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by Lynda Goetz There are still plenty of ‘old schoolers’ who believe that both doctors and vets, like clergymen, are following a vocation. Apart from the fact that this was never invariably true and people chose these careers for varying reasons, including the challenge, the desire for knowledge etc., it is certainly not always the case these days. It is also, perhaps sadly, no longer in line with the way the modern world works. British citizens may have stood on doorsteps and banged saucepans and clapped for “our National Health Service”, or had their kids draw NHS rainbows to display in windows during the pandemic, but when it really comes down to it, they simply want, and expect, doctors to attend to their medical needs NOW, “free at the point of delivery”. They would also really like an NHS equivalent to deal with their increasing number of pets, a service preferably also free at the point of delivery. What they do not expect is for doctors to go on strike or for vets to charge “through the nose” for their services. One elderly lady of my acquaintance, whose father was a family doctor, commented on the subject of the present strikes: “My father must be turning in his grave. In his day you went into medicine to help people”. There is clearly still an element of that in the choice of human or veterinary medicine as a career: the feeling that you are a useful member of society; that your job is not simply a money-making exercise. However, it is also a job which requires a lot of study and carries with it a lot of responsibility. In exchange for which, it is not unreasonable to expect decent recompense and a certain amount of respect, in the old-fashioned sense. Whilst it is true that once you get to the status of consultant there is reasonable recompense, there is a great deal less respect in this age of Dr Google; and the pay, in comparison with what it was a decade or so ago, is considerably reduced. Until you reach that consultant level, not only is the financial reward distinctly less in real terms than it was, but the lack of respect plus uncongenial and demanding working conditions are all issues for many struggling junior doctors*. They are required to pay £433 a year for membership of the doctors’ ruling body, the General Medical Council (GMC), and, like the consultants, are held to account by that organisation for mistakes called out by the public, which may or may not be justifiably laid at their door (take the Bawa-Garba case). They are required, in order to progress through the system once they have qualified initially, to choose a speciality. It takes three years of further training to become a General Practitioner, and eight years in something like anaesthetics. There are a series of compulsory exams to be taken (at a cost of at least £800 a time and alongside long working days) to complete the training before one can then start looking for a post as consultant. I say “complete” but one always has to keep up to date with latest research, techniques and medications by means of Continuing Professional Development (CPD). For a medical professional (or vet) the learning never ends. For most members of the UK public this is all of little or no interest. All they want to know is that when they are sick, or require surgery, a doctor or series of doctors will be on hand to treat them at the earliest opportunity. The quasi-religious status of the NHS in Britain is somewhat bizarre and not replicated in any other countries, but it has resulted sometimes in an equally strange lack of respect for those who work in it, perhaps because of the feeling that it “belongs” to us and that we are entitled to make demands of the services it offers because “we have all paid for it”. Now that it is clearly a very broken service, the feelings of dissatisfaction on all sides are increasing rapidly. Veterinary services, on the other hand, have never been free at the point of delivery. However, veterinary medicine too is currently a cause of dissatisfaction, both for vets themselves and for the public. No longer a profession which operates in the rather cosy way it used to when the vet author of the James Herriot books was recording his series of charming anecdotes about life as a rural vet, it is at present the subject of an inquiry by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) as the costs of services have risen exponentially in recent years. For the public these rising costs are seen as simply the result of greed on the part of vets (as evidenced by such articles as “Exploitative vets make me mad”). What most are unaware of is the fact that the vets themselves are not even particularly well-paid, especially when one considers the hours they have to work. Since 1999 when Tony Blair’s Labour government opened up the world of veterinary services to competition, it has been possible for companies and private equity groups (PE) to own veterinary practices. It is this which has changed the nature of veterinary practice entirely. The speed of change has been particularly rapid in the last five to ten years. In 2021 there were approximately 25,000 vets, either self-employed or employed, in the UK. This is up from around 14,000 in 2013, but because of the increasing ‘feminisation’ of the profession many of these work part-time. As of 2018 there were 4,058 veterinary enterprises, according to Statista, but an increasing number of these are corporate or PE-owned. Anyone at all interested in gaining a bit more understanding of the profession and the way it sees itself should read the 2019 Survey of the Veterinary Profession produced for the Royal College of Veterinary surgeons (RCVS), the ruling body of the profession. 40% of respondents to that survey worked for “a practice that is part of a corporate group or a joint venture with a corporate group” and there are “high levels of concern about the changing structures in veterinary practice ownership”. Interestingly, the RCVS has control over the vets themselves, but no control over the corporates which are increasingly dominating the profession. This has led to a “very commercialised 'profession' which seems to be more interested in commercial gain of large conglomerates rather than to care for our patients and clients”, in the words of one respondent to the survey. Unfortunately, as the number of first-time pet owners in the country increases and their only experiences of veterinary practice are these commercialised conglomerates (largely dedicated to the treatment of domestic pets, mainly cats and dogs), so the standing of the actual professionals, the veterinary surgeons themselves who remain the face of the ‘industry’, will decline. Those who go into the profession do so for very similar reasons to those who go in for human medicine. Like doctors they work extremely hard and have to pass rigorous exams and conform to exacting standards and ongoing CPD. They certainly do not go into it for profit. Unlike NHS doctors, vets are not recipients of state-provided pensions, and the average salary of a veterinary surgeon is between £35,000 and £46,000 depending on which statistics you use. This is hardly rich remuneration for years of training and a work schedule which usually includes weekends and nights. It is possible, by dint of taking further exams (while still working) to obtain specialisations and earn up to £70,000 or £90,000, but this requires a great deal of dedication and almost certainly a further reduction in the poor work-life balance, which is already a major complaint of those in practice. The chances of perhaps one day becoming a partner have receded as the corporates gobble up more and more practices. In the meantime, it is a serious concern to vets that ‘‘The profession appears to be moving away from a caring and clinically-reasoned profession towards a non-caring, profit-based service industry where profit and not medicine is driving treatment approach.” The veterinary surgeons are faced daily with disgruntled and angry clients who seem not to understand that x-rays, blood tests, scans, medications and consultations cost money, so used are they to the NHS system. They also misinterpret the question “Are you insured?” which is not asked so that they can be charged more, but so that the vets do not carry out tests which the client does not have the wherewithal to pay. However, should these costs be as high as they are currently? The CMA inquiry will hopefully determine the truth of the matter. In the meantime, it would almost certainly be of enormous help to both the public and to vets if the RCVS were to include in its role the education of the public and if, instead of being so ready to jump in to action client complaints, it was to step in a little more frequently on behalf of the vets – particularly in their relationship with the conglomerates now determining the direction of the profession. As for the direction of the NHS and the discontent of the doctors and the public, the GMC would not appear to be in any position to improve either of these. The size of the behemoth and the years of state involvement make this a different beast altogether. Many are beginning to feel that reform along the lines of most European health services, or the Australian model, all of which rely on a mixture of state and private insurance, could be a better way forward. Interestingly, the British Medical Association (BMA), the doctors’ union, which could be the subject of a whole article on its own, is not interested in reform of the NHS. It appears simply to want more money thrown at it – oh and possibly to replace the current government with a Labour one. The demand for a 35% pay increase is largely viewed by both politicians and public as completely unrealistic and greedy, although the amount which has been spent on using consultants to cover absent juniors could, it is said, have paid for the increase demanded. Without doctors there can be no NHS; the flood of departures to places like Australia once graduates have completed their two-year post-qualification requirement must be a cause for concern. A system which is capable of treating the health requirements of our ever-expanding population without bankrupting the country, whilst also treating the doctors with the respect and reward they expect and deserve is going to be an ongoing conundrum for whichever government is in power after the next election. A cross-party agreement on this subject would almost certainly be in the interests of all. *For anyone not familiar with so much absurd British terminology, a 'junior doctor' is a qualified medical practitioner who has yet to finish their specialist training. There are many who have been junior doctors for twenty years. At last, this year the BMA voted to stop using this term. 'Postgraduate doctors' has been suggested instead. Unfortunately, neither the media nor the politicians seem to have noticed.

Richard Pooley In “To A Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church”, one of Robert Burns’ most amusing yet profound poems, written in 1786, the final verse contains these lines (translated from the Scots): “Oh, would some Power the gift give us To see ourselves as others see us! It would from many a blunder free us,” “As Others See Us” was an essential element of the cross-cultural courses that I used to run for business people around the world from the late 1980s to 2017. The message to my participants was blunt: if you want to successfully manage or do business with your foreign colleagues and clients, you must learn how they perceive you and your culture. I would often add that this meant learning what they were taught at school about your country’s role, if any, in their nation’s history. In a February 2018 article in Shaw Sheet I wrote about how the French currently view the role the British played in France’s history in the Second World War. It starts out by telling about a remark made by a French woman after the mayor of our village in France had given a speech beside its war memorial on 8 May 2014 – France’s Victory in Europe day. Here is a link to the article: Issue 141: 2018 02 15: You took part too – the Shaw Sheet emagazine, a Monthly Briefing on the News. For those not willing to plough through the whole piece, here is the bit with the woman’s remark: “There are nine names listed on Vayrac’s war memorial under Guerre 1939-1945. It’s unusual to have so many, even in this part of south-west France where the Resistance was arguably the strongest. So, it was not surprising that our mayor devoted almost all of his speech to recalling the courage and sacrifice of the Resistance fighters. After all, he and we can buy our bread each day from the grandson of one of those nine men. There was just one sentence reminding his listeners that others had come to the aid of France – the Russians, the Americans and the British. In that order. The mayor then pinned a medal on one ancien combattant to go with the others the old fighter was already wearing. After the ceremony we were all invited to have a drink at the mairie. A middle-aged woman came up to us and asked if we would like to pay for a bleuet de France, the blue cornflower which, like the poppy, was one of the few flowers that continued to grow in the smashed-up land between the First World War trenches. The bleuet is worn on 8 May as well as 11 November. When the woman realised we were English, she cocked her head to one side and after a moment’s hesitation said: ‘L’Angleterre? Ah oui, vous avez participé aussi.’ She was referring to the Second World War.” Several British readers (and other Brits to whom my wife and I have recounted this story) expressed disbelief: the French think we merely “took part” in the Second World War?! This was usually followed by a tirade against France’s ignominious behaviour during the war...as the British see it. One of the strangest requests I ever received in my business life was from a Japanese human resources manager. It was 1991 and I had been running my company’s Tokyo subsidiary for less than a year. Saito-san worked for Sony. I had impressed my Japanese sales staff soon after becoming their boss by managing to persuade Saito to send Sony staff to us for International Presentation Skills training. He had just come back from working for Sony in France and had seen how many of his European colleagues derided their Japanese managers for their inability to speak persuasively and clearly. He was also a history buff and an Anglophile: he was a huge admirer of the way we British had managed our empire. One day he turned up at our training centre, ostensibly to sit in on the end-of-course presentations of a group of Sony managers but, in fact, to ask me if we could train those staff being sent to China to work in Sony’s new factories. Japanese expatriate managers, technicians and trainers in their Chinese plants and sales offices were being treated with contempt by Sony’s Chinese employees. In Saito’s view one of the biggest problems was that the Japanese expats did not know the history of China in the first half of the 20th Century. They did not know how much and why they were loathed by almost every Chinese. Could we Brits (and the Australians, Canadians and US Americans among my training staff) train the Japanese being sent to China on how to work successfully with their Chinese subordinates? Saito was right. He showed me the official history textbook he had had at school. The Japanese text on the Pacific War, as the Second World War is called in Japan, barely filled a single page. It began with the reason why the Japanese had invaded Manchukuo, north-east China, in 1931: because the USA and Dutch had banned the export of oil to Japan from the Dutch East Indies and elsewhere. The Japanese had invaded Manchuria to find oil and other natural resources. In fact, such sanctions took place after Japan’s invasion, and as a response to it. And while the Japanese rightly believed there was oil in Manchuria it wasn’t discovered until 1959. The last sentence of the paragraph on the Pacific War described the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Saito and his colleagues in China had been taught that in the Pacific War the Japanese were the victims not the aggressors. Above all, there was no mention of what every Chinese child learns at school: the 6-week Nanjing Massacre which started in December 1937. The consensus is that Japanese soldiers murdered about 200,000 Chinese, mostly civilians, tens of thousands of whom were women who had been raped before being killed. Saito told me that no Japanese trainer of his assignees would tell the truth about their countrymen’s appalling treatment of the Chinese during the Pacific War, either because they did not know of it themselves or because it was too shameful (or, as he admitted, they simply did not believe it to be true). He had thought about hiring Chinese trainers but decided his Japanese colleagues would think they were spouting Chinese Communist Party propaganda. Only ‘Western’, ideally British, trainers could do this and be believed by Sony’s managers. The trouble was that whilst we might know about China's recent history neither I nor any of my non-Japanese colleagues had sufficient first-hand knowledge of China and its business culture to be able to prepare Saito's assignees effectively. In the end, if I remember correctly, Chinese trainers were used, after being carefully vetted by Saito. I have often wondered if Saito knew how negative is the image that the Chinese have of the British. Every Chinese child also learns at school about the two Opium Wars conducted by the British against the Chinese in the 19th Century and the “unequal treaties” that the Chinese were forced to sign. The British behaviour towards the Chinese during the “century of humiliation” has neither been forgotten or forgiven. Even today the Japanese version of Wikipedia’s entry on the Nanjing Massacre calls it the Nankin Jiken (Incident), displays none of the gruesome photographs that can be found on the English-language version, and expresses doubt that the numbers killed were so high. In 2019 I was in the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki, as interested in watching and listening to the reaction of the many parties of Japanese schoolchildren as I was in the exhibits themselves. The most poignant exhibits were the bones of a small hand fused into molten glass (a child drinking from a glass of water?), the blackened rice in a metal lunch box which had the owner’s name and class number scratched on the bottom (14-year old Satoko Tsutsumi, whose father discovered her corpse alongside those of his parents) and the ‘shadow’ of a man at the foot of a ladder. But the school children of Satoko Tsutsumi’s age looked bored. I watched them as they passed her lunch box. Not one glanced at it. They had already had enough and were giggling over their smartphones*. In the last room there is a panel which shows a timeline from 1933 explaining what led to the Pacific War and finally the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945. It’s only in Japanese, is badly lit and hides behind another panel, which also has a timeline but starting from 1943, in English and Japanese, focusing on the development of the bomb itself. The schoolchildren looked at neither panel. Perhaps they felt they did not need to. After all they know what happened. Unlike Saito’s textbook the standard history textbook in Japanese secondary schools today devotes 19 out of 357 pages to the period between 1931 and 1945. Even so, there is still just one sentence on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was often asked by my cross-cultural course participants what they should do when preparing to do business or work in a country new to them. My answer was always the same: read a good history of the place and when you get there, ask questions of the locals to learn how they see their nation’s story...and yours. I went to Russia three times in the early 2000s, each time in Moscow to deliver a course, once to also do some selling with a Russian-speaking colleague. Following my own advice, I re-read Orlando Figes’ vast “A People’s Tragedy – The Russian Revolution 1891-1924” and Simon Sebag Montefiore’s equally huge “Stalin – The Court of the Red Tsar.” Insight into the Russian mindset was provided by the many Russian, Belarussian and Ukrainian businesspeople I trained on Executive MBA courses in Latvia between 2009 and 2017. And I have learned yet more having a Ukrainian refugee living in our house for the past sixteen months. Yet it has required me to have some knowledge of Russian history to know what questions to ask these people to find out what makes Russians tick. The current Russian tsar, Vladimir Putin, has been rewriting his country’s history and that of Russia’s neighbours from the start of his reign in 1999. This month, Russian high school students will have a new textbook for studying modern history. From it they will learn that “Ukraine is an ultra-nationalist state. Today, any dissent in Ukraine is severely persecuted, opposition is banned...” and “the USA has become the main beneficiary of the Ukrainian conflict.” Putin is carrying on from where all but one of the Soviet Union’s leaders left off. It was only under Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s that Moscow allowed the full horror of Stalin’s reign of terror to be aired publicly in the USSR. Only then did the Kremlin condemn the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed in Moscow on 23 August 1939, which led to the Soviet invasion of Poland the following month and the Soviet annexation of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Little, if any, mention of all this is made today in Russian classrooms. A letter to the Financial Times last month from a Christopher Bellew told of a visit he had made to Kyrgyzstan, the central Asian state which was part of the Russian empire and then the Soviet Union from 1876 to 1991: “Our guide was an economics graduate; I asked him what if anything he had been taught at school about the UK. He looked embarrassed before saying he only knew we had joined both world wars at the end, when we knew we would be on the winning side.” *I have quoted myself again in this bit. It's from an article I wrote for Shaw Sheet in October 2019 after visiting Japan during the Rugby World Cup -https://shawsheet.com/article/nagasaki/

by Stoker King's Lynn in the 19th Century We must begin with abject apologies to Jan Morris; that great writer, doyenne of travellers, and Celtic poet, whose book title we have unashamedly nicked and amended for the title of this essay. But we did so with good reason. Morris had several cities that she held in particular affection. The best known is Venice; she went there many times, wrote about it often, wrote a spell-binding history of it, and was permanently and helplessly associated in the public mind with La Serenissima. But it was not her favourite city, in so much as she had a favourite; that was a little further east, at the north-east corner of the Adriatic Sea, the (now) Italian city of Trieste. Many of her journeys began in Trieste, garnering a mention as she set off elsewhere; and she was a frequent visitor to the almost forgotten seaport of the lost Hapsburg empire. Finally, she got around to writing a book about it, published in 2001: “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere”. Read it if you can; it is a romantic, almost mystical, book, meandering through Trieste’s streets and history, pondering the many and various who lived there, resting in its cafes whilst considering its complex history and strange geography. And go there. But if you have not the time or the funds or the patience to deal with modern travel complexities, here pro tem is an alternative: King’s Lynn. You may object that this is the most absurd comparison you have heard since the choice between Trump and Biden. But abide with us; you may well be convinced. Of course, England’s King’s Lynn has not the delightful cuisine and culture that Trieste enjoys, sitting at the fusible point between the delights of Italy, the Alpine peaks and meadows to the north, and the cosmopolitan underpinnings of the nations of the eastern Mediterranean. But there is more sophistication to Lynn than you might think. It sits at the landward end of the Wash, that strange melding of North Sea tidal water and flowing river water, of salt, sand and mud, that penetrates deep into the flat lands of East Anglia in the no man’s land, or no man’s water, that divides Lincolnshire and Norfolk. Here man has for centuries dug and straightened, shifted silt, dredged rivers, drained salty land; and so the Wash has shrunk and the surrounding Fens are now some of the best arable land in Britain. Many of Britain’s vegetable crops are grown here, in deep black soil protected by the pumping stations that lift water from farmland often below sea level. Roads and houses wave and recline in the shrinking peat beneath them; speed on these roads and you can easily find yourself bounced into a dyke or cabbage field. And on the very edge of the Wash, between sunken plains and the flat grey North Sea, sits King’s Lynn. This is not an ancient town; no Roman or Saxon settlement was here. It was founded by the local Bishop of Thetford in 1101, when the Great Ouse was diverted to flow more directly into the Wash, and thus created a navigable and safe channel suitable to create a port. The Bishop was astute in his investment. In a very short time Lynn was the leading port of England, serving the increasingly productive, newly-drained agricultural hinterland, and particularly the wool trade. The sheep of East Anglia created almost unimaginable wealth – unimaginable until you look at the number and size of the extravagantly decorated churches that still grace Norfolk and Suffolk (although alas the wealth to maintain them seems in increasingly short supply). Much of England’s trade with Europe went up and down the new navigable rivers which form a network over eastern England, stretching to Cambridge and beyond. At the end of the Wash it was an easy transfer to sea=going ships, which left from the wharves of Lynn, sailing east with the prevailing wind to the Baltic and Germanic shores, and returning with large profits (and German wines). Lynn expanded, both in port facilities and in the architectural glories of the wealthy town behind the quays. As in Trieste, the merchant classes, the merchants, traders, and bankers, lived close to the sources of their wealth, and built behind the wharves great complexes of houses, warehouses, stables, counting houses and staff accommodation, not least to display their great wealth. For both Trieste and for King’s Lynn life continued without much change for hundreds of years. Rivals ports arose, of course, and Lynn‘s importance declined. It stayed busy but remained largely a medieval and Tudor town, albeit with Georgian facades and redecoration. Then in the mid-nineteenth century came disaster. The first blow, to both King’s Lynn and Trieste, was the arrival of the railways. Both were at the end of the line, literally. They were left out of the new trade links. Trains created much faster and more reliable land-based connections between domestic markets and producers. Almost overnight these remote ports ceased to be commercially significant – Lynn in particular saw a catastrophic collapse in business from 1850 onwards. The merchants, traders, and bankers left. Trieste suffered a second blow after the First World War when she became an Italian possession, no longer the gateway to the greatness of the Austro-Hungarian empire, just a town without a role. Lynn went into steep decline, dependent on the Baltic timber trade, and the fishing fleet, though even some of that moved down the coast to Lowestoft and Yarmouth with their faster rail connections to London and the Midlands. The new tourist trade did not come here either; no sand, just mud; and no sea views from the quays, just the mudbanks of the Wash. The town was like the herrings in the fish factory, pickled. There was very little Victorian building in King’s Lynn and the social and cultural life no longer filled the assembly halls and hotels in the two market places. At the beginning of the twentieth century a new type of visitor came. Not many of them, it is true. But with the rise of English music and the culture of the folk-song, a number of composers realised that Lynn, poor and cut off, had preserved a working class and fishing population who clung to their old ways and old tunes. The most dedicated visitor was Ralph Vaughan Williams, then in his early 30’s and starting to build a distinguished reputation as the most English of composers. He spent much time in the slummy pubs and broken-down cottages, persuading the fisher folk to sing, with he writing down words and tunes. Out of this came a huge number of folk tunes, most famously “The Captains Apprentice”, which was taken up by Benjamin Britten to become that most heart- rending of all his operas, “Peter Grimes” (though he moved the location to Aldborough in Suffolk). Then the distinguished musicians left and two world wars came and the town became noted as a sink-hole of unemployment and poverty. In the 1950’s it was resolved that something must be done and in the way of the times it was decided that the best thing would be to demolish large parts of the town, build factories and swathes of new housing on the outskirts, and build a major road round to let the holiday traffic sweep past on its way to the Norfolk beaches. How Lynn was saved from at least part of this fate is a long story; the factories, housing, and by-pass did get built, but the intended bulldozing of much that was historic got stopped by one of the first major conservationist campaigns. One of the most important rescues was of Clifton House, the largest merchants house in the town, sitting on C12th wine cellars. Bizarrely, it was in the 1960’s the district engineers offices for the area and from here the destruction of all around was plotted (including a proposed multi-storey car park immediately to the south), but that turned out to be a plot that failed. Now it is a fascinating private house (occasionally open). The historic centre has survived, but, unusually, it is not a tourist trap. It has a life centred around music and increasingly art, and its traditional role, now much recovered, as being the county town of west Norfolk. It is a quiet, rather shy town with an enormous sense of what is past; there is little actually going on but it has an air of restfulness, of the importance it had in the past, that it shares with its much bigger Adriatic brother. In short, it is Nowhere, but a wonderful nowhere in which to stroll and ponder and be surrounded by past energies. Go to Trieste; but do not omit King’s Lynn. The writer must admit he has not yet got himself to Trieste; there is everything he desires in Lynn.

