Nathaniel Handy

Writer

Natural blonde, 6’0”, surprisingly intelligent, winning smile, GSOH (why fly in the face of public opinion?)

Currently writing propaganda, journalism, novels, screenplays and old fashioned letters. Hell, I might even try poetry

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  • No stilettos please, we’re Swedish!

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    Photo by Alex Hudson

    In the obscure digital labyrinth of my corporate benefits system, there exists an opportunity to subsidise the purchase of a pair of shoes. All very good. All very dull. What is far from dull, however, is the veto list.

    Clogs need not apply

    A quick perusal of the list of shoes and their status is not only hilarious, but also whiffs of a certain social engineering inclination in the Swedish corporate psyche.

    Banned are such innocent delights as crocs, espadrilles (unforgivable), flipflops, galoshes, clogs and moccasins. A more humble, workaday and egalitarian set of shoes could hardly be imagined.

    Then there are the cryptic ones. Why are pumps banned, but sneakers approved? Why are ballerina shoes banned, but sailing shoes, golf shoes, even ski boots allowed?

    Puritanical shoes

    While slippers are barred, roller blades are ok. And this points to a wider wholesome trend. There is a ruddy-faced gusto to the acceptance of everything from hiking shoes and ‘desert shoes’ to snowboard boots and riding boots.

    Yet elsewhere, the heel comes in for stern attention. In fact, it is frowned upon so hard as to smell of sinfulness. Platform shoes, banned. Boots, approved, but only, the coda specifies, if they are low-heeled.

    And of course, the dark satanic queen of shoes: the stiletto. What of its fate? I hardly need to tell you, do I? Wear them if you dare, but don’t expect a corporate staff subsidy for such depravity.

    Feeling peckish? How about a traditional Swedish hot dog?

  • A dispatch from 1880

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    What follows is a view of the world in 1880, as described by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky:

    “The world has celebrated liberty, especially in recent times, and what is it that we see in this liberty of theirs? Nothing but slavery and suicide! For the world says: ‘You have needs, therefore satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most illustrious and the richest amongst you. Do not be afraid to satisfy them, nay multiply them,’ such is the present-day teaching of the world. It is in this that they see freedom. And so, what comes of this right to multiply one’s needs? Isolation and spiritual suicide for the rich, envy and murder for the poor, for though rights have been granted, the means of material gratification have not yet been prescribed. We are assured that the longer times goes on, the closer the world draws towards fraternal communion, when distances will be bridged and thoughts transmitted through the air. Oh, do not believe in such a union of men. By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation. To give dinner-parties, to travel, to have carriages, titles, and slavishly devoted servants is considered such a necessity that, in order to satisfy this need, people will even sacrifice their lives, honour, and sense of humanity, and if they cannot satisfy it, they will even commit suicide. The same thing is true for those who are not rich, but in the case of the poor the inability to satisfy their needs and feelings of envy are for the present drowned in drink. But instead of wine, they will soon quench their thirst with blood, for that is what they are being led to. I ask you: are such men free? I once knew ‘a fighter for a cause’ who told me himself that when he was deprived of tobacco in prison he was in such agony that he nearly betrayed his ‘cause’ just to get some tobacco. And people like him say: ‘I shall go and fight for mankind.’ But where will he go and what is he capable of? A short burst of activity, perhaps – but he will not be able to sustain it for long. And so it is not surprising that instead of being free, people have become enslaved, and instead of serving the cause of brotherly love and human harmony, they have…fallen into disharmony and isolation. So the idea of service to mankind, of brotherhood and human solidarity, grows ever weaker in the world, and truly it is now treated almost with derision, for how is one to shed one’s habits, whither can the bondsman turn, if he has grown so accustomed to gratifying the multifarious needs which are of his own devising? He is isolated, and the world at large means nothing to him. We have reached a stage at which we have surrounded ourselves with more things, but have less joy.”

    Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Karamazov Brothers (1880), translated by Ignat Avsey

    Maybe it’s time to take a look at how the other animals do it: Nature can be annoying. Good.

  • Men, women and paper

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    Photo by Kelly Sikkema

    It is often said that history is written by the victors, the powerful – and that they are men. But have you ever considered what they were writing on? Paper has a history of its own, revealed to me by Madeleine Killacky in History Today (December 2022).

    Papermaking involved beating rags collected in the rag trade, before stretching, pulping, soaking, heating and drying them. Finished paper also had to be coated in a gelatin-based emulsion, made from boiled up animal parts, to prevent ink-blots. And most of this work was done by what Killacky repeated calls “low-status women”.

