The Horses by Edwin Muir

Dogs, cats, sure - lovely creatures. 

But horses - nothing matches horses for the quality of their companionship.

Feeling thus, I suppose it was inevitable I would love this poem:

The Horses by Edwin Muir

Barely a twelvemonth after

The seven days war that put the world to sleep,

Late in the evening the strange horses came.

By then we had made our covenant with silence,

But in the first few days it was so still

We listened to our breathing and were afraid.

On the second day

The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.

On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,

Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day

A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter

Nothing. The radios dumb;

And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,

And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms

All over the world. But now if they should speak,

If on a sudden they should speak again,

If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,

We would not listen, we would not let it bring

That old bad world that swallowed its children quick

At one great gulp. We would not have it again.

Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,

Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,

And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.

The tractors lie about our fields; at evening

They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.

We leave them where they are and let them rust:

"They'll molder away and be like other loam."

We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,

Long laid aside. We have gone back

Far past our fathers' land.

And then, that evening

Late in the summer the strange horses came.

We heard a distant tapping on the road,

A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again

And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.

We saw the heads

Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.

We had sold our horses in our fathers' time

To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us

As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.

Or illustrations in a book of knights.

We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,

Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent

By an old command to find our whereabouts

And that long-lost archaic companionship.

In the first moment we had never a thought

That they were creatures to be owned and used.

Among them were some half a dozen colts

Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,

Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.

Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,

But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.

Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

Happy Christmas and a blessed new year to all.

Unintended Consequences

The Observer newspaper reports today that owners of recent Volkswagens are encountering an unexpected difficulty - their cars are seizing up because rats have eaten through wiring on the underneath of the vehicles. 

This is a new phenomenon apparently, created by Volkswagen's desire to create more environmentally friendly products. To further this end, Volkswagen have started casing car wiring in a plant-based material that rats find delicious.

I suppose encouraging rats to flourish is achieving some kind of blow for the environment versus mankind. And manufacturing cars that don't work must reduce emissions. Honda and Toyota are using soy-based insulation which is apparently the equivalent of KFC for vermin, so switching to them provides no escape for car owners. 

What Colour was Montmorency*?

The Guardian's list of best books is out for 2023

What a feast of joy it isn't. Among the recommendations are:

1. The story of a trio of gay Americans looking for their ancestral roots in Ghana 

2. A propulsive thriller responding to the climate crisis

3. A harrowing testimony from a slave plantation. 

4. An auto- fiction deeply engaged with the horrors of colonialism

5. A shadow history of queer desire and erasure 

6. A hypnotic journey into the dub reggae scene

7. The tale of young Vietnamese refugees in Thatcher’s Britain 

8. A chronicle of Soweto under and after apartheid, 

9. A tale of gay "pioneers" in 1890s London 

10. An excoriating account of Contemporary Britain, which sets one woman’s desire to return to the Nigeria of her youth against the backdrop of the Grenfell tragedy

It's all a very long way from Three Men in a Boat.

Do people in other countries also dedicate most of their publishing industry to self-hating fiction and books challenging heterosexuality? If it's just us, why do we do it? Are publishers responding to the market or trying to indoctrinate their customers? 

Are they successful? Personally, I avoid anything published since this century began, buying books only secondhand. I pray there will be a reset to normal very soon and I can go back into bookshops with optimism and excitement about what enjoyable new novel I might find inside.

*Montmorency is the fox terrier in Three Men in a Boat.

Reasons to Like Twitter - an Occasional Series

Commenting on footage of today's umpteenth Saturday afternoon pro-Hamas March in London, someone Tweeted, 

"Oh I'd forgotten it was Jihaturday again. The weeks go by so fast".

In reply someone else Tweeted:

"Before you know it, it'll be Christhamas".

Dark humour, yes, but we live in dark times, and a sense of the absurd is a useful instrument of survival 

The two Tweets I've mentioned were accompanied by footage of the redoubtable Peter Tatchell, fresh from his dressing-up box, looking for all the world like a boy on his first day of kindergarten:

His poster shows that if only he ruled the world all our problems would be swiftly and simply sorted out.

At the Liszt Academy

During the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, like everyone else I missed a great many things. Most of them were of the unremarkable day-to-day variety, small rituals and interchanges that I'd completely taken for granted until they were taken away. 

Something I'd never taken for granted though, but definitely missed, was going to concerts, especially those at the Liszt Academy, not far from where I live in Budapest. 

Of course the music at a concert is the most important element, but when the concert hall itself is lovely it enhances listeners' experience of the music. This link will give you an idea of just how sumptuous the Liszt Academy building and its concert hall are. The separate elements are not all necessarily beautiful in isolation, but together they create a dazzling splendour, conveying a sense of confidence and optimism, a verve that has since been lost.

That loss is unsurprising when you realise that the concert hall was first opened in 1907. The people who commissioned its riot of decorative details had no idea that in less than a decade war would break out and their ordered world would be shattered. Their innocence is for me most poignantly expressed in the design of the stained-glass ceiling panels that proclaim the virtues of song and poetry, rhythm and beauty. The people who created these do not appear to have suffered from our contemporary inhibitions; no one seems to have suggested they restrain themselves, toning their enthusiasm down a bit in order to try to seem cool.

I think that when human beings gather to listen to music, we are at our most civilised. At the Liszt Academy last week, my mind was still full of the news that a wave of primitive violence had been unleashed on civilians in Israel, the murderers exhibiting the kind of demonic joy I associate with Charles Manson's acolytes. Then out came the orchestra, a group of people who devote their lives to the discipline of musicianship. Following them came the conductor, a great favourite with the Budapest audience, now approaching 90 years old. The music began and as we listened it seemed to me that everyone in that room was striking a blow for civilisation. We must never let the barbarians win.

 

Reading - The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott

In the early 1980s I saw a television adaptation of Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown.  I came away thinking that it was a poignant love story but nothing more. It had an exotic setting and was entertaining as a romance.

Now I have read the novel from which the television series was adapted. Not for the first time I am struck by how badly novels are served by film adaptation. The original novel from which the Jewel in the Crown television production was taken is among the most intelligent and complex novels I have ever read. There is a love story of sorts within it, but rather than being the point of the book it is just the thread upon which everything else depends.

By "everything else", what I mean is an exceptionally wise and perceptive portrait of what being involved with British rule in India did to mostly well-intentioned people - and, of course, what it did to Indians themselves. The novel is told from a number of points of view and that I think makes its title absolutely perfect - we are looking at the Raj as if it were a gem stone and seeing it from the many different angles the stonecutter has created on its surface.

