A New Start

FT: Unscientific America

Unscientific America

Review by Clive Cookson

Published: August 24 2009 04:57 | Last updated: August 24 2009 04:57

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future
By Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
Basic Books £15.99, 224 pages

Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science, a bestseller in 2005, was one of the most powerful political books of George W. Bush’s presidency. His account of a right-wing strategy to twist scientific evidence in favour of political ideology resonated with liberal and intellectual opinion in the US.

But the author has not been sitting around complacently following the election of a science-friendly Obama administration. Mooney, a journalist, has teamed up with Sheril Kirshenbaum, a marine biologist, to write a polemic about scientific illiteracy and the dangerous gulf between science and American culture/politics. If the war is over, they say, urgent “nation building” is needed so that extreme anti-science forces can never return to power.

Unscientific America pays homage to novelist CP Snow, whose “Two Cultures” lecture ignited a similar debate in Britain 50 years ago. “Snow knew what really matters,” the authors write. “You might say our book is merely here to provide half a century of transatlantic updating.”

Yet, for Mooney and Kirshenbaum, the Snow era was the heyday of American science. In the late 1950s and 1960s, a scientific elite had the ear of Republican and Democrat administrations, which poured billions into research and education. After around 1970 many factors, from the rise of the religious right to growing environmentalism, undermined science’s role in public policy and esteem.

The main targets of Unscientific America are scientists themselves. On the whole they have hidden away from the public, avoided political engagement and got on quietly with their research, communicating only with their peers through specialist journals and conferences.

To make matters worse, the authors say, scientists have tended to react with jealousy and scorn to those colleagues who have made an effort to communicate through the mass media. The most glaring example is late astronomer Carl Sagan, America’s greatest scientific communicator of the late 20th century, who received as much jealousy and scorn as thanks from his fellow scientists.

But Mooney and Kirshenbaum go too far in claiming that Sagan, the hero of Unscientific America, was “persecuted” by the scientific establishment for his enthusiastic popularising. For example, they make much of the National Academy of Sciences denying him membership but ignore the award to Sagan of the academy’s top honour, the Public Welfare Medal.

More generally, my own experience suggests that the authors underestimate the improvement since the 1970s in scientists’ ability and willingness to communicate with the outside world. Researchers in the US and UK have become more prepared to answer questions, and proactive in offering information to the media. The result is a distinct improvement in the quality of science reporting.

It is a matter of debate to what extent better science coverage by the media has affected general levels of scientific literacy. Polls suggest little change over the past 30 years – most notoriously, 45 per cent or so of Americans agree that God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years. But other social and educational factors are at work, too. Increased scientific activity in the media may have counteracted what would otherwise have been a decline in scientific literacy.

For the future, the authors are right to call on scientists to engage more with the outside world. Science-based issues have never been more important for human civilisation.

Ultimately, however, Unscientific America is patchy. It will interest anyone engaged in science communications – but it does not have the originality or urgency to win a readership on the scale of The Republican War on Science.

Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web

FT: Moving Stories

Moving stories

By Catherine Moye

Published: August 21 2009 14:40 | Last updated: August 21 2009 14:40

The number of US citizens moving home saw a dramatic drop in 2007-8 to 35.2m, the lowest figure since 1962

In most of the big western economies the global recession has brought a dramatic, if unsurprising, drop in the number of people moving house. For some nations that fall represents a paradigm shift; for others it is almost business as usual.

In his 2004 book Restless Nation, academic James M Jasper argued that what really sets Americans apart from other nations is that they are perennially on the move. In a typical year, according to the International Handbook on Internal Migration, about 20 per cent of US citizens move house (two-thirds of whom are homeowners). This compares with just 4 per cent in Germany and the Netherlands, 8 per cent in France and 9 per cent in the UK.

In April of this year, however, the US Census Bureau reported that the number of people who changed residences in 2007-8 declined to 35.2m: the lowest number since 1962, when the nation had 120m fewer people. Moves between states fell the most, a trend that has US analysts worried.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Stripped down living - Aug-28

Can you dig it? - Aug-15

Attack of the sofa surfer - Aug-08

‘I had a meeting in the bath’ - Jul-28

A living legacy - Jul-24

Natural-born housebuilders - Jul-18

“It does show that the US population, often thought of as the most mobile in the developed world, seems to have stopped dead in its tracks due to a confluence of constraints imposed by a tough economic spell,” William H Frey of the Brookings Institute told the New York Times.

Contrast this with a decade or so ago when, at the end of a typical five-year period, only 53 per cent of the US population was living in the same place as at the start. Furthermore, whereas Europeans typically shuffle round the corner to a place with an extra bedroom, 24 per cent of relocating Americans travel vast distances.

Whether or not the current trend develops into a lasting drop in the number of people relocating, restlessness is central to the American psyche, says Jasper.

“The main force behind this restlessness was immigration,” he says. “Contrary to popular belief, very few of our immigrants have been refugees forced to flee their homes. Most had options and they chose America as the best of them. Once here, immigrants and their descendants – which is to say, almost all of us – continue to move about, associating physical relocation with self-improvement. That’s what the country was based on and thus it is in constant motion.”

Lana Wrightman, whose father was a ranching cowboy, spent most of her childhood “ping-ponging from ranch to ranch, mostly between Texas and Wyoming”. She reckons that by the time she reached her late teens she had clocked up about 20 separate homes (though some were short spells with relations) and gone to four different middle schools and two high schools. It was a restless childhood, driven both by necessity and by lifestyle aspirations, which she now views with mixed feelings.

“I never formed close friendships because I knew that I would be moving on in a short time,” Wrightman says. On the other hand, she thinks that not putting down deep roots made her more independent and adaptable, especially when it came to travelling as a graduate student to the UK.

Her contemporaries did not exhibit the same independence or ease of transition and were, she believes, the worse for it. “My first group of friends had lived a very rooted existence and were leaving home for the first time,” Wrightman says. “They found university very difficult and I found their close-knit, needy friendships claustrophobic to the point of suffocation.”

Now married and living in London, where she works in public relations, Wrightman has no intention of repeating her itinerant childhood. “I have this idea that the next house we move to will be our ‘forever house’ and we’ll never move again,” she says.

Wrightman’s British husband, Michael, had a more “old world” upbringing, having only moved house twice in his entire life and attending just one primary and one secondary school.

