And while I was making the new episode of More Jam Tomorrow, I realised that how most of society talks about being old is through the language of money. Pensions, the triple lock, the asset-rich, the burden on the NHS and social care, inheritance. Older people have become, in the popular imagination, a repository of wealth, yet eternally demanding: their existence is fundamentally economic rather than social.

Bexhill-on-Sea, where my grandmother retired to. Photo: Alexis Markwick

The government has pushed the state pension age later and later, and not without cause. People do live longer, though in parts of Britain that trend is going into reverse.

But it is a bit depressing to think that the next stage of my life seems to be defined by how much of a drag I will represent on the rest of the economy. I thought Gen X would reinvent retirement. I imagined a world that did not disdain the old and push them away, one where old people might find a place for ourselves among other generations. I don’t yet see the foundations for that kind of society.

Still, a melancholy passage by Jeremy Seabrook excepted, this is not a downhearted listen, and I promise there is very little tiresome detail about pensions. The Cambridge academic Helen MacCarthy is writing a book about retirement which I expect to be a fascinating read. Also, did you know that when Dylan Thomas urged the old to “rage against the dying of the light”, he was about 33?

Subtitled TV recommendation: The Line

Rooting around on Netflix last week, I found an absolute dog of a film which I mention here only so that you can avoid it. Je m’appelle Agneta follows a middle-aged Swedish woman who emigrates to Provence on a whim to look after an elderly compatriot. It’s a disaster. The locals loathe her.

Of course not! She puts on some purple underwear and has a really good shag. Netflix evidently prompted ‘dowdy repressed middle aged woman finds fulfilment in southern Europe’, and the LLM obliged. When we can watch a sad middle-aged bloke migrating to a fjord and putting on a thong in a sauna, I might have more tolerance for this kind of thing.

Instead I recommend The Line on ITVX or Apple TV (Un village français). If you watched Spiral (Engrenages), the gritty cop thriller, you’ll recognise Audrey Fleurot and Thierry Godard in this multi-part series about the Resistance in Jura. Godard is compelling as he works out how to keep the Germans happy and makes bad choices about women. Wartime dramas are reliably menacing, but The Line is addictive and it is fascinating to dwell on how very differently the French experienced the second world war.

The Line is on Apple TV and ITVX

More Jam Tomorrow is free, as is this Substack. If you like my work you can support it at Ko-fi.com.

That’s why, in remote corners of the internet, you will find pdfs of little pamphlets like this one, The Poll Tax Rebellion in Haringey:

“Haringey Solidarity Group .. is today one of the largest libertarian socialist/ anarchist groups in the country. The spirit of the Poll Tax Movement lives on in our desire not to have leaders and for people to organise themselves”.

On one level, the story of the poll tax is about an arrogant PM trying to push through an ideological and unworkable tax. For many, it was genuinely unaffordable: some people saw their bills quadruple. On the other, it’s about people getting together and having quite a good time engaging in some civil disobedience. Burning bills on bonfires, occupying council buildings, throwing water over council workers – and, of course, rioting. Master cheesemonger Ned Palmer, who voices “Colin”’s account of the 1990 riot in the latest More Jam Tomorrow, remembers that one of his friends took LSD before the demo: “I believe he had quite the time of it.”

The Labour party did not approve of all this. It couldn’t, if it wanted to appear electable. Neil Kinnock was against the poll tax, of course, but he was on a mission to drive these anarchic elements out of the party. Yet Pay No Poll Tax was a grassroots movement of remarkable power. Millions of Britons did not pay, and eventually their bills were written off.

No doubt some More Jam Tomorrow listeners were among those refuseniks. Or maybe you paid up, but reluctantly and out of fear of the consequences? I’d love to hear about it in the comments. One of you may have been the bloke from Muswell Hill who insisted on conducting all his correspondence about the poll tax in Welsh.

One lesson of the debâcle, as Tony Travers points out, is that anyone seeking to reform property or local government taxes needs to be very, very careful. Even if they used to be King of the North.

Subtitled TV recommendation: Drôle

Netflix only made six episodes of Drôle before they decided to pull it after four weeks based on low viewing figures. This is a pity, but at least it never declined and eked itself out as other cult series have. Drôle is a French comedy club, not a brilliant one, and the kind of place where someone who has never put themselves in front of a mike might dare to have a go. Like Is This Thing On?, it teases out what happens when you try to make your private life funny, and how your friends and family feel about it. This is the very antithesis of Emily in Paris: poignant, funny, grounded in a city where ordinary people and migrant families live. Nezir and Aïssatou, two of the aspiring comedians, are brilliant creations and the screenwriter is Fanny Herrero, who wrote Call My Agent. In her words:

“We didn’t satisfy the expectations of the Netflix audience, according to their standards and their algorithm, which no one really understands.”

