ‘Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again,” and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. Grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.’
But Chesterton never had any children of his own: he missed out on the one very particular way adults have of ‘doing it again’. This is what the Alien films are actually about. The reason the 1979 original is a great film and not just a fun monster flick is that it’s really about us; the xenomorph is us. Its alien form is just a hideous mashup of our ordinary, slimy human genitalia. This monster is your libido: a ravenous, irrational thing that wants to use your body to breed. The whole thing is about the horror of pregnancy, of childbirth, of sexuality in general: our human compulsion to procreate and endlessly repeat ourselves. The mad compulsion to do it again and again and again. That’s why these films always need the android, clinically asexual, standing outside this whole messy business so you can see it more clearly. ‘I admire its purity,’ says an android in the first Alien.
Over the past 45 years, though, the Alien franchise trusts us less and less to notice these obvious themes for ourselves. The latest one really bonks you over the head with it by putting an actual pregnant woman on board the ship. There’s a final act that essentially dispenses with the entire metaphor that’s sustained the franchise for so long. Our heroes might as well turn to the camera and say: ‘Childbirth is pretty creepy, huh? Procreation – weird, am I right?’ It’s a terrible ending, but it gives me hope. When a franchise has exhausted its own central metaphor like this, surely it can’t limp on for much longer. Please, please, let this one be the last.
Fun, frenetic and only a little gauche: Declan McKenna, at the Edinburgh Playhouse, reviewed
Towards the end of Declan McKenna’s snappy, enjoyable 90-minute set at the Edinburgh International Festival, something quite powerful occurs. The English singer-songwriter returns alone to the stage for the encore and proceeds to play a version of ABBA’s ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’ with only his electric guitar as accompaniment.
It becomes a strange, emotionally layered moment. A young musician singing from the perspective of a parent ruefully reflecting on their child growing up, away and beyond reach; a predominantly teenage crowd singing those words back to him; and the older members of the audience, many attending with their own kids, staring blurrily into the middle distance.
The first song is called ‘Bongo Monologue’ and lives up – or down – to its title
It’s odd, but it makes a kind of sense. At the somewhat stodgy all-seated Playhouse, the massed ranks of youths rise to their feet the instant McKenna and his four-piece band walk onstage and remain upright for the entire set. The Circle was literally bouncing. In many ways, like thousands of good-looking young folk before him, McKenna is first and foremost a conduit for the eternal pop mission statement: unfiltered adolescent self-expression.
Yet he is also a modern-day indie star with pan-generational appeal. His earlier material reflects an obvious love of Bowie, Dylan, Talking Heads and, yes, ABBA. The poppier end of the spectrum at his Edinburgh gig – ‘Brazil’, ‘The Kids Don’t Wanna Come Home’, ‘Make Me Your Queen’, ‘Why Do You Feel So Down’ – defaults to lithe, rhythmic pop with a vaguely tropical lilt. Fun and frenetic, direct and only a little gauche.
His third album, What Happened to the Beach?, released in February, is a different affair. It skews towards the kind of guitar-heavy psychedelic terrain familiar to fans of Tame Impala, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Django Django.
His guitarist battles gamely with technical issues for most of the evening – and little wonder. I’ve rarely seen so many pedals, pads and gizmos laid out on stage, but this is technology with a focus. The music feels human. The sound is uncluttered but rich, punctuated by arresting sonic swirls and embellishments.
The title track of the new album is knotty quasi-prog rock. ‘Beautiful Faces’ is driven by the kind of growling Rottweiler guitar riff Cream would have relished sinking their teeth into during their heyday. Some of the synth rolls are straight from the Emerson, Lake & Palmer playbook. ‘Mystery Planet’, ‘Breath of Light’ and ‘Mezzanine’ are sonically intricate without eschewing McKenna’s prevailing interest in melody and rhythm. His voice is generally laconic, but occasionally rises to a scream. He jumps from a mean distorted guitar solo to a pretty piano ballad without breaking stride.
Performing against a backdrop which has the appealing whiff about it of a school play set made of papier-mâché – are they icebergs? The Alps? – McKenna is a low key yet compelling presence throughout. He writhes on his back, pummelling his guitar, lurches as though punch-drunk and, on two occasions, is moved to jump off stage and run around the aisles like a mad thing.
A tiny figure, wearing trousers which terminate their journey south several inches above his ankles, he possesses an urchin charisma which, interestingly, dissolves utterly on the few occasions when he directly addresses the audience. Mark it down as another old school trait: the desire to let the music speak for itself. It duly does, at times still rather hesitantly, but at others rather impressively.
The previous night, performing across town at the Usher Hall, corrupted classicist Chilly Gonzales also indulged in hands-on audience participation by ending his show running through the hall, dispensing high-fives in the manner of an over-stimulated toddler or deranged evangelical preacher.
Gonzales – AKA Jason Beck – is a Canadian concert pianist who has spent decades subverting the very idea of being such a thing. He appears for his Edinburgh International Festival show clad in a bathrobe. The first song is called ‘Bongo Monologue’ and lives up – or down – to its title.
Accompanied by a highly attuned trio on drums, bass and violin, Gonzales roamed across a dizzyingly eclectic career. He’s a post-rave Chopin; Satie by way of Drake. As well as previewing material from the forthcoming album GONZO, he conjured up waves of propulsive piano playing, which was particularly effective when pounded in the lower register, and improvised minimalistic ripples that evoked Studio Ghibli soundtrack music.
There was time for some rap, a little poetry, a Daft Punk tune (‘Within’, which he co-wrote) and a takedown of Richard Wagner, which included a swing at Kanye West while exploring the nuances of cancel culture.
All in all, it was just about the most fun you can have with a piano while keeping your bathrobe on.
In defence of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Grand Duke
Artistic partnerships are elusive things. The best – where two creative personalities somehow inspire or goad each other to do better than their individual best – can seem so natural that they’re almost easier to identify by their absence. No one’s queuing up to revive Richard Rodgers’s Rex (lyrics by Sheldon Harnick). Pretending to rate Band on the Run above Revolver is a fun way to wind up boomers, but c’mon – honestly? With Gilbert and Sullivan, meanwhile, recordings have given us the chance to rediscover Grundy and Sullivan’s Haddon Hall and Gilbert and Cellier’s The Mountebanks: turkeys both.
It’s an artistic marriage that stayed together for the kids – or the balance sheet of the Savoy Theatre
Then there’s the sad case of The Grand Duke, and that might be the saddest of all because, while it’s certainly by Gilbert and Sullivan, somehow it isn’t quite Gilbert-and-Sullivan. It was their final collaboration, and they were both pulling their punches where once they’d struck sparks off each other. Gilbert’s once-tight plotting runs away with him; Sullivan glows where previously he’d glittered – and the big comic song is about sausage rolls. It’s an artistic marriage that’s staying together for the sake of the kids – or in this case, the balance sheet of the Savoy Theatre. Gilbert called the result ‘an ugly misshapen little brat’.
Well, it was brat summer at the 30th International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in Buxton. There’s a gloriously homespun vibe about the whole festival, from the gift shop (where you can buy a hand-knitted Captain Corcoran) to the fans in Ruddigore T-shirts necking pints outside the Old Club House. Don’t be misled. The festival often showcases G&S productions from around the world, and this one-off revival of The Grand Duke was performed by the Savoy Company of Philadelphia. Overall, the festival presented 11 full-scale productions in the space of two weeks, all without public subsidy. Buxton Opera House now hosts more operas per year than the London Coliseum.
The Grand Duke drew a full house, and the American company went at it with glee and some very plausible English accents. The designs were colourful and, with the exception of an anachronistic framing device (Attlee’s England), director Bill Kiesling handled it without gimmicks. Meanwhile if the principals weren’t professionals, they easily could have been. Stephen Underwood played the actor-manager Ludwig like something out of P.G. Wodehouse, and Greta Groothuis, as the English actress Julia Jellicoe, delivered crystal-bright high notes, while gamely obeying Gilbert’s stipulation that she should perform the whole role in a German accent.
