Intelligent Life and the Essay

It has always depressed me that so few British magazines are willing to devote adequate space to thought-provoking essays. Have we only the staying power for the page length articles of the New Statesman or The Spectator? There’s a place for persuasive, succinct journalism – it would be tiresome to see every debate from every side – but isn’t that why our newspapers have Comment pages?

I must have scoffed when I first saw a copy of Intelligent Life, a self-styled ‘lifestyle and culture’ magazine. It's not only the preposterous, presumptuous name, but the word ‘lifestyle’ conjures unfortunate comparisons with Monocle and the Financial Times’ glossily crass supplement, How to Spend It. Magazines are odd place to look for advice on how to live.

Anyway, I don't remember how I first came by a copy — most likely in a bout of departure lounge profligacy — but I’m glad I did. The latest edition includes an article by Bryan Appleyard on Andy Warhol. Did you know that the auction record for a Titian, an artist widely regarded as the greatest painter of them all, is $16.9m, whereas a Warhol print will routinely sell for five times that? When you next see a Warhol, any Warhol, ask yourself if it’s worth so much more than this. 

Recommended Reading: The Riots

Anthony Daniels takes David Cameron's 'sick' Britain theme a little further, claiming in the NY Daily News that 'young British people are among the most unpleasant and potentially violent young people in the world' and in The Australian that Britain's 'young population is ugly, aggressive, vicious, badly educated, uncouth and criminally inclined'. 


In an interesting post at the LRB blog James Meek writes about how, when it comes to riots, London differs from Paris and although we live side by side in reality we're miles apart. 

From new grudge break to ancient mutiny

There is something terrible about wanton violence, destruction and ransacking. Most troubling, for the observer, is the ecstasy and alacrity with which it is carried out, that it seems to happen for no reason other than a desire for mayhem and havoc. When the Vandal king Genseric sacked Rome in 455 it was as much about loot as the destruction of Rome as an idea an emblematic act in itself.

After the disturbances of Monday night it would be useful to draw a distinction between the feckless thugs intent on violence and those involved only in the looting. Some will have been involved in both, of course, but others (a majority?) simply sought to capitalise on a moment of mass lawlessness. It is safe to assume that a fair number of the looters broke no other laws that evening. They were not involved in arson, nor did they assault the police. But why were they so eager to join their thuggish peers in looting their own neighbourhoods?

Here are some facts about the looters. They had homes to go, clothes on their backs, and were well (in some cases, abundantly) fed. They have all had the chance to be educated and were raised in a society where, until Monday at least, the closest we came to ransacking shops was the stampede that customarily accompanies the opening of a new outlet of Primark.

We comfort ourselves that we are not fundamentally brutal and egoistic the moment enforced law is suspended. Yet the looters in Clapham, freed of their everyday constraints, were committing crimes that only a fear of the law normally prevents. So Monday's looting remains unexplained, and we are left looking for answers. I doubt if we will find any. 

Our society relies on two types of law. There is the obvious deterent of police on the street, the courts and the prisons. But there is also what Primo Levi, in If This is a Man, called ‘the moral sense which constitutes a self-imposed law’. In an ideal society the former would render the latter redundant. But is it unreasonable to expect, in a semi-civilized society like ours, that it should at least hold sway? I hope the law catches up with the looters and they're forced to confront their misdeeds. It’s too convenient to write it off as herd behavior. We witnessed an anarchic, primal lust for material goods. In a you-are-what-you-have culture, where he who dies with the most toys wins, where the things you possess are thought not only to represent you and display your financial worth but be integral to your identity, should we really be shocked when people seek to obtain illegally things they feel so far from being able to afford?

Whatever the reasons, such a swift and wholesale disintegration of order is deeply concerning. It seems obvious now that London’s simmering gang culture would spill onto the open street; there was going to be a moment when these hardened thugs could no longer satisfy their nihilistic bloodlust by fighting each other, and when you're on tele everyone knows how tough you are. That moment arrived on Monday night. The Met and the rest of us could but watch on in stunned disbelief. It is only our intrinsic sense of right and wrong that prevents us running with the mob. If we have lost Levi's 'self-imposed law' it must be the job of the courts to administer justice until we've found a way of reclaiming it. 