A gem stone is the wrong analogy, however, as Scott does not present British rule as benign and excellent. Nor does he condemn it. What he does is create numerous vivid characters and take the reader into each one's way of seeing the world. He shows us how, while most of those involved were not intending to do harm, many were pretty unimaginative and mainly interested in the benefits they received from being in India as servants of Britain. Even those who had reservations about the system, such as Miss Crane and Deputy Commissioner White, were not able to either change anything, nor to fully understand it - or, in Miss Crane's case not until very late in the day. 

After reading the book, I wanted to find out about Paul Scott, because I was in awe of his wisdom and skill. I was saddened to discover that he died unrecognised and that his writing was a struggle that seems to have cost him his happiness and health. I urge anyone looking for a superb novel to give The Jewel in the Crown a try. I feel we owe Scott that. He may no longer be alive but I hope he will continue to be read and appreciated. I hope this both because his work is superb but also because I would like to know that his efforts were not in vain.

Charles Causley

 

This charming Tweet, (or whatever the things formerly known as Tweets are now called), reminded me of what may be Charles Causley's most famous poem - the one about a dancing bear. 

In 1985, to my astonishment, I saw a dancing bear. It was in Belgrade, in an underpass near the BIP - (Beogradsko Industriuja Pivo) - factory (was there ever a more enticingly named beer?) and the rehabilitation hospital where men from whatever socialist conflict Yugoslavia was then supporting in Africa lay on loungers contemplating their lost limbs and the perpetual snarls of traffic on the spaghetti junction beside which the institution was positioned.

Years later I encountered Causley's poem for the first time. He captured perfectly the expression in the eyes of the bear I saw, sadly. It was one of the most melancholy things I've ever witnessed:

My Mother Saw A Dancing Bear

My mother saw a dancing bear
By the schoolyard, a day in June.
The keeper stood with chain and bar
And whistle-pipe, and played a tune.

And bruin lifted up its head
And lifted up its dusty feet,
And all the children laughed to see
It caper in the summer heat.

They watched as for the Queen it died
They watched it march. They watched it halt.
They heard the keeper as he cried,
‘Now, roly-poly!’ ‘Somersault!’

And then, my mother said, there came
The keeper with a begging-cup,
The bear with burning coat of fur,
Shaming the laughter to a stop.

They paid a penny for the dance,
But what they saw was not the show;
Only, in bruin’s aching eyes,
Far-distant forests, and the snow.

Charles Causley

More Play for Today

Phil and I watched three plays set in 1970s Northern Ireland and, while neither of us totally enjoyed every minute, we were both ultimately glad we had seen the plays. As Phil says: 

The trilogy "takes us inside a world that would usually be closed to us and explores the complex relationships within a dysfunctional family, allowing us to see below the surface and understand something of the world the members of the family inhabit."

Words and Phrases - an Occasional Series

Recently I've noticed the phrase "whisper it" creeping into articles and features. Here is an example:

I've been wondering why it makes me squirm. I think it is because it encourages the reader to believe they are in cozy collusion with the writer. It has a giggly, girlie feel that I don't want to be part of - and I don't trust. There is also the falsity of suggesting we all keep something a secret that is actually being highlighted in a widely-read publication.

Then there is "spree" used in the context of murder. Spree is usually associated with shopping and it makes me very uncomfortable to see it used in association with wicked activities. I am not saying shopping is virtuous but it is frivolous. Killing people is not:

More Paper Recycling

I am not posting something from the Financial Times this time - possibly this one is from the Telegraph, although I didn't make a note so can't be sure. Anyway it is an enchanting little poem by a pre-World War I phenomenon:

Perhaps I find this poem moving because the opening pages of my first novel contain moth references, suggesting I have moth inclinations. Or, more likely, it is because the question the poem asks is such an interesting one.

Niger

I bought a copy of the Financial Times. As it is difficult to access it on-line, I am posting the articles I read in it that strike me as worth sharing.

This one touches on the extraordinary trivialisation of news reporting in Britain. The BBC is so tabloid it is breathtaking. As the writer of the article says:

"The Sahel, that luckless area stretching from Senegal to Eritrea, is nearer to Europe than America is. Maybe its slow impalement by the pincers of jihadism & secular banditry will turn out to be of no external consequence but it seems a subject deserving more than indifference."

Catty

I don't know how much of this interview in Saturday's Financial Times to believe, but I love the bit about the cat. It's probably an embroidery, intended to make us think, "Ooh Bellingcat belling a cat", but it's a good anecdote all the same, ripe for conversion to fiction or cinema:

Halcyon Days

My oldest daughter gave birth to her own daughter last June. Unexpectedly - and sadly - she did so as a single mother. As a result, we have spent most of the time since the baby's arrival together - with our other daughter joining us as often as possible as well. 

It has been wonderful. As a woman at a supermarket checkout said to my daughter a month or two after the baby's birth, "Children are the joy of the world." Disappointingly for her she had only two, as she went on to explain; ideally, she'd have had several, but her husband turned out to be more violent than she had reckoned on (whatever exactly that means).

Some people would label that conversation "oversharing", but for me it was an affirmation of all that I was feeling. This new life transformed our family circle, endowing each of us with new stores of happiness and love.

Why did I need a reminder of the marvel that the universe becomes when children arrive? Because I am a discontented soul, inclined to focus on how disturbing so much in the world is and too ready to worry, whenever I want to point out loveliness, that I am being sentimental, Pollyannish, or rather like Fotherington-Thomas, deemed total wet and weed at Molesworth's school St Custard's. 

Anyway, thanks to the arrival of our grand daughter, life in our family has become infinitely more full of all sorts of things I hesitate to mention, such as joy, love, laughter ... actually this is getting emetic. Let's just say, it's been great. 

Given the delight brought by a baby's arrival in my own family, I feel more than ever that having children is something good. However, I don't think this is the message many young people are getting. I met someone the other day who said she couldn't have children because of climate anxiety. Others decide they can't pursue the careers they have just begun to succeed in or to afford housing while also meeting the needs of offspring. These are understandable worries but they suggest that things in the world we have built for ourselves need improving, not that young people should have to give up one of the most extraordinary experiences a person can have.

Sadly though during my whole lifetime the politics of childbearing has been focussed on another battle. Instead of campaigning for changes in the way we support those raising children, shaping policies on the principle that having children is the most important thing human beings can do, if they get the chance, the big fight has been for the opportunity to pull part grown babies out of women's bodies.

What a colossal mistake the leaders of the women's liberation movement made when they chose abortion as the central tenet of their struggle. Although any challenge to the argument that abortion is a woman's right to choose is generally met with outrage, to me it has always seemed incoherent, for a range of reasons.