This was probably the most accomplished performance that The Grand Duke has received in the UK this century, and it prompted two reflections. First, the polish, professionalism and sheer joy of this ambitious American company – wholly uninhibited by British snobbery about G&S – was notable. Second, that The Grand Duke really has had a bum rap. Played with a decent-sized orchestra, as it was here (Peter A. Hilliard conducted), Sullivan’s score is a lyrical, luminous thing; a last blossoming of the Mendelssohn spirit in the era of Richard Strauss, with Julia’s gavotte-song ‘How Would I Play This Part?’ providing an irresistible earworm. By the standards of most European operetta in the 1890s, The Grand Duke is a gem. By the standards of the team who created The Mikado, not so much. The best is the enemy of the good.
At Holland Park, Charles Court Opera gave us the best. John Savournin directed The Yeomen of the Guard, and he set it in the Tower of London in the 16th century. A bold move; it might even catch on. Savournin’s only major addition (apart from opening out some traditional cuts) was the appearance during the overture of W.S. Gilbert, complete with top hat and mutton-chop whiskers – conjuring his creations from the page and watching with satisfaction as they sprang to life. It was a touching, tactful homage – an early sign that (as in Buxton) everything we were about to see came from a place of genuine love.
The Grand Duke really has had a bum rap. Played with a decent-sized orchestra, Sullivan’s score is luminous
The Yeomen of the Guard, after all, is the darkest and subtlest of the Savoy canon. Savournin understands that it needs to be allowed to speak on its own terms, and to be peopled by vibrant, just-about-believable characters for whom even the topsy-turviest situations are very real indeed. That’s harder than it sounds but the Charles Court company pulled it off, with Matthew Kellett as an acrobatic likely lad of a Jack Point, Savournin (a bona-fide triple threat) as a great gormless spider of a Shadbolt and Llio Evans as a troubled Elsie. Indisposed on the first night, she walked the part while Ellie Laugharne provided a wonderfully poignant voice from the pit.
It was fresh, it was funny, and when it needed to, it stabbed straight at the heart. These Charles Court co-productions have been an inspired addition to Opera Holland Park’s summer seasons, and this Yeomen was the finest yet.
This Edinburgh Fringe comedian is headed for stardom
Dr Phil Hammond is a hilarious and wildly successful comedian whose career is built on the ruins of the NHS. His act has spawned a host of imitators on the stand up-circuit and they share Dr Phil’s confused adoration for the NHS. All of them love the idea of universal healthcare but they dislike the messy practical details. And they’re convinced that extra cash will save the system. The evidence suggests otherwise; handing more money to the NHS is like giving a gambling addict the keys to a bullion van.
The gallows humour is delightful if you’re not stuck in an NHS queue
Dr Phil claims that he would gladly pay higher taxes because the NHS has to scrape by on ‘third-world funding’. This is part of the difficulty. Even a well-informed source like Dr Phil pretends that spending billions a month and employing 1.5 million staff makes Britain a ‘third-world’ country. He’s joined on stage by an unthreatening sidekick, Dame Clare Gerada, who prefers prejudice to comedy. She complains that Brexit led to staff shortages and to problems with the supply of vital medicines. Ultimately, she claims, leaving the EU killed more people than Covid.
Dr Phil and Dame Clare have an evident distaste for the wealthy (a group from which they exclude themselves, of course) and they question the wisdom of allowing rich people to use the NHS at all. Dr Phil suggests that anyone who pays taxes in the Cayman Islands should have the right to call an ambulance – provided it comes from the Cayman Islands. Dame Clare adds that it would probably arrive more quickly than an NHS ambulance. Their gallows humour is delightful if you’re not a patient stuck in an NHS queue.
Nerine Skinner’s The Exorcism of Liz Truss contains an internal drama about the perils of success. In the summer of 2022, as Truss’s star rose, Skinner began to make tons of money impersonating her. But now Skinner wants to escape the shadow of her subject. Why? As Truss fades into history, the demand for Skinner’s services will dwindle too. Her impersonation is good but very limited. She does the off-kilter smile and the jerky delivery, and she captures the essence of Truss’s blinkered and hectoring persona. She comes across as a bumptious, irritating ten-year-old who believes that her main vice, her steam-roller self-confidence, is a virtue.
Truss had a well-publicised fling with the MP Mark Field, which caused Field’s marriage to collapse while Truss kept her relationship intact. On stage, Truss relates these events with a victorious smirk and a thumbs-up as if there was no emotional cost. Skinner evidently finds Truss a very cold fish indeed, but that’s not a good starting point for an impersonation. Having exhausted her main subject, Skinner turns to Nadine Dorries, whom she portrays as a perfumed matriarch obsessed with Boris Johnson. This is amusing, harmless, and enjoyable.
Skinner tries Ed Davey but she can’t do him. So she invents an Australian gym mistress who helps Davey to keep in shape. It’s feeble satire. And the gym mistress ends up teaching the audience to perform aerobics. What happened to Davey? Skinner simply gave up on the impersonation. She makes a half-hearted attempt to ridicule Angela Rayner’s piercing voice and lisping diction but she seems fearful of damaging her target. Skinner orders us to feel sympathy for Rayner because she had a baby while still at school, as if the pregnancy were a misfortune imposed on Rayner by the crowd at Edinburgh. The show ends with an affectionate take-off of Margaret Thatcher as a flirty vampire. Skinner is too nice to be a satirist.
After Endgame is a confessional monologue by Kevin James Doyle, a New York chess grandmaster who gives private lessons to children. To interest the kids, he uses fairy tales and folk myths – but his secret weapon is incompetence: ‘I let the children win.’ This ploy guarantees his popularity as a tutor. Kevin is contacted by a billionaire from Singapore who praises his ability to teach complex abstract systems through the medium of folk stories. Together they set out to formalise Kevin’s methods and to turn them into a lucrative business. Kevin seems set to make a fortune but his journey to Singapore immerses him in a genuine game of survival involving strategy, cunning and false moves – just like chess. And he doesn’t realise what’s going on until it’s too late. This is a riveting and hilarious hour of storytelling about self-deception and the art of gamesmanship. Not just a chess lesson. A life lesson.
Finlay Christie is a posh white comedian in the mould of Jack Whitehall. He’s witty, self-deprecating and charismatic, and he likes to play both sides at once. Sometimes he poses as the child of privilege: ‘I love Edinburgh. It’s like a seventh home to me.’ And sometimes he presents himself as a skint young adult who resents the complaints of mouldy old pensioners. ‘I can’t afford to heat my house,’ they grumble. To Christie, that sounds like a boast. ‘You’ve got a house?!’
This is a riveting and hilarious hour of storytelling. Not just a chess lesson. A life lesson
He avoids politics, climate change and trans rights and he focuses instead on his struggle to pass himself off as a regular dude. The show’s hook is a rap song that he wrote with his ‘crew’ when he was 16. Being rap, the subject is how to make tons of money very fast but because he and his crew were at public school they simply telephoned their parents and asked for the cash. This sounds like a rather slim motif, but it delivers heaps of comedy because young white men feel very inauthentic these days and they suffer from a permanent crisis of identity. He taps into those anxieties beautifully.
Great things will come his way soon. TV exposure, no doubt. He’ll probably attract the envy of his rivals on the circuit as well. But that’s hardly worth fretting about. You’re not truly popular until you’re hated.
A fiery examination of the damage wrought by internet culture
Historically, when a woman was giving birth, she was attended by the women she trusted most, including her child’s prospective godmother. The word ‘gossip’ derives from the Old English ‘god-sibb’, meaning godparent, but came to refer to what went on around the childbed. As Erica Jong later put it: ‘Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.’