But if historic factors and the sheer size of the landmass forming the country and opportunities in the US make for very different demographic patterns from the UK, one shared lifestyle goal has set both countries in motion. “Moving up is really the main reason that Americans move around,” Jasper says. “They expect to advance, especially in terms of housing.”

Notwithstanding the current gloom hanging over the housing markets in both countries, UK and US nationals have one thing in common: they have ceased to see their homes just as places to live but instead view them as lifestyle commodities to be traded up in bull markets.

“In the UK we’ve seen huge migrations in recent years (2001-2006) from the south of England towards the north because there’s been such a high differentiation in regional house prices,” says Lucian Cooke of the research department at estate agency Savills. “People simply get better, bigger houses by trading out of London and they’ve done that en masse.”

The company’s studies, based on new registrations with general practitioner surgeries throughout the UK, showed that net migration from the north to the south of England peaked at about 70,000 in 1986. By 2004 the trend had reversed, with 38,000 leaving London and the south for the north. Such figures don’t take into account the considerable overseas immigration to London and the south-east, however.

A telling sign of the differing attitudes on either side of the north Atlantic is that the US government regards people’s willingness to move as key to the dynamism, flexibility and productivity of its economy and will allow them to offset their relocation costs against tax to take a new job.

The desire for self-improvement is also making its influence felt in mainland Europe. British-born Edward Goodier works in the Hamburg office of estate agency Engel & Völkers. He says young Germans are prepared to change location in order to advance their careers – especially from east to west.

“The most capable workers in the former east are the most willing to move to better job prospects in the west, where the majority of the service industries are based,” he says. “By contrast, most in the west are already surrounded by good career prospects.”

Intriguingly, Germans, who move house the least frequently of all Europeans, also have the lowest owner-occupancy rates: just 43 per cent, according to a recent survey by Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical information service. The proportion is much lower in big cities such as Berlin, where only 11 per cent of the population are owner-occupiers. This compares with Spain at 82 per cent and the UK at 69 per cent. The survey found that 80 per cent of Germans would prefer to be owners than renters and that the younger generation is increasingly aware of property as a means of shoring up future wealth.

There is a historic reason for the high number of rentals in Germany: much of its housing stock was destroyed during the second world war and the shortage led to high prices. Large apartment buildings were provided as the solution and rental rates generally remained cheap and below the market value, even in desirable locations, because much of the property was state-owned. Many believe that such housing perks are no longer sustainable and that the percentage of homeowners will inexorably rise in line with the rest of Europe.

Yet in France there appears to be little evidence of people associating mobility with self-improvement. Parisienne Isabelle Biglier has moved only once in her life, when she married her husband, Philippe. Although she intends to upgrade to a larger apartment in the suburbs when she starts a family, for Biglier a house is a home and not a route to wealth or, necessarily, a better lifestyle.

“The average French profile is to move two or three times in a lifetime, with most people moving close to the Paris area in order to work and then looking to retire somewhere warmer, in the south,” she says. The local government administrator wonders if stringent workplace regulations and the numbers directly or indirectly employed by the state are key to why people stay put.

“There is still more of a job-for-life mentality here in France than in the UK, for instance, and I think that translates into a ‘house-for-life,’” she says, adding that this brings problems as well. “You do get a lot of hostility towards outsiders in communities that are very deeply rooted because they see it as a threat,” she observes.

Jasper cites the opposite case for the US. “Americans expect that at any stage of their lives they can move and will make friends immediately,” he says. “The US is composed of people who have only moved there recently themselves, so they are far more open. Retirees, especially ones who move to Florida, expect to go to church one Sunday and know everyone thereafter.”

American optimism for the future is often driven by anxiety, despair about the present, says Jasper. “Americans believe in their ideals and define themselves and their country by them, even if it means judging the present harshly. Americans live for what they can be rather than what they are. This is still the land of the dream.”

After Americans, “the other new world nationalities of Canada and Australia are the most on the move,” Jasper says. Australian Ian Austen, director of Austen Brothers shirtmakers, has lived and travelled extensively throughout Australia and Asia and also lived in London.

Now based in Sydney, he says: “Australians are raised with the idea that there’s a party going on somewhere else that we’re not invited to. Our European genes and the tyranny of distance made us believe, up until the 1950s, that our hearts were still English. Then that shifted to America. It makes Australians more restless and outward-looking, whereas the Brits are more inward-looking.”

Austen reckons that, in his lifetime, one of the biggest shifts in the national demographic is among blue-collar workers who have left the populous states of New South Wales and Victoria for Queensland.

“South-east Queensland has seen the largest population growth in Australia, based on the pursuit of better lifestyles,” Austen says. “Blue-collar and internet-based workers have liberated themselves from their desks or the factory floor, put their knapsacks on and gone somewhere warmer.”

Not that he feels that moving cities necessarily means a change of culture. “When I grew up, even moving inter-state gave you a completely foreign experience: you eat different food and drink a different beer. Now, highly efficient travel and global brands have turned Australia into one big monoculture. The lifestyle is not that different if you move or stay where you are.”

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Economist: Women, testosterone and finance/ Sexual selection in humans

Women, testosterone and finance

Risky business

Aug 26th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Hormones, not sexism, explain why fewer women than men work in banks

Getty Images

THAT the risk-taking end of the financial industry is dominated by men is unarguable. But does it discriminate against women merely because they are women? Well, it might. But a piece of research just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Paola Sapienza of Northwestern University, near Chicago, suggests an alternative—that it is not a person’s sex, per se, that is the basis for discrimination, but the level of his or her testosterone. Besides being a sex hormone, testosterone also governs appetite for risk. Control for an individual’s testosterone levels and, at least in America, the perceived sexism vanishes.

Dr Sapienza and her colleagues worked with aspiring bankers (MBA students from the University of Chicago). They measured the amount of testosterone in their subjects’ saliva. They also estimated the students’ exposure to the hormone before they were born by measuring the ratios of their index fingers to their ring fingers (a long ring finger indicates high testosterone exposure) and by measuring how accurately they could determine human emotions by observing only people’s eyes, which also correlates with prenatal exposure to testosterone.

