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by Mark Nicholson Last November a colleague called to ask if I would take two visitors for a tour round my ecological restoration project in Kenya. Two cheerful ladies turned up but I was totally unable to pinpoint the accent. “And where do you come from?” I asked. “We are Saints”, they replied. “Er, yes”, I said, “Well, they are few and far between in this part of the world, so welcome”. They were on their way back to St. Helena and before they left, they invited me to visit and give a lecture about my work. ‘Saints’ is how St. Helenians refer to themselves. And their ethnicity? My hostess, Vanessa Thomas-Williams just describes herself as “pure Saint” which means a healthy mixture of genotypes including Welsh, Portuguese, Indian, English, Chinese, Irish, Indian, Dutch, Filipino, French, and various parts of Africa. For centuries, the only way to the island was by sea. An airport was discussed during the Second World War and it was finally opened in 2016 at a cost of £285m. A regular flight from the UK was envisaged but it never happened.  The runway cannot take the large aircraft needed for the 8500 km trip and the island’s population of 4000 means it would always be uneconomical. There is now one flight a week from Johannesburg via Walvis Bay in Namibia, where the plane is re-fuelled in case of aborted landings, ensuring it has enough fuel to get back to the mainland 2500km away.  This regular flight is a life-saver for the  Saints. Literally, in case of medical emergencies. The runway lies on the eastern end of the island on a bare volcanic plain. The landscape is lunar. The landing is not for the fainthearted. The maiden flight of BA subsidiary Comair with a 737 was not a happy one and required three go-rounds. If the wind backs from the SE trades, a large rock outcrop, the King and Queen, blocks the airflow and causes alarming shear before touchdown. Straight after that, there can be strong crosswinds. A South African airline now flies an Embraer, which is much more manoeuvrable in wind shear and the flight crew always comprises a team of two experienced Captains.  Landing is always accompanied by a big round of applause. The flight two weeks before I arrived resulted in passengers staying in a Johannesburg hotel for a week waiting for the fog to clear. Just before I left, the plane aborted its landing on its first attempt. The head of Air Traffic Control, a Kenyan and his wife, thrilled to have another Kenyan on the island, asked me over for a traditional meal of ugali.  “How did you get the job?” I enquired. He told me he was seconded to Johannesburg for the World Cup in 2010, became Director of ATC in East London until he was driven out as a Kenyan by ‘black-on-black’ xenophobic discrimination. He accepted the St. Helena position and now practises on the most modern ATC simulator in the world. I asked him how he fills his week. “I am the captain of the Golf Club and play two rounds of golf daily except when the plane arrives. It has killed my job prospects of course: a normal ATC handles 20 aircraft movements an hour, so one plane a week may not impress. But I love it here so I will stay till I retire”. When you leave the barren eastern end, you drive through a lush and magical island with a ridge of cloud forest in the middle. Cloud forest in the centre of the island Being used to the steamy tropical islands of the Indian and Pacific oceans, I fell in love with the benign climate of St. Helena. It lies in the centre of a line of three islands, all administered as UK Overseas Territories. Much hotter Ascension Island, an air base for the RAF, USAF and NASA is 1300km to the north. Tristan da Cunha is an island group with stormy seas 2500 km to the south with 300 inhabitants. Over 6000 km to the southwest are the cold Falklands. Many Saints get much higher- paid jobs on Ascension or the Falklands but they always come back. The capital, Jamestown (above), where 90 percent of the population live, lies in a narrow valley between two barren volcanic cliffs. The most delightful part of driving round the island is that one waves to everybody, whether one knows them or not (and most of the time one does). Life is slow: work starts at 8ish, followed immediately by breakfast with one’s workmates, which lasts a good hour. When the Portuguese arrived in 1502, they planted fruit trees and brought goats, which destroyed most of the native vegetation. The Dutch followed in 1633 but it was the East India Company that laid claim to the island in 1659. It was a wise move: a tiny island barely 10 km across and now ‘owned’ by the UK, controls a marine exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of over 100,000 sq. km. of sea and what a beautifully clear, warm ocean it is. Beyond the volcanic peak of the island, the sea goes down to 6000m. On the island itself, the names are redolent of Treasure Island: Prosperous Bay, Half Tree Hollow, Alarm Forest, Two Gun Saddle. The main purpose of my visit was to see the restoration of the unusual biodiversity. There is only one endemic bird species on the island, the Wire Bird, a small plover. The ubiquitous and invasive bird species are the Indian Mynahs, which everyone hates as they gobble up every fig and other fruit they can find. Exquisite Tropic Birds flit all over the island. There are 45 species of endemic plants compared with 376 species of invasive or naturalized plants, which make up a staggering 99 percent of the vegetative biomass. The endemic trees have strange names such as She Cabbage (Lachanodes arborea), He Cabbage (Pladaroxylon leucodendron) - yet neither are cabbages - and the beautiful Bastard Gumwoods and Scrubwoods (Commidendrum rotundifolium & C. rugosum). The last St. Helena Olive on earth (Nesiota elliptica & not an olive) succumbed to disease in 2002. The St. Helena Ebony (Trochetiopsis melanoxylon and no, not an ebony) was recorded by Joseph Banks in 1771 and went extinct in the 1800s. The Dwarf Ebony (Trochetiopsis ebenus) was believed extinct at the same time. In 1980, my hostess’s botanical teacher George Benjamin discovered two Dwarf Ebony trees while climbing with ropes down forbidding sea cliffs. My hostess then collected seed and planted 20,000 plants all over the island for which she was recently awarded an M.B.E. St. Helena Ebony (extinct) Plant collecting near the cliffs Scrubwood on the coastal cliffs The island is known as the place where Napoleon was exiled until he died in 1821. Unlike Andrew Roberts[1] and most of the French nation, I do not adulate a man who was directly responsible for the deaths of millions of young lives. I met a French couple on the top of High Knoll Fort who were doing an oceanographic survey between the island and Cap Verde. I asked them why they revered Napoleon: “Because if it wasn’t for him, we would probably have been forced to become Englishmen, Mon Dieu!” His house, Longwood, is a modest building ill befitting a man who wished to be Emperor of the World. Conspiracy theorists still maintain that he died of arsenic poisoning from the wallpaper. I had dinner with a visiting Danish gastroenterologist in Jamestown who dismissed that theory. Far more likely is that he succumbed to stomach cancer and possibly too much drink. The colleague[2] of a good friend of mine in Cambridge has been begging the French for a tiny biopsy of muscle from the silver urn in Paris that contains Napoleon’s heart so he can look for familial gastric cancer genes.  Nevertheless, the French have continued to say ‘Non’ for a decade, while Napoleon, an autodidact, would almost certainly have approved. Tourists who drop in to visit St. Helena on cruise ships all go to Longwood and see the empty tomb from where Napoleon’s body was transferred in great state to Paris nineteen years later. The slab is unmarked because the British refused to allow the name Bonaparte to be engraved while the French insisted. If you are not a botanist, there is not a huge amount for the average tourist to see; there is one beach, which is dangerous to swim in owing to the strong undertow. Many now ask why so much fuss is still made of Napoleon while the skeletons of 325 unknown slaves were exhumed while building the airport road. Around 9000 of the 30,000 slaves who were transported from Africa via St. Helena died on the island and a memorial plaque has now been erected. Yes, I would be happy to emigrate to St. Helena as long as I had an internet connection. My family would probably not follow me. I have only two minor gripes. Flying there is very expensive: Nairobi to St. Helena (6611km) costs 0.35c/km. An air ticket from New York to Hawaii (7849km.) costs 0.7c/km. That is a bit thick since the northern hemisphere contributes 95 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. Secondly, a UK pound is valid in St. Helena but a St. Helena pound (the same value) is not accepted in the UK. If Napoleon had not been so self-absorbed, maybe he could have taken up arboriculture and saved some of the remarkable trees. Alternatively, he could have learned ‘Saint’, the local dialect. Perhaps he would have understood more of it than I did. They say a good hobby prolongs one’s life. The Saint dialect. A Saint tractor-driver I had tea with. I understood one word in twenty. [1] Recently ennobled by Boris Johnson and now the pretentiously named Lord Roberts of Belgravia [2] Carlos Caldas, Award Laureate 2021, European Society of Human genetics.