Gossip has since moved online – see Mumsnet and the network of Facebook pages called ‘Are we dating the same guy?’. Women use the latter to post warnings to alert others to serial cheaters – and worse. Perhaps inevitably, it has become the focus of several lawsuits brought by men who have been publicly maligned. Is it possible to keep the old ‘whisper network’ alive without being sued in the process? Lily O’Farrell, a young writer and cartoonist, is determined to show us how.
It will furnish you with enough household titbits to make a tradwife proud
It says a lot about the state of the world we’re living in that we need podcasts like hers. Beneath its apologetic title, No Worries if Not! is a potent, even fiery examination of the damage wrought by internet culture. Its target audience is young women – 20-something feminist O’Farrell has a sympathetic voice that will appeal to the slightly younger Gen-Zers – but the topics discussed affect all of us.
A recent episode explored the hysteria over ageing that has prompted even children to use products containing peptides, retinol and other alleged youth-enhancing chemicals. Another proposed that dating apps are turning us into human fruit-machines devoid of empathy. You may not be shocked to learn that 75 per cent of Tinder users are male.
Statistics, eloquent experts and deep research elevate this podcast above most others of its ilk. In place of chit-chat we get a carefully considered commentary which builds to tell a broader story of our times. If you’re bewildered by the current vogue for 1950s domesticity, for example, listen to the episode entitled ‘Should we all become Trad Wives?’. When the average woman is still putting in 3.5 hours of housework a day – and has a paid job besides – she can hardly be blamed for dreaming of dishcloths.
The house is a world of its own. TV historian Ruth Goodman – she of the red hair and rapid period costume changes – focuses on a different household item or fixture each week in her podcast The Curious History of Your Home. We have the oven, the medicine cabinet, even the lawnmower, but you can bet it is the episode on the loo that attracts the highest audience figures.
Goodman decided to begin her journey of ‘lifting the lid on the toilets of the past’ in Pakistan. If you have the budget… The Bronze Age site of Mohenjo-daro (the Mound of the Dead) doesn’t sound like the most obvious place for studying the history of bowel functions, but apparently its waterworks were remarkable. Many of the houses in the area had lavatories built into the brickwork of their outside walls. Minoan Crete also excelled on the privy front.
There is an unintended Life of Brian quality to Goodman’s podcast, which serves to illustrate that, where the home is concerned, our ancestors did just about everything for us. The Romans feature prominently, but so too do the ancient Assyrians, Egyptians and Iranians. The episode on home security is particularly fascinating. Few will know that the palace doors of Khorsabad in Nineveh were fastened using an early form of pin-tumbler lock.
The surprises continue. I hadn’t noticed, for example, that keys feature on the Bayeux Tapestry. It also came as news to me that Benjamin Franklin angled mirrors on his exterior house walls so that he could see who was approaching without being seen himself. This early form of doorbell-cam was targeted principally at his mother-in-law.
The one oddity of this enjoyable podcast is the slight disjunct between the opening and the contents of most episodes. You could be forgiven for thinking you’re listening to an audiobook as Goodman sets the scene over several minutes at the start, transporting you to a drunken feast near Corinth in the third century bc, among other places. The opening scripts, akin to the prologue in a book, are breathless and not a little purple in their prose. Don’t be put off. This is mostly easy listening and will furnish you with enough household titbits to make a tradwife proud.
How Ancient Greece handled riots
Riots are difficult enough for us to deal with, let alone for the ancients, who had neither police nor prisons; and only late on housed troops in cities.
Since Athenian citizens – the poor – made all political decisions, and the state and the rich funded them, there was little for them to riot about. The two riots organised by oligarchs to destroy democracy failed.
But in republican Rome, political tensions between the rich and the poor could produce serious rioting, often designed to disrupt the voting. Tiberius Gracchus’ Bill (132 bc) forbade anyone from owning more than 120 hectares of public land (50 soccer pitches), the excess being distributed among the poor at 30 hectares per family. After blood-soaked rioting, it was passed. As the republic collapsed, riots organised by elites competing for power multiplied.
After voting ended under the imperial system, the emperor was in total control. Like governors and the wealthy across the empire, he was expected to deal with famine, financial problems (debt, taxes), natural disasters, even unpopular political appointees, whose statues were smashed and homes burnt. On big public occasions such as games, he took special pains to listen to the crowd’s concerns. It gave him a chance to show he cared, even on trivial matters: e.g. complaints that the water in the public baths was too cold.
When it came to riots – we hear of professional political ‘stirrers’ – the emperor first made a personal appeal to the rioters, stressing his clemency. If that failed, he would warn that troops might be called in; if they were, he would publicly urge moderation on them. Restoring the normal order of things for everyone: that was the emperor’s aim.
And Sir Keir’s too, the lucky man. For if it comes to more riots, he can now leave it to the despised middle classes to prevent the workers expressing, however foolishly, their genuine frustrations. Who needs police and prisons?
What can save Britain’s ash trees?
The next time you drive or walk down a country road, you may well notice that something is not quite right. Look around and you might see that tall ash trees in the verge-side hedgerows are no longer as handsome, their leaves sparse and scattered, even brown and wilting, while naked branches point accusingly to the sky. A disaster is unfolding, which, on the face of it, seems hardly less serious than the one that hit the countryside in the early 1970s, after ‘Dutch’ elm disease was imported in timber from Canada and killed 30 million trees. This time, the victim is the European ash (Fraxinus excelsior).
The disaster is plain, even to urban dwellers. The sound of chainsaws and tree shears is loud in the land
Hymenoscyphus fraxineus is a fungus indigenous to Asia, where ash species tolerate it, because pathogen and trees have evolved together. The fungus arrived in Europe 30 years ago. Thanks to failures in biosecurity, it then crossed the Channel, possibly as early as 2006, but certainly in 2012, in a consignment of young infected plants. The fungus produces spores, released in summer and borne on the wind that cause a disease called Chalara ash dieback. This results in crown decline, root collar necrosis and, eventually, death – which is often accelerated by secondary pathogens such as honey fungus and bracket fungus.
When the news of the disease broke in 2012, it prompted a general horrified fascination. But as time went on, the threat to ash trees became background noise, easy to ignore. No longer. The disaster is plain, even to urban dwellers, since ash trees grow in city parks and suburban streets as well as country hedgerows. The sound of chainsaws and tree shears is loud in the land.
The ash is a broad-leaved hardwood, with a smooth grey trunk that fissures with age. It has unique velvet-black leaf buds, followed by long, green, compound leaves. These flush later in the spring compared with other native deciduous trees, which means that a rich flora can develop at ground level in woodland. Male and female flowers are usually borne on separate trees, and the wind disperses the pollen; in late summer, distinctive hanging clusters of brown seed ‘keys’ appear. The leaves often drop in a heap after a frosty night.
The ash is a genuinely native British tree (unlike the elm), with a range that extends right through England and Wales and up into Scotland, especially on alkaline soils overlying limestone. Ash are vital denizens of woodland ecosystems, for the leaf litter has a high nutrient content and decays rapidly, which hugely benefits soil fungi and invertebrates. Ash woodland flora is richly diverse and five rare species, including the oxlip, are particularly associated with it. Like all large trees, ash filter out pollution, mitigate storm run-off and store carbon.
The timber, provided it is not affected by disease (which turns the wood from white to brown), is used for flooring, tool handles, oars, Irish hurling sticks and Morgan car frames – because of its remarkable capacity to absorb shocks. Ash also makes the best firewood, which is perhaps just as well, since there will be plenty of that about, as landowners rescue something of value from their stricken woods. Lady Celia Congreve’s poem from 1930 on the various woods for burning put ash first: ‘ash wet or ash dry/ a king shall warm his slippers by.’