The students were then presented with 15 risky choices. In each they had to decide between a 50:50 chance of getting $200 or a gradually increasing sure payout, which ranged from $50 up to $120. (Some of this money was actually paid over at the end of the experiment, to make the consequences real.) The point at which a participant decided to switch from the gamble to the sure thing was reckoned a reasonable approximation of his appetite for risk.

As the researchers suspected, women and men with the same levels of testosterone generally switched at the same time, demonstrating similar risk preferences. In other words, women who had more testosterone were more risk-loving than women with less, while the data for men at the lower end of the spectrum displayed a similar relationship. Curiously, the relationship between testosterone and risk taking was not as strong for men with moderate to high levels of the stuff, though previous studies have shown this relationship can be significant as well.

In all cases the correlation was strongest when the salivary measure of testosterone was used, suggesting that it is the here and now, rather than the developmental effects of testosterone on the brain, that is making the difference.

The researchers then followed the subjects’ progress after they graduated, to see what sort of careers they entered. As expected, men were more likely than women to choose a risky job in finance. Again, though, the difference was accounted for entirely by their levels of salivary testosterone. The researchers also studied the subjects’ personal investment portfolios after they had graduated, once in June 2008 (pre-crash) and again in January 2009 (post-crash). In a paper that has yet to be published, they demonstrate that the riskiness of these portfolios, too, was strongly correlated with subjects’ responses in the lottery game. The past year has, presumably, been kind to those with low testosterone levels.

Sexual selection in humans

Mr Muscle

Aug 27th 2009
From The Economist print edition

The price and privilege of beefcake

AFP Novosti

The way to hook the ladies?

WHY are men’s muscles so much bigger than women’s? Partly, of course, because men do the fighting and hunting. But also, perhaps, because women like men who can do these things well, and are thus attracted to muscular men. Both phenomena—competing with members of the same sex and showing off to members of the opposite—are subject to a form of evolution known as sexual selection. It is sexual selection that created the deer’s antlers and the peacock’s tail, and William Lassek of the University of Pittsburgh and Steven Gaulin of the University of California, Santa Barbara, think it explains men’s muscles as well.

The main characteristic of sexually selected features is that they are expensive to maintain. Since, whether competing or attracting, only the best will do, resources get piled into them, almost regardless of the consequences. In a study just published in Evolution and Human Behavior, Dr Lassek and Dr Gaulin show that this crucial characteristic is true for men’s muscles.

Their data came from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which followed 12,000 American men and women over the course of six years. They found that men require 50% more calories than women do, even after adjusting for activity levels, and that their muscle mass is the strongest predictor of their intake of calories—stronger than their occupation or their body-mass index (a measure of obesity). And there is another cost to being muscly: men’s immune systems are less effective than those of women (which was known before), and become worse the more muscular the men are (which was not).

The benefits, however, were there, as well. The more muscular a man, the more sexual partners he reported, both in the past year and over his lifetime, and the earlier his first sexual experience was likely to have been. This may, in part, be a result of the ability of muscular men to intimidate 97lb weaklings. But in a society where extreme forms of such intimidation are curbed by law, female choice seems as likely an explanation—especially as previous studies have confirmed scientifically the everyday observation that women do indeed prefer men with big biceps and triangular torsos.

Because muscles come at such cost, Dr Gaulin thinks an evolutionary fight is going on between natural selection, which conserves metabolic expenditure and promotes longevity, and sexual selection, which willingly trades both for extra mating opportunities. This may explain why men have such a range of muscularity. In the past, the strong man would have had better mating opportunities in the short term, but the skinny guy who outlived him could have had just as much reproductive success over the course of his longer life.

The irony for the skinny guy is that the laws which protect him from aggression also make it less likely that the hulk will fight himself into an early grave. Modern medicine, meanwhile, means the hulk’s weakened immune system is less likely to expose him to lethal infection. Time, then, to get the weights out, and start pumping iron.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

FT: True democracy is not just about taking part

True democracy is not just about taking part

By John Kay

Published: July 28 2009 20:32 | Last updated: July 28 2009 20:32

Like most people, I want to eat rich desserts, but do not want to get fat. I want to enjoy a secure retirement, but I do not want to save towards it. I want lower taxes, and I also want better public services. Of course I do. It would be odd if I did not. Irrationality does not lie in wanting inconsistent things. Irrationality is being unwilling to make choices between inconsistent things.

There was a time when crowds would wait for hours for a once in a lifetime opportunity to see and hear William Gladstone. But technology has steadily increased possibilities for the public to participate in the political process. It has not, however, created a corresponding increase in the time the public wants to devote to the political process. If anything, the opposite: by offering so many other ways to spend leisure time and by spreading prosperity, the modern age has reduced the intensity of public commitment to politics.

Many people take the view that more avenues for participation make democracy more real. They are excited by the opportunities offered by the internet: Barack Obama was elected after a campaign that made extensive use of computers and mobile phones. Our leaders blog and twitter, receive online petitions and e-mails, consult focus groups and monitor opinion polls. If the measure of democracy is the frequency of communication between politicians and their voters, then society is steadily becoming more democratic.

But these developments do not make society better governed. If these methods of participation are extensive, they are also superficial. If democracy is about delivering what the electorate wants, it is not clear that policies that respond to every angry headline in the Daily Mail achieve that result. Popular esteem for politicians and public approval of political decisions have declined, not increased. When Winston Churchill was advised to keep his ear to the ground, he commented that the public would not have much respect for leaders observed in that position. Politicians planning appearances on YouTube might reflect on his advice.

California is not only the centre of many of these new technologies. With regular plebiscites and recalls, it is a pioneer of models of extended popular participation in the democratic process. It is also a model of dysfunctional democratic governance. The state’s budget crisis goes back to the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. Asked whether they wanted lower property taxes, or not, voters quite reasonably decided they did. Voters also want to use more electricity but do not want more power stations. They want to reduce carbon emissions but also want to drive their cars. If you ask people simple questions that can be answered yes or no, you will get honest answers. But there is not the slightest reason why these answers should add up to a coherent policy programme, and typically they do not. Mature democracies have found ways round this dilemma. There is a big difference between expressing wants and opinions, and taking responsibility for decisions. Experiments in what is now called deliberative democracy show that when you give participants extensive information, and ask them to review alternative policy options, most people are conscientious and sensible in their approach. Political parties used to encourage this form of participation, by involving their members in policy discussions. But fewer and fewer people have time or inclination for this demanding activity, and the membership of political parties has withered to a small and depressing collection of ideologues and careerists.

