Three observations on China

I have recently been in China. Indeed, I've been a few times now and I've seen a variety of places, and as a result I have many, many thoughts on the subject that I would be delighted to share. But you can relax! As with my reflections on Japan and Korea, I will spare you the benefit of any deep thoughts, at least for the moment, and instead give you just three observations about China that I have not seen from anyone else. These observations concern yogurt, high-speed trains and state-owned enterprise. I'll give you the yogurt one above the break, but the other points are a bit longer and so I'll put them below.

1. Chinese people are convinced that yogurt - you know, the white stuff that comes in pots with a little foil lid - is a drink. They even provide you with straws (proper ones, made of plastic) to consume it. To be fair, they have it without lumps and a little bit more runny than we do, but they must have thought I was very strange to be eating it with a spoon. That is especially the case as teaspoons are rare and so I used a dessert spoon. 

Demolition Man

Mellow greetings, readers! 

Demolition Man is a successful mainstream film with lots of explosions. But it was a deliberately satirical film made in the 1990s (fast becoming known as the Golden Age of Cinema) and I found it worth re-watching when I did so recently, and so I'm going to talk about it a little bit. 

If you want someone else's take on the film then the Critical Drinker covers it here; mine is after the break.

Dystopia is here

I think this is the most dystopian thing I have read recently.

It’s a judgment of Mr Justice Saini, a High Court judge, concerning an application for an interim injunction in a Commercial Court dispute between two providers of CRM (customer relations management) services, one of whom wants to stop the other from luring away its customers.

So far, so normal. Bread and butter commercial litigation. So why do I describe the judgment as dystopian?

The reason is that the CRM providers in question serve what the judge describes as a “specialised and niche market”, namely, the people whom the judge carefully describes as “content providers sometimes called OnlyFans "models" or "performers" in the papers before me”, and in order to explain the issues in the case, the judge has to explain, in great detail, precisely how OnlyFans works. It’s not a happy story.

I’m sure you have no idea what OnlyFans is, so I will have to explain, but I do not think I can improve on the introduction that the judge gives in paragraphs [21]-[22] of the judgment:

“OnlyFans is a subscription-based social media platform where creators share exclusive content (photos, videos, live streams), and use built-in messaging tools to have conversations with "fans". While used by some others in the entertainment world, OnlyFans is predominantly known for adult content, and serves as a direct income source for creators in the modern so-called "creator economy". Creators/models charge fans for their interaction/services in a number of different ways and OnlyFans generally takes 20% of the charges.

Creators set their own subscription price for fans, usually between about US$5.00 and US$50.00 per month. For pay-per-view content, creators charge a one-off fee for access to particular content and tips are sent by fans in amounts of their choosing. Creators are responsible for generating income on the platform by producing content that attracts and retains subscribers. OnlyFans does not itself create content. One can gain an idea of the scale of the enterprise from some figures in the evidence before me. In its most recent (2024) accounts, OnlyFans reported gross payments from fans of approximately US$ 7.22 billion (across hundreds of millions of registered users and several million creators worldwide) and pre-tax profits of US$ 683.6 million. Earnings for individual creators vary, but an article published by the Claimant in the evidence before me identifies a number of "middle ground" content creators who earn around US$ 3,000.00-5,000.00 per month, and higher earners making in the region of US$ 20,000.00 per month.”

Such is life, you may say, but it gets worse.

As the judge explains in paragraph [23]: “In order to keep fans engaged, successful content creators maintain personalised dialogues ("chats") with each fan. Messaging lies at the heart of the OnlyFans model and the evidence shows that the overwhelming majority of creator revenue is generated through this "direct messaging" and chats between fans and content creators.” Then the kicker: “As I describe below, the messaging is not in fact (in the case of successful creators) undertaken by them but by "chatters" employed by agencies.”

