What do you do when Uncle Joe comes round with a bucket of Victoria plums? There are many possibilities but here is one thing.

First, rinse them, toss any with mould on and remove the caterpillars. Then put them in a large pot with liquid, herbs and spices. This time I used a mix of white wine, crème de cassis and dry vermouth with a bay leaf, orange peel, Ceylon cinnamon, cloves, anise, allspice berries and long pepper (pippali). (I forgot to add a piece of root ginger and considered adding fennel seeds or thyme but didn’t.) I also put in some hedge blackberries and some too-soft cherries that I’d put in the freezer for future sauce.

You could really just add a cinnamon stick, a bay leaf and some white wine, with sugar at the end. I happened to be in the mood for something needlessly complex.

I simmered and strained the mix through a fine mesh and then considered adding some sherry vinegar and muscovado sugar but didn’t and instead put it in the fridge.

What’s it good for? Lots of things, such as:

• duck sauce

• venison sauce

• ice cream sauce

• seasonal negronis

• red cabbage

• gammon glaze

• gravy enrichment

It keeps for a long time even if you only refrigerate it but you could also freeze some.

Here are some other things I’ve done when given lots of plums in the past:

• Rinsed and frozen them

• Rinsed, stoned and frozen them

• Given them to someone else in my family to make crumble

• Left them on the side until they’re rotten

My neighbour Joe, Uncle Joe to the children, is an interesting man. Some people think he’s only a Character, a big, easy-to-read personality, like one of those large print books in the library. Perhaps, perhaps not.

One time he told me about how he built his pond. He wanted it to be ‘wild’, a sort of nature reserve. Another local, someone who was here before my time, an enormously fat and confident man, told Joe that he had some fish he wanted to keep in his pond. Joe laughed and said, no, he had other plans. The man said, I’ll bring them over soon. Joe said no, you won’t.

Many of Joe’s stories involve him getting into obscure rows, feuds and conflicts—social, legal, financial, culinary, agronomic, territorial, whatever. He is irascible. I always enjoy watching him struggle not to swear in front of my children. The Farmer (who gives us pheasants) told me that years ago when someone kept drinking out of Joe’s mug at his workplace, Joe urinated in it to teach him a lesson. I also know that he made a serious threat to shoot another neighbour’s dog that was repeatedly mauling his chickens. (“It’s not the dog’s fault but unfortunately I can’t shoot the owner.”) So although Joe was laughing appreciatively at the fat man’s effrontery as he told me about the fish, I knew a reckoning was coming.

Joe said, “The fooker put the fish in.” I waited for him to describe his counter-blow. In his stories there’s usually a wittily obscene riposte followed by some devilishly cunning action, depending on how the other party reacts. (Joe possesses not only whatever it is that IQ measures, but also an interest in and feel for whatever it is that makes up life, without which everything else is useless. If you want to make an enemy, start with someone else and get some practice in first.) He smiled. “The thing is, I liked them.” And then Joe told me he liked them so much that he kept them; that they’re the fish in his pond now, or at least their descendants are; that he husbands them carefully; that their owner still visits them once a year from his new home; that they’re also visited once a year by a heron that slaughters them back to a healthy number; that other land-bound animals eat them from time to time. He then told me about all the various wildlife around with a lot of knowledge and enthusiasm though not much sentimentality; he shoots some when he has to. But he sort of loves them, I’d say, if I had to guess.

He’s also someone who will come to your front door and say, “Could you use some plums?” or who you might see on the lane and he’ll ask if you and your children would like to pick some apples or damsons from his trees or watch him feed the fish in his pond, and he’ll do it in a tone suggesting something like, “Oh well, I suppose you’d better,” because he’s not soft and would resent you thinking he is.

The same day Joe gifted his plums I found seven red apples on my doorstep. I don’t know who left them there. Possibly a witch. I might leave them on someone else’s doorstep in the dead of night with a note in blood saying, Let he who eats of the seven apples beware. Two days later another neighbour came to the door offering me runner beans from the allotment, but I said, “The others are away and I won’t be eating runner beans while they’re gone.” She seemed slightly put out. The most interesting recent bit of plunder was an empty wagtail nest The Farmer gave us; he’d found it in the engine of one of his old David Brown tractors and left it there until the eggs had hatched and the chicks had fledged. It’s lined with wool on the inside and trimmed with moss on the outside. That’s now in the log store. In the back garden, hanging over the fence from next door, are immense raspberries of unimaginable juiciness, on display like prostitutes in Amsterdam. Perhaps we’ll get some of those, too.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, August 2026)

I’ve just set up a Buy me a coffee page in the unlikely event that someone enjoys my writing so much they want to throw me some coins in appreciation. It’s a one-off thing, unlike a paid subscription. (If you already have a paid subscription—thank you.)

Gift me some produce

Note: I started writing this in March 2026 after seeing the exchange below but didn’t get past the first few paragraphs. It seems relevant to Substack’s Pangram panic this week so I finished it in a sad attempt to be topical.

Every time you write something you now risk someone thinking you’ve used AI. You can relay a harmless old Soviet joke involving cowboys and Indians on X née Twitter and be attacked with pulverising certainty by a stranger—because Soviets would never reference cowboys and Indians so it must’ve been an AI hallucination.

I don’t know how much of what’s online is AI slop, probably plenty, but not everything shoddy or trite or outside your circle of knowledge comes from AI.

Why would Soviets joke about cowboys and Indians?

America fascinated 19th century Russians as a place of freedom and escape. Many Soviets (and Russians etc before and after the USSR) loved the Wild West and American Westerns, and indeed they had their own Osterns (Easterns).1 It’s not a Western, but Lenin loved the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a boy, while both Stalin and Brezhnev enjoyed Western films. Brezhnev would watch them late at night in the Kremlin and his greatest desire when making a state visit to the US was to meet Chuck Connors, an actor in a long-running TV Western. Soviet jokes were legendary. Nothing is more likely than there being a whole line of Soviet cowboy and Indian jokes.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, deadbeef33, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate slop and abjure AI in my own work and life, but it’s also a scapegoat, in the tradition of internet scapegoats—bots, Russians, The Algorithm, etc. There are still British Members of Parliament who dismiss replies to their posts on X containing obviously genuine but uncomfortable or unfamiliar arguments by saying something like, I hear the weather in Moscow is good at this time of year. This is seen as crushing, witty and unanswerable, and also means they don’t have to engage with challenges to their picture of the world. Anyone who disagrees with them must be Russian or a bot.2 They can be pleased with themselves and not have to think about anything at all, which is exactly how they like it.

My point isn’t that we should be less sceptical, it’s that scepticism is good, but only if you’re also curious. Imagine missing out on learning that Brezhnev loved Westerns, but also never understanding the views of those who disagree with you, because you’re confined to your own little circle of thought.

There’s no substitute for thinking. You have to read things and work it out for yourself. That goes for Pangram and any other AI detector. I won’t obsess over AI tics, but will look for the asinine, the turgid, the bland, the glib, the empty, as ever before. I’ll do it myself, I won’t outsource my reading any more than my writing.

And there’s also nothing sadder and more ridiculous than someone who thinks they’re a sceptic, a critical thinker, but really they’re as innocent and as ignorant as a babe in swaddling, and they’ve never even heard of Chuck Connors. That’s all.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, July 2026)

Please excuse any errors and lack of polish; I wrote this quickly this morning and afternoon to be ready for Father’s Day.

I remember exactly when it was and where I was. I suppose you would. It was mid-morning, Sunday 30 April 2023. May Day Bank Holiday weekend. I was in the waiting room in the Urgent Treatment Centre at Westmorland General Hospital in Kendal talking to a friend’s mother and sister, who happened to be there, while my mother was being treated for sciatica somewhere behind closed doors. I was actually enjoying the conversation because I didn’t know my friend’s family well and it turned out I liked them, and that I’d played army as a young boy with the sister’s husband. I was very tired. The previous day my father had been taken in an ambulance to A&E (US: ER) at the nearest ‘proper’ hospital, Royal Lancaster Infirmary (RLI), around 25 miles away. I’d gone with him and stayed there until after midnight, when I got a taxi back to my parents’ house. At around 3 a.m. a doctor at RLI phoned me to say that my father probably wouldn’t make it through the night and I should come in now if I wanted to be there with him. It was probably close to 4 a.m. by the time I got there and they’d saved my father’s life. The nurse told me brightly that his blood pressure had improved and stabilised. I glanced at the bedside monitor where it read something like 70/50 and said, “Oh.” The doctor, a courteous, unhurried man whom I spoke to for somewhere between thirty and forty-five minutes, told me my father was being treated for a bacterial chest infection, septic shock in the night, covid, a possible UTI, anaemia and severe dehydration. He’d also experienced supraventricular tachycardia and from the enzyme levels in his most recent blood tests had probably had a heart attack. I stayed by his bedside for a couple of hours, exchanging a few words when he was able, and then got another taxi back to my parents’. My mother was in agony from sciatica and obviously this was compounded by her distress for my father. So after speaking on the phone to the emergency on-call doctor for the area at maybe 8 a.m. I’d asked my friend John to drive us to the treatment centre and there we were. But anyway, coming back—as I was talking to the two women in the Urgent Treatment Centre, with my mother in another room, I had a call from a senior practitioner in the Frailty team at RLI. She told me that my father wanted me to make a decision about what happened next. His preference was to cease all therapeutic treatment, to come home and to receive end of life care there. She said that realistically a decision had to be made quickly otherwise he might not be in a condition where he could be moved home. I liked her a lot; she was sympathetic but also practical and not at all slushy. I explained where I was and what I was doing and asked if she could call me back in an hour. I then talked to staff at the treatment centre, who arranged for me to speak privately to my mother. At the same time I called my sister in the US. A decision was agreed. When the call came back in an hour I said to bring my father home.

By late afternoon he was in his own bed and within days a hospital bed had been set up in the sitting room downstairs and he’d been moved into it. If the NHS treated those expected to live with the same care they treat those expected to die it would be a marvel of the world.1 The processes were good and the people involved were mostly a lot better than good.

In the early days, before things had bedded in, and before my mother was physically capable of helping my father in the night, I stayed at the house for two weeks until my sister arrived from the US to take over for more weeks until my mother had recovered sufficiently to then do the long, long duty that followed. My mother would eventually set up a folding bed beside his and sleep there for many months.

The night system we set up was simple. We put a little brass bell by my dad’s bed and when he needed something, usually whatever alternative to morphine he was using, he’d ring it and I’d come down. Often he’d also ask for some chocolate ice cream and I’d spoon this into his mouth after he’d had his painkillers and I’d noted the time and dose. We’d chat for a while in a companionable way if he was up to it. This would continue through to morning at intervals. Some nights were better than others. He said to me, “Whatever happens later, this is me. This is how I feel. This is how things are between us.”

It was at this time that I began to consciously note a change in him. Not a fundamental change, but a slow shifting of the tectonic plates beneath him that had now become sudden and swift. For anyone who knew him when he was younger, he had a powerful presence. One of my schoolfriends referred to him recently as “your charismatic father”. He was entertaining, open, generous and friendly but also not to be trifled with. He wouldn’t tolerate shoddiness from anyone. My father didn’t punish us often as children but when he did we knew we were being punished.

As I spent this time with him, more time than we’d spent together for many years, I felt a quality in him that became more and more apparent. There was a sort of sweetness of nature and gentleness in him that had always been there and although it hadn’t been hidden exactly, it had taken different shapes or had been more mixed with other qualities, less obvious.

I knew there was something I’d read as a boy that was at the back of my mind and it took me a while to work out what it was. There’s a passage in The Lord of the Rings where someone says, He may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can. And later there is this:

Then as he had kept watch Sam had noticed that at times a light seemed to be shining faintly within; but now the light was even clearer and stronger. Frodo’s face was peaceful, the marks of fear and care had left it; but it looked old, old and beautiful, as if the chiselling of the shaping years was now revealed in many fine lines that had before been hidden, though the identity of the face was not changed. Not that Sam Gamgee put it that way to himself. He shook his head, as if finding words useless, and murmured: “I love him. He’s like that, and sometimes it shines through, somehow. But I love him, whether or no.”

Those two weeks we spent together will be a glad memory for as long as I live. There were horrible moments of suffering and worry, at times I missed my wife, who was somewhere between four and five months pregnant, and our 18-month-old son, more than I would’ve thought possible (I joked with a friend that I’d gone soft), and it was impossible to balance out things so that everyone got their due and what they needed, but that’s the way of things. I’d think to myself, this is it, this is life, don’t hold anything in reserve. I would never again be able to do this for my father and I would never again be able to spend so much time with him or be so close.

Time passed. My daughter was born early in the autumn. My father was still there. There was Christmas. The year passed. My father didn’t die. In time, after a year, he was taken off end of life care and the hospital bed was taken away. There was hope of a greater recovery but this never quite came. Two more years passed. My father’s strength came and went but over time you could see it ebbing out of him. Sometimes his light was closed off by frailty or suffering but it was always there. Somehow he gathered strength to write a short volume of memoirs last year. He sent us a gift even ten days before he died. He was always asking if there was something he could do for us.