God's Creation blog

Not enough action. Needs more conflict. Maybe put in a whole bunch more people, limit the resources, and see if we can get some fights going. Give them different skin colors so they can tell each other apart.

***SPOILER***

One of them is going to eat something off that tree You told them not to touch.

Read it all here. 

To go on living

I used to be a member of a gym. After a couple of months I couldn’t remember why I’d joined, so I quit. Those hours I spent on the treadmill are lost forever. Unlike team sports, going to the gym has no social dimension. But health bores are everywhere, and their struggle to be healthy has itself assumed unhealthy dimensions. Why are people so obsessed with exercise and healthy living? Mark Edmundson thinks that ‘health and well-being are now simply ends in themselves. We want to go on living in order to go on living, and not for much more.’

Trent Bridge crowd a disgrace

Praise aplenty this morning for the Indian captain MS Dhoni after his decision to allow Bell to be reinstated after tea. But instead of lauding Dhoni we should be lamenting the despicable behaviour of the Trent Bridge crowd, the petulance of Ian Bell, and the questionable conduct of England captain Andrew Strauss.

Unbelievably, when interviewed after the game, Bell seemed to express relief, not that Dhoni had magnanimously allowed him back to the crease but that the Indian captain had come to his senses, claiming "the right decision was made for the spirit of the game". Even allowing for his humiliation, which must have been very great indeed after such an elementary mistake, it was an astonishingly crass thing to say.

The fault for the entire debacle lay with Bell. The ‘spirit of the game’ was only broken if Kumar (the fielder on the boundary) deliberately set out to deceive the batsman by acting as though the ball had crossed the rope. Such a ploy seems inconceivable. Every Indian fielder, Eoin Morgan and both umpires appeared to be aware the ball was still in play. Tea was not called. The fault belongs entirely to Bell. Since when is it part of any sport - ‘spirit of the game’ or not - to automatically enact a reprieve for idiotic mistakes? There is no suggestion the Indian team were involved in a deceit or that they played any part in leading Bell to believe the ball was dead.

The dignified manner in which the Indian players came onto the field after tea amid deafening boos, the faces of the crowd contorted and ugly, made one wonder how England’s players might have reacted in similar circumstances. Would Pietersen have provocatively cupped his ear to the crowd like a football? Either way this much-vaunted ‘spirit of the game’, which appears to me no more than simply being sporting, should be practised by the players and the crowd; the former failed, the latter failed demonstrably. The sheer hypocrisy of a vitriolic crowd booing a team for supposedly having breached an unwritten code of conduct cannot have been lost on the TV audience.

What about Andrew Strauss? Aware of the hostility of the crowd, the Indian team, and Dhoni in particular, would have been feeling vulnerable during tea. We’re full of praise for Dhoni this morning, but the lateness of his decision suggests he was prompted to reach it only after a visit to the Indian dressing room by the England captain. India are a professional team and Dhoni is an experienced captain, why couldn’t we let them reach their own decision? There is something sickeningly condescending about an England captain lecturing the tourists on what is, and what is not, permissible under this gentleman’s code.

As Mike Atherton points out in The Times this morning, the last time the burden of such a tough call fell on the shoulders of an England captain he failed. Guardians of the ‘spirit of the game’? Only when it suits us.

After Dhoni’s act of enforced charity yesterday, England cannot win this Test with their heads held high. 

What I'm Reading 3

In his brilliant book of essays Working the Room, Geoff Dyer describes falling in love with this woman. But they’ve never met. In fact, he’s never seen or heard of her in any context other than this one photograph. How can that be?

“Well, whoever she is, she’s beautiful. Actually, I can’t really tell if that’s true, for the simple reason that I can’t see enough of her face. But she must be beautiful, for an equally simple reason: because I’m in love with her.”