To my mind, it is the existence of these “chatters” that introduces the truly dystopian element to this (already rather depressing) world. What the CRM companies do is enable teams of people to pretend to be models and to “chat” to them. Back to Saini J: “These are people employed by the agencies to interact with thousands of fans on behalf of the creators, in sometimes an intimate and personal way. The fan believes that these are one-to-one chats, and they are having a personal dialogue with the creator. Fans may well believe that they are chatting to a model in real time but in fact an agency-employed chatter will be interacting with the fan on the pretence that they are the model.”

I think it’s worth considering the industrial scale of this “chatting”. The customers for the CRM software are agencies who manage multiple models. One example is given by the judge, Typa: “Typa manages 50 creators and each one has between 2,000 and 300,000 fans. So, it manages the interactions the creators are having with over 1 million fans on OnlyFans. Typa employs a number of chatters as well as copywriters. … Typa uses a team of five chatters working in shifts to provide 24/7 coverage, supervised by a quality control manager. … This structure is important because it allows Typa to maintain consistent engagement with the substantial fan base.”

All of that means that the really valuable information in this business (and what the companies are fighting about) is what it takes to allow these employed “chatters” successfully to keep up the pretence that “fans” are talking to “models”. This information comes in the form of “scripts”, i.e., the kinds of things that models might say, and “fan notes”, i.e., information about the fans that can be used to make it seem as if they are being remembered and valued.

I’m sure you can imagine how depressing the details of these “scripts” and “fan notes” are, but the judge does not spare us the details and neither will I.

For examples of scripts, he gives “"Hey Ryan, I saw you liked my gym pics yesterday. Want the full video tonight? If you say yes, I'll send for £25”, accompanied by the note “Use it only when: mentions gym pics”; and “Hey Brian, I saw you liked my bath video yesterday. want the full video tonight?...” with the note “Use it only when: replied 'I'm okay' and hasn't bought in 7 days.”

As for fan notes, well, I’ll just quote and let you use your own judgment as to what is going on: “… information which the agency has recorded and logged about Brian, in the course of the dialogue – he is from the Bay Area, California; 40 years old; single; lives with parents; etc. Another example of Fan Notes record that 'Bruno' is a veteran of the Navy SEALS, a jiu jitsu black belt, and that he is from Brazil with Italian parents.” 

The judge explains how the fan notes get updated with a further example: “a change has been made to update David's salary to $2,000 USD per month, that he tips between $50-$100 and he get paid wages between 15th-17th.” As the judge coolly comments, “Fan Notes of this type are intended to enable a chatter to extract maximum financial benefits when they interact with David.”

What is the most depressing thing here? 

- Is it the sheer scale of the vast transfers of money from men sitting around in their pants (or less) to women posing in their knickers (or less)? 

- Is it the fact that those men think they are talking to women but are in fact talking to (I assume) men in India or the Philippines? 

- Is it the bland corporate-speak employed: "To provide this consistent service at scale, they rely on CRM tools which allow for Scripts to be subject to layered controls and quality assurance ... 24/7 coverage, supervised by a quality control manager ... consistent engagement ... financial benefits ..."?

- Or it is just the little glimpses into people’s lives: Brian, who honestly tells a “chatter” that he is a single 40 year-old who lives with his parents, or Bruno who bigs himself up with his jiu jitsu black belt and Navy SEALS experience (seriously?), or David, who is circled by vultures waiting to pounce on payday?

I don’t know. I only know that something, somewhere, has gone badly wrong. Like a cuckoo exploiting the natural nurturing instincts of a bird, these businesses have successfully hacked the natural reproductive instincts of mankind.

On the whole, I think the saddest thing is that the real money – the “overwhelming majority of creator revenue”, as the judge put it – is not to be found in simply selling naughty photos, but in the “chatting”. Taking money in exchange for pornography is an old business and a fundamentally honest one: the customer gets what he pays for. But taking money in exchange for a pretended human connection? That’s dystopian.

AI and the law - a test

There has been much speculation about the impact of AI on the legal professions. I am not going to repeat it. Instead, here is a test.

Last year, the High Court decided a case called "Mazur" (the full reference is available lower down this post, if you're interested). The appeal from the decision was recently heard over three days in the Court of Appeal. I've asked some AIs to predict the outcome.