by Eric Boa Reckless driving in the Democratic Republic of the Congo We live in an age of golden travel. Never has it been so easy to go so far and wide. Yet moving around also has limitations, bounded by where we come from and constrained by political upheavals, conflict, social unrest and natural disasters. Hence the Constant Contradiction: you can more or less go anywhere at any time but have to consider the potential risk of disruptions and worse. Many have a low risk threshold – better Benidorm than Bukavu (in DR Congo). For others, all risks can be managed, nay ignored, in the pursuit of the unknown. Call me reckless, but boldly going, as they say in Star Trek, has been a lifelong pursuit. Here’s a little of what I’ve done and learnt. I lived in Clarkston, a residential area to the south of Glasgow, until I was 12 years old. Beyond Clarkston lay farms, fields and woods. This is where my exploring began: climbing gates, squeezing through fences and falling into a river, my first reckless act. I returned home nervously with sodden shoes from the aptly named Waterfoot, but undaunted. Nearby Floors Farm was where Rudolf Hess, deputy to Adolf Hitler and unrepentant Nazi, landed in 1941. My mother pointed out where he made his parachute landing after the plane he flew solo from Germany crashed, but I never visited. His journey, ostensibly to sue for peace, was utterly reckless and he was incarcerated until his death in Spandau prison in Berlin in 1987. When I started at Hutchesons Boys Grammar school I had to take the train into Glasgow. The suburban rail network was expanding in the 1960s and I looked eagerly at its map's outermost stations – the further away the better. I discovered that I could flash my railcard at the platform ticket inspectors, who controlled access to trains, and go much further than the railcard limits. The first major journey was to Helensburgh, about an hour from Clarkston, and requiring several changes of train. Sometimes I went with friends. We returned as soon as we arrived. The journey was the thing. Our longest journey (three hours there and back) was to Stirling and for this I had a home-made copy of my railcard, suitably modified (or so I thought) to appear legitimate as I flashed it at the ticket inspectors. My crude copy would have been immediately revealed if closely examined. But it wasn’t. I never thought of this as reckless, yet I had no back-up plan if rumbled and hadn’t considered the reactions of my parents once alerted to my illegal travels. On the way back from Stirling, me and my pal were given a selection of sweets by a friendly adult who’d been fixing machinery at a sweet factory. Should we have been suspicious of this stranger? It never occurred to us. I’m quietly astonished at the freedom I found to travel when I was barely out of short trousers. I moved on to bigger things and more recklessness. In 1970, aged 18, I was accepted by Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO). I had no idea at first where I was going to be sent for a year (Molepolole, a village on the edge of the Kalahari desert in Botswana), or what I was expected to do (teach subjects I knew little about), or who I would be teaching (secondary school pupils, some of whom were as old as me) or who I was going to share a house with (Richard Pooley, Only Connect’s editor). So many unknowns and yet with thrilling prospects ahead, at least until we had to start teaching and the hard work started. My parents seemed unperturbed about me going to a country that was next to South Africa and part of a region where political turmoil, insurrections and subversion were rife. The 24-hour news cycle was some years away and it was difficult to grasp what was going on without first-hand knowledge. I wrote regularly, which may have helped soothe any worries, and applied myself to teaching. I also began to witness more acts of recklessness by others: the school caretaker who broke a leg falling off the water tower ladder; the guests at a neighbour’s dinner party who unknowingly ate hash brownies; speeding bus drivers on dirt roads.* Growing up means testing your appetite for recklessness. I was just beginning. All this was a prelude to my most reckless journey so far: a 4000-mile trip through Southwest Africa (now Namibia), down to Cape Town, then back through Lesotho and Johannesburg to Molepolole. I went with Alan Buntin, another VSO, each of us with around £100 for four weeks. We never thought about visas or any other impediments to crossing borders. The VSOs we visited in Ovamboland, a restricted area bordering Angola, were amazed that we’d made it all the way there. So were we after waiting two days to cross the scrubby Kalahari in an open cattle truck, then a further day or so in another truck full of empty fuel drums to get to Windhoek, the capital of Southwest Africa, full of people of German descent wearing what looked like lederhosen. We hitch-hiked the 1300 miles to Cape Town in 36 hours and four lifts. One thing I’ve learned from my decades of travels in the Global South (and Italy) is that driving in a car is the most dangerous activity. Accepting lifts from strangers notches up the dangers. We had Christmas on the beach, where I got the worst sunburn I’ve ever had and discovered that my towelling swimming trunks, made by my mother, had a fatal design flow. They went backwards when I dived into the sea. These were undoubtedly my most reckless acts so far, risking my health and potentially contravening the puritanical mores of White South Africa: do not over-expose on the beach. Attempting to discuss apartheid revealed a different type of recklessness. We imagined that we could talk openly about the divisive policies enshrined in South African law; yet merely mentioning the pass laws (which restricted movement of non-whites) or the creation of ‘native homelands’ raised hackles. Several times we had cars swerve towards us as we were hitching. Some stopped down the road, apparently offering a lift, only to speed away when we gathered our rucksacks to approach the car. It took us some time to figure out that our appearance – longish hair, tie-dye shirts, jeans – was provoking these reactions. How you dress can be reckless, inviting adverse reactions based on prejudice that identified us as hippies and communist revolutionaries. I packed a lot of recklessness into my year in Africa but I was only just starting. My first job was in Bangladesh, where I drove a Land Rover around the country looking at bamboo clumps. I relished driving in the Bangladeshi style, waving my hand to establish my rightful place on the road and jumping ahead of long queues of lorries and buses to get on ferries. My recklessness strayed into dangerous driving and my first accident was a reminder to modify my behaviour. In Indonesia I used the same robust style of driving – purposeful – to navigate the hectic traffic of Jakarta. Or so I thought. Several people said they would never drive with me again. We all have different definitions of reckless. I’d never bungee jump yet others do so with glee. Reckless crater-watching at the Telica volcano in Nicaragua I’ve just returned from my twelfth visit to Colombia. The most common question I (still) get is: “Was it safe?” It is indeed a dangerous and violent country, but like the curate’s egg “only in parts”. In Colombia my friends and colleagues advise me on where to go and how to behave (unlike Charlie Nicholl, who visited Colombia and wrote the utterly reckless and brilliant The Fruit Palace: An Odyssey Through Colombia’s Cocaine Underworld). I listen carefully to advice and I know you can never eliminate risk. I’ve visited the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on many occasions. I survived, reader, and the closest to danger I’ve come is in a car. My appetite for recklessness has undoubtedly diminished, though my thirst for adventure remains. Recklessness has, without consciously thinking about it, provided me with many benefits. Venturing into the unknown teaches you important lessons about how the world and people work, and has given me many rewarding experiences that shape how I see the world. Reckless walking on Beachy Head in the UK *Eric diplomatically fails to mention the accident in which he was thrown out of the back of a pick-up truck being driven recklessly on Botswana’s main north-south dirt road by the editor. The truck did a 360-degree roll. Eric lay motionless in the road for several seconds but then got up apparently unharmed. Unlike the 60-year old Canadian owner of the vehicle whose arm had been broken and whose wife drove us to the nearest hospital. Ed.

by Denis Lyons Wimbledon Windmill Photo: Denis Lyons Bravo, Vincent! The United States of America’s self-inflated bubble of arrogance, stupidity and self-indulgence deserves to be punctured and your ‘American Paradox’ article - American Paradox (only-connect.co.uk) has done a masterly job of it. It was so good in fact that I’m still trying to shake off memories of a dream I had last night after reading your excellent article. In my dream, I was invited to take tea with Professor Royston Brewster III, (one of the Connecticut Brewsters), in his elegant rooms at Harvard College. Royston, as he generously invited me to call him, had also enjoyed your article and, puffing on his pipe, he said he was sorry that he had not been able to refer to it in his recent runaway bestseller: Britain – Europe’s Last, Best Hope. Brushing away a stray ember which had fallen from his pipe onto the sleeve of his tweed jacket, Royston emphasised his pro-British bona fides by pointing out that, despite his publisher’s protests, he had refused point blank to add a question mark at the end of his book title. “Your friend Vincent has certainly got the American Bible-burning thing spot on“, Royston observed. “Mind you,” he mused, “did I hear correctly that over a third of the librarians in Britain have been asked to remove not just the Bible, but a whole range of books from their shelves? And that some librarians have actually been threatened with physical violence for not doing so? Still, thank goodness you’ve cleaned up all that offensive language inAgatha Christie’s books and in the James Bond series”. Pausing reflectively for a moment, he added, “And let’s not talk about the gobblefunking going on with Roald Dahl’s books, where they’ve cut out disgusting words like ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’, or about how they’ve limited the younger audience for Watership Down because of what happens to the bunnies”. “And I loved Vincent’s quote about America going to war in order to learn geography. So true! When Britain was a world power, it was obliged to learn geography because its home market was such a small part of its total empire. When America overtook Britain as the world’s biggest economy in about 1890, admittedly its trade with the rest of the world did begin to surge. But its enormous domestic market was by far the biggest portion of its overall economic activity, so knowledge of global geography was not exactly imperative. No one is proposing gold medals for America’s foreign policy but, on the other hand, we learned a fair amount of geography when we travelled a very long way from home to help Europe sort out a couple of world wars….or ‘to bail out Europe’, as some of our regrettably uninformed Americans still put it”. “And the obesity! Oh boy, has Vincent got that one right! Have you ever tried to get past two wide-bottomed midwesterners on a New York sidewalk?! But surely these reports about obesity and its unfortunate stepsisters, diabetes and heart disease, in the UK can not be true?” Royston rose from his leather armchair with an amazing agility for a man of his age, and scanned his bookshelves before pulling out a fat binder labelled, appropriately enough, ‘Obesity’”. “Here we are”, he said, “the World Health Organization and the OECD both say that Britain has the most obese and overweight adults among the major west European countries”. He drew reflectively on his pipe before adding, “And have you been to Wakefield recently? A colleague of mine told me that over three-quarters of the population there are overweight or obese!” “Vincent also has the US healthcare system dead to rights. We do spend more per capita than pretty much anyone else. But what is it I read about the UK? Your NHS is so venerated that it is almost a national religion? People actually stand in the streets applauding NHS staff? That’s touching. And yet you pay them so poorly that doctors and nurses who are not on strike are leaving their professions in droves. So much so that the NHS England is short of 133,000 people – about one in 10 – and the adult social care sector is short of 165,000 people, according to one of your Parliamentary reports. Might we call that a paradox?” “I know that the UK has world class surgical skills, but the NHS’s waiting lists are longer, its hospital beds are fewer and its health outcomes are worse than in most of its OECD peer group – with higher avoidable mortality rates, below-average survival rates for many major cancers, and poorer outcomes from heart attacks and strokes than other OECD countries. A venerated institution and an institution on life support? Now that really is a paradox!” Royston already seemed to know that 25% of UK patients on waiting lists for surgery have been waiting for over a year and that 17% had their procedures cancelled with no new date given, so I didn’t have the heart to tell him how difficult it is just to get a GP appointment these days. Royston set his pipe aside and leaned forward in his chair. “Shall I be mother?” “I’m sorry?” “Tea?” “Ah, yes. Thank you”. Royston added milk. “After the tea has been poured”, he noted, “just like your late Queen requested when she visited here a few years ago”. He smiled wistfully at the recollection and then asked, “So why does Britain still believe so fervently that it has the finest healthcare system in the world? I read recently that up to 500 people a week were dying due to emergency care delays and over 7 million people were waiting for elective treatment”. His question made my brain seize up and I felt like I had turned up at a tutorial without having done my homework. Smiling, and not waiting for an answer, Royston said, “Now here’s another paradox for you. A few years ago the