by Stoker Stoker’s desk overlooks what would be a typically English rural, sylvan view.  It would be, were it not for the electricity and telephone cables which bring life and energy and communication to this tiny remote hamlet.  If not for these wires any form of practicable life here would not exist. For income and heating and entertainment and cooking and washing, we need these drooping black lines and strange wooden poles marching down the lanes. If we had any doubts, the infrequent but occasional power outages remind us.  So we put up with minor local despoilation of rural beauty for the benefits they bring. But three years ago we had a very near miss.  There is a major turbine wind-farm off the Yorkshire coast and as there is little demand for electricity in the North Sea and a great deal of demand in south-east England, the product of the whirling windmills has to be brought from sea to shore.  At least, when the wind is blowing, but not, of course, blowing too much.  So it was proposed to bring a very high voltage power-line across East Anglia, strung on exceptionally large and strong steel pylons.  East Anglia is flat and suffers in season from strong winds from both east and west; so anything high has to be built so as not to blow over. There are plenty of fallen church towers around Suffolk and Norfolk to prove this point. But this is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and the locals (the most vocal of whom, it must be admitted, tend to live mostly in well-heated London homes, work there in high-rise offices, and drive here increasingly in electric cars) were thunderstruck by this proposal.  And even more so by a proposal to build, in a shallow valley just over the hill from here, a massive converter building, 20 metres high, to step down the high voltage.  In a landscape where a serious hill is anything over 30 metres, this was a real intrusion. The local council and County Council had been told by central Government that resistance would be futile.  So they did not resist.  But those non-local locals did. Who wants their weekend paradise looking out onto steel giants?  And if there is an argument for more second homes, weekend homes, and holiday cottages, this must be it.  It was soon announced that the cables would be laid underground and emerge near what passes for a major city in these parts.  And then, a second announcement, also that the converter building would be on an industrial estate well to the south of these leafy glades.  This followed a further furore when, after being assured that extensive tree-planting would shield the building from view, it was admitted, perhaps accidentally, that the building would emit a continuous low hum and be floodlit at night. In flat, remote countryside low hums can turn out to be rather high hums and travel serious distances (the neighbouring estate’s corn dryer keeps many awake with its “low hum”, but is usually only operational at harvest time.) So, victory all round. But not so much a victory, as a successful first skirmish.  The problem with wind power, and also solar farms, is that the power produced has to be taken to where it is useful.  This, oddly, has not really been drawn to the public’s attention, though it is more than a little obvious on driving past any old-fashioned, coal-fired power station, or indeed a nuclear one.  Solar farms tend to be on farmland which by definition, is in rural areas, and large tracts of it, such as makes for efficiencies of scale (in grid connections and transmission apparatus) is in deepish rural England.  For example: the Badminton estate, one of the largest and most valuable English estates, owned for many centuries by the Dukes of Beaufort, is proposing to create a solar farm covering some 2,000 acres in the eastern Cotswolds. As this is prime (no, not farming country, though it is) second-home country, indeed first-home country, for the rich, fashionable and famous, the uproar is glorious to see.  Led deliciously indeed by the present Duke’s ex-wife, a well-known “green” campaigner.  To the north of the proposed site is another green and fashionable neighbour, though what the King, from his retreat at Highbury, thinks, has not been shared.  The problem is perhaps not so much the solar panels, which can be to some extent be shielded by high hedges and woodland copses, as the cables to get the power away from its source of production. Pylons are quick and cheap to build. On the scale of wind and sun power which Britain is going to have to adopt to achieve Net Zero even on Mr Sunak’s revised timetable, the electricity entrepreneurs are going to fight a major battle to avoid being forced to put many cables underground.  Admittedly for this Cotswolds power source, the investors, or at least their professional advisors, may well live locally; so the anti-wind-farm protestors there may get some qualified support on the transmission front at least. It is more than slightly symptomatic of modern investment UK and of the headlong rush to Net Zero that putting cables underground is strongly resisted by the wind-farmers.  Burying cables (in pipes) greatly extends their life, shelters them from wind damage, and generally allows for easier access for replacement and repair. But the initial cost is much higher.  The recent experiences of Britain’s privatised water industry suggests that short-term profit will beat long-term returns anytime.  Admittedly the water companies, one of them in particular, have behaved appallingly badly in ripping short-term returns out of their business.  But the core problem is that consumers will not pay for cleaning up water and sewage management, and that will be an even greater issue with power transmission costs to get the initial returns investors expect.  The solution should be for some far-sighted financial whizzo to develop a financial product which has much longer payback profiles than the market currently wants.  It happens in mainland Europe, and more relevantly perhaps, was an accepted way of financing the British railway network in the 19th century. Very-long-dated bonds – up to 50 years – became a useful part of family investment portfolios.  That does mean investors have to be confident that inflation will be low over the very long term.  With this government’s economic management? With Labour’s spending plans?  With the competence of the current Governor of the Bank of England? In the 1950’s a number of high-profile personalities, ranging from John Betjeman to John Piper to the Duchess of Devonshire (OK, that’s not ranging very far, but they were an eclectic and well-connected group) fought a series of battles to try to protect the UK countryside and beauty. They were not always successful.  My own grandfather fought a long battle to stop the Central Electricity Generating Board running the main pylon line from Middlesborough to the south right in front of his remote farmhouse.  He won a limited victory – the line went behind his farm buildings. Three years later the CEGB were back, to run another line east to west so that he was at the very junction of the two steel pylon paths.  He gave up and moved to Scarborough. But many of those battles were won, and Britain is all the more beautiful for the tenacity of those battlers. The scale of power lines which we will need to move power to where it is needed from where it is generated is likely to make those battles seem like nothing.  If we are to have any parts of unspoiled British countryside left, bar maybe the Lake District and odd enclaves, we must find a solution to funding hidden transmission lines.  We have not got long to do it; and to be honest, the current level of financial entrepreneurship and political will makes any solution look very unlikely.  Enjoy unspoiled Britain whilst you can.

by Lynda Goetz Photo of transgender symbol: Unsplash Tidying my study is something of a mammoth job.  Apart from my failure to file stuff as it comes in, there is the added problem of my inability to throw out old magazines and my tendency to hang on to ancient theatre programmes, pamphlets from museums, birthday cards and other bits of useless memorabilia.  Then, of course, there is the fact that the reasons I kept those magazines in the first place were either that I had always intended to finish reading them at some future date, or that there was a particularly interesting article I wanted to refer to or show to someone. The end result is that instead of just picking them up and throwing them out I spend hours reading them! As the endless and relentless rain, to which we in Britain have been subjected for most of the last few months, has meant a delay in getting on with the usual Spring gardening tasks, I decided last week to tackle the study; a long overdue job, which should have been dealt with ages ago.  Of course I got side-tracked reading or re-reading some Covid-era issues of The Spectator and The Economist (not to mention three- year-old issues of  the RHS Garden magazine and The English Garden in an attempt to remind myself what a Spring garden not covered in mud, weeds and overgrown wet grass should actually look like). What struck me about several of these was just how little we have moved on from some of the worst aspects of social media-influenced fads, cultures and hysterias, in spite of a few supposed turning-points. In October 2021, Kathleen Stock resigned from her post as philosophy professor at Sussex University after three years of “bullying and harassment” for her views on sex and gender. She had had the temerity to make such ‘controversial’ statements as “there are only two sexes” or “it’s wrong to put male rapists in female prisons”. At the time it seemed to many of us shocking that remarks, which for the overwhelming majority of the population and for most of human history were perfectly straightforward and accepted, should have resulted in her ‘cancellation’. In December 2019, J.K. Rowling had made similar controversial statements about the transgender community. These comments were made calmly, rationally and with the careful consideration of someone who had made her living, not to say her fortune, with words. She too suffered a torrent of online and media abuse, as have people like feminist journalist Julie Bindel, academic researcher Maya Forstater, Labour Member of Parliament Rosie Duffield, and former Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore. Thankfully, she has neither apologised for nor recanted her opinions; a fact for which we should all be truly grateful. Common sense sometimes seems to be in short supply these days. Last week, following the implementation (on April Fools Day!) of the Scottish National Party’s Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, Rowling challenged the Scottish police to arrest her for ‘misgendering’ a number of high-profile trans women on X (formerly Twitter).  They declined to do so, although a number of SNP politicians and trans supporters spoke out against her. Lionel Shriver, author of the 2005 Orange Prize-winning novel, We Need to Talk about Kevin,  praised Rowling for her role in opposing the “consuming social mania for transgenderism” in an interview to promote her new book, actually called Mania. As Shriver pointed out, Rowling is “so important” because she has the money, power and position to stand her ground. For many others such a stance is impossible. It can result not only in being sacked, but failing ever to get a job again. The right to hold opinions appears to be nullified if those opinions do not accord with contemporary ethics and current received wisdom – even where that wisdom has almost no basis in evidence. Indeed, evidence in hate crimes is based on little other than the ‘perception’ of the victim or in the case of the new Scottish law, pretty much anyone who declares themselves “offended”. As for the whole trans debate, the recently-published review of gender identity services for children by Dr Hilary Cass makes it clear that this is a subject about which we know very little. On a practical and medical level we are meddling with young lives based on an ideology and insufficient real evidence of long-term outcomes. The percentage of people declaring themselves to be trans (i.e not identifying with the gender they were registered at birth) was stated in the 2021 census report to be approximately 0.5% . This figure was questioned last autumn because of the unexpectedly high number of people declaring themselves to be trans in areas where English was a second language.  However, an investigation by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) concluded that although measuring gender identity was “undoubtedly challenging” and that the small size of the trans population “creates challenges for data collection”, they were “confident” in the figures. Whether the percentage is in fact slightly higher, or slightly lower, it remains a tiny minority of the general population; yet the influence it has been able to hold over the rest of the us is staggering. Lionel Shriver’s book, Mania, was published this week. I have not read it, but a reviewer in The i called it  “an extended rant”. The novel portrays a parallel dystopian America in 2011. Shriver paints a picture of a society in which the "Mental Parity" movement is gaining ascension and no-one is allowed to be clever, and no-one can be called stupid.  All forms of moral superiority have been banned and university lecturers have to attend classes in “Cerebral Acceptance and Semantic Sensitivity”. Grading papers is a sackable offence. Ms Shriver herself has described the alt-reality depicted in Mania as “essentially one millimetre away from where we are now”.  Mia Levitkin in her review in The Financial Times concludes that in this, Shriver’s seventeenth novel, “sadly, she has too much fun pillorying stupidity to offer herself, or her readers” one of her self-proclaimed pleasures of writing books: the chance to “approach a subject with more complexity and with more appreciation for other viewpoints” than that provided by her opinion pieces written in The Spectator and elsewhere. The New York Times critic described the novel as “ham-fisted parody”. In spite of what appears to be universal dismissal by critics of Ms Shriver’s latest novel, it is interesting that she sets it in 2010-11, the time she regards as being “when things started really going to s---". The cult film Idiocracy, a social satire produced in 2005, which imagines a dystopian America five hundred years hence, has been suggested by many reviewers to have been several hundred years out in its timing, with a number commenting that in so many ways we are almost already there. Certainly, when considering things like hate-crime laws and transgender issues amongst many aspects of modern ideology, it is hard not to wonder how we got here so fast and where on earth it might lead. The Scottish Hate Crime Act resulted in the police force being inundated with over 7,000 complaints by the public, only 240 (≤ 4%) of which were deemed to be crimes under the legislation. All however had to be logged and checked, completely overwhelming the police and resulting in hours of overtime at taxpayers’ expense. Meanwhile assaults, burglaries, thefts and other crimes are neglected. You do not have to have read  George Orwell’s 1984 to know that this focus on subjective crimes heralds an authoritarian state, as well as an unbelievable waste of police resources. Although there is no single piece of legislation in England and Wales criminalising hate crime, the definition adopted by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service is: “Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on a person’s disability or perceived disability; race or perceived race; or religion or perceived religion; or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or transgender identity or perceived transgender identity.” You do not have to be a lawyer to understand that to have a criminal offence based on the ‘perception’ of the victim is straying into the realms of fantasy. To go further, as the legislation has in Scotland, and add a new offence of “threatening or abusive behaviour intended to stir up hatred” based on a list of characteristics which does not include sex but does include gender and sexual orientation, and then encourage the public to come forward anonymously to report crimes, must surely have been foreseen to have resulted in problems.  Apparently not, and in spite of criticisms from such eminent lawyers as Lord Hope of Craighead, SNP ministers are still defending the passing of this Orwellian piece of legislation. As for the Cass Review, this too shows modern society in a very unflattering light.  In what sort of dystopian world do adults “affirm” the social media-induced delusions of children who “may have mental health issues”? In what sort of world do they then encourage such children to take hormone-blockers and hormones, the long-term effects of which remain unknown, and then facilitate their surgical mutilation? The fact that the adults, including teachers as well as the doctors advocating this approach, seem to have acquired the ability to gainsay the views of loving parents is even more terrifying. In another sinister twist to this story it transpires that the medical records of those who went through these procedures were not released to Cass by the institutions acting for them as adults, on the grounds of data protection. As many politicians, journalists and commentators have pointed out, this information is vital to informing the debate as to whether for the vast majority of such children outcomes have been favourable or unfavourable. As the original whistle-blower at the Tavistock Clinic explained, most of the children presenting at the clinic had “a variety of other issues”. Has their treatment solved or alleviated these problems or rather exacerbated their disturbed state of mind? All we do know at present is that it can work for some, but that others profoundly regret the fact that the adults who had responsibility for them allowed them to go down a route from which there can be no return. Mania and Idiocracy may well both be works of fiction and unsubtle satire, but many feel that the world we currently inhabit is already coming uncomfortably close to dystopian parody. Perhaps I shouldn’t be throwing out those old magazines and newspapers after all. In a few years’ time all those ‘op-eds’, as the Americans call commentary articles, will be interesting as quaintly old-fashioned comments on a world which has disappeared completely. As for those old museum guides, they will pre-date the decolonisation movement and thus be of historical interest. On the other hand, perhaps I should be very careful – owning them at all could well have become a crime.

