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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.

by Stoker "Miss, is this where our lunch comes from?" Those of us who are just a touch old fashioned (and Stoker slightly ruefully so admits) had a strange frisson when scanning the various British newspapers and weekly political magazines last week. Passing rapidly from the decay of the Tory Party via the uncertainties of Starmer’s Labour, on through the bizarre spectacle of a US Presidential candidate who seems to be facing charges in almost every court in the land and a serving President mumbling and stumbling his way through another day, and ignoring M. Macron’s Napoleonic graciousness in his state visit to Sweden (the King looking modest and slightly apprehensive), we reach the domestic sanctity of the inner pages.  But even here, things seem a little weird. “Nurseries to Serve Venison to Toddlers” says a headline in the Daily Mail, and whilst that in itself does not make anything true, Wales Online and The Spectator both confirm that this is indeed a verifiable, fact-checked story.  Now, it must be admitted before we go any further, that the lucky tots are those in thirty-two private nurseries in Dorset and Hampshire, run by Tops Day Nurseries (should you wish to bung your little one in for a gourmet experience).  Tops Day sources this new meat supply via Eat Wild, a group backed by various wildlife conservationist groups, which is procuring venison from two large local estates.  Note low green mileage - highly commendable. Venison - game as it is generally known in countryside circles - like most wild meats is highly nutritious.  Such meats are low in fat - when did you last see a stag thoughtfully chewing a Twix bar or a pheasant having a third pint of bitter – with high concentrations of trace elements good for human health, such as iron and Omega 3, and are generally free of additives and the pills and potions often given to farmed livestock to promote rapid growth.  Given the choice, most animals might prefer a free life and gentle old age, but as a second strategy, a free life and sudden death by bullet must be greatly preferable to living in crowded stockyards before being herded into trucks and held in long queues at the abattoir. Before you envisage rooms full of infants sitting down to a spit-roasted stag or waving partridge legs at each other, à la Henry VIII, Eat Wild have considered how best to give their product fork-appeal. Burgers and mince are the infant’s choice wherever possible, and that is how this game food is served, venison lasagne being a particular favourite apparently.  Pheasant is a good and toothsome substitution for chicken, as is rabbit.  Squirrel too tastes like chicken though this is not yet on the school menu (it may be soon; my local butcher now can provide squirrel saddles.)  In an era when what does not taste like chicken tends to be mass-reared chicken, this can only be a good thing.  Better still is pigeon, incidentally. Farmed meat is increasingly expensive to produce. When not organic it increasingly has additive issues; and where it is organic it is even more expensive.  Game though is comparatively cheap.  There is a huge over-supply of pheasants and partridge, and although stories of shot birds having to be buried in mass pits are apparently untrue, game dealers are almost at the point of requiring rural estates to pay them to take and process birds after the great shooting battues of the rural autumn season.  The days when the estates were getting £2 a bird are long over; 50p seems to be the maximum now.  Consumption has gone up dramatically; our Editor notes prepared venison in his local Waitrose, but he will also see pheasant dishes in the poultry or game section, even in Tesco and Morrison, amongst others, should he so venture.  The shooting industry is very concerned that not having strong markets and proper outlets for game is both very wasteful of perfectly good meat, but also creating a potential major image problem for shooting, already under fierce scrutiny from the anti-shooters and countryside regulators. There is also another rural over-supply problem to which all this is the perfect answer. That is the massive growth in the population of wild deer, of red, roe, and fallow, the common ones, but also of Chinese water deer, sika, and muntjac, the latter being the biggest nuisance, as any forester or gardener knows, but also very good eating (so it should be after having consumed so many vegetables and flowers).  The deer population is estimated at over two million and growing rapidly in almost every county in the United Kingdom; the experts think that in overcrowded, intensively farmed Britain the maximum sustainable population of all types of deer is about one million.  Deer are eating trees, destroying fences, occupying habitat of others such as the rare capercaillie and ptarmigan, and causing lots of road accidents. The stalker is suddenly back in favour (deer stalker we mean, and not the hat type), nowhere more so than in Scotland.  The Scottish government is not known for its warm regard for rural hunters but even it has recently removed the closed season for stag hunting, so that they can be shot throughout the year.  There are rumours that in especially deer-plagued areas special licences may also be introduced for killing hinds (females) without offspring, such is the scale of the problem.  So, let’s eat the deer; create yummy dishes and normalise the appearance of wild meats on the nation’s plates.  And where better to start than at one end in Waitrose and at the other in the nursery lunch? Game meat is not just for posh babes in the rural Home Counties.  Many educational authorities caught between the rock of ever-increasing budgetary restraints and the hard place of public concern about health, see non-farmed meat as the answer.  It’s healthy and it’s cheap, but to work for mass caterers it does need to reflect how we eat now.  And in Britain that is, as we noted earlier, not as roast birds or venison haunches, but in the form of quick easy food, for flash cooking or the microwave. Lasagne or moussaka, pasties or pizza, shepherds pies or sausages, that is what the time-pressed modern eater and cook both want.  Such dishes have also the benefit that they disguise what the sensitive modern gourmet is actually getting on the plate.  A roast woodcock with its bill piercing its own breast may reflect the cook’s artistic urges (and be delightful eating) but would empty the school dining hall pretty quickly.  My friend who made venison soup for his young family and when asked what it was said “Bambi Soup” learned food presentational skills the hard way.  But a game pasty or venison sausage seems harmless enough to a hungry audience. So it seems likely that the meat option on school lunch menus or being trolleyed round the hospital wards will increasingly have its meat option as something wild. But, you exclaim, aren’t we all vegan now?  You are not keeping up with eating trends.  The same week as Eat Wild announced its schools contracts, the hip sandwich bar chain Pret A Manger announced the closure of its remaining vegetarian-only branches.  Vegetarianism and veganism are in decline, as restaurants and supermarkets both confirm from their sales figures, and the cause of some of that fading seems to be an increasing public consciousness of the health benefits and provenance of what we eat.  Meat is back, but best of all, healthy meat which has had a jolly life in the wild before meeting its fate and our pleasure.

