|  | Peter Hitchens in Moscow in 1984 |
|
|
| How lucky I am to be old | One of the ways my many social media critics try to insult me, says Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail, is by calling me old. They seem to think this is a "brilliant point" – that because I am old, I must be stupid. I respond by telling them I hope they will "one day be lucky enough to be old themselves". Because in my 72 years, I've seen and done a fair amount. I've marveled at the "deep blue stratosphere" from a Concorde flight deck, and seen the "fiery red and orange" of an express steam locomotive on a winter's evening, back when that was normal. I've crossed the International Date Line backwards, between Siberia and Alaska, from Monday morning to the previous Sunday afternoon. I met Margaret Thatcher, who made it clear I wasn't to "linger in her presence", and was told by Tony Blair, at a press conference, to "sit down and stop being bad". | I passed many times through the Berlin Wall and "stood in the freezing snow, warmed by a pair of Communist-built long johns, as Marxism-Leninism collapsed in Prague in 1989". I've been frightened out of my wits by Islamist gangsters in Somalia, attended divine service in a nuclear missile submarine, and wandered amid the radioactive dust of a nuclear test site. I've seen "chain gangs at work, two American executions, one Soviet massacre and several Nazi concentration camps". I've been chased down the street by the East German People's Police – they weren't as fast as me – and been refused entry to a "rather interesting-looking bar" in North Korea. So yes, call me old all you like. "Don't you wish you were old too?" | 🚀 To read this week's Heroes and Villains, click here | | |  | Imperioli in HBO's The White Lotus |
| Michael Imperioli was just 23 when he landed his breakthrough role getting murdered by Joe Pesci while serving drinks in Goodfellas, says Zach Helfand in The New Yorker. Director Martin Scorsese had hired a stuntman, but Imperioli insisted he was up to the job, so the young actor was fitted with "squibs" – tiny explosives packed with fake blood – and given a glass. "I did the stunt fine," says Imperioli, "but when I hit the ground, the glass broke and sliced open two of my fingers really badly." He was rushed to hospital, where the doctors took one look at him and panicked. "I have three bullet holes in my chest. They think I'm about to die. It's in Queens – they don't know! I said, 'I'm in a movie with Robert De Niro. I cut my hand.' They think I'm delirious." In the trauma room, "they cut my shirt open and see all the squibbing. I said 'I told you, I'm in a movie. Robert De Niro!'" |
| | |
| | |  | Getty |
|
|
| Man's greatest invention | Humans have invented some nifty stuff over the years, says Tommy Tomlinson in The Washington Post. "The wheel, the lightbulb, concrete – all amazing." But nothing comes close to the dog. "Nothing in human creation has been as essential and adaptable as the countless descendants of the ancient grey wolf." Starting around 15,000 to 30,000 years ago, wolves would follow groups of human hunters at a distance, gnawing at the leftover bones they flung out of their camps, and alerting them to intruders in return. "Over time the wolves crept closer." After days or months or generations or centuries, a wolf curled up at a human's feet. "Maybe got its belly rubbed. That was the first dog." | Dogs were almost certainly the first animals we ever tamed. Through breeding, we made them fit our needs. "We made huskies to pull sleds and Newfoundlands to pull fish nets and dachshunds to catch badgers." Later, dogs became our "playmates and unofficial therapists". But look at things another way: around the time wolves were becoming dogs, the Neanderthals, our rival species, were dying out. Some scientists believe this isn't a coincidence. Maybe the dog was our key advantage. "Dogs protected humans at this vulnerable transition from nomadic to settled life. Dogs did work that humans did not have the strength or stamina to do: guarding, herding, hunting, pulling sleds. They created time for humans to build and think and create." We domesticated dogs, "and they domesticated us". | | | | | | Advertisement | | Sarah Raven is an online luxury gardening company providing everything you need for a beautiful garden and a stylish home. Discover must-have plants and seeds to create your own home-grown harvest, exclusive bulb collections curated by Sarah Raven herself, plus essential gardening kit and stylish homeware. All our plants have gone through a tough selection process – they're trialled and tested at Sarah's home, Perch Hill Farm in East Sussex – so you know you'll only ever get the best quality for your kitchen and garden. Click here to discover more. |
| |
| | |
| | |  | JK Rowling: stuck her neck out. John Phillips/Getty |
| The madness that led us to "mutilate" children | Since the independent Cass report concluded that NHS "gender-affirming care" for children is based on "rubbish medical research", says Lionel Shriver in The Spectator, the mainstream is finally starting to acknowledge that pushing "disturbed children" into damaging and sometimes gruesome treatment "in the service of adult fanaticism" might be, you know, "iffy". For outliers who have long argued that "a society that's mutilating its own kids has lost its way", this watershed should constitute a satisfying vindication. Let me tell you: "It does." But that's only half the battle, because the lie that you can choose to be "whichever sex you feel like" is deeply entrenched in Britain's school system. | What was "once sensibly characterised as a rare mental illness" is now culturally glorified to an extent that has "all the hallmarks of an irrational social mania". During such periods of collective madness, "prophets are unwelcome". Pronoun badges may one day be displayed behind museum glass as "fascinating artefacts from an era in which the West lost its collective mind", but those like JK Rowling and Kathleen Stock who stuck their necks out and "pleaded with us all to get a grip" aren't going to be thanked for their foresight. Because when a communal derangement ebbs, "everyone who got caught up in the craze feels a bit abashed" and wants to forget all about it. "Mavericks who bucked the trend are unpleasant reminders of everyone else's cowardice." | | | | | | Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share | | |
| |
| | |
| | |  | A tapestry depicting St Edmund. RDImages/Epics/Getty |
| Sod St George. St Edmund is our true patron saint | Every time St George's Day comes around, as it did this week, says William Cook in The Oldie, "I wonder why England puts up with having such a rubbish patron saint". George never set foot in England – "if he ever existed at all" – and we have to share him with a dozen other countries, from Malta to Montenegro. It was Richard the Lionheart who adopted the "Palestinian upstart" while he was "gallivanting around the Holy Land on one of his expensive crusades". But we already had a perfectly good patron saint of our own: St Edmund. | Born in 841 and crowned King of East Anglia at the age of 14, Edmund liked nothing more than beating up Vikings alongside King Alfred. After being captured by the Danes in 869, he was offered the chance to remain a "puppet king" if he renounced his Christian faith. He refused, so the Danes tied him to a tree, shot him full of arrows and chopped his head off. According to his biographer, Abbo of Fleury, his head was "miraculously reunited with his body" by a talking wolf. While it's easy to mock the miraculous aspects of his martyrdom, the details of his life are not in doubt. "And, unlike Saint George, he actually lived (and died) in England." It wasn't long before he was established as England's patron saint, and when King Athelstan built a shrine in his honour, it became one of the "must-see destinations" of the Middle Ages, "as popular as Canterbury". |
|
| | | | | | | "The bad taste of the masses is more deeply rooted in reality than the tastes of intellectuals."
Bertolt Brecht |
| |
| | |
| | |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment