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  • Long Read: The Shuffle to the Right: Do we get more right wing as we age?

    Christopher Jackson

     

    Once a literary spat caught my eye. It was between the novelist Julian Barnes and the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, towards the end of the latter’s life. This was initially conducted in the pages of The New Statesman, when Barnes gave the following précis of his former colleague: “He was the most brilliant talker I’ve met and the best argufier. At the Statesman he was largely gay, idly anti-Semitic and very left-wing. Then ripple-dissolve to someone who was twice married and had discovered himself to be Jewish and become a neocon. An odd progress, though he didn’t do the traditional shuffle to the right; he kept one left, liberal leg planted where it always had been and made a huge, corkscrewing leap with his right leg. I enjoyed his company but never entirely trusted him.”

    Leaving aside the absurdity of the word ‘argufier’, the phrase which was discussed at the time was the ‘traditional shuffle to the right’. The description generated column inches as part of the debate over the rights and wrongs of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But it remains interesting in that it seems to assume that right-wing attitudes are in some way incorrect and reprehensible – or, as Hitchens would later put it, ‘allied to senility’.

    In his defence in his memoir Hitch-22, Hitchens went on to argue that he had discarded utopianism in favour of complexity. “It is not that there are no certainties, it is that there is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties,” he would write in his memoir.

    And there the matter lay. But sometimes the phrase has returned to me – ‘the traditional shuffle to the right’. When it does, it’s never in relation to the protagonists, but in relation to the phrase itself. In short, is it true that people move to the right with age? And if so, why? And what does this all mean for our careers and for our education?

     

    Blue election

     

    Recent data suggests that Barnes is broadly correct that people become more right wing with age. The best recent indicators are the 2019 General Election, which Boris Johnson’s Tories won with an 80-seat majority.

    When one considers that Brexit, Covid-19, Russia-Ukraine and our present inflationary woes have happened since, it must be admitted that the following statistics emanate out of an ancient period, several historical epochs ago. Reality may have shifted in any number of directions since, and it’s likely that the 2019 data depicts a nation more friendly to the idea of voting Conservative than shall be the case at the next election.

    Furthermore, it must be admitted that the election ended in an unusually personal mandate for the outsized figure of Boris Johnson, who though technically a Conservative, isn’t easily pigeon-holed on the political spectrum: his commitment to Net Zero and his acceptance of lockdown, however reluctant, are, for instance, arguably leftwing positions.

    Even so it’s the best data we have. And what does it say? It backs up Barnes. Between the ages of 24-29, 23 per cent of voters voted Conservative, with Labour at 54 per cent. By the time voters have reached the age of 30, they’re slightly more likely to vote Conservative, and slightly less likely to opt for Labour, though a small percentage seek refuge in the middle position of the Liberal Democrats: the figures are 30 per cent Conservative, 46 per cent Labour.

    Fascinatingly, the trend continues all the way through life, with on average a nine per cent rise in Conservative voters for every ten years of additional experience. By the time you reach the age bracket 60-69, the figures have flipped: 57 per cent vote Conservative, and a mere 22 per cent Labour. The trend continues into our seventies: there, you find 67 per cent vote Conservative, and a mere 14 per cent Labour. If you ever find yourself talking to a grey-haired stranger, there’s a two in three chance you’re talking to a Conservative.

    So there seems little doubt that something is going on here. But what?

     

    A Taxing Problem

     

    In the first place, there’s tax. Human nature is more often acquisitive than altruistic and the rarity of saintliness likely means that most people vote in their own self-interest. Quite simply, over time people’s own self-interest aligns more with the tax policies likely to be espoused by the Conservative Party.

    In Roger’s Version (1986), John Updike describes a Democrat voter as ‘a fighting liberal, fighting to have her money taken from her.’ Most people can see the humour in this position – and the light touch of the novelist who pointed it out. Of course, there have sometimes been attempts to extrapolate a broader lesson. It was Edmund Burke, that great orator and parliamentarian, who said: “Anyone who is not a republican at twenty casts doubt on the generosity of his soul; but he who, after thirty years, perseveres, casts doubt on the soundness of his mind.” Over the course of time, variants of this have been attributed to everyone from Georges Clemenceau, George Bernard Shaw, Victor Hugo and Winston Churchill. In other words, it feels sufficiently true and wise to have been ascribed to numerous people.

    For the Conservative MP Sir Bill Wiggin, tax is the core driver of the Conservative vote. As we get older, if our trajectory has been reasonably normal, then the chances are we’ll be earning more – and, of course, being taxed more as a result.

    “Definitely when I was a young man, the world was ideological place,” Wiggin recalls, “and I remember when I got my first payslip. You look at your payslip and see how much tax you pay and ask yourself the question: “That seems a lot of money, is it good value?” And some people will always say ‘yes’ and some people will say ‘no’. Most people will say: ‘Actually, I think I could get more for that money if things were something slightly differently’.”

    But Wiggin has another point to make: “That’s not why people vote labour. They vote for it and go, ‘That’s a lot of money. If rich people paid more I wouldn’t have to pay so much.’ That’s where the shuffle to the right begins.”

    So Wiggin is sympathetic to the current government – as one would expect – for precisely these reasons: “I want a small tax low interference government.,” he tells me. “Rishi Sunak’s pledge to reduce the income tax from 20 to 19 per cent for two years’ time was a really good thing. Although it would be better if that were happening today, the direction of travel is the right way. Boris Johnson lifted the restrictions on Covid early against some of the medical advice because he wanted us to be free to make some of our own choices and live our own lives. These are very powerful messages for me. So whether you run, hop, skip, shuffle, crawl or are dragged screaming to the right you will do that as your age suggests that that is more important. It’s not more important because you’re older, it’s because you’ve witnessed the alternative.”

    For Wiggin then the question of how much tax you pay, segues into broader questions of the size of the state and its alleged tendency to meddle in personal freedom. “It’s much harder if you’re British to imagine a superstate. When I stood in Burnley in 1997, people had just stopped having outside loos – a privy in the bottom of the garden. And I thought to myself, ‘Why isn’t the council – which was eternally Labour – interested in improving their housing?’ The answer was because once you’ve got people who vote Labour, if you make their situation better they’re less likely to vote Labour, but if you keep them suppressed they’re more likely to stay with you. That authoritarianism keeps them where they are or presses down on them.”

    For Wiggin, there is therefore an essential justice to the government’s levelling up agenda. “Levelling is fair but squashing people down is what we’re against. Lifting the people who have the least and the most vulnerable up is the opposite to what you see under a Labour government when everybody is pressed down, especially the highest earners. If you squash the people at the top, then everybody’s incentive to succeed is suppressed.”

    This leads Wiggin to an interesting dissertation on education. “The grammar school system did that educationally. It took the cleverest kids and pushed them up through the grammar schools but it didn’t deal satisfactorily with those who weren’t able to pass their eleven plus. The biggest challenge for Britain into the 21st century, is to have an education system which is ready to supply a workforce which is able to take on and beat the rest of the world. However old you are, you want your mates and their children to be world-beaters and we can’t afford to get education wrong. Your pension is going to be paid for by the people reading this magazine. It’s across the board and in everyone’s interest to get the best out of every individual.”

    So what does Wiggin think? “Young people should be in school for longer. I look at schools in my constituency: the teachers are good, the facilities are good but if you’re not there, you’re not going to get the most out of it. So why do they go home at 3.30? Of course in the younger age groups they might not be able to last. If you look at the South Koreans, they have after school until 10 o’clock at night, because they need to beat the Chinese and the Taiwanese. The world is a savage place and if you don’t believe it, look at people all over the world who live on a dollar a day. You don’t want to be one of those.”

     

    Hobbes et al.

     

    Not everyone will agree with all this, but it is a comprehensive description of the Conservative mindset. Wiggin’s descriptions might have had their origin in tax policy, but what is noteworthy is how rapidly their logic travels outwards to other things: education, the health service, work.

    Conservativism feels unified in this sense, and this is perhaps something of what people feel they are experiencing when they identify with the Tories. It was summed up best in recent times by Margaret Thatcher with her devastatingly simple maxim: ‘The facts of life are Conservative’. But its pedigree is deeper and one might trace a line back through Edmund Burke and Thomas Hobbes to find its origins in Enlightenment thought.

    Hobbes, like Wiggin, viewed the world as a savage place and life, for him, was, in his famous phrase: “nasty, brutish, and short”. This notion of a world full of dangers and disasters, where human beings are hemmed in all sides, led Hobbes into the idea that people would readily accept a king or a parliament as a remedy to their predicament.

    This turns out not to be a simple idea, since the blind handing over of one’s interests to the state doesn’t always pan out very well – as numerous miserable peoples in the 21st century, from Stalin’s Russia to today’s China would attest. This is where the formidable figure of John Locke comes along, stating that while a government is necessary it nevertheless depends on the ‘consent of the governed’. These words were of huge importance not just to the story of British democracy, but to the Founding Fathers of the United States of America – and to Thomas Jefferson in particular, so much so that they found their way into the Constitution.

    It is Lockean democracy which informs much of what Wiggin is saying, and much of what Thatcher did. It goes without saying that it isn’t accepted by everyone; if it were the UK would be a one-party state. But it is certainly the case that the world presents itself to us over time, and that as we go on in our lives we are more likely to increase our experience of the state: we have children who then attend school and can assess the suitability of the state education system; health scares crop up which enable us to take the measure of the NHS; and over time, the odds go up that we shall become a victim of crime, and wonder about the efficacy of the police.

    None of these experiences of the state is likely to be perfect, and so they will at the very least generate a questioning mindset about the efficacy of the tax system.

    Put simply, the state is a gigantic fact of our lives, and life is imperfect, and so its imperfections are likely to stack up over time. It is possible – even likely – that we can yoke the two together and say: “Things are imperfect because of the state.” For some this will always seem a false joining up – or worse, a lofty denigration, for instance, of all the good work state-paid nurses or teachers do. For others, Conservatism is more measured and might amount to something more like this: “Yes, I know the world isn’t perfect and that a smaller role for the state won’t make all my problems vanish all at once. But it will give me greater agency in my life if I bump up against the state less regularly. And I am at my best when the prime mover of my activities comes from free inspiration – from a felt liberty within.”

