Sunday round-up 22 September 2024

The bumps for Toni Basil, Ruth Jones and Billie Piper, the anniversary of the Battle of Saule in 1236 and the autumn equinox which ends astronomical summer

Who’s a jolly good fellow? Well, if tradition is to be believed, singer, dancer and choreographer Toni Basil (81), equestrian and former royal-in-law Captain Mark Phillips (76), Whitesnake front man David Coverdale (73), Right Said Fred lead singer and unlikely alt-right conspiracist Richard Fairbrass (71), French Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal (71), moody Australian singer Nick Cave (67), Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli (66), singer-songwriter and producer Joan Jett (66), Happy Days stalwart Scott Baio (64), former Conservative cabinet minister Sir Liam Fox (63), Dynasty star and bona fide European royalty Catherine Oxenberg (63), Gavin and Stacey creator Ruth Jones (58), comedian and actress Sue Perkins (55), reliable heartthrob Rupert Penry-Jones (54), French football legend Emmanuel Petit (54), actress, singer and Laurence Fox survivor Billie Piper (42) and Harry Potter villain Tom Felton (37).

Not singing (Happy Birthday) any more are Anne of Cleves (1515), scientist Michael Faraday (1791), Emperor of Vietnam and all-sorted-for-diacriticals-thanks Tự Đức (1829), suffragette pioneer Christabel Pankhurst (1880), midwit Nazi and Nuremberg defendant Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel (1882), actor, director and screenwriter Erich von Stroheim (1885), the second Mrs Joseph Stalin Nadezhda Alliluyeva (1901), war criminal and “Bitch of Buchenwald” Ilse Koch (1906), anti-Nazi and founder of the White Rose Hans Scholl (1918), novelist Rosamunde Pilcher (1924), engineer and founder of Lola Cars Eric Broadley (1928), author, playwright and onetime copywriter Fay Weldon (1931) and former defence secretary and chairman of RBS Viscount Younger of Leckie (1931).

Today in 1792 was the first day of the first month of Year I of the French Republic. Having abolished the monarchy, the revolutionary state also turned its back on the Gregorian calendar and introduced a new dating system of 12 months of 30 days each, divided into three 10-day cycles similar to weeks, with five or six intercalary days at the end to make up a full solar year. It was part of a wider programme of dechristianisation and decimalisation, and rather than measuring years since the birth of Christ, France would begin its dating from the beginning of l’ère républicaine, the Republican Era; the National Convention decided that this would begin with the proclamation of the French Republic on 21 September 1792, making the following day the first of the new era. Accordingly 22 September was Primidi Vendémiaire, the month named for the Occitan word for a grape harvester. The 10-day cycles ran through primidi, duodi, tridi, quartidi, quintidi, sextidi, septidi, octidi, nonidi and décadi, with the last being a day of rest. The months were named Vendémiaire, Brumaire and Frimaire (autumn), Nivôse, Pluviôse and Ventôse (winter), Germinal, Floréal and Prairial (spring) and Messidor, Thermidor and Fructidor (summer). The calendar reform was a genuinely and appropriately revolutionary measure but it did not last, and was abolished on 1 January 1806 by the Emperor Napoleon. It was briefly revived for a few weeks during the Paris Commune in May 1871.

On this day in 1910, the Duke of York’s Picture House opened in Brighton. It claims to be the United Kingdom’s oldest cinema in continuous use, built by actress-manager Violet Melnotte-Wyatt and designed by architects Clayton and Black. It marketed itself as a prestige venue and for many years used the slogan “Bring her to the Duke’s, it is fit for a Duchess”. It was acquired by Picturehouse Cinemas in 1994 and restored after years of relative neglect, its single screen accommodating 278 patrons and retaining one of the original luxury boxes. If you are in the area today, there is a dog-friendly screening of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice at 12 noon, The Shape of Water at 2.45 pm and Lee at 5.40 pm (captioned) and 8.30 pm.

At 00.53 UTC today in 1979, American Vela satellite OPS 6911 detected a double flash of light near the Prince Edward Islands in the Indian Ocean, two small and uninhabited volcanic islands administered by South Africa. The source of the flash has never been confirmed and the United States records of the incident remain classified; it has been hypothesised that the signal from the satellite could have been caused by its being struck by a meteorite but it is widely believed that it was in fact an undeclared test of a nuclear weapon carried out jointly by South Africa and Israel, likely an atmospheric explosion of two to three kilotons. The Vela Hotel satellites had detected 41 previous flashes of the same kind, and all had originated in nuclear tests. Israel has never confirmed that it possesses nuclear weapons, though the fact is universally accepted, while South Africa only formally acknowledged its nuclear capability in 1993, two years after the country had acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. President F.W. de Klerk had ended South Africa’s nuclear programme in 1989 and its arsenal of six complete bombs and one partially constructed device were dismantled. In 1997, South Africa’s deputy foreign minister, Aziz Pahad, stated that the country had conducted a nuclear test on 22 September 1979, but later withdrew his statement and claimed he had been commenting on existing rumours.