by Eric Boa The COVID-19 pandemic emphasised the importance of health in the community Nobody makes films about dentists. So said a friend commenting on the dramatic potential of dental care. Marathon Man, a film starring Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman from years past, does have an excruciating scene involving a tooth extraction, but it’s an exception. General Practitioners (GPs), the bedrock of human healthcare the world over, also largely fall short on the scope for dramatic possibilities. And yes, there are also exceptions, including the venerable Dr Finlay’s casebook TV series and of course The Citadel, a novel by A J Cronin that is credited with bringing about the foundation of the National Health Service in the UK. I’m sure there are other examples of GPs and family doctors at the throbbing heart of films, TV, books and so on; yet there’s a wider point to make about primary healthcare: it’s really rather dull. Sniffles, scratches, spots, aching joints, dicky tummies and generally feeling off-colour are the order of the day. Consultations are short and follow a set procedure. Air Ambulance helicopters are not about to land outside the GP practice. There will be no rush to deliver a replacement kidney to the front door, or indeed witness any of the other medical procedures or ethical dilemmas that make hospitals such, well, dramatic places. Primary healthcare in the poorer parts of the world has a similar low profile. Hospitals have a status and magnetic allure that ensures a high profile and enduring importance to the world at large. In the ideal scenario people go in really sick, often at death’s door, and emerge cured after wondrous interventions by specialist doctors and their heroic teams of nurses. All the medical attention in Gaza, that apocalyptic landscape full of wounded and desperately unwell people, is on the hospitals. The unheralded challenges faced by doctors trying to treat people are deeply disturbing, and yet the true misery and suffering of the masses huddled on the Egyptian border will ultimately derive from a primary healthcare system literally shot to pieces. I don’t want to dwell on a single conflict, one of many where poor sanitation, over-crowding and bodies weakened by malnutrition are susceptible to a barrage of diseases. All are proof that what really matters to the health of people everywhere at all times is having access to basic healthcare. I’m reminded of another example of the crucial importance of primary healthcare from visits to the serene war cemetery in Comilla, Bangladesh, beautifully maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Any thoughts of the misery caused by deaths in fighting and the sacrifices made by many on the battlefields were sadly undermined when I was told that many had died from cholera. A lack of primary healthcare was the reason they failed to return home. There are more recent timely reminders of how a lack of basic healthcare provision has failed us. The impact of an outbreak of Ebola in West Africa ten years ago was heightened by weak primary healthcare. The frontline defence against the spread of infectious disease is in the community. Early reporting of outbreaks and swift responses wouldn’t have stopped Ebola spreading but it would have made a huge difference. Fast forward to COVID-19 and the case for better and consistent funding for health clinics and community health workers is magnified beyond calculation. There are good reasons why primary healthcare systems are underfunded and neglected. The low-key nature of the work doesn’t immediately suggest huge and sustained improvements to human lives, even if the evidence to the contrary is over-whelming. It’s not a glamorous or indeed rewarding job for ambitious doctors, either financially or in job satisfaction. Vaccinating a child doesn’t have the same visceral impact as saving a damaged leg or preventing a death. The Gates Foundation is one of the world’s largest funders of human health projects. They have an admirable record in helping to find better ways to prevent malaria and other communicable diseases. Gates is also heavily involved in developing vaccines. Despite these admirable commitments, they pay much less attention to healthcare provision. A friend who works for the foundation explained this pithily: We don’t do slogging. Yes, setting up and maintaining networks of GPs, nurse practitioners, community health workers and the like is hugely complicated and demanding. Connecting primary healthcare to secondary and tertiary healthcare (hospitals) equally so. But you have to start somewhere, so let me briefly outline how this could be done. I’ll make it even more difficult and challenging by focusing on plant health. The story follows a similar trajectory to human healthcare, though with an important difference. Plant health is not an obviously critical part of our lives. Sure, we all depend on plants, and they are the reason why our planet exists and survives, but this is too vague a justification for consistent attention by policy wonks, governments and international donors. A good plant pandemic, to be mildly cynical, always helps, though even the advent of rapidly spreading pathogens causing death and destruction to major crops such as wheat* and coffee*, has done little to shift the focus of attention away from research to finding a cure to the drudge of providing timely and regular advice to the masses. I once had vague aspirations to being a senior researcher on the biology and behaviour of plant pathogens, developing new ways to characterize the fungi, viruses, bacteria and other microbes that attack plants. For maximum professional kudos I would work on a big disease of a big crop. Instead, I began my research studies on an obscure disease of a rather ordinary tree, here in the UK. The pattern was set and a decade on from completing my PhD I’d worked on diseases of bamboo in Bangladesh and cloves in Indonesia. Fascinating but prosaic research, and not the making of a leading scientist. My thoughts of being the plant equivalent of a medical consultant had gone. Not that I was ever that interested in the minutiae of microbes. Plant health clinic in Tajikistan I discovered primary healthcare by accident. It began with ad hoc plant clinics run in local markets in Bolivia, and a chance opportunity to build on this early experience in Uganda and Bangladesh. Along with two key colleagues, Jeff Bentley and Sol Danielsen, we explored how to run plant clinics in other countries, notably Nicaragua. The challenges of establishing plant health clinics are remarkably like those of human health clinics. So much so that we began to look at the medical literature for hints and suggestions on how to proceed. There was no doubt that plant health clinics were meeting an unmet demand from farmers. We didn’t have the resources, however, to establish permanent plant health clinics and so concentrated on creating a flexible model that would attract the attention and commitment of governments and donors. The roadblocks to progress were substantial, not least in engaging with a myriad of agricultural agencies and institutes. We attempted to answer key questions. What is a plant doctor and is this a full-time job? What are the costs of running clinics and who pays? How do we organise technical support? Each country we went to posed new challenges as well as opportunities. We learnt that NGOs** were a quick way to start plant clinics, but government involvement was essential for long-term success. Responsibilities for providing support to farmers were shared by a variety of national and local bodies who didn’t always collaborate effectively but had great individuals working for them. General agricultural advisors were better plant doctors than research scientists (despite their PhDs and Doctor title). On a practical level, plant clinics needed good publicity and a location easily accessible to farmers. We developed short courses for plant doctors and wrote lots of fact sheets for farmers. After 10 years of trying out plant clinics in 14 countries we were ready to go for a Gates grant. The Biggy: grand ideas, serious money. We had solid evidence of what worked and had an ambitious yet realistic plan to establish primary healthcare systems for plants in the global south. The prospects for getting a modest (at least by Gates’ standards) grant were good. We almost, almost succeeded. Our proposal was rejected. We were given elegant reasons why, but that earlier judgment on Gates, and indeed on other funders of primary healthcare still stands: We don’t do slogging. * For those interested in learning more, see plant pandemic reports on wheat rust and coffee wilt : www.researchgate.net/publication/365926332_Ug99_Stem_Rust_breaching_wheat's_defences www.researchgate.net/publication/367074712_Coffee_Wilt_Disease_The_forgotten_threat_to_coffee ** Non-governmental organisations – the developing world is full of them.