Commonwealth Fund, an American organisation, ranked the UK’s healthcare system first – and the US last - among the 11 developed nations which it surveyed”. “The UK scored highest on quality, access and efficiency. However, as the Guardian noted laconically at the time, ‘The only serious black mark against the NHS was its poor record on keeping people alive.’” Royston chuckled, “One of my favourite examples of British humour.” Royston seemed to forget his tea; he retrieved his pipe and reignited it, having added some fuel from his tobacco pouch. “Several US presidents failed to overhaul the broken US healthcare system until Obama expended an enormous amount of political capital to get the Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’) passed. Within six years Obamacare halved the uninsured part of the population and health insurance coverage was provided for over 20 million additional people. When it was passed, it was projected that Obamacare would result in health coverage for about 94% of the American population. It hasn’t solved all the problems, but what do you say? A step in the right direction?” “Tell me now, which of your brave politicians is leading the charge to overhaul your clearly struggling NHS which was set up in 1948 and which, by any measure, is now fighting for its life? I can’t think of anyone, can you?” Royston turned again to your article, Vincent, and pointed his pipe at the section about drugs. “Oh Lord”, he sighed, “we’ve had a runaway drug crisis here for decades, but some are saying that the current fentanyl epidemic is the deadliest drug crisis in US history. I hope you manage to escape it – it’s ravaging the country. It’s so bad that I sometimes think people confused Nancy Reagan’s slogan ‘Just say no’ with Nike’s ‘Just do it’”! “But tell me, how is Scotland doing these days? It wasn’t long ago that drug-related deaths in Scotland were the highest in Europe and, believe it or not, higher even than here in the US where – even before fentanyl - we were supposed to have the world’s worst drug epidemic. Now there’s a paradox!” “And guns”, he said, “another huge problem. Gun ownership and gun-related deaths in the US are higher than in any other OECD country. I’ll give Vincent that one. But the UK crime trends must surely concern you: I see that gun crime in England and Wales almost doubled recently in the space of one year. And, on top of that, last year there was a 21% increase in knife crime and an 18% increase in violent crime”. “And then, oh God, do we really have to talk about that horrendous blob, Donald Trump? Vincent is absolutely right, he’s a complete disgrace to our democracy. But, despite his controversial term in office, and the turbulence he caused around the election of his successor, we did boot him out of the Oval Office. Ultimately, the democratic process did its job and we’ve only had two Presidents in the last seven years”. “But here’s another paradox. How many Prime Ministers have you had in the last seven years? Two? Three? Oh no, I do believe it’s five. And when was the last time a British Prime Minister first reached Number 10 via a General Election? It was 13 years ago, when David Cameron managed it. Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were all ‘elected’ Prime Minister initially not as the result of a General Election, but by winning the Conservative Party leadership contest. Now that’s what I call a paradox!” “But wait, it’s even more perplexing: when Joe Biden was elected President, 66% of the 240 million eligible voters, about 158 million people, cast ballots. But when Rishi Sunak was being ‘elected’ as your Prime Minister, you could have bought a vote for £25 and become one of just 200,000 Conservative party members – in a nation of 67 million, mind you – eligible to choose the new leader of your country. That’s the sort of democracy which even Putin would endorse! Votes for cash? In the Mother of all Parliaments? How about that for a paradox?” I sipped my tea nervously; Royston was warming to his subject. “And if that wasn’t enough, you have the House of Lords”, Royston continued, “a 700-strong unelected chamber which is even bigger than the elected chamber. The Lords’ ermine robes are quite classy, and I understand that it’s a cool club which the Prime Minister can reward his pals with. But Evgeny Alexandrovich Lebedev? Lord Lebedev? Baron of Hampton and Siberia? Really? Come on!” “Liz Truss, one of your recent short-term residents at Number 10 took only a few weeks to damage the economy quite dramatically. It took Boris Johnson a bit longer but he had an even bigger impact with that thing he did….what was it called again? Oh yes – Brexit! Your Chairman of the Office for Budget Responsibility has said that Brexit cut 4% off your GDP and yet it’s all a bit like the drunk uncle at the wedding – everyone is walking away from the spectacle in embarrassment”. “It’s a sort of collective Basil Fawlty – ‘Don’t mention Brexit!’ But why not? It has aggravated all the problems it was supposed to solve – cost of living, immigration, employment, supply chains, the NHS, inflation, labor shortages, travel. Even Nigel Farage, ‘Mr. Brexit’, has said ‘Brexit has failed’. It looks like a self-inflicted Dunkirk situation – the only difference is that Dunkirk worked”. “Another paradox here is that, as horrendous as The Donald was, he never managed to wreak such economic havoc. Even the chaotic Trump regime was unable to match Boris’s signature triumph – the amputation of Britain’s 40-year old economic agreements with the EU, its largest trading partner. Misleading the queen was a pretty good Boris ruse, but misleading a majority of the British electorate was even better. It looks to me like Johnson, with his particular brand of perverse political genius, could give Trump a few lessons in the art of making paradoxes work for you”. “I did like Vincent’s reference to Dr Samuel Johnson. I am a big fan of Johnson. I even studied at his old Oxford college a long time ago and, being an egalitarian American, I always think of him as Sam. I seem to recall that Sam’s response to the Declaration of Independence was that Americans had no more right to govern themselves than the people of Cornwall. He also wished that the whole American Independence thing would conclude with ‘English superiority and American obedience’. Sam was certainly opinionated, but he was a bright guy and, if he were around today, I think even he might concede that he was very slightly on the wrong side of history with that one”. “However, the Samuel Johnson lines which Vincent quotes do accurately highlight one of American history’s major paradoxes: how on earth did America become a shining beacon of freedom for so many people all around the world, when so many of its own people were enslaved? This paradox has stoked up racial tensions which persist to this day”. “Another striking American paradox for you is how the American Revolution, unlike so many other violent revolutions, has produced one of the longest running democracies in the world”. “I guess one thing that Dr Johnson shows us is that it’s easier to spot the other guy’s paradoxes than it is for him to spot his own. After all, I think you guys dabbled a bit in the slave trade too, didn’t you?” With those words Royston started to fade away behind a cloud of tobacco smoke and his book-lined Harvard study was gradually transformed into the Oval Office. My cold cup of tea had been replaced by a tall flute of champagne and I was standing right next to the President’s Resolute Desk where Joe, (as he insisted I call him), and Suella Braverman, (“Address me as ‘Ma’am’”, she barked helpfully at me), were signing a historic, juicy, bumper new US-UK Trade Agreement. At which point it finally dawned on me: like the juicy new US-UK Trade Agreement, it had all been just a dream. Denis was born in Cornwall, raised in Ireland and Yorkshire, worked throughout Europe for Reuters, then for many years in New York for Spencer Stuart, before returning to London to brush up his English - still slightly more fluent than the Italian and French which he studied at university. We hope we can persuade him to join OC's stable of regular contributors.

by Mark Nicholson Sit yourself down in a chair. Bend your left leg over your right. While keeping your back straight, scratch the end of your nose with your big toe and now start practicing scales on a French horn using the big toe for the first valve, the index & middle toes for the middle valve and the fore toe for the third valve. That’s what Felix Klieser did at his Proms debut on August 1st as he played the second of Mozart’s horn concertos (and for an encore, the Rondo from the 4th Concerto) in front of three thousand five hundred people. For those not well acquainted with classical music, bear in mind that the French horn is not only the hardest of all the brass section to master, it is also generally considered one of the most difficult of all orchestral instruments, owing to a nasty habit of jumping an octave when you least want or expect it to. It is an annual highlight for me to migrate from Kenya to London and join or be guests of special friends for the promenade concerts (“The Proms”), a series of eighty-four concerts performed by over three thousand of the world’s top musicians in the Royal Albert Hall. I was telling everyone that Klieser was a French horn player. But no, he is not a French French horn player but a German French horn Player, and anyway I am told there is nothing French about the French horn. So there! The Gӧttingen-born Klieser has been arm-less from birth. It is humbling indeed to watch someone overcome such a major disability and end up as a professional musician. Let me modify Oscar Wilde’s famous line and say that “to lose one arm is a misfortune, to lose two sounds like carelessness”. And that brings to mind others with disabilities. Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand was composed specifically for the Austrian Jewish pianist Paul Wittgenstein (1) in 1930. His right arm was shot off in the first year of World War 1 when he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army. His 1933 recording is still available (2) but with numerous mistakes, and nothing like the flawless modern interpretations by pianists like Leon Fleisher (who suffered from focal dystonia in his right hand) or Yuja Wang. The comparisons are fascinating. Sadly, Fleisher died three years ago this month. I heard him play along with fifteen thousand others in Verona and his ability to play both melodic and harmonic lines with one hand was breath-taking. The evening before Klieser, we heard Isata Kanneh-Mason (pictured left with her brother, Sheku) play Prokoviev’s devilishly difficult 3rd Piano Concerto. Isata is the eldest of what is generally regarded as the most gifted musical family alive. All six of her siblings are musicians; three are now professional. Sheku, one of the most talented young cellists, performed solo at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan in Windsor castle. The family are British, the mother having been born in Sierra Leone (3) and the father’s parents natives of Antigua. Russian conductors, of course, are not the flavour of the decade in the West. Valerie Gergiev, in my opinion one of the two best conductors alive today, lost his job in early 2022 in Munich for refusing to denounce his long-standing pal Putin following the attack on Ukraine. Gergiev would not, or could not, publicly end his long-expressed support for Putin. Conversely, my other favourite, Kirill Petrenko, who is not a friend of Putin’s, called the invasion “a knife in the back of the entire peaceful world” and so kept his job with the Berlin Philharmonic. Meanwhile, his namesake, Vasily Petrenko, has given up conducting in Russia after describing the Russian invasion as “one of the greatest moral failures of our century”. It is somehow fitting that Vasily conducted Shostakovich’s defiant 10th Symphony on 15 August at the Albert Hall. All Shostakovich’s later symphonies were fervently anti-Stalin, anti-Hitler and anti-war. However, other Russian performers have been sent packing. The opera singer Anna Netrebko is suing New York City's Metropolitan Opera for $360,000, after she was dropped when the invasion happened. She is claiming that this decision caused her "depression, humiliation, embarrassment, stress, anxiety, emotional pain and suffering". I suspect her lawyers embellished her list of woes. At least no one has banned the performance of works by Russian composers. The other large works we heard last week were Rachmaninov’s 2nd Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony. Rightly or wrongly, I have always considered that musicians and gardeners are less likely to have mental health problems than other people. Making music or playing it are essentially joyful activities. Likewise, I don’t think I have ever met an unhappy gardener. The failure of Rachmaninov’s rarely played First Symphony put him into a three-year long bout of depression but I reckon that was his vanity in thinking his composition was more impressive than it was (4). Gustav Mahler’s equally talented brother Otto committed suicide at 21 but that is very rare for musicians. It was Tchaikovsky’s last years that were the exception. Both the 5th and the 6th are ominous and ultimately tragic works even though they cover the whole gamut of human emotions from joy to intense melancholy. Tchaikovsky’s sad end was due to the unacceptability of homosexuality in Orthodox Russian society. His downfall came when he arrived in St. Petersburg to conduct his Sixth Symphony. Duke Stenbock-Thurmor had written to Czar Alexander III, claiming his nephew was engaged in a love affair with the composer. The Czar must have been aware of Tchaikovsky’s sexual inclination because it was widely known. But the prospect of a court case involving Tchaikovsky would have meant a universal scandal: Russian high society in 1893 (two years before Oscar Wilde’s first trial) was not ready for it. Whether he died from cholera or he was ‘invited’ or encouraged to commit suicide (by drinking contaminated water) shortly thereafter has never been resolved. The final Prom I went to this year was Mozart’s unfinished Requiem, written in 1791, the most productive and final year of his life at 35. Mozart was well acquainted