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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  • Why Royals Work

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    (Photo by Markus Spiske)

    Everyone loved Queen Elizabeth II. ‘No one had a bad word to say about her’ is the defining phrase of the moment. Her popularity and success is usually ascribed to who she was, rather than what she was. But is that really so?

    Just an ordinary Queen

    Royalty is generally regarded as anathema to the meritocratic, democratic age. How can we possibly accept people being born to rule? It flies in the face of all we are taught to believe.

    If that’s true, then the only way the Queen can have been so great in her role as a born ruler is by dint of her being a truly wonderful person, on an individual, human level, in spite of the unsavoury task of hereditary rule.

    Deserving to rule us

    There are two other choices: our rulers either rule us due to corruption or merit. Depending on whether we live in an autocracy, a weak democracy or a strong one, the sliding scale between corruption and merit will be different.

    Queen Elizabeth’s United Kingdom is generally regarded as more meritocratic than corrupt. By that rationale, our politicians rule us because they are better than us through merit.

    The trouble is, meritocracy is hard to swallow. When you ask an individual: do you think a political leader is ruling you because they are better than anyone else, you soon hear arguments about the innate corruption of the system.

    The Queen’s (or King’s) magic

    Hereditary rule removes the notion of someone having more merit than someone else, so problematic to our tastes. In doing so, it ironically allows monarchy a back door into the meritocratic, democratic age.

    The Queen was not the Queen through merit. She was just born to it. That makes her no better than anyone else at being a queen – if you were born to it. This notion puts people at their ease.

    Sure, the whole edifice of royalty is deeply unedifying to the modern mind. But if in our hearts we don’t truly believe the utopia of meritocracy can exist, then monarchy becomes a fallback against worse corruption.

    And so most people become happy with the Queen, or indeed, the King.

    Feeling comfy with your royals? Feeling comfy with your country, too?

  • Men and boats

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    (Photo by Howard Roark)

    Sailing big yachts around the marinas of the world is almost exclusively the preserve of couples of a certain age. And captaining that yacht is – according to my eagle-eyed research – entirely the preserve of the man.

    It’s the end of another yachting season where I live in Malmö’s Dockan marina. That means a marina that lies dormant half the year has been full of yachts with Danish, German, Dutch and Polish flags.

    The economics and time constraints of this hobby mean that you appear to have to be a 50+ couple to even contemplate it. Almost every boat has aboard a man and a woman enjoying their silver age upon the high seas.

    Ahoy there, captain!

    And as they glide into the marina, without fail it will be the woman that stands at the bow, rope in hand, ready to leap nimbly to dockside like a good first mate and secure the yacht. At the wheel will be the captain. The male captain.

    We all know about male drivers – the propensity of husbands to drive the car. This is the almost unspoken collusion whereby the role of driver and passenger become cemented in a marriage. But this stereotype is no longer an absolute in the automobile.

    Yet in yachting, which is, after all, a higher end of the market, with much bigger, shinier and more expensive vehicles involved, the need/desire/inevitability of the man holding the helm appears unshakable.

    I’m still waiting eagerly for the first time I see a man clutching that bow rope, his wife eyeing the horizon with a steady eye as she nudges the ship’s wheel to port. Still waiting… here’s hoping…

    On the subject of men and women, have you heard about ‘mansplaining’? Let me mansplain…

  • Walter Close and the Amalthea

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    In a dock close to my home in the Western Harbour of Malmö, Sweden, a tiny, easily missed plaque commemorates a terrorist attack. Despite what you might think, this isn’t a tale of either ethnic minorities or white supremacists.

    On the night of 12 July 1908, a ship was blown up in Malmö harbour. The ship was named the Amalthea and the event became known as the Amalthea Incident. It resulted in two of the last death sentences in Swedish history.

    Socialism in Sweden

    The reason for the attack was that the Amalthea had aboard dockworkers from Hull, in eastern England, who were strikebreakers – men brought in by the dock authorities of Malmö to do the work striking local dockworkers refused to do.

    The antipathy of the locals towards them was so strong that they had to be accommodated aboard ship, not on land. They went to work each day under police escort. In the explosion, one man died and 23 were injured.

    Two of the three terrorists – Anton Nilson and Algot Rosberg – were sentenced to death. The third, Alfred Stern, received a life sentence. The local reaction was further outrage.

    Free the terrorists!

    A petition of 130,000 names called for the young socialists to be released. It’s hard to imagine Swedes supporting the release of terrorists, but this is what occurred just over 100 years ago.

    In October 1917, with the Russian Revolution underway, the Swedish government ordered the release of the terrorists, who went on to become icons of the labour movement in Sweden, Nilson dying in Stockholm in 1989, aged 101.

    A strange sort of victory

    A happy ending… Except, what of that one man who died? He is a forgotten figure in the rather vaguely termed Amalthea Incident? Walter Close was his name. Walter Close from Hull.

    Here was a dockworker from Hull – one of the most deprived cities in England, a man willing to work as a blackleg (or strikebreaker) aboard a ship in a foreign land. Not a rich man, I would imagine.

    And here were angry Swedish dockworkers in one of Sweden’s most deprived working class ports. And the idealistic socialists prepared to take a stand, killing another poor dockworker from Hull for the labour cause.

    Let’s spare a thought for Walter Close, man of Hull.

    Talking of monuments to history, what if statues could speak?

  • History repeating in Russia and Ukraine

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    On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, I was halfway through In Memory of Memory by the Russian Jewish author Maria Stepanova.

    I was reading the letters that her relative Lyodik Gimmelfarb, a 19-year-old at the Siege of Leningrad, sent to his mother. They were matter-of-fact and uncomplaining. Shortly after his 20th birthday, he was killed.

    War. What’s it good for?

    The following chapters turn to another branch of her family, the Gurevichs, in particular Isaak Gurevich, a well-heeled businessman who opened an agricultural machinery factory in Kherson in the early 20th century.

    I had never heard of this southern Ukrainian city, and suddenly I was reading about it in the news, falling to Russian forces, as I simultaneously read about this successful Jewish family who built a fine mansion and owned the first English Vauxhall car in the region.

    In 1907, Isaak Gurevich had been there to welcome the railway to Kherson. He and his family had also witnessed the pogroms that swept across southern Ukraine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a reminder of the fact that the Nazis didn’t invent anti-Semitism.

    Brave new world

    With the Russian Revolution, Gurevich had his factory taken off him and given to the workers. Soon it wasn’t simply a case of losing your wealth, but losing any trace of ever having had wealth. ‘Social background’ had to be filled in on government forms, and a hint of bourgeois ancestry spelt trouble.

    At the conclusion of her family saga, Stepanova visits the Jewish New Cemetery on the outskirts of Kherson. It’s a desolate, windblown spot where the scrub is slowly reclaiming the gravestones. There are no Jews left to tend the cemetery.

    More serendipity? How about Afghanistan Then and Now

  • 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