My favourite television series when I was growing up in the 1970s was Survivors, set in the near-future, in an England devastated by a deadly plague that had been released, inadvertently, from a germ-warfare laboratory. In my usual perverse way I liked the idea of a society reeling from such a disaster, and took a particular joy in imagining the freedoms I might enjoy in a world so turned upside down.

Judging from the mass hysteria that the very hint of such pestilence can summon up, even in such phlegmatic people as ourselves, it would seem that I’m not alone in my grim fascination. Think Sars, think Ebola, think bird flu yet behind them all, knocking on the rear door of collective unconscious, lurks the daddy of all plagues, the Black Death itself, which halved the population of England in three short months of 1349. There had been previous plagues, and more were to follow, but this was the big one.

John Hatcher, a professor of economic and social history, has taught the Black Death for more than 20 years, and in this book he has tried to do something unique. There are many first-hand accounts of the plague extant but they are mostly foreign and urban: one thinks of the introduction to Boccaccio’s Decameron, or Petrarch’s descriptions of the impact of the epidemic in papal Avignon.

Conversely, the manorial and ecclesiastical records of the Suffolk farming communities during the plague are particularly rich in the kind of detail Professor Hatcher excels in analysing, while actual testimony of what it was like to survive the Black Death is lacking.

So, why not join the two together to create a vivid and as factually accurate possible account of what it was like to experience the Black Death? If you like, a 14th-century version of Survivors.

It’s an arresting notion, and Professor Hatcher’s set-up is promising: short, objective sections prefacing each chapter, in which the epidemiology, aetiology and course of the plague are limned in while the social, political and economic institutions of England are discussed in relation to religious faith and agricultural practice. But the body of the book is a narrative of the plague that, while written in Modern English, is in many ways a convincing portrayal of the worldview of a contemporary member of the educated elite, presumably an ecclesiastic.

Professor Hatcher cannot be faulted on his devotion to the detail, or his convincing portrayal of the village of Walsham, a straggling farming community of a couple of thousand in the hinterland of Bury St Edmunds. Individual men and women are painstakingly described.

Peasants like Agnes Chapman, who witnesses her husband’s horrific death, festering with buboes, or the pious vicar, Master John, who, while privately affected by doubts, continues to encourage his congregation to repent of their sins more fully so as to avoid God’s wrath.

The local squire, Edmund de Welles, resorts to a prophylactic of his own devising: inhaling the contents of his chamber pot to protect him from the noxious vapours that it was believed along with sight transmitted the disease.

Moreover, unlike more discursive works, The Black Death conveys with great effectiveness the intensity of medieval English devotions and their deep preoccupation with the business of dying. Reading this book I was reminded time and again of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and of other peasant societies in which life and death are commingled in spirituality.

Sadly, but perhaps inevitably, Professor Hatcher lacks the novelist’s touch and his details tend to be exhaustive, repetitive, and even a little dull. Not something anyone associates with Armageddon.

The Black Death: An Intimate History by John Hatcher (Weidenfeld, £20)

09.06.08

The fact that Saturday’s Facebook-advertised party on the Circle line to mark the Mayor’s new ban on drinking on London’s public transport got out of hand was achingly predictable; but that it should’ve been organised by a City go-getter, miffed that his pal lost her job when the previous incumbent, Ken Livingstone, lost his, is almost too good to be true. Yet there was Alexandre Graham, the 26-year-old RBS banker, popping a bottle of bubbly in a Tube carriage, while all around him tipsy high spirits condensed into pissed bad vibes.

In a way Graham and his actions sum up contemporary London far better than Boris Johnson could ever hope to: London’s anarchy, its irrationalism and its hedonism, but most especially its centuries-old tradition of street theatre, whereby the mob itself struts upon the stage of power. That the mob should also be drunk goes without saying.