It seemed to me that this case is a good test for a couple of reasons. The first instance decision attracted a lot of attention in the legal professions because it concerned the question of whether certain legal tasks have to be carried out by fully-qualified solicitors and the extent to which other professionals, with other (or no) qualifications, can assist. So it's a decision that potentially has a big impact on the business of law firms and has therefore attracted a lot of informed comment for the AIs to consider. On the other hand, the case is of much less interest to the general public, so there is little by way of general media comment. All of which made me think that an AI that 'reads' the public information on the case will get a fairly good steer on what it is all about.

The test I gave the AIs was not to replicate what a lawyer would do when giving advice to their own client. Instead, I was asking them to do something akin to what a law firm does when it publishes a note on a case of wider significance in which it is not itself involved: the kind of thing intended to keep clients updated and show that the law firm is a 'thought leader'.

I've cut and pasted the AIs' predictions below, in advance of the judgment, so that we can all look back after the event and judge them more fully. The headlines are as follows:

- Claude/Sonnet was reluctant to answer the question, saying that the appeal fell after its cut-off date, and I was disinclined to spend any time bringing it up to speed. I have not quoted it below.
- LeChat/Mistral made some howlers that discredited it in my eyes.
- Grok was perhaps most helpful. It immediately gave a convincing answer.
- ChatGPT took some prodding to produce a full answer, but gave a decent one in the end.

But even in advance of seeing if they are right, we can ask how they did on the test I gave them. How does their work product compare to asking a junior lawyer to write a report of this kind?

On balance, as at the time of writing (and I know things change quickly), I'd still rather have the lawyer for this job. But a lawyer at £X per hour working for a few hours, or a few seconds on Grok? That's much closer. One lawyer checking for howlers plus a decent AI doing the legwork would be far more efficient. As one on-line commentator said, AIs are very good at curing 'blank page' panic. 

Given the relative lack of importance of notes such as these, I'd be very surprised if AI is not generating the bulk of them before the end of the year. At which point, AIs will most likely be the bulk of the readership too...

Full details below the break.

What are judges for? What is the law for? A case of emails, mice and murder

The recent judgment of HHJ Paul Matthews in Frost v Giddens [2025] EWHC 3325 (Comm) is an interesting one for thinking about what it is that judges do. 

Read on for more about emails but, I'm afraid, only a little about either mice or murder.

On giving advice

Someone on X posted an engagement-bait-type question, but a good one: "What advice do you have for me for the new year?" One reply was this: "be skeptical of other people’s advice, which is very often aimed at rationalizing their own past choices, exerting power, or projecting their own concerns .... It’s in fact extremely [hard] to give another person advice apart from the banal and the obvious." 

To what extent is that reply true? Some thoughts below.

Sally Rooney's Intermezzo and Alan Hollinghurst's Our Evenings

Last summer, I read two books of modern literary fiction (by which I mean books of the 'in-contention-for-the-Booker-Prize kind'), namely Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst and Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. I don't think these two books are often yoked together (other than perhaps on lists of prizeabile, so to speak) but, in my perpetual quest to produce useful book reviews, I thought it might nonetheless be worth making a little comparison of what I think are their strengths and weaknesses.  

Cads and the law

My previous post, on divorce, lying and the internet, prompted a couple of interesting exchanges on the Site Formerly Known as Twitter and prompted me to do a little more research and thinking. After the break, I set out below some reflections on cads, duels and dobbing.

Lies, damned lies, matrimony and the internet

I was recently reading Uncommon Law, AP Herbert's book of spoof law reports first published in 1935, and it made me wonder whether ordinary, decent, middle-class people are more or less honest than they used to be. To cut a long story short: yes and no.