These include: 

(a) it is against women's interests to fight for the right to have something rather violent done to us in order to allow us to continue a path through life as uninterrupted as that of men, rather than advocating for deep changes to be made in society that will ensure women are not disadvantaged but supported when they become mothers; 

(b) the main liberation abortion provides is that of allowing men to avoid responsibility; 

(c)  'my body, my right to choose' is logically flawed as an argument because, except in a tiny proportion of instances, women have the right to choose not to indulge in an activity that makes them pregnant but once they have made the choice to participate in that activity and as a result got pregnant - as they knew might be possible - their bodies, precisely because of the choice they have already made, stop being the only ones at stake.

The catalyst for my suddenly pouring all this out in a post was an article in this weekend's Telegraph magazine. It tells the story of the sadness of infertility from the point of view of a man, which in itself is quite unusual. It explains how the writer and his wife, having lived the kind of life that young people are encouraged to live by all the various images and influences that surround them, arrived at their mid-thirties and were hit by "the desire to have a child". Perhaps in part because they were both already well into their thirties, things didn't go well when they set out on a quest to conceive. They ended up in "the absolute medical world of IVF". 

This couple were lucky. After all the horrible intrusions of the IVF process, they ended up with a child. Although I acknowledge it, I won't try to grapple here with the ethical quagmire of the fact that in the process they conceived 10 embryos but 9 were discarded because the doctors deemed them all "in some way doomed".  Instead, I'd like to quote from the article and invite readers to contrast the way in which a foetus conceived five days ago is regarded if you are an IVF patient compared to the way we are exhorted to see it by advocates of abortion:

"For five days this child, our child, now a blastocyst, lived in a petri dish in the laboratory. After five days, we went back to the clinic. On a screen they showed us an image: a collection of cells, smudged softly together like bubbles. These cells were then placed inside my wife's body. We left with a Xerox of the image of the cells. It felt very strange, to have this photograph of a person before they were a person, but also comforting, as if the fact that something can be photographed makes it definite and real."

I am reading The Secular Age  by Charles Taylor, which traces among other things a loss of enchantment in the western perception of the world after the Middle Ages Therefore, I was also intrigued by the way in which the author of the Telegraph article returned to the thought habits of the enchanted world when he was hoping to become a father:

"I have never wanted somthing more than I wanted this process (IVF) to work, this change to happen: to have something where before there was nothing. To want something so much was a trauma [this bit is so modern and to me annoying - the word trauma has become so overused.] Perhaps as a way of coping with the need I was feeling, I became very superstitious. I decided that I had to keep reading the same book I happened to be reading when we began the process so I read it every day, even though I had long exhausted it. Or I wore the same T-shirt to every medical appointment.

Of course now this all seems crazy. But maybe the truth is that however much we have a desire for change, in fact to change is very arduous and strange, so that it's not as irrational as it might seem, to need some kind of help in a process of transformation. It was as if the universe became a being that I needed to placate every day, the way I used to talk to unseen spirits and imaginary friends when I was a child."

At the centre of what I see as our current misunderstanding and undervaluing of human procreation may be our state of disenchantment, an attitude to life of banal practicality, something that most of us are schooled in from birth. We are immersed in a noisy world of distractions and novelty - screens and gadgets and all the other flashy stuff we are encouraged to waste our attention on. In this world, while we understand more and more about the mechanics of existence, the mystery at the heart of it  - simply put, "why?" - is rarely even acknowledged. 

Until, for those of us who experience it, childbirth breaks through the clamouring static, reminding us there is something beyond the day-to-day. Perhaps this is another reason we are not strongly encouraged toward having children - the fact that the birth of a baby gives us a glimpse of transcendence, of wonder, of the miraculous. Every single arrival is amazing, a dazzling, confounding event. What creates this inexhaustible supply of unique spirits? Where do they come from, these new individuals emerging daily into the world?

Literary Meals - Martin Chuzzlewit

I am reading Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens. I am disappointed to write that thus far I am finding it heavy going. I don't think it will replace Little Dorrit or Our Mutual Friend in my affections. All the same it has a passage that is rich with descriptions of food, which is never a bad thing in a novel, in my opinion:

"A famous Inn! the hall a very grove of dead game, and dangling joints of mutton; and in one corner an illustrious larder, with glass doors, developing cold fowls and noble joints, and tarts wherein the raspberry jam coyly withdrew itself, as such a precious creature should, behind a lattice work of pastry. And behold, on the first floor, at the court-end of the house, in a room with all the window-curtains drawn, a fire piled half-way up the chimney, plates warming before it, wax candles gleaming everywhere, and a table spread for three, with silver and glass enough for thirty ...

‘I have ordered everything for dinner, that we used to say we’d have, Tom,’ observed John Westlock.

‘No!’ said Tom Pinch. ‘Have you?’

‘Everything. Don’t laugh, if you can help it, before the waiters. I couldn’t when I was ordering it. It’s like a dream.’

John was wrong there, because nobody ever dreamed such soup as was put upon the table directly afterwards; or such fish; or such side-dishes; or such a top and bottom; or such a course of birds and sweets; or in short anything approaching the reality of that entertainment at ten-and-sixpence a head, exclusive of wines. As to them, the man who can dream such iced champagne, such claret, port, or sherry, had better go to bed and stop there.

But perhaps the finest feature of the banquet was, that nobody was half so much amazed by everything as John himself, who in his high delight was constantly bursting into fits of laughter, and then endeavouring to appear preternaturally solemn, lest the waiters should conceive he wasn’t used to it. Some of the things they brought him to carve, were such outrageous practical jokes, though, that it was impossible to stand it; and when Tom Pinch insisted, in spite of the deferential advice of an attendant, not only on breaking down the outer wall of a raised pie with a tablespoon, but on trying to eat it afterwards, John lost all dignity, and sat behind the gorgeous dish-cover at the head of the table, roaring to that extent that he was audible in the kitchen. Nor had he the least objection to laugh at himself, as he demonstrated when they had all three gathered round the fire and the dessert was on the table; at which period the head waiter inquired with respectful solicitude whether that port, being a light and tawny wine, was suited to his taste, or whether he would wish to try a fruity port with greater body. To this John gravely answered that he was well satisfied with what he had, which he esteemed, as one might say, a pretty tidy vintage; for which the waiter thanked him and withdrew. And then John told his friends, with a broad grin, that he supposed it was all right, but he didn’t know; and went off into a perfect shout.

They were very merry and full of enjoyment the whole time, but not the least pleasant part of the festival was when they all three sat about the fire, cracking nuts, drinking wine and talking cheerfully."

Play for Today Marathon

I have been meaning to say that, together with Steerforth, excellent writer of Age of Uncertainty blog, I have set out on a mission to watch every available Play for Today. We will write about each one we see and we have made this blog for the purpose. 