In 1991, this day saw the release by the Huntington Library of 3,000 photographs on microfilm of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the first time the artefacts had been fully available to the public. The manuscripts were discovered between 1946 and 1956 in the Qumran Caves near Ein Feshkha on the northern shore of the Dead Sea, initially by Bedouin shepherds Muhammed edh-Dhib, Jum’a Muhammed and Khalil Musa; they then came to the attention of Dr John C. Trever, an archaeologist who was acting as director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem. The ownership of the scrolls is a complicated and vexed issue, but in the end 15,000 scrolls and fragments would be recovered, dating from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD. Mostly in Hebrew, but with some examples in various dialects of Aramaic, as well as some in Greek, Latin and Arabic, the 981 separate manuscripts contain the oldest texts of many canonical books of the Bible and several other commentaries and documents from the era of Second Temple Judaism. They are now housed in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

It’s a bumper day hagiographically, the feast of brother-and-sister martyrs SS Felix and Constanza (d AD 68); St Phocas of Sinope (d AD 102), bishop and martyr venerated as a defender against fires and a helper of the drowning, though he may not have existed; SS Digna and Emerita (d AD 259), Roman maidens martyred under Emperor Valerian; the Theban Legion (d AD 286), 6,666 soldiers from Egypt led by St Maurice, St Candidus, St Innocent and St Exuperius put to death at Agaunum in modern-day Switzerland for refusing to worship the imperial cult; German-born Italian bishop St Septimius of Iesi (d AD 307), beheaded for refusing to make a sacrifice to the pagan gods; 6th century AD Norman bishop St Laud of Coutances, invoked against maladies of the eyes, especially blindness; Alsatian abbess St Sadalberga (AD 605-70); Spanish preacher, Augustinian friar and archbishop of Valencia St Thomas of Villanova (1488-1555); and Capuchin friar and carer for the sick St Ignatius of Santhià (1686-1770).

It is Independence Day in Bulgaria (from the Ottoman Empire in 1908) and Mali (from France in 1960), and Resistance Fighting Day in Estonia to commemorate prime minister Otto Tief’s attempt in 1944 to preserve the country’s independence in the face of Soviet occupation. In the other two Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania, it is Baltic Unity Day, marking the anniversary of the Battle of Saule in 1236 at which the pagan Samogitian and Semigallian forces routed the Livonian Brothers of the Sword.

Today is Hobbit Day (apparently the birthday of the entirely fictional Bilbo and Frodo Baggins) and World Rivers Day if the outdoors is your jam.

It is also the autumn equinox and therefore the end of astronomical summer. Its lease hath all too short a date…

Factoids

1. As the United States presidential election draws closer, there is much analysis of swing states and key battle grounds. In the last 13 elections—that is, since Richard Nixon was re-elected in 1972—only eight states have been won by the same party every time. The Republicans have consistently been victorious in Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming: essentially the Mid-West and the mountain states, or so-called “flyover states”. No state has voted Democrat every time, because there have been two elections in which the Democrats carried only a single state: Massachusetts for George McGovern in 1972 and Minnesota (his home state) for Walter Mondale in 1984.

2. Oddly enough, despite its solid Republican record in presidential elections, Democrat George McGovern was senator for South Dakota from 1963 to 1981, having previously sat for the state’s 1st District (the counties east of the Missouri River including Sioux Falls) in the House of Representatives 1957-61.

3. South Dakota is the 46th largest state in the Union in terms of population, with only 920,000 residents. When it became a state in 1889, it consisted of a single at-large congressional district which returned two members to the House of Representatives. From 1910 to 1930, as the population grew, the state was divided into three separate districts. This was reduced to two after the 1930 census, and in 1980 it was replaced with a single at-large district with one representative.

4. Six states are currently small enough to be served by a single representative from a statewide at-large district: Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming. They are therefore the only states to have more senators than congressmen, as every state has two senators irrespective of population. The largest congressional delegation, of course, is that of California (population: 39 million), which consists of two senators and 52 members of the House of Representatives.