     

    Surveying the Scene

     

    However the issues Wiggin describes all fall broadly within the question of core policy and do not touch particularly on the question of social conservatism. A non-exhaustive list of issues which would fall under this umbrella would be: immigration, gay marriage, the role of women in the workplace, and climate change.

    Now, if one were to imagine what a clicheic ‘shuffle to the right’ might entail it would be something like this. That as you age, not only do you feel a mounting sense of resentment about the reach of HMRC into your own wallet, and the incompetence of government, but you also begin to lament societal shift of every kind. You yearn for the past and yearning for the past means the restoration of a predominantly white, Christian world where women look after the children and don’t get any crazy ideas about becoming CEOs of FTSE 100 companies. To boot, you’re shortly to leave the world and so relatively cavalier about the seas rising in 20 years’ time since you won’t be around to drown in them.

    Barnes’ original ‘shuffle to the right’ may not have meant precisely this as regards Hitchens, but I think something like this impatience with a perceived stupidity is housed somewhere within it, and it is present within, for instance, the discourse in the pages of The Guardian, and in parts of the BBC. It doesn’t need more than the implications of its tone to establish almost as fact an insurmountable gap between generations where the old are stupid and prejudiced and the young wise and virtuous.

    If taken to its logical conclusion the country, and every organisation within it is undergoing a sort of surreptitious civil war between elderly idiots and young sages. This viewpoint seems inwoven especially in the climate and trans debates: the protestors who vandalise a Van Gogh, for instance, or stop traffic in rush hour in a major city, have assumed a certain behavioural licence which they feel has been bestowed on them by precisely this generational stupidity which is so rampant and obscene that it must be aggressively countermanded.

    The trouble with all this is that human beings turn out to be more complex than this, and that the generational divide isn’t so distinctive as one had thought on many of these questions, though it is still there to some extent.

    Research published by NatCen’s British Social Attitudes at The Policy Institute on the intergenerational divide looks at many of these questions and produces data to capture the mood of the nation. In relation to immigration, its conclusions are stark and don’t make for particularly good reading. Here is the report’s conclusion, as indicated by the graph in figure A:

     

    Attitudes to immigration became one of the most divisive social issues in the UK in the last decade or so – and that has a strong generational dimension. In the late 1990s, hardly anyone in any generation considered immigration one of the most important issues facing the country, but over the follow 15 years, its prominence increased, and generational gaps exploded, so that the oldest cohort was twice as worried as the youngest in the years before the EU referendum.

     

    This would seem to back up the Barnesian idea of a ‘shuffle to the right’. It can seem as though a sort of xenophobia – ‘allied to senility’ as Hitchens put it – had somehow become rife among the elderly on this important point. This notion has generally had its Exhibit A in the career of Nigel Farage, and, for instance, his referendum poster of refugees from Syria and other places, which seemed to portray Islamic people other, and to be feared on account of their external appearance.

    However, some reservations about this narrative need to be aired. In the first place, we don’t know why and on what basis this generational shift in opinion has been brought about. Douglas Murray is one of those alarmed by the way in which the rising movement of peoples during the Blair years isn’t something we’re allowed to discuss. He once told me: ““It’s easy to be ‘for’ more empathy – to stand up and say, like Jess Phillips, ‘If everyone was more like me, everything would be better.’ But decisions require something hard. We’re very good at talking the language of inclusion, but the language of inclusion necessitates the language of exclusion. Try doing exclusion language in public. You can’t.”

    In other words, it might not be that elderly people are opposed to immigration in some broad sense, but that they’re particularly aware of what has been going in recent history – the opening up of borders during the Blair years – versus what had happened before. This is a characteristic of age: the ability to compare the present time with what had gone before. It must also be said that during the first EU referendum, it was the left of the Labour Party, as represented by Tony Benn which took the Leave position which was then, as now, to some extent synonymous with doubts about immigration. But for him the EU was a rich man’s club, where the free movement of workers was in fact a freedom for capital to exploit labour. All this is to say that immigration isn’t a topic easily categorised as being of the left or the right. The NatCen data needs to be treated carefully.

     

    Shared climate

     

    Interestingly, this generational gap turns out to be less marked when it comes to other matters, most notably the environment.

    As the NatCen survey points out, nearly half of the pre-war generation state that they are now concerned about the environment. It’s a reminder that the Clean Air Act in America was passed by the Republican Nixon administration and that the environment has traditionally been a cross-party issue. The report states:

     

    The gaps between generations on environmental concerns is often grossly overstated. It’s true that younger generations in the US are more likely to say that climate change is very or extremely dangerous, but there is not a great deal of difference, and older groups are far from unconcerned.

     

    So the age disparity exists in relation to certain issues more than others. This in itself opens up onto other possible theories about the age divide – and these in turn might open up onto new solutions for the workplace and for education.

     

    The Book of Mark

     

    I talk to Mark Morrin, a policy and research strategist at ResPublica who first digs down into the 2019 General Election. “2019 was a different sort of election,” he explains. “Brexit had been in framed in such a way that those who voted Brexit were more right wing than left, and more likely to be old than young. It doesn’t really do justice to the argument.”

    Then Morrin gives it to me straight: “The younger generation – the millennials – are much more socially conservative as a generation and Rishi Sunak is on the cusp of that. There’s a book called The Fourth Turning is Here by William Strauss and Neil Howe which I like a lot, even though the theory in the book can’t be empirically proven. The book states that there are four different generational archetypes and each lasts for around twenty years – and between them they constitute a cycle lasting between 80 and 90 years.”

    So what point are we at in that cycle? “What happens is we go through a high point, to a rejection of the high point, to an unravelling and then onto a crisis – and we’re at a point of crisis at the minute.” That sounds like bad news. Morrin has this sobering thought. “The last time we were in crisis was in the 1930s and according to The Fourth Turning is Here, it was that GI generation who were the heroes who resolved things last time.”

    This strikes me a far more complex theory of generational mentality than the typical ‘shuffle to the right’ dichotomy. Morrin continues: “The equivalent of the GI generation today would be the millennials, who have similar traits to the GI generation: they’re less likely to commit crime, less likely to take drugs and more inherently optimistic in their character even though they also can’t get on the property ladder.”

    Morrin explains how this affects their approach to policy. “When you poll, they’re happy to pay tax on the Scandinavian model if they’re getting decent services as a consequence. I don’t see a huge popular movement on the streets wanting to lower tax.”

    So does Morrin think people make the traditional ‘shuffle to the right’ at all? His response is nuanced. “There are people who start on the left and then end up Conservative but I don’t know how archetypal those people are. Philip Blond, the CEO of ResPublica, tends to argue that the Conservatives on the right are economically Labour, and that Labour on the left are socially liberal. You need a quadrant to explain it really.”

    This means that those politicians who make it to the top of British politics are all to some extent hybrids on the ‘right-left’ spectrum. Morrin gives an example: “Look at Boris. He’s economically and socially liberal. He has no regard for family, and he wants to be free Europe. Uniquely, he tried to play at being a One Nation Conservative while really being a liberal.”

    Which would mean that that 2019 Boris mandate doesn’t describe a straightforward move to the right at all.

    Morrin agrees, and then gives another example: “Blair was economically liberal and socially liberal. There was perhaps a communitarian nod at the beginning, and his Catholicism of course. But it all just goes to show that the main parties are a hodgepodge and can’t really represent values. Within Labour you’ve got two parties: the far left and the moderate right, and within the Conservatives you’ve got the moderate wing and the far right – so that’s at least four parties between them.”

    So what bearing does this all have on education? Morrin says: “There’s this pervasive idea when you look at the university attendance figures that the younger people who didn’t vote are more educated than the older people who did. We’re not yet at that 50% point in relation to higher education. But soon we’ll get to a stage where 50% of those people aged 30 will have had some experience or exposure to higher education.”

    Morrin pauses then says: “You could argue that if that continues, then the population becomes more educated they’re likely to become more left.” And then the shuffle to the right would become a thing of the past.

    Such a development would go hand in hand with an economy which had become larger and more state-dependent. So what can the workplace do now to adapt? Finito mentor Sophia Petrides has written on this site about the importance of ‘mentoring up’ as a way of making sure that young people are taken properly into account in the workplace setting.

    So the question of our broad political leanings turns out to be both more and less important than we might have expected. We bring these tropes with us into the settings which define us: into work and into our education. But they’re not fit for purpose, and the moment we start looking past them, a more meaningful dialogue becomes possible – and we have the chance to grow together in a way in which our previous simplistic notions about one another had tended to prohibit.

     

     

  • Christopher Wren at 300

    Christopher Jackson visits churches by Christopher Wren (1632-1723) in the City of London, and reports on the nature of work both in his day and in our own

     

    I am standing in St Stephen Walbrook with Helen Vigors who is Heritage Project Manager with the Diocese of London, and leading on the educational programme Wren at 300, the series of celebrations which marks the 300th anniversary of Wren’s death.

    I have been to this magnificent church before but today, with Vigors for company, I am looking at it like I’ve never done before. “One of Wren’s theories was that everybody should see the altar,” Vigors says, pointing to its central position. “Clear glass is also a feature of Wren,” she continues. “His quote was: ‘You can’t add beauty to light’. This is a particularly good example of natural light.” Then she gestures at the high windows, which eschew the principle of stained glass. “This whole area is quite compact – you have the Walbrook Club here, and Rothschilds there, and Starbucks and Bloomberg opposite. But the windows are quite high up and so it hasn’t had that theft of light by contemporary London.”

    Theft of light: the phrase has an undeniable resonance and sounds like it wants to be a broader metaphor, as if by being so modern we’ve somehow entered a sort of accidental dark ages when it comes to understanding the past which lies around us.

    Wren’s work is so ubiquitous that we struggle to see him. Wren’s contemporary Nicholas Hawksmoor’s popularity, helped by Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor (1985), has increased. But with Hawksmoor, there are only six major churches to consider; quite a different proposition to Wren’s 21 (and at one time there were 51 plus St Paul’s Cathedral). The whole question of Christopher Wren can seem almost too big to make time for. Accordingly, we have built our modern life around him, always respecting him but very often ignoring him.

    Sometimes we’ve done worse than that. In his book-length essay On Beauty, Roger Scruton lists St Paul’s as an example of a building which has been destroyed by the ugliness which surrounds it – the protruding cranes, and the gigantic Norman Foster-ish monstrosities of glass which arguably spoil a once elegant skyline.

