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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  • How to tell the baddies

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    Photo by Ivan Diaz

    While watching The Lion King with my young son, he asked, “What’s that pink thing across Scar’s eye, Dad?” Well, it’s a scar, of course. Just the same as the scar on Count Rochefort’s face in the remake of the immortal Dogtanian.

    Why do they have scars?

    ‘Cos they’re baddies, of course. And then kids’ TV gets you thinking, and you realise that baddies having scars and mutilations is just par for the course throughout the history of entertainment.

    Think of the countless James Bond villains, think of Captain Hook, think of Darth Vader. And these villains with terrible physical injuries are always set against a goodie – 007, Peter Pan or Luke Skywalker – who is fit, fresh-faced and utterly free of injury.

    Frankenstein’s monster

    Such discussion always leads back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the classic that pinned this obsession with deformity equating evil and skewered the uncomfortable mob mindset lurking within humanity.

    Sure, we want our goodies to be fit and healthy. We don’t want harm to befall them. But then how quickly does a child begin to associate any such misfortune with the dark side?

    It’ll start to make you ponder every story since the dawn of storytelling. If you go out in the woods today, beware…

    Prefer the goodies? Watch out for the Ninjago pandemic

  • Saying goodbye to January

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    (Photo by Glen Carrie)

    “Bye, then.

    Yeah, see you soon.

    Yeah, yeah, it’s been, it’s been a… It’s been good.

    You know, we really appreciate you making the effort to come again.

    Yeah, it means a lot.

    No. No, it’s not an easy time of year.

    Yeah. Yeah, thanks again.

    You take it easy now.

    Yeah, don’t worry. We’ll be fine.

    Yeah, ha! God, I dunno where my shorts even are!

    Have I got shorts?

    What are shorts? (Makes a goofy face)

    Yeah, anyway… You got everything?

    Yeah? All set?

    Yeah, no, thanks again for coming. Really appreciate it.

    Yeah. You too.

    It was a laugh wasn’t it? Yeah, we had a laugh. Ha!

    Who knew? Straight after Christmas and all that…

    Yeah, I know you do it every year.

    Yeah.

    Yeah, I know that’s what makes it special.

    The repetition.

    It’s a tradition. Yeah, I guess it is.

    Special.

    Yeah, it’s important. Good to do these things.

    Yeah. Good to see you.

    Cheers.

    Thanks again.

    Great to see you.

    Bye.

    Bye.

    Bye.

    Yeah. Bye.

    You too.

    Yep.

    Thanks.

    Yep.

    Ta. Gotta go now.

    Yep.

    Yes. Got to dash. I think I left something on the hob.

    Yeah, best check.

    Hahaha (Awkward laugh). OK, bye then.

    Bye.

    Bye.

    Bye.

    Bye.

    Bye.

    Thank fuck he’s gone.”

    Want more? Try talking to a three-year-old

  • You cannot be serious

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    (Photo by Charles Deluvio)

    This week on planet earth: Australia deports a tennis champion and a Tory prime minister teeters on the edge of resignation over an undisclosed party.

    Let me guess…

    The tennis champ smashed his entire racket collection to pieces while effing and blinding at the umpire until, in a fit of pique, he turned his white-flannelled posterior to a waiting cameraman’s lens, pulled his shorts down and showed the whole of the moon to the whole world.

    And for seconds…

    Well, that’s easy. A Tory politician and a party? We’re talking an orange, a gimp suit, a fleet of extremely expensive high-end prostitutes, 5 litres of unfiltered extra virgin olive oil and a very well trained Jack Russell terrier. 

    No?

    They what?

    He didn’t take his vaccinations?

    Eh?

    An office party?

    A socially-distanced office party? 

    With a quiz?

    What the…?

    Did I fall into a coma and the whole world turned into Mary Whitehouse without me noticing?

    Someone wake me up.

    Please.

    Hello?

    Anyone?

    In Sweden, no one had to ask: are you social distancing?

  • Slow wit

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    Photo by Chris Montgomery

    One of the unsung boons of the fast-forward into remote working has been the rise in slow wit, or the ability to be funny at a more leisurely pace.

    If, like me, you’re one of those people who is really, really funny in their own head, this new way of working is a godsend. All those one-liners you never quite got out now stand a fighting chance.

    A cracking lag

    The beauty is in the technology. Nearly anyone can be witty in the Teams chat function, since you have hours to polish and refine your repartee. But it’s in meetings that your standup routine can shine.

    Video chat in a largish group offers so much mileage. It’s all in the lag. You know that if a reply is too quick, it’ll simply get caught up in static. No one’ll hear it. Your brilliance will go to waste.