Eloquently put, but is it possible to fall in love with a figure in a photograph? Well, possibly. We’ve all leafed through a book and found ourselves fleetingly besotted. It's important, too, that we differentiate between falling in love and being in love, the former a state of vertiginous possibility, the latter one of some certainty. 


And can’t it feel like we love someone before we ever lay eyes on them? The feeling that we’ve waited for such a person, and when we finally see them they are perfectly familiar. And yet we think of love as an intense attachment to somebody as they are at this very moment. But something of love is constituted by the idea of a person, not simply (or only) the physical being before us. If we can love something not yet there — the possibility of a future, the person we hope they become — then falling in love with someone you’ve only seen or heard isn’t quite as absurd as it sounds. 

Unfortunate Events

A man wandering nonchalantly through a car park with an assault rifle, an old lady prostrate on the pavement whilst a man tends to his bicycle, a parked van in flames, a woman squatting behind a car with her trousers down. Just some of the moments of menace, crisis and comedy unwittingly captured by Google Street View. Michael Wolf spent hundreds of hours finding and re-photographing these calamities for A Series of Unfortunate Events. 

The Toning Shoe Fad

I’ve always doubted if the ludicrous ‘toning’ shoe actually worked. Turns out this gimmick is more likely to be doing you harm than good. 

Draft cover 3

Here’s my cover for Alex Capus’s forthcoming novel A Matter of Time. Delicately made criticisms that lead to a change for the better will be rewarded with a free copy of the book. Make two worthy suggestions and I’ll send you two copies, and so on, until you have more than you know what to do with.

On Service

Before I get going I should make it clear that as a student I worked for a few days in a job that required me to serve people. During that brief stint, the foul nature of some of the customers was enough to ensure that I would never unthinkingly say an unkind word to a waiter or waitress. I try to be kind. I give the benefit of the doubt. I have even been known to smile. But this desire for harmony is being strained, and here’s why.

We’re crawling out of recession, times are hard. Quite understandably, restaurants, cafes and shops are trying to make the most of every customer. But there’s a disconcerting development afoot: waiters and waitresses, it seems, are being urged by their managers to push customers into spending more. If I have to endure many more exchanges like this, I cannot vow to keep my composure in check:

ME: A bowl of muesli, a black coffee and an almond croissant, please.

WAITRESS: Great. And would you like some fresh orange juice?

ME: Just these two, please [he places a packet of pasta and a jar of ragu sauce on the counter].

SERVER: And would you like some Parmesan today?

ME: I would like the spaghetti alle vongole, please?

WAITER: No starter for you today?

ME: Please could we have two glasses of tap water and the wine list?

WAITER: Of course. And maybe a glass of champagne to start?

On each of these occasions I have forced a ‘no thank you’ through gritted teeth. If I want something, I will ask for it.

Perhaps because it’s new to me, this aggressive selling is so much more infuriating than being constantly pestered (‘is everything ok with your meal’? To which answer should be ‘It was, and we’re having lunch’). It's more annoying, even, than the constant refilling of wine glasses. The waiter deliberately pouring all that remains of the bottle into one glass before asking if you’d like another. Worse than a maitre d’ who ums and ahs as he surveys the legions of empty tables, pretending it’ll be an effort to fit you in. Somehow they always find room.

Venting Spleen again

A friend, whose opinion I value highly, read this and urged me not to let my blog become a place of perpetual whining and sounding-off. One diatribe after another is no fun, she said. And besides, these rants of yours are fogeyish and don’t show you in a good light. And yet I've always thought the French dramatist Henry de Montherlant was on to something when he said: ‘happiness writes white’.

So I’m going to keep this piece of spleen venting brief. Not because I don’t have a lot to say on the issue, and certainly not because the garment in question does not deserve thousands of words of ridicule and scorn (it does), but because this thing is so ludicrous that one picture is all that’s required.

When did somebody first think that neither trousers nor shorts would suffice, and that these were the answer?

p.s. there’s another rant to come this afternoon, after which I’ll do my best to be positive.