On Tuesday of last week, the ninth of June, he was admitted for the last time to RLI. On Wednesday, about an hour and a half before my mother and I visited him, he had a seizure after which he never fully regained consciousness. We’d been called in again to say goodbye, three years and some weeks on from the last time. But it was another false alarm. And then at last on Friday the call came again. I knew this time there would be no reprieve. As I waited for my taxi my children, now two and a half and four and a half, hid in the laundry until I boomed out, “What creatures lurk in the cave of doom?” Then they jumped out and roared at me. This we repeated again and again until the car arrived. I thought about this sometimes as we drove to the hospital. The ward staff were gentle and solemn and treated us with almost painful consideration. My mother and I sat with my father for perhaps twenty minutes, if that, before he stopped breathing. Perhaps he’d heard our voices as we talked quietly. I moistened the back of my hand and held it in front of his mouth but felt nothing. We both tried to find a pulse but could not. I found a nurse and said, “I think my father’s gone.” She examined him and said that yes, he had. An emptiness descended on us but at the same time I was relieved for him. He’d shown so much courage for such a long time and at last didn’t have to any more.

One thing I felt every time I thought our loss was approaching was, “If only we could have one more conversation, if only I could see him smile again and look at me affectionately as he has so often; if only we could share one more meal.” Every time this happened until at last it didn’t.

This Friday, a week after my father’s death, I made my children’s favourite breakfast for them. As is now our custom, I rang my father’s bell to summon them to the table. They kept asking me to say, “What creatures lurk in the cave of doom?” so they could then open their mouths and show me what they were chewing before laughing as if the world would end. My mother was sleeping upstairs. My sister was sleeping in her bed four thousand miles away. And never again in this world would we see my father. But he believed with all his being that we would be reunited one day.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, June 2026)

Ira Neal Fishman, 1940–2026

…through my own experience I knew that the most excruciating thing is to implant in an individual a doubt as to his or her being a reality—a three-dimensional reality rather than some other sort.

—Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

Always the gentleman … a merciful man is merciful also to his beast … But I wouldn’t leave my little wooden ’ut, nor miss my breakfast, for no beast … Some do and some … do not.

—Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not (Parade’s End)

My children like watching an old Disney cartoon called The Aristocats; I probably watched it myself when I was a boy. I hate it less than any Disney I’ve seen in a while and unexpectedly it touches on human nature more closely than many of these sorts of things, much more than recent ones, which for me exist in a sort of weird, artificial un-universe, like Candy Corn, vivid and empty. The cat characters are more rounded, more human than Pixar people.

If you’ve forgotten or are not familiar with the plot of The Aristocats, an elderly Parisian lady, Madame Adelaide Bonfamille, keeps a family of absurdly pampered but amiable cats. She also has a loyal servant, Edgar, who discovers that he will be passed over in his employer’s will in favour of the cats until they die. He then dumps them out in the country far away so he can inherit when the time comes without waiting for them to lose their nine lives. Because he’s an unprepossessing middle-aged man, balding with a big nose, a little comical without being likeable, and the cats are charming, Edgar gets no sympathy. The cats win out. The story is supposedly based in a small way on something that actually happened in 1910, i.e. some cats inheriting a fortune.

Hearing the film playing again in another room this morning as I cooked eggs, I thought of something in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson:1

I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature.2

Johnson’s reading of human nature is so obviously true but how many people take such care?3 Not, so much the worse for the aristocats, Madame Bonfamille. Charming, elegant and unaware, she sowed dragon’s teeth.

There’s another true cat story from Paris that happened in Johnson’s time—the Great Cat Massacre of the rue Saint-Séverin in the first half of the 18th century. Disney probably won’t make a film of this one.

For context, print workers in France at that time were particularly miserable and oppressed. At Jacque Vincent’s printing shop on rue Saint-Séverin:

Apprentices slept in a filthy, freezing room, rose before dawn, ran errands all day while dodging insults from the journeymen and abuse from the master, and received nothing but slops to eat.4

Cats were treated better.5

A passion for cats seemed to have swept through the printing trade, at least at the level of the masters, or bourgeois as the workers called them. One bourgeois kept twenty-five cats. He had their portraits painted and fed them on roast fowl.

Mme Vincent at rue Saint-Séverin was a particular cat fancier whose special favourite was la grise (the grey). When grievances among the apprentices came to a head, there followed “a riotous massacre of cats”, in which la grise was killed. Some cats were given mock trials and hanged. Journeymen printers helped the apprentices.

Like Mme Bonfamille, the Vincents might have avoided catastrophe for their pets by showing some of what G K Chesterton called Samuel Johnson’s “gigantic realism”.6 Instead, they too had been sowing dragon’s teeth.

Writing about the Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton observed of the cat killers:

They certainly felt debased and had accumulated enough resentment to explode in an orgy of killing. A half-century later, the artisans of Paris would run riot in a similar manner, combining indiscriminate slaughter with improvised popular tribunals. It would be absurd to view the cat massacre as a dress rehearsal for the September massacres of the French Revolution, but the earlier outburst of violence did suggest a popular rebellion, though it remained restricted to the level of symbolism.

If you have caused people to feel humiliated, even inadvertently, by accident, by omission, by not considering they are worth thinking of at all, then watch out.7

For Samuel Johnson there were no NPCs, no non-player characters; everyone existed in three dimensions, everyone had motives and interests and feelings, and they were not alien from his own—

We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.8

Ignoring these was not only immoral but unwise (“Want of tenderness is want of parts, and is no less a proof of stupidity than depravity”).9

Alongside Johnson’s intelligence and sympathetic imagination was unusual simplicity: he wanted to know what is true and what is not; what will in fact really happen if I do this or that, setting aside what I would like to happen and what I think ought to happen; he lived in a world of solid objects and solid thoughts, not wishes and abstractions.10

The revolution in France a few years after his death was in every way unJohnsonian, marrying the rage of the humiliated with a passion for abstractions (Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité) and an ambition to remake human nature, not work with the grain of it—which in practice always means oppression and death.11 This would be repeated again and again in the 20th century and in the 21st century we again have the sinister promise of technological rebirth.12

Johnson was far too pessimistic about human nature, including his own, to kill people for not being good. His clear understanding of what we are fed his charity, not impatience to change us into something else, which can only in any case mutilate, never transform.13 His realism and his kindness were at one; and his gigantic realism was also at times a gigantic sadness, for the ineradicable pain of being human.14

Although they are separated by distances of time and space and circumstance, Solzhenitsyn’s reading of human nature sometimes makes me think of Johnson:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?15

It was around the time I was quoting this loudly to my children, aged 2 and 4, that I thought perhaps I’d forgotten my audience and wasn’t working with the grain of their natures.

I called on Dr Johnson one morning, when Mrs. Williams, the blind lady, was conversing with him. She was telling him where she had dined the day before. “There were several gentlemen there,” said she, “and when some of them came to the tea-table, I found that there had been a good deal of hard drinking.” She closed this observation with a common and trite moral reflection; which, indeed, is very ill-founded, and does great injustice to animals—“I wonder what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves.” “I wonder, Madam,” replied the Doctor, “that you have not penetration to see the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

—G B Hill (ed) Johnsonian Miscellanies (originally published in Anecdotes of the Revd Percival Stockdale)

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, May 2026)

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.

—A E Housman, Last Poems IX

A while ago I interviewed Florencia Campicelli, a sommelier at Anuva Wines of Buenos Aires, for Alderman Lushington. We talked about Argentinian wine, and at the end she gave me a wine-based cocktail recipe. Since then Anuva closed and the Alderman ceased publication—sic transit gloria mundi—but the interview remains (I think) interesting and relevant. So here it is.

In the English-speaking world people talk about ‘Argentinian wine’, but Argentina is the eighth largest country in the world and one of the longest (2268 miles from top to bottom), with an extraordinarily varied climate and geology, and this must have implications for winemaking—tell us something about the different wine regions and styles

As you mentioned, Argentina is a long country, and we have diverse microclimates that help us to develop different styles of wine. Going from north to south, we can pinpoint three very different regions, all continental (right next to the mountain range) and all receiving many days of sun during the year.

Northwestern region. Includes the provinces Jujuy, Salta, Catamarca and Tucuman, with the most important production- and quality-wise being Salta. The best Salta wines come from a valley called Calchaqui (which is shared with Tucuman province). Torrontés wines are definitely a must in this area, though Tannat and Cabernet Sauvignon are also ones to look out for. This is a very hot and dry area, with the highest vineyards in the world, which makes for a big difference of temperature between the day and night—it cools down a lot and that helps slow down the ripening process, so the grapes grow to have more complexity.

Cuyo or western region. La Rioja, San Juan and Mendoza are the three provinces here. Obviously, Mendoza stands out with its various microclimates, though it’s worth mentioning that San Juan has a valley called Pedernal that makes very high-quality wines; the Syrah, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot from this area are highly regarded. This is mainly a hot weather area with alluvial soil, good for deep styles of red wine.

Southern region or north Patagonia. Here the main areas are Neuquen, Rio Negro and the south of La Pampa. Over there we have the coolest weather for winemaking in Argentina, and Pinot Noir, Merlot and most of the whites are at their best. Mainly cool weather wines.

Note that after 1934, the Argentine government passed a law to concentrate grapevine production near the Andes mountain range, and this wasn’t lifted until the last decade of the twentieth century. From that time on, they started to grow grapevines in the Entre Rios, Buenos Aires and Santa Fe provinces. So there are new winemaking areas and new styles of wine emerging. There is a promising area in Buenos Aires called Medanos (near the seaside), where experimental vineyards are already starting to make high-quality vintages.

Why is Mendoza so dominant?

Sixty per cent of Argentinian wine comes from Mendoza. A bunch of factors come into play when you try to explain this. It has amazing natural conditions for winemaking, with its different microclimates at different altitudes, its types of soil and its overall temperatures. Water is readily available and—keeping in mind that most of our vineyards are basically in the middle of deserts—that is no small matter. Alongside these natural advantages, it is an area of high economic and social development and it benefits from favourable government policies.

The best Malbec comes from this province. Three names to remember when looking for wine from Mendoza are: Maipu (for easy drinking and fruit-driven styles of wine), Lujan de Cuyo (for more mineral and complex styles, especially when they come from the Perdriel region, a small city in that area) and Valle de Uco (for flowery, fruity and delicate styles, the best come from the Tupungato, Gualtallary and Vista Flores areas). Look for all these names on the label.

Tell us about the special relationship between Malbec and Argentina

I’ll start by telling you a bit about the story of Malbec from its beginnings, if I may put it that way. Malbec wasn’t the original name for the grape, it was known as Cot or Cot Noir, but because of the way the grapes were used in Cahors it was nicknamed Malbec, after the French words mal (bad) and bec (beak), meaning ‘bad mouth’ or ‘bad tasting’ in slang! This was because the grape that came from those vineyards was very deep in colour (it was widely used for blending to add colour and acidity in wines from neighbouring Bordeaux) and would smell and taste like raisins and garlic; French people didn’t like it, and who could blame them?1

Luckily for us, it arrived here in the mid-1800s thanks to a French agronomist called Michel Aime Pouget, who was hired by our soon-to-be president, Domingo F Sarmiento. Michel had already started a greenhouse of French vines in Santiago by that time and the main goal of this was to introduce high-quality vines to Argentina—before then we only had vines to make wine for church mass. And so it was that Malbec found its place in this very sunny and dry climate with (mostly) alluvial soil to become a full-bodied yet very fruity wine with lots of different aromas—red fruits and also flowers such as violets—that can be drunk young or after aging in the cellar.

In the UK, Argentinian Malbec has become a supermarket and pub staple, with many reliably enjoyable, good value wines being sold. However, there’s a lot more to Argentinian wine than value and reliability. Tell us a bit about what’s available and how you choose what to stock. What should our readers look out for?

Look out for boutique wines would be my recommendation. These are wines from limited production wineries, most of them are family owned and they put a lot of time and effort into making a high-quality, great value product! This is the type of winery we work with. Las Perdices started really small and worked their way up to the medium-size winery they are now—they were one of the first partners we had. We now also work with El Porvenir de Cafayate, a winery from Salta with amazing Torrontés. Then there is the MeVi boutique winery (which has great Tuscan-style wines, yet made from 100% Argentine Malbec), Familia Blanco (with mind-blowing and award-winning Bonarda) and CarinaE (French-style wines, since the owners are from France with a new found love for Malbec)—all from Mendoza. The newest addition is Patritti (with incredible Pinot Noir, Merlot and Chardonnay) from Neuquen, in northern Patagonia.

When looking for wine for cellaring it is always good to go for full-bodied wines that are very aromatic yet slightly strong in the ‘gripping’ sensation they leave in the mouth; that way we know that they have enough tannins to age nicely. (Tannins are responsible for that dry feeling we get in the mouth when drinking red wine.) I’d recommend getting at least three bottles (or two if you’ve already tasted it) when laying wine down to mature: one to drink now and see if it has aging potential, and the other two for cellaring itself. One will work as a tester (usually opened halfway through the time you’d want to age the wine), and the other one can be left for the final test, the opening and drinking!