In the past, ash foliage was used as forage for livestock in hungry winters, so trees were part of ancient ‘wood pasture’. Ash’s tolerance for being coppiced or pollarded means there are some very old trees about. (Coppicing is the process of cutting trunks almost to ground level, creating ‘stools’, while pollarding is cutting the crown right back.) In times past, my husband and I delighted in seeing the ash stools growing by the side of a country lane near Loweswater in the Lake District. We guessed they were a couple of centuries old, so broad and almost hollow were the boles, but still supporting strong, straight young poles. Delight turned to dismay when – years before ash dieback arrived – we came across men grubbing them up. Heaven knows why.
Thirty years ago, we planted hundreds of 18-inch ‘whips’ of a mix of native tree species in an acre of paddock beyond our garden. Previously, this had contained a single centenarian, hollow-centred ash, the haunt of tawny owls and woodpeckers. Our tiny ‘wood’, with the birds and insects it attracts, has become as dear to us as anything we possess. It contains 47 ash trees, a dozen of which we cut down to stumps when they started to encroach on their neighbours. We used the timber as firewood.
Mature trees take longer to decline, but most will go in the end, even if it takes a decade or two
It is the young growths from the stools that have succumbed quickest to ash dieback. Removing the infected stools won’t make any difference, since the fungal spores can be carried miles on the wind, so the rest will simply become infected from elsewhere. Mature trees take longer to decline, but most will go in the end, even if it takes a decade or two. Every day, I anxiously scan the crowns of 50ft ash trees, looking for signs of thinning at the extremities.
If these trees are dear to us, how much more must they be to the 30 invertebrates, four lichens and 11 fungi that are ash ‘obligates’, i.e. only found on ash. In all, 955 species benefit in some way from association with ash.
In 2019, an Oxford University study estimated that the cost of ash dieback, in lost benefits and the removal of dead and dying trees, would be £14.8 billion over the next 100 years – but with more than half of that, £7.6 billion, by 2030. What else can we expect when great tracts of countryside, many of them places of special aesthetic or scientific value, are affected? I might add that there are no grants available to private landowners for cutting down ash trees. Yet many grow in field hedgerows, next to roads or footpaths; these risk becoming unsafe when dead or dying, creating one more damn thing for hard-pressed farmers to deal with. We can safely leave some of our trees to stand, but those close to our neighbours’ boundaries may have to be felled – at substantial cost.
The Oxford report estimated that councils in Devon, a county badly hit, may incur annual costs of more than £30 million just to clean up dangerous roadside trees. In the Peak District, ash comprises 80 per cent of woodland and an even greater percentage in the steep ravines, a Special Area of Conservation. Here there is good news. Thanks to a diverse partnership, led by Natural England, the ravines are being replanted with ecologically similar large- and small-leaved limes, and wych elm. But it is arduous and skilled work that must continue for years.
The reason almost the entire population of elms died in the 1970s was that the vast majority were genetically identical. Mirabile dictu, as the Romans would say, most elms in Great Britain were descended from a single clone, the Antinian elm, imported from Italy via Spain to be used to stake vines. Such a wipeout won’t happen to Fraxinus excelsior, thank heavens, for it is genetically more heterogeneous.
Dr Jo Clark, head of research at Future Trees Trust (a charity founded to improve the stock of hardwood trees), estimates that 1 per cent of ash trees, i.e. perhaps 1.5 million, have substantial tolerance for the disease and can either live with it or will regrow after infection. It is these trees that have been the focus of FTT’s research and propagation project, carried out in conjunction with Forest Research, RBG Kew and Fera, under the umbrella of the Living Ash Project, and funded for the past ten years, until this month, by Defra. The work has resulted in the establishment of a ‘National Archive of Tolerant Ash’, a collection of grafted plants – the foundation for producing resistant trees at scale in future years – assembled and cared for at a site in Hampshire, and soon one in Scotland as well. The hope is that Defra will wish to fund a seed production programme, to build on this success. Dr Clark believes that there is hope for ash in the future. It certainly looks like it, but the present still feels grim.
‘I came here to escape radical Islam’: the asylum seekers who understand the rioters’ fears
Sousou is a 24-year-old Syrian-Palestinian woman who arrived in Britain a few weeks ago in a rubber dinghy from Calais. Her husband was also on the boat, along with 70 other men and women. Sousou was (and is) pregnant and the passengers all nearly drowned – as her aunt had done on a previous crossing attempt. There were too many people on board and the overloaded dinghy began to take in water. Sousou and her husband were rescued by the British coastguard and for a while they felt safe – until the riots began. Now, after things seem to have quietened down, she talks to me from a hotel in south London. ‘I was scared. I was watching it all on the news,’ she says.
‘Following the laws and values of a country should define citizenship’
Rioting men hurled chairs through the windows of asylum-seeker hotels and the people inside feared arson. I spoke to Sheyda too, a 20-year-old Iranian student and former uprising leader who claimed asylum in the UK after being shot by police in Iran. ‘Everyone in my hotel is still terrified. We’re mainly women and children.’
Unexpectedly though, Sheyda has some sympathy with the rioters. She was moved to London by the Home Office from her previous hotel in Somerset and was shocked by the amount of violent Islamism she discovered in the city. ‘You’ve got too many people here from the Middle East,’ she said. ‘I came here to escape radical Islam. My Generation Z grew up in Iran with social media and western values. Those are the values we want to live by. But you’ve got some people here who want to spread Sharia law.’ Somerset, she said, felt very different: much safer, much more the sort of Britain she’d hoped for when she fled. ‘Most of the people there were born in Britain.’
I met Sousou and Sheyda because I’m involved in a drama programme for refugees and asylum seekers called the Trojan Women Project. Sheyda is a participant and Sousou’s elder sister Arwa, who claimed asylum in the UK in 2016, is our lead actress and a workshop trainer. Arwa is also now married to a British citizen with whom she has British children. Our charity helps refugees to overcome isolation, depression and trauma – and to tell their stories to the world in the hope that when people understand what made them leave home, it will defuse the anger.
Asylum seekers are not the problem here. Only 67,337 asylum applications were made last year and 36,704 people arrived illegally. That number is dwarfed by the 685,000 legal migrants. But the issue won’t be resolved until we wean ourselves from low-cost immigrant labour by incentivising Brits to do the jobs that immigrants currently do. And that can only be done by carrot and stick – higher pay and tougher benefit rules. The former may happen under a Labour government, but the latter is looking unlikely.
It’s doubtful that many of the men who’ve thrown bricks at hotels and mosques around the country over the past few weeks would rather Sheyda be tortured, imprisoned, even executed. But surely it would help soothe tensions if they understood that many Muslims, like her, are as worried about radical Islam as they are. Our project is a microcosm of the asylum process. This year we’ve been completely inundated: 90, mainly Iranian participants instead of the 30 our 11 years’ experience had led us to expect. The majority of them are fleeing from the Islamic Republic’s crackdown after last year’s uprising.
Most asylum seekers I’ve met are desperate to work and to integrate. They don’t want to live off the state, but months of legally enforced idleness and moping in hotel rooms is catastrophic for their sanity and future employability. There are pitifully few communal spaces where they can make friends. Most are forced to eat hotel-provided ready meals in their rooms and rarely communicate even with the people in neighbouring rooms for fear they’re from the Iranian security service or Home Office plants. Sousou and her husband hadn’t spoken to anyone else since they arrived. When asylum seekers do finally get refugee settled status, they’re often in a terrible state: penniless and with no work experience or contacts in this country. Many become homeless and unemployed.