    When I ask Dr. Michael Paraskos, a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication at Imperial College about this, he is in strong agreement: “Roger Scruton is right. The enclosure of Wren’s Monument brings particular shame on the city. But I think there is a much bigger danger in London than just losing sight of Wren’s achievement. We are in danger of losing the city’s unique identity as a whole, which of course Wren helped establish.”

    When I ask him for examples, he says: “When you read about companies like Marks and Spencer wanting to trash not only their own history but the city’s by demolishing yet another building on Oxford Street, and a few years ago King’s College wanting to do the same with a great swathe of historic buildings in the Strand, you have to wonder what’s wrong with people.”

    As my afternoon with Helen continues, I come into a deeper realisation of how much of a pity this is. We have placed obstacles in the way of understanding one of the undisputed giants of our history – to all our detriment.

    We are, for one thing, too busy for him. Paraskos adds: “It’s worth remembering that barely a century ago, people still pulled down Wren churches without too much thought, and now we think of them as vandals. One day we will look on those who do the equivalent today and think the same. It’s a kind of stupidity.”

    Wren at 300 is a definitive pushback against this ‘stupidity’, and has many aspects to it: it is educational, historical and conservationist. I tell Helen that when we experience these buildings, it’s difficult to know what’s Wren and what’s not since the history of destruction is so layered and complex.

    She agrees: “It’s so difficult to unravel. St Mary Le Bow, for example, is completely rebuilt – but the things which are rebuilt are rebuilt to the Wren design. That church was the highest point in London before St Paul’s and it was really badly bombed.” But we’re not just talking about World War II: “The story of destruction starts with the Great Fire, and then the rebuilding, and then the Church Commissioners in the Victorian era took decisions which led to reduction in numbers. St Magnus the Martyr was moved with the widening of London Bridge. Then there was the Blitz.”

    It is an image of a vulnerable London, where every great achievement is subject to reversal. But perhaps it would be too simplistic to be only despairing about this. It is, after all, as much as to say that these structures exist in the present, and that contemporary skills are still required to keep them going: you can have a career today centred around old buildings.

    After a stroll down Queen Victoria Street, we arrive at St Mary Abchurch, a beautiful building I’ve not been to before, tucked away behind a construction site just off King William Street, and not far from the Monument.

    Looking up at the Grinling Gibbons reredos, Vigors tells me a bit more about the conservation side of Wren at 300: “The conservation project has two parts to it,” she says. “One is working with Cliveden Conservation Workshop and a number of different experts in different fields. We’re aiming it at the incumbents and staff at churches; we’re seeing how we can equip them in basic conversation techniques. Secondly, we’re doing public-facing things: we’re working with City and Guilds Art School and building Crafts College to deliver workshops.”

    So what are the opportunities in the sector which Wren at 300 is seeking to illuminate? “We have demonstrations of pointing, looking at mortars, and stone-cutting, and plastering. What we’re trying to do is to encourage all ages, and explain that this is a sector which needs people to see it as a potential career. It’s not the sort of thing sixth formers know about: the diplomas and qualifications and so on.”

    There’s also a tech emphasis to Wren at 300: “We’re also going to be looking at innovative techniques in conservation. We’re looking at model-making with drone footage and drone surveys and how you can model the future deterioration of a building.”

    The hope is that this focus on sustainability will have a knock-on effect throughout the City churches: “We’re looking at a number of Wren churches and how they can reach carbon net zero,” Vigors continues. “We’re working with a private architectural practice Roger Mears, as well as surveyors and the faculty at Nottingham Trent University. They’ve put sensors in six buildings and they hope to collect data. We want to make an assessment and support incumbents on that process and give them an idea of what’s possible. Heating is another question – whether you heat under person or under pew. We have warm places and cool places schemes. Eventually we’ll give a toolkit to incumbents.”

    We continue our walk, passing the London Mithraeum on our right, arriving in time at another Wren church, St Mary Aldermary, which has a thriving café.

    This church seems to have hardly anything in common with either of the two churches we’ve just visited. It has, for instance, stained glass which Wren was generally opposed to, and a certain charming wonkiness about the East window and the roof. When I ask Vigors about this, she replies: “We think it’s like because of the road system outside. Wren worked around problems. Neil McGregor [former Director of the British Museum] talks about how pragmatic Wren was – even when he did St Paul’s he had two designs. One was turned down for being too Italianate. One, which he thought was ugly, was accepted but he was told he could develop it – and he certainly did.”

    Another obstacle to understanding Wren is that his work is often so redolent of Italian architecture that one sometimes struggles to discern what in his work was borrowed and what was uniquely his. Vigors again stresses his pragmatism: “I think he was certainly influenced by Italian architecture but then he had to deal with the patrons he had here. They weren’t staunchly or puritanically protestant but they had a need for something to be less elaborate which is why you don’t see gold inside. He responded to each parish and each brief he got.”

    So just like architects today, he had to be flexible. What is Vigors’ sense of Wren as a man? “The fact that he was a courtier is probably central. There’s one lovely love letter to his wife; he was fond of his children but wished they’d been more intelligent than they were. The piece he wrote on his tomb: “If you want to see the man look around you” – I think that’s revealing. He also got on with six monarchs – he had to sail a clever path. He must have been a master of diplomacy. He sometimes got cross with builders and he wasn’t always happy with how things went. He was really annoyed when his first St Paul’s was turned down.”

    Wren, then, doesn’t seem to have drawn particular attention to himself. The image is similar in fact to Shakespeare or Leonardo da Vinci – of someone quietly getting things done, and not being in people’s faces too much. Greatness very often isn’t flashy; it’s about hard work.

    We walk next up to St Martin-within-Ludgate and there meet Susan Skedd who is leading on the social history aspect of the project, the findings of which already up onto discoveries about the world of work during Wren’s time. Skedd’s work has already revealed a rich world with a strong flavour of the contemporary. “One of the fascinating things is that we understand how the parish worked as a form of local government,” Skedd begins, her enthusiasm notable as we stand over a 300 year old chair over by the reredos. “They decided who could live there, and who would be kicked out, and these decisions sound contemporary.” It’s a reminder that for some people somewhere, there’s always a ‘cost-of-living’ crisis.

    Susan’s research has led her to look closely at the stories of the craft contractors who worked on Wren’s buildings. She’s asking who they were, where they lived and where they worked. “Masons were more than minor gentry, they were wealthy gentry,” she tells me. “One was William Emmett. He lived in the parish and had his workshop here. That’s our lens – and we’re moving at pace to create those stories.”

    This pushes back a bit at the idea of Wren as the archetypal great man – the unique genius who, one might almost imagine, built the world around us alone, and with his bare hands. Skedd laughs: “My easy way out of that idea is to point out that it was a team – it’s very modern. Neil McGregor calls it the ‘Wren system’. What’s extraordinary is the sense of the office and these amazing records which exist in the London Metropolitan Archives. You can see contractors presenting their bills and getting paid, and they’re witnessing each other’s payments.”

    This question of teamwork is something which also intrigues Paraskos: “I think it’s a really interesting question for anyone looking at Wren to face. How do we cope with the idea he was some kind of unique, one-off, genius? I think the answer is that, although he was undoubtedly very talented, none of what he achieved in architecture, or in science, would have been possible without lots of other talented people around him. We tend to know about the big names, like Robert Hooke and Nicholas Hawksmoor of course, but then there are half-forgotten people like Edward Woodroffe, John Oliver and Edward Pearce, all working in Wren’s office, drawing up plans, designing things and negotiating contracts as part of a team.”

    So the idea of the individual genius doesn’t quite hold water? Paraskos doesn’t think so: “Genius can be thought of as a kind of collective phenomenon, rather than an individual one. I think that was true in Wren’s architectural office, it was true in his scientific work at Oxford, and its true for artists and scientists today. I think it is misleading, but it’s also debilitating for people with real talent, to have to face the myth of genius, instead of the fact of co-operation.”

    Another theme is emerging from Skedd’s research: “Wren’s ecosystem was all about the question of “who you know”. For Wren’s buildings, people worked with people they trusted. You get the same people popping up time and again. And Wren could draw on the very best. People who are building not just in the Royal Palaces but for aristocratic clientele. This morning I was looking at an inventory at the death of a glazier called John Brace. He died mid-work and it listed all the clients who owed him money, and it’s this astonishing list of 20 or 25 people. These buildings aren’t in isolation; the people working on them are also working in Bloomsbury, Greenwich, and Hampton Court.”

    And what about the humbler people who toiled in the profession? “At the lower end of the scale I’ve come across another fascinating detail,” Skedd says. “There were two workmen – we don’t know their names – who were paid for five days to clear one of the sites, which would have included all the rubble and all of the detritus. That helps you understand the pace of work – it was done with real rapidity.”

    Vigors adds: “It’s obviously Office of Wren. In that period of 51 churches plus St Paul’s – you sometimes see ‘approved by Wren’. They’re not all by him. If you’ve got Hooke, and Woodruff and Hawksmoor as your right hand men, you don’t need to be involved in every project.” Skedd adds: “He presided over and inspired and could draw on an amazing array of talent.”

    It reminds me of Thomas Heatherwick or Frank Gehry with their hundreds of unsung employees: the world doesn’t change as much as we think it does. Skedd makes another point: “One of the other details I’ve come across with John Brace. You see in his inventory mathematical instruments – and you’re reminded that this is a time when science and architecture go hand in hand.”

    Of course, this is another area where Wren might be relevant in our own time, when it comes to the arguments over the curriculum and whether STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics

    or STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) subjects should get greater coverage on the curriculum for primary and secondary school pupils.

    Paraskos draws a broad lesson about Wren’s life as both a scientist and artist: “England has always forced people to specialise too soon and go either to science or the arts, and it’s no good for either science or art. When you look at Wren, or any of the great scientists of the past, it’s very rare for them to have no interest in art, or music, or literature. They were more rounded personalities than we seem to recognise. And Wren is the great example of that, using science to solve not only the technical problems of architecture, but as a kind of experimental method to try to understand aesthetic problems.”

    It’s this which, for Paraskos, gives the Wren churches their flavour. “That’s why you get such a lot of variety in Wren’s churches. Each one is a kind of aesthetic experiment. So, he takes the idea of a dome he sees when he visits Paris, he tests it out at St Mary on the Hill in London, then at St Stephen Walbrook, then at St Mary Aldermary, until he’s finally ready to make the most beautiful dome of them all, at St Paul’s Cathedral. That’s interdisciplinarity in action.”