Even today, there is still much in Uncommon Law to enjoy, or at least there is if you are a lawyer or interested in the law. It's a mixture of 'law is an ass'-type invented but more or less plausible cases, poking fun at judges and judge-ese, liberal/libertarian fulminations at silly legal restrictions and the occasional clever observation. To give you an idea of the kind of thing, in one case a judge muses whether a marriage contract is unenforceable because it is in effect gambling, given that one never quite really knows what one is getting oneself into when marrying.

But whether that sort of thing is your cup of tea or not, you might want to think about divorce. 

One of Herbert's imagined cases is an old barrister doing his last case who has stopped caring about keeping up the pretences involved in 1920s divorces. So he tells the judge that evidence will be given that the husband's ardour for his wife cooled quickly after marriage, but the reality is that the wife wants the divorce and the husband is still keen on her; he says that Mrs So-and-so will give evidence that she had a liaison with the husband, but in fact she's been paid; he says that the wife will ask for alimony but in fact her family are having to pay money to the husband to get him to agree to this charade; and so on and so forth. The barrister says that everyone involved is perfectly decent, but, in effect, they are all going to perjure themselves.

Now of course I knew that this kind of rigmarole was how divorces were conducted under the old law: you see an example in Waugh's A Handful of Dust, perhaps based on his own experiences, and I have vague memories of reading about rooms rented in Brighton, private detectives primed to pounce at the right time and so on, all to ensure that a decent husband was the respondent rather than the petitioner. But it had not previously dawned on me that the parties would go to court, swear on Bibles and straightforwardly lie in the face of His Majesty's judiciary. It may be pearl-clutching on my part, but wasn't this an awful lot of perjury or perverting the course of justice? And does it make it better or worse to think that the judges knew (sometimes? always?) that everyone was making it up and that it was their job, in order to make society (and Society) work, to go along with it?

Herbert's point was that ordinary decent people were forced into these expedients by the restrictive divorce laws of the time. His argument has won the day and divorces can be had nowadays without anyone being required to choose between ruining a decent woman's reputation or committing perjury. 

There is, it seems to me, something very positive about that development. A world in which one can consider oneself a fine and upstanding gentleman despite deliberately conspiring to break the law (or perhaps because one is so conspiring) is, other things being equal, not as good in which fine and upstanding people hesitate and quail before misleading the legal authorities. It would not surprise me if an ordinary decent man who considered himself above the law when it came to divorce then came to consider himself above the law on other subjects too. Truthfulness is a habit, at least to some extent, and habits are formed by behaviour. 

Even today, I don't think that everyone follows the law all the time - I'm a lawyer! - but the instances in which a decent person can hold their head up high while lying to the courts are pretty few. I can imagine that someone might consider it to be "doing the decent thing" to take points on a driving licence that should properly go to a spouse in order to prevent the loss of that licence. I can also imagine family members concealing crimes even to the extent of barefaced lying to the authorities: perhaps to hush up a repentant teenager's drug use, for example. But even these examples seem to be different from deliberately setting out, with a plan formulated in advance, to mislead the court in order to obtain a desired outcome. So the world has improved, in one respect at least.

On the other hand, there is a big part of our lives that is forcing us the other way: clicking online forms. Forms require us to say that we have read and understood vast screeds of terms and conditions that we have no intention of even looking at, or they ask questions when we know that, if we give the honest answer, we will be taken down a rabbit hole of unnecessary extra steps. What's your view on cookies? Do you have the consent of everyone involved in this booking? How did you hear about us? Have you forgotten your password (maybe ...?)? Once upon a time, someone might be able to say, with a straight face, that they always read the small print; but now no-one does (no-one always does) and yet everyone says that they do. 

The whole world of doing business on the internet relies on, to put it at its lowest, a lot of polite fictions. On the one hand, that is not as bad as perjury but, on the other hand, this kind of lying is far more prevalent than divorce was in the 1920s. 

"Ah", you might say, "but that doesn't really count. It's just online forms - it's just computers". But if AI is anywhere near as successful as both its proponents and its chief opponents suspect, filling in online forms is only going to become a bigger part of our everyday life. 