‘We’d much rather work, pay tax, be part of this country,’ says Sheyda. ‘That’s why we’ve come here.’ Work would also help them learn English, which is the real key to integration. The solution is to make compulsory work part of the asylum process so that the government can use asylum seekers’ earnings to pay for their food, accommodation and tax. Then, if asylum is granted, they will have experience and a way of beginning a productive new life rather than trying to get money by illegal means. Less crime means fewer tabloid horror stories and less frustration among the British working classes. This would be a virtuous circle.
Despite the riots, both Sheyda and Sousou are optimistic about the long-term. ‘These aren’t British values. These are just rough men. Most of the people I met in Somerset were nice and kind,’ Sheyda tells me. ‘Arwa’s husband Jonathan apologised to me,’ says Sousou. ‘Britain is really a very welcoming country,’ adds Arwa. ‘Jonathan was the sort of person who was suspicious of immigrants. And then he met me.’
‘But we immigrants do have to behave ourselves,’ she goes on. ‘Following the laws and values of a country and serving that country should define citizenship. Unfortunately, there are some immigrants who do not want to live according to British values. They still follow Islamic Sharia law and wish to impose it on others. We fled radical, violent Islam in our country and do not wish to see similar behaviours here in the free world. These are not British values.’
How bus travel lost its magic
At the former Chiswick Works in west London, I recently celebrated the Routemaster’s 70th birthday. I owe my existence to this majestic mode of transport. My mum was a conductress on a Routemaster – the No. 16 – which cut a merry swathe from Cricklewood to Victoria, right through the centre of London. My dad, like a lot of young Irishmen, had arrived in London in the 1950s to help rebuild a city still recovering from the second world war. Every morning, he’d catch the first bus from his digs off the Edgware Road to various building sites. One morning he got chatting to the young clippie, and married her a few months later. ‘Open the front door,’ he’d say to me years later, ‘and the whole world’s outside.’
For families like ours, who didn’t own a car, the ‘whole world’ began at the bus stop. Routemasters arrived at the end of our street to take us where we wanted to go. Passengers still pine for their perfect confluence of form and function. Each one was more than a mere bus, it was a mobile community. Its open back platform allowed the locals to jump on and off swiftly.
My mum wasn’t the only family member who worked on the No. 16. She and Uncle Ken, conductor and driver respectively, were London Transport’s only brother-and-sister bus crew. Except when Uncle Ken was paired with his sister Gert or his sister Joyce. So for my family, On the Buses was less a sitcom and more a documentary.
On a Routemaster, the conductor ran the show. The best ones were like good publicans, greeting their regulars with a quip and a smile. They all had their rules and my mum’s included ‘Never take a fare from a nurse or a nun’. She also acted as a vital conduit between passengers who’d just arrived from Ireland or the Caribbean and needed somewhere to live, and other passengers who might have a spare room.
After dark, the sight of an approaching Routemaster was like a warm, welcoming lantern that had come to carry you home. Although you were never sure exactly when it was going to arrive, I believed – still do – that if you stared hard enough up the road, your bus would miraculously appear.
From an early age, I was hopping on without adult supervision. Kids round our way were all brought up with that ideal combination of love and neglect, so our mums neither knew nor cared where we went during school holidays. The first place was usually Franklin’s newsagent, where we could buy a 25p ticket called a Red Rover and enjoy a day’s unlimited bus travel on Routemasters.
Bus travel lost its magic when Routemasters, along with conductors, were phased out. They were replaced by lumbering one-man buses. Passengers were delayed because the driver had to take all the fares, then again because, without the open platform, they were trapped until the doors were released.
Socially and environmentally, London has suffered ever since. At Chiswick Works, I felt extraordinarily lucky. Without the Routemaster, I wouldn’t be here. And without it, as a child, I wouldn’t have been anywhere.
Grandmaster Royal
The British Championships, which concluded in Hull earlier this month, saw a notable achievement for 15-year-old Shreyas Royal, whose stellar performance was his third and final qualifying result to earn him the grandmaster title. He becomes the youngest British player to reach that milestone, beating David Howell’s record which had held since 2007 (and before that, my own!).
Royal’s win against Howell was one of the best games of the event, although the Alexander Best Game Prize (named for C.H.O’D. Alexander, the Bletchley Park codebreaker and Spectator chess columnist) was awarded to Howell, for the precision in his endgame against Ameet Ghasi.
Below, Royal made the courageous decision to jettison his knight and fight for the initiative, avoiding the obvious but passive 23…Nf5-e7.
David Howell-Shreyas Royal
British Championships, Hull 2024
(see left diagram)
23… fxe5!? 24 gxf5 e4 25 Ne1 25 Ne5 Qg5+ sheds the e3-pawn, and perhaps d4 too. Routing the knight to g2 has a more secure appearance. Qh4 26 Ne2 Qxh3 27 Qd2 Bc7 28 fxg6 Re6 29 Nf4 Bxf4 30 Rxf4 Rxg6+ 31 Ng2 Rh6 32 Raf1 Missing an ingenious defensive idea: 32 Kf2 g5 33 Rg1! Qh2+ 33 Kf2 Rg6 34 Rg1 Rf8 34…Rg3! introducing ideas of g7-g5 and Rg3-f3+ would give Black a decisive attack. 35 Rxf8+ Kxf8 36 Qb4+ Kg8 37 Kf1 Rf6+ 38 Nf4 Qh3+ 39 Ke2 39 Rg2! clings on, e.g. 39…Qxe3 40 Rxg7+ Kxg7 41 Qe7+ Rf7 42 Qg5+ with a draw by perpetual check. Qf3+ 40 Kd2 Rxf4 41 exf4 Qf2+ 42 Kc3 Qxg1 43 Qxb7 Qc1+ 44 Kb3 Qc4+ 45 Ka3 Qxd4 46 Qxc6 Kf7 Once the checks expire, the extra pawn easily decides the game. 47 Qd7+ Kf6 48 Qd8+ Kf5 49 Qg5+ Ke6 50 Qg4+ Kd6 51 Qg6+ Kc5 52 Qe8 Qb4+ 53 Ka2 Kc4 54 Qc6+ Kd4 55 Qd7 Qc4+ 56 b3 Qc2+ 57 Ka3 Qc5+ 58 Ka2 Kd3 59 Qxg7 e3 60 Qg1 Kd2 61 Qg5 e2 62 f5+ Qe3 63 Qg2 Kc1 64 f6 Qd2+ 65 Ka3 Qb2+ White resigns
Royal’s only loss came against Matthew Wadsworth, whose result in Hull (including an impressive win against me) also earned him a grandmaster ‘norm’; Wadsworth will need one more such result to earn the title.
Matthew Wadsworth-Shreyas Royal
British Championships, Hull 2024
(see right diagram)
35 Rbc1! 35 Rbd1 Rf7 is less clear. a4 36 Rd7 a3 37 Rcc7 Rf7 A creative defence, avoiding 37…a2 38 Rxg7+ Kh8 39 Rxh7+ Kg8 40 Rcg7 mate. 38 Rc8+ Rf8 39 Rcc7 Rf7 40 Rxf7 a2 41 Rxg7+ Kf8 42 Rcf7+ Ke8 43 Rxh7! Wadsworth correctly judges that the hoovering rooks will beat the promoted queen. a1=Q+ 44 Kg2 Qa2 45 Rc7 Qd5+ 46 f3 Qa2+ 47 Kh3 Qe6+ 48 Kh4 Kd8 49 Rc8+! Black resigns in view of 49…Rxc8 50 Rh8+
No. 814
Black to play. Vidit-Al-Mudahka, Fide World Rapid Team Championship, 2024. The Qatari grandmaster landed a decisive blow here. What did he play? Email answers tochess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 19 August. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.