by Richard Pooley Knocking on doors in hail and freezing wind The blood was all over the back of my left hand. I was in the middle of delivering leaflets on behalf of the Liberal Democrats’ parliamentary candidate in the newly-formed constituency of Frome and East Somerset in south-west England. Pushing bits of paper through the slits in British front doors, misnamed ‘letterboxes’, is the occupational hazard of British postal workers. And of politicians and their helpers at election time. Why have a slot in your front door for your post to be delivered and then block it with thick brushes and a metal flap on a spring to stop the wind... and, er, the post, getting through? The Economist magazine spent the first paragraph of an article last month, entitled “Why on earth would anyone become a British MP?”,  on letterboxes: “few topics arouse stronger passions.” In my case I soaked up the blood with tissues and folded up each leaflet enough times for it to become a hard enough wad to break through the toughest of defences. Later, fellow activists gave me sympathy and advice aplenty in our WhatsApp group: “Use a spatula or wooden spoon”, “I always roll mine up”. Our kind constituency chairman ordered a hideously-coloured, plastic “Postie Mate” (see below) for each of us. I’ve yet to use mine. I continue with the thick wad method. Two weeks later, while I was canvassing in a village close to Bath, someone posted the story of a Green Party candidate in Bristol who had just had a fingertip bitten off by a dog while pushing a leaflet through the slot. She had staunched the flow of blood with her remaining leaflets and headed for the nearest hospital. On returning home the dog-owner found a blood-spattered leaflet, bearing a photo of the candidate, and a human finger tip (and a guilty-looking canine?), and rushed to the same hospital with both. Surgeons were unable to sew the tip back on but, apparently, the dog-owner promised the shortened-finger-owner his vote. I told both stories over dinner with friends shortly after arriving in our French village this month. Besides wondering what the hell I was doing knocking on strangers’ doors months before an election is likely to happen, there was incomprehension about British letterboxes. The French really do have boxes – metal ones fixed to an outside wall or on the road side of a front gate. In the whole village of 1300 souls, I have only seen one slot in a front door. I checked: no brushes, no spring-flap, no dog. I should break off here to explain to non-Brits (and maybe Brits too) what ‘LiberaI Democrat’ means in the UK. I would much prefer us to stick to our old name – Liberal. But since this label is capable of such wide interpretation (equating to ‘socialist’ in the USA and ‘unregulated capitalist’ in France), I have to accept the downbeat moniker Lib Dem. Most British commentators regard us as left-of-centre opportunists who will say whatever will win us votes. Or as one person, a Green Party voter, I canvassed in last year’s local election snorted: “You are irrelevant” (We went on to win nearly every seat on the local council). So, why have I been knocking on British doors since the start of February and what have I learned from those strangers I have met? Will Labour win the election? Might they regret doing so? Yes, to the last two questions. First though, where have I been knocking? Frome and East Somerset conjures up in British friends’ minds an image of a small market town surrounded by cattle-dotted farmlands, apple orchards and ye-olde villages. The perfect place, surely, for a Conservative Party MP to have and to hold for an assured, long-term political career. Except that the current MP for one half of the new constituency, the Frome bit, is a Liberal Democrat, and the other half, whilst currently in the constituency of the right-wing Tory and avid Brexiteer, Jacob Rees-Mogg, is full of people who are traditional Labour supporters. This latter part, encompassing small towns and villages such as Midsomer Norton, Radstock and Peasedown, was the old Somerset Coalfield. At its peak in 1901 there were 79 collieries producing over one million tons of coal a year. The last pit, near where my children went to primary school,  closed in 1973*. My house in Bath, by the Kennet and Avon Canal, was built in 1815 by a coal merchant next to the wharf he had already built to take the coal transported along the new Somerset Coal Canal. You might think that a way of life which finally disappeared over 50 years ago and had been in sharp decline for decades before would have no bearing on today’s politics. You would be wrong. These old colliery towns and villages are little different from the better known ones in south Wales and northern England, from which many of the mineworkers in Somerset migrated in the late 19th century. The people I have met there are often living from hand to mouth – unemployed, working in badly-paid jobs, or retired and eking out the basic State Pension (£8814 a year) by doing some informal, cash-in-hand child care. One woman I met complained about the cuts in bus routes (a very common complaint in rural England). What had once taken 45 minutes by one bus to get to her job in Bristol now took two hours and three buses at twice the cost. “Four hours travel for five hours work.  What can you or anybody else do about it?” I was able to give her some hope that her old bus route would be restored. One of the local Liberal Democrat councillors has been campaigning, with some success, to get the bus companies to reinstate routes. So, why canvass? Because we need to know who will vote for us, who definitely won’t, and most importantly, who might be persuaded to do so. The first will get reminders before and on election day to actually get out and vote; the second will not hear from us again; and the third will get targeted mail along the lines of “If you vote Green, you will split the progressive vote and let the Tories back in.” Our target is to listen to at least a thousand voters a month before the general election campaign starts in earnest. Please note: "listen." This time we are also educating voters: “Are you aware that your constituency boundary has changed?” Most have not known and are grateful to be told. This approach gives me the opportunity to avoid the crass “Can I ask how you usually vote?”  In that part of the constituency which currently has Jacob Rees-Mogg as their MP, I say: “This means that you can no longer vote for Rees-Mogg” and await their reaction. Within seconds I know which party they are not going to vote for. Further silence on my part will usually reveal who they are likely to support. Rees-Mogg is Marmite**. Quite a few, including many traditional Labour voters, like him because of his support for Brexit. Many more are delighted to be rid of him. I reckon I have had meaningful conversations on the doorstep with over a hundred people over the last two months. Most have been depressing. Voters are not just fed up with politicians and their perceived antics and failures. There is little overt anger or rudeness; few slammed doors or “Don’t waste your breath.” Instead there is resignation, shrugged shoulders, and “What’s the point? Whoever gets in can’t do anything.” One man, grinning broadly, said “Good on you mate for trying. But let’s face it, we’re all fucked.” Most people I have met have given up hope that any government can get us out of the economic and social mess we are in. Never before have I had so few people quiz me about my party’s or indeed any party’s policies. The party tribalism that was so evident only a decade or so ago is nothing like as strong now. People who have voted all their lives for the Conservatives are sick of the amorality and incompetence of their party’s recent and current leaders. In Somerset they could vote Lib Dem (never Labour) but are just as likely either not to vote or, if convinced by the media they usually absorb (The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, GB News), plump for the populist, Brexit, anti-immigration Reform Party. Life-long Labour supporters don’t see much policy difference between the two main parties and are only certain to vote Labour if they are persuaded that this will get the Tories out of power. “Anybody but the Tories” is the phrase I hear most of all, even beating the calumny: “You’re all the same.” Frome and East Somerset is now a marginal between us, the Tories and Labour. Three different, seat-by-seat national opinion polls have each predicted a different winner. Only the Liberal Democrats have made it a target seat. I think we’ll win it but only if we pour the resources – people and money - into it that we usually do at by-elections. Which is why I’m not only canvassing but fund-raising too. Nationally, every poll has predicted for months that Labour will win by a landslide, perhaps greater than the one achieved by Tony Blair’s “New” Labour Party in 1997. A lot depends how well the Reform Party do in splitting the right-wing vote. Also, on how big the turnout is (I forecast the lowest in decades), how badly the Scottish National Party perform (very badly), and how well we Liberal Democrats do in persuading Labour and Green supporters that we are the only party who will defeat the Tories in many southern constituencies (I'm not optimistic). But what will Labour inherit from the current Tory government? A stagnant economy, barely-functioning public services, and a sullen, despairing electorate who have no faith that any of the politicians they elect will lead them out of the mire. I see no evidence that any party has the answers to our deep-seated problems. No party is prepared to admit that the only policies that can solve them require radical reform to the structure of just about every institution in the country, most notably the civil service, and central and local government.  We have to abandon such shibboleths as a “world-beating” national health service “free at the point of delivery”. We should scrap a planning regime that regards ‘The Green Belt’ as untouchable and the views of NIMBies as undeniable. We should reject an education and adult training system which so completely fails to give people the skills and knowledge required to get well-paid jobs that we have to import hundreds of thousands of people from abroad to do them. All of this will be painful and costly. Who would vote for more pain and higher costs? I don’t envy Sir Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting et al their new jobs. I wish them well, even if, as a Lib Dem, I will be expected to snipe at them from the safety of “irrelevant” opposition. *The village, Kilmersdon, claims to be the origin of the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme. The school is at the top of a hill, next to a well. **A by-product of the brewing industry, spread thinly on toast, which Brits either love or hate. I’m a fan. So are my children. Even better, so are my grandsons, much to the disgust of my French son-in-law.

by Stoker The editorial command* is that we must cheer our readers up this month.  Crikey, as a much missed politician used to say: “Steady on, these are not cheerful times”.  But there are reasons to be cheerful; allow us to bring you one, easily accessible and a deep joy. We begin though with a little diversion; to Paris, Texas, in the august company of Wim Wenders. Some years ago I suffered repeated nights of bad dreams and eventually consulted a Jungian dream psychologist. Delving about in the dark pit of my mind, she asked me to write an essay about my five favourite films and to rank them in order of enjoyment.  I did: The Third Man, Get Carter; Once Upon A Time In The West; Paris, Texas; A Handful of Dust, but was utterly unable to give an order of preference.  She had never watched any of them (what a wonderfully sheltered life), but I lent her my DvD’s;. Two weeks later we discussed what she had learnt.  “You do realise” she kicked off, “they are all basically the same story?” They aren’t, but I understood what she meant.  They are all about individualistic men behaving badly, and even when they seem to be goodies they are just more subtle baddies.  Even now I cannot rank them, though Paris, Texas is always in the top three.  And in Texas we must begin. Wim Wenders directed that astonishing movie forty years ago.  He was in his late thirties, a gifted photographer, German but resident in the USA, already thrice married, and with ambitions to deliver searing insights in movie form.  He had so far failed to make much of a mark, but had a small and enthusiastic following.  He knew that from a financing perspective his film making career had only one more chance.  He had a story, in embryo anyway; and he knew who were to be his lead actors; all he needed was a location.  He set off south from California with a car and a camera to find one.  In the Badlands of Texas he found the perfect place.  After five weeks filming – five weeks – the movie was complete. Travis, a missing man, walked out of the Texas desert and into cinematographic history.  Accompanied by one of the most powerful film scores ever composed, by Ry Cooder. What is it about?  At one level it is a sort of modern western, with a solitary cowboy trying to put right a terrible wrong (cf The Searchers). At another it is a study of a man who just does not fit into society.  And it is a sort of road movie.  It has been posited as a Greek tragedy; a German Greek tragedy set in West Texas.  It is certainly a rather admiring, almost wistful, look at modern (mid-1980’s) America. Most of all, it is about an outsider trying to find a way of living. The ending is rather enigmatic (Wenders admitted later to filming several treatments) but most film buffs think it right. The absolute kingpin of the film is that fine actor Harry Dean Stanton, himself an enigmatic outsider. His co-star is Natassja Kinski, famously a protégée of Roman Polanski. She and Stanton were perfect for the film, and perhaps it could not have been made without them.  But it has to be said that all the casting is perfect.  It won many prizes, and is a true cult movie. Paris, Texas is one of those films that cause you to look at life in a rather different way; and to evaluate what you are doing and consider whether it might be better to… well, walk off into the desert for a while.  It rather had that effect on the movie industry for a while, though not for long; money and multiplexes overcame that.  Wenders found it difficult to follow up; one suspects that he found nothing else he wanted to say, at least for a while. Forty years later Wenders has become a very highly regarded figure in the film industry, mainly in Europe and particularly in Germany, perhaps little known to the general public but much admired by his peers.  Most of what he has done since Paris, Texas have been documentaries rather than fiction, generally not drawing big numbers at the box office.  He is keenly interested not just in film, but in art, still photography, travel, and modern architecture.  He greatly admires much about Japan, and has become moderately famous there.  As a result he has made documentary films about the Japanese way of life; in 2022, he was asked to make a documentary about five new, architect-designed public toilets in Shibuya, Tokyo. Japanese architects are becoming major stars in the architectural firmament; indeed Rikin Yamamoto, the veteran modernist Japanese architect, has just won this year’s Pritzker Architecture prize. Modern Japanese architecture focuses on buildings that respect local architectural heritage and encourage social integration.  So we may giggle at architect-designed public toilets, but in Japan these essential utilities are to be taken very seriously; to misquote William Morris a little, to be both beautiful and useful. They are not hidden away, but are little temples of convenience in easily visible and accessible spaces. Wenders went out to Shibuya, and loved what he saw.  He suggested that instead of a documentary, he featured the toilets in a fictionalised movie, Perfect Days, a singularly apt title as becomes apparent. His sponsors agreed, and Wenders was able to secure as lead a great Japanese actor, Koji Yakusho. He plays Hirayama, whose job and joy it is to clean the toilets.  Filming was complete in 17 days. To begin with, you may think this movie is a Japanese remake of Groundhog Day.  Hirayama, a 60-plus year old, wakes up in his simple flat in a poor district, puts on his uniform, gets a coffee from a vending machine, starts his van, selects a cassette tape with his chosen music, and goes off to work, the endless round of toil.  Or toilets.  In the evening he goes for a shower in a bathhouse, eats in the same modest restaurant, goes home, reads a book from his extensive paperback collection of serious literature, and sleeps. This structure repeats throughout the film.  His routine does not vary, though occasional events mildly disrupt it – his assistant wants to sell his tapes, the assistant’s girlfriend steals a tape and then returns it with a kiss, the assistant quits, Hirayama’s niece turns up for two days so Hirayama has to sleep on the kitchen floor, his rich sister arrives to retrieve the niece, he meets the dying ex-husband of the owner of his diner and they talk and play shadow games. But in this simple structure, through these minor events, we get to know Hirayama and we glimpse a former life which he left.  His family seem rich; his father was perhaps a bully; he is intelligent and well-educated.  His aesthetic tastes were formed in that former life and do not appear to have changed.  In his reading, his music (all western, mostly Lou Reed, another glimpse into what went before), his hard work, meticulous standards, settled routine, he has achieved a sort of nirvana.  He is alone, other than those he knows at work and in his daily habits.  He is gentle but not weak. More than anything he is happy.  Simple tastes and a simple lifestyle give him all he needs.  Wenders (and Takuma Takasaki, who co-wrote the film) do not suggest that his life is perfect, that all is happiness, but that it is good enough. One more thing.  Hirayama is alone. He is as alone as Travis was, walking out of the desert.  In a way Hirayama is Travis, in an intensely urban location, it is true.  What we are watching is a remake of Paris, Texas, and perhaps a bookend to it.  Travis was searching for redemption and happiness. Hirayama has achieved it. Which is a lesson to us all indeed, though perhaps a lesson most of us will ignore. Perhaps this beautiful, happy movie also gives an insight into the mind of Wim Wenders, of a journey that has embraced solitude (part of any creative life) but has harnessed it to come to cheerfulness.  And even to prizes. Perfect Days is out now, at a number of cinemas across the UK, and has won many nominations and prizes to date. *Thank you, sir. I have also seen this film. For me a mix of nostalgia (I lived in Tokyo in the early 1990s and visited three or four times a year for more than a decade afterwards) and joy. You want "mindfulness"? Go see this film. Ed.