For those who don't know, Play for Today was a weekly programme on the BBC. As the name implies, it took the form of a play. It ran from 1970 to 1984 and I think Steerforth told me that there are 150 plays in the series. We may also include the Play for Today's predecessor, The Wednesday Play, if we are still keen at the end of the 150 plays ahead. 

Well actually, I suppose there are only 147 now, as we've already covered three. And of that three, I really enjoyed two. The other was not really very good, but, for me at least, almost worth watching as its star was a very young. Ray Davies. 

Words and Phrases - an Occasional Series

 In the London Review of Books, Jo Moran writes:

"Relatable [is] a word I have been trying to get students to stop writing in their essays for at least a decade. Again and again, they commend a text, character or theme for being relatable, meaning 'easy to relate to'. Relatable to what? I gruffly write in the margin. The word seems to demand that literature should always mirror our own lives, instead of illuminating the strangeness of other lives."

Related to Moran's observations (although not at all relatable) is this piece pointing out that while Leonard Bernstein had to defend himself from fierce criticism when, following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he allowed Schiller's Ode to Joy to be performed with the word "joy" replaced by the word "freedom", now in America the impulse to make stuffy old works by Beethoven, Schiller et al "relatable" is depressingly routine and any amount of fiddling with text is allowed to pass without an eyebrow raised.

Here Heather MacDonald, the author of the article in the link, articulates the case against relatability very well:

"In revising works to match contemporary sensibilities, we diminish, not expand, our human possibilities. No one would write Schiller’s Ode to Joy today. That is precisely why it should be performed intact. Its elevated rhetoric belongs to a lost aesthetic universe of romantic idealism, classical allusion, and exacting formal craft. It speaks to a now-alien way of being in the world that we can nevertheless dimly sense through close engagement with its language."

I pray we will emerge from the strange times we are living through and regain our senses - most particularly our understanding of and ability to appreciate (and possibly even create?) beauty.

Reading: The Lampitt Papers by AN Wilson

I am bereft at bedtime, having had the five-volume Lampitt Papers as my bedtime treat for some weeks.

The series of novels is told in the first person by a character who loses his parents to a bomb in world war two and goes to live with his father's brother, Uncle Roy, who is a vicar, but whose real religion is the family of his very dear friend Sargie Lampitt. 

The books conjure up an earlier England. They contain many perceptive insights about love, writing, infatuation, unquenchable low-level grief, the desire for success, the forms of English snobbery, Catholicism and the mystery of existence, among many other things. The volumes are packed with entertaining, vivid characters and reaching the end of the series I found it a wrench to have to leave them all. 

Instead of sharing every well-turned description and enlightening aperçu I found in the series of novels, which would make an idiotically long blogpost, I will limit myself to quoting just one passage - a conversation between Sargie Lampitt and his niece about a misconceived trip Sargie made to Venice with his brother; it makes me laugh a lot:

' "We had a jaunt to Venice. Not a very happy one. The place is bloody depressing - ever been there? And we stayed at an absolutely godforsaken hotel."

"You should have stayed at one of the grand ones like the Gritti." Anne spoke with the authority of one who had written undergraduate essays on Titian, Tintoretto, Ruskin.

"Gritti! That's the place. God Almighty! My room overlooked this dreary sludge of water..."

"The Grand Canal", said Anne 

"I hate looking at water from a bedroom" '

To sum up, if you want a roman fleuve evocative of middle-class English life and the literary world of London from the 1960s to the 1990s (with a murder mystery thrown in), you will enjoy the richly imagined world of The Lampitt Papers. My only caveat would be the pages devoted to the poetry of a character called Rice Robey, most of which I skipped.

Meals in Fiction - Incline Our Hearts by AN Wilson

I  have just finished reading a series of five novels by AN Wilson collectively called The Lampitt Chronicles. I will probably write a blog post about them under "Reading", but in the meantime I would like to include in the occasional series of posts on literary meals on this blog a meal in the very first volume of the series, Incline Our Hearts. The meal takes place in France in a house at the seaside called Les Mouettes where the protagonist stays as a youth, in order to improve his French. He describes the house thus:

"Les Mouettes had been a family home. A turreted, granite affair, it would have been hard to classify architecturally. Is there such a thing as Seaside Gothic Celtic Twilight Revival?"

The meal goes like this:

"This was a series of dishes done to such perfection that one was half aware, even while eating it, that the memory of the meal would remain for ever. Almost all experience is instantaneously forgettable. Most of what we do remember is only fixed in our minds by chance. For another person to place something in our consciousness deliberately, so that we never forget it, that is art. Thérèse as a cook [had it]. The meal began with a spinach soufflé which was like a thing of nature, a puffy light green crust sprouting from its bowl like a bush coming to leaf. And then there was raie au beurre noire, the freshest strands of succulent skate as white as snow amid the black butter and the little, dark green capers: once again, one felt that the food was for the first time in its natural habitat: a naked mermaid was suggested, sitting in seaweed. And then there were pieces of roast beef, pink and tender, served with pommes dauphinoises. And then there were haricots verts from the garden, served separately when we had all finished our meat. And then there was a fresh, very oily, green salad with which to eat the Camembert. And then, to crown it all, omelettes soufflées aux liqueurs, frothing, bubbling in their great buttery pans."

I could have done without the mermaid analogy, plus the italicised French, and I would have preferred Brie de Meaux to Camembert, but all the same.

Reading: Scott-King's Modern Europe, by Evelyn Waugh

I first realised that Evelyn Waugh had written a book called Scott-King's Modern Europe when I was reading a book about Waugh by Malcolm Bradbury. What Bradbury does not mention but I suspect, now that I have read Scott-King's Modern Europe, is that Rates of Exchange owes its inspiration at least in part to the 1947 book by Waugh.

You can find Scott-King's Europe on Internet Archive. It is only available on hourly loan but it can be read in one hour if you are not interrupted and in two hours even if you are. It is the story of a classics master who long ago made a translation of an obscure poet and is consequently invited on what would now be called a freebee to a country called Neutralia, which is holding a celebration of the poet.

Bradbury claims the book was written by Waugh after a visit to Spain. To me the country Scott-Rigby is taken to seemed stranger and more remote than Spain could ever feel to a visitor from England. In any case, Waugh is, as always in my view, unable to put a word out of place and full of perceptive melancholy humour and wisdom. No one is a hero, everyone is scrabbling to live in some sort of reasonable comfort, life is consistently absurd and strange. The business of travel - the waiting rooms and so forth - are horrible, people are mysterious, surprising and absurd, confused surrender is the only useful attitude in face of the onrushing tide of life's events.