How to Begin 2

One other glaring omission (and one missed opportunity) from yesterday’s list of best opening lines. Some openings are so synonymous with the book that eventually the line comes to stand for the book itself. That’s certainly the case with Camus’s existentialist classic The Stranger.** You would do well to find a more detached and chilling line than Meursault's ‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure’

And they have been stingy with their quotation from the King James Bible, quoting only the first sentence and omitting the poetically brilliant second. The first sentence is iconic; the second should stir even the most secular heart:

‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’

**I’ve always thought George W. Bush unfairly maligned. But when he named The Stranger — a book about a man who, with scant provocation, kills an Arab and feels no remorse — as his summer read in 2006 I began to wonder.

How to Begin...

These are apparently the 100 best opening lines in literature. Good to see Bellow's Herzog, but scandalously no mention of his epic bildungsroman The Adventures of Augie March, which boasts, to my mind, the greatest opening salvo of them all:

I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

The master at work: a manuscript page from The Adventures of Augie March

The Price of a Peach

We live in an Age of Price Comparison, so I was unsurprised a reader should be in touch about yesterday’s post, Daylesford: It's Love.

The soup and sandwich cost roughly £6. Give or take a few pence, that’s on par with the competition.

The price conscious customer would do well to avoid the fruit. This Spanish peach, weighing a paltry 138 grams, costs a staggering £1.32. I buy peaches very infrequently so have no idea if that’s untypical. But four 33 pence bites later it doesn’t feel like value.

I know it was bought in Belgravia. I understand it’s organic. But £1.32? For a peach? Think about that.

The Daylesford Organic Spanish peach, yours for £1.32

Incidentally, when TS Eliot wrote ‘Do I dare to eat a peach’ he was thought to be alluding to Prufrock’s feelings of sexual inadequacy, not the cost of a piece of organic fruit.

Prospects for 2012

The head coach of UK athletics, the flamboyantly named Charles van Commenee, believes we’re in danger of falling short of our medals target at the 2012 Olympics. A warning all the more humiliating when you consider we’re hoping for only one gold in track and field.

According to this study by UC3M, governments can expect to be rewarded with a gold medal for every £35 million they invest. But this paper from Dartmouth says it’s not all about direct investment; they say GDP per capita is the best indicator of who is most likely to triumph. On their model the UK over performed in both Sydney and Beijing. However if we keep improving at an average rate of 11 medals per games (my maths is suspect, but that’s my rough calculation of our improved performance from Atalanta '96 to Beijing '08), and add one more for home advantage (according to the same Dartmouth paper the host nation can expect 1.8% more medals) then we’re looking at an impressive haul of 59 medals.

It’s a shame the overwhelming (though unexplained) home advantage so prevalent in team sports, doesn’t translate to individual events.

Bradley Wiggins (above), winner of two gold medals in Beijing, has declared the Tour de France his priority over the Olympics next year, to the dismay of British Cycling.

Drugs, the Gateway Myth & Winehouse

The autopsy is not yet complete and it would be reckless to predict its outcome. Even if Amy Winehouse’s death was not caused by an overdose the drug debate, that beast that never lies idle for long, has once again been roused. Here we go again.

The plethora of statistics on drug abuse mislead as readily as they inform. Not unusually, I rely on anecdotal evidence (guilty, no doubt, of this) and I have enough friends who decided to steer clear of drugs altogether to know that drug addicts are far from passive victims of their own genes.

As I observed the drug taking habits of my peers, it became clear that those determined to indulge would not be easily deterred. Of those who set out brimming with a righteous determination to avoid drugs, many later succumbed. Not under malign peer pressure, but because they could see with their own eyes that their friends were having fun and were still alive in the morning. This crucial point is often omitted in the muddy waters of the drugs debate. On the whole, people take drugs for the same reason they drink, not through misguided Reactance, nor because they want to dice with death or break the law, but because drugs can be enjoyable. People also take drugs when they’re manically depressed or attempting suicide, but we’re warping the debate if we let ourselves believe that’s true in anything close to the majority of cases.