By Lynda Goetz ‘Echo chambers’ may not have been the word or phrase of 2023 (that was ‘authentic’ according to Merriam Webster; ‘rizz’, short for ‘charisma’ apparently, according to the Oxford University Press, and ‘hallucinate’ if you go with the choice of Cambridge University Press), but for journalists and commentators, it has certainly been a much-used phrase over the last year. It has cropped up in articles in The Spectator, The Economist, The Telegraph and many others, including online.  The more frequent use of the term reflects concern that the prevalence of social media has resulted in more and more people getting their news only from sources which echo and thus reinforce their existing prejudices. Is this really the case and if so should it worry us? It has historically always been the case that humans are pretty tribal and tend to congregate in social groups according to interests, social status, like-minded views and opinions.  This in itself is nothing new.  Hundreds of years ago news would have largely been limited to local news, communicated in person orally, for most people, apart from those few in the privileged positions of power. Town criers might have provided national or international news in larger conurbations. News of wars or of requirements to fight would have come down from local landowners and barons. As literacy increased there were handwritten news sheets containing information on Italian and European wars and politics distributed in Venice in the mid-16th C.  Elsewhere in the world, although the Egyptians had invented papyrus and the Chinese paper, and indeed a form of moveable type and a press, hundreds of years earlier, the idea of distributing news information to the public did not take off.  It was in Europe, more specifically in Germany, with Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, that the idea of newspapers evolved . From the 17th century onwards the term  ‘newspaper’ became common and all over Europe the format was spreading, although the contents were generally censored by governments. By the 19th century, increased literacy, better and faster printing and the invention of wood- pulp papermaking (paper had previously been made from rags) all contributed to more newspapers and wider readership. Throughout Europe and parts of the Middle East, coffee houses started opening from the mid-17th century onwards.  By the late 17th century and throughout the 18th century coffee houses became important centres for the distribution and discussion of news. In Oxford, coffee houses became known as ‘Penny Universities’ as the entrance fee of often just one penny provided access to books, print newspapers and much serious and lively discussion both of an academic and a political nature. By 1739 there were 551 coffee houses in London alone. Both Lloyds of London and the London Stock exchange evolved from coffee houses. Coffee houses were the discussion and debating forums of the day and each had a defining characteristic and clientele. They were the echo chambers of their time, and although women were on the whole not welcome, historians generally agree that coffee houses were democratic forums where people from different strata of society could go to discuss the issues of the day. Coffee shops died out with the arrival of gentleman’s clubs, the government interest in the tea trade and the rise once again of a more snobbish era. Historians also consider that the attempt by coffee houses to control print media may have contributed to their decline. Newspapers, available to the general public, held sway throughout the 19th century. The golden age of newspapers is regarded as being between 1860, when taxes were removed, and 1910. But as we moved into the 20th, radio, film reels and then television became of increasing importance. It is largely to this era that those of us living now look back for comparison. Throughout the latter part of  the 20th century there was a variety of newspapers to choose from, most with varying declared political affiliations.  At the same time, news on the radio or the television was generally expected to be ‘impartial’ and to deliver information without biased comment or opinion. Newspapers on the Left included The Daily Worker (founded in 1930 by the Communist Party of Great Britain, renamed in 1966 as The Morning Star and still published under this name today), the Daily Mirror and The Guardian, also both still published. The Financial Times, to the surprise I suspect of those who don’t read it, is in the centre. On the Right there is The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, The Sun, and the Daily Express. The Times has a slightly ambiguous position as a long-standing newspaper of record and thus is supposed to be unbiased, but is generally regarded as having drifted right since its purchase in 1981 by Rupert Murdoch. So, in their own way all these newspapers addressed the needs of their readers to have their own biases confirmed, their opinions corroborated and on occasion their prejudices whipped up. What is new in the 21st century is the way in which our interaction with social media is increasingly removing general news reporting from the public forum and pushing ‘news’ into categories of interest determined not by journalists, whose job it was and is to investigate and report on news,  but by algorithms and AI. Subjects which appear to interest individuals are thrust at them, with different items being directed at others. Effectively general news is replaced by ‘items of interest’. In an interesting article in The Economist, the writer draws attention to the way in which fewer people are nowadays using social media to post details of the trivia in their own lives, and how more and more are becoming passive consumers of information fed to them via algorithms which have determined the items of interest to them. Even Facebook (20 years old this year – doesn’t it seem like a lot longer?) is ceasing to be a place where we tell our friends and acquaintances, with accompanying photos, the trivial details of our mostly mundane lives (we have just baked some fresh bread; acquired a new puppy; got a parking ticket or are currently lounging on a beach somewhere) and has instead become a series of videos created by organisations which the algorithms have determined will/might trigger our interest. Whether that interest is animal rescue, vegan recipes or scrap yard challenges, there will be a video to match. If, as is so often the case, the viewer shows no interest in current affairs or politics then there will be no feeds relating to that. In the relatively recent past, it was the case that newspapers with different political leanings would report news differently, but they would mostly be reporting the same events, even if that was in greater or lesser detail and with a different slant. Advertising and different features would be targeted to appeal to the different readership. Nowadays, when almost no-one buys a daily newspaper or even watches the television news, where does that leave people getting any updates on what is actually happening around the world? This may not appear to some to be a problem. It can be pointed out, quite truthfully, that echo chambers have always existed and that this is simply in the nature of human beings. The big difference now is the increased polarisation of views and the lack of live debate between real people. As the young, in particular, live increasingly through the medium of the internet, of virtual reality and of social media apps the opportunity for live debate and discussion has decreased. It has been replaced by Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), by Tik Tok, Telegram and others. In schools and universities, which used to be the places to foster such things, debate and discussion are under threat as cancel culture has proliferated. Students have retreated into “safe spaces” where they do not have to encounter opinions with which they disagree or listen to anything of “an upsetting nature”.  