Last week’s solution 1 Nd5! then 1…Kxd5 2 Qd4# or 1…Kxf3 2 Qg2# or 1…Kf5/1…Kd3 2 Qg6#
Last week’s winner Mike Truran, Ducklington, Witney, Oxon
Spectator Competition: As they prefer it
In Competition 3362 you were invited to submit a passage from Shakespeare as rewritten by the sensitivity reader. The entries were on the whole excellent and it was painful to have to jettison so many: often it came down to a repetition of the same excerpt. A special mention to D.A. Prince (‘My partner’s eyes are theirs: I cannot share comparisons’), David Blakey for his Old Shepherd’s speech, and Robert Brydges for his revised Twelfth Night in which Viola ends up with Olivia, Sebastian with Antonio, and Orsino is left ‘betrothèd nor to maid nor man’. The winners get £25.
This royal throne of monarchs, government-supported,
This oft-changing democracy, this seat of deities,
This other Utopia, pending improvements,
This island built by evolving nature
Against infection, acts of terrorism and related hostilities,
This collection of citizens of all backgrounds,
This diverse geological landscape set by the English Channel,
Which serves it in the physical form of a barrier,
Or as a moat, separating its territory
from other Euro-centric lands,
This location, this environment, this nation, this United Kingdom,
This birthplace of royal figureheads and commoners,
Famous for certain celebrities,
Despised for its former empire-building actions,
Now offering multi-faith service and true equality,
Repenting of past crusades, slavery and invasions.
Janine Beacham
Thrice its contents have been boiled
As round our cauldron we have toiled
At hummus, quorn and mung-bean bake
And kelp and lentil protein shake,
With kale en gelée, lettuce purée,
Pulses three-way, seaweed soufflé,
Edamame bean surprise
With almond milk and fat-free fries,
And fig brulée with senna pods,
The choice of costive vegan gods.
Good fortune will attend Macbeth who
Comes to try our tasting menu.
So, double, double toil and trouble;
Though fire still burns ’tis veggies bubble.
Martin Parker
To be, or what to be, that is the question,
Whether we should rely on mindfulness,
Or face proactively those many things
That might keep us awake. We need our rest,
For by our sleep we can bring to an end
A thousand problems. But perchance we’ll dream –
Ay, there’s the rub! For sometimes when we have
Dropped off, dreams are not nice, so we require
A healthy sleep, and pleasant visions are
Something devoutly to be wished, that we
Forget our boyfriend/girlfriend troubles, or
Our pompous boss. We may quietus make
Not with a bodkin but a beaker full
Of cocoa, from whose bourn-ville all may drink,
Then, like all travellers, return refreshed.
Brian Murdoch
All the world is a safe performance space. Persons of one, several or no genders play vital roles. All share equally a capacity to exit and enter. Orthodox chronology restricts freedom by compelling individuals to adopt seven roles in a given order. These roles, here ungendered in order to encourage identification from the full breadth of the identity rainbow, can be listed thus: infant, learner, lover, peacemaker, human rights lawyer, pre-senior, senior. To each role can be appended a set of stereotypical descriptors, excised here because they are in all cases discriminatory and likely triggering to those who have passed through the phases described, or to those bearing witness to similar passage in others. The suggestion offered by these satirical descriptors, that life is circular and for this reason futile, is excised also, as it is disempowering. Blank verse being exclusionary,
I have chosen to express myself in plain English.Adrian Fry
IAGO: Even now, no, very now
A proud man of African descent
Doth this night woo thy gender-neutral offspring,
They are lock’d e’er now in discourse. Arise!
Awake the loyal citizens with the bell,
A birthing person, they may give to thee,
A grandchild thou can’st dandle on thy knee.
Arise, I say.
BRABANTIO. What? What say you?
Is your emotional judgment lost?
Sylvia Fairley
The raven herself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements, bespeaking his sense
Of imperious entitlement, to thus encroach
Upon this fortress which serves me in the office
Of a safe space, preserved from the male gaze,
Now invaded by this hateful agent of the patriarchy.
Come you physicians that tend on mortal parts,
Unsex me here, fill me from crown to toe
Top-full of potions and medicines potable,
Stop up the access to my front passage.
Come to my woman’s breasts and take them
With thy keen knife, leave not the slightest substance.
As for my privy parts, thou can’st make them
And I shall set them forth before foul Duncan
And cry, ‘Behold, behold!’
Sue Pickard
Recycle all your efforts, cherished chums,
In this ongoing siege scenario;
Or gently plug the edifice ahead
With pictures of this country’s ‘fallen’ folk.
When peril’s only mild, it is most apt
For humans to keep calm and carry on.
But in peak danger, you are all advised
To match a tiger’s/tigress’ attitude.
And mirror his/her/their assertiveness,
Invoking vital fluids. So: replace
Innate kindheartedness with shows of pique,
Then use your eyeball (mind your mental health!)
To emulate artillery on wheels,
And, with your forehead jutting out, extend
It, like a cliff, towards the French. Teeth clenched,
And nostrils flared, inhale, but please take care.
Richard Spencer
No. 3365: breaking it down
You are invited to submit an extract from or synopsis of a PhD about some aspect of contemporary street culture, such as for example breakdancing (150 words maximum). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 28 August.
2667: Orbital
The unclued lights are of a kind and are listed in Chambers.
Across
1 Dry duck takes in energy drink (8)
6 Least exciting exam takes a minute (6)
10 Place for improvement? (8,4)
11 Man of note could break galley up – regularly (5)
13 Snapshot taken last month around Ohio for US novelist (7)
17 Watch drunken orgy after broadcast (6-2)
21 Wandering bear wandering round tarn (8)
23 Sign, given role in section of defence (7)
25 Sea loch oddly not found in Seville (3)
26 Lengthen in either direction (3)
28 Makes it possible for former England manager to go topless (7)
29 Basic principle of weakling keeping little money (8)
34 Cavers in trouble – nearly all see deep crack (8)
35 Long delay – but heading off (4)
40 Used lob cryptically – in this sport? (5,7)
41 On board Noah’s opening his ship for fantastic animals (6)
42 Takes stock, quadrupeds and half the shires (8)
Down
1 Little love, right for the bursar (9)
2 Swimmers sleep over endlessly (4)
3 Where porkers head to get warm and cosy (6)
5 Proudly claim spa’s not hot (8)
6 Odd title or poem (7)
7 Conquerors of Granada changing rooms (5)
8 Formality of taking torch from Loch Ness Monster at sea (10)
15 Make quick run, leaving cover behind (6)
18 Rating of economic measure of November 1967 not used at first (10)
20 No alcoholic drink served up as spirit (6)
22 Hardy girl crossing a street the Valencian finds vulgar (9)
24 New tyres are badly serrated (8)
27 Short time before new seed breaks away (7)
31 Cultured fellows starting to support a team from Edinburgh (6)
33 Shock after termination of eccentric professor’s post (5)
37 King once called for a joint (4)
Download a printable version here.
A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on 2 September. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2667, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery.
2664: First name terms – solution
The unclued lights can be sorted into four trios of forenames in a reducing anagram chain: MONICA, NAOMI, MONA (4,31): DECLAN, LANCE, NEAL (12,24,36): SINEAD, DIANE, ENID (33,15,34) and ALISON, SONIA, SIAN (42,13).
First prize E.C. Jones, Whaley Bridge, Derbyshire
Runners-up Charles Barr, Norwich; Mike Brand, Edinburgh
Portrait of the week: riot justice, Olympic success and Ukraine’s Russian advance
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Riots subsided after 7 August, a night when many were expected but only empty streets or demonstrations against riots eventuated. By 12 August there had been 975 arrests and 546 charges in 36 of the 43 police force areas in England and Wales. Rioters could be released from jail after serving 40 per cent of their sentence, as part of the early release scheme to ease prison overcrowding, Downing Street said. Ricky Jones, a councillor for Dartford, now suspended from the Labour party, was remanded in custody after being charged with encouraging violent disorder in Walthamstow. The judge told him: ‘It is alleged that using a microphone you addressed a crowd at an anti-fascist protest and, talking about others you described as “disgusting Nazi fascists”, you said, “We need to cut their throats and get rid of them”.’Lucy Connolly, the wife of a Tory councillor in Northamptonshire, appeared in court charged with publishing written material to stir up racial hatred. It was alleged that, on the day of the Southport knife killings, she posted a Twitter message saying: ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the hotels full of the bastards for all I care… If that makes me racist, so be it.’ A 13-year-old girl and two 12-year-old boys pleaded guilty to violent disorder offences. In Liverpool, a 16-year-old boy admitted stealing £15,000 worth of vapes.