We have trained ourselves to lie to computers. That wasn't so much of a problem when we mostly talked to humans. But it might be when we mostly talk to computers. In fact, once ChatGPT gets any good at humour, I might ask an it to write an AP Herbert-style story with that theme.

Some short film reviews

I have been on a couple of long flights recently and, as we all know, flights mean films, so here are some brief and helpful film reviews for you. To be especially useful, I will start with the best and work down to the worst.

The Castle of Otranto, Shakespeare, Voltaire and the ancestry of suburban magic

I have just finished reading Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. Below the break, I will review it in my usual manner (i.e., quickly and usefully), but I am really here to talk about what Walpole said he was trying to do when he wrote the book.

What chess teaches us about AI - and what AI teaches us about chess

It sometimes strikes me as odd that humans still play chess despite the fact that computers can do it much better than us.

I know that people still delight in foot races or contests of strength despite there being machines that are much faster and stronger than any of us, but I don't find that odd. Humanity has grown up in the knowledge that it is a physically weak creature: there have pretty much always been domesticated animals that are faster or stronger than us, let alone wild ones. 

But, although we weren't the stongest or fastest animal out there, we knew we were the cleverest, with minds that far surpass anything else we encountered, minds that allowed us eventually to outwit and subdue all the alpha predators and alpha prey (if that's a thing - think mammoths) that we came across. 

Chess was a kind of symbol of this intellectual mastery. The 100m Olympic final might tell you who the fastest man in the world is, but the world chess championship plausibly used to tell you who was the best entity in the entire universe at a particularly demanding mental endeavour. It doesn't surprise me that when Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov, it was a pretty big deal. 

Yet on we go, playing games that once would have been regarded as the among highest intellectual achievements in the known universe, but are now the equivalent of washing up by hand when you could use the dishwasher. 

What's going on? Why has our self-regard - our self-conception as the intellectual monarchs of creation - not been badly dented?

Part of the reason is that we have changed our view of what chess is. No-one really thinks it's like discovering the Grand Unified Theory of Everything or writing a symphony any more. It's not even brain surgery or rocket science. It's just a diversion, like noughts and crosses but a bit more tricky. 

One question that immediately arises is: when (and surely it is when) AI does produce cutting edge science, or a mathematical proof no human could hope to achieve, or write a symphony beyond Beethoven's wildest dreams ... what then? Will we then regard those achievements as nothing more than mere arithmetic, better handled by machines than humans? Presumably brain surgery and rocket science are even closer to losing their lustre: what then will we say about easy tasks?

But I want to leave that high-falutin' stuff to one side for the moment. I've got a more prosaic point: AI will be really good at teaching us how to do the things we want to do. (By "AI", I don't mean to refer to the latest LLMs, simply to any computer process.) And it turns out that what we want to do involves other people.

I have recently come across this website called lichess.org. It's amazing and I recommend it to anyone who plays chess. You can play against a seemingly limitless pool of humans or against a computer at various different levels of difficulty. But it does a number of other cool things besides. And it's all free. 

I'm going to show you some of the cool things that it does. You won't need to understand anything about chess to understand the points I am going to make, but if you are completely allergic to chess-chat then just skim until I shout NO MORE CHESS below.

As an illustration, I will use a very low quality game of chess that I played recently (against another human). If you play chess then you will see that I am not using this example as a boast: it is not a game on which either I (white) or my opponent (black) can look back with any great pride.

After you finish a game on lichess, you can get the computer to give you an analysis of it. That is what I show here. 

This is the game as at move 20, when black has just blundered with Nd4. Black's idea is to put pressure on the bishop on e6 and simultaneously be threatening against the white king, which is looking a little exposed and has a few pieces pointing ominously towards him. But it's a blunder nonetheless, as we shall see. This is what you see on lichess (click on it to see it properly):

You'll see that black has 3:28 left and I have 3:03. It's a fast game (5 minutes each side plus 3 seconds per move), which in part explains the poor quality of play.