I’m not making a case for unfettered public drinking being a good thing – I find crapulent teenagers and twentysomethings quite as noxious as any other sober grump – but in a week that sees an increasingly tired and emotional Government lashing out with still more legislation aimed at curbing the menace of drunken teens, you have to ask yourself: isn’t the law already a herd of asses when it comes to boozing? And hypocritical asses to boot, thrusting the bottle at the British with one hand, while trying to yank it away with the other.

The new legislation is aimed at criminalising under-18s who “persistently” drink in public, while also criminalising parents who let their under-12s drink at home. At the same time, the Government is to issue a guide to exactly how many units are suitable for younger drinkers. Naturally, the hedonists cry that all this betokens a ghastly nanny state. They’re dead right: they have abrogated the responsibility for teaching our kids how to drink in a socially acceptable way and the Government has taken it on.

My view is that the only way to avoid a nanny state is to have a parental one. The home and family-based social gatherings are where young people should learn how to drink alcohol responsibly; the wider society should only tacitly enforce – through general disapproval – what’s already deemed unacceptable. Of course there are going to be young people who “persistently” drink in public and indulge in antisocial behaviour, but my hunch is that they’re either nascent alcoholics or have other severe problems: further criminalisation is not the way to deal with them either.

Funny old Boris Johnson, who won the mayoralty on a “he knows how to have a good time” ticket, is now in danger of seeming like just the sort of numbing killjoy that New Labour has been brewing for a decade now. Frankly, I’ve never been troubled by people drinking on the Tube, but as for people scoffing fried chicken out of boxes – string ’em up, Boris.

03.06.08

Back in 1985 I was an inpatient at a drug rehab in the West Country and had genital warts that required regular and painful treatments.

Each week I went to the STD clinic at the nearby hospital, where a middle-aged consultant applied an acidic preparation to the glans of my penis. One day, while he was actually holding the afflicted portion, he remarked — quite casually — that the best way to rid the country of HIV/Aids would be to “castrate all you junkies — and the queers, too”.

You didn’t need to have a well-developed persecution complex — which I did, anyway — not to find this a little aggressive.

At the time, Aids was the nasty new kid on the infectious diseases block; the first few cases had appeared in England, but those of us in the high-risk groups could already see the battle lines being drawn across the Atlantic: the blameless sheep with “good” Aids — haemophiliacs, faithful heterosexual partners — being sectioned off from those with “bad” Aids — gay men, IV drug users, prostitutes — and the field day that the so-called “moral majority” were having.

I’d already been tested for Aids a year earlier when I’d been in hospital and, so far as I knew, I was HIV negative. Perhaps because of some early hard-drubbing into me of the basic facts about hygiene, or possibly because — in this aspect of my malady, at least — I was less chaotic than my peers, I was never a big sharer of needles. Needless to say, although I can only think of two or three occasions when I did so, of the five other people involved, two are now dead, while the other three may not have Aids but did contract the almost as nasty hepatitis C.

Elizabeth Pisani’s thoughtful and necessary book, at some length, and by following her own picaresque journey through the international Aids prevention industry, explains the evolved consequences of experiences I’ve limned in above. The message of her book is simple: no matter how much money the global community (another priceless oxymoron) chooses to throw at stopping this killer disease, entrenched attitudes — and practices — will ensure that the spectre of “slim”, as it’s known in sub-Saharan Africa, just keeps getting fatter and fatter, as the virus gorges on human life.

When Pisani — a journalist initially — became interested in epidemiology, qualified, then began working in the Aids field, the big battle was to secure funding for prevention campaigns. In part because of the chronic wonkery of the UN, in part because of the activism of the US gay community — vital as it was at the time — but mostly because of the practices that spread the disease, and their unacceptability to the Jerry Falwells of this world (and, presumably, the next), the most obvious and practicable ways of stemming the epidemic were neglected.

Instead we were given campaigns like the Thatcher government’s countrywide mailshot, warning maiden aunts in the Cotswolds not to “die of ignorance”, when the truth was that if public health had been managed effectively, they could’ve died happily ignorant of what Aids was at all. Apart from in sub-Saharan Africa — where, as Pisani plainly states, sexual mores have allowed for rapid transmission through the heterosexual population — your chances of contracting HIV/Aids remain small, unless you are an IV drug user, a prostitute or engage in anal sex.

