Convenience Big Store: The story of the pencil

19 October, 2021

In the headlines

There were 49,156 Covid cases in the UK yesterday, but "I'm actually more worried about influenza", says Professor Paul Hunter on Newsnight. Because of lockdown, the UK hasn't seen any flu cases for 18 months – and "the longer you wait between cases of influenza, the worse the illness". The government is offering £5,000 grants to replace gas boilers with low-carbon heat pumps. Gas boilers should be gone by 2035, but Boris Johnson tells Sun readers: "The Greenshirts of the Boiler Police are not going to kick in your door with their sandal-clad feet and seize, at carrot-point, your trusty old combi." Southend will be made a city to honour Sir David Amess. The murdered MP ended every speech, no matter what the topic, with: "And that's why Southend should become a city!"

Comment of the day

Pencils being manufactured in Germany. Ralph Orlowski/Getty Images

The story of the pencil – and why it matters

If you can't fathom Britain's supply-chain woes, consider a famous 1958 essay by economist Leonard Read about the pencil, says Tim Harford in the Financial Times. "Pick me up and look me over," wrote Read in I, Pencil. "Not much meets the eye." But look at the pencil's "family tree": collecting its cedar wood requires axes, saws and a railway; its graphite comes from Sri Lanka, mixed with Mississippi clay, sulphuric acid and other ingredients. Then there's the rubber and its "magnificent six (six!) coats of lacquer". The pencil's autobiography is a vivid account of the complexities of a market economy, says Harford. It shows why the current supply crisis is potentially so serious.

Most "supply-chain geeks" think we will weather the crisis, which stems from a post-lockdown surge in demand coinciding with ports hampered by Covid restrictions, manufacturing in Vietnam being held back by an outbreak of the Delta variant and truck drivers wondering if the job is worth the hassle. Britain, however, is a special case: until recently it was home to tens of thousands of truck drivers from the EU. Thanks to Covid, more than a third went home; thanks to post-Brexit curbs on immigration, they "are unlikely to return". Boris Johnson is betting that if he gives the UK economy a shock, something will turn up. "But in this case, I am suffering from an acute shortage of optimism."

The National Trust should be a refuge, not a battleground

"We all want quiet. We all want beauty... Unless we have it, we cannot reach that sense of quiet in which whispers of better things come to us gently." So wrote Octavia Hill, the social reformer who 126 years ago founded the National Trust. Since then, says Clare Foges in The Times, it has been a tonic for millions of souls. But now it faces a battle for its own. Restore Trust, a band of heritage traditionalists, are "disgruntled" by the charity's "capitulation to wokeness", by volunteers being forced to wear gay-pride lanyards, by the trust's endless dwelling on slavery and colonialism, by its declared intent to be "rigorous in how we reflect changing times, changing attitudes and changing demographies".

The traditionalists are right. What's happening is that the trust is picking sides in a "highly polarised debate", in a way antithetical to its founding purpose, which is to provide peace and respite. "Vacuous corporate speak is always thick with mentions of change, as though this is always a good thing in itself." But it isn't – most of us value the National Trust precisely because it doesn't move with the times. "In today's world of ugly retail parks [and] uncouth social media exchanges", we long for "Englishness-in-aspic: are there scones and jams still for tea? And gardens bright with lupins and flocks, and genteel custodians in Laura Ashley skirts... We do not want the trust to reflect the modern world, but to be a refuge from it."

On the way out

Nigels – no babies were recorded as being named Nigel in 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics. Fine by me, says Nigel Farndale in The Times. What were my parents thinking? "Who looks at a baby boy and thinks, 'Yes, he's definitely a Nigel. Baby Nigel'?" The only person who has "truly owned" the name is former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, who even called his daughter Nigella.

Love etc

The eldest Kardashian sister, Kourtney, 42, has got engaged to Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker in suitably showy fashion, says Olivia Craighead in Gawker. Barker, 45, proposed on the beach in Montecito, California, while surrounded by "approximately one million" red roses ("which I'm sure were a real hassle to clean up"), with a $1m engagement ring "similar in size to the iceberg that sunk the Titanic".

On the money

London's Frieze art fair finished on Sunday – and showed no evidence of an economic downturn, says the Evening Standard. Sales at one auction alone totalled more than £64m. "Even the coffee market seemed to be thriving – one visitor reported paying £7 for a flat white."

Snapshot

Noted

After English and Welsh, Polish is the most common language in England and Wales – 1% of the population report it as their main tongue, says the I newspaper. That's more than three times as many as speak French.

Snapshot answer

It's a meteorite that landed in the bed of a woman from British Columbia earlier this month. The 2lb 13oz rock left a hole in the ceiling of Ruth Hamilton's bedroom – the 66-year-old Canadian told Victoria News that she heard "an explosion", then called the police. Professor Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario says it probably came from an asteroid.