Malbec wines are the most successful ones in Argentina, especially for the international market, but many other wines are made. What about the other wines, in particular Bonarda and Torrontés?

Bonarda is the new up-and-coming red. Look out for it in the future. Experts like Alberto Antonini (the famous travelling Italian winemaker) say it’ll be the next big red wine from here. It’s only grown here in Argentina and is an extremely easy drinking style of wine. Lots of red fruit aromas plus a black pepper aftertaste, and incredibly easy to pair with simple food (pasta, pizza, cold cuts and cheeses). I recommend one from Mendoza for the full expression of the grape.

Torrontés is amazingly unique. Not only is it our flagship white wine, it’s the only native grape that we have to make high-quality wines. Definitely one to look out for when pairing with hot and spicy food, since it’s very aromatic (it is excellent with aromatic spices like ginger) and has an amazing lively acidity to it that will cut right through the heat and flavors and allow you to keep on eating. The best come from Cafayate or the Valles Calchaquies area in general, which is in the province of Salta.

Argentinian and Chilean wines are well known internationally, but wine is also made elsewhere in South and Central America, e.g. in Brazil and Uruguay. Is any of it good and do you think it’ll become better known?

Uruguay has some great Tannat (actually that’s their flagship wine) and Brazil has some good sparkling wines. They both have very particular weather, one is very humid (Uruguay) and the other tropical (Brazil), so that makes the winemaking process very different. My guess is that they’ll get much better with time, which is more or less what happened with Chile and Argentina. You have to learn to play to your strengths!

You serve food at your wine tastings. Is this because wine is usually drunk with food in Argentina? What should we eat with Argentinian wine?

Here in Argentina we do usually have a drink and eat at the same time, and I personally think that the best thing to eat when drinking is a picada, an assortment of cold cuts, cheeses, sauces and bread. Depending on the types of things you have to hand to chop and get onto a plate to share, you can pair it with red, white or even a rosé. Our favourite choices are Malbec, Bonarda, Torrontés or Malbec rosé to pair with this.

How is wine served in Argentina? What glasses, serving temperatures, etc would you recommend for the different types and styles?

Our wines are usually high in alcohol because we have a lot of sun in all of our wine regions, so the best thing is to serve the red wines slightly chilled. Depending on how complex and old the wine is, it can be served from 14 to 17°C. Younger, lighter and fruitier styles should be served cooler than more complex, full-bodied and aged wines.

White wines can be served at fridge temperature, around 10°C, and sparkling is usually enjoyed best when cold, around 7°C.

When it comes to glassware, I could recommend one style per wine, but the truth is that most of us don’t have that much space (or perhaps the budget) to get so many different ones. The large glasses are good for letting the aromas of the wine develop, but whatever you get, just keep in mind that the glass should be good quality and not too thick, and when serving white, serve to less than the line of the ‘equator’, so it doesn’t become warm before you finish.

You seem to enjoy wine cocktails, do you have a recipe for us?

Yes: the Cynblanc Julep. It’s a sweet and sour drink made with Cynar, now super-trendy in Buenos Aires. Cynar is a herbal bitters with artichokes as the base ingredient. [Editor’s note: Cynar is an Italian bitters and is now made by Campari; it can be used instead of Campari in the Negroni.] We would choose Punta Carmelo Sauvignon Blanc 2013 as the wine component in this one—a crisp and fresh white wine. Let’s see what else we will need for this one…

• a highball glass (or any large and tall one)

• 1½ oz Cynar

• 2 oz Punta Carmelo Sauvignon Blanc (or similar wine)

• four large basil leaves

• ½ oz basic syrup

• 1 oz grapefruit juice

• crushed ice

First, put the basil leaves at the bottom of the glass along with the syrup and a few drops of juice, then crush and mix with a mortar. Then place the crushed ice in the glass (slightly more than half of the glass capacity) and start pouring in the following order: Cynar, Sauvignon Blanc and juice. You can decorate with peppermint leaves and half a slice of grapefruit for garnish.

What would you say to our readers about the best way to drink wine?

The best way to drink wine is to enjoy it! It’s better in company from my perspective, although I know people who have a glass of wine and use it to take some time to reflect about the day. It’s up to the reader how they enjoy that bottle or glass, the point of it is to have a nice time.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, April 2026)

This is the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the other will descend. If you go to the right—you lose your life, and if you go the left—you lose your conscience.

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Captain of Cavalry Witold Pilecki volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz.

The prisoners were at first mostly Poles suspected of anti-German activity, as well as ‘undesirables’ of one kind or another. Auschwitz didn’t begin as a death camp; many inmates died, but that wasn’t yet the real purpose. They could always be killed quite casually by guards, kapos or anyone else with authority, and then there was starvation, cold and overwork. Lists of people to be shot were issued regularly; sometimes fatal punishments were more elaborate. The Gestapo would take a sudden, often deadly, interest in individuals. There was an especially atrocious and deadly penal company for Jews and Catholic priests.1 But the real mass killings hadn’t begun and the gas chambers and huge crematoria hadn’t been built or probably even thought of.

In 1940 the Polish underground decided that they needed an agent on the inside, someone to report on what was happening and organise resistance from within. Even pre-death camp, this wasn’t something you could order someone to do: a volunteer was required. Pilecki, formerly a gentleman farmer, amateur poet and painter, then a wartime cavalry officer, now part of the underground, decided to do it. The plan was to be deliberately arrested and taken to the camp, and that’s what he did.

Pilecki’s most recent English language biographer, Jack Fairweather, begins his book with a small incident moments before the arrest:

The door crashes open below and boots clatter on the stairs. The man [Pilecki] puts his coat on and then notices that the three-year-old boy in the room opposite is standing up wide-eyed in his cot. His teddy bear has fallen to the floor. Fists start to pound on the door. The man quickly picks up the bear and hands it to the boy as the mother lets the Germans in.

I suspect Fairweather opened with this because it’s so characteristic, showing Pilecki’s mix of toughness, gentleness and courtesy, and how he maintained his character under duress.

Of his arrival at Auschwitz, Pilecki later wrote:

Around 10:00 p.m. (22:00 hours) the train stopped somewhere and went no further. We could hear shouting and yelling, the cars being opened up and the baying of dogs. I consider this place in my story to be the moment when I bade farewell to everything I had hitherto known on this earth and entered something seemingly no longer of it.

On the way into the camp some of his fellow prisoners were chosen at random and shot “to the accompaniment of laughter and joking” from the SS guards.2

In camps, in particular Nazi concentration camps and those in the Soviet Gulag system,3 if you survived the early shock,4 the farewell to everything you had hitherto known on this earth and entry into something seemingly no longer of it, some of the greatest moral and physical tests were endless hunger and, for much of the year, terrible cold.

Varlam Shalamov5 was a political prisoner in camps in the Soviet Far East from 1937–1951. In What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps, he listed (among many other things):

• The extraordinary fragility of human nature, of civilization. A human being would turn into a beast after three weeks of hard work, cold, starvation and beatings.

• The cold was the principal means of corrupting the soul; in the Central Asian camps people must have held out longer—it was warmer there.

• I saw that the only group that retained a bit of their humanity, despite the starvation and abuse, were the religious, the sectarians, almost all of them—and the majority of the priests.

The stronger prisoners faced endless temptations and choices. Should you take what you need from others, their food, anything they might have for warmth? Should you sell out to the camp authorities, perhaps even become an informer? Should you look out only for yourself? Is the only thing to survive, or at least minimise your suffering? Or should you simply give up thinking, exist like a fatalistic amoeba?

These choices returned again and again, with temptation taking new forms and familiar ones suddenly catching fire again.

Pilecki was affected like everyone else, with the extra temptation of using his mission as an excuse for demanding or accepting special treatment from other prisoners. After all, he’d volunteered to be there, he was there on official underground business, he needed to stay fit and alert; he was important. Nonetheless, he resisted, found his way through, decided he could do the job assigned to him and set about it in a thoughtful, methodical and enterprising way.

Pilecki doesn’t seem to have been an eager martyr or full of reckless courage. He thought about volunteering to enter Auschwitz for some time before doing it. Similarly, after arrival, he thought seriously about whether his mission was realistic and how to go about it; he didn’t just go through the motions but gave it a real and intelligent go. He didn’t want to throw his life away, not least because he had a wife and son on the outside. He was careful though not timid about his life and the lives of his comrades. His courage and selflessness weren’t flashy or bombastic but impressed his fellow prisoners, gave him authority, and helped him overcome the every-man-for-himself nihilism of the camp—something that had seemed impossible. He changed the moral atmosphere around him.

When Pilecki was confident that he could do something meaningful in Auschwitz, he sidestepped another temptation. In the early days, the families of Polish prisoners who were well off and not high profile could ‘ransom’ their captive relatives, i.e. bribe Nazi officials to release them. Pilecki smuggled a message out to his family instructing them not to do this; volunteering for a second time, if you like.

He was in Auschwitz from September 1940 to April 1943 before escaping. In that time, he recruited and organised an underground movement, with cells spread through the camp, in the circumstances an extraordinary achievement. The risks were appalling.

He also saw the development of Auschwitz into a death camp.

Pilecki struggled to make sense of what was happening and sometimes misreported events and the motives behind them through inability to understand the Nazis. Their thoughts were beyond his reckoning.6 But he chose not to ignore what he couldn’t comprehend, unlike many others,7 gathering intelligence assiduously and smuggling it out, together with increasingly desperate requests for assistance, whether from Allied bombing raids (better than being murdered by the SS) or underground attacks to make an uprising and mass escape possible. Nothing happened. Pilecki’s information was treated with scepticism and plans for taking direct action were often regarded as a distraction from the one thing that the authorities believed would ultimately stop the horrors: winning the war.

When he believed he could achieve nothing more by staying, Pilecki plotted his escape, going with two other prisoners. The odds were hugely against them8 but all three made it to safety. Pilecki thought that a personal appeal to his superiors in the resistance was the only way to coordinate an attack on and uprising in Auschwitz, but despite his enterprise and perseverance, he didn’t get the necessary support. He regarded his mission as a failure. There had been, and would be, no uprising.

Around that time, he learned that the majority of the camp’s underground leadership had been rounded up and shot. He was devastated by what he saw as his failure to persuade the underground to take action. He understood the practical objections to the mission … but remained certain of the moral case for attacking the camp. After all, the imperative to face down such evil was what had kept his men fighting and had formed the basis of his reports.9

Having worked for one since Poland’s defeat in 1939, Pilecki did finally take part in a revolt against her occupiers, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, leading his unit of resistance fighters against German troops with courage and skill in the face of what turned out to be impossible odds. This, too, was a failure: the underground suffered huge casualties, with many taken prisoner; civilians were systematically massacred by the SS in revenge; the city was destroyed. The Germans kept hold of Poland’s capital until the Soviets replaced them.

One of the aims of the uprising was to establish a strong, independent position as the Red Army approached: many Poles worried about becoming Soviet vassals after the Nazis were defeated. When the Germans invaded from the west in 1939, the Soviets invaded in concert from the east, occupying a large part of Poland until it was their turn to be invaded in 1941.10 Nor would earlier history have reassured anyone.11

In the event, the Soviets and their local flunkies did seize power after a brief interlude of pseudo-democratic theatre and purged every part of Polish society.

Tens of thousands … were interrogated, tortured, and often murdered: as many as 16,000 people are thought to have died in this way…. Recently vacated German concentration camps were reactivated and filled up…. Those who had served in Polish forces abroad and returned to offer their services to the new state were mostly shot.12

Pilecki’s final mission was to return to Poland from Italy, where from summer 1945 he’d been serving under General Władysław Anders in Polish II Corps, and report on the new regime. Again he put himself into danger voluntarily. By using various false identities he avoided unwelcome attention for a while, but then his cover was blown and he was ordered to flee. Pilecki decided not to. He was arrested by the communist authorities in 1947, interrogated with torture, and then put on trial for treason and whatever other charges occurred to them. It was one of the first show trials in post-war Poland, following the Stalinist template.

Pilecki said that this was the worst time:

Auschwitz was just a game compared to this. I’m very tired. I want a swift conclusion.

The frantic cruelty of the Nazis seemed less focused than the measured, calculated destruction of the communists. Anyone who has read, say, 1984 or Darkness at Noon will have some notion of this peculiar determination to annihilate ‘enemies’ psychologically and morally before disposing of them:

the goal was absolute dehumanization, reducing people to quivering masses of flesh who had forgotten who they were and who had lost the ability to feel normal emotions.13

Though he was worn out, Pilecki kept hold of his humanity.

Two things stand out to me from his trial. First, the fact that he tried to hide his hands in the courtroom because they showed obvious signs of torture and he wanted to spare his wife and sister, who were watching. Second, there were his remarks when testifying. In place of the customary plea for mercy, he said:

I tried to live my life in such a fashion so that in my last hour, I would rather be happy than fearful. I find happiness in knowing that the fight was worth it.