I suspect someone could rig up a proposal for an academic thesis on books about innocents abroad, which could include Rates of Exchange, Scott-King's Modern Europe and the scariest I've yet found of the genre - Metropole (or in Hungarian Epepe) by Ferenc Karinthy. If one wanted to, it also wouldn't be impossible to argue that the story of Scott-King's Modern Europe has some similarity to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - in both, the main characters are swept from their daily lives to a strange world quite outside their experience and then returned to their normal existences, with no one in their original world being any the wiser. 

Incidentally, Evelyn Waugh wrote Scott-King's Modern Europe in the same place he wrote Brideshead Revisited, a house that Country Life claims is "one of the most beautiful houses in Gloucestershire". It was sold in an auction last year. It looks really lovely, but I wouldn't like to be in charge of cleaning it. The skirting boards alone would take half a lifetime, surely.

Reading: Not Zero,How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (and Won't Even Save the Planet) by Ross Clark

I read Ross Clark's satirical novel The Denial a while back. Set in a Net Zero Britain where those who are appointed "Climate Influencers" can jet about, while the rest of the population can't travel or keep warm or obtain meat unless they somehow manage to accumulate enough credits to be allowed a morsel, it seemed pure fantasy once but increasingly I find myself wondering if it is prophecy.

The book by Clark I am now reading is factual, but addressing the same subject - climate change and the policies of the UK government to tackle it. 

Clark explains that China produces 33 per cent of global emissions and its leader did not even turn up to Boris Johnson's Glasgow COP26 gathering, that the US, another huge contributor to pollution, did not sign the conference's final pledge and that, while 77 countries did sign, they only did so because the commitment to lowering emissions by a certain date was hedged by the clause "or as soon as possible thereafter". Despite this, the Tory government is hellbent on bringing into beinv rapid and extreme Net Zero measures.

"There are two wings to the Net Zero movement", Clark goes on to explain. "The first argues that the only route to salvation is for us all to reduce our living standards, to abandon consumerism, or even to do away with capitalism for good. This is the wing represented, at the extreme end, by Extinction Rebellion. 

The second argues that technology will save us, without us having to make great sacrifices; indeed, it often asserts that, far from costing us, the Net Zero target will end up enriching us, by unleashing a rush of wealth-creating innovation that otherwise would not have taken place. The market, somehow, will provide. This is, broadly, the position of Britain's Conservative government. 

Both these wings have lost touch with reality - the first because it overstates climate science and because it fails to grasp that people, the poor especially, are not going to accept being made poorer, going vegan or giving up the car commute for a morning cycle ride. These might be pleasant enough options for the well-off, but the poor are not going to be prepared to shiver or go hungry in the name of carbon emissions. 

And they really would shiver and go hungry. If you want to reach Net Zero over the next few years through the curtailment of lifestyles, you're not going to achieve it without returning society to a pre-industrial level of subsistence.

But the second school of thought is equally naive in expecting technology magically to allow us to achieve Net Zero emissions without any reduction in our living standards. The industrial revolution of the eighteenth century and all subsequent advances that have transformed human societies have been based on one thing above all others: a source of cheap, concentrated energy, whether that be coal, oil or nuclear. To expect the same level of wealth in an economy based on far less dense forms of energy, such as wind and solar, which appears to be the current expectation of the UK and other European governments, is not realistic. 

To expect to be  able to achieve Net Zero without a serious cost to the economy is no more than Panglossian optimism. It would require multiple forms of new technology that either have not yet been invented or have yet to be proven on a commercial scale - and it would require all this to be achieved in less than thirty years time. 

Whenever you make these points however they tend to be batted away with the generalised assertion, without any evidence to support it, that the costs of acting are much less than the costs of not acting, if indeed you are not  dismissed as a 'climate denier'."

Clark also mentions that it was Boris Johnson who presided over the Glasgow conference and who was exceptionally determined to impose Net Zero policies rapidly on the United Kingdom. Given that the Boris Johnson voters believed they were electing was the one who, only a few years earlier, claimed the fear of man-made climate change was without foundation, it is unsurprising Jonhson's party (now headed by Rishi Sunak, but still pursuing the same goals) was rejected at the latest local elections in Britain.

The volte-face the Conservative Party has executed on climate and a number of other issues is a betrayal and also means that its successful candidates at the last election were essentially guilty of false advertising. There was an old joke about the US Democrats and Republicans being indistinguishable. That is no longer the case in America but instead is true of Britain two main political parties. There is nothing at all that I can see that distinguishes the UK Labour Party from the Conservatives and, as someone called Pete North on Twitter observed this morning:

"The lesson the Tory campaign machine will learn from their losses this week, and all subsequent losses, is that they need to soften their rhetoric on immigration and step up Net Zero. It is a walking corpse of a party. It cannot be fixed."

Excuse His French

 While walking this morning I listened to an Unherd podcast devoted to Iain McGilchrist, whose book The Master and the Emissary I am making rather heavy weather of - if I'm honest I listened in the hope that I might be able to glean the essence of the argument after an hour and save myself the trouble of the actual reading; but, no.

Anyway, as I sometimes think I spend too many of my waking hours trying to unsubscribe from mailing lists, I was amused by a reference McGilchrist made to this story - which, be warned, contains bad language

An Amusing Bit of Minor Snark

I do the cooking in our house and, to make it more interesting, I like to read recipes and even try them out. One of my favourite places for finding new things to cook is the New York Times cooking section, which, surprisingly, given the bulk of NYT content these days, has not yet excluded all recipes that aren't vegan.

Leaving aside the desire for ideas for new things to cook, something that appeals to me about the NYT recipe section is the comments other readers leave beneath the paper's recipe suggestions. These usually involve advice on how to adjust recipes to make them, in each commenter's opinion, better. 

There must be other people who find this second-guessing amusing I realised, when, looking through the comments beneath this recipe:

I found this wonderful spoof of the typical helpful reader contributions:

The phrase "rave reviews all round" is typical of the genre.

Reading - The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li's first novel The Vagrants (published in 2010) is set in a provincial town in China called Muddy River. The action takes place during the period leading up to the rapidly crushed protests in Red Square in 1989. It follows the stories of a number of characters in the town, some of whom are actively engaged in politics, the majority of whom simply lead their lives within the framework of and despite the difficulties created by their government system.

Each character is expertly brought to life. Each story is sad. One of the achievements of the novel is to be undogmatic yet, simply through the telling of each character's story, to provide the reader with a vivid understanding of how grim it is to live under a totalitarian regime. 

Yiyun Li is one of the wisest writers at work today. This novel is gripping, poignant and fascinating. Her characters, especially Teacher Gu, Tong, Mrs Hua and Nini, will stay in my imagination, their stories and those of the others in the novel, both intriguing for themselves but also windows into a deprived and constantly dangerous way of life where famine has to be endured, along with various other lesser trials and in which every citizen's freedom is, to a greater or lesser extent curtailed.

