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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/15/welcome-home-simon-rattle-your-return-more-than-lived-up-to-the-hype
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| Version 3 | Version 4 |
|---|---|
| Welcome home Simon Rattle, your return more than lived up to the hype | Welcome home Simon Rattle, your return more than lived up to the hype |
| (about 1 month later) | |
| Monday | Monday |
| I spent the weekend in Iceland as a guest of the Reykjavik international literary festival. As so often, I had as much – if not more – fun meeting readers and authors from other countries as I did talking at my own events. Highlights also included whale watching, being taken on a day’s excursion around the local sights and avoiding eating the local delicacies of foal, whale and puffin. On the Sunday night I had dinner with Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and, as you would expect of one of Iceland’s top crime writers, she was a fund of great stories. As well as keeping me up to speed on ever more inventive ways of killing people with household appliances, Yrsa told me that Iceland’s main mortuary is now so full of tourists whose bodies have gone unclaimed that the authorities are planning to build an extension. Unfortunately for fans of Icelandic noir, there is no great mystery to these bodies. Many have failed to remember that Iceland is near the Arctic Circle and have gone out into the countryside unprepared for the weather. The reason they are unclaimed is because Iceland is fiendishly expensive and their relatives can’t afford to pay the storage charges and have their bodies flown home. | I spent the weekend in Iceland as a guest of the Reykjavik international literary festival. As so often, I had as much – if not more – fun meeting readers and authors from other countries as I did talking at my own events. Highlights also included whale watching, being taken on a day’s excursion around the local sights and avoiding eating the local delicacies of foal, whale and puffin. On the Sunday night I had dinner with Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and, as you would expect of one of Iceland’s top crime writers, she was a fund of great stories. As well as keeping me up to speed on ever more inventive ways of killing people with household appliances, Yrsa told me that Iceland’s main mortuary is now so full of tourists whose bodies have gone unclaimed that the authorities are planning to build an extension. Unfortunately for fans of Icelandic noir, there is no great mystery to these bodies. Many have failed to remember that Iceland is near the Arctic Circle and have gone out into the countryside unprepared for the weather. The reason they are unclaimed is because Iceland is fiendishly expensive and their relatives can’t afford to pay the storage charges and have their bodies flown home. |
| Tuesday | Tuesday |
| In a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Britain ranks seventh in the league table of depression. While I am obviously thrilled that my current state of anxiety, which is often a precursor to a bout of depression, might have helped push Britain above France, Greece, Poland and Slovakia in the rankings – if it gets much worse we could nudge ahead of Iceland, Ireland and Germany – I have my reservations about the data. In many cases mental illness goes undiagnosed as so often it relies on patients self-reporting their condition. So a country with fewer people identifying themselves as depressed might actually be a worse place to live for those suffering from a mental illness, as the pressure to try to pretend everything is OK might be far greater. I’d rather be living in a country where being depressed was no big deal than in one where I was expected to suffer in silence. | In a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Britain ranks seventh in the league table of depression. While I am obviously thrilled that my current state of anxiety, which is often a precursor to a bout of depression, might have helped push Britain above France, Greece, Poland and Slovakia in the rankings – if it gets much worse we could nudge ahead of Iceland, Ireland and Germany – I have my reservations about the data. In many cases mental illness goes undiagnosed as so often it relies on patients self-reporting their condition. So a country with fewer people identifying themselves as depressed might actually be a worse place to live for those suffering from a mental illness, as the pressure to try to pretend everything is OK might be far greater. I’d rather be living in a country where being depressed was no big deal than in one where I was expected to suffer in silence. |
| Wednesday | Wednesday |
| Britain has been criticised for its slow response to the devastation caused throughout the Caribbean by Hurricane Irma. Whether residents of the British Virgin Islands actually wanted a visit from Boris Johnson – there are few bad situations the foreign secretary hasn’t been known to make worse – is open to question, but they did belatedly get one, along with some rather grudging offers of financial assistance from the UK government. With so much rebuilding required and comparatively little cash seemingly available, it is surprising that some MPs haven’t put their hands into their pockets to help out. Both Nicholas Soames and Andrew Mitchell have benefited from having offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands and it shouldn’t be beyond them to find a few quid to replace the buildings that housed their accountants. The Cayman Islands, where Jacob Rees-Mogg has an offshore company, also did not escape unscathed, so perhaps the Tory leadership hopeful