    But for Paraskos it’s unhelpful to try and recruit Wren as a poster boy for the cause of STEAM being added to the curriculum: “This is a loaded question as I can only really give my own view and then try to ascribe it to Wren. I suppose what we can say is that what we see in Wren is someone who believed science is important, and who believed the aesthetics of architecture is important. From that starting point we should perhaps ask ourselves whether the increasing exclusion of the arts and humanities from education also show a belief that both science and aesthetics are important? I would say no. But the whole debate is based on a fallacy that there is a distinction to be made between different aspects of human behaviour. That somehow, when a scientist is engaging in an experiment they are not being creative, or that an artist painting a picture or composing a complex poetic metre is not being methodical. It shows a lack of understanding of what it is to be human not to see that we are integrated personalities, in which we move between different ways of thinking and acting all the time. I would question whether our education system understands that.”

    As we walk out of St-Martin-within-Ludgate, I ask Vigors what will come out of Wren at 300?  “We want there to be not only an appeal but a feasibility study about how the buildings are used,” she says, “and how we can get people in through education, research and community engagement. Obviously the congregations are falling but the buildings are here, and they’re an amazing resource.”

    They are indeed – and because of Wren’s longevity we’ll be doing it all over again in nine years’ time when it comes to the 400th anniversary of his birth. It’s a reminder that Wren isn’t going anywhere, so we need to engage with him now.

     

    To find out more about Wren at 300 go to: wren300.org

     

  • Film roundup: Why it’s a good year for female film directors at Cannes

    Meredith Taylor

     

    Talk to any young person seeking a career in the arts, television or film and the creative industries, the one place that they want to attend is the Cannes Film Festival that takes place each year on France’s Cote d’Azur.

    The 76th Festival, 16th – 27th May, is set for a legendary year with Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, and an out-of-competition world premiere of Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny from James Mangold.

    Some of the best names in cinema will be crowding the Croisette in May – in fact, it’s hard to think which stars won’t be on the famous Red Carpet for this year’s epic celebration announced by General Delegate Thierry Fremaux.

    The 2023 competition line-up includes new films from Wes Anderson, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Todd Haynes, Nanni Moretti and Aki Kaurismäki. The programme also includes the latest from cinema greats Wim Wenders, Takeshi Kitano, Victor Erice and Catherine Breillat. Seven female directors – one making her feature debut – will compete for the coveted main prize: the Palme d’Or.

    Palme d’Or hopefuls include Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won in 2018 with Shoplifters and is now back in Cannes competition with Monster, and Nanni Moretti with Il Sol Dell’Avvenire after winning the main prize with The Son’s Room in 2001. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, won the Palme in 2014 with Winter Sleep, and comes back with About Dry Grasses, a family story set between Istanbul and small town Anatolia, billed as his most ambitious to date and running at over three hours.

    Wes Anderson’s latest Asteroid City promises to be as quirky as ever and stars Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Steve Carell and Tilda Swindon. Todd Haynes’ May December features Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore in another emotional rollercoaster. But humour will undoubtedly come from Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki and Dead Leaves, his first film in six years.

    Veteran Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas) makes a reappearance in Cannes with his Japan-set drama Perfect Days, together with a documentary Anselm, a portrait of German painter Anselm Kiefer, one of two films about artists, the second being Martin Provost’s Bonnard, Pierre et Marthe exploring the love story between the renowned French painters Pierre Bonnard and his wife Marthe. With love in the air, one time partners Benoit Magimel and Juliette Binoche team up again for La Passion de Dodin Bouffant, a 19th century romance between a gourmet and his cook, from Vietnam-born French director Tran Anh Hung.

    Jessica Hausner is one of seven female directors in the main competition this year, with Club Zero. She joins Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, who directs her sister Alba, Josh O’Connor and Isabella Rossellini in La Chimera. French filmmaker Justine Triet will present her thriller Anatomy of a Fall. Catherine Breillat, another seasoned French director, will be there with Last Summer starring Léa Drucker and Olivier Rabourdin; Catherine Corsini with her latest Le Retour ; Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania (The Man Who Sold His Skin) is coming with Four Daughters. A feature debut for Senegalese-French director Ramata-Toulaye Sy with Banel & Adamawill premiere in competition this year.

    It takes a Brazilian/Algerian director (Karim Ainouz) to make a film about Henry the VIII, but forget Hilary Mantel, Firebrand, billed as a ‘history horror story’, has a British writing team behind it: Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth, best known for the BAFTA-winning series Killing Eve. The stars are Alicia Vikander, Eddie Marsan, Jude Law and Simon Russell Beale.

    One of this year’s most anticipated films vying for the Palme d’Or is from English auteur Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Under the Skin): The Zone of Interest is an Auschwitz-set love story inspired by a novel of the same name by Martin Amis. British Oscar winner Steve McQueen brings Occupied City, a documentary that looks back at Amsterdam under Nazi-occupation. Also from England comes Molly Manning Walker, a graduate of the NFTS, with her debut feature that goes by the buzzworthy title of How to Have Sex. Let’s just hope that this and all the others live up to expectations.

     

    Meredith Taylor is the film editor at Finito World

     

    Photo caption: Catherine Deneuve, on the set of La Chamade, Cote d’Azur, June 1, 1968. Copyright Jack Garofalo/Paris Match/Scoop

     

  • Sophia Petrides: Letter from Cyprus

    Sophia Petrides

     

    Relocating can be a breath of fresh air, literally and figuratively. After decades of battling through the commute into the City of London, elbowing my way through the crowds of financiers and brokers, I find myself savouring the relaxed mood that blows in with the warm sea breeze here in Cyprus. However, don’t mistake Cyprus for a quiet business destination because nothing could be further from the truth. We just do things differently here. Or at least, we used to. As a coach this is something I love to pass on to my clients – that you don’t have to be stressed and work 24/7 to produce great results. As the economy here booms, we all need to remember that. It could be the key to ongoing success.

     

    There is a joke you might know about a big shot from Silicon Valley who complains about an Italian restaurant in Rome for opening 5 minutes late. The angry millionaire tells the owner “The USA dominates the world because we always open on time!” and the restaurant owner replies “So what? We Romans used to dominate the world, but then we discovered if you make tomato sauce like mama, the world will come to you… and wait for you to open.” The moral of the story is quality and high performance don’t mean re-creating someone else’s recipe for success. It’s about finding your own path. So, what is the right path for booming Cyprus?

     

    Finding the right path for Cyprus is more complex than it sounds. The Migration Department reports circa 9,000 relocations from international companies. This is reflected in our economic growth – GDP is forecast to grow by around 3.3% this year. Property prices have risen faster than GDP on average over the last 5 years and students and young executives are finding it hard to afford rent or affordable houses, particularly in the booming area of Limassol. We are resilient people, but now is the time for leadership to reduce the problems other boom countries within the EU have experienced before us.

    Despite a slowdown in property investment since the abolition of the so-called Golden Passport route to citizenship last year, in 2022 the government introduced more favourable tax benefits for foreign companies to set up their headquarters in Cyprus and have also introduced “The Digital Nomad Scheme” enabling people to enjoy our beautiful weather and quality of life, while working for companies operating outside the country. The scheme aims to transform our business ecosystem by attracting talented individuals and entrepreneurs. This is hugely positive but begs the question of Cyprus – the last nation in the EU to set a minimum wage – how do we make sure homegrown talent benefits from the boom? (Because most young Cypriots report they can’t afford the rising rents or a night out with friends in downtown Limassol). If we learn from EU countries that experienced similar recent booms – in Central and Eastern Europe – two things become clear.

    Firstly, company leaders need to focus on talent retention, because there is already a shortage of young local talent in our cities, and that will only get worse as more companies arrive. Holding onto the best new local hires and managing local talent will offer cost benefits over recruiting from outside Cyprus. Training and coaching, reduces staff turnover dramatically (studies show 30-50%) – so coaching for emerging Cypriot professionals should help to encourage them to build careers here, not leave for destinations where rents are cheaper to make their wages go further.

    Secondly, if we want our young people to benefit from these opportunities, we need to invest in mental fitness and resilience. Young workers aged 18 to 30 are perceived to be under almost twice as much pressure as their more senior peers, being more likely to suffer from stress and worries about debt or struggling to pay their bills. If we want to avoid a brain drain of young talent moving to cheaper parts of the EU, leaders need to offer coaching programmes that prioritise wellbeing, resilience, and mental health at work, in addition to talent retention programmes and rewarding loyalty with competitive salaries.

    There has never been a more exciting time to live and work in Cyprus, but leading effectively through

     

    rapid growth – and change – means learning from previous EU regional booms to avoid storing up

     

    problems for ourselves in the future. That’s how we do things in the more relaxed, older and wiser

     

    cultures of the Mediterranean, isn’t it?

  • Douglas Stewart: Letter from the Isle of Man

    Douglas Stewart

     

    After many years loving life in London followed by working for seven years in glitzy, noisy and brash Las Vegas, moving to this small island in the Irish Sea was quite an adjustment. That was back in 2009. I may now have acquired “stop-over” status rather than being seen as a mere “come-over.” There are thousands of both categories – many linked to financial services or eGaming. However, like the UK, the island needs more new arrivals to fill vacancies, especially in the Health Service. Helping people like me to relocate was Mary Linehan of BLocal – https://b-localiom.com

    The Isle of Man is an independent nation and not part of the UK. In Tynwald, it has the world’s longest continuous running Parliament, dating back over 1000 years. The Government issues Manx passports but remains a Crown Dependency, having strong ties with the UK. However, when referring to the UK, islanders will say “I’ve been across” or “I’ve been to England but will never say: “I’ve been to the mainland.” The M-word is a big no-no!

    Our island is much larger than Malta, Jersey or Guernsey and is dominated by rolling hills, forests and wonderful sea views With a population of around 85,000, the island is similar in size to Singapore which has approaching six million people. Beautiful green space we have in abundance.

    In June 2022, a report by KPMG LLC, confirmed that we have a larger economy by GDP than either Jersey or Guernsey. In 2021, the Government’s report “Our Island, Our Future” has targeted a population of 100,000 by 2037. New arrivals are needed to boost and diversify the economy. The population is ageing and with unemployment in handful figures, the need is for newcomers, especially families, to start a new life in a safe, welcoming and environmentally aware community. While the island welcomes retirees, the main need is for a larger and younger working population. Covid19 brought a stream of new residents, snapping up properties off-plan.