    And so, slow wit is born. When someone requires a response, you can hold your tongue a moment. Make a silly face. Unmute yourself. Wait until all static has subsided. Drumroll. One-liner. Gold.

    West Country bons mots

    The new slow wit reality isn’t all roses for everyone. I feel for almost the entire Irish and Jewish peoples, naturally. But I hail from the farms of the English West Country.

    Now, as any rapier-witted Glaswegian or Londoner will tell you, the English West Country is known for its pace. Those West Country farmers, they know their way around a joke, and no mistake.

    Want more slow wit? Try talking to a three-year-old

  • Liked or unliked

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    I wonder what the people who are not liked think?

    You might think you already know. You might say it’s easy to spot people who are not liked. Donald Trump? Hillary Clinton? Boris Johnson? Greta Thunberg?

    But of course, everybody we have ever heard of is liked by some group of people. That’s why we know them at all. They are doing it to be liked.

    You don’t have to like me

    Even when they say they’re not doing it to be liked, that they’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do, they’re still liked. Liked by the people who like to hear someone say they’re not doing it to be liked.

    Humans are social creatures in general. It’s our drive. But I wonder, what do the people who are not liked think? Those who go unseen. Those nobody notices.

    We’ll never know, of course. Because they’re not on social media. Or any platform of any kind. They’re unseen. Unliked.

    Talking of being liked, are you a smartphone addict?

  • I’m all about pine

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    Pine is a tree for all the senses. I’ve had a lot of favourites in my time – oak, plum, apple, silver birch – but recently I’ve begun to appreciate just how great pine is.

    That’s got a lot to do with living in lowland, sandy, flinty-soiled Sweden where pines line the back of every sand dune, making everywhere feel like Winnie the Pooh country.

    A feast for the senses

    Pine has it all. The dazzling rusty red bark, those blue-green needles that look dusty in summer and glow bright in winter, that smell like a long lost dream, that taste… that taste?

    Retsina… wine of the Greek gods

    Now I know pine-resinated wine is one that splits people like Marmite, but as a pine enthusiast I claim that even the taste of pine in those sun-kissed Greek mouthfuls is glorious.

    Pine isn’t just nice to see, smell and taste, it also provides the finest climbing of any tree. It’s numerous, regular spread of branches makes it inviting to even the most amateur of tree climbers.

    Pine makes me feel fine

    Sitting in the branches of a pine, with the canopy filtering a hot sun, the scent of resin and armies of ants marching up the branches is the finest of places to be.

    Even when chopped down – RIP – the pine morphs into an architectural gem. Perhaps the original and most glorious use for this wood is in a space any reader of my blog will know is very close to my heart: the sauna. In a sauna, the scent of pine is once more the glory, just as it is when the tree is in full bloom.

    So, I raise a toast… To that most majestic of trees: the pine.

    This boy likes trees, but apparently Boys Don’t Like Flowers

  • What makes cities so comfortable?

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    The urban condition – that in-built terror of small town life that makes city folk twitch when they try a new life in the country – is sometimes thought of as a new disease. 

    Not so. 

    Listening to Anton Chekhov’s 1900 play Three Sisters, all about three sisters who once lived in Moscow and are now reduced to the desperation of life in a small provincial Russian town, the following line rang out:

    “In Moscow, you can sit in an enormous restaurant where you don’t know anybody and nobody knows you and yet you don’t feel like a stranger. But here, you know everybody and everybody knows you, and you’re a stranger.”

    Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters

    Oh, to be anonymous! 

    It’s a catch 22 that many will be familiar with – I want to feel connected to a community, but I don’t want everyone I meet to know all my business. I want an element of mystery. 

    The allure of the city – as I found when first living in London – is that despite having a close circle of friends, you can still walk out of your front door and simply disappear, for days on end, into a mass of humanity in which you are unknown. 

    There is clearly a certain liberation and freedom in this very act. Sitting in a busy pavement café, surrounded by life, watching everything go by, part of and yet apart from it. This is the great gift of urban life, one that all provincials like myself discover as such an unexpected delight. 

    Some existentialism with your coffee, monsieur?

    The trouble that lurks in every city since civilization began is alienation. The risk that in being able to move freely, and unmolested, among strangers, one loses all connection with a tribe, and becomes so adrift that life begins to lose all its meaning. 

    No doubt Chekhov grappled with this dilemma in Russia over a hundred years ago, as it ran breakneck into modern life. And it is still the great dilemma facing us today. To sit in that enormous restaurant, or to go home where everything is known and familiar…

    City life sounding a bit tough? What Would A Soft City Feel Like?