By Michael Carberry What do Donald Trump’s runaway victories in the all the Republican Primary elections to date and the slaughter of over thirty thousand Israelis and Palestinians in the current conflict in Gaza have in common?   Answer:  both are fuelled by religious fundamentalism. I was initially prompted to think about this after having read the article Believe it or not (OC 22 May 2023) by my fellow contributor Vincent Guy about his brief flirtation with being a Christian.  Vincent is not the first person I have met who has gone through a similar experience and which has rarely proved to be a happy one. Note that I do not say “his brief flirtation with Christianity” because I would argue that what Vincent and others experienced had little to do with Christianity as preached by mainstream Christian denominations but rather, as he himself acknowledges, with Christian fundamentalism, which is something very different.  In any case Vincent’s article got me thinking about an issue which has caused me increasing concern: the relationship between religious fundamentalism and extremist politics. It is salutary to note how much of the upsurge in political violence we have seen in various countries around the world in recent years has been accompanied and often fuelled by a particularly strident religious rhetoric.  When thinking of religiously- fuelled political extremism many people think instinctively of Islamist terrorism but Muslims are themselves often the victims of religious fundamentalism, as in India or Myanmar where they are the target of Hindu or Buddhist extremists. Christianity is supposed to be about brotherly love, tolerance and forgiveness. Yet ‘Christian’ fundamentalists in the United States are strongly in favour of the death penalty, oppose gun control, and favour draconian or degrading punishments, including long prison sentences  or putting prisoners in chain gangs.  Protestant paramilitaries in Northern Ireland used to make their members swear an oath on the Bible before sending them out to murder innocent civilians.  Muslim fundamentalists support public floggings, cutting off hands, and beheading.  Islamist terrorists shout “God is great!” while carrying out the sort of unspeakable atrocities we saw committed by Hamas fighters on October 7th last year. Ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers are driving Palestinians out of their homes in the West Bank at the point of a gun while opposing a settlement with Hamas which could release more Jewish hostages. Or take the case of Donald Trump. Widely regarded as a narcissist, liar, sexual predator, fraudster and racist, who is facing a criminal prosecution for inciting a mob to violence in order to try and subvert the US Constitution by overturning the results of a democratic election, Trump appears to be the very antithesis of Christian values.  It would seem inconceivable that any sincere Christian could vote for such a man and yet we know that he enjoys the support of over 90% of Evangelicals in the US and many of the more traditionalist Roman Catholics.   Why is this so? Wikipedia gives a useful definition of fundamentalism as “a tendency among certain groups and individuals that is characterized by the application of a strict literal interpretation to scriptures, dogmas, or ideologies, along with a strong belief in the importance of distinguishing one's ingroup and outgroup, which leads to an emphasis on some conception of "purity", and a desire to return to a previous ideal from which advocates believe members have strayed. The term is usually used in the context of religion to indicate an unwavering attachment to a set of irreducible beliefs (the "fundamentals"). This definition gives an insight into the way fundamentalists think.  For most mainstream Christians there is no conflict between science and religion.   Indeed, the Christian churches have produced many eminent scientists:  Copernicus in astronomy, Gregor Mendel the father of genetics, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in palaeontology and many others.  Even today the Vatican has a world-class astronomical observatory, while Professor Paolo Benanti, electronic engineer and Franciscan friar is consultant to both the Vatican and the Italian Government on the ethics of Artificial Intelligence.  A French scientist and devout Christian said to me “God gave man intelligence so that he could interrogate his creation.” So, while all Christians believe the Bible to be divinely inspired, most mainstream Christian Churches would acknowledge the human element in the composition of the scriptures over three millennia.  Biblical exegesis such as that by the distinguished Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem (founded by the Dominican Order) has shown that the text we know today has multiple sources and has been edited and re-edited many times.  There are many textual variants or disputed readings and much of the language is of a poetic or hyperbolic nature and not to be taken literally.  But that is not the view of the fundamentalists who reject all science and learning in favour of unquestioning belief in the literal text.  This can sometimes reach the level of the absurd. An American friend was invited to watch a film which turned out to be by “Christian geologists” purporting to demonstrate how the geological record “proved” that the world had been created in seven days. This unquestioning belief in the authority of religious texts or dogmas, entailing as it does the rejection of reasoned or critical thinking, leaves fundamentalists peculiarly susceptible to conspiracy theories and wild assertions.  And their unquestioning acceptance of authority has implications for politics. Many fundamentalists reject democracy, free speech and public debate in favour of “strong” political leadership. The French fundamentalist Catholic Archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre (1905-1991) broke away from the Catholic Church and ordained his own bishops. He supported the authoritarian Vichy regime (1940-1944), urged support for the far-right National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen and railed against Muslim immigration into Europe.  Many autocrats, although themselves totally irreligious, have often made cynical use of religious zealots to further their own cause. The Spanish dictator Francisco Franco proclaimed a “Catholic Crusade”, Vladimir Putin has carefully cultivated the Russian Orthodox Church, and both Trump and Bolsonaro have embraced the Protestant evangelicals. Fundamentalists also tend to uphold the authority of men over women.  Many westerners have been shocked at the treatment of women by the Taliban in Afghanistan or the mullahs in Iran, but such patriarchal attitudes can also be found in many Christian fundamentalist sects. Margaret Attwood’s dystopian futuristic novel The Handmaid’s Tale and the TV series based on it describe what life for women will be like should these attitudes prevail in the USA. The Christian Domestic Discipline Movement (CDD) advocates spanking for wives - and publishes guidebooks on how to do it - and this profound social conservatism is evident in other areas such as gay rights, abortion or trans issues. One of the bishops ordained by Lefebvre (an Englishman) claimed that homosexuality was the result of women wearing trousers. But it is perhaps another aspect of fundamentalist psychology which explains their penchant for violence – the importance of distinguishing one’s ingroup and outgroup.  In contrast to mainstream religious groups fundamentalists are inward looking, focussing on what distinguishes them from others. This means not just   beliefs and dogma but extends also to outward manifestations of differences: symbolic gestures, ritual cleanliness, specific clothing, or dietary restrictions. They are intolerant of non-conformity, often resorting to shunning or publicly shaming group members deemed guilty of backsliding or failing to meet the strict tenets of their faith. The intolerance is even greater with regard to those who do not share their beliefs. The religious rhetoric of many militant groups such as Protestant paramilitaries, Trump supporting militias, Islamist terrorists or Ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers would seem to be less about personal values than about tribalism - defining themselves by those whom they hate. It is important to recognise that fundamentalists do not speak for their respective mainstream religious communities. In fact, their words and actions are often a grotesque distortion of religious teaching.  A typical example was the US fundamentalist preacher and televangelist Pastor Jerry Falwell, founder of the ‘Moral Majority’ who died in 2007.  Falwell attacked progressive evangelicals like former President Jimmy Carter, pressed for all-out war against Vietnam, claimed that Aids was a divine punishment for homosexuality, promoted and distributed a fake video documentary - The Clinton Chronicles - which purported to connect Bill Clinton to a murder conspiracy and a cocaine-smuggling operation, blamed lesbians gays and feminists for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York,  courted segregationist politicians, opposed sanctions against Apartheid in South Africa and described Nobel prize-winning Anglican Archbishop Dr Desmond Tutu as a“phony”.  He called Islam “Satanic” and claimed that the prophet Mohammed was a terrorist and that the people of Israel had a not only a theological but also a historic and legal right to the land of Palestine.  There was in fact nothing remotely moral about Falwell’s Moral Majority (the movement is now dissolved) or remotely Christian about his message, which was a catalogue of ignorance, bigotry, intolerance and hate. All the great monotheistic religions -Judaism, Christianity and Islam - share common outward-looking values. Throughout the Bible the People of God are encouraged to look after the widow, the orphan and the stranger, i.e. the most vulnerable in society.  For Christians, the three theological virtues are faith, hope and charity “and the greatest of these is charity.”  Giving alms (zakat) is one of the five basic duties of a Muslim and during Ramadan Muslims are expected share the hunger and thirst of the needy as a reminder of the religious duty to help those less fortunate.  Certainly, as a young student visiting Morrocco in the 1960s, I was overwhelmed by the hospitality and generosity shown to me wherever I went. My Moroccan hosts were always proud to point out that to welcome the stranger was an intrinsic part of their Muslim faith. In contrast to the severe restrictions put on women and girls by the Taliban in Afghanistan, in nearly all other Muslim countries girls go to school and university and occupy an increasingly important place in the workforce, often as professionals, doctors, nurses, teachers and politicians and even as heads of government. Historically, evangelical Christians have a proud and admirable record of fighting for the rights of the poor and underprivileged and in social reform. They were a leading force in the abolition of the slave trade in UK and (at least for Northern evangelicals) in the abolitionist movement in the United States. Even after the split in the 1920s between U.S. northern progressives and southern fundamentalists many of the latter were active in the Civil Rights movement.  However, the southern fundamentalists have now largely usurped the term ‘Evangelical’. Genuinely religious people of all faiths have often found themselves in opposition to the fundamentalists.  During the second World war, ultra-conservative Catholics in France supported the Vichy regime and after the war hid Nazi collaborators. But in Germany it was Christians from both main confessions, such as the Catholic student ‘White Rose Movement’ or the protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who showed great courage in resisting the Nazis and paid with their lives for so doing.  During the Northern Ireland troubles while fundamentalist preachers where whipping up sectarian hatred, it was mainstream clergy and Christians from both communities who sought to alleviate the suffering and to bridge the divide between the  parties, again often at considerable risk to themselves.   A Protestant clergyman who helped broker talks with the IRA which led eventually to the Good Friday peace agreement had to flee the country and emigrate to Canada because of death threats from Protestant paramilitaries.  It is no coincidence that Mahatma Gandhi, who preached non-violence and better treatment for ‘untouchables’, Anwar Sadat, the first Arab leader to visit Jerusalem and reach a lasting peace deal with Israel, and Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who signed the ‘Oslo Accords’ with Yasser Arafat - the first face-to-face agreement between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organisation - which offered a brief prospect of a peace settlement in the region, were all assassinated by religious extremists from within their own communities. Despite the divisive and corrosive impact of the fundamentalists, religion has always been and remains an immense influence for good in the world. In medieval Europe the ‘Peace of God’, first proclaimed by the Church in 989, was one of the most influential mass peace movements in history, granting immunity to non-combatants who could not protect themselves; the ‘Truce of God’ established temporary pauses in the endemic warfare between the nobles. Medieval monasteries provided a vast network of poor relief and care for the sick as well as safe spaces for travellers. Today, the vast majority of charitable and humanitarian work around the globe, both domestically and internationally, is undertaken by organisations and individuals of many different faiths motivated by religious conviction. Despite the obvious differences of race, theology, history and culture, people of different faiths, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and many others can and do work for the common good when they share a common focus. In a recent British television programme, an assorted group of British celebrities of various faiths or none who had made a pilgrimage to Rome were given a private audience with Pope Francis.  One of the group asked the Pope why, as a black gay man he should feel excluded.  Pope Francis replied that there was too much emphasis on the adjectives and not enough on the noun.  Irrespective of how we describe ourselves or how others describe us, the Pope said, we should focus, not on our differences or the things that divide us but, on what we all share; something which no one can take away from us - our common dignity as human beings.  It is a lesson the fundamentalists would do well to heed.