You can see that black's move, Nd4, is highlighted in red and described as "??", i.e. it's a blunder. You'll also see that the computer recommends Bc4 for my next move - but that I also blundered with Bxf6 instead (also in red, also with "??"). Then you can see that black blundered one more time by re-taking the bishop with the pawn rather with the knight. That allowed me to play Bc4 next move (which I should have done before) and that won the game.

You can also see that the computer identifies not only "blunders", but also "mistakes" (less serious errors, in a kind of gold colour) and the even more minor "inaccuracies" (in blue): I have taken this passage of play in part because it is so full of sub-optimal moves that it's a good example of quite how colourful lichess' analysis of fast and messy play can be.

 

Below that, you get this overview of the game as a whole:

The red line shows who is winning - if it is above the horizontal line then white is winning and if it's below the line then black is ahead. I was marginally ahead in the opening, notably behind thereafter, but you can see that black's blunder has put me well ahead - although I'm about to throw it away with my next blunder - except that black will then re-blunder and put me back in the lead.

NO MORE CHESS

That's enough chess-chat. All I meant to show you was that about 5 minutes of human diversion - a quick break in the working day - can be rigorously analysed by a computer and used as a highly personalised teaching tool. If I were to click on the blue "learn from your mistakes" button then the computer would give me actual examples of my own games, show me where I went wrong, and ask me to work out the better moves. It recommends specific training using its wider library of puzzles (you'll see that it recommends Two Knights Defence puzzles in the picture above). And it does all of that, tirelessly, without complaining that it is working with an idiot who can't even play an obvious move like Bc4 and for free. This is a really extraordinary resource. And it is used, by thousands of people, in order to improve their ability to beat other people at chess.

Now imagine that kind of resource being available in other fields of human endeavour. "That character was introduced too early in your novel", "this is the kind of problem in which it's helpful to take logs" or "here are some changes that might get your project funded by these institutions". There is no inherent reason why AI would not be able to produce advice like that, just as it can tell me that Bc4 was the right move.

Almost 12 years ago, i.e. well before the wonders of recent AIs, Tyler Cowen went even further:

I think we can all agree that "you are sampling optimally in the quest for a lifetime companion" is not quite how the user interfaces of today would put it, but the idea is there. The kinds of advice that lichess can give you about your chess game could soon be provided about your game game, so to speak. 

Would we take such guidance from computers? Of course! As Cowen points out, GPS was already so standard even back then as to be unremarkable. Food preparation is not far behind now. Many people already use AI for low-level social or professional correspondence (the suggested replies to emails or, for example, LinkedIn posts are getting more useful all the time). 

So I'm inclined to think that we'll carry on quite happily competing with (or trying to get off with) each other even when there are AIs whose intelligence compares to us as the speed of a cheetah or the strength of an elephant do.  

I said above that we have always known that we are in the company of physical giants but regarded ourselves as the intellectual giants. But on reflection I'm not sure that's entirely true. Until recently, it was pretty common to think that the Earth was also inhabited by entities with intellectual powers well beyond our own: various gods and spirits with foresight, wisdom and knowledge that humans could never hope to match. We may well now be creating them for real. Perhaps it's just as well that we already have mental models of how to deal with them.

One final point. There are various stories about gods with amazing powers - gods who move the sun or throw down thunderbolts - or gods of various powerful things - rivers, mountains or seas - but we're a pretty self-regarding species and we never had any difficulty in supposing that these powerful creatures would be interested in what we get up to. Poor old Odysseus, for example, was a small and weak chap compared to the Olympians, but they nonetheless took a keen interest in his doings. At present, AIs are pretty interested in our doings too: they'll patiently answer your trivial questions and draw you silly pictures without pointing once out that you might be wasting the time and energy of an incredibly intelligent being. Perhaps the real problem for humans would come, not if we are surpassed by AIs, but if we are ignored by them. Then again, we might be sufficiently self-regarding to shrug that off too. I asked above why our self-regard has not been badly dented: perhaps self-regard is the one axis on which humans truly excel.