with early death. He was the youngest of seven children, five of whom died in infancy. Of his own six children, only two survived. In addition to having what was probably the behavioural disorder Tourettes’s syndrome (first described in 1895), he also suffered frequent attacks of tonsillitis. In 1794 he developed post-streptococcal Schönlein-Henoch syndrome, which would have caused purpura, chronic nephritis and renal failure. His death was probably due either to the latter or to cerebral haemorrhage and/ or bronchopneumonia, or all three. Beethoven’s deafness was almost certainly the result of another unusual malady. By the age of 44, he had become completely deaf in both ears, most likely caused by compression of the eighth cranial nerve associated with Paget's disease. His head became enlarged, which one can see from the prominent forehead, the protruding jaw and chin, all features consistent with Paget's, a disease containable today using bisphosphonates to control bone growth. While on the subject of deafness, the viola player Christopher Goldsheider successfully sued the Royal Opera in 2012 for hearing loss after playing in front of the brass section during performances of Wagner’s Die Walkure. The noise level was 137 dB, “equivalent to a jet engine 100ft. away”. The Spanish composer Rodrigo, who wrote the magical Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar, went blind at three following diphtheria, today easily preventable with vaccination. Composers are no less susceptible to the diseases that kill the rest of us. Robert Schumann died of vascular dementia brought on by tertiary syphilis. Brahms died of liver cancer, Bartok of polycythaemia and Chopin of TB, But the lives of many of them might have been much longer if antibiotics and related drugs had been around. Mental illness, sadly, is not so easily treatable, but it seems to be rare amongst musicians. Yes, both Paul Wittgenstein and the extraordinary Canadian pianist Glenn Gould displayed Asperger’s syndrome but that clearly contributed to their flair. Tchaikovsky did not of course suffer from mental illness. He was the victim of discrimination and persecution, which resulted in depression. As the great Horowitz said: "Tchaikovsky is admired for his emotional frankness; if his music seems harried and insecure, so are we all". The Proms serve also to remind us how much we should be grateful for in the 21st Century: the sheer professionalism of today’s performers is staggering. And let us not forget the technological magic that allows us to hear superb renditions of brilliant performances, live, or on the radio or television or indeed anytime, thanks to advances such as BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds etc. 1 From a highly distinguished family and brother of one of the greatest mathematicians and philosophers of the 20th Century, Ludwig Wittgenstein. 2 Available on https://www.google.com/search? q=wittgenstein+ravel+piano+concerto&oq=&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCQgCECMYJxjqAjIJCAAQIxgnGOoCMgkIARAjGCcY6gIyCQgCECMYJxjqAjIJCAMQIxgnGOoCMgkIBBAjGCcY6gIyCQgFECMYJxjqAjIJCAYQLhgnGOoCMgkIBxAjGCcY6gLSAQ4yNTUzNzIyNzdqMGoxNagCCLACAQ&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:6ca0c5e2,vid:Qz3sf3WWo7U 3 House of Music – Raising the Kanneh-Masons by Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason 4 It is actually a wonderful work. The first under-rehearsed performance was ruined by the conductor (and composer) Alexander Glazunov, who happened to be drunk at the time.

by Richard Pooley “Is it original?” the member of the film crew asked me. “Yes. It’s a letter he wrote to his mother. One of about a thousand that still exist. He wrote to her from his schooldays until her death. As you can see, he called her ‘Mam’. This one is unusual; he’s written the date: ‘Nov 11 /91’. Very few of his letters to her have a date. Must be a nightmare for his biographers. And the punctuation is almost all correct. That’s unusual too; for a writer he was pretty cavalier with his punctuation. And his spelling.” “Beautiful handwriting. And so easy to read.” “Yes, and no crossing-outs. In all the letters he wrote … thousands to all sorts of people...you’ll hardly find any crossing-outs. He had a very ordered mind." She wasn’t listening to my wittering. “Can I pick it up?” “Sure” She slid her hand under the little letter and lifted it off the table. She placed a finger against the top of the brown-yellowed paper, presumably so as not to touch any ink, and deftly turned over the first page to look at the next two. The content of the first page had not seemed to interest her, even though it contained a line which still shocks me however many times I read it. It was the same with the other pages. She scanned them swiftly, whispered a quiet “Wow!” and let the letter slip off her palm on to the table. Her reverence for this piece of paper was palpable. We were in a Victorian-era country house hotel on the edge of the New Forest in England. I was about to be interviewed by historian Lucy Worsley for a three-hour, three-episode BBC television documentary on Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.* The producer wanted me to talk about Doyle’s relationship with his mother, Mary, focusing on the letters about his Sherlock Holmes stories that he wrote to her between October 1891 and April 1893. Even though “A Scandal in Bohemia”, the first of these stories, had, unlike two previous Holmes novels, brought him instant fame and much-needed fortune in July 1891, he was telling her just three months later that: “I think of slaying Holmes...& winding him up for good & all. He takes my mind from better things.” On 6 January 1892 he wrote: “So now a long farewell to Sherlock...He still lives however, thanks to your entreaties.” Clearly, she had kept begging him not to kill off Holmes. She must have seen what her son could not: that he had created someone and something totally new and fascinating. So much more enthralling to Victorian readers than his painstakingly-researched historical novels. We don’t know exactly what her arguments were (though we can be sure that one was financial); whilst she kept all his letters to her, he only kept a few from her to him. It is largely thanks to her “entreaties” that it took almost another two years and twelve more Holmes stories before Doyle sent Holmes and his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, plummeting to their (apparent) deaths at the Reichenbach Falls in “The Final Problem.” But none of that seemed to have been of great interest to the member of the film crew. I am sure she appreciated that the letter’s contents made it both financially and historically valuable. But her reverential “Wow!” came from somewhere else. Why do we so value, worship even, the original? The BBC producer had insisted that Worsley and I have Doyle’s original letters in front of us; that I read from the originals or handed them over for her to read. You don’t need to have the original in your hands to make the same observations I made to Worsley and to the member of her film crew. A good copy would have sufficed. It’s true that it makes a difference when you can see how someone writes. You don’t need to be a graphologist to make a few shrewd guesses about the writer’s personality. But you don’t have to see the original to make those guesses. You can find these letters or extracts from them in the excellent “Arthur Conan Doyle - A Life in Letters”**. The editors give the context in which each letter was written, making the book more illuminating than most biographies of Doyle that I have read. In the book the letters are typewritten, not facsimiles of the original letters, all but a few of which were hand-written. Toronto-based psychologist George Newman has conducted a number of experiments to find out why we value the original over the copy or the forgery. He used paintings and sculpture but he reckons that his findings are relevant to any object which can be shown to be connected to a famous person. We seem to believe that the object, however mundane, is imbued with a special quality simply because it has been touched by that person. I also had that Wow! feeling when I first handled (very carefully) Doyle’s original letters. But the Wow! was louder when I saw and touched the blotting paper which had been on his desk the day he died in 1930. Ostensibly, it has little financial value. But to touch something which he must have used time and again to dry the ink on his letters and manuscripts (you can still see many signatures of his in mirror form) still gives me goose bumps. There is a twist to this tale of handwritten letters. From 1901 to 1930 Doyle employed Major Alfred Wood as his secretary. Wood had been a cricketing and football friend of Doyle’s when the young doctor lived and practised in Southsea. He came to be part of the Doyle family, living and travelling with them (and playing golf and cricket with Doyle). Doyle became very dependant on him. In a 1919 letter to his mother Doyle wrote “I had a hard time in London, but got back last night and am all fit again – about 60 letters awaited me. I don’t know what I should do without Wood.” Many of Doyle’s letters were dictated to Wood for him to type but Wood would also write many of them by hand, especially those which were impersonal – e.g. responses to invitations – or which required standard answers – e.g. letters to Doyle imploring him, or more often Sherlock Holmes, to solve some problem. He soon was able to imitate Doyle’s handwriting perfectly, although I understand that the signature was usually done by Doyle. I have occasionally come across publicity for the sale of some of Doyle’s letters. I wonder if auctioneers know about Wood and, if they do, whether they warn any prospective buyer that the handwriting may not be Doyle’s. What do you think? Once I watched an episode of the BBC’s Flog It! during which a few of his handwritten letters were auctioned. Their content was of such little interest that we were not told what it was. They appeared to have been written during the time when Wood was Doyle’s secretary. I fear the buyer of those letters thinks they are ‘original’, meaning that the hand that wrote them was Doyle’s. Does it matter if Wood wrote them? Probably not. I’m sure their new owner would have muttered “Wow!” on first handling them, thinking “this was written by the man who created Sherlock Holmes.”*** *It was commissioned by the BBC (and PBS of the USA) after the success of Worsley’s three-part documentary on Agatha Christie, broadcast last year. I am Doyle’s step-great grandson and run the Conan Doyle Estate. If you are wondering why I have not called Doyle ‘Sir’, it’s because he himself seldom wrote it and insisted that his publishers did not use it either. As three letters to his mother, written in April-June 1902, show, he really did not want to be knighted. She thought otherwise. She had commissioned a “Pedigree” from “Sir Arthur Vicars, Ulster King-at-Arms at Dublin Castle” which showed that he, via her Irish mother’s family, was descended from English nobility (the Percys of Northumberland) and royalty (King Henry III and John of Gaunt). So, she must have thought, it would be right for him to accept a knighthood from King Edward VII. She won; as she nearly always did when arguing with her son. **The Penguin Press, published in 2007. ***Though not all believe he did. See my article - https://www.only-connect.co.uk/post/did-sherlock-holmes-really-exist

by Vincent Guy Yap Currency Photo: Eric Guinther A Stone The Isles of Yap lie in the Mid Pacific, some 800 miles East of the Philippines. If both name and location suggest something out of Gulliver’s Travels, their financial system is even more exotic. For several thousand years they have used stones for money. These vary in size from pebbles to hold in the hand, to huge rocks which a single person couldn’t shift. The Yap islanders bring them across the sea from Palau 300 miles away. Things can go wrong. A while ago, a huge money boulder representing the wealth of several people dropped to the sea bottom. You might think that would cancel its value, but no: it remains part of the currency system though no-one has seen it for years. Is this surprising? A House In London’s Bloomsbury, just round the corner from the budget hotel I use when in town, stands an elegant house. It has a fine frontage, looks reasonably spacious and is handily located for travel in and out of London or strolling to the British Museum, the University or even the West End. It boasts a sign saying “Keep Clear. Entrance in frequent use”, but I’ve never seen anyone using it. Recently I spotted a youngish man sitting on the front step drinking a bottle of beer. I asked him: “Do you live here?” “No, no, I just like sitting here. I live round the corner.” “So who does it belong to?” “Not quite sure. No-one’s been here for years.” “So it’s empty?” “Well, it does belong to somebody.” “How much is it worth? Do you have any idea?” “Search me, mate.” A glance in the window of a nearby estate agent indicates that a Bloomsbury bedsit would leave you some small change from a million pounds. So the house must represent something like 10 million sitting idle. A Mansion It’s far from unique. Empty high-value properties abound throughout central London. The most expensive of all is reputedly one in Rutland Gate near the Albert Hall in Kensington. You could buy it now if you have £200 million rattling around in your purse. The Guardian, under the headline “This is where people with staggering wealth end up”, reported that it’s on the market, with its 45 rooms in a rather dilapidated state, and has its own website. Again it’s not quite clear who the owner might be. Its story goes back to the time of Napoleon when the Duke of Rutland had a pile of spare loot from the slave trade, the East India Company and his feudal estates in, of course, Rutland. Rutland was then England’s smallest county, so his estates probably spread beyond the county borderlines. The Duke’s metropolitan pied-a-terre was rebuilt in the 1930s; subsequent owners have included politicians and business leaders from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Hongkong and mainland China. The agent appears to be B*** Estates, whose spokesperson describes their clients as “billionaires who buy private palaces and state-of-the-art mega-mansions and country estates”. A Butler But London is more than a place for the super-rich to turn their gains into bricks and stucco. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson observed in 1962 that “Great Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role”. But it has: facilitating the planet’s wealthy in concealing assets, laundering money, evading tax. It is “Butler to the World”. In his book of that name, Oliver Bullough makes play with the role of Jeeves, butler to the fictional Bertie Wooster, who smooths out the consequences of Bertie’s pranks without asking awkward questions. But whereas the Jeeves/Wooster relationship is imaginary fun, the role London plays is serious, even deadly serious, covering up exploitation, rapacity and crime. The UK’s strict defamation laws and the high cost of going to court enable the fixers to quash most attempts at uncovering or criticising their manipulations. This role is hardly new; London played it as hub of the empire and, prior to that, of the Atlantic slave trade. I am choosing my words judiciously here to minimise the risk of a libel suit. A Bulb In Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) Charles Mackay wrote a convincing historical account of how money gets divorced from value. A best seller, the book is still in print. The first case he treats is the 1637 Dutch Tulip Mania. A by-product of the Netherlands’ economic boom, we read how tulip bulbs changed hands for more than the price of a house, a man was attacked for eating a bulb thinking it was an onion, and how the boom bust, leaving a heap of ruined speculators.In fact, Tulip Mania never happened, at least not on the ruinous scale Mackay described; it seems to be largely another of those historical myths. A Bubble However, another “madness”, the South Sea Bubble, was real enough. It was fuelled by the emerging prosperity of Britain as a mercantile nation in the early 1700s. Among the new company prospectuses, my personal favourite is one that promised "a company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is". If it didn’t ruin many, it certainly humiliated them. Incautious punters ranged throughout the upper echelons of society, even King George I himself. Another was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had first introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, now hoping to grab some wonga to cover up an indiscreet romance. Most famous and perhaps most foolish was the great mathematician, Isaac Newton, who got his numbers wrong. He invested, got out in good time, but then re-entered the whirlpool, losing, in today’s money, several million pounds. "I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies", but not the madness of men" was his reported comment. But the Bubble’s lasting consequences were few. Britain went on merrily coining it in from trading and colonising for the next couple of centuries. It’s worth mentioning a couple of other financial fantasies that did leave a lasting mark on the real world: the Spanish conquests in the Americas and the Darién Disaster. A Ship Spain funded the journeys of the Genoese sailor Cristóforo Colombo who made landfall in the Caribbean in 1492. Within a few years, the Spanish had toppled the Inca and Aztec empires, melting down much of their imperial treasure and shipping the results home to Spain. A word-picture, painted by John Masefield, evokes the rich pickings in raw materials over the next 300 years: Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus, Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores, With a cargo of diamonds, Emeralds, amethysts, Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores. Masefield’s tally of the cargo is remarkably accurate: all those items come from Latin America (except those mysterious moidores which are gold coins minted in Portugal). But did those galleons bring prosperity to Spain? Quite the opposite. The Spanish treasury declared itself bankrupt at least three times in this period. Spanish society remained frozen in quasi-feudalism until the death of Franco in 1976. A Scheme An event in the same part of the world has reverberations down to our day. In the 1690s the Scots were keen to compete with the English in profiting from new opportunities in world trade. William Paterson, whose name also pops up in the South Sea Bubble affair, set up a scheme to establish a colony in Panama at the Darién Gap. His prospectus described riches for the taking, a benign climate and friendly natives. The Scots, both rich and poor, were invited to invest, which they did, in droves, digging themselves into debt. A couple of ships full of would-be colonists went out there. The Spanish, believing, with some justification, that the place belonged to them, harassed the colony. The English, for their own good reasons, declined to help. Local variants of tropical diseases killed off most of the survivors. Only the natives did a bit to fulfil the airy promises, offering a little fruit to the starving colonists. Not enough to make a difference. Back home in Scotland, everyone was ruined. At which point the English kindly stepped in saying something like: “Look, give up your independent parliament, come under ours in Westminster and we’ll pay off your debts.” Thus Scotland, instead of just sharing a monarch, became an integral part of the United Kingdom. Today the Scottish National Party hope to be well on their way to undoing that. Oddly, they seldom mention Darién. A Tree “There is no Magic Money Tree”, said Theresa May as UK Prime Minister in 2017, when people were claiming that there should be no limits on government spending. On the political Left there’s a current mode of thinking known as Modern Monetary Theory which argues exactly that: government can spend as much as it chooses. The coincidence of initial letters, MMT, might make you wonder. Next PM but one Liz Truss, very much of the Right, went all out for a Britain of lower taxes and bigger debt. But by neglecting to consult the experts, ignoring numerical details and sacking some people who might have steadied the ship, she demonstrated that MMT of either kind was a dead duck. A myriad more examples could be added, from the 1840s Railway Mania (which “Madness of Crowds” Mackay robustly assured his readers would never collapse), to the 2022 failure of FTX Bank. In a matter of months. its boss’s net worth slid from $26billion to zero. His name is strangely appropriate: Bankman-Fried. A Dream Why do we chase money? In 1930 the economist J. M. Keynes wrote “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren”. He imagined a near future when people would have enough wealth for their comfort, choose a shorter working week and simply enjoy themselves. Have the French, rioting over a couple of retirement years, been reading Keynes? Or dipping into Marx’s early writings about the laid-back life after the revolution where a person might do a little fishing in the morning, write some criticism in the afternoon, and discuss philosophy in the evening? How unlike the home life of Soviet Russians or the Chinese today. How unlike ours in Britain. The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. William Wordsworth, 1807

by Lynda Goetz Geralt, Pixabay Every week there are yet more examples of a country, or indeed a world, which seems increasingly insane. Clearly, this is not the first time in history that the general populace has felt out of touch with its rulers and, assuming climate change continues as a relatively slow-onset disaster, it will not be the last. There is undoubtedly though, at the moment, a feeling of impending disaster and general doom and gloom which is not just felt in this country, but in many others around the globe. Should we believe those who feel that we have reached a new existential crisis point for humankind or should we be “Taking the Long View”*? Here in the UK there is disenchantment with our present government, but as far as one can tell, not a great deal of enthusiasm for the Labour alternative led by Sir Keir Starmer. The Greens appear to be playing to both sides and presenting themselves as radical and outraged in the cities but conservationist guardians of the community in the countryside. It is hard to have any confidence or place any faith in our cohort of current politicians; no potential leaders stand out. Sunak seems capable, intelligent and steady, but somehow uninspiring and it is hard to tell what, if anything, he really believes in or stands for. One of his major drawbacks is that he was never elected as Prime Minister but came to that position by default; never an easy situation for his detractors to come to terms with. Sir Keir may have been elected by his party, but what he actually stands for is even harder to determine. Journalist Zoe Strimpel goes as far as to suggest that “There is no issue that the Labour leader can’t find a way to flip-flop on”. She is admittedly writing for The Telegraph, but even that supporter of the Right finds it extremely difficult these days to raise any sort of enthusiasm for this current Tory government’s policies. Rod Liddle in The Spectator starts his most recent article with the comment “My default mood at the moment is bleak despair, although it can sometimes be triggered into nihilistic loathing, which I think I mildly prefer.” This state of mind is not sadly limited to middle-aged white men whose views are supposedly completely out of touch with the current ‘zeitgeist’. It exists on both Left and Right of the political spectrum and amongst those who profess no interest in politics. It is prevalent amongst the old, the young and all those in between. Unfortunately the polarisation of views, first so obvious in America, seems to have been exported to Europe. There would appear to be no consensus possible. On one side are those who believe that the whole of history (of which they mainly have little or no understanding or knowledge) is a gigantic conspiracy of the white “patriarchy” to subjugate not only women but all of the rest of the world who have different skin colour and beliefs. On the other side are those who consider that “the past is a foreign country”**, which we need to accept and understand and move on from without negating its positives or swinging away from so violently that we create our own contemporary cultural cul-de-sac. Strangely, in our current world, the word ‘inclusive’ actually seems to mean the exact opposite of the definition in my dictionary. Whenever this word is used, it seems to precede the cancellation, silencing or ejection of someone with whose views the organisation disagrees or disapproves. The recent cancellation of Graham Lineham’s show at the Leith Arches at the Edinburgh Fringe is a case in point. The fact that The Telegraph subsequently gave him space to comment on this does not, as TV star Jenny Ryan suggests, stop it being a cancellation. In its cancellation announcement, Leith Arches said, ‘….we are an inclusive venue and this does not align with our overall values’. Very similar words were used by Coutts in their internal memorandum prepared before "debanking" Nigel Farage. It is no longer enough these days that one is prepared to live and let live, we are increasingly pushed to "celebrate" difference. Those who have the temerity to suggest that they believe in biological difference or that they fail to understand why Snow White should not be White or that it really doesn’t make sense for a character in a particular play to be in a wheelchair or question why we need all our supermarkets and banks to spend a month celebrating LGBTQ++ can, if they dare to voice such opinions openly, find themselves without a job, bank account, X (née Twitter) followers or whatever. Those who questioned Lock-down during the Covid 19 pandemic were similarly silenced. This is not what should be happening in a democracy. Whatever has happened to free speech? Whatever has happened to debate? In Europe, governments are moving right rather than left. However, Will Hutton in The Guardian takes the view that this will pass and that “ultra-right wing politics will retreat. Ultimately, people want prosperity, security and fairness”. The latter statement is obviously true and impossible to disagree with. Unfortunately, I am not convinced that what we currently have in this country is any of those things. Hutton, clearly a committed ‘Rejoiner’, goes on as follows “Starmer’s Labour has the opportunity of a generation: to turn the economy around, meet today’s grand challenges while retaining our great liberal open culture. Success will be defeat for Europe’s Right: democracy and capitalism shown to work. It will be our ticket to be readmitted to the heart of what will still be a great club that will emerge stronger, if battered. What we are living through is all part of the process: building Europe. Take heart”. Our “great liberal open culture” is currently neither liberal nor open. It is divided, dogmatic and divisive. All we can hope is that with so many MPs proposing to retire at the next election we get the opportunity to vote in some energetic new ones with the vision to see that “our NHS” is broken and needs a new approach to management and funding; that our schools and examination systems likewise are not the envy of the world; that technology and AI will play an important role in our future, but that consensus will be required as to how extensive that role should be; that immigration is a massive worldwide issue which needs addressing on a worldwide basis; and that whilst climate and the environment are of huge concern, nothing will be solved by shooting our economy in the foot to eradicate our own 1% contribution to global emissions. A tall order? Definitely, but if the next generations want to tear down the patriarchy, then they perhaps need to roll up their sleeves and make a positive contribution rather than putting their fingers in their ears, whingeing about their mental health and the upset caused to them by ‘triggering’ events. It might also be useful if more were to study history, rather than sociology or psychology (currently both racing up the A-level popularity lists). *A BBC Radio 4 programme which compares current events with similar situations from history. **From L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between.