But as Aids, because of the African epidemic, moved up the agenda of righteousness, and precisely those “moralists” who were happy for whores, queers and junkies to be shovelled out with the rest of the trash seized upon the new “good” sufferers as worthy aid recipients, so their entrenched attitudes ensured that their efforts were as useless as a condom that looks like a colander — because condoms is where it’s all at; condoms and clean needles. US government aid is not only tied to programmes that Bush and his fundamentalist backers approve of, but the recipient governments and NGOs must spend that money on anti-retroviral drugs, needles and condoms made in America.

As Pisani so elegantly establishes, this is the public health equivalent of burning taxpayers’ money in a brazier and magically expecting people on the other side of the world not to contract the virus.

It is, though, only the most glaring example of the waste, profligacy and wrong-headedness that undermines the worldwide effort to curtail a disease the transmission of which is — compared with TB, or cholera, or flu for that matter — relatively easily to guard against.

Pisani’s training as an epidemiologist leads her to commonsense conclusions — which is not to dismiss the hard, committed work she did establishing HIV/Aids prevalence across Asia, or campaigning for funding to fight its spread.

Nevertheless, it turns out that the consultant burning my warts and talking eugenics was on the money all along. He may not have expressed himself sensitively or humanely, but completely curtailing the sexual — and injecting — activity of gay men, drug users and prostitutes would certainly put the mockers on the epidemic; short of that, there are free condoms — with incentives to use them — and free sterile needles.

You can feel Pisani’s frustration as she details the idiotic lengths politicians will go to in order not to be seen to endorse the practices that pass the virus on. The provision of needle exchanges in British prisons is one obvious way of stopping them being Aids factories — and a complete political no-no.

But, I ask Pisani, weren’t things ever thus? When it comes to Aids, polio or diphtheria are not the relevant comparisons — it’s syphilis. Nothing is rational when it comes to sex, and everything really goes tits-ups when you throw drugs into the mix. Pisani isn’t exactly jolly-hockey-sticks but she’s still a ewe when it comes to Aids; unfortunately, it was already clear back in the mid-1980s, to those of us who were in high-risk groups, that this is a ram’s world.

The Wisdom of Whores is published by Granta at £17.99
01.05.08

This week, Will writes about how he overcame his motoring addiction

29.04.08

Read Will’s Evening Standard column of 18.03.08 here

The Prime Minister has uttered two cheers for 24-hour drinking. Yes, there will be a crackdown on premises flogging booze to underage drinkers, and yes, there will be a campaign to persuade us not to damage our health and looks, but overall the Government feels the more liberal drinking regime is by no means a disaster.

Not so, claims the Local Government Association. Its head, Sir Simon Milton of Westminster Council, believes the liberalisation has been a disaster, with town centres becoming no-go areas, full of berserker teens, their chests daubed with lager: violent crime has increased by 25 per cent between 3am and 6am in the morning. The statistic the Government prefers is that there has been a three per cent reduction in crime since the citizenry were able to spread out their imbibing.

For myself I think, first, that there will always be underage drinking: some of it is perfectly acceptable and some isn’t. Contrary to what some health hardliners preach, there’s nothing wrong with teens being offered drink in the home, as long as it’s part of a constructive education in intoxication as a social ritual.

This is more than learning to “hold your liquor”; it’s a question of knowing when to drink, what to drink and when, emphatically, not to drink at all. If young people learn to drink responsibly – just as they learn to take public transport responsibly under adult supervision – then once they are out on their own, by and large, they’ll continue to do so. Retailers of alcohol can only bear a very partial responsibility for maladaptive underage drinking.

Secondly, a culture that allows regional town centres to become arid precincts stalked only by CCTV cameras cannot expect its youth to regard them with any great respect. Frankly, the high streets of most clone towns make me feel like getting completely mullered.

