Author: Mark Hannam

In 49 BC, on a cold winter night, the advanced guard of the 13^th Legion of the Senate and People of Rome reached a small stream that flowed towards the Mediterranean.  This was the Rubicon, a waterway of such little geomorphological importance that today no-one really knows where it ran from and to: its location has been lost.  Minor in physical terms, it was nonetheless major in symbolic terms, for the Rubicon formed part of the frontier between Italy and Gaul, between Rome’s domestic territory and its foreign dominions.  It the 13^th Legion crossed the Rubicon, they were in effect declaring the start of a civil war, a repudiation of the republican form of government that had existed in Rome for almost five hundred years, its traditions, its laws, its aversion to monarchy, and the clear separation between the violence used to suppress enemies abroad and the electoral process used to settle arguments at home.  The commander of the 13^th Legion – Gaius Julius Caesar – paused at the stream, contemplating the potential consequences of his next steps.  

Caesar was aware of the likely immediate impact of his actions, but perhaps not even he could fully understand the historical significance of the symbolic act that he was about to undertake.  A contemporary British historian notes that, in Europe, because of Caesar’s action, a thousand years of civic self-government were brought to an end, and not for a thousand years and more, would it become a living reality again.  (Tom Holland, Rubicon, 2003.)  Caesar overthrew the Roman republic and inaugurated two millennium of monarchic and imperial government, the legacies of which remain today in Europe: the designations ‘Kaiser’ and ‘Czar’ are both derivations of Caesar’s name, and while he might call himself the President of Russia, it seems clear that Mr Putin considers himself an heir to the form of militarist dictatorship that Gaius Julius established at Rome. 

Continue reading “Crossing the Rubicon”

Shoreditch – where I happily live – attracts large crowds on Friday and Saturday nights, dressed in a variety of colourful but wholly impractical costumes, spilling out onto the streets from the cocktail bars, clubs, and restaurants: clothes for show: circus wear.  Early the following morning the streets are cleaned by men and women in heavy boots, overalls, and thick gloves, who remove the vast amounts of debris – glasses, bottles, discarded food containers, and nitrous oxide canisters – and sweep-up and wash the pavements and kerbsides.  The Sunday morning crowd is dressed for work, not pleasure: function trumps style: industrial wear.   

Our attire is a sign of our standing, of our place in the world.  If I were to wander through an art museum, looking at figurative paintings from, say, Bruegel onwards, it would be easy to distinguish those who must work to live from those who lived off the work of others.  It is said that the clerical class in ancient China grew their fingernails long, to make it obvious to others that they worked at desks rather than by manual labour.  In Hans Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus, painted in 1523, the nails are short but the fingers inky: scholarly hands.

If the style of our clothes tells a story about who we are and how we live, the fabric from which our clothes are made tells a different but equally important story about the trade in raw materials and manufactured goods.  Whereas once most people wore clothes that were made locally from materials that were gathered locally – whether animal skins or plant products – today’s clothes are manufactured in places where labour is cheap and transport links are good, from a wide range of natural and synthetic materials that are often sourced far away from where the garments are sold.  What we wear today reflects our position in a complex global trading system.  While economists tend to focus on the processes of manufacturing and distribution, quantifying the financial value of goods made, transported, and sold, it is artists who are best able to help us think about what this means for both makers and buyers, to consider the symbolic value of the fabrics within which we wrap ourselves.