Those determined to make the penalties of using cannabis more severe cite its role as the ‘gateway’ drug. It's a redundant argument. Whilst it’s true I know no one who graduated directly from Stella Artois to crack cocaine, the idea that cannabis is the first station on a line that includes cocaine, ecstasy and heroine and terminates at early death simply isn’t borne out by the facts.

Yes, the majority of habitual drug takers began by smoking cannabis, but a minute proportion go on to become full blow addicts. Such is the stigma and clouded thinking around drugs that those who would usually be proponents of free will, who place such value on individual choice and responsibility in other aspects of life, are curiously willing to abandon the principle when it comes to drugs. There are countless places along the way to withdraw, to say no more, to resist something harder. When it comes to drug use I suspect those who campaign for a so-called ‘zero-tolerance’ approach are guilty of a focusing effect. It is death that makes the headlines. Besides, it appears to me that stricter controls on cannabis push the young into the arms of criminal dealers who have a vested interest in seeing them hooked on something genuinely lethal.

Daylesford: It’s Love

Anyone who works in an office will be familiar with the euphoria as lunchtime nears. The mood lightens and the morning’s misgivings give way to more peaceable and contented thoughts. But the joy is tinged with anguish about what to eat, and where. As the clock strikes one, the grim prospect of the queue at Pret a Manger beckons.

For months my colleague Eliza has urged me to try the soup at Daylesford Organic. Reluctant to abandon my long-standing and happy relationship with Waitrose’s Caesar salad, a fixation that lasted six months, I kept finding excuses. That was until last Tuesday, when I threw caution to the wind.

Reader, I’m addicted. For five straight days lunch has consisted of cool pea and mint soup with a salmon sandwich of pumpernickel bread. They’re embarrassingly generous with the salmon and the bread is all one could wish bread to be.

I know it’s early days, but the sterile stench and yelping staff of Pret are a distant memory.

The pea and mint soup is served with a wooden spoon

The salmon sandwich is made with pumpernickel bread

Flip-flops and the Feet of Men

Do the seemingly endless clouds of this wet summer have a silver lining? The cold has meant their is less skin on display. Not just any skin, but feet. And not just any feet, but the feet of my fellow men.

Lets start at the beginning. In the past, men’s feet were so seldom on display that their neglect never much mattered. Men who wore sandals were mocked. Rubber sandals were worn in campsite showers to prevent the spread of verrucas. Socks were removed at bath time and before bed.

Sadly, in recent years, the flip-flop has migrated from its natural (and rightful) home, the beach, and has for many become the summer shoe of choice. Yet however sartorially deplorable the flip-flop may be, and it is a harrowing indictment of our aesthetic sensibilities, it is not the flip-flop itself that is the cause of my ire. Taken alone, the flip-flop is an ugly but inoffensive thing.

The trouble is feet. Some men’s feet are unsightly. The terrible trio of hair, dead skin and untended toenail is a deeply unpleasant sight. Men who devote a considerable amount of time to shaving and moisturising and otherwise treating their face – the cosmetics industry like to call it ‘male grooming’ or 'manscaping'– believe their feet, for some unfathomable reason, to be out-of-bounds. If men’s feet must be exposed in public (and I am yet to hear a convincing argument why they should be granted such freedom) then lavish them with the attention devoted to other exposed parts.

Bad idea: worn with jeans the foot is given even greater prominence

Otherwise, keep them on the beach and away from restaurants, offices, lecture halls and other confined spaces where it’s a nuisance to have to conscientiously avert our eyes. The rise of exposed, ill-kept feet is symptomatic of a wider trend in society, a selfish streak that promotes your own comfort above others. As with talking loudly into a mobile phone on a bus or train, it demonstrates an obliviousness to the senses of those around you. One an assault on the ears, the other on the eyes, but both borne from the death of shame and the perverse, self-gratifying pleasure taken in doing what you want (perpetrators call it being 'authentic' or 'real' or 'true to yourself') at the expense of others.