Those who have the temerity to express opinions which are not in tune with very vocal minorities of students and strident academics cannot simply have a good-natured discussion to put across their point of view and see if they can sway those with differing views. They must be made to conform or “disappear”. If they can find a like-minded group then they can hide within that and confirm their own prejudices and, in many cases, anger or even misery. Add to this lethal mix the existence of what Donald Trump loves to refer to, not always accurately , as “fake news” and one is left with a picture of contemporary society which is not very healthy. There is a great deal of mistrust, a lot of disbelief, a worrying number of young adults with ‘anxiety’ (which somehow, instead of simply being one of the emotions which humans are prey to, has become medicalised to the point of being labelled a disability), the bureaucratisation of victimhood and vast numbers of people living inside their own little bubbles. Is there any way out of this mess? Is it only going to get worse as the onward march of AI, virtual reality and the domination of the workplace by robots and robotics denies numbers of people a useful role and participation in society? Is the fragmentation destined to get worse? Black against White; young against old; disadvantaged against privileged; disabled (of all stripes) against healthy; jobless against employed; Islamists against Christians (or the rest of the world); immigrants against nationals; migrants against refugees. The list goes on and it is an international, not a national problem. Suggestions have been made recently that those under 16 should not have access to social media given the evident harm it can do and the way in which it can link up those like the young murderers of Brianna Ghey. Such people have always existed, but their propensity for evil has been restrained or contained by the limitations of their social circles and lack of access to material to inflame or exacerbate their base inclinations. The internet is an educational tool, a source of entertainment and a dangerous weapon, and we should, as adults, at the very least be prepared as Celia Walden points out, to acknowledge that and prevent children from having access to it. It is hard to know whether, now that the genie is out of the bottle, it can be returned, but this is perhaps something to be considered. In fact, if we are to move on from this phase in our history, it is education which we need to engage on our side. Instead of teaching our children that so many of them are victims, we need them to learn to believe in and make the best of themselves, but at the same time to be able to listen to and discuss and debate with others. We need the return of the coffee houses. Social media in its current form is not, as The Economist writer would like it to be, the coffee house culture of today. That we have yet to find. In order to do so we need to re-learn the art of civilised debate and lose our current polarisations and emphasis on victimhood and its antithesis, bullying.

Review by Vincent Guy Song Recital Brian Bannantyne-Scott, bass Derek Clark, piano Saturday 3rd February 2024 St Andrew’s & St George’s Church, Edinburgh ‘Winterreise’ was, fittingly, Schubert’s final work. He was checking the text for publishing just before he died. He died young, but so did so many in those days, when infectious diseases were rife and medicine offered little help for any affliction. In this he joined the ranks of Keats, Byron, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and many other less illustrious names. Müller, who wrote the Winterreise lyrics, died at 32. The word is that Schubert died of syphilis, but I doubt it. Late-stage syphilis, the mortal phase, destroys the brain. Schubert’s creativity, his ability to write this very piece, one of the greatest and most complex in the 19th century repertoire, gives that the lie.  And great this piece is. Melancholy yes, even tragic: a contemplation of lost love, the prospect of death, with the landscape reflecting that in an extended exercise in Pathetic Fallacy.  Melancholy is a mood Schubert explored repeatedly, though one or two of his works do go elsewhere. ‘The Trout’, as both song and quintet, takes playful delight in the fish’s escape from the angler. His 8th symphony has been described as Schubert’s Sommerreise, his summer journey. His productivity was immense. I’ve loved Schubert all my adult life but can still go to a concert or switch on the radio to find I’m hearing a work of his for the first time. Just yesterday something spine-tingling calls me from the next room. Brass and a small chorus make me think, “Oh that’s beautiful, what is it?” Then the Radio 3 announcer: “ Nachtgesang im Walde D.913 by Schubert.” Written for the tenor voice, how will Winterreise come over sung by Brian in the bass register? Wonderfully, is the answer. Brian Bannantyne-Scott’s voice is not the barnstorming rafter-resonating kind of Chaliapin or even Paul Robeson. There is a lightness, a range not only along the scale but in tone and timbre, with precision and clarity of diction plus a mastery of German pronunciation. The songs are quite short, complex, varied in style. But there’s an element common to most of the 24 songs: internal contrast. The lover sees or recalls moments of hope and happiness which are then dashed from him as he realises again what he has lost and will never find again. Brian brings out these contrasts with great skill and feeling, his lighter voice reliving the good things, his powerful depth expressing the anger, disappointment, desperation. The last song, ‘Der Leiermann’, has a different quality: a memorable tune that might become an earworm, with only slight variations on the theme. The word picture of the hurdy-gurdy man, ignored and alone, is mysterious and haunting. Is he a figure of death? The protagonist’s alter-ego? Madness in person? Pianist Derek Clark gives discreet and masterful accompaniment. The music is so rich one could almost imagine a concert performance of the piano line alone. Schubert died before he could hear a proper performance of ‘Winterreise’. He only heard himself sing it informally to a small group of friends. He would have been proud and delighted to sit among us this evening. [First published in The Edinburgh Music Review on 5th February, 2024]

by Lynda Goetz I was one of the 1.2 million Brits who signed the petition calling for Paula Vennells, ex-Chief Executive of the UK's Post Office, to be stripped of her CBE honour. I was not, though, one of the 9.8 million who watched Gwyneth Hughes’s dramatization on ITV, Mr Bates vs The Post Office. This was, in part at least, because I am a fairly avid reader of newspapers and a follower of national and international news and had been aware of the Post Office debacle for over a decade. I honestly wasn’t sure that I wanted to be further horrified or enraged about the injustices which had clearly been perpetrated against hundreds of innocent Middle Englanders who had chosen to run small businesses and become a vital part of their local communities. The impotence of the individual in the face of state or corporate bullying was always something which for me had been an easily imagined fear. Most English speakers will know of the celebrated American film ‘Shawshank Redemption’, made back in the early 90s about a man accused wrongly of the murder of his wife and incarcerated for years, but these sorts of scenarios are not just fictional. Last summer, Andrew Malkinson was released from jail after seventees years, finally exonerated of a rape of which he was not guilty. I