    The Island has a reputation as a respected and well-regulated financial centre and is especially strong in insurance with many Corporate Service Providers. A bespoke fund, corporate and private wealth provider such as Suntera Global https://www.suntera.com/ has its substantial international engine-room in Douglas. Such a business provides a wide array of international advice and support, perhaps involving e-Gaming, property, trusts, jets and super-yachts.  As one of the world’s few blue-chip eGaming centres, this sector has been a major boost during the past fourteen years. Global giants like Pokerstars and Microgaming are headquartered here along with the likes of Celton Manx.

    There is some light engineering and manufacturing industry, such as Strix, a world leader in kettle safety controls. Regulated cultivation of medicinal cannabis commenced in 2021. Crypto has also been embraced though, currently, what the future holds is less clear than once it was.

    In Ballasalla, an easy commute into Douglas, Dandara https://www.dandara.com/ is offering new-builds of 3-4 bedrooms for just over £400,000. Castletown, the ancient capital is close by. This delightful small town is dominated by its magnificent castle, parts dating back to Norman times.

    Rural properties generally range from around £300,000 to multi-millions, the latter providing country estates for international HNWs who take advantage of the highly attractive tax regime. The rental market is buoyant with demand being high from financial institutions and eGaming sector.

    There are two hospitals – one on the outskirts of Douglas and the other at the northern part of the island in Ramsey. Just like the UK, the hospitals currently struggle to attract consultants and nurses. Under a deal with the UK, residents needing specialist care, such as for heart operations, are flown at public expense to Manchester or Liverpool, just 40 minutes away.

    In a changing society, the demands on and for teachers present all the problems similar to the UK. Children from here gravitate to the Universities across the water and may be eligible for some financial support.  University College Isle of Man (UCM) has offerings for 14–16-year-olds through to Advanced Education. King William’s

    There are two ferries linking the Island to Liverpool, Heysham, Dublin and Belfast. A new vessel, the Manxman, is being completed now in South Korea and will soon be improving travel facilities. The airport caters for private jets as well as commercial airlines. There are flights including to Heathrow, Gatwick, London City, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham and Scotland. Direct charter flights offer travel into Europe at peak seasons. Flybe are restoring services to compete with Easyjet and Loganair. Cheap flights were plentiful before Covid 19. Now, with soaring energy costs and staff shortages, prices have risen whether by air or when taking a car by ferry to Liverpool.

    I was told before my arrival that there was no crime and although that is not strictly accurate, most residents do not feel threatened by real risks of burglary, rapes or murder – such as cause increasing concern in the UK’s major conurbations and even smaller urban communities. Even here, there will always be a criminal element but parents have far less cause to worry about their children’s welfare than in the UK’s major cities. Sadly, though the Isle of Man is not drug-free. Pushers and dealers from the UK have seen to that but if caught, sentences can be severe.

    Commuting is a doddle for anyone more used to long tailbacks around the big cities or standstills on the M6 motorway.  For eating out, the number and quality of restaurants has also improved since 2009. Now with Greek, Chinese, Turkish, Japanese, Italian and French offerings, the choice is considerably wider.

    There are two cinemas, a casino and two main entertainment centres where every taste of live music or theatre are catered for. Well-known sporting and entertainment celebrities are regulars appearing at the venues or charity events. Entering the Villa Gaiety is like being back in London’s West End. The magnificent building was designed by the celebrated architect Frank Matcham, whose legacy lives on around London’s theatreland.

    The renowned TT motorbike races attract over 35,000 visitors to watch these fearless competitors race through town and country on our winding roads at mind-boggling speeds. They cover the 37 miles in about 17 minutes – averaging over 135mph. It takes me over an hour longer.

    There is an excellent Sports Centre and football, rugby, hockey and cricket all thrive, along with the other indoor sports. Cycling on our roads was also the starting point for Olympic Gold medallists – the legendary Mark Cavendish and Peter Kennaugh. There are several good golf-courses including the challenging Castletown Golf Links, now rated number 261 in the world. Walking paths abound. While strolling round the bays, whether on beaches or clifftops, seals, dolphins, whales and sharks and seabirds can sometimes add to the pleasure.

    It is typically never as cold nor as hot as most of England Sadly, there are too few gloriously sunny days. When they do come, the blue sea and swaying palm trees mean there are few better sights anywhere. If it is wet, cloudy and blustery, then perhaps its time to sort out the annual Tax Return – a far less demanding task than in the UK

    Except for VAT, the Manx Government fixes its own tax rates and policies. Starting at 10% and only rising to 20%, Income Tax is far less than the UK’s 45% top rate. Even better, for the world’s HNWs, the maximum tax payable by a single person on global income is only £200,000 – a bargain that attracts many to live in grand homes, hidden away amidst the hills and glens. The island operates in lockstep with the UK on VAT, something that can be advantageous or sometimes a negative for international business.

    For most companies, the rate of Corporation Tax is 0%, tax only being taken via dividends on withdrawals. There is no Stamp Duty Land Tax, no Capital Gains Tax and no Inheritance Tax – benefits that attract many to take up residence. The income in Manx Trusts can roll up tax-free.

    Strand Street, the main shopping centre in Douglas, is scarcely the Trafford Centre, Bluewater or London’s Bond Street. However, most needs are catered for on-Island through such as Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Next, Currys and B&Q. Otherwise, many shoppers get their fix on away-days in Liverpool or Manchester, sometimes combined with supporting the great football teams in those cities. There’s plenty to love about life on this Island.

    Douglas Stewart is an Author and Lawyer

     

  • Are we in the Age of Pointless Jobs?

    Christopher Jackson

     

    It is one of the most astonishing remarks ever attributed to a UK prime minister. The story, as told, by Harry Cole and James Heale in the recent book Out of the Blue: The inside story of the unexpected rise and rapid fall of Liz Truss, is that as Truss’ mayfly premiership wound to its helter skelter conclusion, Downing Street aides were crying as the then PM prepared her resignation statement. But Truss was in philosophical mode and not about to cry over spilt milk. “Don’t worry I’m relieved it’s over,” Truss said. “At least I’ve been prime minister.”

    With all due allowance given for the possible casualness of the remark, this is nevertheless revealing. It seems to mark the apotheosis of political ambition whereby holding a position is good in and of itself, regardless of one’s suitability for the role, and what one was able to accomplish in it. One might read the remarks aloud and place particular emphasis on the words ‘I’m’ and ‘I’ve’ and thereby better arrive at the truth of the matter.

    Truss aside, do the remarks tell us something broader about who we are, and what we’ve become? Of course, it is important to proceed with trepidation. It was Leo Tolstoy who, in War and Peace, pointed out that anytime you hear the words ‘These days’ prepare to hear a lie. There have always been people ambitious for position; in fact, it’s a safe bet that every prime minister of the past had precisely that same kind of ambition which animated Truss. As Gore Vidal once noted: “Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so.” Sometimes when one sees a politician assume the highest office, one notices a range of emotions, but often a certain relief is there: a remorseless itch has finally been scratched.

    It’s not just presidents who have ambition, but those who surround them. Reading Carl Sandburg’s magnificent biography of Abraham Lincoln, we find the president issue the poetry of his first great inaugural speech and then settle into the prose of governing. In that spring of 1861, job-seekers descend on the President in to the extent that Lincoln invented the humorous salutation: “Good morning, I’m very pleased to see you’ve not come here asking for a position.’

    Sandburg picks up the narrative: “Of a visit of several days in Washington Herndon wrote that Lincoln could scarcely cease from referring to the persistence of office seekers. They slipped in, he said, through half-opened doors; they edged their way through crowds and thrust papers in his hands when he rode.” On another occasion, Herndon quoted Lincoln directly: “if our American society and the United States Government are demoralized and overthrown, it will come from the voracious desire for office, this wriggle to live without toil, work, and labor, from which I am not free myself.”

    In these words it might be said, is squirrelled away a far-sighted prediction of the Truss administration, where the PM knows only one thing: that they want to be PM.

    Lincoln was too wise not to include himself within his own criticism, but also too humble to differentiate himself from all those office-seekers who hemmed him in during those first months of his presidency. History has shown abundantly that Lincoln did have a reason for being there: he is one of those people, like Churchill, with a historical mission to fulfil. In Churchill’s case, he was always the preserver the British Empire and the foe of Hitler before he was Prime Minister. Lincoln, meanwhile, was always the defender of the Union and the enemy of slavery before he was President.

    It’s possible that an advocate for Liz Truss might argue that she was the evangelist of lower taxes before she was the occupant of Downing Street, but it seems likely that this won’t quite wash. In a sense Truss also represented the real life embodiment of the comedy of Armando Iannucci, the leading satirist of our times. Iannucci is the creator of not only The Day Today but Alan Partridge, The Thick of It, Veep, In The Loop and latterly a satirical prose poem Pandemonium. The common thread of Iannucci’s comedy is that people in his world occupy roles which seem to lack real meaning: Alan Partridge wants to be TV star while having no talent to entertain or inform; the civil servants and spads in The Thick of It, are rushing around Westminster bereft of real political beliefs; in Veep, an entire position – the vice-presidency of the United States – has no discernible function.

    It is as if the world has itself turned into satire – making it increasingly difficult for satirists to mock. This sense of futility regarding the roles we need to carry out is far worse beyond Westminster than in Westminster itself. In his 2018 work of sociology Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, the late writer David Graeber identified the way in which numerous jobs have cropped up in contemporary society whose fundamental value is highly questionable.

    Graeber’s point is not just that many contemporary roles are pointless, but that their pointlessness is known even to those who carry them out. Furthermore, this lack of meaning is made to rub along with the contemporary tendency to tie work to status. He writes of ‘a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.’

    This, Graeber says, in what amounts to a searing indictment of contemporary life, is ‘profound psychological violence’. So what kind of jobs is he talking about? Firstly he refers to ‘flunkies’ whose purpose is to make important people feel more important: he is discussing the whole raft of receptionists, assistants and assistants’ assistants who populate the typical corporate setting. Graeber’s second category is ‘goons’, those who set out to deceive or do harm on behalf of their employers: he is thinking of lobbyists, some lawyers, telemarketers, and the like.