Confidence Trick

I was watching a documentary about Ian Paisley the other evening (as you do.) Among those interviewed were several men who had fallen completely under Paisley's spell. It was hard, from this distance in time and not having lived in Northern Ireland, to understand what it was about Paisley that captivated people, producing in them a fervour that did not seem a usual part of their personality. 

But then one of the men gave me a clue: "He was so full of confidence", he said. 

I know that trick. Boris Johnson had it once, and it worked for him for ages.  More recently, having decided to go to a free talk at the MCC in Budapest, I was disappointed to discover that the same was true of Katherine Birbalsingh. 

Ms Birbalsingh has made a big name for herself as an educator. Her school has adopted the radical approach of being old-fashioned. She is considered to be - or at least touts herself as - a huge success. Her school supposedly helps many many students from less-well-off families achieve stunning exam results, thanks to a no-tolerance policy on everything except hard work.

I wanted all this to be true, but alarm bells started ringing the minute Ms Birbalsingh began to talk. Perhaps, having stepped on stage a full hour after she was scheduled to begin, her decision to continue with her pre-prepared opening joke didn't help - the joke was about how lucky it was that we, her listeners, were on time, as, had we been late, she would have had to give us all detentions. 

After a brief pause for laughter that did not come, Birbalsingh switched on a Power Point presentation. It might have been devised for five-year-olds. The graphic that stands out in my memory was of a shoal of red fish going in one direction and one yellow fish, (Birbalsingh), swimming against the tide. 

She seemed unaware that this sort of stuff was pitching the message rather low, chatting on blithely, sprinkling her observations with reminders that she is known as the strictest headmistress in Britain. 

Following a brief description of her career so far (a description that left out, I later discovered, quite a lot), Birbalsingh sketched out her educational ideas. They seemed to me somewhat crude. Be strict, tolerate no difficult behaviour and come down like a ton of bricks at the first sign of rule infringement. Think Rudy Giuliani and graffiti and apply that policy to young people - zero tolerance of anything unrobotic in a student's behaviour is apparently the secret to a successful school. The idea that a child might have an off day and play up because something in their life has gone horribly wrong and they are crying for help appears not to be entertained at this educational establishment. And the lack of respect expressed for most of the pupils' parents was striking to say the least. 

The central message of the talk it seemed to me was that Birbalsingh - uniquely among educators in Britain and possibly even the world - recognises that all other educators are too soft and that the students of today are in danger from low standards and woke ideas. There is some truth in the latter proposition, but one could have been excused for coming away from Birbalsingh's talk with the idea that the UK education system, apart from her school, is one huge leftist playpen, with her creation, Michaela School, just about the only successful state school left in Britain - and that there is only one prescription, the Birbalsingh approach, that will heal all educational problems. 

When Birbalsingh began explaining her management style, things got weird. Her first rule, she said, is to never write anything down (which might explain why her speech lacked depth and structure - it was just a riff off the top of her head, something that other highly confident soul, Boris Johnson, is also in the habit of). So much does Birbalsingh object to paperwork that she expressed somewhat disgruntled surprise at the fact that the Hungarian authorities had asked her to fill in some forms before visiting their country. She suggested, in possibly not the most diplomatic moment of her life, that this request to put pen to paper was probably due to the fact that Hungary used to be Communist. 

Mind you, Birbalsingh is not against all writing; apparently she is very keen on writing emails. In fact, she builds her team's sense of community by writing them all emails on a variety subjects throughout the course of every day.  For instance, she explained, just that morning she had seen a small piece of news about littering somewhere in England and had sent it immediately to all her staff, observing that she thought the item was proof that civilisation really is on the brink of collapse. One of her staff members had replied that at a school he had worked at earlier there had been dreadful problems with rubbish. Perhaps this is a worthwhile use of their time and hers. 

When Ms Birbalsingh had finished singing her own praises and offending her hosts, questions were permitted. One member of the audience asked about the drop-out rate at her school. "There is none", she asserted. Can this be true? Surely every school has some students who don't find it suits them - but no, she insisted that that doesn't happen at all at Michaela. 

"What about teachers", came another query, "do you find it easy to recruit teachers, given they have, as you say, all been brainwashed by the system in which they have trained?" Again, apparently no clouds at all on the horizon, apart from a shortage of art teachers. They, apparently are all, you know, like, woo woo. 

At this point, my companion, a teacher, showed me her telephone screen. She had searched vacancies for teachers at Michaela. Surprisingly, teachers were being sought in every subject area at Ms Birbalsingh's school. As it turns out, there are almost always numerous vacancies for teachers there, which is not at all a good sign.

Perhaps the Birbalsingh school is as astonishingly good as its headmistress asserts, perhaps she is as brilliant as she believes herself to be. However, I do remember the bouncy labrador phase of Boris Johnson and how hard it was to see beyond the dazzling ray of his immense self-regard. Another figure also kept straying into my thoughts, also a most impressive self-promoter, more colourfully dressed than Birbalsingh but equally convinced of her own rightness, equally persuasive. Camila Batmanghelidjh was, I think, that person's name.  

Australia's Betjeman

While many people know about Barry Humphries's creation, Dame Edna, his passion for Victorian architecture is less often mentioned. However, in Australia, Humphries, mirroring John Betjeman in England, used his fame to campaign for lovely old buildings under threat. Whereas Betjeman was defeated on the Euston Arch, Humphries was successful in saving Sydney's Queen Victoria Building. Sadly, Betjeman was the better poet. Not that that stopped Humphries. Here is his Ode to the QVB:

Ode to the Queen Victoria Building, Sydney (which was threatened by demolition in 1971)

Your domes dream of Constantinople.

Facade picturesque;

Stained glass that once glowed like an opal,

Sydney Romanesque.

They built you way back in the Boom Time,

The Opulent Era;

But now in the seventies' Doom Time

The Wrecker steals nearer.

The noose of Progress slowly throttles

The old and the brave;

New towers rise like giant jumbo bottles

Of cheap aftershave.

How we hate all that sandstone as golden

As obsolete guineas;

With nowhere to stable our Holden

Or tether our Minis.

A casino, car park or urinal

Would grace such a site,

The end could be painless and final,

The deed done by night.

Reactionary ratbags won't budge us

Nor sentiment sway;

But how will Posterity judge us

Ten years from today?

Nowhere Else to Go

 

Reading this article about Northern Ireland and Brexit the other day, something leapt out at me. It was the allegation that an EU official suggested someone should say this to the #DUP: 

"Listen you guys, you’ve got nowhere else to go anyway, so this is what’s going to happen." 

