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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  • Us versus AI

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    (Photo by Andy Kelly)

    Artificial Intelligence is a popular topic. You are either excited about its possibilities, fear its consequences, or a bit of both.

    Copywriters get particularly jumpy. The new ChatGPT chatbot launched on 30 November 2022 by OpenAI (founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others and funded by Microsoft) is the latest impressive reality of AI.

    Like people, but better

    Compared to machines, real people are lazy and inconsistent. That’s just life. I’ve no doubt that AI will soon be not only more consistent, but also a better copywriter than most human copywriters.

    Given that the industrialisation of human labour is essentially the machine process applied for the maximum output from the minimum time and effort, AI wins every time.

    A longer wait until bedtime

    Which always reminds me of a quote from American author Garrison Keillor that sums up his lovely Lake Wobegon Days series, about his childhood home in the Midwest:

    Back for a visit one August, I crossed Main Street toward Ralph’s and stopped, hearing a sound from childhood in the distance. The faint mutter of ancient combines. Norwegian bachelor farmers combining in their antique McCormacks, the old six-footers. New combines cut a twenty-foot swath, but these guys aren’t interested in getting done sooner; it would only mean a longer wait until bedtime. 

    Given that AI will inevitably be not only more consistent at most jobs than any of us could ever be, but also have an output that’s just better, even creatively, we are left only with Garrison Keillor’s implied question:

    What sort of life do we want to live?

    Talking of technology, are you a smartphone addict?

  • My money is your money

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    The problem with direct democracy is it doesn’t work very well. Big political questions, which are usually big economic questions, are hard to understand. Who really gets economics? Anyone?

    So, when asked if you want the EU to stop stealing your money, what do people say? “Stop stealing my money!” When asked if you would like to keep more of your cash-money-dollar in your pocket, and not give it to the taxman, what do people say? “Less tax, please!”

    The politics of economics

    That’s exactly what occurred in the Brexit referendum of 2016, and it’s exactly what occurred in the Tory leadership contest vote of party members to select Britain’s new Prime Minister in September 2022. Both times, people made instinctive economic choices.

    Those choices failed to see the bigger picture of economic interconnectedness that means a vote to apparently make myself richer by keeping money directly in my pocket now, can actually translate into me being poorer in the end due to macro-economic effects I don’t understand.

    What’s the point of MPs?

    A Member of Parliament (MP), lest we forget, is there to represent their constituents in parliament. We have chosen them based on their worldview and priorities broadly aligning with our own. We ask them to make the big calls for us.

    If MPs turn back to the electorate and ask them to make the big calls, in referendums, then they are no longer representing us. They become a pointless middleman.

    MPs knew – barring ideological zealots – that leaving the EU was a bad idea. MPs knew that Rishi Sunak was the most competent replacement for Boris Johnson. Their decision to pick him second time round illustrates the gap.

    If MPs renege on their responsibility to represent us on matters they – or if not, their advisors in the relevant fields – know far more about than the average voter, then democracies will continue to get the poor results they are getting used to.

    Of course, we voters are very good at electing appalling politicians in the first place. But that’s our own fault. And it beats being told what to do by a benevolent dictator.

    Remember Brexit? Yes, it was that bad. Let’s laugh about it with some Blackadder goes Brexit

  • 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