Pilecki was sentenced to death and then killed.

The jailers read his sentence aloud, gagged him with a white scarf, then took him under the arms to lead him outside. It had rained that morning, but the clouds were lifting and the sky was still light in the west. They brought him to a small, single-story building on the prison grounds. As they neared the dimly lit building, Witold insisted on walking unaided. The executioner, Piotr Śmietański, was waiting inside. A priest and a doctor in a medical smock stood to one side. Witold was ordered to stand against the wall. Then Śmietański raised his pistol and shot him in the back of the head.

His sacrifice was again in a lost cause. Until the rise of Solidarność (Solidarity) in the 1980s and then the collapse of communism throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Poland was governed almost unchallenged by a totalitarian regime itself subject to Soviet control.14

Pilecki’s brave, consistent, carefully made choices led to personal disaster. All his worldly hopes failed. By the lights of, say, utilitarian ethics, effective altruism, or LinkedIn, his life was a failure.15 But if people aren’t some sort of biological machine for whom the best you can do is to optimise their outputs, perhaps he was a great man.

At the very least he helped some of his fellow prisoners suffer and die with a greater measure of hope, dignity, fellowship and purpose than they otherwise would; maybe he saved some from losing themselves altogether and becoming monsters. He may have helped some survive who would otherwise have surrendered to despair.

The scholar of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, emphasised the power of:

political and moral examples: they are rare, but they illuminate and expand our moral imaginations, revealing the innermost potentialities in the human soul, an ability to rise above the everyday and the typical.16

Moral examples can cut either way. One of Varlam Shalamov’s saddest Kolyma Tales (Gulag stories) concerns a certain Captain Schneider, whom the protagonist remembers as a brave, dauntless comrade from an earlier spell in prison, but then encounters later as a servile wretch, broken by the camps—it destroys him:

He had no desire to go on living. Even though this was a trivial event by comparison with that which he had seen and was still destined to witness, he never forgot Captain Schneider.

But if just one person isn’t reduced to a beast or a monster or a slave under the intolerable pressure, then collapse and surrender are no longer an ineluctable law, and even if we are unable to follow their example, we know that the victory of evil is not written in the stars, there is somebody who didn’t give in.

I enjoyed the 2006 film, Śmierć rotmistrza Pileckiego (The Death of Cavalry Captain Pilecki), directed by Ryszard Bugajski, English subtitles, though it’s a dramatization and as you’d expect not entirely historically accurate.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, April 2026)

I first saw someone talk about a global Wile E Coyote moment as the 2008 financial crisis brewed up:

in the Road Runner, there’s almost always a moment when Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff and according to the laws of cartoon physics it’s only when he looks down and realizes that there’s nothing under him and ... So the Wile E. Coyote moment hit in 2008 when you know, the housing bubble had started to burst, people started to look and say: There’s all that debt, oh that’s terrible, better call in those loans, better force people to repay.1

This appealed to me in all sorts of ways. To start with, there was the sense of how these things are experienced. There was also the mingled pathos and comedy; the glance to camera, the shared recognition of the moment, and then the plunge.2

(If you click on this clip it almost immediately shows you the coyote doing his bit.)

I used the stolen Wile E Coyote analogy in early 2020 as the covid pandemic approached the British Isles during days of rain and political fury. It took a while for people to look down. I also became a bit obsessed with the David Bowie song, Panic in Detroit. Chorus aside, the lyrics didn’t fit all that brilliantly, but the shaky jauntiness of the tune and the repetition of PANIC IN DETROIT felt right for the time.

I started to respond internally, silently, to the news in the medium of song.

The road is closed because of flooding.

PANIC IN DETROIT.

We had a woman in buying as much toilet roll as she could fit in her trolley.

PANIC IN DETROIT.

You’re supposed to wash your hands with soap for twenty seconds.

PANIC IN DETROIT.

With my wife and a couple of friends I’d just text or email PANIC IN DETROIT or PID in response to any news and they began replying in kind. Then we started saying it to each other in person when out as code. Look, someone’s buying up all the handwash—PID.3

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about all this off and on as I get the Wile E Coyote feeling again. (Yes, Iran, oil, gas, etc, mostly.) Switching metaphors, there’s a huge wild pig of inflation moving down the boa constrictor of life, and we’re just waiting for it to reach us along with all the second and third order indigestion that’ll mean.4 Still, at least we don’t have any other problems and we’re well prepared and brilliantly governed, we have been for years.

(Don’t) PID.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, March 2026)

We’ve gradually become friends with the owner of a farm my son walks through on the way to (pre)school. Although we call him The Farmer and he comes from generations of farmers, he’s actually an agricultural engineer and the yard is full of old tractors and machinery, all tended to with loving care according to a private system that certainly exists but isn’t immediately apparent.1 (I also have private systems and recognise one even where I don’t understand it.)

I’ve written elsewhere about his kindness to the children, showing one of them a bird nest, giving them eggs laid by his hens, even putting a few coins into their grubby hands for birthdays and holidays, or when they’ve had a haircut,2 but we’ve also got into the habit of having sometimes quite long conversations from time to time. During one of these last year I mentioned that I like eating pheasant and he said he’d bring me one some day.

Hence I was surprised but not amazed when he appeared on our doorstep on New Year’s Day carrying a dead but intact hen pheasant, held behind his back in case it upset the children (aged two and four). He wouldn’t come in or stay long to be thanked because his grandson was waiting for him in his van.

Our friend needn’t have worried about the bairns: there was a sort of ceremonial-festival atmosphere as I carried the pheasant solemnly through to the kitchen, with them capering around me. They’ve seen pheasants and they’ve seen death already.

Things we’ve seen dead on walks and in our garden:

• a deer3

• squirrels

• mice

• rats

• shrews, voles, etc

• moles4

• frogs

• sheep

• rabbits

• a badger

• a hare

• a cat

• bats

• birds, e.g. blackbirds, pigeons, a snipe, pheasants, a duck, a thrush, tits, sparrows and finches

• fish

The day before we’d seen a headless pigeon in the woods.

So this was exciting, to have a dead pheasant in the house, but not shocking or alarming.

However, unlike the children, I had mixed feelings. My gratitude was pure enough but I was fantastically busy and distracted by a lot of overlapping things involving family and work, and worried that I’d fail to rise to the moment. I’d never plucked, trimmed and gutted a bird of any kind from scratch. I have an old book called Butchering, Processing and Preservation of Meat, but I got that years ago mostly for smoking and curing, and, I’ll be honest, posing—mostly to myself.5 I’d like to be someone who can butcher, process and preserve meat.

The Farmer thought that I was such a person, at least to the extent of handling a pheasant. I’m guessing this is because I talk like such a person sometimes.

It’s perfectly legitimate and amiable to shrug and laugh at your pretensions and shortcomings, and move on, I do it often, but sometimes you can try to grow into your exaggerated self-image to make it a little bit truer.

So one afternoon after it had been hanging around in the cold utility room for a few days, I removed the pheasant’s head, wings and feet, my wife skinned it, I removed its innards, my wife rinsed and tidied it, removing stray feathers, and then I jointed it. Skinning was quicker and easier than plucking and we’d decided to casserole it anyway.

We didn’t make an especially neat job of it, but it was okay. It wasn’t technically particularly difficult. There was some knife work though much of it was done with our hands. It might seem pretty grisly if you’re not used to this sort of thing and it’s not a job to take on if you’re in two minds about what you’re doing, you have to do it with conviction.

It’s an outdoor job and requires some prep: we used a sharp short-bladed knife, a chopping board to do the work on, a large bowl with cold water for cleaning, a large carrier bag for feathers and other waste and a plate to put the finished bird on. I also filled the kitchen sink with hot soapy water, like someone getting ready for an emergency home birth.

Having two of us, and especially having someone else who could offer a second opinion or look something up when your hands were full, made it a lot easier for novices like us. It was obvious, though, that someone skilled and experienced would do all this quickly and casually, and make a much better job of it.

I browned the pheasant legs and breasts and seasoned them with salt and pepper, set them aside, made a sort of soffritto by sautéing cubes of locally smoked pig cheek (guanciale), onion, garlic, fennel, carrots and red pepper slowly in olive oil, seasoned this with rosemary, thyme and fennel seeds, added tomato paste, a tin of chopped tomatoes, some wine and a lot of meat stock,6 returned the browned pheasant to the liquid, and then cooked this on a low heat for a few hours.

We ate the finished dish with potatoes and greens. It would’ve been good with pappardelle but the children love taters. Both tried the pheasant and our daughter had seconds. Perhaps it was just the sunk cost fallacy talking, but I enjoyed it a great deal.

I took a lot of satisfaction from the whole episode beyond the eating of the food. Among other things, I’d done something my ten-year-old self would be impressed by for probably the first time in a while.

In notebooks, on scraps of paper in folders and envelopes, in odd places on my computer, I have scores and scores of stubs, which is to say pictures and ideas for writing that haven’t been fully developed or realised. Some are tiny; some are quite close to maturity. There’s something alike in broader life: ideas of living I’ve had, paths started on but not taken, ways of thinking about myself that are unrealised or incomplete. And this gift of a pheasant touched on one of the oldest stubs and brought it suddenly to life.

Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt. (Measure for Measure)

You might also like…

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, January 2026)

You like the mind a Substack to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind a Substack to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position. (Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost (part 1 of the Salterton Trilogy)

My first proper Substack post went out to only six subscribers. If you signed up later, as you probably did, there’s a good chance you haven’t read the earlier pieces, so here’s some of my backlist in case you’re interested.

(If you haven’t subscribed already and you like some of this, it’s free to sign up and all that happens is that you receive an email when I post something.)

Happy New Year and thank you for reading.

The three most popular from 2024

Methods for living

The English Lake District seen through different eyes

If I could only drink one cocktail for the rest of my life, it’d be this

The three most popular from 2025

The things that happen

I’d rather be flogged than go on a team building exercise

Respecting and possibly romanticising the parallel lives of farmers

Three older drink pieces

An election night cocktail

Campari: a story

Drinking red wine in the heat

AI, art, tech and all that

Maybe there are things you need to do for yourself

Smartphones and tobacco as opposing twins

Who is training whom?

Nothing in particular

Something and nothing, mostly nothing

Most pretentious and/or mystifying

Cryptic tarns and the mystery of life

Are some things best left unsaid, unseen, unheard?

Also quite popular

Things heard on the road

There are others I haven’t listed, some of which might be alright. And I probably shouldn’t have laid into Paddington Bear at Christmas.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, January 2026)

The government introduced Tier 4: Stay at Home covid restrictions in Cumbria and many other areas at 00:01 on 31 December 2020; effectively another lockdown.

In the morning there was a deep, hard frost, with a little snow. Streaks of blue and gold mixed with freezing fog and clouds. It could only have been better with more snow.

I walked up to two local tarns, Potter Tarn and on to Gurnal Dubs, and then home; a seven or eight mile circuit from my front door. I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed a solitary walk more. I’d done the same walk the day before, when the sky was pure winter blue and the surface of Gurnal Dubs was like glass.

Late afternoon I lit the barbecue.

All this was good, but there was a feeling of unreality about the world, and of being constantly managed, that I’d begun to dislike more than I realised at the time. Now this seems a hundred years ago.

Happy New Year for 2026. My next proper post will be in a few weeks.

Paul Fishman (Burneside, 2020; Skelsmergh, 2025)

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death)

Cruelty is invariably accompanied by sentimentality. It is the law of complementaries. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago)

One way I amuse myself while trying to make sense of things is to run parts of life through a script.

A favourite is the fairy tale/1970s sci-fi script.

If AI were an apple in a fairy tale, should you eat it? Would creating simulacra of the dead work out well? If cybernetic implants were being pushed as a new wonder technology, would the Charlton Heston character go all in on them or resist? Would gain of function research on pathogenic viruses … have you seen The Omega Man? And so on and on.

There are some more specific scripts.

Choose and perish

There’s a moment towards the end of Ghostbusters (1984) where Gozer the Gozerian,1 having established that its adversaries aren’t gods, says—Choose and perish.

Gozer is the Sumerian god of destruction that looks like it might once have been a friend of David Bowie’s.

Choose and perish means that the ghostbusters get to pick the physical form that Gozer will take in our dimension to destroy us. One of them—What did you do, Ray?—can’t help thinking of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, who duly appears 100 feet high and full of fight. Thus will the world end, unless they can stop it somehow.

This may just have been the casual setup for the gag of the Marshmallow Man, but it feels as if there is somehow something true embedded in it, as in some myths.

Is there a sense in which individuals and civilisations sometimes choose implicitly the manner of their destruction?

I think so, and it’s likely to be some deep, inscrutable impulse, like Ray’s childhood memory of Stay Puft. Not something conscious, but something you can still be aware of at times.

So, this script becomes, what will we choose to perish by, and will we know we’ve done it?