Another concept of democracy invites voters to appoint people they trust to make decisions on their behalf. Two centuries ago, Edmund Burke explained to the electors of Bristol that he would be their representative, not their delegate. He would not seek to mirror or parrot their opinions, but would apply his own best judgment to the issues before him. Even if the technology had been available, we may assume he would not have twittered or consulted focus groups. It is unlikely that the results of introducing these technologies would have caused him to take a different view.

johnkay@johnkay.com
Post and read comments at www.ft.com/kay

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: The mobile society stalls at the gates of academe

The mobile society stalls at the gates of academe

By John Lloyd

Published: July 24 2009 20:52 | Last updated: July 24 2009 20:52

Making it has been the American dream for two centuries. Horatio Alger, who died 110 years ago this month, wrote dozens of hugely popular novels (Struggling Upward, Strive and Succeed) that imprinted the aspiration on millions of minds. In their pages boys would rise from poverty to the middle class, often through the kindly intercession of older men but always with a display of grit. The theme spanned the 19th-century Atlantic: Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) promoted the theme of social advancement through individual striving in Self Help (1859) and other works. The career of his fellow Scot Andrew Carnegie, moving from real childhood rags to world-beating riches in early middle age, gave foundation to such exhortations.

But where the myth had reality, it now has less. Recent studies show that the US is near the top, and the UK in the upper levels, of the league of developed states in which the poor do not or cannot help themselves to rise. One much quoted study* notes that “the idea of the US as ‘the land of opportunity’ persists; and clearly seems misplaced”.

Why? Education is at the root. In the land of opportunity, the immigrants of the 19th and early 20th century could rise – or at least their families could – with the burgeoning industrial economy. In 1914, Ford’s workers were three-quarters foreign-born, and their jobs did become as solid and middle-class as Alger imagined – if more through militant unions than kindly benefactors. Now, the good jobs need at least one college degree: a PhD is no longer synonymous with genteel scholarly shabbiness but can be leveraged into great wealth, personal and corporate.

George Borjas, the economist, reckons that where children of immigrant parents had, for much of the last century, easily surpassed the earnings of their fathers and mothers, they now more often stick at the same level. Because US immigrants are disproportionately little-educated Mexicans, and because they tend to stay in Hispanic enclaves, their ability and willingness to mount the academic ladder is limited. The lesson travels: acculturation to norms of ambition, improvement through education and willingness to integrate into the broader society (which means a loss of distinct identity) are good ideas for social mobility in all societies. Insofar as some communities – including indigenous working-class communities – wish to emphasise their difference, their place on the lower rungs of class society will remain.

Thus, curiously, the university becomes an ambiguous social factor. The more education it confers, the better the possibility for advancement up through the classes. But it also functions as a filter: the professions, and higher earnings, are now so routinely associated with the degrees it gives that those without its benison find the career and class bonds tighter than ever. This seems true everywhere: a study of Latin American social mobility showed that the greater the expenditure by governments on primary and secondary schooling, the greater the mobility – yet “relatively greater public spending on tertiary education may actually reinforce the impact of family background and reduce intergenerational mobility”.

Concern over the effects of a divided society – accented by the effects of the financial crisis – is now rising. This week’s British Cabinet Office report on access to the professions presents the narrowing of access in stark terms, forecasting a kind of caste society in which professionals are drawn largely from the 30 per cent of the most highly educated (and higher social classes) of the population. This is true of all professions in wealthy countries – even as they have recruited more women, as the gender pay gap has fallen and as minority groups have seen their representation in the professions rise.

Which societies do better? We should remember that all of the advanced societies have done “well” since the war: there has been a huge shift, from working to middle class. In London, half of the working population is classified as managerial or professional; that goes down to one in five in some parts of the UK but is common in other dynamic world cities. But this is the mobility of classes, in which all advanced societies have shared: individual and family mobility – another irony – seems better served in states with a strong social democratic tradition. In the Scandinavian countries, Denmark in particular, movement up (and down) is better lubricated.

One cannot have everything. The international tables of top universities are dominated by the US and the UK, which cater for global as well as their own elites. Hard-driving and expensive private schools are embedded in the Anglo-American social fabrics; the Cabinet Office report shows that some professions – such as the judiciary and journalism – are at the higher levels dominated by their products. When this writer began in a provincial newsroom, he was one of two graduates; the route to national glory could still be trod by a school leaver with shorthand and sharp elbows. Now, it would be far more difficult.

Education needs aspiration – and aspiration needs sharp elbows, too. Parental ambition is, says the British report, four times more useful than any other factor: parents who push for entry to better schools, or better schooling in the one they get, are the real motor forces of a dynamic society. The antidote to social ossification would thus seem to be a new kind of class struggle, a storming of the frozen winter palaces that tutor and employ our increasingly entrenched elites.

* Intergenerational mobility in Europe and North America: Blanden, Gregg and Machin (LSE, 2005)

The writer is an FT columnist
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd

FT: Children of the credit revolution

Children of the credit revolution

By Samantha Pearson

Published: July 8 2009 22:43 | Last updated: July 8 2009 22:43

Andy Slater, a 22-year-old delivery driver in London, appears oblivious to the fact that the UK is suffering its worst recession since the second world war.

“You gotta have new trainers ain’t you? Nike, Adidas, Lacoste – whatever looks good,” he says, eyeing up the latest models in the Westfield shopping mall in west London.

He is not alone in his opinion. In a survey conducted by the US-based Westfield group in May, 70 per cent of its shoppers aged between 18 and 35 said they were spending the same or more on clothes and eating out.

Slaves to fashion and free of most financial commitments, young people have kept spending in economic downturns when others have cut back. But today’s younger generation is particularly flush with cash and, after growing up during the credit boom, spending is deeply ingrained.  

As a result, retailers geared towards the youth market – particularly clothing chains – have been basking in their good fortune.

Fashion retailers JD Sports, New Look and Primark all reported double-digit sales growth this year and the internet-based Asos doubled its profits to £14.1m ($22.6m, €16.3m) in the year to March. In the US, Hot Topic, which sells music merchandise to teenagers, reported a 19 per cent increase in fourth-quarter profits and Buckle, another youth-focused fashion chain, has recorded double-digit monthly sales growth over the past year.