5. Sir John Major (see below) is 81 years old. However, his father, Tom Major-Ball (born Abraham Thomas Ball) was 64 when he was born: he was born on 18 May 1879, during the Anglo-Zulu War, only five months after the Battle of Rorke’s Drift (as depicted in Cy Endfield’s 1964 epic film Zulu). Queen Victoria was only 59 years old.

6. Rapper and music executive Sean Combs—variously “Puff Daddy”, “P. Diddy” and just “Diddy”—is currently in what a layman would call a whole heap of trouble, having been indicted by a grand jury in Manhattan for sex trafficking and racketeering (he has pleaded not guilty). Most of us are vaguely aware of grand juries from American legal usage, but they originate in very old English legal practice: they can certainly be traced back to the Assize of Clarendon in 1166, but some have argued they originated in the reign of Æthelred II (AD 978-1013, 1014-16). The role of the grand jury is to examine accusations of criminal conduct and decide whether charges should be brought, and the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury”. In England, a grand jury of between 14 and 23 men was summoned to all quarter sessions and assizes “to inquire into, present, do and execute all those things which, on the part of our Lord the King, shall then be commanded them”. They were increasingly superseded by the development of committal hearings in magistrates’ courts from 1848 onwards, and the Administration of Justice (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1933 made them redundant except for charges involving officials abroad. This last role was then abolished under the Criminal Justice Act 1948.

7. Æthelred II is remembered by posterity, insofar as he is remembered at all, as “Ethelred the Unready”. It is a misnomer, and he the king was not in fact perenially unprepared. It stems from a mistranslation of the Anglo-Saxon epithet applied to him, unræd, which means “poorly advised” or “of evil counsel”, indicating that he had some undesirable courtiers leading him astray. It was applied because it was a punning and ironic inversion of his name, “Æthelred”, a compound of æþele, “noble”, and ræd, “counsel” or “reason”, meaning “well-advised”. Not many English kings have near-universal epithets—Alfred the Great, Edward the Elder, Edgar the Peaceful, Edward the Confessor, William the Conqueror—because numbering became the preferred distinction after the Norman Conquest, so it’s a shame one of the few is based on a mistake.

8. Although they are not as widely used as, say, those of Alfred the Great or Edward the Confessor, a handful of monarchs do have well-known cognomens to accompany or stand in for their regnal numbers. Those which have gained wide currency are, I suppose, William Rufus (William II), Richard the Lionheart or Cœur de Lion (Richard I), Longshanks (Edward I), frustratingly for me, my beloved Bloody Mary (Mary I) and William of Orange (William III). Slightly less frequently used are Stephen of Blois (King Stephen), Lackland (King John), Edward of Caernarfon (Edward II) and Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV).

9. While we’re talking monarchs, 10 kings of England and Great Britain have been born other than in Britain itself: William I (Falaise), William II (somewhere in Normandy), Stephen (Blois), Henry II (Le Mans), Richard II (Bordeaux), Edward IV (Rouen), Philip, husband of Mary I but King of England rather than merely consort (Valladolid), William III (The Hague), George I (Hanover) and George II (Hanover). The first monarch to be born in what we would reasonably recognise as an ordinary private house was Elizabeth II, born at 17 Bruton Street in Mayfair, which belonged to the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorn, parents of her mother, the then-Duchess of York. The Duke and Duchess of York (later George VI and Queen Elizabeth) had moved in only weeks before. The house was demolished before the Second World War and is now the site of an office block called Berkeley Square House, although the address 17 Bruton Street lives on and is now the Mayfair branch of Cantonese restaurant Hakkasan.

10. This is true of all cities, but it’s fascinating to hear what people call different parts of London: I remember a colleague telling me that he lived in Paddington, “or Bayswater, depending on whether you’re buying or selling”. To an extent, all geographical names are marketing, but some are much more recent coinages than we might think. Take Fitzrovia, the area roughly bounded by Euston Road, Oxford Street, Great Portland Street and Tottenham Court Road or Gower Street, depending on taste. The name is nor recorded formally until 1940: the libertine and future Labour MP Tom Driberg, then writing the William Hickey gossip column in The Daily Express, used it, based on his local pub the Fitzroy Tavern, on the corner of Charlotte and Windmill Street, and a take on “Belgravia”. It must, of course, have been in usage already, and the Tamil poet Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu, known as “Tambi”, claimed to have invented the name. So next time you come across an obnoxious neologism (I have heard Shepherd’s Bush called “SheBu”, and shuddered), just think, it might catch on.