I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible

There’s also a moment in The Lord of the Rings.

In Lothlórien, Frodo offers Galadriel the One Ring, the Ring of Power.

She responds:

In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen! And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!2

Galadriel refuses the ring, the temptation of (middle) earthly power, which seems like the point. But there’s more to it.

In offering the ring, Frodo said:

You are wise and fearless and fair, Lady Galadriel …. It is too great a matter for me.

In complement to the hunger for power there is a hunger for subjection; a desire not to be responsible, to be protected, to be provided for, to think there is some worldly power that will exercise our will for us with wisdom, justice and strength, with no effort from us, without troubling our judgement.

For some this will centre on an individual, but for others it will be impersonal institutions, systems, technologies, procedures, the law. Combining elements of both is the elevation of the Party and/or the cause.3

This is also a temptation to be resisted.

Then there’s the understanding that tyranny can take congenial or even beautiful, lovable forms, according to the tastes of the age and the place. Bad things don’t always have flaming eyes, or wear black cloaks, or march in jackboots. You can be smothered with a cushion just as well as being clubbed with a truncheon or flayed with a whip.

Also implicit in Galadriel’s refusal is that good cannot be achieved through evil means, that anything accomplished using evil means will turn to evil, that you should never under any circumstances use the One Ring, even with good intentions. Not only do the ends not justify the means, but you will never achieve good through evil.

So, this script becomes, to whom or what shall we prostrate ourselves, and give possession of not just our bodily fates but our consciences; what earthly power shall we pretend is endlessly wise and good; what shall we persuade ourselves is okay to do because we are good and want good things?

But Paddington, oh Paddington, how can we, how dare we, speak of you, Our Paddington?

It happened during a special Christmas episode of The Great British Bake Off, broadcast over all media throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the British Overseas Territories and the Crown Dependencies.

The final episode. The final coronation. The final handshake.

Extraordinary pre-publicity efforts came to little; the public were already weary from over-stimulus. Everything was always everything, someone complained; it was always the biggest this or the final that or the newest the other; the culmination of everything always, all the time. It was boring.

When it finally happened it was with a feeling of relief rather than exultation: peace at last, and comfort.

There was only one celebrity contestant. The others were said to have withdrawn out of respect.

On the winner’s table was a brightly lit tray of simple cupcakes with marmalade-coloured icing. In shadow behind stood the victor.

The show’s judges and presenters emerged slowly and then stopped a few metres from the cupcakes. Paul Hollywood advanced alone before extending his hand and shaking a hairy paw. He bowed his head.

Paddington then spoke.

And now at last it comes. You will give me the Handshake freely! In place of the King and the Prime Minister you will set up a Bear. And I shall not be drab, wearing an open-necked shirt under a dark suit, but twee and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and be cosy!

He lifted up his paw and through the marmalade smeared on his claws there issued a warm orange light that illuminated him alone and left all else dark. He stood before the Bake Off lackeys seeming now soft beyond measurement, and twee beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful.

“Choose and perish,” said Paddington.

Faintly, Noel Fielding’s voice could be heard hissing, What did you do, Paul?

Hollywood was the first to taste a cupcake. He bit, smiled, looked briefly joyous, his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell to the floor. The others followed.

Thus began the Great Therapeutanisation. An end to all cares, all discomfort, all sorrow, all life.

Epilogue: fortune’s son

There are different versions of the Oedipus story, but this is one.

In a first prophecy, Laius, king of Thebes, is told by an oracle that he is fated to be killed by his son.

In a second prophecy, Oedipus, son of King Laius and Queen Jocasta, is told by an oracle that he is fated to kill his father and marry his mother.

In response to the first, Laius orders that his baby son be killed, but, unknown to him, he lives. Oedipus then grows up in the city of Corinth, where he is adopted by the king and queen, Polybus and Merope (sometimes called Periboea), thinking he is their child by birth. He’s then told the second prophecy and leaves his home to escape this crime. Oedipus travels to Thebes and on the way meets his real father King Laius on the road and kills him after a disagreement, not knowing who he is. Arriving in Thebes, he saves the city by solving the Riddle of the Sphinx. After delivering the newly kingless Thebes from its affliction, Oedipus is made king and marries the widowed queen, Jocasta, his mother, unwittingly fulfilling the prophecies. Before he discovers what he has done he thinks of himself as specially lucky, fortune’s son.

There are different ways of looking at this as well as different tellings, and there aren’t any Key Takeaways to stick in a PowerPoint, but—

Are we really who we think we are? Are we really doing what we think we’re doing? What are the second and third order consequences of our actions? Is there a tendency for us to make the things we are trying most to avoid in life happen through the very actions we are taking to avoid them?

So, this script becomes, who are we really, what are we actually doing, what are we most trying to avoid, and are we actually making it happen—as individuals, states, nations, civilisations?

For what it’s worth, I think the Paddington era in Great Britain may be drawing to a close, to be replaced by a harder aesthetic, who knows what.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, December 2025)

Christmas-ish films

Die Hard (1988) is the Christmas(-ish) action film people talk about, but I think writer–director Shane Black’s pictures in that line are more interesting. He made his Hollywood writing debut with the screenplay for Lethal Weapon (1987) and then his directorial debut with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)—both set at Christmas.

I like to watch Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in particular at this time of year. It’s a mystery–comedy–thriller, and a bit of a smart arse pastiche of film noir and hardboiled crime fiction, though I think also in a sense sincere. If you love Raymond Chandler like I do, you might enjoy all that.1 It’s not exactly It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), but it has some warmth and, as in that, there is real misery and pain and there are real problems to work through. That’s also true for Lethal Weapon, for that matter. Real misery, not just Bruce Willis walking on broken glass in bare feet or another Cherman being clubbed to death like an angry baby seal.

Shane Black used to be known for his use of Christmas settings:

I saw him talk at a film festival once and he said he used to do that because Christmas was just a happy, fun time of year that he liked spending time in. But then he got divorced around Christmas or something so now he doesn’t do it anymore.

I don’t know why, but that little story stuck with me. The fact that the teller can’t be bothered to remember the details (“or something”) makes it more poignant and, I’ll admit, amusing.

Christmas 1946, part 1

The year It’s a Wonderful Life was released, Evelyn Waugh, characteristically, wasn’t feeling much Christmas spirit:

The frost has now broken and everything is now dripping and shabby and gusty. The prospect of Christmas appalls me and I look forward to the operating theatre as a happy release.

Waugh was going to have his haemorrhoids removed, thus the reference to the operating theatre. Christmas was as expected:

I made a fair show of geniality throughout the day though the spectre of a litter of shoddy toys and half-eaten sweets sickened me. Everything is so badly made nowadays that none of the children’s presents seemed to work. Luncheon was cold and poorly cooked. A ghastly day.2

Luncheon was cold

Some people thought I arranged things outdoors on Christmas Day 2020 because of covid, but really I just like being outside with large fires, especially when it’s cold. It was –4°C and fine when we set up in the morning but picked up to be around 2°C late in the afternoon, when it started raining. The food lost its heat almost instantly. Although it made for theatre and camaraderie and some indefinable special quality, only I wanted to do it again.

A theory of Christmas gifts

Children famously, to the point of it being boring to mention it, love playing with empty boxes. They leave their presents untouched and play with the packaging instead!

But has it occurred to you that they’re following the principles of ancient Chinese art?

The highest type of pictorial style is called xie yi, which means the style that writes the meaning of things (instead of describing their appearances or shapes). The guiding principle for this form of painting is ‘to express the idea without the brush having to run its full course’ (yi da bi bu dao). The ideal painting is achieved not on paper but in the mind of the spectator; for the painter, the whole skill consists in selecting those minimal visual clues that will allow the painting to reach its full and invisible blossoming in the viewer’s imagination. This point leads us into another theme: the active function of emptiness—the role played by ‘blanks’ in painting, by silence in music, the poems that lie beyond words. (Simon Leys (real name: Pierre Ryckmans), essay in The Hall of Uselessness; I go on about this in a long discursive piece here)

An empty box is a poem that lies beyond words.

Christmas 1946, part 2

The classic Powell and Pressburger film, A Matter of Life and Death, was released over the same Christmas period in 1946 as It’s a Wonderful Life. It isn’t about Christmas, only around a fifth is set on Christmas Eve, but it works beautifully and is sometimes regarded as a traditional seasonal watch, including in parts of the USA. (It was released on Christmas Day in New York as Stairway to Heaven.)3 It’s also a good film, possibly a great one, and a favourite of mine, even though it’s not my best loved Powell and Pressburger—that’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Blimp and some other P&P films would also make excellent Christmas viewing.

Martin Scorsese loves Powell and Pressburger’s work.

After Christmas 1946

Following Evelyn Waugh’s frost then thaw and dismal, sodden Christmas, the cold set in again and Britain and parts of Europe experienced exceptional snowfall. In Britain this was known as the Big Freeze. There was some jollity for a while, smiling skaters on frozen ponds and all that, but coal and food were short after the war and electricity was cut off for hours every day; people were often cold and hungry. The weather lasted into spring, after which thaws led to flooding.

Although the idea for the story went much further back, C S Lewis wrote much of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, with its hundred-year winter, not long after in 1948; at the least it would have been useful experience.

In Britain, German prisoners of war who hadn’t yet returned home helped clear snowdrifts. Perhaps they were lucky. In Germany itself, this time was known as the Hungerwinter. Werner Herzog said that his aunt ate wallpaper paste.4

Guilty admission: I still look at the pictures of the world under snow, including the grim German one above, as being very beautiful, just as with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe I thought swapping snow for the Christmas thaw wrecked things when I was a boy.

A postwar British Christmas film and a prewar American one

My favourite rendering of A Christmas Carol is the 1951 film Scrooge with Alastair Sim. Sim had a highly unusual and sometimes unsettling screen presence. He’s a tremendous, inimitable Scrooge.

For whatever reason, and perhaps it’s not hard to guess, quite a few classic Christmas films in both Britain and the United States were made in the years after the Second World War.

Alternatively, for a jaunty, carefree, boozy prewar Christmas-ish classic, another mystery–comedy–thriller like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, there’s The Thin Man (1934). This, too, I like to watch over the holidays.

Friends

My friends and some-time colleagues (Owen Williams) and are on Substack.

FlexibleHead

Films and books. And books of films.

Inkpen and Paper

Essays from Edinburgh-based artist and scientist Felicity Inkpen

By Felicity Inkpen

Feliz Navidad

The top comment for this video on YouTube is:

Unlike most other modern Christmas songs, I have no doubt this man actually wants to wish me a merry Christmas.

I found this amusing and appealing enough to remember it from last Christmas.

Merry Christmas

Reader, have no doubt that this man actually wants to wish you a merry Christmas.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, December 2025)

Most of my usual cocktails are strong and I like some bitterness or sourness or aromatic punch, but there’s a mellow, creamy, slightly naff1 drink I enjoy mixing in the winter—the White Russian, aka the Caucasian. It’s against all my expected tastes and yet it has a weird attraction.

It feels seasonal, it’s comfortable, it’s undemanding, it’s likeable, it’s calorific, it’s sweet but not sickeningly so, and its milk or cream may slow the absorption of alcohol into your bloodstream if you’re drinking it on Christmas morning. (I wouldn’t count on that.)

It was probably invented somewhere around the mid-1960s as a variant of the Black Russian, and its time had pretty much passed by the time it featured in The Big Lebowski in 1998. The film semi-revived it as something both ludicrous and good. I think its alias as the Caucasian may come from Lebowski, where it’s called that a lot by the Dude, though I’m not sure; in any case, it works as a play on words.2

There are many variations, and milk is often used instead of cream. In fact, I mostly use (whole, full fat) milk instead of cream.3 Some stir the drink, some shake it and some shake or stir the booze and then float cream on top.

The most basic short (old fashioned) glass version is:

• 1 part vodka (should be decent and plain, nothing fancy)

• 1 part Kahlúa (coffee liqueur; you could also use Tia Maria or some artisanal equivalent if you like)

• 1 part double (US: heavy) cream or whole milk

Shake with crushed ice or stir over ice. If stirring, you can do this in a mixing glass and then strain the finished drink into your glasses (over ice or not though beware over-dilution) or just do the whole thing in the drinking glasses to start with. If you haven’t already added the dairy, pour cream on now, over the back of a spoon to help it float, as with a liqueur coffee. Dust with nutmeg or some other spice or mixture thereof, or cocoa powder, or dark chocolate shavings, or something else, if you like; it’s fine without.

• Many people up the proportion of vodka (in 3-Ingredient Cocktails, indicates 1½ oz vodka, ¾ oz Kahlúa, ¾ oz heavy cream).

• You can switch out, say, half of the coffee liqueur for another liqueur, e.g. Amaretto or Créme de Cacao.

• You can use single cream or whipped cream or milk or milk and cream or (US) half and half; I wouldn’t use semi-skimmed or skimmed milk, but I don’t use them for anything anyway.

• What about using ice cream instead of cream or milk?