TNS, the consumer research group, says that while under-35s spend 30 per cent of their total clothing budget on discounted items, all other age categories spend 35 per cent.

Why young Brits love spending on fashion

It’s official: young adults in Britain are among the most fashion-obsessed in the world. JWT, the US-based advertising agency, asked 18- to 29-year-olds in the UK, the US, Brazil, Canada and Australia which items they would never cut back on, no matter how bad their finances were. Brits ranked “buying new clothes” as fourth on the list – higher than any other country in the poll. Above that, they prioritised the internet, mobile phones and satellite television. While young people in the US also said they could not do without home entertainment, they ranked alcohol consumption as the fifth most cherished area of spending. Brits put boozing at only 16 on their list.

The Canadians and Australians favoured going out to see movies and sports events while half of Brazilians said paying for college was their most important outgoing.

All nationalities agreed they could probably do without magazine subscriptions, taxis and paying to download music.

In an effort to ingratiate itself with its most lucrative customers, Westfield’s London shopping centre is planning an indoor summer festival, including indie punk bands and Nintendo Wiis. Even Liberty – more often known as purveyor of paisley patterns to the middle-aged – is having a go. The luxury department store has teamed up with Nike to create a range of vintage floral basketball shoes and roped in Kate Moss and Topshop to design dresses.

“We had to refresh and bring in a new crowd,” says Geoffroy de La Bourdonnaye, Liberty’s chief executive. “The youth don’t like arrogance or stiffness.”

One explanation for young people’s increased spending power may be that they are living with their parents for longer or choosing to rent rather than buy.

“If you don’t have a mortgage, you’re not going to be so worried about losing your job,” says Andrew Wade, a retail analyst at Numis investment bank. It is fear of unemployment, rather than unemployment itself, that stops people spending and encourages them to save more, he says.

For the British, growing up during 16 years of uninterrupted economic growth has also had an effect, by giving the young an “innate sense of entitlement”, according to JWT, the US-based advertising agency.

“If you see something that you like, then you’re going to get it, yeah?” says student Sattar Mozafari as he walks out of the Westfield outlet of HMV, the entertainment chain, computer game in hand.

You no longer need to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth to get what you want: a credit card in the back pocket will do.

This generation has grown up watching back-to-back adverts for unsecured loans, learnt the art of financial leverage before tea-time thanks to television programmes such as Property Ladder, and is used to being offered store cards every time they get to the check-out.

The credit-boom babies are programmed to buy, buy, buy and it seems the credit crunch may not be enough to break the habit. In fact, credit card spending has risen every month since the start of this year, according to figures from the UK Card Association, and is down less than 3 per cent from 2008.

But, above all, young people’s determination to keep spending comes down to the simple fact that consumerism is cool.

In 2003, “bling-bling” earned a place in the Oxford English Dictionary, defining an era of popular culture based on unashamed materialism.

While past youth movements – from hippies to ravers – rejected capitalist consumerism, the urban music scene made ostentatious signs of wealth not only acceptable but highly desirable.

Cash is for flashing, gold is for hanging around your neck and, in the words of New York rapper 50 Cent, life is there to “get rich or die tryin’”.

However, just as retailers are trying to court this market by learning how to get down with the kids, there are some signs that young shoppers are beginning to change their ways.

Last week, Nick Robertson, Asos’s chief executive, was surprisingly gloomy for a man who had just seen his company’s profits double.

“Young people are going to come under pressure too and, if you ask me what my health-check on retail over the next 12 months is, well, I’m saying it’s not good. I don’t see any green shoots at all.”

Certainly, the dire outlook for youth unemployment will test the resolve of the most blasé of spenders and young people may soon be forced at last to tighten their belts – even if does mean covering up those Calvin Klein boxer shorts.

Employment agency Reed says: “For students looking for summer work this year, it’s almost impossible for them to find anything. They’re competing against people who have been made redundant who are already quite experienced.”

The “bling culture” may also be losing its sparkle as anti-globalist sentiment gains momentum in the recession. The G20 protests in March and the bubbling resentment over bankers suggest brazen affluence is already something to be coy about or even ashamed of and the “green” movement may soon put a damper on “consumer chic”.

Rupa Huq, a lecturer on cultural studies at London’s Kingston University, says: “Youth culture today is crucially plural. While there is the bling generation present, who attach importance to labels culture and conspicuous consumption, the past 10-15 years has also seen the development of an anti-consumerist movement which has the potential to be huge in recessionary times.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Burma starts to acquire veneer of wealth as elite enjoy times of plenty

Burma starts to acquire veneer of wealth as elite enjoy times of plenty

By Amy Kazmin

Published: July 4 2009 03:00 | Last updated: July 4 2009 03:00

It's nearly midnight on Saturday and the dance floor of DJ's Bar in Rangoon is packed with Burmese youth, grooving to throbbing house music as red, green and yellow light beams flash and slice across the room.

The revellers - young men with hair gelled into modish styles and young women wearing mini-skirts and clutching mobile phones - have each paid a $10 cover charge to enter, a steep price in a land where university lecturers earn just $80 (£50, €57) a month.

Yet the hefty charges are no barrier for these affluent, well-connected members of an emergent Burmese elite with money to burn. "People are spending money - and it's not just a half a dozen of the regime cronies," says one foreign diplomat in Rangoon.

Burma's resource-rich economy, a treasure trove of natural gas, precious gems and valuable hardwood, has long been squeezed by the twin pressures of western sanctions and a military junta with a weak grasp of economics and little faith in civilian technocrats. That no-win combination has left most of Burma's 52m people struggling to get by, with their frustration boiling over into mass protests in 2007.

Yet amid the widespread hardship, Rangoon, the dilapidated former colonial capital, is acquiring a veneer of wealth, as a privileged elite enjoys unprecedented times of plenty, two decades after the military abandoned its autarkic "Burmese way to socialism".

Today, Burmese with the right military connections are profiting from access to natural resources, government construction contracts and privileges including the right to engage in international trade, still tightly controlled by the regime.

