Rafael Nadal as secular experience

 

I‘ve been a lover of tennis pretty much my whole life. For me it combines the excitement of direct confrontation – the psychological, individualistic and gladiatorial aspects of boxing – with the hand-eye co-ordination, whole-body athleticism, dexterity and skills of the best of any games involving a ball. My earliest defining tennis memory was listening on the radio to Boris Becker winning Wimbledon for the first time in 1985 when my family was on the way back from a camping trip in Dartmoor. I remember sitting on a rug amongst the dry, floral-smelling, sun-blasted heather as Becker defeated Kevin Curren in four sets. Since then I have followed the game almost constantly. Yet in terms of being a fan of a particular player, or being drawn into the (essentially silly) debate over who is the greatest male tennis player of all time (or – to use an acronym I have always hated – the GOAT), I have always stayed well clear. On the odd occasion that I do look at reader comments when I’m reading online articles, all I generally see is a lot of tedious, tendentious polemics about why Roger or Rafa or Nole or Andy is so great – the first sure sign of a tennis superfan is that they always call their idol by their first name or an affectionate nickname. Just to be clear: I will use the conventional system of writing out names in full on first mention, then surnames afterwards.

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Dame Vera Lynn’s new book

 

Dame Vera Lynn's new book Keep Smiling Through

 

Dame Vera Lynn’s new book Keep Smiling Through: My Wartime Story is published today by Century. Vera turned 100 earlier this year and I have been fortunate enough to work with her and her daughter Virginia Lewis-Jones in telling the remarkable story of her visit to entertain the troops in Burma in 1944.

Her visit coincided with the turning point in the war in the Far East and she was close to the front as the pivotal battles of Kohima and Imphal were being fought. Vera had just turned twenty-seven, and had only been out of the country once before, but she wanted to do ‘her bit’ to help.

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A new charter – and a new chance – for trees in the UK

 

 

I wanted to write something about the launch of the tree charter on 6 November, which hasn’t been widely covered in the media, but I did find this great piece by Boudicca Fox-Leonard (what a name!) in the Telegraph that seems to cover most of what I wanted to say, which either means I’m not nearly as original as I thought I was, or I’m in exalted company in thinking along the same lines as Ms Fox-Leonard!

Her piece begins with a wonderful sentence: ‘In slides the shovel, out comes a clod of earth; a delicate sapling is dropped into the neat hole and soil repacked around it.’ She mentions the fact that our percentage of tree cover in the UK is far below the European average. Across the UK it stands at around 13 per cent and in England it is just 10 per cent. Compare this to France (36.76%), Spain (36.7%), Italy (35%) and Germany (32%). Even allowing for the fact that Britain is an island with a high population density, the comparison is enormously unfavourable, yet 2016 was the worst year for planting on record. She also points out that the government pledged to plant 11 million trees by 2020 and that this pledge is unlikely to be kept. In other words, not enough is being done to improve the situation.

Why do I think it is important that more trees are planted? I have two main answers to that question – the first is personal; and the second is more about the benefits that I believe trees provide to our society as a whole.

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My strange role in the death of neonicotinoids in the UK

My very first blog on my new website was an open letter to Michael Gove about neonicotinoids – the controversial family of pesticides that many scientists believe has been one of the primary causes of major reductions in insect and bird populations over the past fifteen years. I suggested that Mr Gove make a move to ban the use of neoniciotinoids.

I first published my blog on 6 November but didn’t get around to actually sending the letter to Michael Gove until 8 November. On 9 November there was a surprise announcement: Michael Gove backed a total ban on neonicotinoids.

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American Pastoral and the need for a new American Dream

 

 

I am reading the novel American Pastoral by Philip Roth at the moment (a really thought-provoking novel) and I was struck by this passage in the book – a speech that the narrator imagines himself giving to his fiftieth anniversary high school reunion, but never does.

Let’s remember the energy. Americans were governing not only themselves but some two hundred million people in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Japan. The war-crimes trials were cleansing the earth of its devils once and for all. Atomic power was ours alone. Rationing was ending, price controls were being lifted; in an explosion of self-assertion, auto workers, coal workers, transit workers, maritime workers, steel workers – laborers by the millions demanded more and went on strike for it. And playing Sunday morning softball on the Chancellor Avenue field and pickup basketball on the asphalt courts behind the school were all the boys who had come back alive, neighbors, cousins, older brothers, their pockets full of separation pay, the GI Bill inviting them to break out in ways they could not have imagined possible before the war. Our class started high school six months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history. And the upsurge of energy was contagious. Around us nothing was lifeless. Sacrifice and constraint were over. The Depression had disappeared. Everything was in motion. The lid was off. Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together.

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An open letter to Michael Gove MP

Dear Mr Gove,

Two worrying reports about insects have come to my attention in the past couple of weeks – the first a widely reported study from Germany that has seen a 75 per cent drop in insect numbers over the past 25 years; the second a report about the steady decline in honey crop from the British Beekeepers Association.

In a survey of members of the British Beekeepers Association, 62 per cent said that they believed neonicotinoids are to blame, a belief which seems to be supported by the fact that suburban beekeepers (away from agricultural land) are returning better yields that rural beekeepers.

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