• You could also add bitters, e.g. cardamom (a bit Turkish coffee-ish) or chocolate.

If you want to go all in, see this Serious Eats piece.

Drink it by the fire, watching a film, reading a book, or just eating pistachios. Not a bad drink for opening gifts on Christmas morning, either.

Mixed opinions

, Serious Eats: “while in theory the White Russian is extremely not my thing, I found my first sip after a few decades to be surprisingly delightful.”

, 3-Ingredient Cocktails: “This rather unsubtle, postwar favorite was restored to relevancy by the Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski … It’s a good drink if you’re not inclined toward a lot of thinking at the moment….”

, The Cocktail Dictionary: “With its simple sweet flavours, high dairy content and coffee kick, the White Russian is the perfect cocktail for when you just got up—or look like you’ve just got up.”

The Dude: “You mix a hell of a Caucasian, Jackie.”

Note: in The Big Lebowski, a shady character called Jackie Treehorn mixes the hero (the Dude) a special White Russian.

This tremendous and serendipitous piece on The Big Lebowski was just posted on Substack:

The Underline

Fuck it Dude, let’s go bowling

Previously on the Coen Brothers: series intro, Buster Scruggs, Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, Hudsucker Proxy, ten-year career check-up, and Fargo…

Read more

9 months ago · 29 likes · 4 comments · Danny Sullivan

See also: the Brandy Alexander and the Golden Cadillac.4

And if you want something that’s an excellent palate cleanser during or after Christmas dinner, and can be an aperitif, an alternative to Buck’s Fizz (or just fizz) in the morning, or a livener/sharpener, or just a good, handy and fresh festive drink, here’s my piece on the Sgroppino.

If you want something with more biff, read my Negroni piece here or my Last Word piece here.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, December 2025)

I accept that I can no longer jump off my right foot … in Mexico, one of the men of the arena, a great master of the lasso, assured me that this was part of life, this was pura vida [‘pure life’]. Euklides was his name. He shook me by the hand the first time I was thrown [by a bull] and bleeding out of my mouth because I’d almost bitten my tongue off when I hit the deck. His hand felt like a vice. What he meant wasn’t the purity of life, as with the early saints, but the sheer, brute, unpredictable, overwhelming presence of life. (Werner Herzog, Every Man for Himself and God Against All)1

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. (Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men)

One of my neighbours is a retired forester who has a lot of interesting old wounds, especially in his legs, which are probably one tenth surgical metal. He makes his injuries into stories, not complaints. These are full of drama, surprises, humour, indignities and pain. You do things; you get smashed up; your body gets further and further away from its factory settings.

If you do physical work for long enough, if you split enough logs, something’s likely to get you in some more or less serious way. Outside that, the strain can start to nag away at your joints and in time you’ll have a dodgy shoulder or bad knees or arthritic hands or whatever. If you’re lucky these won’t stop you from earning a living in your chosen way or getting a decent amount of enjoyment and satisfaction from life.2

I think about this when they talk about raising the retirement age. If you sit at a desk five days a week, possibly working from home since 2020, this might seem regrettable but basically alright. If you’re a roofer, not so much.3

But even sedentary types, even writers and other slack-limbed, pale-faced losers, experience pura vida. It may not be woven so closely into the fabric of their everyday lives, but there it is.

A friend and some-time colleague at an academic publisher shattered his ankle while helping someone move house and then nearly lost his foot from an infected hospital implant. The hair on his ankle still grows upward after a skin graft he had following reconstruction surgery.

My wife lost the hearing in her right ear and some of her sense of balance after an operation to remove a chance-in-a-hundred-thousand brain tumour.4 When the surgeons finished her ear was sealed like an empty tomb.

Neither my friend nor my wife dwell on their losses and I remembered this when a fluoroquinolone antibiotic called ciprofloxacin damaged my joints and tendons to the extent that I couldn’t stand up for more than a couple of minutes at a time.5 Although I can now walk many miles on a good day they’ll never be the same again.

There were other things I remembered.

I remembered friends diagnosed with rare blood disorders and cancers, one of whom died a few hours after I visited him for the last time; my grandfather diagnosed with MS in his early forties with his children still at school; two friends diagnosed with MS in their twenties; the boy at school who’d been born with a defective heart and alternated between crutches and a wheelchair. While I was laid up, a friend, someone whose presence I can always imagine without trying, died without any sort of warning from a blood clot.

I also remembered something said during a cross-cultural communication course at an old job: that many of our offshore colleagues lived very different lives from us, less secure, less predictable, more exposed to the workings of blind chance in everyday life. Similarly, previous generations living in Western Europe and North America were less shielded from the buffetings of raw life than we are.6 Being struck down by some damn thing, often something petty, was just what happened, and is still just what happens in many places.7

Another thing I remembered was Eric Hoffer’s8 short book, The True Believer, where he talks at one point about “People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled”. They are one of the character types prone to fanaticism.

In a minor key, you can see this in the Hollywood stereotypes of the brilliant high school athlete who is now an ageing loser brooding over old glories after something, perhaps an injury, wrecked the prospect of a career, and the disappointed prom queen living through her mercilessly driven daughter.9 The latter is a good example of one of Hoffer’s observations:

Their innermost craving is for a new life—a rebirth—or, failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, conscience, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause.

The holy cause could be your child getting the honours and glory you failed to attain; it could be international communism or mass murder of the people behind the imperfection of the world; or it could be something personal and potentially benign and selfless, as when bereaved parents dedicate themselves to campaigning to protect others from similar affliction.10

Some people who have suffered try to ‘raise awareness’ to spare others from being struck down by whatever hit them. It can give meaning to suffering.

A related effect, a sign that an experience hasn’t been fully processed, is when people make their affliction part of their identity, see the world through its prism, and in a strange way almost live for it, like those whose lives are given meaning by having an enemy.11

You can also medicalise your life; becoming a sort of passenger riding along the tracks of the various systems and procedures, viewing yourself as a case, as a collection of symptoms and treatments, an entity defined by tests and measurements and metrics, and perhaps not much else.12

I didn’t want to be one of those “People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled”, not even one of the altruistic ones. What had happened to me was just part of life, it was pura vida.

This isn’t fatalism or indifference; I’ve worked hard to recover. When I was laid up I plotted my way through the walks I’d do in the future. Two years after I’d spent ten days just getting the toes on my frozen left foot to move, I walked the Kentmere Horseshoe, the first big one on the list. I carried my young son in a backpack on many shorter walks. Although things have deteriorated since then—relapses, slippages and nagging problems are common—I’m still hoping to work back to ultimately be able to walk the Dales Way (Ilkley–Windermere); the Via degli Dei (the Way of the Gods, Bologna–Florence following the ancient path); and English pilgrimages such as Winchester–Canterbury and Canterbury–Rome. I’d like to walk at least some of these with my children as they grow up.

It’s a matter of perspective. Spoiled lifers tend to compartmentalise their lives: your real life was all before it happened and what follows is imposture, fake, unworthy, unjust; it’s a tragic variant of “My real weight and body shape are what they were when I was 17”. In Great Expectations, after being abandoned on her wedding day, Miss Havisham continues to wear her wedding dress until she dies, as the celebration feast decays on the still set table, and she schemes for vicarious revenge; there is no continuum in her life, only before and after. The (un)holy cause of her ‘second’ life, her vengeance, could be seen as an attempt to impose meaning on her affliction.

For me, I’d rather absorb the experience, compost it13 and wait for whatever meaning there is to emerge later. You might not know for a long time and even then your view is likely to change. Maybe it’s illusory in any case. But whatever has happened to me is life, and part of my life, and becomes part of me, whether that’s a simple physical scar; moving like a ninety year old some mornings; or something more intangible. If in the end I can’t walk the Via degli Dei with my family, the sadness will also become part of me, as it should, because that is also life, pura vida.

You play whatever hand you are dealt with as much courage and skill as you can, knowing that many are likely to have worse, and some never had much in the way of cards to start with. As time passes, physically you’ll start playing weaker hands anyway—even without the ciprofloxacin I am not the fifteen year old who could jump over a pub table from a standing start—though perhaps your gameplay will improve. But, whatever cards you began with, however good your play, however wealthy you or your country are, and however skilled your physicians, one day you’ll lose everything you have in this world; whether dramatically, like lightning out of a clear sky, or slowly and inexorably, like water eroding things made of earth.

This thing all things devours;
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats mountain down. (Riddle from The Hobbit. The thing is time.)

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, December 2025)

Chloe lived in Berlin at that time, and has since lived in London and now Bristol (again). You can view her website here.

Click on the first photograph and then scroll through using the arrows for the best view.

1. Mandy’s, Reichenberger straße

2. Dschungel, Friedelstraße

3. Manouche, Grimmstraße

4. Minibar, Graefestraße

5. BKK, Manteuffelstraße

6. Cinema Café, Rosenthaler straße

7. Prater Garten, Kastanienallee

8. Freischwimmer, Vor dem Schlesischen Tor

9. Tiki Heart, Wiener straße

10. Clärchens Ballhaus, Auguststraße

11. Lenau-Stuben, Hobrechtstraße

12. Chloe, Berlin

NB Some of these bars have closed.

Chloe Brooks (Berlin and Bristol, 2015 and 2025)

For around two years, from him being just about still a baby to no longer being a toddler, I carried my son on walks several times a week, sometimes every day. We went out in all seasons and all weather. For some of the time it was because my wife was working on a contract and I was looking after him, but it also just became what we did together.

I’d put him in his backpack and walk miles and miles on the lanes, through the fields and over the fells; we must’ve walked hundreds of miles together and we met many people on the way, sometimes the same people regularly. Most were old enough to be retired because who else would be wandering about during weekdays? The men were much more likely to make a quip, usually revolving around the desirability of being carried on my back (“Room for another up there?” etc). One man in the nearest village made the same two jokes every time. Some just said something like, “Good lad,” meaning that I was doing a good job, and getting the boy off to sleep, which they mostly assumed was the purpose of our endless walking. (By being friendly passers-by would sometimes wake him up after miles of treading had got him off to sleep; especially when it was a large group of hikers, chattering like jackdaws.) Both men and women talked about how good the modern backpacks are and wished that they’d had them. The women were more likely to ask questions, sometimes quite detailed, and they’d often enquire into our home affairs and about my wife, etc. They were also more likely to make comments or offer advice. Some of the advice was excellent and carefully modulated; some was obviously the result of some specific trauma they’d experienced at a similar time. There were a few who just liked laying down the law. One pair of middle-aged women who were walking the Dales Way from Ilkley to Windermere stopped to talk for almost an hour, speaking to me very earnestly about what I should do when our second child was born, for both the children and their mother. They were nice and made a lot of sense and I remember them fondly. Much of what they said concerned the delicate psychology of a larger family unit.

There was another overlapping spell of making a lot of chance acquaintances around two and a half years ago when my son was still only one, my wife was pregnant with our second child and my father was—so all medical professionals agreed—likely to die at any time. (Happily he’s still alive.) We’re stuck out in the country without a car and I was taking taxis all the time, between our house and my parents’, between hospitals, etc, and some of the journeys were quite long. I had many conversations with taxi drivers, a few of whom I came to know quite well.

Once I was called by a doctor at Royal Lancaster Infirmary at 3 a.m. and told to come in immediately if I wanted to say goodbye to my father, who probably wouldn’t last the night. The hospital was twenty miles away. I phoned Blue Star Taxis, ‘my’ firm, and was told there was nothing available, but when I explained the situation the night dispatcher (also a driver) got someone to work extra time to cover his jobs and came to get me himself. It could’ve been an awkward, silent journey, but we talked quite naturally about our families, my wife’s pregnancy, the ebb and flow of life. On the return journey a Romanian driver from a Lancaster firm told me about his brother’s last illness and how he’d handled it—badly by his own account—and questioned whether the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu was all it seemed.1 We shook hands when he dropped me off.

One regular driver would begin a journey by saying, “Now then, what have you got to tell me today?”, and then listen politely before telling a series of stories about unusual, often comically bad, experiences he’d had. Once, when I was being picked up from my parents’, my mother told him I’d be right out, I was just getting my baggage. When I emerged he was incredulous—Call that baggage? One bag?—and then mentioned this with renewed disbelief every time he picked me up.

Some of the drivers (mostly South Asian) came up from Lancashire every day to work here. The younger ones often liked to show their friendliness by offering advice, and they’d find a topic they knew about and then tell me about it. I was instructed in the best way to get a driving licence quickly; how to buy a second-hand car; the wisdom and manners of the road; etc. There can be something soothing and almost hypnotic about listening to someone speak whereof they know, or from evident good will, and I liked this.

In turn, some would ask me detailed, at times touchingly naive, questions about Cumbria and the Lake District or say how much they liked it—most though not all said that the people were polite and friendly, as well as the countryside being beautiful. (They were only working days and might have had some quite different experiences at night.)

And so it went. The taxi journeys are weirdly quite a happy memory from a pretty desperate time.