Lastly, as someone who initially recoiled from the prospect of 24-hour drinking, and then drank liquidised humble pie when it turned out not to be going too badly, I think the concentration on statistics as an engine for legislation to alter social behaviour is as much part of the problem as drinking itself. The Government says three per cent down, the LGA says 25 per cent up. The chief medical officer says you should drink 16 units a week – while some other authority states, just as emphatically, that your cup runneth over with more than 14.

All of this bean-counting has very little to do with the realities of grape and grain, and older people – quite as much as teens – who find their subjective experience differing from the state-sanctioned norm are quite likely to ignore all the advice on offer and retreat into denial.

Notoriously, genuine alcoholics are most susceptible to this refusal to accept that they have a problem at all: for them there is only the slap of the pavement against their cheek. By bombarding us all with such prescriptive drinking rules, the Government undermines the responsibility of individuals and families to manage what we drink.

04.03.08

Read Will’s archive of Evening Standard columns

I’m delighted to be able to sign up to this newspaper’s campaign to make London restaurants offer their clientele tap water as a matter of course. It’s long been difficult for the cynics among us not to imagine that somewhere, deep in the bowels of the establishment, there isn’t a bus boy resolutely refilling fancy bottles from a rusty faucet, especially if those bottles have reusable lids and are blazoned with the restaurant’s own logo.

But even setting thoughts of such brazen dishonesty to one side, there’s still a wholly unjustifiable profit to be gained by a waiter asking: “Still or sparkling?”, especially when you know full well that in a blind tasting not even the most superior of sommeliers can tell the difference between these and the tap stuff. Still, the campaign isn’t really about our self-interested pockets, it’s about the waste of resources and the grotesque impact on the environment of our mania for paying for branded H2O.

While I don’t disagree, I think even those who are sceptical about our ability to stop the planet boiling by drinking Thames Water should still join the campaign. There’s something both silly and ugly about the mineral water habit. It hearkens back to a time when travellers to exotic France drank Vichy for fear of some Gallic curse on their stomachs, and in so doing gives us the message that we’re tourists in our own land.

I blame Mrs Thatcher. Once a universal resource like tap water was carved up and sold off to the private sector by the litre, the idea that absolutely anything had and should have its price gained a terrible grip, even on the hydrophobic English. Mineral water is the real drink of the 1980s not Kristal vodka, or Bollinger champagne. And throughout the Nineties, and into the new millennium, New Labour continued to spout the message that thirst is good no matter what the consequences.

I think the low-water mark came for me in 2004, when Coca-Cola’s new mineral water was launched in a flood of hype: “Dasani Mineral Water: A New Wave is Coming”.

Needless to say, a suitable comeuppance was wreaked on the company: their Sidcup plant was found to be contaminated and the water had to be speedily withdrawn.

I must confess that as a non-alcohol drinker I will feel a twinge about signing up wholeheartedly to the Standard campaign, but while the potential of San Pellegrino as a substitute bubbly is debatable, there’s no argument about the fatuity of “still”.

Any doubts I ever had were resolved years ago: 1994 to be precise.

In San Francisco, I found myself sitting in the Prescott Hotel, gazing by chance at a mirror which had a bottle of still mineral water standing in front of it. It was the first time I realised what Evian spelled backwards …

***

On Friday evening, on Clapham Common, our dog was the unwitting perpetrator of a bizarre assault. A gentleman who’d been struck by White Lightning staggered up to the pup, bent over, slurring: “Ishn’t he cute,” and toppled on to his face. As my cockney mates would say, there was claret everywhere. I calmed my kids and called an ambulance.

Waiting with the now fiercely apologetic victim, we were accosted by a younger drunk, who asserted: “He tripped, didn’t he.”

“No,” my drunk maintained, “I was trying to pat the dog.”

“C’mon,” the young drunk persisted, “we’ll say you tripped on the paving stones, then you can sue the council.”

