MEMES OVER GENES

For the first fifty or so years of my life I somehow managed to avoid knowing anything about Stephen Sondheim. Probably because I have an almost pathological dislike of musicals -- so if I'd heard anything about him at all, I'm afraid to say he would just have got lumped into the waste-basket of slushy, mawkish and soppy-ending trash that, based first on painful childhood experience and then on adult preference, I generally associate with the genre.  Things changed when I found myself making a travel documentary one day with Amon Miyamoto, Japan's premier musical director. "Found myself" because it wasn't planned -- I'd been asked to set up and coordinate a shoot in the UK without knowing until the last minute who the presenter was going to be. So it was quite a shock when I found out who he was and what he did. But despite my initial concern that we might not hit it off too well, we got on like a house on fire: I still remember that week as one of the hig...

It's easy to be cynical about the promises being made at COP26 in Glasgow. We've heard it all before: promises are made, only to be broken. Cut methane emissions by 30%? Sure, we'll do that. End deforestation by 2030? No problem. But here's the thing: however frustrating the process may be, an agreement is still better than no agreement.  That's because words do matter. Language is all about agreement, after all. There's nothing about the actual sounds of the words we use -- or the shapes of the letters we use to write them -- that has any meaning in itself. It's only because we all agree that certain combinations of sounds and shapes have particular meanings that we're able to understand each other in the first place. It's the basis of everything that makes us human, the secret of our civilisation. So when we use words to express a commitment, we're leveraging the fundamental nature of language.  And we all understand how important that is: in e...

It's easy to forget exactly what we're celebrating on November 5th, when we so enthusiastically loose off fireworks all around the UK. In most countries, fireworks are used to mark some significant political, cultural or social occasion -- the founding of the nation, the end of  period of fasting, or the start of the New Year. But here in Britain our most extravagant displays are reserved for a day which commemorates a failed terrorist plot -- over 400 years after it was foiled. It's almost as if people in the 25th century were still celebrating the death of Bin Laden. In some ways, that makes sense. It's a celebration of stability over chaos. If Guy Fawkes had succeeded in blowing up Parliament, killing the King and the people who ran the country, England would have descended (yet again) into a period of political mayhem. But less than 40 years after Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators were hung, drawn and quartered, the country did just that anyway: the battle line...