Of course not all the chance-met strangers on the road left much of an afterglow. There were the weird vinegar-faced walkers who looked straight through us when I said “Good morning” and my son gave them a shy wave; the walkers in enough gear for an attempt on the Khumbu Icefall who were angered at being passed on a hill by a man in ordinary clothes carrying a child; the unsympathetic drivers of fat vehicles on narrow lanes; and then there was the red-haired young taxi driver who drove us home one night in a silent rage because we’d asked him to take a less winding route to spare the children’s carsickness—all part of the rich tapestry of life.

I don’t have a particular point in mind in telling you all this, I’m not trying to make these experiences into a neat little lesson, but I remember Joseph Conrad’s words about human fellowship (and ships):

All vessels are handled in the same way as far as theory goes, just as you may deal with all men on broad and rigid principles. But if you want that success in life which comes from the affection and confidence of your fellows, then with no two men, however similar they may appear in their nature, will you deal in the same way. There may be a rule of conduct; there is no rule of human fellowship. To deal with men is as fine an art as it is to deal with ships. Both men and ships live in an unstable element, are subject to subtle and powerful influences, and want to have their merits understood rather than their faults found out…. And, like all fine arts, it must be based upon a broad, solid sincerity, which, like a law of Nature, rules an infinity of different phenomena. Your endeavour must be single-minded. You would talk differently to a coal-heaver and to a professor. But is this duplicity? I deny it. The truth consists in the genuineness of the feeling, in the genuine recognition of the two men, so similar and so different, as your two partners in the hazard of life. (Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea)

I’ve always loved the phrase “partners in the hazard of life”.

(Side note: if you squint you can see my son’s tiny hand resting on my shoulder in the headshot I’ve been using for bylines, LinkedIn, etc. The full picture has me sitting on a wall by a tarn with him on my back and a lamb jumping through the air behind us.)

NB This piece was inspired by my friend ’s post here.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, November 2025)

The artist was not a special kind of man, but every man a special kind of artist. (Ananda K Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art)

Some time in the 1990s the BBC broadcast a series in which two senescent art traditionalists were introduced to (challenged by) some modern artists and their work. The trads were a married couple, something like bourgeois versions of Roy and Renée from The Fast Show, or possibly an artist’s impression of Daily Telegraph readers.

The setup was obviously intended to more or less gently make this couple look like chumps at the same time as educating them and, by extension, us. It was boring and fascinating all at once. Everyone came across as an idiot.1

The one thing in it that I’ve thought about regularly since is a monkey man sculpture and the modern artist couple who created it. The sculpture was a large figure that looked a bit like a monkey and a bit like a man; that was it. It was weirdly lifeless and unmemorable as an object in itself but we were told it said something about evolution, our animal selves, human pretensions, etc.2 Whatever; the thing that interested me was the thing that bewildered and distressed Mr & Mrs Tradcake: the artists hadn’t actually made the sculpture.

The artists, also a married couple, a sort of Yang to the traditionalists’ Yin, were purely conceptual. They had what they thought were ideas and then hired technicians to give form to them. This, they said, created art.

The Tradcakes were certain that to make art you had to do it yourself. But they struggled to put together an argument and they liked sweet, boring pictures, so the choice was clear: you could either side with the old sods with a taste for paintings of cats sleeping by stoves in country cottages3 or the sophisticated young thrusters of Cool Britannia whose work at least hinted at greater things than a liking for Laura Ashley designs.

Quo vadis, Fishman? Cool or uncool; sophisticated or twee; Guardian or Telegraph? (Or even, God help us, Daily Mail.)

But even if it was obvious which position the programme makers intended us to identify with, I wasn’t sure and I wanted to think about it. Many otherwise baffling trends in our lives can be at least partly explained by people’s desperate fear of appearing uncool; especially if they are, in fact, uncool, and above all if they are middle aged.4

My first thought was that any fool can have an idea. Making something of it is where things get difficult; where the sheep are divided from the goats. You start with this perfect interior vision, but then as soon as you try to give it shape outside of yourself, all the flaws of the world come in. Then you realise that actually you don’t quite know what you thought you did.

You’re like an archaeologist reaching out for a precious artefact that turns to dust on contact; or, more extreme, the Nazis opening the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark—there’s a moment of ecstasy and then your face melts off.

An artist—or scientist, carpenter, joiner, chef, architect, anyone who thinks and feels a certain way about what they do—is someone who somehow gets through the horror of giving an idea solid form. They have whatever individual mix of talent and character and desire allows someone to persevere and make something.

My second thought was about what sort of world view the monkey man artists had.

At the most basic level, I suspected that they wanted to be Artists, to have the name and reputation and lifestyle of artists, without being much interested in making art or having the means to do it themselves.5 Possibly uncharitable but not exactly implausible. Tied into this there might be a vision of the artist as a fascinating higher being expressing itself, with trivial worldly things like craft, technique and drudgery being for the birds.6 Taking an intense interest in their methods and materials as a fundamental part of what they do would be alien.7

I also wondered if their vision of the world, their sense of how things work, had been in some ways shaped by the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age that followed, by the dominance of engineering, manufacturing and now computing. All processes are mechanical and all work is broken down into specialised tasks in the division of labour. If you’re at the top, if you are a manager or creator, you put together a design or a blueprint or whatever, or you write some code, and it will be executed.8 (Obviously this isn’t actually a good model for what really happens in engineering, etc, but it’s a way of seeing things.)

And yes, generative AI is of course, at least for now, the supreme expression of this view of things.

But what if an idea is actually just the first in a series of questions?

David Lynch wrote that:

It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments. That first fragment is like the Rosetta Stone. It’s the piece of the puzzle that indicates the rest … In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawns, and the song—Bobby Vinton’s version of ‘Blue Velvet’.9

I don’t think you just have an idea like a hen lays an egg, and that you can pass it to a chef to make your omelette.10

Perhaps a better analogy is with mammalian pregnancy: conception, gestation, labour, birth. An ongoing process, with every part as essential as the others. The chance of it failing at the end after much pain and endurance. Or perhaps it was only a phantom, after all.

And also the phenomenon of foetal microchimerism, where cells move from the baby to live on in the mother during and after pregnancy, reflecting a profound two-way relationship that affects both parties permanently.

If you make something living and valuable, a work of art in some sense, it also changes you. This could just be that your thinking develops; the poet C Day Lewis said that:

I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write to be understood; we write in order to understand.11

Graham Greene went further:

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed—he has developed with them….12

My last thought was that if you delegate the execution of your monkey man to a technician, you will not experience this. You won’t ever finish your thinking or complete your idea. You won’t learn how to make things. You won’t be changed.

Similarly, if you use AI to execute whatever work you do, whatever your monkey man is, you’re not really doing the same thing as if you were doing it yourself. It’s a different activity. And that’s fine if you don’t confuse them. If you’re making something, if you’re trying to give shape to some idea, I don’t know what sort of work you’ll produce, but you won’t be working as or like an artist; and perhaps with the passage of time you will become unable to work like that; and you will find that parts of yourself are closed off, unused. You might miss one of the paths in life towards satisfaction and a sense of purpose—using your talent and everything you have to do good work.13

My piece on inspiration in Rathbones Review has some overlap with this post, read it here.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, November 2025)

Note: this is adapted from something I published in Alderman Lushington (now defunct) a few years ago. Now, i.e. during a spring heatwave in Britain, seemed a good time to post it.

                                                                     ⁂

In summer wine should be refreshing, not just taste good. This means drinking something that’s cool, fairly light and has a decent slug of acidity, which is what we mean by crispness. So yes to Vinho Verde, and no to a big, placid, oaky chardonnay. Also yes to keeping your bottles in a cooler in the shade and pouring smallish glasses that won’t be urine-warm by the time you’re halfway down.

So far, so obvious, but it’s surprising how rarely we bother to apply it, and above all how rarely we apply the same thinking to red wine.

The popular fashion in red wine in the UK, at least in the supermarkets and chains, is for big, soupsweet, blandly agreeable wines. They’re like celebrities who’ve been coached in PR and never say anything wrong, and may as well never say anything at all; their noises fill a moment and are then instantly forgotten. These wines are actually ingeniously made—you can read about it here—but they’re made to be comforting, not refreshing. They’re a baby’s blankie when what you want in the summer is a snowball in the face. The case is made worse when, as so often, they’re served at the temperature of used dishwater.

I know people who will drink wines like these when it’s 25–30°C, with them left baking in the heat, and they taste like grapey saliva with notes of surgical spirit.

Just as with white wine, a nice bit of acidity gives a red wine pep, while in some cases a little bit of chew from bitter tannins also works, as with bitter and refreshing Campari or Aperol. Lightness is also preferable, and temperature is as important as it is with white wine. At the very least your red shouldn’t taste cooked, while many repay being cellar cool or even chilled. In fact, chilling even the slack-jawed comfort wines can give them a bit more snap and it’s something I sometimes try to rescue boring wine.

Drinking temperature

Most red wine is served too warm, regardless of weather and season. You probably don’t want to serve even a big brute of a winter red much above 18°C.

Above 20°C wine begins to taste cooked, soupy and heavy in alcohol. It loses all snap, edge and structure. As it gets hotter it begins to turn to degrade permanently.

Cooling wine reduces its sweetness, accentuates its acidity and tannins, and brings out the fruit; it makes it more refreshing. It can also make it seem more structured and taut. However, it will also reduce its complexity and isn’t good for full, tannic or oaky wines, which can become harsh.

The principles are these.

The warmer a wine is, the more volatiles it emits, which gives the impression of greater aroma and flavour. Lighter wines give off volatiles more readily than full-bodied ones, and will do so at lower temperatures. Hence you lose less from chilling them. This applies equally to reds and whites.

There are upper and lower limits. Jancis Robinson says that “If you want to get the maximum flavour from any wine—red, white, or pink—you should drink it at a temperature between 15°C and 18°C.”

Robinson adds, however, that “There is another factor to consider: we cherish wine’s ability to refresh us, as well as intrigue us with its flavour.” Hence it’s a balancing act that depends in part on context as well as the wine you’re drinking.

When wine is hot it begins to turn acetic, i.e. starts to become vinegar. You’ll have noticed a funny sort of off-sherry or cooked flavour from wine that is either too warm or has been stored somewhere warm—such as, all too often, a restaurant. If the wine is all racked up by the open-plan kitchen, watch out. And if you don’t mind raising some eyebrows, ask for an ice bucket for your red when it’s hot, it may help, even if it can’t turn acetic acid back into wine.

Normally you would cool red wine down to 12–16°C, with something like Beaujolais at the lower end and something more serious like Chianti at the upper end. Below 12°C even light reds are likely to start tasting muted and harsh, with only the acidity and tannins surviving the deadening effect of cold.

On the other side, alcohol is one of the volatiles emphasised by warmth, and warm wines can taste unpleasantly boozy, especially if they are strong to start with.

If you chill a wine it’ll become warmer quite quickly; within half an hour it’ll probably be at the ambient temperature. Hence there’s not much risk from over-cooling the wine, much less than over-heating it. Plus it’s pretty agreeable for it to start off refreshing and then end up more flavoursome, and you can always cup your glass in your hand like a brandy balloon and warm it on its way.

Cooling it

• Use an ice bucket with a mix of ice and water and cool for ~10–15 minutes.

• Cool in the fridge for 25–30 minutes. (Fridges tend to be around 5°C.)

• Put the bottle in a wine cooler after chilling to keep it from warming too quickly, or use an ice bucket with only a little ice.

• If you have a lot of guests fill something like a large container (I use a huge gardening bucket from the local hardware store) with a lot of water and a lot of ice. You can keep a dozen bottles and cans very cold, and dip the red in for a quick cooling whenever you want. It’s also a good way of storing it pre-drinking to make sure it doesn’t ‘cook’, you can always take out for 10 minutes to warm. Keep the container in the shade, if you can.

Some red wines for summer

Traditionally, northern Europe has been the place to find light, easygoing reds—as wine writer Andrew Jefford put it, many “have the texture of a white wine, yet the curranty perfumes and flavours of a red; they are delicious chilled”. However, there are now many, many good options from all over the world, from high-altitude pinot noir in Argentina through to exotic-seeming blends of native and ‘international’ grapes from the Balkans, especially Croatia, Slovenia and North Macedonia. I’m not going to try to be inclusive, because that would be madness, but here are few grapes and places to look out for.

• Beaujolais (mostly gamay).

• Loire Valley reds (cabernet franc, gamay, pinot noir).

• Various Italian, e.g. basic Valpolicella and Bardolino (mostly corvina), lighter sangiovese, including some Chianti, and frappato (usually Sicilian). There are also some lovely crunchy wines (including blends) from the Alps, e.g. teroldego, lagrein, marzemino, and if you want something special, try Valtellina (chiavennasca, aka nebbiolo) at 15 or 16°C; it’s the Barolo grape, hence ‘serious’, but with Alpine freshness, often made to be drunk young.

• Blaufränkisch, zweigelt and St Laurent (usually Austrian).