    Thirdly, there are ‘duct tapers’ – those who fix temporarily something which ought to be fixed permanently, like software engineers, or those working in computer science. Fourthly, there are ‘box tickers’ who create the appearance of utility without actually doing anything such as compliance officers, or survey administrators.

    Finally, Graeber refers to ‘taskmasters’, those whose primary function is to create unnecessary tasks for others: Graeber is thinking of the whole realm of middle management which is often blamed, with a degree of justice, on the Blair years.

    None of these calls to mind the prime ministership. Is it then that during the Truss administration we temporarily saw the Graeberisation of 10 Downing Street – a strange, fleeting glimpse of what happens when the highest office of state somehow cannot be injected with any particular meaning? This probably cannot be complete because the affairs of state will always have inherent meaning and so it is hard to see how the role of prime minister could ever become as numbing as Graeber’s other listed roles. Nevertheless the fact remains, that insofar as is possible, the spectacle of Truss holding the position of prime minister, predominantly for the pleasure of holding it, represented a nadir in the office, and makes one realise that a position isn’t a static thing, but a space which one fills – above all, an opportunity, around which one needs to deploy initiative.

    In general, it should be said Graeber’s target isn’t the public sector, where one imagines a fair number of ‘taskmasters’ not to mention ‘flunkies’ and ‘box tickers’ reside, but the private sector. And I think his reticence on that question is probably related to his solution for all these problems: universal basic income. This, in one (expensive) swoop, would get rid of the need to work for those who don’t want to, and in theory free people up for more meaningful activity.

    The jury is out on how sensible this is. We had a glimpse of how it might look like during Covid-19 when something almost resembling Universal Basic Income had a morbid parody of a trial run. The results for productivity are already there to see with the economy in recession, and some businesses struggling to find momentum amid the pervasive malaise. It would also likely lead to inflation, since earnings would increase while productivity would remain the same, or even decline.

    Therefore there has probably never been a time less propitious for UBI than the present one. It would appear we need an alternative.

    Happily, a recent film suggests it might all be rather simpler than we think. This is Living, starring Bill Nighy and written by Kazuo Ishiguro. This is remake, deriving from Kurosawa’s ‘Ikiru’ and tells the story of a middling civil servant, Mr Williams, played by Nighy, who discovers he hasn’t long to live. He is one of Graeber’s taskmasters. In the opening scenes, some women turn up lobbying to change a dilapidated part of East London, by building a playground in a disused slum. There follows a tragicomic scene where the women are – as they had been on the previous day – taken from department to department all of whom absolve themselves of responsibility. The playground won’t be built, not because it’s not a genuine possibility but because nobody is using initiative in their roles.

    But as Mr Williams begins to accept his diagnosis, it becomes clear that he hasn’t been granted so much a death sentence, as a heightened sense of life. In fact, he seems strangle in possession of a kind of superpower, all the more vivid because it is contrasted with what he had been before.

    He comes to realise that with the right mindset and creativity his role can be put to use. He begins to lobby for the playground with a mixture of persistence and smarts until, without giving anything away, his sense of himself and his role’s potential is transformed.

    It seems to me that many of us enter our roles in life with too much passivity, and that if we are significantly vigilant we can actually make a difference to those around us no matter what our title, or even our function might be. What if the right answer isn’t to unpick the whole world of work with a vast social safety net which might then be expensive and difficult to administer, but to find it within ourselves to do the jobs we do have with the right spirit and creativity? Living suggests that such a thing is possible. It’s also, of course, free.

    It can’t be a complete solution. Some people do jobs which beat them down, and the answer to that will be a mixture of technological advance and education. But the Truss administration, mercifully brief for both the country and, one senses, for Truss herself, has perhaps as much to teach us as a more successful administration. It asks us to look inside ourselves and ask what we’re fit for, and then to wonder what we’re capable of. It’s a reminder not to attempt what we cannot do; by getting that decision right, and with the right measure of modesty, we just might nudge the world a little in the right direction.

  • The Apple of his Eye: the case of Paul Cézanne

    Cézanne is the patron saint of those who don’t find their chosen path in life easy, writes Christopher Jackson

    If genius is to do with fluidity and effortlessness then Paul Cézanne wasn’t a genius at all. This isn’t meant to be derogatory to Cézanne. Sometimes in great achievement we can still see the graft that went into it – a sense that things were never straightforward, and that nothing was ever arrived at in a flash.

    That kind of achievement deserves a respect distinct from the awe we feel at genius when it has less hindrance attached to it. We can see in Van Gogh and Picasso that mark-making came unusually easily to them: mistakes were simply not in their nature and that there was an unusually easy relationship between world, eye and hand which almost always added up to something worthwhile.

    It wasn’t like that for Cézanne. A new show at the Tate shows how long it took for Cézanne to become Cézanne. If you’ve ever thought in your career that you have something to offer, but that it might be a long time coming to fruition, then visit this exhibition and make the artist your patron saint.

    The exhibition should be viewed in tandem with reading Alex Danchev’s marvellous Cézanne: A Life (2012), now experiencing a muted 10th anniversary. This book gives vital biographical detail which the placards in the exhibition don’t have time to cover.

    So who was Cézanne? Cézanne grew up in Aix-en-Provence where he would eventually die: he is one of those who doesn’t need to travel much because he suspects the substance of what he has to do lies not in travel but in stasis. To broaden the terms of reference of life would be to create an insoluble complexity; but to stay still and really pay attention might just lead you to a coup. That was the Cézanne wager.

    But early on in Danchev’s biography you learn that Cézanne was defined by a coincidence: he went to school with the novelist Emile Zola. This relationship – which isn’t paramount in the Tate Modern’s exhibition – is nevertheless the chief biographical fact about him. Many people who are creative or successful are influenced to an extent they might not wish to admit by chance. For the future painter, given to a certain sluggishness, one gets the sense it was important to have the rocket fuel of a close friendship with Zola right at the beginning.

    Cézanne had his influences among the dead too: Rubens, Leonardo, Puget, Delacroix. But a great friendship can be an accelerator of development and it appears to have been so in this case. It also reminds us that Cézanne’s talent wasn’t necessarily pictorial in the first instance. In fact, Zola appears to have always harboured a secret sense that Cézanne would have been a better writer than he was. Here is Danchev:

    On Zola’s side there was a certain sense of inferiority, perhaps early acknowledged and then long submerged. After leaving school he dreamed of writing a kind of prequel to Jules Michet’s L’Amour (1858): “if I consider it worthy of publication, I’ll dedicate it to you,” he wrote to Cézanne, “who would perhaps do it better, if you were to write it, you whose heart is younger and more affectionate than mine.”

    This is a fascinating letter, especially in light of the subsequent difficulties which would later beset their friendship. Danchev makes it clear that on Zola’s side, these feelings of insecurity were a sort of time bomb which would detonate far later with the publication of Zola’s L’Oeuvre. But it is also interesting in that it opens up onto the possibility that Cézanne’s first gift wasn’t painterly at all – instead, in the opinion of his friend, it lay elsewhere. Zola seems to suggest he was made of the sort of stuff that can turn itself to any task.

    Was this true? There seems to be something in Zola’s assessment. In Danchev’s biography, we read a fascinating description of Cézanne’s attainments at school. We glimpse a general talent which would find in the end a singular outlet, and not a unique aptitude for the thing for which’d eventually become known. Danchev writes:

    He [Cézanne] was a prize-winning pupil. At the ceremony at the end of the first year (when he was fourteen), he won first prize for arithmetic, and gained a first honourable mention for Latin translation and a second honourable mention for history and geography, and for calligraphy. The years rolled by in like fashion. In the fifth grade he won second prize for overall excellence (after Baille), first prize for Latin translation, second prize for Greek translation, a first honorable mention for painting…

    The fifteen year old who has a first prize in Latin can be a Latinist as much as a painter later in life, and there’s always the sense in Cézanne’s life that there was something arbitrary and quixotic about his decision to be a painter at all.

    But this arbitrariness itself goes into the mix and forms part of his achievement. The sense is that only someone with a certain amount of ground to make up would consider to focus with the kind of ardour which Cézanne did on just a few subjects: his bowls of apples belie a determination to really look at the world which are different somehow from Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’, wrestled with by an artist of genius and then not subsequently returned to.

    Paul Joyce, the brilliant photographer and painter, agrees with this assessment, telling me: “I think art came with difficulty to Cézanne and I have the impression he struggled a great deal with perfecting his vision. My guess is that he destroyed more work than he actually exhibited or finished.”

    This is certainly the impression one gets in the Tate exhibition. The first rooms see Cézanne groping for an identity as an artist, and while this is always the case with anybody’s early work, it could be argued that the greater the artist’s eventual achievement, the more unlikely it seems at the beginning. An image like The Murder, where Caravaggio-esque lighting and the ghoulishness of El Greco’s figures combines to make an image which teaches us in one fell swoop why Cézanne would never make a drama painter. The murder in this picture doesn’t matter to the painter as an apple or a mountain would later do. Ruction and disaster didn’t appeal to Cézanne as subjects. This isn’t to call him heartless; probably quite the opposite. It might be that he felt the calamity of murder too keenly to produce a valid picture depicting it; certainly he couldn’t look at it in the same way as he would find he could look at a bather. But then, aside from a murderer, who can?

    But if The Murder was a failure of sorts, it was a promising one. Crucially, it must have been sufficiently promising to Cézanne, since he kept going. This fact alone is a reminder that perseverance is rarely rational: without it, nothing would ever be achieved. Persistence needs to be innate: if we weren’t wired to dream, few would rationally continue with their first efforts, since in the ordinary scheme of things these tend to be extraordinarily unpromising.

    Success, then, is often against the grain. At the Tate Modern, a self-portrait of Cézanne against a pink background dating to 1875 seems to contain this knowledge. The colours of the face are applied with a delicate care which reminds you of the fragility of any human face, composed of little strokes which happen to be together, and which might just as easily rush apart. The eyes, tired as if with too much looking, also seem vulnerable: ambivalent about the tasks ahead, doubtful about the likelihood of self-fulfilment. It’s an arresting intimate image, bringing a fragile ego near. This portrait might give us our own permission to make inroads in our own lives, since we can see that one of the great names in history didn’t always seem confident of his value.