The train operator CrossCountry announced reduced timetables until 9 November because it had not trained enough drivers; Louise Haigh, the Transport Secretary, said the company’s passengers had been ‘suffering from a substandard service for too long’. Ioan Pintaru, 32, a Romanian national of no fixed address, appeared in court charged with attempted murder after an 11-year-old girl was stabbed in Leicester Square. Two migrants died off the French coast between Calais and Dunkirk attempting to cross the Channel in a small boat with 54 others, who were rescued. On the same day, 703 migrants arrived in England in 11 small boats.
Unemployment fell to 4.2 per cent for the three months to June, from 4.4 per cent over the previous quarter. But 9.41 million – 22.2 per cent of those of working age – were economically inactive. Inflation rose from 2 to 2.2 per cent. Wages grew at an annual rate of 5.4 per cent, the slowest for two years. Financially stretched universities competed to accept new students; David Maguire, the vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia, told the Guardian: ‘I don’t think there are enough students to go around.’ Britain won 65 medals in the Olympics, one more than in Tokyo and the same number as in London in 2012.
Abroad
Ukraine sustained an incursion into Russia for more than a week, reaching a facility outside Sudzha involved in piping natural gas from Russia to the EU via Ukraine, which has continued despite the war. Russia said 180,000 people were being evacuated from the Kursk region, and others from the Belgorod region. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine acknowledged that the attack was taking the war into ‘the aggressor’s territory’. President Vladimir Putin of Russia said his ‘defence ministry’s main task is to push, to kick the enemy out of our territory’. Russia attacked Ukraine with drones.
Israel spent days expecting an attack by Iran and from Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon. America sent an aircraft carrier and a guided missile submarine to the Middle East. Sir Keir Starmer told President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran over the telephone that now was ‘the time for calm and careful consideration’. Israel struck al-Taba’een school in Gaza, which it said served as a Hamas and Islamic Jihad military facility; at least 70 were reported killed. US Vice President Kamala Harris said ‘far too many’ civilians had been killed ‘yet again’. Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority, made a state visit to Russia.
Athens smelt of burning under skies darkened by smoke from wildfires. A plane crashed in Brazil killing 62. Analysis of seismic data indicated reservoirs of water six to 12 miles below the surface of Mars. On Twitter, which he owns, Elon Musk, the eccentric businessman, held a discussion, notable for a technical hitch, with Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate. Starbucks got a new chief executive from Chipotle. An Australian who competed in the Olympic breakdancing under the name Raygun scored zero after a routine in which she hopped like a kangaroo. CSH
Does it matter if Trump is weird?
Richard Madeley has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Would-be veep Tim Walz has opened Pandora’s box with his use of the W-word to characterise Donald Trump and his running mate (no sniggering at the back: this W is for ‘weird’). Because, let’s face it, a heck of a lot of politicians are way-out weird, aren’t they? It’s practically part of the job description. If we start calling them all out on it, the currency’s going to devalue fast. My thesaurus devotes nearly half a page to synonyms for weird. ‘Freaky. Wacko. Odd. Eccentric. Crazy. Off the wall. Out to lunch…’ Well, sure, that’s pretty much Trump to a T. He is uniquely odd, but those adjectives neatly summarise plenty of politicos this side of the pond too. Liz Truss. (Oh, come on, don’t get all Truss-defensive – you know she was weird.) Theresa May. May closed the lid of the weird-box firmly over her own head when she said the naughtiest thing she’d ever done was ‘run through fields of wheat’. That’s a really weird thing to say. As for her excruciating conference Maybot dance – I rest my case.
It’s funny, but all the party leaders I can think of that I’d describe as weird seem to have been on the right. Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t weird, he was cracked. Neil Kinnock was delusional. James Callaghan was bank-manager boring. Harold Wilson was dull as ditchwater too (apart from his private life – not so much weird as ‘way-hey!’). But spinning back still further on the right, Ted Heath was proper weird. That laugh! Head and shoulders pumping up and down like a supercharged nodding donkey. As for his private life… what private life? Did bachelor Ted even have one? Apart from his passion for classical music and sailing, it’s a blank canvas, even today. Again, weird.
But as I said, anyone who chooses a life in politics is fundamentally weird. Not on planet normal. So now that Donald has belatedly agreed to a TV debate with Kamala Harris, if she throws the whole weird thing at him, there’s really only one riposte: ‘And your point is?’ But of course, windy Donald will go off on a tangled tangent. Maybe he’ll reprise his baffling ‘late, great Hannibal Lecter’ line. Why? Because he’s weird.
‘You know I’m no art critic, but I know what I hate’ (Monty Burns, The Simpsons). I feel the same about the Olympics. All right, maybe ‘hate’ is a bit strong, but I was bemused by some recently included categories. Breakdancing? Seriously? I thought allowing skateboarding into the Olympics was bizarre enough (Is it a sport? Athletics? Skateboarding’s basically mucking about on a super-sized roller skate.) But breakdancing? The founding fathers of the Olympics must be spinning in their Greek graves. Presumably not on their heads, though.
Some of the more liberal-minded insist that there’s no proof that the swift, stiff sentences dished out to rioters has been a deterrent. I’d say that it’s pretty much a textbook example of cause and effect. You only have to look at the reaction of convicted rioters when they were told that they wouldn’t be home in time for Christmas. Many burst into tears. One thirtysomething rock-tosser sobbed for his mum. I’d bet the cost of the clean-up operation that none will venture near a riot again. And many of those planning to cause mayhem at the weekend will have had an abrupt change of mind.
Sorry to sound like an old-fashioned reactionary, but it’s undeniable that exemplary sentencing deters re-offending (and others contemplating similar crimes) in a way that ‘soft’ punishment doesn’t. I was a court reporter back when suspended sentences were much less common, but I vividly recall the reactions of those handed one. Yes, there was relief, even gratitude, now and then. But most miscreants would smirk or punch the air, expression and body language unmistakable: ‘Yeah! Got away with it!’ Until last week, we seemed to have all but forgotten the crucial component of deterrence in sentencing. Sadly, I’m sure the re-awakening will be brief.
Of all sports, boxing has the greatest disparity between males and females. Boxers with XY chromosomes punch, on average, 162 per cent harder than those with XX. So you don’t put them in the ring together, any more than you’d match a heavyweight with a welterweight. Unless, of course, you’re the International Olympic Committee. I’m with Sharron Davies. She says that the ‘insane’ gender row which engulfed Olympic boxing amounts to ‘genuine neglect’ by the IOC, and that we’re ‘on the cusp’ of a female athlete being killed. She’s right. You don’t define this by what’s on someone’s passport. You check their chromosomes. XX marks the spot. XY marks the other one. It’s that simple.
Douglas Murray vs the mob
Ihad entirely missed the online furore in which my colleague Douglas Murray was engulfed recently and only found out about it through a dubious article on the Guardian website by Kenan Malik. So I was slow off the mark, the reason being that I never read Twitter and have not the slightest interest in what anybody has to say on that absurd forum. (This includes whatever is said by the several people on there who are pretending to be me, incidentally.) Missing out on Douglas’s misery was a fairly crushing blow: there is nothing one enjoys more than revelling in the misfortunes of a colleague, especially if that colleague is also a good friend. I am way past the age when schadenfreude first eclipsed sexual intercourse as my principal enjoyment in life.