    Highbrow and low-status

    How many of history’s great historians, I wonder, wrote their histories on paper made by these “low-status women”? Almost all of them, we can assume. Which paints – or scribes – a rather different portrait of history.

    Every narrative of victory, every male-centred gaze upon the great moments that have defined great men, were all written upon pure white paper beaten into being by the sweat of “low-status women”.

    Hidden histories

    This is not a unique tale, of course. That paper was made from rags, not trees as I had always imagined, is revealing of other layers of unseen history: that of ethnic minorities. Jews thrived in the trade of schmatta (rags), while their history remained hidden to the wealthy and literate of London and New York.

    Paper pulp from trees wasn’t first achieved until 1800 in Germany. It wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that tree-based paper became the norm, allowing such limitless amounts to be made that we could even start wiping our bums with it.

    Before that, the laborious rag trade was the only route to a nice, bright white piece of paper, ready for the quill to hit it. I’ll never see a blank piece of paper the same again.

    And fast forward to today – what hidden stories lie behind the ice white screen on which this post is typed?

    Talking of words and letters, ever wondered where ‘Zed’ comes from?

  • Zeds and zees

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    Photo by Zyanya BMO

    English and American English have their differences. Tomato, tomato. Sidewalk, pavement. Trunk, boot. Thank God they managed to keep the alphabet the same. Almost.

    They must have been kicking themselves when they managed a perfect match, only to come unstuck not on the last letter, but the last sound in the last letter.

    It’s a telling example of the importance of paying attention right the way to the end of something, even when you think you already know the answer. How America must be kicking itself now. 

    Because for all the perfect alignment of the previous 25 letters, when they were delivering ‘Z’ it’s like they went to sleep on the job.

    Zzzzeeeeeeeeeee

    As we all know, it’s zed, not zee. So, what went wrong, America? Let’s find out. 

    It turns out there weren’t simply two options in the running. As with all the best stories, there was a rogue third element, and its name was izzard.

    That’s right, go back into the yokel dialects of England (and apparently to some far-flung corners of Wyoming or Idaho in more recent times) and you may have heard the final letter of the alphabet pronounced ‘izzard’.

    That clears up the derivation of stalwart UK comedian Eddie Izzard’s surname, but it doesn’t untangle the zeds versus zees debate any further.

    Zed’s long lineage

    We have to go back to the Phoenicians for the semitic letter ‘zayin’, which was later borrowed by the Greeks for their letter ‘zeta’. The link between ‘zeta’ and ‘zed’ is immediately obvious.

    But it wasn’t that simple. Zed came to the English via the Romans. But wait! Latin had no zed in its alphabet, just as it had no zero in its number system (another story, for another post).

    Nevertheless, the Romans borrowed ‘Z’ and applied it to their ‘ts’ and ‘dz’ sounds. The ‘dz’ sound being the derivation of the French ‘j’ that came to English before the zed did. Most European languages take their word for the letter ‘Z’ from the Greek root ‘zeta’.

    And finally, we meander back to 19th century America, where dictionaries began cementing ‘zee’ as the preferred option over ‘zed’, apparently as an alignment of the pronunciation with other letters, such as ‘bee’, ‘cee’, ‘dee’, ‘ee’, ‘pee’ and ‘tee’. As with so many American linguistic treasure hunts, it all comes down to simplicity in the end.  

    More treasure hunts? How about all the Swedish words in English?

  • Hug a hoodie?

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    It’s high summer. Traditionally, this is riot season. Angry young men are rarely roused to protest in the dead of winter, but give them a nice sunny day and they’re game for anything.

    But aside from all the most eye-catchingly ugly racial violence that has accompanied protests in the UK this August, it is a postscript to the events that caught my attention.

    BBC Verify wrote the following in the final paragraph of their analysis of violence in Hull: “We have also seen footage of looting in Shoezone, where a large pile of shoes was brought out and set on fire, Greggs the bakers and cosmetics retailer Lush.”

    Thinking small

    It reminded me of the riots of the summer of 2011, which included the looting of Argos, Currys, Lidl, Aldi and JD Sports and the smashing up of corner shops. Angry men smashing up shabby discount chains and small shopkeepers.

    I spent that first rioting night in August 2011 in St John’s Wood in north-west London, and knew nothing about it until the morning. The fact that the poor were smashing up their own streets was striking and somehow pathetic.