    John Updike once wrote a review of a Jackson Pollock show which began very unpromisingly and then transformed itself in round about Room Three, with the advent of the famous drip paintings. “Beauty, how strange to find it here!” Updike exclaimed in that article. One wants to exclaim the same in the Tate exhibition as the exhibition ripens in its last rooms.

    By this point, Cézanne has found his subjects: bathers, Mont Saint-Victoire and of course his famous apples. When I ask Paul Joyce what he has learned from these masterworks he replies: “There are really too many lessons to learn from Cézanne to simply list, and as you return to him and his work as your own career as a painter progresses, you realise that what you may barely grasp from him is that the closer you look, the more you see. Colour, balance, fluidity of brush stroke, command of the subject, ability to build “atmosphere” and movement into a still, flat canvas amongst many more things.”

    That’s a good summary of what these last rooms offer. One might add that Cézanne, though he looked hard at the world, always looked with a consciousness of the limitations imposed on looking. A humility pervades his work, which is a possible reason for his popularity today. It is the genius as everyman, which makes us wonder if mightn’t we be great too.

    His popularity may be set to grow again. Cézanne lived without too much pizzazz, and may therefore be an attractive figure in our own cost of living crisis. Danchev cites some evidence that the painter came to feel that his friend Zola, showered with plaudits in Paris, had come to live too grandly. Cézanne never did that; his was a quiet existence dedicated to work.

    Nevertheless, though Zola is less admired today than Cézanne, this work ethic was an example which he had had all along from Zola himself. The novelist wrote to Cézanne when he was 21 that ‘in the artist, there are two men, the poet and the worker. One is born a poet, one becomes a worker.’

    To some extent, Zola heeded his own advice: his complete works comprise a formidable number of volumes, most of them fat. He might be one of those writers who makes shelves groan more than he makes readers dream. The friendship between them reminds us that work for its own sake can lead to an inferior achievement: sometimes it can really be volubility. It was once said in relation to Proust that a bore is someone who tells you everything, and perhaps Zola was a bit like that.

    In relation to Cézanne, one senses a greater focus – a more coherent and patient mindset about the task which needs to be accomplished. This had also, to an extent, been pre-empted by Zola who wrote to his friend in 1877 regarding his work: “Such strong and true canvases can make the bourgeois smile, nonetheless they show the makings of a very great painter. Come the day when M. Paul Cézanne achieves complete self-mastery, he will produce works of indisputable superiority.’ Though this might have been to damn him with faint praise, something like this prediction did in fact come true.

    What was that legacy? Cézanne realised his own way of looking. Too often we tend to think of him as a staging-post in the history of art, but I don’t think this is quite right. All artists worth their salt do something unrepeatably unique. Too often, we compare them to those who came before and after, meaning we don’t properly take the measure of what’s in front of us. Maybe this is especially a problem with Cézanne, not only because he really does have antecedents and a legacy, but because something about his pictures feels hard to rise to. There are those whose opinion one respects, who would say: “Oh God, not another Mont Saint-Victoire”. We feel we cannot match his intensity and so we turn away.

    What is his art ultimately about? The great landscapes flaunt the strokes by which they were compiled and yet each individual stroke which seems so apparently simple, adds to the alchemy of the whole. This art then comprises more than just a series of fragmented strategies: they’re shot through instead with honesty about our predicament as creatures dwarfed by the scale and complexity of things. That means that his landscapes and his apples are really unusual kinds of self-portraits because they are as much about the insecure position of the painter – and his integrity to admit that insecurity – as they are about the mountain or fruit which he is ostensibly depicting.

    Van Gogh’s condition as a genius likely suffering from bipolar disorder was always impinging on his work. Cézanne was saying something else: that we’re all standing on shifting ground. It’s the kind of thing which, once said, has to be admitted by everyone. This accounts for his influence, and this has carried into the present day. There is some anxiety attached to high achievers: we think we might not be able to outdo them, and feel our own efforts likely to be paltry when set next to theirs. One can easily guess what Cézanne himself would have made of such a defeatist attitude. He would have liked the mantra of Sir Kingsley Amis: KBO (Keep Buggering On).

    Paul Joyce tells me: “Artists are always anxious whatever their reputation or state of maturity may be. Each generation is influenced by the previous one and the History of Art is simultaneously one of constant homage and theft. My answer would be “be anxious, be influenced, then set out on your own path, like Cezanne!”

    It’s sound advice – and you don’t need to be a budding artist to heed it.

  • An Interview with revered clinical psychotherapist Dr. Paul Hokemeyer about Get Back and workplace toxicity

    Finito World interviews Dr. Paul Hokemeyer about the Beatles film ‘Get Back’ as a study in workplace toxicity

     

    Psychologically speaking, how do toxic work situations arise and why is it that we find them so difficult to deal with?

     

    Toxic work situations mirror toxic family of origin situations. In them, we and our colleagues consciously and unconsciously play out unresolved patterns from our primary developmental relationships. In my work, I’ve seen this is particularly true in creative industries where there are fewer organizational boundaries to keep people operating with a modicum of decorum. Toxic work relationships arise because people feel threatened. They feel they are not getting what they need to feel safe and secure in the organization. The best way to look at this is through the lens of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In this lens, people can only be their highest and best self and produce their best work when their physical and emotional needs are satiated and they operate in a culture of psychological safety.

     

    We struggle to productively deal with toxic work relationships because they affect us on the most primal level of our being. In them, we are constantly feeling the whole of our being is under attack. In this state of being, our limbic system goes on overdrive. It keeps us in a state of hypervigilance and stress. Our central nervous system floods us with stress hormones such as Cortisol and causes our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that rules our rational behaviours and enables us to make smart strategic decisions, to go offline. Many times we can see these toxic patterns clearly, but because our neurophysiology is operating through a place of stress and danger, we are paralyzed from making rational decisions and taking reparative actions to change things.

     

    In Get Back, Paul McCartney emerges as a boss figure. He seems in some way a micromanager, particularly of George Harrison. How should we deal with micromanagers and ensure we retain our equilibrium in these situations?

     

    One of the defining features of anxiety disorders is a compulsive need to control what feels out of control. Micromanagers are operating from a place of heightened anxiety. Once we understand the etiology of their behaviours we can create a plan to address them. The best way to do this is to focus first on self and second on the other. Become conscious of what your manager fears most. Look for her triggers. Everyone has hot buttons that send them into states of emotional reactivity. Once you’ve identified these patterns in your manager, consciously strive to go above and beyond in your efforts in these areas. Also, address these issues directly with your manager. Ask her straight out what you can do to improve your service to her and the organization in these areas. The mere fact that you evidence awareness of her triggers and are diligently and intentionally striving to improve in these areas will go far in reducing her anxiety and enable her to put her focus on someone or something else.

     

    To be fair to McCartney he is partly in a position of authority due to a greater talent – his ability to play more instruments than the others for instance means that he invades their space more. How should CEOs and managers deal with extremely gifted individuals to ensure that they don’t alter the balance of a workplace setting?

     

    The construct of psychological safety is every bit as relevant in creative families as it is in traditional organizations. Through it, people feel safe to fail and have a voice that’s outside the norm. Studies show that a culture rich in psychological safety produces exceptionally innovative work and is made up of happy, healthy employees. Managers who are working with extremely gifted employees will be well served to look at the foundations of the construct. At its core, a culture of psychological safety ensures that people will not be humiliated or punished for challenging the cultural norm or speaking up against authority. It requires managers to have healthy egos and to have a mechanism for managing their own issues of narcissism, insecurity and self esteem.

     

    Contrastingly, Ringo Starr in the film seems to carry himself extremely well, and maintain excellent relationships with all people, even in an increasingly toxic situation. How is he able to do this and what might we learn from him?

     

    As in most challenging situations, successful resolution comes not from investing your principal energy in changing the system but rather on focusing on how you can change your reaction to the toxicity that exists in the system in which you are operating. In short, this means coming up with healthy ways to manage the toxicity that surrounds you.  The first step in this process is to accept the reality of the situation. Toxic work environments exist. Yes, you might be able to change them but the probability of changing major systems can be quite low and the return on your risk in trying to change them low.   Instead focus, like Ringo Starr focused, on that in which there is a high probability of success and a high return on investment. As we see in the film, Ringo had the most balanced life. He had a rich and rewarding personal life and invested his human and relational capital through a diverse intrapersonal and interpersonal portfolio. He manifested resilience, which is the capacity to make meaning from setbacks and grit which is the capacity to tolerate short term discomfort for a long term gain.

     

     

  • Waterfly on King Charles, Ronnie O’Sullivan and Stephen Hawking

    The Waterfly sees the reflection in the water. It takes note as the water shifts. Here’s the latest gossip from the education and employability sectors.

     

    Racking up the Royalties

     

    As we move towards the coronation of a new King, Waterfly hears that Finito’s CEO Ronel Lehmann has had the opportunity to meet His Majesty on multiple occasions when the current King was the Prince of Wales. The first meeting was facilitated by Lady Nourse, who enjoyed her superior position perhaps a little too much. “The first time that I met HRH The Prince of Wales was thanks to Lady Nourse who was chairing a charity event at a West End theatre,” Lehmann recalls. “We all had to be seated half an hour before Charles arrived. Lady Nourse took great pleasure in marching into the Royal box and immediately chastising us for not standing up quickly,” he recalls. It’s not recorded how Charles reacted to this: at least it didn’t involve a rogue pen.

     

    But the future King’s humour comes through in Lehmann’s recollections. After a lifetime of service, charity, and championing the environment, His Majesty took particular pride in another accomplishment of his when he and Camilla visited The Jewish Museum to mark its Camden Town expansion. Among the refreshments were Duchy Original Biscuits, which the then-Prince of Wales began production of in 1990. Now they are a Waitrose product, though to their credit the royalties still go to charity. At the museum’s grand opening, His Majesty was seen to relish picking up biscuits, placing them in his jacket pocket, and excitedly telling guests “these were mine!”

     

    Lehmann also recalls a meeting at the Platinum Jubilee celebrations, which he attended through an invitation from Marianne Fredericks CC. Lehmann and the future King spoke of his own long-standing association with Sylvia Darley OBE, who founded The Malcolm Sargent Cancer Fund for Children. “I told His Royal Highness that I was trying to get the Royal Albert Hall to honour Sir Malcolm on one of their stars located under the canopy of the building. These are dedicated to key players in the building’s history, from its opening in 1871 to the present day,” Lehmann says. “Most young people have no idea of his impact on classical music or Sir Malcolm’s importance to the survival of The Royal Albert Hall. I felt that I was beating a Royal path for common sense to prevail!” We feel another black spider memo coming on.