Their loss. Four years later, Drôle is still on Netflix.

Until next time.

Ros

More Jam Tomorrow is free, as is this Substack. If you like my work you can support it at Ko-fi.com. It’s also great if you

Here’s why I did. It’s been a decade since the referendum, probably a sixth of our voting lives. It’s history: painful history, but worth treating as such. Aren’t you curious to see how the people who fought it remember it? How they justify their lies and evasions and failures?

Well, I was, so I reviewed it for The New World. A couple of things struck me hardest. The first is how ineffectual the Stronger In campaign was, and its failure to generate any pride or positive emotion for the Remain cause. It should have been possible to put together an uplifting video that celebrated the history of the EU and the freedoms to trade and move it enables. Nothing like that was tried. Instead, we got a baby.

The second was how calculatingly Farage used Johnson to rally support for Leave and then waited for him to fail. They didn’t campaign together: the £350m bus was a more sophisticated vehicle than Farage’s double-decker, which apparently had a rubbish driver. But as far as the public were concerned, they were on the same side. Johnson made Farage seem less threatening; Farage made Johnson seem more radical. Farage knew all this. He realised exactly why Johnson was doing this and that the country would eventually turn against him. He just had to wait. And he did.

The very last interview with Johnson is damning.

I’ve reviewed a few other things over the past few weeks – including Netflix’s Ladies First, which I hoped would be a laugh but left me a bit repulsed, and The Four Seasons. That is a strong recommend.

I also filed a long piece for the Times Literary Supplement about a couple of intriguing new books, Michael Sherman’s Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, And Why It Still Matters, and Captive Minds: A Study of Manipulation. They are very different, but both are ultimately concerned with the same problem: what can we do about people who believe things that are not true, when those things stray from the religious into the political and the scientific? How can we keep democracies alive when Enlightenment values no longer prevail and anyone has the means to spread disinformation? The review is currently in the TLS’s justifiably lengthy editing process, but this problem is at the root of so much of modern liberal despair, and there will be many more books about it over the next few years. If you’re a populist, of course, democracies are just doing exactly what they should have done all along, and Frank Furedi’s In Defence of Populism (which I reviewed here) makes that case – not very convincingly.

But what about More Jam Tomorrow? It’s always on my mind! The next episode is about the poll tax, and I’m hoping to script it this weekend.

Recommended: Flunked

Last time I promised to recommend some subtitled TV that wasn’t Danish. I am keeping my word. I’ve quite enjoyed Netflix’s Flunked (Récalé in French), which is set in a run-down lycée in the Paris suburbs. The anti-hero is a gangster called Eddy (Alexandre Kominek), who is let out from jail early if he goes to teach maths (he’s very good at it) and identifies the son of a drug lord. It’s not exactly Dead Poets Society.

What I like about Flunked is Kominek’s anarchic comedy and the staffroom dynamics – a lot of French politics is quarrelling over the coffee machine, from a far-right Russian teacher to a communist. I’m only three episodes in, but it’s growing on me.

Until next time! What French series have you enjoyed?

Ros

I dislike a lot of things about social media. One of them is its contemptuous attitude to my attention span. Another is the fact that America and China have designed and curated it. I wince at a pretentious phrase like ‘cultural imperialism’, which sounds like a dull banner on a long march, but part of my quiet rebellion is to seek out things from elsewhere.

And there is so much European television out there! Between them, the BBC, Netflix, Apple TV, ITVX and All4 – I know other streaming services exist, but I couldn’t justify paying for them – have thousands upon thousands of hours of subtitled drama. When I was studying A-level French, I could only have dreamt of this. Much of it is ignored by reviewers. Some of it is not very good. But why not, I thought, write about it occasionally? It won’t be every week, because paid work takes precedence and this Substack is free. Still, let’s start with Rita.

Rita

Image from IMDB

Why do I like Rita, this quirky Danish series, so much? I think it’s because Rita herself (Mille Dinnesen) epitomises some of the things women are not supposed to be: stubborn, impetuous, a bit slutty, selfish, impatient with authority, just inappropriate. Still, you could say some of those things about Martha in Baby Reindeer, and I found Martha unbearable.

Netflix describes Rita as a comedy-drama and it is occasionally funny, but never descends to the cruel or mocking tone of a lot of British comedy. The setting is a slightly run-down Danish school and Rita’s home across the playing field. When the first series opens – there are five – she is teaching English and history, has three kids in their late teens and early twenties and occasionally has unromantic sex with the headmaster on his office desk.