I’ve heard it said that on hot summer days flip-flops are more comfortable than shoes. That might be so, and were we in Africa or some other stifling spot I would positively encourage flip-flop wearing, but to wear shoes on a British summer day is not that unbearable. It’s no great hardship. The continued resurgence of the docksider (or ‘deck shoe’) and this summers craze for espadrilles are to be welcomed. The espadrille has its flaws, but it conceals everything the flip-flop so callously exposes.

Amy Winehouse

The death of Amy Winehouse is tragic, as is the death of any 27-year-old*. But the disingenuous clamour to say something profound has lead to a lot of nonsense being spoken. On the news yesterday they were talking of a girl ‘petrified by her own talent’ and ‘haunted by her voice’, as though she had a divine gift that became a burden too heavy to bare. The truth is more tragic: her death was not inevitable or pre-ordained. Her self-destructive behaviour was well-documented by the tabloids that now head the mourning procession. In the aftermath of a death, it is easier to talk of a ‘tortured genius’ than of a drug addict, which seems to apportion blame. Perversely, the mourners are leaving bottles of alcohol outside her flat. A tribute The Times calls ‘ill-judged’. I would go further, and suggest it’s worrying that her young fans, in attempting to celebrate her life, are vaunting the very things that contributed to her downfall. It was her talent that mattered, and still does.

*Am I alone in finding the near-reverential tones in which ‘club 27’ is spoken of grotesque?

A Very Social Summer

The British summer is littered with sporting occasions that are really no such thing. Ascot, Wimbledon, Henley, Lords, they’re all an excuse for a day out.

Far from the distractions of home, the Warner stand at Lords is a wonderful place to read the Sunday papers. I spent a day at Royal Ascot admiring hats and losing money, with only a cursory glance at the Racing Post. A friend of mine makes a point each year of quizzing his mother as she sets off for the Royal Regatta. Who does she fancy in The Princess Grace Challenge Cup? How are the British men’s fours shaping up for the Olympics? Of course she hasn’t a clue, but why should she?

Wimbledon is the worst of all – the fetishistic fascination with strawberries and cream, the incessant harping-on about heritage, the line judges dressed as (bad) Bertie Wooster impersonators, the faux blitz-spirit-infused camaraderie when it starts to rain. Come Wimbledon fortnight, friends you never suspected of having the remotest interest in tennis willingly queue all night for a glimpse of Centre Court and are all too eager to pontificate on the sudden reemergence of del Potro in the ATP top twenty and what it really means. Barely two months later they’re not ke­­en for a wager on the Cincinnati Masters.

No harm is really done by these annual, fleeting associations with sport, except to sport itself. You don’t raise interest or participation by hosting an increasingly exclusive jamboree year after year, and these events undermine themselves by doing so. In the long run it’s the sport that suffers.

Look at Your Man

Ghana & Intolerance

This news from Ghana is the latest in a deeply worrying trend: the rise of politically sanctioned homophobia in Africa. We don't hesitate to criticise Islam for its many prejudices, but this hatred, it appears, has its origins in Christian belief. It is also worth noting that the suspected perpetrator of the atrocities in Norway yesterday (acts so repugnant and horrifying they almost defy description) is reported to be a Christian fundamentalist.

I'm not religious**, and so may never understand how commonly held beliefs can so easily warp or mutate, and in so doing lead to slaughter and state-approved prejuidice. Yesterdays events in Norway were beyond tragic. The situation in Ghana is deeply worrying. In Malawi, aid donors threatened withdrawal in order to procure a pardon for two men jailed for homosexuality. The idea of withdrawing aid because a country will not conform to our concepts of tolerance seems drastic (and is controversial) but our responsibility should be to combat such blatantly medieval and hatful dogma wherever we find it.

---------

**I was baptized, though never confirmed, into the most non-committal, wishy-washy church of them all, the Church of England. If, as an unbeliever, I am forced to express an opinion on religious belief, I turn to John Henry Newman's instructions for the unbelieveing gentleman:

'If he is an unbeliever, he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule religion or to act against it; he is too wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic....He respects piety and devotion; he even supports institutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to which he does not assent....and it contents him to decline its mysteries without assailing or denouncing them.'