might think about paying for one of the food banks of which he has recently become so fond. | Britain has been criticised for its slow response to the devastation caused throughout the Caribbean by Hurricane Irma. Whether residents of the British Virgin Islands actually wanted a visit from Boris Johnson – there are few bad situations the foreign secretary hasn’t been known to make worse – is open to question, but they did belatedly get one, along with some rather grudging offers of financial assistance from the UK government. With so much rebuilding required and comparatively little cash seemingly available, it is surprising that some MPs haven’t put their hands into their pockets to help out. Both Nicholas Soames and Andrew Mitchell have benefited from having offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands and it shouldn’t be beyond them to find a few quid to replace the buildings that housed their accountants. The Cayman Islands, where Jacob Rees-Mogg has an offshore company, also did not escape unscathed, so perhaps the Tory leadership hopeful might think about paying for one of the food banks of which he has recently become so fond. |
| Thursday | Thursday |
| It’s been revealed that Theresa May’s decision to call a snap election cost the country £140m that could have been better spent elsewhere. Personally, I am quite happy to have contributed £2 to an election that destroyed her strong and stable majority, but I can see that not everyone might feel the same way. Given the outcome, you might have thought the prime minister would now think twice about spending other people’s money on pointless vanity projects, but apparently not. The latest waste of money is a two-and-a-half-minute animated video explaining why Brexit is going to be brilliantly simple, which has appeared on No 10’s official Twitter feed. Not only is the video ludicrously amateur and upbeat – it wouldn’t be out of place alongside one of those 1960s public information films explaining how to survive a nuclear attack by hiding under a table – it also suggests we’re only going to bother to trade with one country in Africa and a couple in South America, and manages to overlook the fact that Croatia is a member of the EU. It’s you who’s paid for all this. So that’s alright then. | It’s been revealed that Theresa May’s decision to call a snap election cost the country £140m that could have been better spent elsewhere. Personally, I am quite happy to have contributed £2 to an election that destroyed her strong and stable majority, but I can see that not everyone might feel the same way. Given the outcome, you might have thought the prime minister would now think twice about spending other people’s money on pointless vanity projects, but apparently not. The latest waste of money is a two-and-a-half-minute animated video explaining why Brexit is going to be brilliantly simple, which has appeared on No 10’s official Twitter feed. Not only is the video ludicrously amateur and upbeat – it wouldn’t be out of place alongside one of those 1960s public information films explaining how to survive a nuclear attack by hiding under a table – it also suggests we’re only going to bother to trade with one country in Africa and a couple in South America, and manages to overlook the fact that Croatia is a member of the EU. It’s you who’s paid for all this. So that’s alright then. |
| Friday | Friday |
| Simon Rattle’s return to Britain to take over the baton of the London Symphony Orchestra, after a 15-year spell in charge of the Berlin Philharmonic, has come with a lot of hype. The Barbican Centre has been taken over with large “This is Rattle” signs and there are large portraits of him on almost every spare piece of blank wall. But the first concert more than lived up to expectations and Rattle and the orchestra fully deserved the five-minute standing ovation they received at the end. For me, the undoubted highlight was Elgar’s Enigma Variations, which can sound like a classic Last Night of the Proms old familiar but in Rattle’s hands reached moments of sublime beauty. At my father’s funeral nearly 20 years ago, the organist played the Nimrod variation – quite badly – and it left me almost unmoved: I couldn’t think why my dad had asked for it. But last night, the opening bars seemed to emerge as if from another world and grew into something powerfully transcendent. My whole body came out in goosebumps, tears came to my eyes and I felt closer to my father than at any time since he died. Thank you, Simon. And welcome home. | Simon Rattle’s return to Britain to take over the baton of the London Symphony Orchestra, after a 15-year spell in charge of the Berlin Philharmonic, has come with a lot of hype. The Barbican Centre has been taken over with large “This is Rattle” signs and there are large portraits of him on almost every spare piece of blank wall. But the first concert more than lived up to expectations and Rattle and the orchestra fully deserved the five-minute standing ovation they received at the end. For me, the undoubted highlight was Elgar’s Enigma Variations, which can sound like a classic Last Night of the Proms old familiar but in Rattle’s hands reached moments of sublime beauty. At my father’s funeral nearly 20 years ago, the organist played the Nimrod variation – quite badly – and it left me almost unmoved: I couldn’t think why my dad had asked for it. But last night, the opening bars seemed to emerge as if from another world and grew into something powerfully transcendent. My whole body came out in goosebumps, tears came to my eyes and I felt closer to my father than at any time since he died. Thank you, Simon. And welcome home. |
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