BY NICHOLAS ENGERT There is a theory that coat hangers, when left alone in a wardrobe, multiply and, before you can blink, two have multiplied to ten or more. Worse, they will all be of different types, sizes and materials. Using this as a general principle, so it is with all the other stuff we collect throughout our lives. Those who move house every five … Continue reading The Things We Keep
BY ALEX STORY We beat Argentina and lost to France, not in football unfortunately, but in the fat stakes. With nearly 40% of its adult population being obese, Argentina ranks 36th out of 193 countries in the world. France, with only 10%, is 172nd. Britain, for her part, is listed as 77th according to the Global Obese Observatory. American Samoa wins the overall prize with three quarters of … Continue reading Fat or Sugar?
BY SEAN WALSH If only… I don’t know if you’re into the football? I’m not particularly, not since the politicians decided to pretend that they really cared about the “beautiful game” on the assumption that the rest of us did as well. But I was hoping that this year’s World Cup could be used to start waving the flag again, and especially in the face … Continue reading On Niceness Versus Kindness
BY ALEX STORY Standing at the top of Salzburg’s thousand‑year‑old fortress on a sunny day, facing south into the heart of the Alps, one sees the Nonntal below, nearly at one’s feet. In spring, it is lusciously green. There, in fact, sang the nuns of The Sound of Music, their chanting still echoing enchantingly across the landscape. The Nonntal is split in two by the AlmKanal, a … Continue reading A Fresh and a Ripe Pair
BY SEAN WALSH “Sound out 30 Manchester adjacent constituencies! There must be at least one with a humiliation fetish!” The “leadership contest” in the Labour Party is like the “war in Iran” in that neither is actually a real thing. Unless you can have a war without any warring or a competition for a job which doesn’t exist. It’s all very “postmodern”, as if things … Continue reading Postmodern Politics
BY SEAN WALSH I couldn’t be what’s known as a political libertarian because the version of freedom assumed doesn’t seem to me to be worth getting excited about. To borrow the language of the Dominican Thomistic theologian Father Servais Pinckaers, I’ll take freedom for excellence over freedom of indifference. I understand that libertarianism isn’t particularly sensitive to that distinction, or many others now I think of it, which is why … Continue reading Holy Faces
BY SEAN WALSH Before doing the relevant analytical deeper dive let me make two remarks, by way of qualification. First, the condition known as “Tourette’s Syndrome” should not be trivialised, and it’s not my intention to do so here; second, what I suppose we must call “BAFTAgate” (or maybe “f@@@@@g BAFTAgate”, given the subject matter) is the funniest thing to happen at an awards ceremony … Continue reading Anscombe and that BAFTA Incident
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN A book is a pact between freedom and form. Its pages, while bound, invite the unbinding of thought. To open a cover is to accept an invitation to a silent, limitless argument—with the author, with the self, with the world. The book’s physicality is a necessary concession to the material world, a vessel for the immaterial. It is a sacred technology precisely … Continue reading The Weight of Doctrine
BY SEAN WALSH Why are “puberty blockers” morally obscene? Aquinas would have the answer. We need to remind ourselves that the potential is as real as the actual. I’m not going to waste much time defending the self-evident truth that it is obscene to perform medical experiments on children. I mean no disrespect to the eugenicists who think otherwise, but these people are in need … Continue reading On Aquinas and Puberty Blockers
BY ALEX STORY Societies are defined, in part, by their celebrations. Two of these expose the cultural battlefield on which we currently stand. In one corner, sporting the red of the Poppy, we have the withered, dignified, but dying Remembrance Day; in the opposite one, we have the Rainbow-coloured, indecorous Pride month. To the first is dedicated a single minute of silence, its centrepiece; to … Continue reading Pride and Humility
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN It is one of those unremarked truths, visible to anyone who troubles to look, that the character of a nation can be deduced from the state of its boundaries. I found this thought pressing upon me the other afternoon, halted by the spectacle of a common hedge sparrow at work. The scene was a Devon lane, bordered by a hedgerow of the … Continue reading On the Wisdom of Hedgerows
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN Every morning at five, when the world is still half-asleep, I take the dogs across the fields. The ritual is unchanging, the path well-worn, yet the people I meet are like fragments of a larger story, half-told. Normally I pass four. First, the man with the spaniel puppy—a cheerful, ruddy-faced fellow whose enthusiasm for cricket is matched only by his bewilderment at … Continue reading Dogless Walkers
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN From Barbarism to Empathy: Why Future Generations Will Judge Our Cruelty Across the world exist rare couples who communicate not only through words but through something deeper—a current that hums beneath the skin, making oceans between them feel like illusions. When one thinks of the other, the other feels it as warmth flaring behind the ribs, the heart pressing against its cage … Continue reading The Next Evolution
BY STEWART SLATER If it was the Fisherman’s ring which got the media’s attention (the $500,000 figure quoted is, apparently, a resale estimate for an item which will never be sold), the new Pope’s cross is no less worthy of note. A gift from his Order when he was elevated to the Cardinalate, it contains fragmentary remains of Saints Augustine, Monica (a rare example of … Continue reading From the Pope to Paddington
BY STEWART SLATER The day passed off as such days do. People marched, horses walked, planes flew. Flags were waved, street parties held, and the nation’s swing dancers briefly emerged from the shadows. And as the sun went down, we promised to remember them, the best of us. For the story we tell ourselves is a simple one. Roused to confront the evil of tyranny … Continue reading A Festival of Forgetting
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN Once, the plain was united by a single path, a shared journey. But now, the path has fragmented. Men and women bear their burdens—hopes, dreams, suspicions—like pilgrims on an ancient road. And on the horizon, a storm gathers. Not a single tempest, but a maelstrom of winds, each howling with its own menace, its own peril. This is the chronicle of Western … Continue reading The Plain
BY MUDYARD KIPLING It is a great misfortune in life to be one’s own secretary and his employer at the same time. The man so afflicted finds himself as if torn by two different dogs at once. If the secretary is incompetent, as in my case he is, then his employer feels the anger of frustration and delay — why on Earth were these simple tasks … Continue reading On Being One’s Own Secretary
BY GARY McGHEE There exists a photograph of some of my extended family members, not dissimilar to the one above. At the centre of it is a matriarch, now in her 90s, called Rose. A wonderful lady who, when I saw her at my brother’s wedding, said to me, “I looked after you when you were a baby.” I was 50 at the time and … Continue reading Family
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN The argument that people deserve the leaders they get is a seductive one. I heard it expressed in a Janners pub this week. It is simple, clean, and fits neatly into the moral framework we like to impose on the world. Bad people get bad leaders. Good people get good ones. But the world is hardly so tidy. It is messy, complicated, … Continue reading People Deserve the Leaders They Get?
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN ‘Why do so many men collect?’ my wife asked. I told her I would think and write rather than answering with guesses… Men collect things. It is a fact, simple and unadorned. They gather objects—coins, stamps, guns, books, cars, stones, or shells. They line them up, stack them, display them. They care for them. They hunt for more. Why? It is not … Continue reading Hunted Permanence