Continue reading “Art and commerce”

There is a beautiful passage in Anna Karenina (part III, chapters 4 and 5) which describes the pleasure to be found in demanding physical work.  Konstantin Lévin, a landowner, spends a day with a group of forty muzhiks – peasants who work for him on his land – harvesting the summer grass.  They work in a long row, each man with a regularly sharpened scythe, cutting a swathe through the meadows under the heat of the sun. The day is long and hard, especially for Lévin who is unused to hours of repetitive physical work, but he finds happiness in belonging to this collective endeavour, seeing the large fields of his property transformed around him.  At some moments, he loses all sense of time and place, the rhythmical movements of his arms and legs becoming automatic, his mind at ease, as if his blade acted upon its own will: In this hottest time the mowing did not seem so hard to him.  The sweat that drenched him cooled him off, and the sun, burning on his back, head and arm with its sleeve rolled to the elbow, gave him firmness and perseverance in his work; more and more often those moments of unconsciousness came, when it was possible for him not to think of what he was doing.  The scythe cut by itself.  These were happy moments.  

Agricultural workers around the world would have cut grass together each year in a similar way for hundreds of years.  However, in 1877, when Tolstoy’s novel was published, machines were routinely supplanting human labour: the novel ends – famously – with a woman’s suicide assisted by a train.   The process of automation of work has continued ever since.  The modern farmer no longer has need of forty men to cut the grass of her fields: instead, she will have a tractor driven perhaps by a computer.  She will have other machines to bale the hay and transport it to where it will be stored for the winter.  Today, work is more about controlling machines than swinging scythes, which means much less sweat but much greater productivity. 

Continue reading “Hard work”

Some are born rich, some achieve riches, others have riches thrust upon them.  Last week, the owner of a lottery ticket purchased in Illinois won a prize worth up to $1.34bn.  The ticket holder will have to decide whether to take an immediate cash prize of $780.5m, or to take the full amount in instalments over a period of 29 years.  Making this choice will, I assume, depend in part on the life expectancy of the winner, and in part on the way they would respond to Walter Mischel’s marshmallow test.

Before I think about what I would do with a billion dollars, I feel the need for a short digression.  When I was a child, the pound was worth roughly two-and-a-half dollars. The rate varied, month-by-month and year-by-year, but the simple rule of conversion was that one dollar was worth about 40p.  In those days, winning $1.34bn in a US lottery would equate to around £536m, which is a very healthy sum for sure, but only just over halfway to a billion pounds.  Nowadays, the pound is trading at around 1.20 to the dollar, which means that the lucky lottery ticket holder from Illinois is a billionaire in both dollars and pounds. In my lifetime, the pound has lost half its value against the dollar, which makes UK assets – houses, land, companies, and leading football teams – more vulnerable to foreign takeover, and which makes it increasingly hard for British citizens to move to the US without a significant short-term reduction in living standards.  The dollar benefits from the privilège exorbitant of being the leading global reserve currency, but its comparative strength relative to the pound over the past fifty years also reflects the higher calibre of economic policy making in the US.  If there were a marshmallow test for nations, I think we all know that today the UK would make no attempt to defer gratification.

Continue reading “Who wants to be a billionaire?”

Start spreading the news: after two years of pandemic restrictions, for the past six months it has been possible to travel once again.  I have been taking advantage and getting onto planes and trains to enjoy the capital pleasures of Europe.  Top of the list was Lisbon, which I visited over Christmas, followed by Paris in February, Athens in May, and then Berlin and Edinburgh in June.  I will be in Belfast briefly this month, before a trip to Vienna in August, on my way to a friend’s wedding in Transylvania.  Having grown-up in a monochrome commuter town, I count myself lucky to have escaped suburbia for the multi-coloured metropolis.   Now, I live in the centre of London and when I go on holiday, I want to wake up in a city. 

That’s not to say that the countryside does not have its pleasures.  I enjoy spending time on the west coast of Ireland, which I visit regularly.  I like the silence of the moors, save for the sound of water cascading down mountain streams, and the challenge of climbing the steep local summits, to enjoy views of the Atlantic and the sea breeze in my face.  It’s easy to find that I’m king of the hill after walking for hours without another person in sight.  And later, in the evenings, to sit and read with only the sound of the wind for company.  There is comfort to be found in the solitude of the wild places of the earth, and a sense of rejuvenation right through the very heart of it. 

Continue reading “Small town blues”