    Were they to walk down any street in St John’s Wood and run a key down every parked car, or maybe put a brick through the window of every BMW they passed, it would rightly cause deep alarm among London’s wealthy.

    Shoezone in Hull city centre

    When you see images of a Shoezone looted and burnt, or a Greggs the bakers smashed up, it is almost like an installation art piece depicting the decline of modern Britain. This is what we’ve come to.

    The poverty of the high streets being smashed up speaks volumes for the state of the men doing the smashing, long before they even pick up the metal bars. The easy response is to see them as pathetic, and as a consequence, despise them.

    The difficult response is to see the open wound in the pathetic. Men reduced to pathetic acts are a dangerous and sorrowful sight. There is something cruel in responding only with contempt.

  • Losing a sense of place

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    This is the shelter Bush Trolls built. Bush Trolls is a group of children, plus a few adults, who go out into the Swedish forest once in a while to do stuff. One of the things we did was build this shelter as our HQ in the heart of the forest.

    When we arrived for our first visit of the year in April this year, this is what we found.

    The entire area had been clear felled. It was all entirely legal. The landowner gives us permission to use the land, but it’s ultimately a commercial forest. The trees are there to be harvested.

    Total dislocation

    But the effect was extraordinary. The children were in tears. There was a palpable sense of shock. But even in us adults – grown men who have seen much and aren’t easily moved – the disorientation was unmistakable.

    What amazed me was the fact that I couldn’t envisage myself in the same place. There was our shelter, with one solitary tree that the loggers left standing to support it. But I couldn’t conceive it as the same place.

    I knew every path in that forest. I knew how it felt and could guide myself almost without looking. It was as if I could feel where each tree stood. But with the trees removed, even the topography seemed unfamiliar.

    Like First Nations

    I walked around the site from every angle, searching in my senses for recognition. But I failed. It was as if our shelter had been airlifted to another place entirely. I could get no bearing on it anymore.

    Is this a small hint, I wonder, of what an Amazonian tribesman feels at a cleared forest? Not so much sadness as total disorientation. You don’t mourn the space. You simply look upon it as alien land. A place you’ve never seen before.

    The numb disconnection is profound. We left the shelter and walked, solemnly, together into the forest areas, searching for a new site to make our HQ. We felt like pioneers, a tribe setting off to find a new home.

    And the site we left was not hard to leave, because it bore no resemblance to our memories. The old site, the one we all loved, was now locked only in the capsule of memory. That is the only place in which it now exists.

    Talking of homelessness, are nomads bad?

  • Sweden, England and the letter Y

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    There’s a lot that’s funny about the Swedish language. To English ears, the sound of it is probably the funniest part. Why else does the Swedish chef exist? (The Swedish chef exists?)

    But surely the funniest single letter in the Swedish alphabet (and there’s some stiff competition, in the form of Å, Ä and Ö) is undoubtedly Y. What’s so strange about Y, I hear you ask? The pronunciation is what’s so strange.

    Disclaimer: This is the first time in the history of the Internet that a blog has combined the Grey Friars of London, English national football chants and Swedish pronunciation.

    Clear your throat

    Clear your throat

    The Swedish Y starts way back in the throat. It then proceeds to clear the throat of all phlegm. It’s the sound (probably) made by an Olympic weightlifting champion just as he begins to lift the weight.

    It’s not a clear, high-pitched ‘eeeeeee’, and it’s not a quick, solitary ‘ya’. In fact, the closest approximation in the English language is the sound English football fans make when they begin the chant of “England!”

    As all English football fans know, they don’t chant “England” at all. Because the English don’t say “England”, they say “Ingland”. But they don’t chant “Ingland” either. They chant something that football writers have endlessly tried to replicate in written form as “Iiiiiiiingerland” or “Errrrrrngland” or similar.

    That sound they first utter is uncannily close to the Swedish Y. Which brings me to the Grey Friars of London. Thanks to the indispensible History Today magazine, I learnt that the Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London wrote of their country using the spelling “Yngland”.

    Dripping in the Danelaw

    Could it be that this is a distant echoing memory of an “Yngland” pronounced as they would have done under the Danelaw? An “Yngland” whose pronunciation had travelled down the centuries to the English football terrace in the mouths of the nation’s commoners?

    If it wasn’t for the throaty chant of “Yyyyyyyyngland” that I know so well, and my discovery of the peculiar Swedish pronunciation of the letter Y, I might not have paused on the Grey Friars and their “Yngland” more than a moment. I would have dismissed it as just another silly peculiarity of pre-standardisation English.

