Mad World

A selection of the comments I post on newspaper websites... (Most recent first) These ones are all lockdown-related. Upsides of lockdown: 1 POSSIBLY slowed the virus spread SLIGHTLY for a short time Downsides of lockdown: 1 Added to the mountain of national debt – each month we now spend more on servicing the debt than on defence 2 Caused immense psychological damage to millions – even now you see the odd person walking round outside in a mask 3 Had a terrible effect on other health conditions such as cancer – and in terms of YEARS lost of life, is vastly more than covid. In general public health suffered because people exercised less, drank more, worried more and felt lonelier 4 Damaged the socialisation and education of children – with effects possibly lasting a lifetime 5 The furlough scheme turbo-charged Brits’ belief in getting something for nothing, ie the government will pay you to do nothing – this will continue to have a devastating effect on productivity 6 Tru...

It was the North By Northwest comment that set the alarm bells ringing. I’d listened to hundreds of hours of Sam Harris – and read a good deal of what he’d written – and I liked most of what he said, but a few years back he related on his podcast that he and his wife Annaka had walked out of a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest because they found it slow and boring. What?! I thought. Are you kidding me?! It's one of the Master’s greatest suspense thrillers, a brilliant film that harkened back to the likes of Hitch’s own The 39 Steps , while providing something of a template for the James Bond films. And for Harris to say that not only did he not like it, but he had walked out  of it, well, that’s a shocker!  So the warning signs were there. Fast forward to mid 2023 and myself, like many others, have given up on Sam Harris. He’s lost the plot. He’s discredited himself in a number of ways, including infamously telling Triggernometry that he wouldn’t ca...

It’s crackers that in 2023 there are still people prepared to argue that Beatle Paul McCartney was killed in 1966 and was replaced by a double, but this appears to be the view of journalist James Delingpole who, in the always entertaining podcast London Calling , frequently makes this point to Toby Young. James is, of course, wrong. Let’s look at some of the evidence that tells us that the James Paul McCartney who is about to tour Australia is the same person who was born in Walton, Liverpool, on 18 June 1942. In Peter Jackson’s Get Back , a documentary fashioned from early 1969 footage of The Beatles recording what would become their last-to-be-released album Let It Be , we drop in for hours on end on candid conversations between the band members. They frequently talk about their joint past, stuff only the four of them could know, and they jam songs that they used to play in their early days. This includes ‘One After 909’, that John and Paul wrote when they were teenagers, with the...

Seeing that my country, the UK, has become one where a school teacher is forced to apologise for saying “Good afternoon, girls” to a class of girls, a boy accidentally scuffing a Koran necessitates the need for a press conference involving the police and local ‘faith leaders’, and citizens have their bank accounts closed if their views happen not to align with left-wing dogma, I figure it’s time to go abroad again, this time to Montenegro, one of the seven countries formerly known as Yugoslavia (six, if you don’t count Kosovo). In late July 2023, I go for one week, accompanied by a friend and David Szalay’s magnificent book All That Man Is . The weather is hot and sunny (in summer, in Southern Europe, who knew?) and we stay in the slice-of-heaven Old Town in a nice Airbnb. I fly with easyJet into Tivat airport from Gatwick, my friend from elsewhere. To speedily get the covid crap out of the way first: in terms of finger-wagging signage I see only the very occasional faded sticke...