     

    Baised and Confused

     

    Waterfly hears that the world of snooker is a place where journalists experience a variety of welcomes. According to Finito staff writer Patrick Crowder, Australian champion Neil Robertson exuded quiet confidence and kindness, asking nearly as many questions about Crowder’s life during the interview as Crowder was asking him. Eventually the expats connected over the question of homesickness – and even swapped mobiles.

     

    But when Crowder approached Ronnie O’Sullivan after a match, the legend was initially closed off. O’Sullivan generally has little patience for the media, preferring to focus on his play. He asked which publication Crowder was writing for, and as he began to explain, O’Sullivan cut him off with, “I don’t give a f**k mate, how much time have we got?” But O’Sullivan warmed up when he picked up on Crowder’s Californian accent – an unusual nationality on the snooker circuit. Eventually the pair bonded over their shared love of scones and clotted cream from ‘Marksies’, which O’Sullivan was surprised Crowder had even heard of. From expletives to cream – the true trajectory of a Rocket.

     

    Our Mole in TV

     

    The author Tim Robinson recalls what it was like directing and producing Reading the Eighties for BBC2. He recalls: “Sue Townsend of Adrian Mole fame was perhaps the most amiable, although she couldn’t stand Beryl Reid who played Adrian’s grandmother in the TV adaptation. ‘She was a mad pain in the neck,’ said Sue, ‘who, unable to do a Sheffield accent, did an awful Brummie caricature and then tried to force the rest of the cast to imitate her.’ I confessed to her my terrible fear of aging and losing my looks, and she, who was close to death, replied, laughingly: ‘Because of my diabetes, I’m completely blind and can’t see you at all, but I’ll tell you how lovely you look if that helps.’

     

    Hawking his book

     

    Robinson, whose acclaimed new novel The Orphans of Hatham Hall is published by Northside Press, also had other fascinating encounters: “Stephen Hawking wasn’t noticeably more agile than Sue, but still manfully plugging A Brief History of Time which had sold in huge numbers – although, it has been scandalously suggested, a smaller percentage than usual ever reached the end. I was allowed only one unprepared question and as we were featuring ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, asked him about Douglas Adams. For twenty minutes the camera ran while he dutifully programmed his gizmo, and I crossed and uncrossed my legs. But it was well worth the wait as finally everybody’s favourite household dalek began speaking: ‘I once met Douglas Adams in Los Angeles for lunch where he told me about working on scripts for Doctor Who.’ The silence that followed told me the anecdote was complete, so I jumped up, shouting out: ‘Wonderful, that’s simply wonderful!’ Still, it made it to the final cut.

     

    Lowering the Standard

     

    The management team at Stansted Airport aren’t the only ones struggling to find solid ground. A source close to Waterfly tells us of trouble at the Evening Standard. After two years of anticipation and preparation, staff at the Standard were finally ready to move into their new offices, only to find that the WiFi didn’t work. Apparently, staff were told that there was “an 80% chance of WiFi” during their first week in the new digs. On top of that, the Standard faces an £11,847,000 operating loss, and net liabilities totalling £28,998,000, so if you’re on the market for some pre-owned printing presses keep an eye out on Gumtree.

     

    Call a Doctor

     

    Russell T Davies was heard to be quite rude about MP Nadine Dorries over her appearance on Radio 4. “The woman is an idiot – a big f**king idiot. She’s a plain, complete, clearly idiotic woman,” Davies tells Waterfly. Speaking of his return to writing for the nation’s favourite time-travelling doctor, the Welsh screenwriter expressed concern about going back to the BBC, which he believes is coming under fire. “I think it’s under attack all the time. Every single day,” he tells us. His proposal to save the historic broadcast service? “Vote the government out, it’s simple as that. But we won’t, it’s not going to happen, so when your children are sitting watching cartoons it’s your fault for not voting them out.” Call the Paw Patrol.

     

     

  • Christopher Jackson reviews Bob Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song: “A great career has its basis ultimately in enthusiasm’

    Christopher Jackson

     

    ‘Curioser and curioser,’ said Alice.” The lines come from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland but might easily have been describing the career of Bob Dylan.

    In Dylan’s world nothing is ever what we might expect, and it’s this quality of oddity which has created the obsessiveness of so-called Dylanologists. And now, just as his recording career has settled down into the possible endpoint of 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, and his art career seems also established in a comfortable retrospective – called Retrospectrum – at the Frost Art Museum, we get something altogether different again. Indefatigability is an underrated character of high achievers: Dylan is stubborn and remorseless, able to find an audience while remaining tied to deliberate mystery.

    His literary career is brief, and occasional – a fact which alone makes it peculiar to consider that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. But his output in books shows in microcosm his essential strangeness. First comes an incomprehensible novel Tarantula, released during the height of 1960s mayhem. Dylan then releases in 2003, a magnificent memoir Chronicles Vol., only to eschew publication of a second. Now we have something altogether different to what we were expecting – except if we had recalibrated our expectations to anticipate the improbable.

    Strangeness will not always amount to genius, but it is impossible when reading this latest offering The Philosophy of Modern Song not to remember Schopenhauer’s remark that talent hits a target no other can hit, and genius a target none can see.

    There’s never been a book like this. The book consists of 65 essays on songs which have influenced Dylan, mainly by men – as numerous reviewers have pointed out – and predominantly emanating out of the 1950s of his youth. Most of them have essays in the second person. Many feel oddly pertinent. This riff, for instance, on Elvis Presley’s ‘Money Honey’ feels relevant to the inflationary status quo:


    This money thing is driving you up the wall, it’s got you dragged out and spooked, it’s a constant concern. The landlord’s at your door and he’s ringing the bell. Lots of space between the rings, and you’re hoping he’ll go away, like there’s nobody home.

    Dylan recently sold his back catalogue to Universal for around $300 million, but there is somehow an authentic note to this – a wisdom which has come his way through songs. It was Eddie Izzard who joked that fame tended to injure comedy as you can’t begin a joke with ‘My butler went to the supermarket.’ Dylan doesn’t always get it right; after this book was published, it emerged that copies of this book masquerading as possessing his unique signature had in fact been signed electronically. It was unacceptable, but in this book, the writer gives the impression of being able to get to the core of things, even when looking at the world through the tinted glass of a limousine.

     

    Sometimes, as in the extended riff on ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ – Dylan writes about the Carl Perkins and not the Presley version – the predominant note is comic:

     

    You get on with most people, and you put up with a lot, and you hardly get caught off guard, but your shoes are something else. Minor things may annoy you but you rise above them. Having your teeth kicked in, being pounded senseless, being dumped on and discredited, but you don’t put any weight on that, none of it’s as real to you as your shoes. They’re priceless and beyond monetary worth. 

    The chapter only grows more absurd until Dylan writes of these shoes: “They neither move nor speak, yet they vibrate with life, and contain the infinite power of the sun.” It’s writing which is a joy in itself but also transforms your listening. Spotify already has several playlists featuring the songs in this book: it is a transformative listen as well as a transformative read.

    Another aspect to this book is the curation of its splendid photographs which makes the book a luxury object and also ups the price to £35 at the same time. The collection is prefaced by a fascinating portrait of a young Elvis browsing in a record store; ‘London Calling’ by the Clash is illustrated by a picture of bobbies breaking up a riot; ‘Cheaper to Keep Her’ by Johnnie Taylor, includes an ad for a divorce law firm.

    That chapter also contains an intriguing invective against the divorce law profession which, having been through several marriages, is a topic close to Dylan’s heart. It’s not the only passage which feels autobiographical. Dylan’s love of London is brought out when discussing The Clash:


    London calling – send food, clothing, airplanes, whatever you could do. But then, calling is immediate, especially to Americans. It wouldn’t be the same as Rome calling or Paris calling or Copenhagen calling or Buenos Aires, or Sydney, or even Moscow. You can pass off all these calls with somebody saying, “Take a message, we’ll call you back.” But not with London calling. 

    Likewise a dissertation on the little known singer Johnny Paycheck delivers this thought from the man who began life as Robert Zimmerman: “And then there are those who change their own names, either on the run from some unseen demon of heading toward something else.”

    It all amounts to a new kind of colloquialised, aestheticized and poeticised music criticism. It’s a homage to all that Dylan has known and loved, and perhaps in that sense has a valedictory feel: but then once you’re 81 everything feels like a goodbye. Yet you’re also reminded that the book is at the same time a hello, and a gift. It reminds you of Dylan’s explanation of his songwriting: “Every song I’ve ever written is saying: ‘Good luck, I hope you make it’.”

    Despite a bit of padding here and there, taken in the round the book has the feeling of necessity: Dylan’s long career appears to have taught him to wait on the vital inspiration. His latest records, now spread further and further apart to the extent that one wonders whether to expect another, have the same quality this book has of things which had to be done, since they could only be done by Dylan – and only done by him at the moment when they were carried out. All great artists are opportunists in that then they end up claiming all the prizes going.

    Greed is an aspect of Dylan’s life – or perhaps hunger. Because alongside this selectiveness of projects is also the other side to him: profusion, growth, energy, and restlessness. These qualities are all encapsulated by the Neverending Tour which has just swung through the UK during the publication of this book.

    There are limits to this book: you can sense that by the last 10 songs or so, the exercise has been largely spent and that some of the tropes have become repetitive. But this sense is more than offset by the enormous impact which the first half has: it feels regenerative, and makes you want to listen again not just to these songs, but to all music.

    A great career has its basis ultimately in enthusiasm. What we glimpse here is the power of that early passion for music which the young Dylan had: it was this which propelled him forwards, changing popular culture along the way, and eventually entering the annals of the true greats. The value of this book is that it needn’t necessarily apply to budding musicians: its lessons are transferable across sectors.

    We also sense that it is just a tiny corner of a voluminous mind. Artists who Dylan knew well – most notably Leonard Cohen and The Beatles – don’t feature at all. So this books suggests other books which will likely remain unwritten – at least unwritten by Dylan.

    This is a book which doesn’t mind who you are or where you are. It only wants to grip you and never let you go until you succeed. In another sense it doesn’t mind what you do, provided you listen to the music.

     

    The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan is published by Simon and Schuster (£35)