Spoken by Vincent Guy You may have heard of Heraklitos the philosopher who said “You can’t enter the same river twice”. This poem was a tribute by Kallimachos of Alexandria to a later Heraklitos, a poet from Caria in Anatolia. “Pleasant voices” and “nightingales” both refer to his verses. I learned this version, a loose translation by the Victorian schoolteacher William Cory, when I was about 15. Now, at 80, it’s the only poem I still  know by heart. I dedicate this recording to Alexei Navalny; news of his death made me weep. Click here to watch and listen: https://youtu.be/M-7ud0cA1iE

By Mark Nicholson I read today that Rupert Murdoch is to be married for the fifth time. While I am not particularly interested in Murdoch, he is often referred to as a ‘mogul’, a word deriving from the Mughals, who ruled vast areas of central and southern Asia for 450 years. By coincidence, in the same week, the most renowned of the Mughals appeared in the news, not as an Emperor but as a lion. Einstein once said, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about the universe”. I thought about that quote when I read about a far-right Hindu group, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) in India, which has contested the naming of a lioness ‘Sita’, who is to cohabit with a lion named Akbar in a Bengal safari park. The Hindus seem to be triply furious. First, that a lioness should be named after a Hindu goddess of the Earth (the Indian equivalent of Wagner’s Erda, I suppose); secondly, that she should be betrothed to a mortal; and most of all, God forbid, to a Muslim Mughal Emperor. The outcome so far is that the High Court in Kolkata has told the two sides, the Hindus and the zoo owners, to sort it out themselves. I suspect that the irony is lost on the far-right Islamophobic nationalists. Akbar was the greatest of the six emperors. He ruled from 1542 (some say 1556) to 1605. His vast empire stretched south into what was known as Hindustan, which he greatly expanded. His most important legacy was his religious tolerance. At a time in England when Edward VI was beheading Roman Catholics and Bloody Mary was burning Protestants, the older and wiser Akbar prohibited Shia-Sunni rivalry, promoted syncretism and transtheism, and encouraged the adoption of numerous teachings from Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism and Christianity. His beloved fourth wife Mariam-uz-Zamani was a Rajput, and therefore a Hindu. In the India of today, one suspects, he would not last long. So, apart from the fact that I do not like to see lions in captivity, I would wholeheartedly applaud the marriage between Akbar and Sita (as would Emperor Akbar, no doubt). My favourite part of India has always been Kashmir, a Muslim stronghold and always a thorn in the side of Prime Minister Modi’s lot. Yes, Kashmiris bait the Hindus by pretending to be pro-Pakistan but every Kashmiri I ever spoke to wanted independence from both and they are fed up with Hindu nationalism. Of course most people associate India with tigers, not lions. Indian (or Persian) lions are rare but have increased markedly since being almost extirpated over a hundred years ago. They are now confined to the Gir National Park in Gujarat but the lion population has climbed back to well over 500 individuals (but are no longer in Iran). They are regarded as a sub-species of the African lion, being smaller (adult males average 160-190 kg[1]) and having shorter manes and prominent ears. In Africa there are about 20,000-30,000 lions left compared with over 200,000 a century ago. Over the last few weeks, I have had something of a surfeit of lions. We saw a pride kill a huge giraffe the other day, which always distresses me, as giraffes have always been my favourite animals. Not that they are defenceless: they kick forward with their front legs with devastating effect. In 1998, I was at a small reserve in central Kenya one weekend when one of the guests was killed. A missionary had unwisely stood his ground as a tall male giraffe approached him while protecting its family. The giraffe dispatched the man with one kick to the front of his skull. Much to my annoyance the giraffe was shot. Lions will attack both buffalo (their favourite food) and young elephants but it is a highly risky enterprise for the lions, which often come off worse. Much easier for them are cattle until they receive the sharp end of a pastoralist’s spear. That remains one source of human-wildlife conflict. Hunting lions with spears is now banned, so sadly, Maasai and others revert to poisoning. The poisoned carcass of a lion is then eaten by hyaenas and vultures, which die as well. In East Africa, tourists refer to the ‘Big Five’ that everyone wants to see[2]. The three most dangerous wild mammals in Africa are actually hippo, buffalo and elephant. Lions are very rarely dangerous: they view humans as the apex predator and will normally run a mile when approached by a human unless they are being hunted. Leopards, being largely nocturnal, solitary and super crafty are even less dangerous which is why the next story is interesting. On the second ranch in Laikipia we stayed on last week, the owner told us a gruesome story. A few weeks earlier, a Turkana man turned up looking for work. Apparently, he appeared to have ‘a few roos loose in the top paddock’ to use an Australian phrase. In the evening, he wandered off, possibly for a nap under a tree. The following morning, half of his corpse was found hanging in a nearby tree with leopard pugmarks (much smaller than a lion’s) all around. The police arrived, as usual suspecting murder but the cause of death was unequivocal. That is the first time in my life I have ever heard of a leopard killing and eating a human in East Africa. The only exception is when a wounded leopard is being hunted, and then it has the reputation of being the most dangerous animal on Earth. But it made me slightly more wary wandering off late at night to my guest house a good 200 metres from the main house. The story reminded me of one of my boyhood heroes. Jim Corbett was the most revered hunter of big cats in India. The first man-eater he hunted was the Champawat tiger that had killed 436 humans. The most famous leopards he shot, were the Panar leopard (400 deaths), and, after months of trying, the Rudraprayag leopard, responsible for 126 victims. Corbett was a phenomenal naturalist as well as a hunter and he frequently described going in ever decreasing circles as the tiger would be hunting him. He claimed that modern and urban humans have lost their ability to sense danger. He called it ‘proximity sense’ and reckoned it saved his life on many occasions. Corbett left India in 1947 and settled in Kenya where he died in 1955. He reckoned that tigers and leopards became man-eaters for quite different reasons. Tigers became man-eaters when someone stumbled into a sick tiger or a tigress with cubs who would then swipe the intruder and get its first taste of human blood. Leopards on the other hand were often scavengers. During times of epidemics, so many people would die that bodies tended to be dumped unburnt into ravines, and leopards, being scavengers as well as hunters, would get a taste for human flesh. One evening we set off to see the camel herd of some 150 fully-habituated adults. The camels come in the evening to the boma (stockade) for milking and safety. Lions frequently try their luck but a 2m high fence is an adequate deterrence. Lions, like the stronger tiger and jaguar, can grab a young camel and leap astounding heights over fences. Camels are milked twice a day, the milk is cooled and transported several hours to the nearest town, which partly explains the high cost. Many claims are made about the superiority of camel milk. The fact that camels browse and cattle graze would suggest that camel’s milk is considerably more interesting because shrubs in dry country are full of unusual aromatic compounds. Google reports many medicinal benefits of camel milk, which include immune boosters, as well as anti-diabetic, anti-autistic (??), anti-microbial, anti-hypertensive, anti-carcinogenic, anti-cholesterolemic, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, hypoallergenic, hepatoprotective properties. If all that is true, one cannot help wondering why camel keepers ever die at all. The herders are all northern pastoralists, Turkana, Samburu, Boran, Somali etc. Their housing is simple and might shock westerners. Their circular houses are built using traditional thatch and the one concession to modernity is a covering of plastic to improve waterproofing.  The pastoralists all come from villages sometimes hundreds of kilometres away with identical housing and the only difference is that the herders get a wage on top, so they are have a better lifestyle than most of their tribe. But here’s the thing: some might look down in dismay at the conditions of these people. I can guarantee that none of them has heard of Ukraine, or Gaza, or Haiti. The outside world is of little interest to them. They are a joyful and a friendly bunch. They work hard; they laugh and joke and I am quite sure no one suffers from depression. Maybe they can teach us a thing or two. [1] The largest Kenyan lion weighed in at  272kg [2] Elephant, rhino, lion, leopard and buffalo

by Richard Pooley In an article published on 18 April 2019 I wrote the following: “There wasn’t the usual levity when I walked into my French village’s southern boulangerie early on Tuesday morning. The queue was quiet, the mood sombre. We live 500 km south of Paris but the sudden destruction of the roof and spire of Notre Dame has shocked every villager I have met. “It is sad to see this part of us burn.” Well said, M Macron. Later that day, on the radio, I heard a French woman declare tearfully that “It is the burning of our history.” I wasn’t surprised by the reaction. The cathedral of Notre Dame means more to the French than any other building. It is where France as a territory was born. The island on which it stands was for centuries at the heart of the relatively small area over which the kings of France held real power. Since 1768 all distances from Paris have been measured from a point in the square in front of the two western towers. The reports that firefighters acted swiftly and bravely to save many of the cathedral’s most precious objects, including its three superb rose windows and that the towers, stone vaults, walls and buttresses have all survived intact has fuelled optimism that the damage has not been as extensive as first feared. The French can be confident that it will be rebuilt, perhaps without too much cost to French taxpayers if promises of hundreds of millions of euros continue to be made by France’s richest people and companies.” A month later I wrote that only €71 million of the €850 million so far promised had actually been donated. Many mayors had been forced to withdraw their offers by residents of their towns, furious that money had suddenly been found at a time when they had been told there was none for local projects. I wondered if the cathedral would be restored to exactly what it was moments before the fire, or whether the new roof area should be “an innovative and inspiring example of the best in 21st century architecture?” An architect friend thought the former opinion a “folly”. For a start “the French oak trees that would be required to be felled, sawn and seasoned simply don’t exist any more.” He, like most architects who expressed a view, wanted something modern, taking advantage of “the most amazing advances in structural material and building fabric design” since the cathedral’s spire was previously restored in the 1850s. The proposal that my friend and I liked the most imagined the roof as a solar-powered urban farm. The roof and the spire would be made of glass, with the iron cockerel which crowned the 1859 spire and which had somehow survived the fire restored to its old position. I predicted the modernist architects and intellectuals would win the argument. Not because they made a good case. Many didn’t; their language was pretentious and their proposals impractical. But I thought we had lost the skills needed to restore Notre Dame to its medieval state. How wrong I was. The majority of French people appeared to want the cathedral to be restored to how it was (54% according to one YouGov poll). And perhaps more importantly, so did