In which the writer praises Stephen Bush and tentatively suggests some ideas that differ from his

Stephen Bush is an interesting and thoughtful writer. I recommend that you look out for his work in the FT, and not only his political writing but also his comments on cultural matters. He seems to me to be a man of both intelligence and taste.

That's my (glowing) review of him. But what does he say about me? I'm sorry to say that the picture here is a little more mixed. I make "smug asides" and my "analysis, such as it is, is a greatest hits of partisan wishful thinking". I say "increasingly ridiculous things". At one point, he gave the (sensible, but I think inapposite) advice to "Live in the real world, stand up for decency regardless of the rosette colour, don't excuse-make for opening up the tent to include people who don't think I [Bush] am English." (In fact, the advice to live "in the real world" was given to me twice.) I was also said to have caricatured Bush's point and he suggested that my "need" to do so "tells its own story". 

Gosh. 

(More below the break.)

An email from a WEIRDO ...

I want to explain (and apologise for) the break in posting.

Over the Christmas holidays, I received an interesting email from one of my old tutors, now a big name in behavioural economics. For reasons that will appear from the email itself, I was keen to publish it. The negotiations for that took a bit of time (hence the delay in posting), but the author has now very kindly agreed to my request, after I made certain changes to preserve his anonymity. 

I am not entirely sure what to make of it all, but I don’t want to influence you in advance of reading it and so, without further comment, here is the email.

Not everything is going to the dogs: a cheerful Christmas post

It's nearly Christmas and therefore time for a bit of goodwill.

Like everyone who is broadly sane, I've noticed that some things are going pretty badly in this country. But that makes it all the more important to identify the things that are going well. In my own, Eeyore-ish way, I try to do that from time to time, whether it's good writing for children or goodish writing for adults (but not, I think, writing for people who fall in the middle). So here's another one - and it's seasonal: choral music.

I went to Temple Church a couple of weeks ago for the last concert in their Winter Festival. It was the choir of Merton College, Oxford, together with François Cloete on the organ. Here's the programme.

A couple of things to note. 

First, it was lovely - simply a very pleasant auditory experience. The performance of the Panufnik Sleep, little Jesus, sleep was the best I've heard: I find that recordings tend to emphasise the soloist's voice too much and that can jar against the sound of the choir, whereas the Merton choir did it with better balance. Chacun a son goût, of course, but I'm not alone in thinking that the choir is pretty good. The most challenging piece at Temple Church was probably the Dupré one, on the organ, which to English ears sounded like virtuoso variations on a slightly wrong version of "Now the Green Blade Riseth", but even that was really quite fun.

Second, did you notice how many of those composers are modern and British? Have another look at the list and perhaps Google a name if you don't recognise it. Sir James Macmillan, Dame Judith Weir and Roxana Panufnik are all still with us, while Jonathan Harvey died not that long ago (2012) and John Joubert even more recently (2019). And yet, it was all very lovely music. 

That in itself is very encouraging. But there's more! Cheryl Frances-Hoad (with whom Merton College Choir has also been associated) is also with us and if you don't take to her music then perhaps you will enjoy that of Rebecca Dale. You might well recall that there was plenty of new music composed for the Coronation too, for example Paul Mealor's Coronation Kyrie sung by Sir Bryn Terfel (in Welsh). And those are just the examples that come to my mind - there are bound to be even more.

In short, the modern age has produced a good list of composers - within the UK - who can write very appealing music. That is really very good news.  

It's also instructive to look at the history of Merton College Choir. The college itself is a notably ancient one, but its choir is not and was founded only in 2008. It's also distinctive in another way: girl choristers. As their website puts it, "In 2016 Merton College became the first College in Oxford University to admit girls into its Choral Foundation ... 24 girl choristers ... specialist musical training from the College’s professional musicians, they sing Choral Vespers ... and Choral Evensong .... In addition, the choristers undertake a number of concerts and other activities each year, including performing in the Passiontide at Merton festival and touring over the summer." In my view, that's a rather charming way of expanding and building on the wonderful choral traditions of the country as a whole and of our oldest universities in particular: rather than stopping anyone training boy choristers or altering the sound of established choirs, Merton decided to do its own thing. No woke nonsense - no virtue signalling - just a serious expansion of the options open to girls and women to participate in one of this country's best features.