Hope Not Hate simply wishes the lower orders to shut up about things which concern them
Malik’s piece gave me the bones of the issue, although it is questionable as to whether anything can have bones on such an ectoplasmic medium as Twitter. You, by now, will have read what Douglas said in a conversation with the Australian former deputy prime minister John Anderson last year. The stuff about the British soul awakening, stirred by righteous anger, and how the police had lost control of the streets. ‘If the army will not be sent in, then the public will have to go in, and the public will have to sort this out themselves, and it’ll be very, very brutal.’ Malik, who is usually one of the left’s more sensible and conscientious commentators, said: ‘The comments might sound like a prescient warning. They sound also like a dangerous apology for the violence.’
Now, Malik had already conceded the conversation took place nine months ago, so how does he explain that second sentence? How could it possibly be an apology for something which hadn’t happened? I yield to nobody in my admiration for Douglas Murray, but he can’t bloody time travel, can he? Malik was merely trying to fan the flames beneath the pyre on which Douglas had been placed and the fact that in order to do so he had to make an idiot of himself, semantically, did not matter. What Murray said was, obviously, a warning – and his fear that the coming rebellion would be ‘very brutal’ did not, to my mind, suggest he was much looking forward to it.
I later learned that one of the first people to cloak himself in confected outrage at Douglas’s comments about Muslim immigrants was a certain Alastair Campbell. This struck me as a little ironic. Douglas may not always come across as the most steadfast supporter of Islam, but so far as I am aware he was not responsible for the deaths of 460,000 Muslims, as in my opinion Campbell was in his odious dissembling prior to the UK and USA’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Campbell prepared the ground for perhaps the most egregious and lethal foreign policy decision in British history. The man should be in a prison cell, not gobbing off on Twitter or chewing the fat with a supposed political opponent, Rory Stewart, who actually agrees with him about everything and looks up to him, dewy-eyed and worshipful, in the manner of a pussy-whipped prep-school fresher desperate to curry the favour of a particularly demented Flashman.
Hope Not Hate were also involved, of course, which is a more serious concern. This organisation spends its time and considerable amounts of money attempting to silence any form of debate on issues regarding race and immigration. It is the most anti-democratic organisation in the country. Hope Not Hate – an asinine name, incidentally – simply wishes the lower orders to shut up about things which concern them; any suggestion that immigration may not have been exclusively a marvel, to be cherished by us all, identifies them as ‘racist’ and thus to be reported to the police for extremism and racial hatred.
If one were to apply HNH’s criteria for what constitutes incitement to the organisation itself, its boss Nick Lowles would certainly find himself in the dock. It magnifies supposed infractions against the Muslim community to such an extent that it cannot but engender a sense of fear, alienation and in the end defiance, perhaps violent defiance. As I write this, the idiot Lowles is in the process of trying to extricate himself from censure for talking of an acid attack on a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough. There had been no such attack. In what sense is that not incitement? The truth is that Lowles yearns for confrontation every bit as much as those coked-up hoolies setting fire to Nissan Jukes. His livelihood, as well as his imbecilic world view, depends upon it.
Both Campbell and Lowles demanded that The Spectator – and the Daily Telegraph – distance themselves from Douglas (as well as Campbell demanding the police should get involved). Well, let me, briefly, distance myself from what Douglas had to say – on the grounds that I do not think it is true.
Those recent riots were, as I suggested last week, perpetrated by bored and fractious football yobbos and dissipated at the first sign of rain and indeed – as I mentioned – the start of the new football season. That was not the uprising Douglas had predicted. But then, I do not see much evidence of a righteous fury brewing among the general public. The numbers taking part in those riots were minuscule and the thuggery was condemned by everyone.
The truth is that we are walking towards a grim, dystopic future rather dutifully, marching along without – for the most part – daring to raise our voices in objection. Every person I met in Middlesbrough last week lamented the level of immigration, the consequential crime levels, and how they were not allowed to talk about it for fear of being called racist. But not on the record. Douglas is quite wrong. We are all doing as we are told, and Hope Not Hate has won.
What today’s A-level results reveal about boys
In her first speech as Chancellor, Rachel Reeves made much of being the first woman to hold that position. ‘To every young woman and girl,’ she said, ‘let today show that there should be no ceilings on your ambitions.’ Britain has already had three female prime ministers, two female foreign secretaries and six female home secretaries – so what makes Reeves think that girls and young women have low ambitions? This week’s A-level results and accompanying university offers will show that it’s the boys she should be more worried about.
For every 100 girls who secure a university place this week, about 75 boys will do the same
For every 100 girls who secure a university place this week, about 75 boys will do the same. Why should that be? Look at the most prestigious courses and the gender gap deepens. On law and medical courses, for every 100 girls who are enrolled, just 57 boys are. In subjects such as maths there is a heavy bias towards boys (173 for every 100 girls) but in vocational degrees that lead into high-paid professions, women are dominant and more likely to graduate with a first-class degree. The dropout rate for male students is also higher.
The news headlines will declare that a slightly greater share of the boys who do sit A-levels attain As or A*s. But what no one seems to talk about is why so many more boys opt out of taking such exams at all. Typically, about 85,000 more A-levels are taken by girls than by boys. As a result the higher-
education entry rate is now around 43 per cent for girls vs 32 per cent for boys.
When Mary Curnock Cook ran UCAS, the university admission service, she raised this matter. One factor, she said, could be a potential lack of male role models in a country where 13-year-olds are significantly more likely to own a smartphone than to have their father still living at home. Many children may go to primary schools where the only man they see is the PE teacher. We assume that girls and young women need female role models, Curnock Cook pointed out, to persuade them to pursue STEM subjects. Why don’t we realise that male role models for boys are just as important?
Surveys show that a large number of parents worry that boys in school are made to feel ashamed of being male, and that children are being taught that young men are a problem in society. The phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ is quickly becoming a new kind of prejudice, a lazy stereotype that is perpetuated in classrooms instead of being denounced as discriminatory. But this will never be recognised while governments cling to the old myths. Why, for example, is there a minister of state ‘for women and equalities’ rather than just for equalities?
A great deal of political attention is lavished on gender inequality in boardrooms, but this mostly concerns disparities that affected people born in the 1960s and 1970s. Ministerial attention should be focused on who can be helped now. Ministers should be asking why, for every 100 grade As that girls achieve at A-level this week, boys will get about 85. Some 220 boys are expelled from school for every 100 girls. For women born after 1980 there is no gender pay gap. The trap for the Labour government is that its outdated ideas of inequality blind them to the reality of the sex divide now, which reveals itself in exam results and university admission data.
Ethnicity is a factor. Take the latest figures for 16-year-olds from households that are poor enough to qualify for free school meals (a common marker of socioeconomic status when analysing education performance). Among Asian girls, 64 per cent will go into higher education: narrowly behind the 77 per cent who are not on free school meals. Black girls are not far behind: 61 per cent and 75 per cent respectively. But for white boys the figure is just 15 per cent, compared to 38 per cent of those not on free school meals. The group less likely than any other to win a university place are poor white boys, and that gap is wide, growing and completely indefensible. Just 2 per cent of poor white boys make it to a top university.
The outlier in Keir Starmer’s government is not Reeves but Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, a white boy who grew up in poverty, qualified for free school meals and went on to Cambridge. Why, we should ask, has his story become so unusual? Is it to do with wealth, culture, family structure, educational norms – or gender-based clichés and outmoded ideas about the sort of pupils who most need help and encouragement? Streeting is in a powerful position to lead this debate, if he chooses to do so.
It is time to set aside the assumptions of past decades in order to recognise that the plight of poor white boys is a new burning injustice. This needs to be more discussed, better understood and remedied.