That phrase hit me hard. Now, with the added information provided by the release of WhatsApp messages between Matt Hancock, the UK's health minister during the pandemic, and other politicians and officials, it seems even more striking.

My first thought when reading what the EU official said was this: 

"That's not just what one EU official wants to tell the DUP; that's precisely what almost all politicians of almost all major parties want to tell their electorates these days." 

And therein, I guess, lies the appeal of the likes (if such a thing exists) of Donald Trump.

Words

Lionel Shriver identifies some words and phrases she dislikes here.

I don't disagree with her, but if you really pinned me down to choosing only one word that I would prefer never to see again, I would have to pick "ontological". Try this piece and tell me that you don't begin to dread "ontological" looming ahead for the three hundredth time, yet another Becher's Brook and you stuck in the Grand National of pompous pronouncement where "foreground" has somehow become a verb.  

A Poor Chisel

I read this passage in today's Telegraph and wondered if we have learned anything at all since 1914: 

"The current job of the Ukrainian infantry is basically to sit in trenches and get shelled. Those who survive the barrage must then engage in firefights with approaching infantry and tanks. The survivors of that encounter then wait for the next artillery barrage. And so on. 

Their Russian enemies have it even worse. Accounts from prisoners of war, pro-Russian military bloggers and public quarrels between Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group’s chief, and the army command paint a picture of apocalyptic casualty rates, suicidal human wave assaults, and piteous shortages of ammo and kit."

I wondered how to head this post and only came up with cliches about smashed innocence and a lost golden age. Rejecting these, I went searching for sayings by the famous on the subject of war. Several caught my attention:

"Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means." ~ Ronald Reagan

"Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please." ~ Niccolo Machiavelli. (Vladimir Putin must be beginning to recognise this truth, surely).

"We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war." ~ Mao Zedong (this one struck me as worthy of Orwell at his most satiric)

"Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding." ~ Albert Einstein

"We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace." ~ Jeane Kirkpatrick

In the end though, this is the one I liked the best:

"War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Consolation

 I went through a brief phase of being outraged when A.A.Gill announced he'd killed an ape to see what it would feel like. Then I realised that I had fallen into his trap and reacted precisely in the way he hoped. So I went back to enjoying his writing, which has a kind of mad acerbic courage and also makes me laugh.

Now he is dead, I am running out of new things by him. I was therefore glad this morning to discover a volume of bracing advice columns he wrote in response to real or imagined letters from readers.

This one I think could or should have been addressed to the author of Spare, although at the time Gill died he could not have known what a psychobabbling nitwit that person was going to become - and of course university has not been part of his "life journey":

Toys Abound

I was in a doctor's waiting room with a six-month-old relative recently. Minutes after arriving there, while waiting for the baby's mother's name to be called, it had dawned on us that we had forgotten to bring any of the baby's toys.

How would I amuse the baby without the usual gang, we wondered.  Without the dear little pink rabbit that had been ordered online and unexpectedly turned out on arrival to be no bigger than a hand. Without the ranks of Beanie babies preserved in a pristine state for 25 years by the baby's aunt. Without the strange furry creature with a long curling tail, a face like an Alison Utley hedgehog and tiny human hands that always make me think of the Queen's remark when Giles Brandreth pointed out to her that Rupert Bear has the head of a bear but the hands of a human: 

"I’m sorry you told me that. Some things are best left unknown, don’t you think?"

Oh well. We would have to manage. The baby's mother headed off to her consultation, and the baby and I looked around. There was a grey abstract painting with splashes of glued-on-gravel. There was a glass case containing herbal remedies marketed by the doctor. There was a flat screen television riveted to the wall and not turned on.

Not easy to get much excitement from that lot.

But there was the mask that I was supposed to be wearing but had taken off because it made my glasses mist over. The baby, with the delicate care of a newly learnt skill, closed thumb and index finger on one corner of the blue papery cloth of the mask itself. Then, with equal concentration, she clasped one of the mask's soft white loops between the thumb and index finger of her other hand.

She lifted the hand that held the loop. She stared in wonder. This wasn't like ribbon or cord or any thin stringy thing that she had encountered so far in life. It stretched. And, look, if you let it go, it bounced back into place. Let's try that again. And again. And again.

A quick glance at me - without words her huge eyes convey that this is amazing.

Back to testing the limits of stretch and spring.

And then a man entered. He went over to a small bowl I hadn't noticed that sat on a table underneath the television. He scooped up a handful of wrapped sweets and took a seat on the other side of the room.

The baby watched him closely as he moved about, and then she returned to her investigation  of soft elastic. Ping. Ping. Ping.

And then, such excitement - the man unwrapped a sweet, and the rattle of the foil wrapper caught the baby's attention. What was that amazing noise?

The baby stared in the man's direction, but the noise had already ended  Back once more to ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. 

Until another sweet paper rustle. The baby's head jerked up again. She looked over at what she thought must be its source. He was absolutely still now, his attention absorbed by his telephone. No further noise or movement from his direction. What on earth could it have been. 

And so it went on - a mask and some sweet papers provided twenty minutes of absorption. When the world is new, almost nothing is dull, it seems.

When the baby's mother came back and asked if there'd been any problem, I explained that it had all been fine as the baby had found some pingers.

At which the baby's mother raised an eyebrow. Pingers, I now know have a specific meaning. Pingers are most unsuitable for babies, no matter how desperate you are to entertain them. Just stick with simple things.

I Don't Quite Get It

Going through old photographs, I found this from the Times of April 2020. It seems there was a time, not long ago at all, when even professional journalists could not tell the difference between Hungary and Ukraine.

This only intensified my confusion about what we are doing in Ukraine. 

While it is clear Putin is a thug and a monster and Ukraine has been attacked without having done anything that could be interpreted as aggressive provocation, what I don't understand is why this conflict is being treated so differently to the conflicts in other countries where in recent decades equally unfair attacks have been made - and in some cases the aggressor has been Putin, just like now. 

Somehow, the whole of the West has been whipped up into wild outrage by this particular war, as opposed to all the many cruel unfair wars in the world that we usually turn a blind eye to - in fact, simultaneous with expressing our horror at what is happening in Ukraine, we are turning the blindest of blind eyes to poor old Armenia, under regular and unjustified attack from Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan, in fact, at least, according to Ursula von der Leyen, is a reliable and trustworthy partner, not like brutal Russia at all (except it is). 

So why here, why now, do we suddenly find our (selective) moral compass? And most especially, why here? I mean, when Boris Johnson wrote in his usual bombastic way, "What conceivable grounds can there be for delay" in providing more assistance and weaponry for the Ukrainians to fight back against Russia, was I the only one to think, "Er, mate, the fact that you are taking on a madman with a vast nuclear arsenal who, if driven too hard, might decide to use those weapons, because he is cruel, blood thirsty and completely mad and if we leave him nothing to lose who knows what will happen."