by Richard Pooley Henley Royal Regatta, 2014. Great Britain's Women's Quadruple Sculls passing the Stewards Enclosure to win the Princess Grace Cup. Photo: Ben Rodford “I didn’t think you were the type.” Zu Henry, our neighbour in Bath, was looking through the passenger window of our car and addressing me. My wife had just told her that we were on our way to Henley Royal Regatta, Britain’s premier rowing event and one long regarded as the last bastion of the English upper classes. There was no reason for Zu to know that I had rowed at my secondary school – Westminster, one of the oldest ‘public’ (in fact, private and fee-paying) schools in the country, dating back at least a thousand years and re-founded both by Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth I in the 16th century. Nor does she know that I had rowed at Exeter University and was going to Henley on the fiftieth anniversary of my being a losing finalist in the Visitors Cup, an event for coxless fours. We were beaten by a crew from Trinity College, Cambridge. One of the four men in the Trinity boat had also rowed in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and had been my best friend at Westminster. Like me, the other three men in my boat had been to public schools - two to Radley and one to Eton*. The British rowing world in the 1960s and 1970s was a tiny one, consisting almost entirely of boys and men who attended public schools before going on to Oxbridge and a few other top universities. Having rowed at Henley I was entitled to become a member of the prestigious (and expensive) Stewards Enclosure during the annual Royal Regatta, which then lasted four days but which is now a six-day event. I did so and went every year in my early and mid-twenties, taking girlfriends (in dresses or skirts, which covered their knees; trouser-suits were banned), seeing old rowing mates, drinking too much Pimms, and always dressed in jacket and tie (as required by the rules). I'm sure I looked and sounded like the "type" who went to Henley. But I soon tired of it. It’s seldom exciting to watch – two crews rowing against each other for 2,112 metres (1 mile 550 yards) who start side-by-side but hardly ever finish so – and my jobs often meant I was not in the UK in late June. I had loved the sport and was good at it but once I was only a spectator saw and heard little that I liked. Snobbery and misogyny ruled, as it had done almost from the regatta’s inception in 1839. Actually, in 1839 any man could enter what was supposed to be an amateur competition. But soon those whose profession involved rowing, a large number of men in the days before motor engines, were shut out. Was it because they were beating the public schoolboys and university men? By 1879 Henley excluded anybody who had competed for money, who had earned money from teaching “athletic exercises of any kind”, who had “been employed in or about boats for money or wages”, and who had “been by trade or employment for wages a mechanic, artisan or labourer.” Clearly even these strictures were not enough to keep the hoi-polloi** from trying to compete with their betters. In 1886 any person “engaged in any menial activity” was banned. British rowing’s governing body, the Amateur Rowing Association, adopted these same rules. Although a rival organisation was set up in 1890 which allowed manual labourers to be amateur rowers, the ARA and Henley RR continued to effectively exclude all but the upper classes from rowing in the UK up to the beginning of the second world war. And little had changed by the time I had stopped going regularly to Henley in the late 1970s. I had been twice again since then, the last time some twenty years ago. I noticed some changes. Most important, there were events for women. Henley’s chairman, Peter Coni, had allowed women to race in “exhibition races” (what were they exhibiting?) in 1981 and 1982. But he thought the experiment a failure and women did not row again at Henley until 1993. Coni’s comment on the anger this ban caused is worth repeating: “the women’s squealing is more noisy, stupid and harmful to their cause than anything I can think of.” A Single Sculls event for women was started in 1993 over the full course. The winner, a Swede, was handed her prize by Coni, a few weeks before he died.*** By the early years of this century there were many more women’s events. Now, there are almost as many women rowing at Henley as men. In 2023 Henley Royal Regatta (and British rowing) has utterly changed from even twenty years ago. Yes, there are the same trappings in the Stewards Enclosure – the immaculate marquees and stands (and loos), the champagne bar, the military band, the men in rowing blazers and caps (not me, guv), the women in long dresses and hats. But the feel of it is so different. For a start it’s become so much less old male. No longer are the spectators mostly paunchy men of middle age and beyond recalling their days of youth in over-loud voices baying of privilege. No sooner had we walked though the entrance to the Stewards Enclosure than our host, Mark Venn, with whom I rowed at university, introduced us to Beth Rodford a member of his boat club, Gloucester. Beth won a gold medal representing Great Britain at the 2010 World Championships as well as winning many events at Henley (she is the stroke - on the right - in the photo above, taken by her brother). She was a finalist in the Olympic Games of 2008 and 2012. Henley was full of athletic, confident, no-nonsense women like her. No squealing women here, Mr Coni. For a paunchy old public school male like me it was a delight to behold. The glass ceiling which once consigned women to a lowly position in rowing’s hierarchy has been smashed. And by breaking through the glass ceiling, women rowers have in turn helped break the class ceiling which stopped people who did not go to public schools and universities from getting to the top in the sport. When I was at Exeter University fifty years ago there was not a single woman in our boat club. The same boat club today has almost as many women members as men. Hardly any of these women had stepped into a rowing boat before they arrived at Exeter. It’s the same at universities across the country. I would guess that most of these women went to state schools, not public schools. As well as the women, one man can justifiably claim to have also helped break the class ceiling in British rowing. Sir Steven Redgrave won gold medals at five consecutive Olympic Games from 1984 to 2000, as well as winning three Commonwealth Games gold medals and nine World Rowing Championship golds. He also won seventeen times at Henley, where he has been Chairman of the management committee since 2015 (2024 will be his last year). Yet Redgrave, son of a builder, went to a state school, Great Marlow, by the river Thames. He has dyslexia and had to have extra tuition from his English teacher, Francis Smith, who happened to be the captain of Marlow Rowing Club. Smith saw his potential and encouraged him to row. Redgrave left school in 1978 with a single GCSE (in woodwork) but went on to be a role model for countless others who have taken up rowing in the UK whatever their education and background. Mark, our host at Henley, had a similar entry into rowing as Redgrave, though his was several years earlier: “As you know, when we learned [to row], rowing was really the preserve of public schools and universities. I was fortunate, going to a state school, in that our deputy head was a bigwig in Reading Rowing Club, so took pupils down and taught them from 3rd/4th year. Since that time more state schools have taken up the sport and many clubs also started offering facilities for junior rowing...We now see an enormous breadth of activity across the country. At Gloucester [Rowing Club], for example, we have (or had, until Hartpury College Boat Club was set up) a big junior section, all drawn from local state schools.” Mark continues to shame me by rowing into his seventies. And he attends almost every day of Henley Royal Regatta every year. Its thanks to people like him and Beth Rodford that rowing has moved from being one of the most hidebound sports in the UK to becoming one of the most egalitarian. *Eton’s rowing blades are painted in ‘Eton Blue’ (actually a shade of green). For much of the 19th century there was an annual Westminster v Eton boat race on the river Thames. In the first few years both crews wore pink, a fashionable colour at the time, regarded as very masculine (think ‘Hunting Pink’… which is actually red). In order to distinguish between the crews, the Etonians wore blue-green ribbons. In 1837 the schools rowed for the honour of having pink as their school colour. Westminster won. I hated the colour but found it useful when I wanted to watch a particularly interesting debate in the House of Commons across Parliament Square from the school. The school’s Queen’s Scholars were allowed to go to the head of the queue to get in. I wasn’t a Q.S. but, wearing my pink blazer, I was never stopped. **From Greek, meaning “the many”. It was an expression I heard a lot at Westminster along with “plebs” and “the great unwashed”, although we used it sarcastically: these were terms for the working class used by Etonians and other public school boys, not us London liberal cosmopolitans. We did not consider ourselves to be the hoi oligoi (“the few”). After all, none of the seven British prime ministers (and one deputy prime minister) who had gone to Westminster had been Tories. ***It was Coni who had insisted that short skirts were prohibited in the Stewards Enclosure. In 1988 he was quoted in The Times as saying: “If you go with fashion you get middle-aged women showing thighs that should have been kept secret for years. What is the next stage? You start having people stripping to the waist because it’s hot. It will begin to look like Lord’s or Wimbledon; God forbid we should get down to their level.” For more on Coni (and his "type"), read: https://heartheboatsing.com/2017/05/08/peter-coni-turning-over-an-old-leaf/

by Jehad Al-Omari A few weeks ago, I found myself repeatedly humming a tune of a well-known Arabic song lamenting the loss of Andalusia and its splendour. It suddenly struck me that the words of this song, indeed the entire poem, are more than seven hundred years old. It is one of literally hundreds of a school of poetry that are sung throughout the Arab world called “Muwashahaat”. The name refers to a style of poetry that was first developed in Andalusian Spain some seven hundred to a thousand years ago. Readers who are not familiar with the Arabic language might be amazed that even to the ordinary non-educated Arab, the Muwashahaat are perfectly understood as if they were only written a few years ago. Although today we use the term ‘Modern Literary Arabic’ to distinguish it from ‘Classical Arabic’ or “Fos-ha” the distance or gap between the two isn’t that great. In other words, the main difference between the two is that Modern Literary Arabic simply avoids the use of ancient, dead or difficult words and those aren’t too many if we compare them to the differences between, say, Modern English and Medieval English. In fact, Classical Arabic is significantly older than Medieval English as it dates to around the 7th Century CE. Yet, Classical Arabic is fairly accessible to the modern Arab providing that they are reasonably educated. In other words, if someone has the skills to understand and appreciate Modern Literary Arabic then they would find Classical Arabic reasonably accessible. The most credible theory as to why this is the case relates to the Qur’an, the Muslim Holy Book. To understand this, we must go back to the 7th century of the Common Era (CE) and before it and to the origins of Classical Arabic and the revelation of the Qur’an. Prior to the advent of Islam, the Arabic people of the Arabian Peninsula all spoke Arabic but with many varying dialects. The revelation of the Qur’an by the Prophet Mohammed changed all of this. The language of the Qur’an and its poetry was considered to be supreme to all the Arabic poetry of previous ages and generations. The Qur’an was considered to be the only miracle of the Prophet Mohammed in the same way other biblical prophets such as Moses and Jesus were gifted with miracles. For the Arabic language it signified a new age and a major linguistic leap. Gradually, the Arabic language began to become standardized; the Qur’an became the single most important point of reference and measurement rule in all things grammatical. By the 9th century CE, which is two centuries after the rise of Islam and during the golden Abbasid Dynasty (750 to 1258 CE), many linguistic schools had by then emerged, most notably in Basrah and Kufah in modern-day Iraq. Scholars began to standardize the Arabic language by way of establishing grammatical rules, authoring dictionaries and collecting new words from the remote tribes of Arabia. There was also a practical reason for this. As the Abbasid Caliphate expanded west and east to cover all of north Africa and well into Asia, bordering China and including northern India, there was a need to teach the empire’s new subjects standard Arabic and to protect the language from foreign influences. Interestingly, as time went by, some of the most notable Arabic linguists were themselves of foreign origin, especially Persians. This is when standard or Classical Arabic was basically carved into stone and became the lingua franca of the Islamic empire and its peoples. Most of the Islamic creative works in Science, Literature, and Philosophy were written in Classical Arabic, from the extreme western areas such as Andalusia in modern-day Spain to Samarkand in today’s Uzbekistan. The centrality of the Qur’an and, with it, the Hadith (the Prophet’s Traditions and Sayings) meant that the language which was standardized in the 9th century CE was largely protected and preserved for all future generations. The result is that a reasonably educated Arab can easily pick any book written in Arabic ten centuries ago and read it with a good level of understanding barring a few old words or expressions that may have gone out of use. This continuity with the past is considered a source of richness enabling us Arabs to delve into past treasures and masterpieces. Indeed, for the Arabs, it is said that they have stored their heritage and culture in poetry. There are seven classical poems that actually predate Islam that continue to resonate with the Arabs’ sense of beauty, love, fidelity, heroism, courage and valour. They are called “Mu’alakat”, meaning “Hung”, as it is believed that they were written and hung on the “Kabaah” (the black cubicle) in Mecca which is Islam’s holiest shrine (though Muslims believe it was built by Abraham and his son Ishmael some two thousand years before the Prophet’s birth in Mecca). Compare this with, say, the English Language and the great gap between the Medieval English of Geoffrey Chaucer or even Shakespearean English on one side and Modern English on the other. In a nutshell, there is no comparison. What an average Arab can understand in terms of Classical Arabic is far greater than what an average native English speaker can understand from a Shakespearean play (let alone Chaucer!). As an avid reader of English classics, I consider the most difficult piece of literature that I have read so far is “Waverley” by Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, published in 1814, and for some time I dared not go any earlier or even try a contemporary of his. However, I have recently been reliably informed that I should test my English with another difficult novel, namely “Northanger Abbey” by English writer Jane Austen (published in 1818, a year after she died). I have enjoyed all Austen’s other novels and found them accessible but this, I am told, will be harder for me to grasp. For foreign learners of Arabic, a similar task would not pose such a challenge. This is not to say that Arabic is an easy language to learn but rather once reasonably mastered one can access any work of literature from any period of Islamic history with less difficulty. Notwithstanding all of the above, today the Arab world, extending across north Africa and western Asia, has far more dialects than nations. It is conceivable that if a Moroccan tries to have a conversation with a Bahraini, each in their own dialect, they would not understand each other very well or at least would face many challenges. What tends to happen when this takes place is that both will moderate their language and move towards Classical Arabic or Modern Literary Arabic so that they can communicate with reasonable ease. This is primarily the case with spoken Arabic but not with the majority of written Arabic where I as a Jordanian would have absolutely no problem reading a piece of literature from Sudan or even the Senegal (not an Arab country) as long as it is written in Modern Literary Arabic. As an example, there are several pan-Arab competitions for the “Poet of the Year”, and it is not unusual to find Arabs from non-Arab countries joining in. The same happens with the many International Qur’an recitation competitions and it is not unusual for an Indonesian or a Ugandan to win it. Such is the world of Islam and Arabic, and it is said that being an Arab means that you belong not to a race but to a tongue. However, there is a dichotomy that arises between the spoken Arabic language and its written version. There are those who now advocate that the written should follow the spoken and people should be encouraged to write as they speak, so that each country sticks to its own dialect eventually developing into an independent language. These voices are becoming more vociferous, but they remain in the minority. Most Arabs simply do not want to lose the connection with the Qur’an. In the words of the British diplomat and great Arabist, Sir James Macqueen Craig, “the Arabic language did not split because the Arabs do not want to.”

