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.

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**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.

More Hacking

Staying with the base and primitive emotions that encourage us to detest the rich and powerful, Deborah Orr in The Guardian (in a good article on the deeper cultural malaise of which hacking was but a part) says that: ‘…for many years there has been widespread acquiescence to the idea that it's reasonable, even necessary, to punish imperfect humans for their success or wealth.’ She makes other prescient points, most importantly about the way we, as readers, legitimised the sickening behaviour of newspapers by allowing them to expose things which we had no business knowing.

Timothy Garton Ash is also good on what the long-term implications could (and should) be.

DSK & The Rape of Innocence

Some of the journalists who set about convicting Strauss-Khan in print in the hours and days after his arrest in New York included a cursory 'of course he's innocent until proven guilty'. Others did not even manage that. It's worth reading Theodore Dalrymple on the prejudices and double standards involved in the arrest and subsequent outcry.

'If it [the trial] does collapse, a lot of people will have to re-arrange their memories to demonstrate, both to themselves and to others, that they had been right about the whole business from the very beginning, and had always smelt a rat.....Hatred of the powerful, supposedly because of love of justice, is therefore not in itself a noble or a good emotion. In essence, it appeals to the same baseness, and calls for the same low, primitive and visceral reactions, as hatred of foreigners and immigrants.'

A Noble Mien

It's Mr Darcy's 'handsome features and noble mien' that make him the star attraction at the Lucas's ball in Pride and Prejudice. That, and the small matter of his 'having ten thousand a year'. Using the National Archives Website we can see why he was such a catch. In today's money that's an annual income of just under £350,000. Add to that whatever he would be making from CAP (I guess Pemberley had a few farms) and he'd be doing well.

Given the fuss over the private schooling of our politicians you'd think privilege was something new to politics. But Lord Salisbury, prime minister at the turn of the last century, had a fortune of £6 million. Today that would be almost £350 million. With that sort of fortune you're pretty incorruptible.