In the commodity boom, Burma's agricultural exports soared to $2bn, up from $300m a few years earlier, doing little for farmers, but enriching urban traders. "There is economic activity going on," the foreign diplomat said. "The vast majority of trade is with Burma's immediate neighbours, and there is a lot of investment and a lot of exports."

Growth in tourism and other forms of commerce has created a small cadre of professionals. "More people are getting management roles and seeing salaries rise," said the diplomat.

Meanwhile, signs of affluence are everywhere. Stylish-looking new condominiums are sprouting near the city's lakes, and prime real estate prices have tripled over the past five years. Colonial-era wooden bungalows are being replaced by ostentatious mansions with Greco-Roman columns.

Young men drive souped-up Jeeps painted lemon yellow or ultra-violet while their elders display their wealth in expensive imported Land Cruisers and Pajeros. Swanky boutiques proliferate, with names such as the Sky Princess beauty salon, We and We interior design, and She Shines jewellery.

Yet some savvy Burmese business people say Rangoon's spurt of highly conspicuous consumption reflects the economy's deep malaise - including its dysfunctional banking system and rampant inflation - rather than its fundamental health.

Although Burma has about a dozen private banks, they are hampered by regime rules that cap their deposit-taking at just 10 per cent of their paid-in capital, preventing them from channelling surplus household cash into productive investment. According to the IMF, the ratio of bank deposits, and credit to the private sector, to gross domestic product has fallen sharply over the past eight years.

With inflation running at about 30 per cent, many Burmese are pouring their surplus cash into hard assets that they feel will at least hold their value - if not appreciate. "You can't put it in the bank so you put your money in cars or a nice new house to keep the value of the money," said one business person.

But Burma's asset bubble may be about to burst. Many of the Rangoon condos have been developed by companies that received prime urban land as part of their payment for helping to construct the junta's new capital city far to the north and its $3.5bn new airport. Many of the units are unsold, leaving the companies struggling to recover costs.

Senior General Than Shwe, the junta's head, has apparently ordered the government to balance its budget, which has been in deficit for years, ahead of the regime's planned elections next year, which could create a squeeze on liquidity and bring the spending spree to a halt.

"No one is getting any more money," said one economist. "Businessmen are also quite fed up. They want change."

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Why size is now everything in China

Why size is now everything in China

By Patti Waldmeir in Shanghai with additional reporting,by Yan Jin

Published: June 23 2009 03:00 | Last updated: June 23 2009 03:00

Big eyes, big noses, big breasts and now humungous Hummers - China seems to be indulging an obsession with size, just when the rest of the world is learning the virtues of moderation.

In Shanghai, for example, business is booming on eyelifts, noselifts, chestlifts and other surgery aimed at enlarging classically Asian narrow eyes, flat noses and unobtrusive mammary glands. At the Shanghai Time Plastic Surgery Hospital, Dr Liao Yuhua says business is up 40 per cent since the end of last year - not despite the global economic crisis, but because of it.

Half her business is job-related: "Many of our customers are white-collar workers, many have lost their jobs, so they have time to execute their plastic surgery dreams," says the retired paediatrician, whose genially wrinkled face and ankle socks that bag around her feet hardly seem like anyone's clichéd view of a plastic surgeon.

"They want to be more competitive when they go for the next interview," she says, adding that famously pushy Chinese parents are very "supportive" of this trend.

Several brought in their children to make appointments straight after China's strongly competitive national university entrance examinations earlier this month. "Parents hope that their kids can be more competitive in job hunting," she says, admitting that as an employer, she would "recruit a prettier nurse with the same qualities as one who wasn't so pretty".

Graduates leaving college this year are facing one of the toughest job markets in years, and women - who make up three-quarters of Dr Liao's patients - find it particularly hard to land a job. According to a study recently by the Centre for Women's Law and Legal Services of Peking University, published in the Chinese press, one in four women surveyed said they had failed to get a job because of gender, a fifth said salaries were cut if they became pregnant and 11 per cent lost jobs when they had a family.

Dr Liao says plastic surgeries have grown by 15 per cent a year since the fad really took off in China about five years ago. But China is hardly alone in using disposable income on facelifts - and even justifying the cost as a career development expense. In the US last year, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, cosmetic procedures rose among all groups except Caucasians; procedures among Hispanics were up 18 per cent. But the age profile of consumers of plastic procedures - and the parts of their bodies they want fixed - differs greatly from the US to Asia.

At Dr Liao's hospital, the top two procedures are so-called double-eyelid surgery - which inserts an extra crease in the eyelid to make the eyes appear larger - and inserting a bridge in the nose, using a part of the rib. "Oriental people prefer bigger eyes and bigger noses - everything they don't have," she says, chuckling at the irony that, in Chinese slang, westerners are called "big noses" (and it is not necessarily a compliment). Her clients are mostly aged 25 to 35 - whereas half of all plastic surgeries in the US are for patients aged 40 to 55.

Bigger eyes are relatively cheap: from RMB2,400 ($350, €252, £213). Bigger breasts cost RMB60,000 (and clients must sacrifice a piece of thigh).

Zhou Jin Feng is one of the clinic's satisfied past clients (blackhead removal). This time the 31- year-old nurse - clean-cut yet hardly a wanna-be movie star - wants a double eyelid and more pointed chin. "Young people these days want to be pretty, it's important for their self-esteem, mainly for job hunting," she says. Dr Liao says many of her patients are doctors, nurses or teachers: "Beauty is very important for communication in such professions," she says.

Dr Liao can remember when plastic surgery would have been seen as bourgeois decadence of the first order. Now she thinks it is just a natural consequence of the wealth effect. "When the basic needs are met - a car, a house, food - what shall we do with our extra money? Spend it on beautification." Additional reporting by Yan Jin

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Long-distance love

Long-distance love

By Simon Kuper

Published: May 30 2009 01:31 | Last updated: May 30 2009 01:31

Runners fill New York’s Verrazano-Narrows Bridge at the start of the city’s 2005 marathon

Born to Run: The Hidden Tribe, the Ultra-Runners and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen
By Christopher McDougall
Profile £16.99, 287 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
By Haruki Murakami
Translated by Philip Gabriel
Vintage £7.99, 181 pages
FT Bookshop price: £6.39

Once a Runner
By John L. Parker, Jr
Scribner $24, 273 pages

Blade Runner
By Oscar Pistorius
Virgin £12.99, 186 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

A Race Like No Other: 26.2 Miles Through the Streets of New York
By Liz Robbins
Harper £14.99, 336 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.59

In the 1970s large numbers of people began running for the first time. John L Parker, himself a former champion runner, wrote a novel about the habit in 1978. But no publisher wanted Once A Runner, so Parker self-published it.