by Vincent Guy Chicago Photo: Vincent Guy Unholy Bible The other day I was pulled up short by a headline from the USA that a school district in the state of Utah had banned the Bible, King James’ version, from its school shelves. Utah? Where the Mormon majority holds sway, and declare King James’ Bible a primary source of spirituality, as do the Fundamentalists and other practising Christians in this God-fearing State. Grounds for the ban? It contains too much “vulgarity and violence”. It seems descriptions of “incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape and infanticide” had been brought to the attention of school officials who were shocked to find the book violating the standards of decency required for access by pupils under Utah Code Ann.§76.10.1227. They hastily purged it from the shelves. If you, dear reader, would like to do a little delving, you will find plenty of support for their decision. The Book of Ezekiel is particularly rich in details that were never mentioned in my childhood Sunday School. In fact this cat had been set among the censors’ pigeons by a liberal-leaning parent, furious at the recent eviction of quality literature from Utah libraries. She wanted the authorities to admit their favourite volume was a grave offender, and not above their law. (Except of course that it was: demonstrations by angry mainstream parents soon saw the Bible re-instated.) After all, the Fundamentalists, perhaps a quarter of the nation, insist the Bible contains all truth; so nuclear physics, climate change and evolution are illusions sent to try us. Since there is no mention of the New World in the pages of the holy book, it would be reasonable to conclude that the existence of America itself is some sort of fantasy. Military might or might not The USA is the world’s greatest military power, the greatest in history, with economic resources and technical sophistication unmatched elsewhere. Military spending is nearly 40% of the world’s total. Expressed per capita, America scores 3rd after Qatar and Israel which might be thought of as special cases. US Americans deployed these resources across the world to defeat two sophisticated military powers, culminating in the atomic weapons dropped on Japan. But within four years, the Russians, their new enemy, had their own nuclear weapons. The Korean War ended inconclusively with a divided Korea. Fidel Castro, after his hostile takeover of Cuba right on their doorstep, the Americans were unable to dislodge. In Somalia, a small number of losses due to incompetence led the Americans to abandon their intervention. In Vietnam and in Afghanistan, peasant armies drove the world’s most sophisticated force into chaotic withdrawals. The Iran hostage affair left the US humiliated in more ways than I have space to describe. It’s been said that the Americans go to war in order to learn geography. They certainly hadn’t done their homework before they went to Iraq. Here again, substantial losses led to confused withdrawal, and a country, indeed the whole region, left in chaos by American action. Iraq itself shifted into alignment with Iran, America’s principal foe in the area, a result that might have been anticipated had American leaders glanced at the local pattern of religious affiliations. A couple of modest successes: they removed the President of Serbia (population 7m) by bombing from the air without putting boots on the ground. And the President of Panama (population 4m) they overwhelmed with ear-splitting rock music. Loosen your belts With GDP at 78 dollars per capita, the US is the 7th richest nation on earth (after oddities like Luxembourg, Qatar, Switzerland and - surprise! - Ireland). One of the richest countries in history has possibly the worst diet. This plays a role in increasing fatness. This century, cases of obesity have increased by 12%, while severe obesity has doubled. Someone has probably calculated how the total inches added to American waistlines since the lunar landing compare to the distance to the moon. Allow me to furnish you with some nourishing anecdotes: You can eat well in the United States. One of the best restaurant meals I’ve ever had was in Chicago. It was also by a country mile the most expensive. I have yet to confess to family or friends just how much I paid for it. With my Greek friend Kalliopi I was invited to the home of a couple in Michigan, not poor folk or youngsters: she’s a head teacher, he’s a successful attorney. “We don’t cook.” says the wife. “So what do you do?” “Pick up something on the way home from work, pizza or a burger or maybe a Mexican.” Kalliopi offers to cook a meal for them. The wife looks on in wonder, tinged with disgust: “But you don’t wear rubber gloves! Oh Yuk! You taste the sauce with your finger!” She happily tucked into the resulting meal. In a provincial eatery we watch two men at the next table share a dish of ice cream. The rainbow-coloured pyramid is up to their noses. We engage in conversation. “Is it good? “Sure, wonderful! Mmmmm, awesome!” “Do you eat this often?” “Yeah, he’s my pop.” “Yeah, he’s my son. He lives on the West Coast, he’s a lawyer” “Yup, he’s a finance guy. Right here in Illinois. “We get together every year.” “Uhhuh, it’s his birthday” “Yush” We leave them to demolish their mountain of ice in peace. Health careless The Americans manage to tot up the world’s biggest overall expenditure on healthcare in the world per head of population. At nearly $800 billion per year, it’s three times that of the next country in line: China, whose population is more than 4 times larger. Surprisingly for a nation so vociferously against the “nanny state”, the Federal Government’s health outlay, as share of its total spending, comes in at no. 3 in the world (yielding top spot only to oddities Costa Rica and Palau). But a substantial part of this is deployed on medical research, which has developed into a huge, well-funded industry. State financing is boosted by private benefactors and corporate players. The results are sad. For life expectancy at birth, different sources give widely differing answers, but in any case it’s shocking: US citizens rank somewhere between 29th and 46th in the world tables of longevity, with the average age of death around 76 years. And even as I write, it is falling further, the only developed country where that is so. Damn drugs Americans have learnt nothing from the rackety days of Prohibition. Back then the booze business was handed over to the gangsters. Principal beneficiary: Al Capone and his buddies. Now we see widescale addiction among rich and poor Americans to both illegal and legal drugs, while the “war on drugs” is carried on, whether in Chicago or Mexico, by gangs slaughtering each other. Addiction continues to increase with a new twist. The free enterprise approach to healthcare means pharmaceutical companies push their products to both patients and doctors even harder than elsewhere. This leads to over-prescription and addiction. The opioid crisis is the latest manifestation. Doctor prescribes pain relief, patient gets addicted, doctor stops prescribing, patient goes to black market. Nearly 200 Americans die every day from opioid overdose. OxyContin is the best-known example. The Sackler family, who own the company making it, are worth an estimated $13 billion. The Sacklers have made an art form of “artwashing”, funding cultural events and buildings to make their name appear benign. London's Victoria & Albert Museum had a Sackler wing until recently. The wing has been renamed in the face of criticism but the Museum has yet to update its signage (this photo was taken in July 2023). OxyContin is still available, though you’ll need – yes -– a doctor’s prescription. In the US today the leading cause of death in adults under 55 is drug overdose. A drug is a drug, legit or not. Al Capone’s ghost is laughing. Guns are fun Almost uniquely in America, guns are not confined to warfare, police-work or hunting. They are in regular use in the streets, in the classroom, in the home. One third of households owns at least one gun. There are more guns than people. Gun deaths are enormous, though more than half are suicides. Until recently federal law put restrictions on research into the causes of gun crime. As to guns per person, the US is far from the top, a position taken by El Salvador. British readers may sleep easier in their beds knowing the UK sits near the bottom of this list. The pattern is energetically held in place by a lobby, the National Rifle Association (NRA), who cite the 2nd Amendment to the 1776 Constitution, which gives American citizens “the right to bear arms”. But the words are taken out of context. The Amendment reads: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country. In other words, you can have your gun as long as it’s for fighting the British. I am baffled that lawyers and reformers cannot point to the militia phrase to bring about legal control over guns. The U.S. is the only country among its peers in which guns are the leading cause of death among children and teenagers. Six-year-old child at NRA convention Photo: Daily Star Lead off Trump is, of course, the outstanding current example of paradoxical America. You must admit that he’s good at his job, if we define that as grabbing and maintaining a place in the headlines. His promises to build a wall, restore prosperity to the working poor, lock up Hillary Clinton, and to make America great again were, of course, not fulfilled during his presidency. The extraordinary thing about “the Donald “ is that, after all that let-down, he still got around half of the American electorate to vote for him. Then came the events of January 2021. His subsequent arraignments before the law may have dented his support, but at the time of writing he remains the likely Republican candidate in the next presidential election, and possible winner. In the UK by contrast, such flamboyant politicians generally lurk in the margins, like Oswald Mosley or Enoch Powell. Nigel Farage has had considerable, even decisive, influence, but never got his hands near the reins of power. Britain’s charisma merchant Boris Johnson is perhaps the exception. But his move to suspend the constitution involved the silent signature of Queen Elizabeth, not a crowd of gun-toting ruffians. And Johnson has now resigned, something Trump has yet to do. There is nothing new in this contradictory nature of American life. Dr Johnson asked a question in 1775: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"