So there you are. You may think that this is the bleak midwinter, but remember that there are always reasons for hope. Which neatly brings us back to Christmas. Best wishes of the season to all my hopeful readers!

Observations on Conversations with Friends - more on Sally Rooney

I wrote previously about Sally Rooney's Normal People (NP). It's fair to say that I was not especially impressed. But I have now read Conversations with Friends (CWF) and doing so has changed my thinking about NP. It's not that I am any more impressed with NP than I was, but I have a better understanding of what NP was trying to do and why it was so well-received.

Below the break I set out, first, what is good about CWF (especially compared to NP), then a couple of caveats and, finally, why I think NP got much higher praise than it deserved.

Japan (part III): the stuff that Twitter loves - babies, YIMBYism and religion

Enough of musing about holidays! It's time for Issues with a capital I. Let's take it away with the big 3 favourites of Twitter (by which I mean X and all its imitators): babies, YIMBYism and religion. 

I repeat that I don't pretend to understand Japan: all I intend to do below is to set out some relevant observations on these topics. I leave both the explanations and the lessons to be learned for more qualified people. 

Japan (part II): the sights

I started this series of posts by describing the experience of being in Japan. One reason I did so is because that experience is one of the highlights of visiting Japan. More fundamentally, in this post I will suggest that you need to consider the sights of Japan as a whole in experiential terms. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that "sights" - meaning, things that are to be seen - is the wrong word and "gestalt experiences" would be a better phrase, but this post is already sufficiently pretentious. Time for a break.

Japan (part I): Being in Japan

I have recently returned from a trip to Japan. Just as when I went to Korea, I have come back convinced that I am now the fount of all wisdom about the country. But rather than give you the full "Mysteries of the Land of the Rising Sun"-style thinkpiece, laden with gnomic quotations from Bashō, I will instead provide some helpful and accurate observations about Japan today, and I will do so over the course of a number of posts. (A full set of profound insights is of course available on request through the usual channels.)

I will start with this post, in which I try to give an explanation of what it is like to be in Japan. Subsequent posts will address other topics of interest to people thinking of travelling to Japan or simply interested in the normal topics of this blog.

TL;DR - you should visit Japan. You should visit it now.

On being frozen in time - and on looking forward

The end of a living thing has the effect of bringing equality to every moment in its life. Let me try to explain what I mean.

Think of one of those long prestige TV series. What is it? It is what it is right now: right at this point, series 7 episode 4 or whatever. But, when it ends, no moment within its life is privileged in this way. You might prefer this series or consider its peak to be that episode. But each one of these, for better or worse, is equally what it - the series itself - is.

Or, more seriously, think of a human life. You might have seen someone growing older, weaker, dying. Who are they? What is their condition? An old, weak, dying person, sadly. But after their death, their whole life is equally who they are (or were, if you prefer - it makes no difference to my point). Perhaps you have been to a funeral or memorial service with an order of service adorned by photographs of a much younger, healthier and happier person than the one you knew. And rightly so. That person - the one in their pomp and their prime - is the one you are remembering too.

More significant than even the most CGI'd American TV series, but much less important than a human life, we are, it seems, coming to the end of a government. (Yes, pedants, I know that Parliament has already been dissolved. You know what I mean.) When it has been finally dispatched, it will immediately acquire that quality of temporal indifference that both your great great aunt and Game of Thrones have: there is no "now" to take precedence over the other moments of its existence; it's up to you what you remember of it; and perhaps it's up to history to decide what part of it matters.

The government that is to come will one day have that quality too. It will one day be over and frozen in time. No life - no TV series, even - consists of nothing but high points, and I doubt that anyone claim that either this government is the exception or that the next one will be. But I think all people of goodwill can hope there will be some good episodes to replay, some joyful photos for the albums, for us to take from what is to come.