He sold copies at races out of the boot of his car, and a cult developed around the book. In 2007, search engine BookFinder rated it the most sought after out-of-print book in the US. This spring, the book was republished – this time by Scribner, a commercial publisher in the US.

Now, a bunch of books on running has arrived at once. One of them, by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, even achieved a rare honour for a translated memoir of being advertised on posters on the London Underground. All these books tackle the great question that a Parisian reclining on a park bench once shouted at me as I lumbered into the woods: “Why?”.

So why do we run?

Running long distances used to be considered beyond most humans, like visiting the moon. Phidippides, who is credited with running the first marathon in 490BC, supposedly died on the spot straight afterwards. As late as the 1960s it was considered unacceptable to run around your neighbourhood in sweaty clothes. The New York City marathon is now the biggest race on earth; when it was first held in 1970, there were only 126 male participants and one woman. The winners received unused bowling trophies.

Many things were changing at that time. The social revolutions of 1968 inaugurated the era of “informalisation”, the spread of permissive behaviour. It became acceptable to run around town in the new sports kit that Nike and others were making. Even old women were now allowed to play sport in public. Many old people found running congenial. Born To Run, Christopher McDougall’s book on people who run vast distances, even unearths a 96-year-old ultra-runner. McDougall, a magazine journalist and runner, also reports that 64-year-olds average the same pace in marathons as 19-year-olds.

Today “distance running is the world’s number one participation sport”, says McDougall. Indeed, judging by these books, many people now identify themselves above all else as runners. No wonder they want to read about running.

It’s no coincidence that the running craze also took off at the same time as the obesity epidemic. People worried more about their health, and sought solitary sports that they didn’t have to do in the old social units. “You don’t need anybody else to do it,” gloats Murakami, explaining why he began running in 1982. Political scientist Robert Putnam has written of a social trend towards “bowling alone” – people taking their leisure alone rather than in groups. Running, too, was a sport for an atomised society.

Runners divide into two distinct tribes. The first consists of casual runners: those of us who trudge a couple of painful miles to lose weight and perhaps live a bit longer.

One reason people run – and read running books – is that casual running often confers status. Jogging is considered an outward marker of achievement. It helps draw the American class divide between the thin and the fat. For example, a daily group jog in Central Park, starting at 5.30am, features “many of New York’s top executives, lawyers and traders”. One author, Liz Robbins, calls it a “power breakfast”.

Casual runners are rational actors – we understand what they get out of it. More baffling are serious runners: the smaller tribe that runs ever longer distances.

These books draw a cumulative psychological profile of the serious runner. Many of them have abandoned marathons for double marathons and worse. There is always a next step, such as the six-day, 151-mile Marathon des Sables, or Marathon of the Sands, across the Sahara.

Serious runners don’t do it for their health – they massacre their joints. But their motives aren’t easily captured in words. It’s as hard for them to explain why they do it as it is for an astronaut to describe walking on the moon. We will never go there.

That may be why none of these books entirely satisfies – and also why many serious runners appear to be hermits. Parker’s hero, for example, is a miler named Cassidy. He’s suspended from his Florida college during a 1970s controversy over the length of athletes’ hair, and ends up a hermit living in a cabin.

Murakami, too, takes up running after moving to the Japanese countryside. And McDougall’s book climaxes in a 50-mile race “in a sniper-patrolled corner of the Mexican outback”, home to the isolated Tarahumara Indians, famed long-distance runners.

Running, it seems, offers an escape from the world, with all its chores, noise and complications. We casual runners sometimes imagine that serious runners get time to think. Rather, according to Murakami and Parker, part of the pleasure is entering a trance in which you don’t think. You can run away.

In explaining why people run, McDougall returns to human origins. Drawing on scientific research, he argues that we were, literally, “born to run”. After man first stood erect, he probably survived by running animals to death. Humans were slower than antelopes and many other mammals, but could keep going longer. We hunted in packs, and after a couple of hours our prey would generally collapse.

The Bushmen of the Kalahari desert – Africa’s last hunter-gatherers – have remained excellent long-distance runners, he notes. Indeed, some time in the 1960s, a South-West African policeman, in a spirit of scientific inquiry, chased a Bushman in his Land Rover over sandy, bush terrain, and the little runner kept going for almost a whole day. Nowadays most of us hate long runs because we don’t have to do them; our brain urges us to relax. But some capacity remains.

Serious runners don’t seem concerned with pleasure. These books seldom dwell on the “runner’s high” – the famous release of endorphins. Instead, Parker’s novel has some gruesome descriptions of racing. Here’s Cassidy winning the biggest mile race of his life: “… it hurts but go all the way through do not stop until you are past it you cannot afford to give the son of a bitch anything … so holdit holdit holdit Jesus Christ hold it holditholdit HOLDITHOLDITHOLD IT …”

In different ways these books tell us that serious runners welcome pain. Indeed, that may even be the point of running. “If pain weren’t involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon,” asks Murakami. “It’s precisely because we want to overcome that pain that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive – or at least a partial sense of it.”

Serious runners push through pain to touch their human limits. Murakami writes: “Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life – and for me, for writing as well.”

For Parker, this touching of limits is what distinguishes serious runners from the rest of us: “Fleeing from an armed killer or deadly animal, a layman will soon find the frightening limits that even stark terror will not overcome. The runner knows such boundaries like he knows the sidewalks of his own neighbourhood.”

At our human limits, we apparently feel not joy but a sense of achievement. And that is another reason why running took off after 1968. In the age of meritocracy, achievement became a dominant value. Running is an achievement that almost everyone can have.

This becomes apparent in A Race Like No Other, a mercilessly positive account of the New York City marathon by Liz Robbins, a New York Times reporter. Practically every runner in the book is a confident yet humble hero who triumphs against the odds. “The will to live and the will to win carry 38,676 today to the limit and beyond,” Robbins tells us. However, another of her numbers gives the game away: only 1,129 runners fail to finish the race. This is a Herculean task that you don’t need to be Hercules to complete. Even Oprah Winfrey has run a marathon.