also clearly remember reading about the several families who had been accused of child abuse in the 1980s, when their babies had been taken into hospital with injuries as a result of using baby walkers, popular around the time we had our first child. In spite of these families protesting their innocence of any such criminality towards their children, the combined weight of medical and social workers’ reports resulted in some horrific miscarriages of justice. It was easy to see how difficult, not to say impossible, it would have been to prove one’s innocence in the face of such ‘expert’ opinion, even though several of those involved were articulate middle-class professionals. The postmasters individually didn’t stand a chance, particularly when the Post Office was offering its security staff what were effectively ‘bounties’, called bonuses, for prosecutions. Apart from the worrying implications of such a policy, basically encouraging avarice and venality amongst its staff, there are a number of other serious concerns arising from this scandal. The public response to the television drama has at long last prompted the much-needed backlash and discussion. Firstly, there is the fact that, apart from a few honourable exceptions (e.g. the former Conservative M.P, James, now Lord, Arbuthnot, and Labour M.P, Kevan Jones,), so many in the higher echelons of the Post Office, in Government and in the legal profession ignored the pleas and protests of those wrongly accused and convicted. Secondly, the behaviour of the Post Office Investigation Branch (IB), now known as the Post Office Security Department which is the “oldest recognised criminal investigations force in the world and has worked for more than 335 years to detect offences against the post and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes”, * has highlighted the problems and dangers of private prosecutions. Thirdly, also put under the spotlight, is the legal presumption that computers are ‘reliable’. This has in fact been questioned by legal experts since 2009, but recommendations put forward by a group of lawyers were never implemented. Fourthly, the fact that it has taken a television drama to alert the majority of the population to this monstrous miscarriage of justice puts into question the way the public gets its information in this digital age. Finally, there is the issue of honours and how they are seemingly still, in spite of reforms, dished out wantonly to highly paid civil servants irrespective of merit and actual achievement. Starting with the first point, the attitude of the Establishment in general to this problem has been cavalier and indifferent. As several commentators have pointed out, we used to believe that this country was relatively free of the corruption we could see in other governments around the world; that our institutions were basically on our side, not simply there for the reward of those who ran them. Perhaps naively, the public believed that those in powerful positions were not rapacious and mendacious protectors of nothing but their own positions, reputations and fortunes and that of course ‘truth would out’. Well, it finally is, but it has taken far too long and too many ruined lives before this has happened. Apart from those who have died whilst waiting for justice, there were the four who killed themselves. For so many others the nightmare they couldn’t wake up from went on. As in the Andrew Malkinson case, those who had the power (in that case the police) abused it and those who had the power to listen (e.g. Sir Ed Davey, PO Minister between 2010 and 2012) turned a deaf ear or preferred to believe the executives rather than ‘the little people’. It could take a long time to remedy the mistrust which has resulted. Interestingly, on the second issue, the Bar Council in a press release yesterday (12th January) called on Parliament to review the safeguards around private prosecutions  in the wake of the Horizon Scandal. As the barristers point out, “Those bringing private prosecutions almost inevitably have a vested interest. It is important to recall that the Crown Prosecution Service itself was created in the 1980s to remove the decision on whether to prosecute for more serious crimes from the police in order to separate the decision to prosecute from those invested in the investigation”. Putting it another way, as Allison Pearson points out in her article in The Telegraph, the current position makes the Post Office “the complainant, the investigator and the beneficiary.” The Bar council’s approach echoes the request of Sir Robert Neill M.P that the Government re-visit the recommendations of the Justice Committee inquiry on safeguards. The third point could in fact be remedied relatively quickly by legislation and, given that we are now faced with the rapid spread of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is probably important that it should be. Computers, as we all know, are not always right. They are not infallible, any more than humans are. Why on earth should we have a legal presumption in their favour? In a short article in yesterday’s Guardian, Alex Hern describes how that presumption came into being in 1999 following an earlier incarnation which presumed that ‘mechanical instruments’ operated correctly unless proven otherwise. Between 1984 and 1999 computers did not benefit from that presumption, but s69 of the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act was repealed in 1999 (under pressure from, inter alia, the Post Office), when it was argued that, as volumes of computer evidence increased, the requirement imposed by s69 to prove that a computer was working properly had become burdensome and inconvenient. In a briefing note produced by a group of lawyers in June 2022, it was argued that this presumption was unsafe for a number of reasons. The Horizon scandal was referred to and in particular the findings of Lord Justice Fraser in his 2019 judgement in Bates v The Post Office. As the lawyers pointed out, the defendants “had no means of providing to the court evidence capable of rebutting the presumption. Rebutting the legal presumption may, in practice, present insuperable problems for defendants, and in the Post Office prosecutions did so.” The fourth point is one which it is almost impossible to know how to do anything about in an age of echo chambers and social media driven by algorithms. The Post Office scandal has been building for over two decades and yet it would seem that whole swathes of the population were unaware of it until very recently, when a TV drama brought it to their attention. The drama’s scriptwriter, Gwyneth Hughes, seems nonplussed by this and is quoted as saying “that’s what drama was invented to do.” Maybe, but possibly we should all be aware that if we only get our news from social media sources it will be influenced by what the algorithms deem to be our areas of interest, so that a wide-ranging coverage of events will not be presented to us. Furthermore, just listening or watching, for example, the BBC news is only going to provide coverage of what they consider to be the main news items of the day. This could leave us ignorant of a great deal of other national and international events happening at the same time. There is little which can be done to avoid this, other than educate children into understanding how information is purveyed and make them aware of the need to evaluate sources and listen to different opinions. Given that our schools, and in particular our universities, seem currently to be failing singularly on this point, it is maybe this which needs somehow to be addressed. This rather damning conclusion only confirms the view that our elites and those in positions of power and authority need to be more sensitive about their ability to affect people and influence change and to be less