    More links between English and Swedish? Well, Pardon my Swedish!

  • Believing in Santa 

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    My son still believes in Santa. Just. A girl in his class at school was sceptical this year, and even suggested that parents did it. He said that was stupid of her to say, because if Santa heard her (and he hears everything, right?) then he won’t be bringing any presents to her this year.

    Don’t tempt fate. 

    This Easter weekend it was the same with the Easter bunny. Everyone says it’s your parents, but does the Easter bunny only turn up if you believe in him, too? Should you tempt fate again?

    As long as he believes, I’m going to go on believing with him. That’s the gift he gave me, the one of discovering that in someone else’s belief, you’re given permission to suspend your disbelief. 

    Don’t stop believin’

    This is the great thing about stories. As long as enough of us believe them, they’re true. The Christian story, given that it’s Easter, is truly extraordinary. As outlandish as any you ever heard. Yet it is truly believed by millions of adults around the world.

    And whether it’s the Christian story or the Hindu story or the story of the Big Bang and the burning spheres out there in the night sky, millions of miles away. As long as enough of us believe them, they’re true.

    So I’m going to go on believing in Santa and the Easter bunny, for as long as there’s someone else to believe the story with me. Because somewhere, in the corner of the universe, maybe he’s right and I’m wrong.

    On the subject of kids, have you tried talking to a three-year-old?

  • Why am I so tired?

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    ‘Why am I so tired all the time’ reached an all-time high in US google searches in June 2023.

    People didn’t ask another person. They didn’t ask themselves. They didn’t know, so they asked their computers. They asked a search engine to tell them why.

    Ask AI what’s wrong

    AI isn’t something that will happen soon, it’s already happening. Confronted with the fact that I feel tired all the time, my source of wisdom on the subject is the internet. 

    What if I’m tired all the time because of the screen I am interacting with? Will the search engine tell me the honest truth? Or will it not? Is it in its interest to tell me? And if it is the problem, and it won’t tell me, who will? 

    Screens have more answers

    If I go to a search engine for wisdom on the subject, and nowhere else, will I ever find a solution to my tiredness? Perhaps I will?

    After all, search engines are just connecting us with other real people, right? That can’t be so bad. That is socializing, just on a massive, never-before-known scale. We’ve just supersized socializing. Has it made you feel less lonely, more popular? Maybe it has?

    Perhaps it will tell me I need to get out more, do more exercise, socialize with real people, meditate, do yoga, get better sleep?

    If the screen tells me to stop sitting on my screen asking search engines questions, who will I turn to next time I need an answer?

    Given that the bots are so good, what about us?

  • Politics is looks

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    Photo by charlesdeluvio

    The defining factor of Emmanuel Macron’s entire presidency, if he were to resign tomorrow, would for me be the chest hair. Does that make me vapid? The only thing missing was a Galousies discreetly nestled between index and middle fingers. 

    The defining thing about Rishi Sunak is surely his suits. My, that man’s dapper. The defining element of Donald Trump? Undoubtedly his hair. Bojo? Ditto. 

    Dictator chic

    But these are the image conscious aesthetes of the democratic world, hankering after votes. Surely, autocrats are more interested in industrial policy and geopolitical alignments than hair spray?

    And yet. And yet, in a two-decade career as Russian supremo, what is the defining takeaway for me from Vladimir Putin? Why, that topless horseback riding shot (doctored or not), of course. Either he waxed his chest or he is unusually hairless. Either way, it’s suspicious. 

    Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Where do I start? Despite a long and patchy career in both domestic Libyan and international affairs, this man found time to pretty much define the sartorial cues of dictator chic. First, he brought the Raybans. Then, he upped it with those tasselled army jackets straight outta Michael Jackson’s wardrobe. And finally, he flipped again to full-on Saharan vibe in swirling robes.

    The eyebrows have it!

    I’m not saying what Michael Heseltine did for internal auditing among ministers wasn’t to die for. But really, it was that floppy mop and those eyebrows that won him a place in the annals. 

    Tony Blair was a man imboiled in a lot of politics in his time. But what’s the enduring memory? Surely, that 2001 footage of him wielding his electric guitar as he relived his glory days as axeman in the band, Ugly Rumours.

    And they say only female politicians are judged by their looks… Not a bit of it.

    Want more highbrow politics? How about the damning verdict of the (first?) Trump presidency?