  • The office is a luxury now

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    Photo by Carl Heyerdahl

    The reality of the post-COVID world is that going to the office has become a luxury you do when you’ve got time on your hands. 

    When deadlines loom, going to the office to chat to people, have a social lunch, spend time away from the family, goes out the window. 

    On those days you stay home, strapped to your laptop, and get it all done, using all the methods that worked at the click of a button for the last two years.

    And when the work slacks off, you think, hell, I’m going to have a day at the office – to unwind. 

    OOO gets shit done

    As a freelancer, I’ve been saying this for years. Out of office work is much more effective – more focused and more productive (at least in my line of work). 

    Of course, this isn’t how most companies see it. They believe that offices work to create dynamic, productive workforces. After all, they’ve spent a century getting used to the slack that office life entails, and factored it in. 

    The managers in charge of these traditional systems don’t want a revolution, ‘cos revolutions are dangerous things.

    But the fact remains, however uncomfortable. If you need to get shit done effectively, staying home and starting up your VPN and Teams channel is the way to go.

    How about thinking about a New School Way To Work?

  • Afghanistan then and now

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    Just as the Taliban swept into Kabul, I was coming to the end of Eric Newby’s famous 1956 account of his hiking trip to Afghanistan, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. 

    I’d been avoiding news media for a month previous, preferring old books, and was unaware of recent developments. It made the end of the book, especially the 2008 epilogue, very poignant. 

    Newby travelled to Afghanistan during a period of unusual peace and stability. He and his climbing companion, Hugh Carless, visited the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul (where fighters are still holding out against the Taliban as I write), and then attempted an ascent of Mir Samir, a mighty peak in the Hindu Kush. 

    Entering Nuristan

    They failed, but then turned to perhaps the real object of their trip, the attempt to penetrate the mountain passes into Nuristan – an impossibly remote series of valleys known, prior to 1895, as Kafiristan, due to the paganism of the locals (kafir is an Islamic term for a non-believer).

    In 1895, Emir Abdur Rahman came from Kabul to subdue and forcibly convert the inhabitants to Islam. I found it extraordinary that little over a hundred years ago, Afghans so close to Kabul were still being forcibly converted from paganism to Islam. 

    It throws the Afghanistan of devout Islam, the one I thought I knew, into a new light. Even when Newby travelled there in the 1950s, there was much evidence of pagan practice beneath the recent adoption of Islam. 

    A quick google of this mysterious land of Nuristan (renamed since Rahman had brought the light (nur) of Islam to the inhabitants), brought up only familiar images of US soldiers on patrol along mountain paths. 

    Only scratch the surface a little, and so much more is revealed. 

    Want more? Read my blog about Afghanistan in the 1930s in Robert Byron’s classic The Road to Oxiana

    Photo credit: nasim dadfar

  • Tailenders make cricket great

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    (Photo by Alessandro Bogliari)

    What other sport can you see played – at the most elite levels – by people who are basically not very good at it (puns aside)? This is the beauty of cricket.

    A lot of people claim to not understand cricket. The statement above will perhaps convince them it’s not worth trying to. After all, isn’t all elite sport these days about professionals excelling at the outer boundaries of human ability? 

    The beauty of bowlers

    In cricket you have tailenders. They are bowlers who are picked because they are great at bowling. But the beauty of cricket is that everyone on the team must have a bat as well. Not just the batsmen. Everyone. That is cricket’s brilliance.

    In watching the tailenders bat, it brings even a national Test Match side – the pinnacle of the game – in touch with the ordinary spectator. When we see Jimmy Anderson, the greatest England bowler, cowering before the Indian pace attack, we feel his pain. 

    This is sport as empathy. Where the precision brilliance of Centre Court at Wimbledon, or Twickenham, or the Crucible, or Wembley, leaves us as mere spectators beyond the glass ceiling of sporting excellence, a tailender at Lord’s brings the village game to the greatest stage. 

    The great leveller

    Cricket is unique in preserving some of the magic of amateurism, so lost in other sports. Due to the quirk of a rule that allows for amateur abilities to be put to the test in the biggest matches, the spirit of simply playing a game is rekindled. 

    Why, one might ask, don’t they just tweak the rules so that each team can field 11 batsmen, and simply have larger teams with a bigger subs bench for the fielding side? Yes, it would result in a more elite batting display, with more excellence on show etc etc. 

    But the other major complaint about cricket is that it takes too long. Test Matches with 11 out-and-out batsmen in each side wouldn’t last five days, they’d last ten! Unless, of course, England are batting (minus Joe Root). 

    While we’re on the subject of cricket, let’s hear it for The Amateur Sportsman