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Football is for Losers

The day before my first birthday, England won the World Cup. England’s greatest footballing triumph passed me by. I grew up never seeing them as a World Cup team as they failed to qualify for the ’74 and ’78 finals. In 1982, I finally saw England kick their first ball in the tournament: and what …

The Seventies

If obliged to live my whole life perpetually in a single decade, I hope it would be the 1970s. Some think of it, with all its excesses, as the decade that taste forgot. But it was a time of extremes and never boring. Starting more or less with the first manned moon landing, there was …

Diversity

While in some ways there is a commonality that holds us together as a species – all of us wanting love, freedom and personal growth – we also exhibit a great diversity. There is no denying this. As well as the very apparent differences in race, sex and culture, we are diverse in our politics, …

The Past is in the Present; and the Present is in the Past

It’s not just writings, data and bytes of memory that can contain information. I’ve always loved the way that a plain old object, dug up from the ground, can tell a story about the past. The object and the information are in the present, yet they relate to some distant age and give us a …

What Science Cannot Teach Us

If I had a hammer, there’s lots I could do with it. I could crush a walnut, for one thing. But I might hang a picture on the wall, knock a bulge out of my car’s wheel arch, break some toffee, start a carpentry project. I could also use it to bash someone’s brains in. …

Losing our Minds

A further sadness about death is the loss of mind. A mind collects memories, experiences and learning. All those skills of intellect, painstakingly acquired, all those beliefs and values, all those habits and affections. They once made a person: an entirely unique individual shaped by their experiences and education; now gone into the past. They …

Disco Potential

A year or more ago someone remarked that they didn’t know what musical universe I inhabited, given that I’d expressed a diverse range of likes. It’s true; I like all sorts. The genre doesn’t matter as long as it’s good. But in my youth, there was one kind of music I just couldn’t appreciate: disco. …

Cultural Exchange

In the last week I have travelled far. Doing so, I have eaten food I couldn’t identify, got lost on the outskirts of a city I didn’t know, listened with growing fondness to the local pop music, stood out as the only white European in a crowd, unable to speak the same language as everyone …

Lost and Found in Translation

A couple of months ago I had dinner with a professional translator who produces subtitles for film and TV. The conversation led to the complexities of the process. There are difficult judgments to be made all the time, as with any form of translation. Does the word in language A really mean the same as …

The Political Power of the Idea

Because they can contain ideas, the tyrant will always fear the power of words and images. It may be force that ultimately topples them, but it is always an idea that motivates people to threaten such force. Ideas may be vague or mean many different things – freedom, equality, fairness, change – but if enough …