“They say that 90 percent of TV is junk. But, 90 per cent of everything is junk.” (Gene Roddenberry)

1. “The Project”: BBC4 repeated Peter Kosminsky’s gripping 2002 political drama which encapsulates the birth and rise of New Labour. Matthew Macfadyen, Naomie Harris and Paloma Baeza play young party activists who negotiate their way from the surprise Conservative victory at the general election in 1992 through the 1997 Blair landslide to Labour’s re-election in 2001. Kosminsky and writer Leigh Jackson drew on deep and painstaking research, including 120 interviews, to present a story which, although superficially fictional, was in some ways a patchwork of lightly concealed real events. Andrew Neil dismissed The Project at the time as a “predictable left-wing critique of the government”, and certainly Kosminsky has always had a political and ideological edge to his work, but it remains a complex and absorbing study of the tension between idealism and pragmatism, and the profound changes the Labour Party underwent to take power for a transformational 13 years.

2. “The Rest Is Politics: Leading—Frank Luntz”: another episode from the “Leading” strand of Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s mighty podcast, this time with legendary American pollster Frank Luntz. It is a strange, often surprising and absorbing interview, and Luntz is both painfully honest and sometimes defensive. It seems to me that he is struggling to reconcile his past self with his present incarnation, in some ways, yet I think he is overwhelmingly sincere and well-intentioned. His adoration for Sir Tony Blair, while it clearly warms the cockles of Campbell’s heart, will strike some as mawkish, but there is little doubting Luntz’s expertise and deep knowledge based on experience. It is easy to dismiss polling as part of a suite of superficial techniques bundled together as “spin”, and of course they can be used cynically; at the same time, no political platform has an automatic right to obedience and democracy works on the basis of debate and persuasion. A great deal of food for thought here.

3. “Amol Rajan Interviews John Major”: it is easy to forget that Sir John Major was prime minister for six-and-a-half years, longer that Peel, Lloyd George, Attlee, Brown or Cameron. It is nearly 30 years since he left office (which is terrifying) and we remember his premiership in broad strokes—Black Wednesday, Maastricht, sleaze. Here he tells Rajan that he agreed to this interview because it is a decent length, at 45 minutes, and because he has things to say which he kept to himself before the general election. I tried to re-examine the priorities and intentions of the Major premiership a couple of years ago: a strange, determined, rather kind man who rose to the top of the Conservative Party from easily the most disadvantaged background of any, even Edward Heath, and knew genuine poverty in his childhood. Even if you don’t agree with him, his time in high office means he has observations worth listening to.

4. “Britain’s Atomic Bomb Scandal”: an intriguing and rather moving Channel 4 documentary which should make you genuinely angry examined the long-term effects of nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s and 1960s on British servicemen who were present and their descendants. The United Kingdom initially conducted its nuclear tests in Australia—thanks fellas!—moving them to Christmas Island (now Kiritimati) and Malden Island in the Pacific Ocean when the Australian government (not unreasonably) banned nuclear test explosions in 1956. Twenty-one tests were conducted between 1952 and 1958, airbursts mainly above water or with the device suspended a few hundred feet above the ground by a balloon. The explosions varied from less than a kiloton to three megatons, and the 22,000 servicemen who participated, mainly Royal Navy and Royal Air Force personnel, were given virtually no protection: one veteran interviewed recalls that they were given goggles, told to put their shirts on and turn to face away from the explosion but that was it. There is substantial evidence that exposure to radiation caused a range of health conditions later on including cancer, bone deficiencies and genetic abnormalities, but the Ministry of Defence has consistently disputed this, arguing that few servicemen were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation and there is no unusual rate of illness among those who were. In 2012 the Supreme Court dismissed a class action against the MoD by nuclear test veterans because the provisions of the Limitation Act 1980 meant they had left too long between learning of potential illness and bringing a case. The government denies that any medical records are being withheld, but there is a nasty, lingering feeling that it is, even if only unconsciously, waiting for the veterans, of whom around 2,000 remain, to die off. It’s hard to watch men who were often conscripts undertaking National Service and have undoubtedly suffered dreadful illnesses, whatever the cause, and maintain that there is nothing to see here.

5. “Peter, Paul and Mary: Rhythm on Two”: a glorious concert by the 1960s American folk trio recorded at the now-under-demolition Southport Theatre during their 1983 tour of the United Kingdom. They were all well into their 40s by this time (Mary Travers died in 2009) and look like otherwise-respectable middle-aged citizens, which makes it hard to remember that in their heyday they were, like many folk musicians, energetic political activists for progressive causes. They performed at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 1963, which is remembered for Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech and endorsed and campaigned for Senator Eugene McCarthy to be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 1968. Their music is, however, marvellously tuneful and often uplifting, and their joy in performing is infectious. A friend remarked to me that they presumably styled themselves Peter, Paul and Mary because Yarrow, Stookey and Travers sounded like an accountancy firm.