complacent, incompetent, insensitive and arrogant when it comes to dealing with issues pertaining to their responsibility to the public, their employees or their customers. (The victims of the infected blood scandal are already wondering when their turn to be fully listened to will come). Finally, in spite of reforms to the honours system which have seen members of the public able to nominate ‘ordinary’ people, the system remains seemingly entrenched. Civil servants and those directly or indirectly employed by Government at senior levels, are not only extremely well remunerated, many being paid more than the Prime Minister, they are also entitled to huge bonuses, retirement packages that those in the private sector can only dream of, and to top it all are awarded gongs and honours irrespective of actual merit or achievement, but seemingly for time served. Most of us are aghast at a situation where Ms Vennells is not only able to walk away with millions in bonuses, but is also able to walk straight into another highly paid government job with the National Health Service and is given a CBE, one of the highest levels of honour (OBEs rank next, followed by MBEs) at a time when the extent of the Horizon scandal was already known. What was the Honours Committee thinking of? Now that the public reaction appears to have forced the Government’s hand, the Prime Minister has made a number of announcements on this whole sorry matter: a new law will be rushed through Parliament to exonerate sub-postmasters caught up in the Horizon IT scandal; more than £1 billion of taxpayers money has been set aside to provide compensation; No 10 “fully intends” to make Fujitsu pay up if the firm is found culpable. All moves in the right direction, but what most people would also like to know is will Ms Vennells and all those self-serving bounty hunters also be made to pay up, knowing, as most of them did, the true state of affairs? Will all involved ‘have learned lessons’ or will that phrase just be parroted out meaninglessly as usual? *The Postal Museum

by Mark Nicholson The thirteenth of October 2023 was international day at our younger daughters’ school in Nairobi. On that day, the whole world was prepared to wager that very soon the Israeli Defence Force  would launch… a what? An invasion, an incursion, a punitive expedition or a Специальная военная операция into Gaza. Well, Putin might call it a “special military operation” but the rest of us would call it a war. The rest, as we say, is history. There are over one hundred nationalities among the school’s parents and roughly 45 languages. Overwhelmingly, the children are Third Culture Kids (TCKs) and/or ‘mixed’, mainly because Kenya is home to many international organizations. TCKs are children born or brought up in a third country or culture with parents often having different nationalities. “Mixed” is the children’s term for mixed race but, as our children ask, “How can there be races within the human race?”  My girls also pointed out the absurdity of the fuss created recently over the South African pop singer, Tyla.  Richard Pooley wrote about this in his last article - Coloured? "We are a culture, not a race." (only-connect.co.uk). She described herself in an interview in the USA as “Coloured", which upset many Americans. It was the official name in South Africa for persons of mixed heritage during the apartheid regime.  In the USA, the term ‘colored’ is apparently as derogatory as the names used to describe black (or Black?) people over half a century ago. Tyla is in fact of Indian-Irish-Zulu-Mauritian descent. Cultural Day at school is always a very special day. The flags, traditional dress, the (amazing) food and drink (booze not allowed), and the different cultures were all on show. Each tent comprised cuisines of three or four nationalities.  The whole school community comes together and celebrates what we are collectively: a group of highly diverse humans. Neither children nor parents took any notice of the differences in origins, dialect, skin colour, class, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. The Russian tent Groups of parents from one nationality got together and laid out their national cuisine in tents. There were Russians and Ukrainians, Serbians and Kosovans, Jews and Muslims all wandering around sampling each other’s fare. My wife and her Ethiopian team prepared njera (traditional pancake), doro wat (chicken stew in chilli sauce) and numerous vegetarian dishes. I tried Laotian, Russian and Puerto Rican food but my favourites (excluding the Ethiopian food before I get a frying pan on my head) were the Indian and the Italian. West African Muslims at the Saudi tent So what had Cultural Day at our children’s school to do with the situation in the Middle East? Well, a few days later I arrived in Glasgow and was wheeling my suitcase along the main pedestrian precinct (Buchanan Street) on a cloudless autumnal day while waiting for a train. Crowds were everywhere and so were police. There were five temporary tents manned by pro-Gaza groups and one run by a pro-Israel group. I had time to look in at each. On arrival at the Israeli tent, police officers quickly surrounded me, suspecting that I was dragging a suitcase bomb. Clearly, they did not think pro-Palestinian groups were likely targets. But what I did learn from my visit to the pro-Israel kiosk was the numbers of Jews who had left or been thrown out of their native countries in North Africa and the league of Arab States. In 1980 I was working in North Yemen, now amalgamated with Aden into Yemen. There were still Jews living peaceably among Muslims. One day, the Minister of Agriculture announced he was paying a visit to my office. There was a map of the Middle East on the wall, on which I had blacked out Israel with a felt pen. The Minister glanced at the map and said “Kindly take that map down”. “Yes, Sir, but why? I have erased Israel”. His reply was swift: “How can you erase a country that does not exist?”. The map below suggests that Yemen has lost its 62,900 Jews. Too many of my friends and acquaintances are taking sides over the ghastly conflict. You just have to listen to journalist and author, Douglas Murray, argufying (sic) with tv presenter, politician and professional controversialist, Cenk Uygur, and realize that invective and vituperation gets nowhere.  Israel will never get rid of Hamas, which is a movement or an ideology, not a people. Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran will never get rid of Israel. ¡Jamás! I have met many Israelis in Africa and many Palestinians in Jordan and elsewhere, mostly delightful, mostly well-educated, but I have yet to come across an overt member of Isis, Hamas or Al Q’aeda. The curious fact about the current Israel-Hamas conflict is that there is no relationship between death toll and international media coverage. The table below is a list of some of the conflicts over my adult life.  The sources vary as much as the estimates but you can start with Wikipedia[1] At least 25,000 Palestinians and almost 2000 Israelis have been killed in the present conflict and every day the death toll increases and is widely reported. Horrific as it is, that figure is actually insignificant in relation to the major (mostly civil) conflicts over the last 50 years or so. There must be a reason for this variation in international coverage. I am perhaps cynical so I proffer a few reasons: Israel is supposed to be a democracy and democracies should not behave like that; perhaps there is more vestigial anti-Semitism in the West than we like to believe; Cyprus (the EU) is 300 km from Haifa; Ukraine is close to (or part of ?) Western Europe and Europeans don’t like wars on their doorstep; Africa and SE Asia are a long way away for most people in the West. I could go on. Israel’s attack on Hamas is widely called genocide, which is defined as the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part. In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Isn’t all war genocide? Wasn’t Hitler’s invasion of Russia, which killed 27 million Russians, genocide? The Hamas Covenant states; “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”. That sounds fairly genocidal to me. The sad irony is that Sephardim Jews are genetically extremely close to Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians. If I ruled the world, I would do five things. First, I would create a Palestinian state that was not split into two, on condition that Palestine and its allies recognized Israel in perpetuity. Secondly, I would make it mandatory for every Israeli and Palestinian child to learn to speak and write Hebrew and Arabic fluently. Thirdly, I would ban all and any religious indoctrination and cultural brainwashing for anybody under 18, after which they could make up their own minds. Fourthly, I would make Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews do non-combative service in the military for their country. Finally, I would give Israeli-Argentine conductor, Daniel Barenboim, the Nobel Peace Prize for creating (along with the Jerusalem-born, Palestinian-American academic, Edward Said) the West-Eastern Divan orchestra of exactly 50 percent Jews and 50 percent Muslims, thereby showing that they can get on joyfully and without discrimination. Sadly, I doubt if any of the first four will happen in my lifetime. Children at our school appear not to be prejudiced by the standards of my generation. They are multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-coloured and I am glad the world belongs to them because they will have more existential threats facing them than religious differences or petty nationalism. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

by Richard Pooley Photo: Keira Burton on Pexels When I first read the headline on the news website, my immediate reaction was “Don’t tell me the bleeding obvious!”. I can’t recall the exact wording but it was something like “Greeting, thanking and conversing is good for you”. It was only when I read the article beneath that I realised that the headline writer had missed a key point of the research the journalist was reporting on. It’s long been shown that if you regularly conduct warm, friendly conversations with people you know well it doesn’t just make them happier. It makes you feel good too. But this new research, conducted by academics in Turkey and the UK* and published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, shows that even everyday, minimal social interactions can  make you a lot happier with life. Saying “Good Morning” to someone you often see on your journey to work, thanking the driver when you get off the bus, saying a few words to the person at the supermarket till will lift you (and, probably, them). I have gone out of my way to hold conversations with strangers for most of my adult life. It was a conscious attempt to overcome my crippling childhood shyness. I soon learned that it made me feel better and more confident. Only later did I realise that such chats, especially if I was listening more than talking, often made my interlocutor happier too. I have never forgotten the remark a British client made to me one day. He admitted that I had persuaded him to buy my company’s services not by the brilliance of my pitch but because we had spent most of our first meeting having a chat about his years in his company’s head office in the USA from where he had just returned. “You were the first person to show genuine interest.” My family cringe when I ask our waiter in a restaurant how long they have worked there. They cringe even more if I ask where he or she is from. Yet never has any waiter seemed put out. Quite the opposite. Their stories are almost always interesting and they clearly enjoy telling them. Yet this Turkish research is saying that you don’t need to converse at length with strangers or acquaintances (what the researchers call “weak ties”) to feel better. Just a simple “Hi” or “Thanks” will do. Over the last few weeks I have been making an effort to conduct such minimal interactions with strangers in the UK. I took a bus to and from our local hospital and thanked the driver each time I got off (and heard others do the same). I have greeted and thanked my way into and out of shops. I have made a point of greeting people on my daily walk rather than just smile or nod. In the countryside, I often get a greeting in return. In town, the reactions have ranged from a scowl to a startled response (reminding me of the reactions to Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee’s “G’day” to one and all on the streets of New York in the 1986 film). Just today, I guided a woman who was backing her car out of a driveway on a blind corner. How have I felt? Better, yes. Also, as a cross-cultural trainer for much of my working life, pleased. Because that article missed the most important finding of the research: that this improvement in life satisfaction as a result of such simple behaviour was found to be statistically valid in two very different countries – Turkey and the UK. A representative sample of 3,266 adult Turks from all twelve regions of Turkey were interviewed face-to-face by KONDA, a Turkish polling firm. A far bigger group of 60,141 English-speaking adults, mostly Brits**, were asked to complete an online questionnaire as part of The Kindness Test, a survey done between August and October 2021 by the University of Sussex in collaboration with the BBC. In the abstract of their report Dr Aşçigil and her colleagues say that previous research “relied on Western samples.” But in their study, they “examined…momentary interactions in a large, nationally representative, non-WEIRD sample from Turkey.” And they also “investigated the robustness of this approach” by seeing if they got similar results with a WEIRD sample – those 60,141 anglophones. Their conclusion? Across the two samples, even minimal social interaction leads to greater life satisfaction. A little to my surprise, the Brits, on average, registered more pleasure than the Turks did when having brief interactions with complete strangers. Not come across WEIRD before? This acronym (or backronym) was coined by Joseph Henrich, Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. It stands for Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. I’m WEIRD. So are all those who usually write for Only Connect, bar Dr Jehad Al-Omari. He’s Jordanian and therefore, like those Turks, non-WEIRD. If you want to know more about WEIRD, read Henrich’s 2020 book – The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (and suckers for acronyms and alliteration). What interests me most about Henrich is that he has pointed out that most published research on psychology and human behaviour is inherently biased, and so not universally applicable, because the participants in such research – researchers as well as those being studied – have up to now mostly been WEIRD people. Hence the importance of this Turkish-British study. As Dr Aşçigil says: “… whether our findings would generalize to other countries remains an open question.” She hopes to conduct more cross-cultural studies to find out. So, if you are looking for a way to lift your spirits (and who doesn’t right now?), try a little bit of greeting, thanking and conversing. Go well. Photo: Fred Moon on Unsplash *Minimal Social Interactions and Life Satisfaction: The Role of Greeting, Thanking, and Conversing. Esra Aşçigil and 3 others from Sabanci University, Istanbul, and Gillian Sandstrom, University of Sussex, Brighton. Published online November 17, 2023. **Anglophones from 144 countries, including many British expatriates, as well as Brits living in the UK.