“That’s ridiculous!” I expostulated, whereupon the sot nouveau rounded on me: “You startin’, mate?” I don’t know, sometimes London kills you, even if you don’t try to pat dogs.

***

There’s an old Peter Sellers sketch, Balham: Gateway to the South, in which the comedian parodies a travelogue, treating the sarf London ‘burb as one of the most exciting places on earth. Ever keen to know my native city better, on Saturday I took the small boys on a walk from Tooting Broadway to Balham.

After the lively market along Mitcham Road, and the long sweep of Rectory Lane with its mountainous speed bumps, Tooting Common seemed like a verdant expanse. It took us until dusk to reach the outskirts of Balham.

Far from it being a desultory spot, the High Road was heaving, there was an independent cinema, the Exhibit, a good second-hand bookshop, ethnic eateries and upmarket restaurants.

Descending into the grimy gullet of the Tube heading back up to Stockwell, it occurred to me that these days, Balham is the Gateway to the North.

***

I have no idea whether the Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, is guilty of fiddling his expenses, but given the number of MPs currently under investigation for this or that financial irregularity, the chamber must now resound not with principled debate but only pots and kettles shouting “Black!” while Mr Martin himself bellows “Order!” What I do know is that if the Speaker is, as we are told, such an intensely proud man, who feels he’s the victim of a snobbish witchhunt due to his ‘umble origins, why on earth does he want to spend part of his working life sporting a white lace cravat, threequarter-length coat embellished in gold and sitting on a throne?

26.02.08

John Williams, the then press secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote the “first draft” of the so-called “dodgy dossier” on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, after concerted campaigning, the Government has finally released this “first draft” only for David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, to say that it’s nothing of the sort.

Williams’s draft doesn’t have the key stuff about Saddam Hussein being able to target Britain in 45 minutes, or the long-since discredited cobblers about uranium being sourced from West Africa, but it does paint up a picture of an aggressive state with a capability for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Is Miliband’s bizarre statement that this was not the basis for the later dossier meant to suggest that more information will somehow come to light showing there was sound intelligence for these claims? It hardly seems likely.

Williams says he was approached to write it in August 2002. But he was hardly working from scratch: a dossier compiled to put the case for going to war with Iraq was reported to be going the rounds as early as March of that year. It was being booted back and forth from the Cabinet Office, to the Joint Intelligence Committee to the Foreign Office, and no one was very happy with it. But even those of us who only watched TV footage of Hans Blix’s UN Weapons Inspectorate blundering about in the Iraqi desert could see there was unlikely to be any stockpile of inter-continental ballistic missiles.

Still, who cares about the Williamses and for that matter, the Campbells of this world? They were just the little people who greased the wheels of the juggernaut that has crushed hundreds of thousands of people to death.

No, the more grotesque spectacle is that now afforded by the current Foreign Secretary, who goes on robustly defending a policy that isn’t working, hasn’t worked and never could have.

In his sleek suits and smooth dark plumage, Miliband looks like a vulture feeding on the neo-cons’ bloated corpse. Where others see Afghanistan as a failed state, the Panglossian Foreign Secretary sees a burgeoning democracy. In a speech last week to honour Aung San Suu Kyi, there was Miliband, searching for a way to distance himself from realpolitik, while still robustly countenancing military support for what he describes in a chilling echo of the current US policy in Iraq as the “civilian surge”.

This refusal to face up to the human cost of the Iraq war, and to the lies and evasions that justified the invasion, represents the moral rot at the core of Gordon Brown’s government. Brown, notoriously, cannot bear to do anything unless he knows what the consequences will be, and so he directs his foreign policy puppet to carry on mugging, as this end-of-the-pier show staggers towards its bitter end.

***

The history of modern folly isn’t set in stone but painted in water – mineral water, to be precise. We are now spending more than £2 billion a year on the stuff, and voices are being raised that this is morally unacceptable, especially given that some of the countries where the stuff is sourced – Fiji, for example – don’t have enough potable water for their own population. Not only that, but all tests establish that bottled is no better, healthier or tastier than tap.

