DRAMA

is a good guess for completing the missing letters in the word D??MA. Wordle enthusiasts will probably be aware that there is another good guess.

Endangered

 

Since 2001 the koala population of Eastern Australia has halved. They are under constant threat from the destruction of their habitats, bush fires, drought and disease (especially Chlamydia). The government has designated them 'endangered' to raise public awareness and support various initiatives to protect them.

Fairer Franchise

Democracy may be the best of a bad bunch of forms of government, but can be very regressive. The grey brigade (to which I belong) is a powerful voting lobby. A political party that seeks to redress the grossly unfair share of Government resources it receives (see previous post) does so at its peril. A young voter may have 60 or more years of life ahead of them whereas I can expect to live only another 6 years on average. It surely cannot be just that my vote carries equal weight in determining my 18-year-old son's future.

I have a simple remedy to reduce my power at the ballot box as I get older and make it more likely that future Governments will be motivated to study the interests of younger generations. The crosses of electors between the ages of 18 and 50 (say) would count as one full vote. Thereafter the weight our votes would tapered in a linear fashion down to zero for anyone over 100. Thus, for example, the vote of someone aged 75 would carry only half the weight of of the vote of someone of 50 or under.

It has to be admitted, however, that since the electoral success of the Conservative party depends heavily on the grey vote, my modest proposal will have to wait for a more progressive alliance to take it up.

Tax me more, Gov

In The Economist this week the columnist Bagehot points out that 'shrinkflation' -- a stealthy commercial device for raising prices without the customer noticing by reducing the weight, volume, quantity or quality of standard items -- is also used by Government when they discreetly reduce, or even remove, benefits and services without raising taxes. Legal aid is cut, the Police, with Government connivance, largely ignore the crime of fraud, while the NHS eats up an ever larger fraction of the State spending, with its share likely to reach 44% by 2024 compared with 27% in 2000. As we have seen with the impending rise in National Insurance contributions, eventually something has to give.

Even more shocking is how this diminishing State munificence is unequally shared among the voting cohorts. The British Government currently spends £20,000 per year on each young person and £40,000 per year on folk like me in their late 80s; the current figures of around 3m over-80s is expected to rise to 4.4m by 2030. Unless politicians take unpopular measures to dramatically stimulate economic growth, some of us will need to pay more into the Exchequer's coffers. While people living only on a State pension are struggling desperately to make very modest ends meet in the face of 6--7% price inflation, there are many like me with an index-linked professional pension and significant assets who live a life of middle-class comfort, to a large extent cushioned against the vagaries of market forces. I believe we should contribute more for the unfair share of the nation's wealth we receive.

In passing

I am so allergic to euphemisms that I am prone to stop reading (or visibly cringe) when a writer (or speaker) describes a dead person as having ‘passed’ — not to be confused with being ‘past’, the state of no longer being in the present. I grew up in a world of euphemisms, of aversion to calling a spade a spade, although nowadays one probably needs a euphemism for a ‘spade’. For long into adolescence I thought ‘numbers’ was a euphemism for faeces because when I was told to “go and do my numbers” no-one explained there were two things involved: number 1 and number 2. (Hypocrisy warning: Using the medical term ‘faeces’ as an alternative to ‘turds’ might be seen as a kind of euphemism). Genteel visitors to the family home would say they needed to ‘spend’ a penny, ‘powder their noses’, or ‘visit the smallest room’ when even ‘doing their numbers’ sounded too explicit. (Of course, we youngsters still knew the words ‘piss’ and ‘shit’ even though speaking them was taboo.) So, I am happy to pass the salt, to pass when asked a tricky question, to strive to pass muster, to pass the time of day, perhaps even to pass water, and not to pass by on the other side. But please, when my time is up, no-one say that I have passed. If you do, I will come back to haunt you! Just grant me the dignity of simply having died.

Corrida de Toros

 The bull has left his pen and is in the ring, the spectators are in their seats, baying for blood, a whole nation of them in front of their TVs rather than behind the barrera, The banderilleros have done their preliminary softening-up: the 100 tories voting against the Government’s whipped proposal for covid passports. The arch-picador is drip-feeding the news media with damaging stories about boozy parties in No 10’s garden during lockdowns, If the bull is sufficiently weakened and ready for the matador to drive his sword into his aorta of power, who might deliver the coup de grâce? Could it be a rich donor, like Baron Bamford threatening to withhold his millions? Or perhaps a majority of Tory rebels worried about losing their seats? Or even those spectators, due to cast (or withhold) their votes in May? There’s no time to lose. The next contender is already in the pen.

Lost in Translation?

The names of the translators of books written in a foreign tongue, and critical acclaim for their work, are rarely seen on the covers or title pages of English editions published in the UK or the USA. I learnt from Jennifer Croft, a translator writing for The Guardian, that although the Man Booker International Award decided in 2016 forthwith to split the £50,000 prize between author and translator, nevertheless, not one of the six winning works of fiction published since then has the translator’s name on the front.

Translation is a highly skilled art. It calls for a deep knowledge of both languages and a sensitive ear for literary style, social context, idiom and narrative mood. Take the first page (in the original) of your favourite foreign-language novel, cut and paste it into Google Translate, and compare what Google suggests with the first page of an accredited English translation. Convinced?

Jennifer Croft translates into English from Polish, Argentine-Spanish, and Ukrainian and is perhaps best known for translating the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, mixed-genre work for which Croft and Tokarczuk won the above-mentioned prize in 2018. As she says: "Generally speaking we are also the most reliable advocates for our books, and we take better care of them than anybody else. Covers simply can’t continue to conceal who we are. It’s bad business, it doesn’t hold us accountable for our choices, and in its wilful obfuscation it is a practice that is disrespectful not only to us, but to readers as well."