It is worth reading the definition of a gentleman from Newman's The Idea of a University.

Phone Coverage

After the excellent Deborah Orr, an article by Sebastian Shakespeare yesterday to make the blood simmer. The phone hacking scandal, he says, is dominating the news agenda at the direct expense of the famine in Somalia. It's true that were there no hacking scandal the famine would be more widely (though perhaps no better) reported, but does that make us insular, as he suggests? There's a worthwhile debate to be had about the diminishing coverage of international news in the print media, but the truth is there is almost always a story that invloves more sorrow, hardship and death in another corner of the globe, and it's beyond hopeful (verging on the utopian, even) to imagine that these often tragic situations will be given perpetual prominance over the domestic. In a perfect world all eyes would be trained on Somalia and our resources dedicated to lifting the famine there, but such wishes ignore that even in a global age our concerns remain alarmingly local.

Besides, can newspapers really be blamed for obsessing over the downfall of their biggest rival? Only 6% of us receive the majority of our news from the papers. It is the BBC, whose reporting of the hacking scandal has been woeful, that has questions to answer.

News of the World

This seems to be a common sentiment when lamenting the closure of The News of the World:

It's an outrage that honest journalists have lost their jobs. No one involved in phone-hacking was any longer at The News of the World...some of these journalists had worked at the paper for twenty years.

A slight contradiction?

Draft Cover 2

A draft cover for Berlin Cantata, a novel set in Berlin shortly after the fall

of the Berlin Wall. Published March 2012.

At the Cinema, The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life is hard to pin down, at heart it is the story of a family in 1950s Texas. Jessica Chastain plays a stupefyingly beautiful, ethereal, angelic and fragile mother and Brad Pitt a stern, authoritarian father.

Our presumptions are challenged in the usual way: the father clearly loves his sons, is devoted to them, and the mother’s ethereal nature seems to indulge them, but on the whole we are left with an all too recognizable conflict, the father representing the harshness of nature and experience in a fallen world, the mother’s tenderness standing for love, grace and innocence. Being dismissive, we could say The Tree of Love is an elegant and beguiling (and somewhat overblown) rehash of the oldest conflict in the book, that of father vs mother and their competing natures. Being kind, it is a courageous and largely successful attempt to ask grand and unanswerable metaphysical questions about the nature of life on earth, family, childhood and a whole lot more; a film that seems to say we should be enthralled that anything exists, let alone that we exist, here and now. It is clear from the beginning that one of the sons (there are three) will die. Spliced throughout the film are vertiginously scenes in which Sean Penn — as the family’s eldest son grown old and now an architect in a very urban setting from which all nature seems to have been banished and, we assume, demolished — stares out of office windows and rides in glass lifts. At once melancholic and frenzied, he is carrying a burden, perhaps prolonged or delayed grief over the death of his brother. It is worth seeing the film for the relationship between the brothers alone, a precise and moving examination of sibling love, cruelty and loyalty.

But before any of this gets going we’re subjected to a half-hour sequence on the origins of life, through the big bang and the age of dinosaurs. It’s overwhelmingly powerful cinema, a beguiling and majestic nature film unleashed across the big screen. I might have enjoyed it more if I’d know it was coming and it was spoiled by people walking out – it was not just that they walked across the screen but that I couldn't help wondering why they were leaving. Ten or so must have walked out within the first hour, but there was applause at the end too**, though it’s fleeting nature suggested it might have been intended ironically.

**If reviewers are to be believed, films premièring at Cannes are often applauded as the credits roll. This only ever makes sense if an actor or the director are in the room to witness your appreciation. There is little that aggravates me more than a football supporter watching a match in a pub (or even at home, come to that) and applauding a substitute off the pitch. You’re showing your appreciation to someone who cannot possibly hear you. I’m all for spontaneous moments of celebration and outrage, but why act as though you’re at the game when you aren’t? I imagine it’s the fallacy that says only real fans go to the game, so to be a real fan you must behave as though you’re in the stadium. Or at least your behaviour should suggest that you’re usually at the game but couldn’t make it today because…you’re in the pub.