The value of life
Last week I was invited backstage in the British Library to look at some of the books and manuscripts. Everything you would want to see is there; Coleridge's notebooks - small, squat leather bound volumes, water stained from all that walking favoured by the Romantic poets, and filled with spidery handwriting on beauty and imagination.
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Bereavement
I took my oldest friend, recently bereaved of a sister, to see The Year of Magical Thinking at the National Theatre. Based on the book of the same name by Joan Didion, and performed as a monologue by Vanessa Regrave, I wondered if the bestseller on loss, death, denial, grief and coping, would help my friend, and just as importantly open up new territory for our conversations.
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Crime fiction
One of Mrs Winterson's objections to literature was that 'the trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late.' To extract the full flavour of this dire warning, 'book' must rhyme with 'spook' and be allowed four extra'Os'. When I challenged her with own taste in murder mysteries, she replied, 'If you know there's a body coming, it's not so much of a shock.'
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Romaine Brookes and Natalie Barney
In 1921, a Tory MP proposed the clause 'Acts of Gross Indecency by Females', to be added to the criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which proscribed male homosexuality. In the House of Commons he pronounced that lesbianism threatened the birth rate, debauched young girls and induced neurasthenia and insanity. Everyone agreed, and the clause was taken to the House of Lords to be ratified.
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Britart Fire
News of the fire destroying a vast collection of work by Britpack artists, including Hirst, Emin, Hume, Lucas, the Chapman brothers, and Gillian Ayres, is bringing joy to the philistines who would have paid good money to torch it themselves.
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Private Banking
Next time your dinner party conversation starts to flag, introduce the subject of banking. At a stroke you will include Call Centres in India, computer catastrophes, malevolent Counter Clerks, pushy Sales Teams, queue misery, glossy brochures and dull service.
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Belle Du Jour
The curious incident of the tart in the Web-Blog asks interesting questions about what we call fiction and fact. Now that The Times is almost certain that Belle de Jour is not a prostitute on the game, but a writer on the make, her publishing deal looks set to collapse faster than one of her elderly clients without Viagra.
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Status Anxiety review
Does modern life make us happy?
Prompted by Alain de Botton's new book, I asked forty people this question, and every one of them said no. Too fast, too loud, impersonal, no values, were common complaints, side by side with insecurity - particularly at work. The dream of Socialism and Conservatism alike - to provide a framework where people can find purpose and possibility, has become a fitful and sleepless night. Last year, in the UK alone, 30,000,000 tranquilisers and anti-depressants were prescribed.
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Roman short story
Rome. La Dolce Vita. Rome. The Eternal City. Rome, where the snow falls through the unclosed dome of The Pantheon.
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Second Homes
In the reign of Elizabeth the First, life expectancy was around forty years,
In our Elizabeth's reign, it is eighty years and rising.
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