The South African Oscar Pistorius, author of Blade Runner, exemplifies the runner as an unlikely achiever. He was born without fibula bones, and as a baby had both his legs amputated. But he became a winner nonetheless. Injured in a rugby match, he turned sprinter by accident. In his first race he unknowingly smashed a world record for runners with his disability. Soon he was fast enough to compete against the best runners with legs. Pistorius has become a symbol of achievement, or as he puts it, “a superhero for disabled people worldwide”.

Some of these books will struggle to appeal beyond the runners’ ghetto. Parker nicely conveys the horrors of running, but the book’s cult status among serious runners remains a mystery to me. Murakami’s memoir is a gentle read but the incessant banalities are reminiscent of Adrian Mole’s diary. Here’s the great author on the aftermath of a knee twinge: “The next morning, after I woke up, washed my face, and drank a cup of coffee, I tried walking down the stairs in our apartment building.” Lo, the twinge has gone.

Pistorius is a simple Christian with no literary pretensions. Blade Runner is an extraordinary story but an ordinary book.

Robbins would make a great researcher: excellent legwork, shame about the tin ear. No detail is too insignificant for her to record, and she helps purvey fantasies about noble savages: “Lel [a Kenyan runner] believes that more than anything about growing up in the Rift Valley – the starchy diet or the altitude of 5,000 to 10,000ft above sea level or the long runs to school – the Kalenjin warrior heritage is what makes Kenyan runners so successful.” Devoutly as I admire Kalenjin heritage, I suspect that their diet, altitude and daily long-distance running help them rather more.

Robbins’s book suffers from its overwritten opening. McDougall’s does too – the overwritten opening is a staple of contemporary American non-fiction. But Born To Run later recovers. McDougall eventually slows down, breathes out, and reaches the state of bliss that runners, or so we are told, very occasionally experience in the midst of an endless run.

All these books may prove relics of our time, however. A report, “Sport Participation in the European Union”, published in 2005 by a Dutch centre for research on sports in society, says the growth of running has stagnated since the 1990s. “Diverse fitness sports” have taken off instead. Activities such as Pilates, yoga and treadmills are good for the heart and waistline but they don’t destroy the knees. Future generations may wonder how we ever hit upon such a painful and unprofitable craze.

Simon Kuper is an FT writer based in Paris

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: Time to look and listen

Time to look and listen

By Harry Eyres

Published: May 2 2009 02:04 | Last updated: May 2 2009 02:04

Many people seem to believe that the way to make the most of time is to cut it fine. Arriving at the very last minute means not wasting precious seconds that could be spent in a more productive pursuit than loafing around at some airport terminal or railway station – or worst of all, a waiting room.

This often carries an element of pride or machismo – waiting is for wimps. But what does not wasting time really mean? It seems to mean putting time to some profitable use or intensive cultivation: getting the highest possible yield out of it. But this attitude could lead to the ultimate waste of time; the whole of time turned into a wasteland in which no moment can be enjoyed for its own sake.

Somehow what works for salami (the fine slicing) does not succeed with time. I like time in thick slabs. When time is too finely sliced, it does not taste like time at all. If you cut all the fat off it (to adjust the metaphor), it takes on an ominous and unrelenting aspect – you feel there is never enough of it. If I cut it too fine getting to the airport or station, I spend the whole journey in an anxious stew, waiting for the tube train or bus to get stuck in a tunnel or a traffic jam on the North Circular Road.

According to my no doubt rather peculiar calculus, this results in a double loss of time. First of all, the journey itself is lost, as a stretch of enjoyable time. But leaving enough time to arrive early means not only that the journey is salvaged from the dread of last-minute, fatal delay, but also that a chunk of potentially creative time is released at the point of arrival.

The other day Ching Ling and I, on our way to visit friends, arrived early at a country railway station. Nothing much was going on there; a man arrived to pick up his daughter; we watched a group of young Chinese lads waiting for a minibus; a man with a comically friendly dog, tail wagging so hard it could be used as a source of renewable energy, turned up at the ticket office. There was a wonderfully desultory feel about things, which you rarely get in the city, combined with the haunting scents of early spring, a thrush somewhere repeating its evening song.

The minutes we spent there could certainly have been considered a waste of time. There was no particular point to them; they had figured in no schedule or timetable; they were a chronological anomaly. But they stick in my memory as some of the most precious in the past few weeks.

Thank goodness the poet Edward Thomas was not too fixated on the timetable when his express train stopped unexpectedly one June afternoon at the country station of Adelstrop. The word he uses is “unwontedly”, which implies not just that the stop was unscheduled, but that it broke the crust of ordinary, chugging, routine time and opened a portal into something different.

The sudden stop meant that Thomas was able to appreciate where he was, and where he never expected to be, rather than being moved ever onwards on smooth rails towards an ever-receding goal.

What he saw and heard was nothing special; an empty platform, a man clearing his throat, the ordinary flowers and trees and haycocks and one of the commonest birds of English summer.

But the minute Thomas spent at Adelstrop station left an indelible impression; it printed an essence of summer time in the English countryside on his visual and aural imagination. Above all that minute had depth – depth that transformed the sense of place and history.

Instead of the flat landscape you see through a train window passing at high speed, a succession of unrelated “views”, Thomas experienced the mysterious profundity of place. The place suddenly became part of him; he was planted within it, rather than being rushed through it; he became, as a perceiving being, the centre and the heart of it.

Being at the centre means perceiving concentric circles radiating outwards. And the sense that best perceives those subtle gradations of nearness and farness, which hearkens towards them, is the sense of hearing, not the sense of sight. We are used to being eye-centred (not to mention I-centred), to directing our eyes almost as an extension of our hands, to grasp and grab. Hearing works in quite a different way. We are powerless to direct our ears; we must allow sounds to come to them.

Edward Thomas, in the unexpected lull of time, allows the sound of the blackbird’s song to come to him, and he hearkens towards it. At that moment comes the epiphany. The blackbird’s call, in its contentment and plenitude, summons “all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire”, and with them a profound sense of English geography and history, of gentle hills and valleys, stone villages, a university city and a cathedral one, woods and fields, in their most benign and peaceful aspect. Not a waste of time at all.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009