Am I a dreadful appeaser? Or is there something to be said for noting that Hitler did not have nuclear weapons and Putin does, and therefore the situation between Russia and Ukraine might deserve a slightly more delicate strategy than simply going in hard, hard, hard?

The Ukrainians are in the right, no doubt about it, but so many others are - and have been - in similar skirmishes. Why have we all suddenly found our morality for this war but no others? And, having found our compass, are we sure the best solution to what is a horrific problem is to goad the bear?

I sound pusillanimous. I am. But I am also suspicious, simply because our response to what is happening in Ukraine strikes me as very much the exception to the rule, and I would like to know why that is.

And somehow I don't feel tremendously encouraged by the news that there has just been a purge of very senior people in the Ukrainian government who were corrupt - not because the purge isn't good news but because the news only came yesterday, suggesting to me that we have all been going round thinking this is a fight between good and bad, when actually it's a fight between not that great and terrible, in terms of the leaders. 

Would the purge have happened, I wonder, if the Ukrainian leadership hadn't been forced into it by us, its new allies? Who are we dealing with really - not the civilians but those who run things in the Ukrainian government? If Ukraine wins and the immediate aftermath is not that we are all drenched in radioactive fallout, will the corrupt individuals purged yesterday come sliding back and resume their business? Are we being encouraged into a huge and endless war because of some other agenda, or is it just that Ukrainian civilians are more attractive to us than those in the Caucasus or Armenia? Is Putin really a threat to the entire free world or is he just an elderly thuggish Russian with stupid dreams that he cannot actually sustain or even fulfil? 

Icky Fingers

When I was five or six my brother and I were very interested in the weekly Top Ten countdown on the radio. I can still remember our bafflement and disgust as week after week for almost two months Frank Ifield yodelling a song called "I Remember You" remained stuck at No. 1. What could it mean? Who were the people who could bear to listen to this appalling noise?

My memory has it that we wanted Ferry Cross the Mersey to knock off Frank Ifield - but it turns out it came out years later. If it wasn't that, perhaps it was The House of the Rising Sun. But, no: that too came years afterwards. So it must have been the Beatles with Love Me Do that we were barracking for.  I didn't think I liked that song much, but it seems that long ago a three-foot two version of myself cared about it very, very much.

In connection with our Top Ten mania, on Saturday mornings my brother and I used to go with our friends from nextdoor, Charlie and David, to the Chelsea Record Shop, on the Kings Road, almost next to the Chelsea Town Hall. Charlie and David had more pocket money than us (and television, and free access to sweets, such astonishing riches), and they would buy singles. I did not have enough money for singles - at least not genuine ones. However, there was a product that I could afford - a record that came out every week with the top ten songs on it, but all sung by people who, despite their best efforts, did not sound quite like the real thing.

There is nothing in my life that has been a bigger waste of money than those imitation hit records. I succumbed to the temptation of buying them three times, before realising they were just completely no good. Actually, I think I realised they were no good right from the first time I bought one - but the next couple of times I was genuinely interested to try to work out what it was that made them inferior. They were so very nearly like the originals. No one sang off tune. They had the lyrics and the tempo perfect, their singers had similar voices to those of the singers they were imitating. But they mysteriously failed - entirely - every time.

I remembered those records when someone showed me some of the photographs of non-existent people that artificial intelligence is beginning to produce. Here are a couple of examples:

They look remarkably good, at first glance. But look a little more closer - just like those fake top ten records, there is something not quite right about these fake people. It's their hands. What on earth is going on with their hands?

I find it reassuring actually. As someone on Twitter said:

Someone replied with this account of robots pitted against US Marines that was also quite cheering.

On the other hand, (ho ho), if Dora Carrington's portrait of Lytton Strachey is accurate, perhaps AI photograph generators have simply had Strachey-related data fed into their programming:

Only time will tell: will robots gain the upper hand (ho ho ho ho) or are their barriers we cannot get over? I grew up in an age when we were led to believe that humans could solve everything, but it's been 50 years and there still seems no solution to the problem of storing energy for any length of time in batteries. Either robots and artificial intelligence, as human-made phenomena, will reach certain limits and go no further, or they will go beyond those limits, not thanks to human efforts but surpassing them. I pray that the first option will prevail,  that robots and AI will reach the limits that we are capable of and go no further and that human life will meander on in its messy, muddled, mostly five-fingered way.

Ps: coincidentally (or because AI is already infinitely better than I'd imagined) straight after writing this, two articles on the subject of AI turned up in the ever flowing stream that is Twitter. Here is one. And here is the other. 

The Slow Lane

 On the subject of supermarket automation, this is cheering, if true:

Luddites Unite

 "Them robots innit, coming over here taking our jobs", I think now, whenever I go into a supermarket and see the self-checkouts they are putting in everywhere - although when I very first saw them, when living in London, I thought their cry of "Unexpected item in the bagging area" might one day be appropriated for the title of a chick lit novel about a girl who gets pregnant by mistake. 

So far I think nobody else has thought that and acted upon it. Or, more likely, many others have, but they have recognised that it is a very stupid idea. 

In Hungary, I don't think the supermarket robots speak anyway, those that are here, that is - thus far, Hungarian self-checkout machines are relatively few and far between, I'm glad to say. 

As far as I know, they exist mainly in one of the two chains of supermarkets with yellow and blue signs - Aldi or Lidl, (I've chosen not to waste my limited mental capacity distinguishing between the two). Incidentally, in whichever of those two supermarkets it is where they haven't invested heavily in robots, all "store announcements" are made first in Hungarian and then again in the pre-recorded voice of an Australian woman, which I find appealing. Any other Australians in Hungary may be interested, if they are feeling mildly homesick.

In short, I recognise the convenience of self-checkouts (although an alternative would be employing far more people so that all checkout desks are filled) and therefore I do use them, but I rather wish I wasn't given the opportunity to make this anti-social choice. Taking away jobs is bad enough, but taking away the minor interchanges of daily life is worse. 

A way to defeat the new wave of supermarket robots did occur to me yesterday when I saw one elderly woman use a self-checkout so farcically incompetently that she needed a member of the shop's staff to scan every single one of her bits of shopping. Watching her, I realised that, if all customers had the courage and intent, we could together perform equal incompetence, so that more and more staff members would be needed to help us. Eventually managers everywhere would be forced to recognise that it would actually be a much better idea to employ people. 

I won't bet on that though, because as this small item shows, the business of replacing humans with non-humans has been with us for a very long time.