• Pinot noir from Argentina, New Zealand, the Pacific Northwest, Germany, Eastern Europe, etc. You wouldn’t cool the more ‘serious’ wines much, however, e.g. good Burgundy should be 16 or 17°C.

• Bonarda from Argentina.

• Young Côtes du Rhône.

• Some grenache/garnacha (including the above).

• Some basic tempranillo (the Rioja grape).

• Some light Greek reds, e.g. xinomavro (also in North Macedonia).

The best way to find which work for you is to experiment, though if you have a good local wine merchant, ask them for advice.

Tip: be cautious about cooling wines made predominantly from cabernet sauvignon, syrah/shiraz and other hefty grapes; going too far down doesn’t usually suit them.

Trivia: some winemakers use a technique called carbonic maceration to make light, approachable reds. This is particularly the case in Beaujolais, though it’s now being employed in innovative ways in the New World, e.g. Argentina.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, April 2025)

First, thank you for subscribing.

If you’re a fairly new subscriber you’ll probably wonder what my Substack is all about; what to expect. If you’re a longer-standing subscriber you might wonder the same.

What’s going on?

Many people say that to publish a successful (i.e. popular) Substack you need focus, to have an identifiable purpose or perspective; to be definable. In which case I’m ruined. I might write about Campari one time and then next about AI and then about tarns or farmers or David Lynch or corporate Las Vegas; I might tell a story or try to understand something or attempt to be amusing (sorry about that). Sometimes it’ll be a brief note and others a long discursive something or other.

There’s a typically unhelpful explanation in my introductory piece here. The short summary is something like this:

If I say that I generally view life not as a project with a fixed destination or set of goals, but as an experience or a conversation or an exploration or an adventure, and that for me writing is the same, then that at least suggests something…. The way I best like writing is to step outside the front door and see where I end up. Even when something I’ve written looks organised, purposeful and certain, the likelihood is that it’s wandered and taken wrong paths and circled back on itself before it found its way.

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Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, April 2025)

At the end of my cricket career, even great victories were often celebrated in social isolation: we might have been all together, but most team-mates were checking their smartphones. The craic, the revolving narrator and shared storytelling, was on the wrong side of history. The mobile phone was a disaster for team spirit: it broke the intuitive understanding that boredom generates entertainment. (Ed Smith, former Kent and England cricketer, New Statesman)

                                                                       ⁂

Note on smoothing. ‘Using’ or e.g. ‘swiping’ smartphones seems insufficiently expressive. I prefer ‘smoothing’. In the Bristol dialect smoothing can mean ‘stroking [a domestic pet]’, e.g. “I just smoothed a Siamese cat”.1

                                                                       ⁂

On the day of the 2015 UK general election there was a long queue of voters outside my local polling station as I walked past and perhaps a quarter or a third of them were smoothing phones. If the queue had been in 1992, for the first general election I was eligible to vote in, those people probably would have been smoking instead. Now there was no smoking at all.

Obviously smartphones and the things they deliver aren’t complete, like-for-like replacements for tobacco, but in places they fill the same social and psychological niche.

How do you occupy a vacant moment, give your eyes somewhere to look and your hands something to do when you’re feeling socially awkward, say when alone waiting for people in the pub, what do you for a natural pause or stop in activity, say on a break at work, how do you pass time with others when you don’t feel much urge to talk? Is there something you turn to automatically when you’re nervous? What’s your default activity?

But if the niche is the same, or at least akin, the filling is not.

When I see workmen silently looking at smartphones during their breaks, often sitting in their vans, I think back twenty-five years to when I worked for around six months on a house renovation, first doing odd jobs when it was more or less a building site and then stripping layers of paint that dated back to the Crimean War, room by room.

Once in the morning, then at lunch, and again in the afternoon, we’d most of us stop and sit down together. I was lucky with my workmates, I know you can have sour or even hostile experiences, especially as a useless newbie, or just indifferent ones.2 But at different times I’d sit down with the joiner, the builders, the electrician, the plasterer, the painter and decorator, and the plumber. (Actually, no, not the plumber.) We’d drink tea, sometimes smoke cigarettes, and eat together, talking or not talking companionably. One afternoon, the joiner, one of the owners who was working on the house and I fell to talking in earnest, and we drank tea and smoked three or four cigarettes each, sitting in the garden. On landmark or difficult days we might finish with a beer and, for me, a cigarette.

I took a lot away from the experience, in addition to some skill in delicate paint removal work. Take, for example, the enormous tact and sensitivity of my workmates at lunch on a few occasions. We all knew that one of our number for a short spell, who was skilled and conscientious in his trade and universally liked as a good natured man with no side to him, drank his wages in the pub every night and had nothing for food in the day. Nothing was ever said and C— pretended he wasn’t hungry but the situation was dealt with in a way that preserved his pride and didn’t let him go without. It was clear somehow that even to mention this privately to one another would be bad form.

To think of this all being reduced to solitary phone paddling in vans is death in the heart.3

Smoking—for someone who is a natural smoker; not everyone is—gives a smoker some small but important occupation but it doesn’t close off other possibilities. You think or talk or just pause in life and smoke. If it occupies a moment, it doesn’t have to fill it; it can open you to the world not shutter you off.

Some of this is the ritual: you’re lighting a fire each time and holding a smouldering brand in your fingers; you might also be sharing fire with friends or strangers; you’re stepping outside the ordinary flow of time and events for a moment.4 But there’s also the unusual properties of nicotine, which are largely responsible for tobacco’s occasional reputation as a medicine and ‘wonder drug’ over the ages.

It’s ruin and death for every other organ, but it may be good for the mind, so long as you don’t have a stroke.

According to psychopharmacologist Paul Newhouse, director of the Center for Cognitive Medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, “Nicotinic receptors in the brain appear to work by regulating other receptor systems. If you’re sleepy, nicotine tends to make you more alert. If you’re anxious, it tends to calm you.”5

There are numerous studies suggesting that tobacco (nicotine) aids concentration (“To my knowledge, nicotine is the most reliable cognitive enhancer that we currently have”), including for those with ADHD (“acute nicotine administration improves concentration and reduces clinical symptoms as well as shortens and homogenizes reaction times in adult smokers and nonsmokers with ADHD”).6

Put less drily: “tobacco purges the mind of its gross humours, sharpens the wits, renders the judicious smoker sprightly and vivacious”.7

Stephen King said that it’s a great connector of synapses and that his work slowed after he stopped smoking.

Evidence concerning nicotine and ‘emotional dysfunctions’ is more mixed, but at least in the short-term, it does seem to offer some benefits. Certainly there is evidence for ‘self-medication’ with tobacco by those with emotional as well as attentional mental health disorders, whether this is effective or not.

This isn’t a new line of thinking:

Dr Johnson himself took snuff which he kept loose in his waistcoat pocket, but he always had a respect for the sedative influence of smoking, and he was once heard to say that madness had grown more frequent since smoking had gone out of fashion. It would not be extravagant to claim to-day that smoking saves myriads from an exacerbation of the nerves that might well lead to an increase of insanity.8

Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie, OBE, the distinguished and fanatical smoker who wrote this, elsewhere said:

And as I murmur those words to myself there rises before the mind's eye the spectre of that non-smoking lackey of death in his lavatory-attendant's uniform—Adolf Hitler … I do not propose to attribute the evil that was Hitler to his antipathy against tobacco. Nevertheless, the ineluctable fact remains that the man who brought more human misery to the world than any other human being hated smoking as in medieval days the devil was said to hate holy water. Hitler dreaded the benign influence of tobacco. He must have known intuitively that if he surrendered to that sedative influence his ulcerous mind might be healed, and if once the inner rage that gnawed at him was allayed he must have realized he would be as commonplace as he looked … It may be remembered that Dr Johnson foresaw an increase of madness if smoking should become obsolete.9

But whether nicotine can or cannot soothe and heal lackeys of death, it does seem to help with neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s.10

Despite their shared niches and their shared association with dopamine, it’s hard to imagine anyone making similar claims for smartphones and their cargo of apps; that they purge the mind of its gross humours, sharpen the wits, or ease anxiety; that they are a medicine, even a deadly one. They have a reputation as distractors rather than enhancers, drawing our attention away from all else in life.

I’m not making any particular claims about smartphones and social media, I’m wary of moral panics,11 especially ones that appeal to me, I’m just making a negative observation: if you say “I’ve just spent an hour smoothing my phone” you’re unlikely to have people reply “Amazing! Well done! Lucky you! I wish I could make more time for my phone!” As with smokers, heavy users often want to cut back or give up.

Ten years ago I planned to pitch a feature arguing that smartphones would probably follow a similar pattern to tobacco in our lives: initial wonder and suspicion and socially circumscribed use (impolite to do it in some or all company); opening out and greater acceptance but with pockets of continued resistance (people come to smoke everywhere across sexes and classes); growing recognition of harm but with pockets of continued resistance; social and legal restriction (going from no non-smoking carriages on trains to one and then to one smoking carriage to none). It wasn’t that long ago that British people sniggered and tutted at mobile phone use in public.

I still think this is likely though now I wonder if other technological developments will make it irrelevant. But then the same principles are likely to apply with what comes.

For compelling substances and technologies a question is always, who is consuming whom?

For me smoking was like keeping a jinni trapped in a lamp; a powerful fire spirit that can do magical things for you but will enslave you if you let it and ultimately is likely to be your end. It’s not a stable relationship and if you don’t actively resist, it’ll shift ineluctably away from you.

Artificial limitations can help: manners; respecting the presence of others; having civilisational shapes to your hours, where you do things at certain times or on certain occasions, arranged for example around eating; having to do it in certain places or outside; fear of losing face, not being seen to be in thrall; and so on.

But then to be a skilled smoker still requires individual effort and care: “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.”12 I smoked off and on from the age of ten, never heavily and often not at all, but by the time I was thirty I could feel it growing in me and started to handle it more deliberately. There were always diminishing returns anyway; the more you smoked, the less you enjoyed it. I took regular month-long breaks to reset; I cut it out entirely from work; I stopped smoking during the day or the week; I stopped carrying tobacco and only bought it when I was going to smoke; I threw away unused tobacco at the end of a night out.13 Finally, I rarely smoked, and then I stopped altogether.

Some of what we might call vices, I think of as bargains with a jinni, with an embedded wager. My thinking is: what is the ‘good’, what is the price of maintaining it, what are my odds like for the gamble and what happens if I lose? I’d played my hand with the smoking jinni over the years with as much skill as I could but in the end I found to my surprise that I no longer wanted to be part of the game. Perhaps I’d lost my relish for the pleasure it offered, maybe the returns had diminished permanently, I could sometimes feel it in my chest and the odds were worsening. I never much minded the idea of losing some years of life but losing my ability to do things troubled me more. Kingsley Amis said that “No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare,” but then the potential for years of living in a reduced state, immobile or otherwise incapable, seemed a different bargain.

For a compelling technology like a smartphone, it’s not the same, but it’s not so different. If it doesn’t directly lead to a shorter life, it can be a thief of time in other ways: when you spend, say, three hours a day smoothing for ten years, you might have lost a chunk of your life in a meaningful way. If it doesn’t directly lead to a reduced state or immobility beyond RSI, heavy use might not be good for you in many ways.14 Physical health isn’t the only thing.

Something we’re not especially good at in our civilisation is recognising that we live in a world of trade-offs; without really thinking about it, we assume that good things are all good, that bad things are all bad, and that good things look obviously good and bad things look obviously bad.

What if people smoke not because of peer pressure or irresistible and immediate addiction, but because there’s something enjoyable and even beneficial about it, and yet it’s also mortally dangerous? What if smartphones are not just unmatched all-round communication devices, but are like pocket libraries and encyclopaedias, and also offer endless entertainment and refuge from dull moments, but then can have an enormous opportunity cost if they stop you from doing other things, using your imagination, exercising your memory, or developing your other mental capabilities, and you look back on thousands of hours of cat videos and think what have I done with my life? What if what we vaguely call AI allows us to do what we vaguely call curing cancer, but also reshapes our world in such a way that even as it extends our lives it drains satisfaction and meaning from them?

There is, after all, wisdom in the old fairy tales, where things can be fair and perilous, and temptation is really tempting; where temptation is not a piece of chocolate cake with your coffee; it is pervasive, it is consequential, it can shape your life.

It’s a difficult and uncertain business trying to map this out as best you can and then navigate it, and even in a healthy society with structures and an ethos that help, you also have to do it for yourself.15

When we consider new technologies and temptations, and they are coming our way, some obvious, some probably not, we might use some thinking garnered from handling old-fashioned vices; we might ask ourselves, what is this jinni, what is its magic, what is the good it is offering, what is the bargain, what is the price, what is the wager? Who is consuming whom? How am I going to keep this in check, if I need to? How can I give myself the best chance of avoiding servitude and degradation? What if it makes doing good things and developing my talents and interests and friendships harder, what if it is a substitute for ‘life’ not an enhancement? Am I just putting my life into this machine like a gambler pushing coins into a slot machine?

                                                                       ⁂

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time. (Jack London, in conversation)

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, April 2025)