by Michael Carberry Recently, one of my in-laws announced that he and his wife had decided that when they died, they would not have a funeral, since they were not religious and did not believe in an afterlife.  The undertakers would simply remove the body and cremate it without fuss.  He seemed to think my wife and I would be shocked because it would be a departure from the religious funerals which had been the norm on both sides of the family.  I was certainly not shocked – indeed it would be hypocritical for non-believers to expect a religious funeral service – but I do find it rather sad.  For me it is yet another manifestation of the increasingly common – and to my mind rather bizarre - notion that funerals are for the dead.  They are not.  It cannot be stressed too strongly that funerals are for the living! Whether or not one believes in any kind of afterlife, once a person is dead, they are past caring about what takes place after they have gone or how their remains are disposed of.  That is not true for those who survive them.  The permanent loss of a parent, partner, sibling, child or close friend can be very traumatic.   Even the passing of a public figure who we admire or respect can give rise to widespread grief as we saw with the death of the late Queen Elizabeth II or Diana, Princess of Wales.  That is why, since prehistoric times, human beings have held funeral rites to mark the passing of members of the community.  Indeed, it is one of those things that distinguish us as human beings and differentiate us from brute beasts.  Such rites have varied enormously in different periods and in different cultures but they have always involved much more than simply disposing of the dead body. That does not mean funerals need to be elaborate or expensive.  One of the most moving funerals I ever attended was that of a young Arab student in Morocco who had drowned in a swimming accident.  His mother was a widow and the family were not well off.   The hearse was an open-topped truck and the plain wooden coffin was covered with a simple green cloth.  The family members did everything themselves, including digging and filling in the grave, but all was done with great dignity including serving strangers, like myself, refreshments of mint tea with bread and honey.  And, despite the differences of language, religion and culture, I was struck by the profound similarities to funerals I had attended in the UK, and other countries – the same grief, the same compassion and the same sense of the community coming together to support the bereaved family. In my youth funerals were simple affairs.  Undertakers were usually small family businesses passed down from father to son who often made the coffins themselves.  The corpse of the deceased was clothed in a simple white shroud – clothes were too expensive to waste - and the reception after the funeral was often just a cup of tea and a sandwich in the church hall.  But in almost every case such funerals were arranged by and for the bereaved family and the community.  No one - unless one had the arrogance of a Winston Churchill - expected to organise his or her own funeral.  So why have things changed? The reason, as ever, is money. In the 1960s I remember laughing at a television programme satirising “The American Way of Death” in which “morticians” would display the corpse like a painted doll, in an elaborate coffin, decked out in their Sunday best, complete with makeup and surrounded by absurd quantities of flowers.  I thought it ludicrous.  But then some years ago something strange began to happen.   American morticians started expanding their businesses into the UK.   Many small, family undertakers were bought up by American firms who brought with them American business practices, including offering what in business-speak are known as “value added services” or what a cynic might regard as simply additional ways to extract money from grieving clients.  It has now become the norm for corpses to be dressed in their best finery and we see ever-more elaborate funerals with Victorian style horse-drawn hearses and over-elaborate and often very sentimental flower arrangements. It is interesting to note that as religious sentiment has declined so the need for such secular manifestations of love and affection seems to have increased.  Funerals are now big business. But undoubtedly the biggest money-making wheeze of all has been to get people to pay for their own funerals in advance.  This amounts to nothing less than an interest- free loan, often of thousands of pounds, given for an indeterminate period which is then invested at a profit. Multiplied across all the people who are persuaded to take up these schemes this adds up to vast sums of interest-free capital available at almost no risk.  The companies concerned do not even have to wait for the person to die to make their profit – indeed the longer their clients live the better.  Those targeted are typically elderly people often living alone and vulnerable to the blandishments of slick marketing campaigns, which highlight the high cost of funerals and the fact that the elderly relative does not want to put a financial burden on their heirs.  But the fact is that very few people die without leaving enough to cover their funeral costs, and certainly not the kind of people who take out funeral plans – many of whom own their own homes. Not surprisingly many insurance companies are now getting in on the act.  Insurance-based schemes often involve the insured person paying for the rest of their lives, meaning they can end up paying many times the cost of their funeral.   I was horrified to discover my late mother-in-law had taken out such a funeral plan. I persuaded her to cancel it.   When she died many years later, we discovered that she had already paid enough into the scheme to cover the cost of her funeral.  By cancelling it we had saved her thousands of pounds which she had been able to use and which would have gone in profits to the insurance company for doing absolutely nothing.  For me such funeral plans are merely the exploitation of vulnerable old people and I was shocked to see that Help the Aged, a registered charity in the UK, had got involved in promoting such schemes as a way of raising funds. Another inducement used by companies to encourage clients to part with money is offering them help to organise their funeral service so as not to be an inconvenience or worry to those left behind.    To me, the idea that burying one’s dead relatives is somehow a burden or an inconvenience is frankly offensive.  It is the last act we can perform for those we love to show both to ourselves and to those around us, how much they meant to us.  Moreover, many people find that preparing for a funeral can itself be very cathartic. Deciding what kind of ceremony to have, the choice of readings or music obliges the bereaved relatives to think positively about the life and character of the deceased and is a great help in coping with their own grief.  To take away that responsibility is to rob the family of something very precious.  My wife was very upset when her mother announced that she had already organised everything for her own funeral. As the only daughter and eldest child my wife felt that should have been her special responsibility and something she very much wanted to do. Instead of which her role would be reduced to little more than that of a spectator.  Although nothing was said, her mother must have come round to the same conclusion because, shortly before the old lady died, she said, “Oh, forget everything I organised.  You just do what you want!” Perhaps the most insidious justification for encouraging people to organise their own funerals is to appeal to their vanity by suggesting that they can determine “how they would like to be remembered”.  People are remembered for what they do in their lifetime – not what happens at their funeral – especially if it is they who have organised it.  We could all write glowing obituaries of ourselves, but what would those be worth, compared to those written by the people who really know us? There are some people who will not be remembered; people who die with no one to mourn them or celebrate their lives.  But these are usually those living on the fringes of society, homeless or destitute individuals, or sociopaths who, having been unloved and unloving during their lives, are unlikely to care what people think about them once they are dead.  For most of us there is someone, hopefully lots of people, who will mourn our passing and wish to remember and celebrate our lives in a way that matters to them.  That is what funerals are for. So, despite my advancing years, I will not be taking out a funeral plan nor telling my heirs what they have to do with my mortal remains when I die.  Why should I?  After all, “It’s not my funeral.”

