Category: Living

This week, there are lengthy queues outside petrol stations in Britain, as desperate motorists try to secure fuel for their cars.  The companies that supply petrol stations say there is a shortage of lorry drivers to transport fuel from the refineries and that the government needs to offer visas to foreign drivers to meet demand.  The government, not wanting to accept that its policy on immigration – linked inevitably to the way it managed the UK’s exit from the EU – is the source of the problem, says that there is no shortage of fuel in the country.   Unsurprisingly, as soon as government ministers deny that there is a shortage, some drivers assume they are lying and head to the petrol stations to fill up.  Many others, seeing growing lines of cars, waiting at the pumps, worry that they will lose out unless they join; so, they do.  Whether or not there was a serious problem a few days ago, there is certainly one now.

Queues of irate drivers waiting impatiently to buy petrol makes for good television and newspaper coverage, which has temporarily displaced the story of the other, more serious energy crisis from the headlines.  Natural gas is a major source of energy for the UK, with more than four out of five households reliant on gas for heating their homes and around a third of wholesale electricity produced by burning gas.  Prices have risen dramatically over the past twelve months, for example, the ICE’s NBP Natural Gas Index has risen from 33.5 to 213.  Whether this price spike will be temporary is unclear, but it has become a political problem for the UK because of the way in which energy prices are regulated.

Continue reading “The cap that does not fit”

I am writing this text at my house in Co Donegal, on the west coast of Ireland.  This is my first visit for twelve months, my first journey into the European Union since the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland formally exited.  Flying from London to Belfast was my first trip by plane for a year and, for some reason I am not fully certain of, it was comforting to travel at altitude once more.  I am glad to be back.

The house was in good condition, despite the absence of occupants for a year.  My neighbour checks in regularly and my local contractor fixed a problem with the heating system over the winter.  There are no signs of damp or water damage, no broken tiles or windowpanes, and the plumbing and electrics all seem to be working well.  I have replaced the batteries in the smoke alarms and defrosted the freezer, and in addition I have given all the rooms a thorough clean since I discovered a greater than usual number of spider’s webs and a plenitude of dead flies. Most of the latter were scattered across the floors: I imagine the flies entered the house via the vents in the windows but could not find their way back out again and died of cold, hunger, or old age.  A few were tangled up in webs, but I suspect most of the flies that were trapped that way had already been eaten.  The war between the Arachnids and the Muscidæ lacks the graphic intensity of Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw” and does not stir the passions as that between the Jets and the Sharks, but it is nonetheless one small part of the cosmic evolutionary struggle.  The detritus of battle was soon sucked up by my vacuum cleaner, and the house feels more comfortable for humans as a result.

Continue reading “I re-land”

We call them the Dark Ages, but all that we mean is that we cannot see. R G Collingwood

I have written previously about Dante, who died seven hundred years ago.  He is considered by some critics to be the greatest poet of the Western canon, whose artistic innovation in the Commedia transformed our understanding of what it means to be human.  One of the conceits of the poem is that Dante, the narrator of the story, is guided through hell and purgatory by Virgil, the Roman poet whom he greatly admired.  Previously, I had taken this to be solely a literary device, that allows for a continuous dialogue between the two protagonists as they travel, by which the fates of the various characters they encounter can be explained to the reader and, at the same time, an implicit assertion by Dante that he too ranked as one of the great poets.  Recently, my attention was drawn to a point that previously I had missed entirely: Virgil lived in the age of the Emperor Augustus, born in 70BCE and died in 19BCE, whereas Dante was born in 1265CE and died in 1321CE.  The distance in time between Dante’s death and Virgil’s death – 1340 years – is almost twice as long as the distance between the date of Dante’s death and the present time.  Dante is far more contemporary with us than Virgil was with him. 

Now consider a modern-day poet.  Bob Dylan this year celebrated his eightieth birthday.  Growing up, he would have enjoyed the US’s post-war economic boom, in his twenties he was part of the Civil Rights Movement, in the seventies he lived through the Vietnam War, the oil crisis, and the first landing on the moon.  In more recent years he will have encountered novelties such as the internet, electric cars, and 3D-printing.  Now imagine a woman who celebrated her eightieth birthday in the year of his birth.  She would have been born in 1861, the year that the Civil War broke out in the US, and during her lifetime she would have experienced the development of electric lights, motor cars, the first human flight in an aeroplane, and the first global war.  She would also have been entertained by innovations such as photography, the movies, and jazz music.  The world of her birth – when none of the above were part of daily life – seems unimaginably remote to me.  While Bob Dylan seems to be my contemporary, an imaginary woman who lived from 1861 to 1941 appears to come from way back in the historical past.

Continue reading “Lost time”

Back in my college days, I had a job at a newsstand in the centre of Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The name of the place was Out of Town News, and it was well known for having newspapers and magazines from around the world. In fact part of my job – I worked two nights a week and usually both days on the weekends – was to drive the company truck out to Logan Airport and make the rounds at the cargo terminals to get the weekly drop of papers – Alitalia for the Italian papers, JAL for the Asian papers, Air France, British Airways, blah blah. I enjoyed the fact that I worked a “real job” (not some internship) while I was finishing up my undergrad at Harvard; I never really meshed with the regular Harvard house types, neither the rich legacy kids nor the overambitious strivers nor even – though I tried – with the artsy pseudo intellectual crowd. I was by no means of the proletariat – my family wore its bourgeois stripes proudly – but I felt more comfortable hanging out with the locals who worked the newsstand and complained about Sheldon, the owner of the place, and who introduced me to the cops and the semi-professional panhandlers and the rest of the locals who worked minimum wage plus tips to service the university crowd. It also meant I could walk into any local – not the ones catering to parents or students, but the proper locals – and drink without being ID’ed, which was good because I looked like I was twelve years old back then.

Continue reading “Filthy”

The United States is currently pulling its armed forces out of Afghanistan.  Unsurprisingly, the European nations are following close behind, having neither the resources nor the resolve to remain and fight once their American colleagues have departed.  The chaos at Kabul airport portends what might happen next across the entire country, as the American-backed Afghani government disintegrates, and the Taliban and its associates move in to fill the power vacuum.  In a speech given in early July, President Biden argued that “… after twenty years … a trillion dollars spent …” it was the right time for American troops to come home.  In this text I am not going to take a view about whether his decision to bring the war to an end now is sensible, nor whether the decision by one of his predecessors to start the war in the first place was justified, rather I want to reflect on the price-tag associated with the endeavour.

The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, at Brown University, has provided some analysis of the costs of the “War on Terror”, launched back in 2001 in response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.   In a paper published in November 2019, which takes account of budget forecasts for the fiscal year 2020, they estimate the full costs of the various wars to be just over $5.4 trillion dollars.  Add in their estimate for medical and disability costs for veterans (a liability that has been incurred already, but not yet budgeted for) and the total rises to just over $6.4 trillion dollars.  This bill includes not just the costs of the war in Afghanistan, but also the war in Iraq, as well as spending on homeland security, and probably the costs of running the Guantanamo Bay Detention Centre too.  It is an impressively large sum of money: $6,400,000,000,000. 

Continue reading “Welfare versus warfare”