But it was a financial adviser I had lunch with in the Eighties who first alerted me to how Badoit the water racket really was.

When the poor waiter poured him a glass of sparkling from a freshly cracked bottle, this fellow plucked one of the ice cubes out and said derisively: “I suppose you’re going to tell me you made this out of mineral water as well.” Undiluted wisdom.

***

To the Royal Festival Hall for the last in Daniel Barenboim’s sublime Beethoven piano sonata series. Before the stumpy virtuoso came on stage, a dapper man in his fifties sat beside me and began chatting. “The amazing thing about Barenboim, Will, is he can remember, note-perfect, every single piece he learned before the age of 28.” Meanwhile, I racked my tone-deaf brains to remember who this affable chap was. Eventually, I traced him back to the fiction department of Hatchards, where he is manager.

I would’ve cried “Bingo!” at this point, were it not for the fact that the entire audience had fallen silent in anticipation of a rather superior act of mnemonics. But while to remember the sonatas is one thing, to modulate them exquisitely and theatrically in live performance as Barenboim did is quite another. I would’ve taken my hat off to him, if I hadn’t left it somewhere..

***

Oon sunday I took the youngest member of the family to see a medical practitioner. He’d had a sick bug for a couple of days and I was worried because he wouldn’t drink any water. The surgery was open and I didn’t have to wait.

The medic examined him thoroughly, X-rayed his stomach, then prescribed three sets of medication, demonstrating how to give them. There was nothing high-handed or patronising in his manner.

Granted, the patient was a seven-month-old puppy, but there have to be some lessons here for the NHS – after all, a society that treats its pets better than its people has to be barking mad.

19.02.08

Boris Johnson is the latest visionary to wade into the soggy morass of the Thames estuary and propose that an airport be sited there. The Tory mayoral candidate describes Heathrow as a “planning error” and proposes that it be shut down and a new London airport built to the east of the city.

I well remember my late father, Professor Peter Self, sitting on the Roskill Commission in the 1960s, although mostly because of his vivid description of going on an amphibious vehicle out to visit Foulness Island. The Commission was considering sites for a third London airport, and the Thames Estuary was on their list – only to be abandoned for Stansted because of cost considerations.

Now his old colleague on the Town and Country Planning Association is also promoting an estuarine airport, although this one might be on floating islands, rather than real ones. As for costs, at £13 billion they seem comparable to Heathrow expansion.

I suppose if these people must have a huge London airport then east is a good way to go: Heathrow is a nightmare, in terms of its banjaxed ground transport infrastructure and the daily disruption of Londoners’ lives by half a million flights a year booming over our heads and dropping tons of nitrous oxide on them. As for the likelihood of a plane coming down on the city, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

But an eastern airport won’t happen. Instead, successive governments in thrall to the aviation lobby have simply allowed Heathrow to get bigger and badder. Why? It can’t be because of the 72,000 jobs it’s estimated the airport provides. Frankly, the kind of employment offered by the likes of Gate Gourmet and Sock Shop isn’t that great, and doesn’t necessarily represent a sustainable contribution to London’s economy. Nor can it be because the additional 250,000 flights per year once the third runway is in operation will be such an earner, except for Heathrow’s retail operations and car parks.

It’s a little understood fact that the main revenue for BAA comes from these, not landing fees. Think of Heathrow as an enormous Bluewater, with customers arriving by plane, rather than as some key engine of London’s prosperity, and you’re closer to the truth. No, I think the mythology of airport expansion – and air travel itself – only has such potency as part of the worship of the market, and the ceaseless growth we devoutly believe it will bring.

Why not consider the possibility of investing that £13 billion (which will really be double that) in more sustainable forms of ground transportation such as high-speed rail to cut down on domestic flights? And why not entertain the notion – heretical, I realise – that being able to go and buy a pair of pants in Prague isn’t the only possible indication of socio-economic wellbeing?

11.02.08

Read Will’s piece about the smoking ban from the Evening Standard
04.02.08