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” (Stephen King)

1. “How Joe Rogan Remade Austin”: a fascinating Helen Lewis article in The Atlantic on the career of the singular, unpredictable podcaster, comedian and commentator Joe Rogan and, intertwined, how the Texan capital has changed and grown over the past 10 or 20 years. Rogan in many ways represents the collapse of the traditional left/right political spectrum and the increasing unpredictability of political allegiances and identities: “he hates Democratic finger-wagging but supports gay marriage and abortion rights… he also wonders if President Biden might have been replaced by a body double… he sees himself as an outsider, nontribal, just an average Joe. The best way to think of him, one of my friends told me, is as if ‘Homer Simpson got swole.’” Texas is growing fast. In 2000, it had a population of 20 million; now, it’s more than 30 million, one of only two states to break that barrier (the other is California: between them they make up more than a fifth of the US population). Lewis neatly identifies a contradiction in the professed culture of Austin, which is that it prides itself on a daring heterodoxy yet is dominated by a widely shared set of opinions. A sharp and penetrating read.

2. “Starmer shouldn’t rush to copy Meloni’s Albania migrant plan”: a sensible, careful analysis of immigration by Alexander Horne in The Spectator. Disclaimer: Alex is a good friend whom I’ve known for years, and we worked together in Parliament in various guises. He has a great ability to put legal arguments clearly and simply, and is a great pragmatist, and this points out that the Italian prime minister’s scheme to process immigration applications in Albania is not yet operational, cannot be assessed accurately in cost terms and is not coherently comparable with the Rwanda scheme in its details. Outsourcing of any kind is complicated and controversial, but, as Alex concludes, “the mere fact that [Starmer] may be considering such an idea proves that the issue of illegal immigration remains both a pressingly high priority and one which will not easily be resolved”.

3. “Populism and assassinations go hand-in-hand across history”: as ever, a sharp and penetrating view from Dr Thomas P.M. Barnett’s Substack, Global Throughlines. Populism is a high-emotion manifestation of politics, one which relies on an appeal to heart rather than head, with cultic elements, and that is in part its huge potency. There is no doubt that the dominant strand in the Republican Party now, MAGA if you will, is a personality cult based on Donald Trump (and, as I wrote a while back in The Hill, he is making it a dynastic one). Once you have an atmosphere based on instinct and belief rather than debate and discussion, the door is halfway opened to extreme acts of political violence: just look at Abraham Lincoln (1865), Rep James M Hinds (1868), Senator Huey Long (1935), Jack Kennedy (1963), Malcolm X (1965), George Lincoln Rockwell (1967), Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Senator Robert Kennedy (1968), Harvey Milk (1978)… Politics is running at a high temperature in the United States.

4. “Ten years sober: the story I haven’t told”: I have a profound affection and admiration for journalist Hannah Betts, who writes sharply and elegantly and has an unerring ability to speak to something deep in my brain. She is excoriatingly honest, which I think is a vital quality in a writer, and in this essay from her brilliantly eclectic Substack The Shit, she talks about reaching the 10th anniversary of giving up booze, but also, agonisingly and movingly, of the lingering death from alcohol abuse of her beloved father. His demise was brutal, painful, messy and undignified, and Betts is brave to commit it to writing, but I am very glad she did. I am the very last person to be censorious, and statistically most people can eat, drink and be merry while living relatively normal lives. For others, though, this is where reality leads.

5. “The U.S. military’s true advantage against any adversary”: a revealing Washington Post article by journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff, which argues that the United States military possesses one particular strength over other nations. It trains its non-commissioned officers and “invests unusual authority into its NCOs, the enlisted men and women who provide the day-to-day leadership of smaller units across the Army”, which means the armed forces can operate with flexibility and autonomy throughout the ranks. “When given broad orders to, say, seize an objective, they were often left to decide for themselves how to best get the job done.” This is in stark contrast to, for example, the Russian Army, which has traditionally been micro-managed and relied on obedience rather than initiative: the results have been obvious in the war in Ukraine. At a time when the West is often downbeat, and often justifiably, about its military capabilities and hard power, this is a useful and encouraging corrective.

Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes…

… as the Sufi poet Rumi tells us, because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation. TTFN.