by Stoker No, really.  We won’t even say “it’s bound to be better than last year”.  Last year was OK, as years go, and whilst we all suffer from personal downturns and unhappinesses, many of us also had minor triumphs and special joys, and look forward to more.  But if you do feel a slight tinge of optimism creeping in, in this January of 2024, then quickly turn to your newspaper or favoured TV channel. Because, my goodness, qualified joviality is not the way modern media thinks.  Only Connect tends to not be deeply glum or unduly cheerful; we try to tell you things that might intrigue or educate or amuse; that’s the general idea anyway.  And social media, by which we mean Google and Instagram and X (formerly and mostly still known as Twitter), they are not what we mean by ‘media’.  In Britain anyway, we mean The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Times, and maybe The Independent; plus of course The Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express, (though we are not sure who reads the latter now).  Plus we mean The Spectator and the New Statesman, and much more broadly, all those specialist magazines which many of us read to reflect our hobbies and tastes and social standing. And, of course, on the telly or tablet, ITV and the BBC and Sky News and GB News. Google and all those websites which are supposedly written by their readers – though heavily censored by their owners, who claim that they are mere platforms but in spite of that insist on controlling the material that their readers-turned-correspondents try to place there – are really on-line versions of the shouting matches which go on after city-centre pubs have turned out at 11pm and the more well-fuelled patrons continue the well-informed debates that have been energetically running inside.  We jest; most of the contributors in either forum have little idea what they are talking about and the debate is really aggressive personal abuse (much more unpleasant abuse on-line than outside the pub.)  Such ‘discussion’ is of no value to anybody, even the parties involved, none of whom we suspect have ever changed their views or stance by their participation, and may indeed make themselves ill by their fury. We read or watch (or used to read and watch) the more serious media in the hope of learning something interesting about what is going on in the broader world.  That hope has gradually diminished but is not entirely extinguished; there is still some serious news in your newspaper, if you can cleave your way through the life-style junk and the personal agonies (“my Christmas weight gain”) of the journalists who scribble for their monthly pittance.  The TV stations have gone further in abandoning news (except when they can have a go at Boris or Liz or Rishi) but still have some bulletins and current affairs and documentary programmes.  Less than they used to, and not nearly so good, and, as in print, poorly and scrappily researched. Of course, the point of owning a newspaper or TV station or publishing a magazine is, at heart, to make money (“Really?” Ed.).  Perhaps not the whole point (“Certainly not” Ed.). Newspapers in particular also used to represent power for their proprietors. At opposite ends of the spectrum The Sun and The Times (bizarrely, both owned by the Murdoch family) had some serious influence over voters’ approaches to decision- making in the polling booth.  But if the publication does not make money it will not survive long, and in recent years the making of money in print media has become more and more difficult.  Circulations have fallen, even on-line circulations, quite dramatically in some cases, advertising is in rapid retreat, and costs have risen enormously.  So, expenses must be cut, and increasingly the big costs relate to employees.  Sub-editing is almost an extinct skillset, to the great irritation of many readers who passed English language ‘O- level’ exams.  Not only is the media full of spelling and structural errors, it is also startingly factually inaccurate.  Read any article on a subject in which you have a specialist knowledge, it is most unlikely not to end in you throwing your newspaper to the floor (if you are reading on your tablet, please first make sure your dog is not sitting at your feet).  The support staff have also mostly gone.  Journalists answer their own phones and type their own articles ready in format for publication.  And the journalists themselves are also greatly thinned out; like a felled wood the great trees have gone and what is growing now are young and rather weedy saplings.  Mostly younger, cheaper saplings, with little knowledge of the world, very limited expense accounts, and many working from home.  Good on The Telegraph which still employs the heavyweights Charles Moore and Simon Heffer, though presumably as free-lancers, and perhaps not for much longer when the long-heralded change of ownership takes place. And, getting back to where we began, editors have realised that good news does not do much to sell newspapers or cause viewers to tune in. Now, whether it is that those editors have picked up on the general gloom of the public, or whether they have caused it, or whether it is a mixture of both, what sells is bad news.  To such an extent that there does not seem to be enough gloom to report, so the modern writer must work hard to find a gloomy side to their every story.  Admittedly, there are two full-scale wars going on, but the modern reader soon gets bored with faraway fighting.  He wants new glumness, pessimism among even the most brilliant sunshine.  Sunshine? Sure sign of global warming, cause of skin cancer, bad for your garden and making hospitals so hot patients are suffering. So, with one accord, all our national media assured us that 2024 will be even worse than 2023.  Taxes will rise, in adjusted terms if not actual. Everything will be even more expensive than it was last year. The new government which must come in this year will be even more incompetent than the one we have now – even if by some chance it is the same one we have now.  Interest rates will go back up. Energy prices will increase.  Flooding is worse than ever. Record amounts of sewage are pouring out of rivers onto beaches. The roads are ever more congested and the trains less reliable.  None of these latter statements are, in general, actually true, but no modern journalist will check such sweeping assertions for fear of not scaring their readers.  To be fair, they probably don’t have time to do that anyway. We are all sunk in a morass of unhappiness, with record numbers of us reporting unprecedented levels of mental illness.  No use turning to our glossy magazines.  Even Country Life has become a herald of doom, worrying about extinction of species, increasing regulation of countryside sports, the effect of global climate change on British gardens, and the unsustainable costs of repairing historic buildings (and even the outcome of the USA Presidential elections).  The Garden is also glum about climate change and the threats to our soil and to our woodlands and to insect life. So too the Railway Magazine about the effects on the railway network of cancelling HS2 Parts 2 and 3. We have not looked at Wisden, the cricket-lover's annual bible, but have no doubt it has concerns about pitches being both water-logged and parched, lack of cricket coaching in schools, the rapid decline of support for five-day matches; and the rising cost of beer. Oh blow this. Cheer Up!  We are still here and the snow is just starting to fall, although, in fact, it’s been a mild winter so far, with even the odd rose still out, as is the flowering cherry.  We have never lived longer or been richer or had better health, and our democracy still more or less works.  Whatever you think of the two candidates in the US election, they are both old men (as is Putin) and cannot go on much longer.  Life is not that bad and this year will be as good as last year, if not better. Happy New Year!