most French Roman Catholics. The traditionalists won. The rich kept their promises. But whilst many French local councils didn’t donate, about 340,000 people from France and abroad did so. €846 million (£723m, $921m) was raised. The French state has hardly paid anything. What the French government did was make it happen. Macron promised that the cathedral would be restored in five years and so it will be. Many, including those directly involved in managing the rebuilding, thought it a crazy deadline. How have they managed to meet it? Much credit must go to the speedy decision-making of president, ministers and officials at the start: we’ll restore it to how it was, we’ll have one person in charge, the management team will be small, suppliers and the workforce will be chosen swiftly from the best craftspeople around France, consultation with experts will take place as far as possible in parallel with the work rather than before it, planning restrictions will be eased. Two days after the fire General George Jean-Louis Georgelin, ex Chief of the Defence Staff, was pulled out of retirement and told to restore Notre Dame by 2024. Yes, sir! He ran it like a military operation until he died in a mountaineering accident in August last year. What makes the speed of restoration so extraordinary is that in bringing the building back to what it was before the fire, all the wood and stone has been cut and carved just as it was when first built. Over 140 contracts were signed with specialist craftspeople from across France. Two companies were chosen to rebuild the oak “forest” (“charpente”) under its lead roof – 91 metres long, 13 metres wide and 9 metres tall. My architect friend was wrong: there were enough oak trees of sufficient size in France to replace the burned timber. In early March 2020 1,400 oak trees were felled across France before their sap rose. They were dried over the next 12 to 18 months. Alarm calls from Greens were silenced when it was shown that these trees represented only a small proportion of trees cut down each year and would have been felled anyway as part of normal forestry maintenance. Photo: Cristina Baussan The carpenters then went to work cutting, honing and joining the wood to form the trusses needed to make the roof support. They used different types of axes, all forged to be exactly like the ones used by their medieval predecessors 800 years ago. Not a single electric saw or drill has been heard. There are practical reasons for this insistence on old methods. As one carpenter said: "We could easily cut the logs into boards [with a saw] but keeping the wood fibres the whole length of the beam [using an axe] gives it more strength." The removable metal pins joining the trusses have been, yes, removed and replaced by wooden mortise and tenon joints. There is not one piece of metal in the new charpente. Nor is the new spire made of glass. It has a wooden skeleton and looks exactly like the one finished by Viollet-le-Duc in 1859. On top is a new, gilt-covered copper cockerel. The old one is on display in the Cité de l’Architecture et du Partrimoine museum in Paris. What I don’t know is whether the relics in the old bird – a small piece of Christ’s Crown of Thorns, a piece of St Denis, and one of St Geneviève – have gone into the new one.** Of course, modern practices have been used too. In 2012 an architectural student, Rémi Fromont, together with a colleague,  spent the year taking precise measurements of the charpente, the first people to do so. No surprise then that Fromont was appointed head architect in charge of rebuilding it, using his computerised plans. Materials have been transported to the site and lifted to where they are needed using the most modern technology.  As Georgelin said early on: “You have people everywhere in France working to restore the stained glass windows, to find the stones, to restore the organ and the paintings, to build the wooden framework, the spire…” He went on to point out that the deadline could only be met if the old skills were combined with the most advanced computer design technology: “We’re restoring a medieval cathedral but Notre Dame will also be a cathedral for the 21st century.” I suspect by this stage, any British reader still with me will be expecting me to ask why the British can’t successfully bring big projects like this to fruition . No doubt the vastly wasteful HS2 fast train project comes to mind. But we Brits can manage such a project. We did it forty years ago after York Minster’s fire on 9 July 1984 destroyed the roof of the South Transept and much else. The Archbishop of Canterbury, echoed by Macron in 2019, said; “It will rise again.” And it did; in four years, not five. Oak trees across Yorkshire and beyond were cut down to renew the roof, done, just as at Notre Dame, by using the same techniques applied by the medieval carpenters. Admittedly, the damage to the minster was much less extensive and so the cost -  £2.25 million - was tiny compared to what it has taken to restore Notre Dame. That’s only about £9.2 million in today’s money. Another difference was that the minster had full insurance cover; the Ecclesiastical Insurance Fund paid for the rebuilding. However, donations from individuals and companies of around £500,000 paid for a new lightning conductor system. The expert view was that it was lightning that had started the fire in York. Some of the Church of England faithful (and the insurance company?) believed it was an Act of God, angry at the installation as Bishop of Durham of a man, David Jenkins, who appeared to doubt His/Her existence. It's still not known what sparked the fire in Notre Dame, though it was not lightning. The stereotypical view of the arm-waving, insouciant, Gauloise-smoking French artisan has led to the accusation that it was a worker who started it in his long lunch break. Highly unlikely. The fire alarm first went off at 18.20, after the people working on the then renovation effort in the roof had gone home. Perhaps it was a spark from a welding tool which landed in all the debris of the “forest”. What can we learn from this French success story? When there is the will, there is usually a way. Cut out the bureaucracy and keep the planners under control. Listen more to the doers and makers – the artisans and engineers - than the intellectuals, journalists and politicians. And have a clear chain of command, with a small management team, and a workforce dedicated to the project for its full term. Above all, have an ambitious target, achievable just this side of impossibility. *If you are wondering why there is a cockerel on Notre Dame and on nearly every war memorial in France, it’s because it’s a symbol of the French people. Gallus is the  Latin for Gaul, the Roman province, and also for cockerel. **I have been following this story closely over the past five years but not read anywhere what has happened to the relics. Did they survive the fire?

by Dr. Mark Nicholson 14D (or was it 21B?) by Jackson Pollock Any art dealer is going to regard me as hopelessly naïve and lacking in acumen but I would far rather have a beautiful painting by an unknown artist than a ghastly, uninteresting or unintelligible painting by a well-known (and note that I don’t say ‘great’) artist. Give me a Rothko for Christmas and it will end up on the bonfire (er, well, maybe not; Christies perhaps). Ditto for a Pollock. I am not supposed to say that. I am supposed to be empathetic and artistic enough to recognize the importance of two of America’s ‘greatest’ artists (except Rothko was a gloomy Latvian). If you want to see great American art, go and see the nineteenth century oils by Cole, Duncanson and Bierstadt in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. So maybe I am too thick, too philistine or old-fashioned. I do not dismiss Abstract Expressionism out of hand. Some work in that genre is amazingly beautiful but Rothko and Pollock are to my mind the most meaningless. Anyone who can pay $250 million for one needs their head examined, except they know they can one day sell them again for more. To me, it is the Emperor’s New Clothes (and Pollock at least knew it). So let me start with a quiz: what connects Palawan, Kherson and Mark Rothko? Nobody can give me a feasible answer of course because the question is only relevant to me. Almost no one will know the first name, few the second even if quite a few people may have heard of Rothko. So let me explain. A few years ago after a consultancy in Laos, a friend told me to jump on a plane via Manila for a few days off on Palawan, one of the most beautiful tropical islands on earth, which was originally attached to the Chinese mainland but had drifted away towards the main Philippine archipelago. Annoyingly, I had left my book on the plane and arrived with no reading material. The ‘library’ at the resort consisted of books left behind by tourists. Most of the books were in Russian, Japanese and Chinese. Only one was in English, entitled Hammer by Armand Hammer, a 500-page autobiography by someone of whom I had never heard but who clearly had a high opinion of himself. It turned out to be the most riveting autobiography I have ever read. Armand Hammer’s grandfather was a shipbuilder from Kherson, a Ukrainian city grabbed by the Russians two years ago,  reclaimed by the Ukrainians in November 2022, flooded by the Russians in June last year and still subject to daily bombardment. What is it with Ukrainian Jews? I had just finished re-reading about the Ephrussi family from Odessa [1], one of the wealthiest trading and banking families on Earth in the early nineteenth century. Then along comes a book about a Jewish migrant whose four wealthy grandparents came either from Odessa and Kherson and who had escaped the Pogroms in Russia with nothing, ending up in a Russian/ Irish ghetto on the Lower East side of New York. The family built a pharmacy business and soon cornered the world market in ginger. By the time he was 18, Armand Hammer was making a million dollars a year before deciding to study medicine. His father, a prominent member of the American Communist Party, started exporting medical drugs to Russia in 1919. Armand then set off to Moscow with a complete American field hospital left over from WWI in order to help in the typhus epidemic. He met Lenin (who spoke to him in good English), whom Armand found charming, humorous and sincere as well as having “dazzling intellectual flexibility”. He found Trotsky (conversing in German) highly intelligent, very brave but somewhat cold. Traveling onwards to Ekaterinburg, Armand witnessed the full horrors of the famine and agreed to send over a million bushels of American wheat at his own expense ($1m) at a time when the American wheat price was so low that farmers preferred to burn it. In exchange, he was paid in furs and hides, which he sold in the USA for two million dollars. This trading continued until he was granted a huge asbestos concession east of the Urals.  It was not long before Armand was buying up Romanov treasures including art, Faberge jewels, rubies and platinum in exchange for American grain and pencils from Germany. In Leningrad (St. Petersburg), he buys a Rembrandt from an old picture restorer, which he later discovers is a superb fake, created by the Director of one of Moscow’s museums.  He wrote “I kept our fake Rembrandt for a many years as a salutary reminder of how easily a collector of art can be duped”. That comment would later come to haunt his grandson in the rest of this tale. Armand Hammer had the Midas touch. He moved into merchant banking, cattle breeding, fine art, before acquiring Occidental Petroleum in 1957. He maintained close ties with the USSR and was very close to Brezhnev, advising Nixon/ Kissinger during the détente years. He died a very wealthy man in 1990. If you can ever find it, the book is an astonishing read. Fast forward to November 2023. On a flight from Glasgow to Dubai, I could not find a film to interest me so I switched to documentaries. One called “Made to Look” began with a ‘Rothko’ painting at the centre of a storm. Black in deep red by Mark Rothco. Yours for $250 million Ann Freedman, the President of Knoedlers, America’s oldest art gallery founded in 1846, had been ‘invited’ to resign by the owner, Michael Hammer. Yes, Michael was Armand’s grandson. Armand had bought the gallery in 1971 for $25m at a time when the gallery was close to bankruptcy for buying expensive real estate. It continued to be run by wealthy New York Jews: Rubins, Geffens, Taubmanns, Freedmans etc. Between 1992 and 2008, Ann Freedman had bought about over 40 Abstract Impressionist paintings, and sold them on to collectors making a huge profit, sometimes approaching 1000 percent. She had provided the provenance each time (“a private Swiss collector who wishes to remain anonymous”), which seemed to have satisfied the specialists in the field, even if they tended to be rather non-committal. Perhaps they were just too cheap. The problem was that both Freedman and Glafira Rosales who supplied the paintings seemed to have an endless supply of Rothkos and Pollocks. Freedman bought a ‘Pollock’ for $900,000 and sold it to a London hedge fund manager for $17 m. Domenico de Sole, a former CEO of Gucci and Chairman of Sotheby’s, and his wife Eleanore dished out a modest $8.3m for a ‘Rothko’.  A few years went by until exhaustive forensic chemical analysis proved that one of the yellow pigments in a fake ‘Pollock’ had not existed before 1970 (the artist died in 1956). Then a number of irate buyers started to sue. The painter of these masterpieces was Pei Shen Qian, a Chinese gentleman in New York, who quickly hoofed it to Shanghai. Rosales’ unpleasant Spanish boyfriend, the mastermind of the scheme, flew off to Spain and was eventually extradited to the USA. Rosales pleaded guilty but Freedman continued to maintain her innocence[2]. She, Michael Hammer and the company were all sued but all was settled out of Court. Knoedlers collapsed in 2011 after the company was shown to have made $80m in the sale of fakes. The scandal rocked the art world but privacy and lack of transparency continues to be the core of the art market. Now I am no artist but with two pots of paint, I reckon I could rustle up a fake Rothko before lunch but it wouldn’t fool an expert.  A Pollock is even easier: one just has to dribble different colours onto the canvas. It is said that Pollock’s whole aim was to make a mockery of the international art market. I enjoy my paintings even if they are not worth much. They mean something to me and they are pleasing. However, they have been in the same place for over 30 years and how often to I really look at them? My plan was to join forces with a group of aficionados and share each other’s paintings on a regular basis. My Colombian friends nearby, who have some great art, think it is a great idea and already want to nab my large oil painting of aloes in the Northern Cape, which was done to remind me of a great holiday. Koker Boom by Conrad Nagel Theys Still, Rothkos and Pollocks have one advantage apart from paying school fees: they can be hung upside down or turned to the right or left for a bit of variety, so we can see idiocy and meaninglessness in four different ways. Or am I just obtuse? [1] In The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal (2011) [2] She now serves food in a Brooklyn diner

By Richard Pooley “The Gerry-Mander” Cartoon in the Boston Gazette , 26 March 1812, probably by Elkanah Tisdale Gerrymandering is a fun word for something so pernicious to democracy. I have always loved the story of its origin. In 1812 the Governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, who would go on to become briefly Vice President of the USA, agreed to a bill which redrew the boundaries of the senate election districts in his state for the benefit of his Democratic-Republican Party. Those supporting the opposing Federalist Party were concentrated into a few districts so that many more districts had Democratic-Republican-supporting majorities. This led to districts looking very odd. One in the Boston area was so contorted that it resembled the salamander of Greek mythology when drawn by the designer and engraver Elkanah Tisdale. Hence the portmanteau word combining the name of the governor with the second half of the amphibian. So common did gerrymandering become in the USA that the Oxford English Dictionary listed it in 1848 and has done so ever since. My Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it as manipulating “boundaries of a constituency etc unfairly so as to secure disproportionate influence at election for some party or class”. A US professor and journalist, Wayne Dawkins, has a wider and catchier definition: “politicians picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.” As US American readers will know only too well gerrymandering is still widely practised by both main political parties in their country and frequently decides the outcome of elections to state and national bodies. We Brits are luckier. We have four boundary commissions, one for each nation within the United Kingdom, who are totally independent of government and who decide every eight years what changes need to be made to parliamentary constituency boundaries. The commissions must each ensure that constituencies have roughly the same number of voters (within 5% more or less of the national average) and must be no more than 13,000 sq. km. in area. Once their proposals are published there is an eighteen-week consultation period during which anybody, including politicians, can express their opinions. In the most recent Act of Parliament on this issue, the Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020, it was made impossible for any government minister or indeed Parliament itself,  to modify a commission’s recommendations. The aim was to eliminate “any scope for gerrymandering.” I have been thinking a lot about gerrymandering over the past three Saturdays, while knocking on doors and telling voters that their constituency has changed. I live and vote in Bath, one of the very few constituencies in the UK where there is an Member of Parliament from my party, the Liberal Democrats. Completely circling the city is the constituency of North-east Somerset, whose MP is the right-wing Conservative Brexiteer, Jacob Rees-Mogg. He has been its MP since it was created in 2010. I have never been able to discover what made the boundary commission think having one constituency surround another was a good idea, nor why it didn’t change its mind after some vociferous criticism, especially from people living east of Bath, during the consultation stage. Anyway they have now seen the stupidity of it and have proposed more rational boundaries. I am not suggesting that any gerrymandering took place. But several voters I have met think it did. One reacted last Saturday by telling me how “They are doing it all over the country.” By “they” she meant the Conservative government. “They” have only themselves to blame. Last year they introduced new ID rules in time for May’s local elections. They claimed they wanted to stop voters pretending to be someone else and voting more than once, despite the fact that in elections in the previous year there had been just seven allegations of fraud and no convictions.  It was a crude attempt to stop non-Tory voters from voting. Student cards and young person’s railcards are invalid ID but old people’s bus passes are acceptable. As I mentioned in an article last May, this attempt at voter suppression backfired spectacularly. I met people who were voting against the Tories mainly because of their anger at the new ID rules. “You are undermining democracy”, said one to the hapless Tory teller beside me. And there is anecdotal evidence that many elderly Tory voters were put off voting at all. None other than Jacob Rees-Mogg berated his own government: "Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding that their clever scheme comes back to bite them, as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections…We found the people who didn't have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well” Note that Rees-Mogg has widened the meaning of ‘gerrymander’. But it seems Rees-Mogg’s colleagues have not listened to him. Last month they fulfilled a promise the Tories had made in their 2019 election manifesto: all UK citizens living abroad will be able to vote in the UK’s general elections. Previously, only those who had lived overseas for fewer than fifteen years could do so. This means, according to the government’s own figures, that an extra 2.3 million British citizens living abroad will be eligible to vote. So some 3.3 million UK expats, a third of whom live in the European Union, can now vote in the next general election. In the fortnight after the new law came into force on January 16th, 21,000 newly-eligible expats registered to vote. Not many out of 2.3 million. But that may be because the new law got so little publicity in the mostly Tory-supporting mainstream media. They must have realised what most Tories have not: this could be another “clever scheme” which will come “back to bite them.” Historically, even those expats who were allowed to vote seldom registered to do so. Just under 25% of them registered to vote in the 2019 general election. Many, especially those living in the EU, bitterly regretted their apathy after the 2016 referendum which led to the UK leaving the EU. I was living in France at the time and could see that the Remain campaign was losing the argument. My wife and I voted to remain but I believe many of our British expat friends didn’t bother to vote at all. Did the Tories believe in 2019 that most British expats are, almost by definition, rich businesspeople or retirees who are natural Conservative supporters? Do they still think that? Maybe that was once the case. But research done by Professor Paul Webb and Dr Susan Collard at the University of Sussex in early 2020 says otherwise, at least for those expats living in the EU. Their key finding is as follows: “Only 17% of those who voted for the Conservative Party in 2015 [UK general election] and then for Remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum (that is, some 95% of all 2015 EU-based Tories) still supported the Conservatives in 2019; by contrast, 90% of Leave-voting Tories stuck with the party in 2019.” This huge drop in Tory support among British expats living in Europe made little difference to the result of the 2019 election which the Tories won resoundingly. But that is because so few registered to vote and their votes must have been spread quite widely across 650 UK constituencies. Next time could be different. Sure, I doubt if those many UK expats in Australia and New Zealand who can now vote in the UK will bother doing so. But those in Europe? I have seen first-hand (from “Liberal Democrats in France” and UK expat online media such as “Local”)  that the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National Party expat organisations are urging those newly eligible to vote to do so. It’s not just Brexit which has infuriated UK expats. Recent changes in migration rules mean that, for example, the minimum income requirement for UK citizens wishing to return to the UK with their foreign spouse and children will rise in April from £18,600 to £29,000. Even the Tory-supporting media have been full of stories of tearful British citizens saying they are now unable to return to the country of their birth. However, the really astonishing thing about this latest example of Conservative Party gerrymandering is how easy the new law will make it to commit electoral fraud, just the thing that the Tories tell us they are trying to stop. British expats are now able to vote by proxy or by post in the last UK constituency where they lived. But if they cannot provide proof of address, an acquaintance can “attest” that they lived in a certain constituency. So, dear reader, if you are a British citizen living outside the UK and you wish to vote in a way which will have the most effect – i.e. to vote in a marginal seat – get in touch with me at Only Connect and I will attest that you lived in a constituency where the Conservatives are defending a small majority…provided, of course, that you promise me you will vote for whichever party is most likely to defeat the Tory candidate. After all, if you read my articles, we are surely acquainted. But if that is too much hassle, please post this article to as many British expats as you know and urge them to register asap. And if you are a British expat too, don’t forget to do so yourself. If proof were needed that this Conservative government is both corrupt and incompetent, its inability to gerrymander competently proves it beyond doubt.