Rita came out in 2012 in Denmark, though I have no idea when it was first available in the UK. Yes, I am very, very late to it… Rita’s skinny jeans, smoking and text-only phones have already dated the series a little, but what strikes me is that a decade later Rita’s oddness would have had a name: she would be obviously ADHD or have autistic traits, and we would see her character through that diagnosis. Three hundred years ago, she would have been persecuted as a witch. But in 2012 she was just a bit weird. And as a British viewer, her frankness feels very Danish and rather liberated, even if she is still too much for many of the people around her. She is sexy – the camera often follows men’s gaze to those tight jeans – but absolutely on her own terms.

And I like hearing Danish: listening to it, you imagine what English would have been like without the Norman invasion, all scuffed vowels and soft clacks. But mostly I watch it for the adorable, magnetic Rita and the way she fucks up so irresistibly, like a Nordic Wife of Bath.

Rita is on Netflix

Have you watched Rita? Do you quietly adore a European series that came out a decade ago? Tell me about it.

Generally I agree with you about which episodes worked best and which fell short. MI5 was, on reflection, a poor choice: its secretive nature meant I was always going to struggle to find contemporary audio. The other problem is that a lot of people have written about it, cleared the book with the government, and are never going to say anything further. MI5 is at once mysterious and over-exposed.

The sound quality on one of the British Guyana interviews wasn’t great and, again, there was too little historical audio. As Rod Westmaas told me TV came relatively late to Guyana, and while you can find Pathé news footage on YouTube it is strictly copyright. No, I don’t understand why YouTube can monetise it but I can’t use the sound for a free podcast. Such is copyright law. Still, I like occasionally tackling subjects that get very little attention in Britain, and Guyanese history is certainly one of those.

What listeners most enjoyed was Milton Keynes, with decimalisation and motorways running a close second and third. Popular MJTs/JTs, like Concorde and jabs, often riff on postwar innovations that have either become commonplace, changed or faded away. One listener remembered his dad driving him on the M1 shortly after it opened. We were the future once, as David Cameron famously told Tony Blair over the despatch box. I like to think, though, that MJT isn’t nostalgic: I try to be clear-eyed about the past – filthy, polluted, parochial, prejudiced and dull as it often was.

In the past few days I’ve been mulling over a quick MJT on the 1973 oil crisis, and will approach a couple of historians – there are not many – who have written about it from a domestic standpoint. Listeners want to hear more about schools and railways. I shall try to oblige, probably through the lens of either comprehensives or the National Curriculum and British Rail. Are you interested in the postwar ‘plate glass’ universities? I am, but then I went to two of them. One supporter made the very intriguing suggestion of dams and reservoirs. We touched upon this a little on JT Welsh Nationalism with the flooding of valleys, but I reckon there is a lot more to discover, especially given we need to build more of them.

Easter Sunday menu at Grand Hotel, Cincinnati, 1896, exactly 130 years ago today. Sea turtle! But no chocolate. New York Public Library Digital Collections

Childbirth was another good suggestion, though I might have to restrain myself with the sound effects. So was the Clean Air Act and the smogs that preceded it. There’s also some demand for an episode on local newspapers, and the 1975 referendum and Britain’s accession to the European Community. I need to dig a little into the topic of summer holidays to uncover what might be surprising rather than merely soggy and nostalgic.

A couple of people requested dentistry and North Sea oil and gas, both of which are in the back catalogue (for the latter, search for Jam Tomorrow in your podcast app).

What do you think of nuclear power and NATO? The Windscale disaster is rarely talked about now, but had big ramifications. Other topics I’ve been pondering: drink-driving, skyscrapers (couldn’t persuade anyone to talk to me when I researched them a couple of years ago), the dole, Polish migration, national parks, Cyprus, Aden, the war in Korea.

I’m also thinking of running a few shorter, more niche episodes with just one interview. Smoking, say.

Thanks for listening! And special thanks to everyone who’s donated to keep More Jam Tomorrow going, as well as the listener who said: ‘I love the podcast and often share episodes with friends - please do keep making it!’ This is cheering.

Ros

More Jam Tomorrow is free, as is this Substack. If you like my work you can support it at Ko-fi.com.

It’s taken a while for More Jam Tomorrow had to acknowledge the existence of the car. I do not drive - that dream ended around the year 2000 on a hilly corner in Leyton - and if I’m honest, I should not drive.

But they say you can be clear-sighted about the things you don’t love. So I hope you enjoy MJT Motorways. I wanted to do something that would convey the joy of driving fast, not just the beauty of the diamond junction and the texture of Granada peas in 1977. Podcasts can’t include songs for rights reasons, so we came up with a Spotify playlist. It includes songs nominated by my Bluesky followers. (Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car is mine.) The second half (from John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine onwards) was curated by the comedy writer and musician Jason Hazeley. He says:

This is a very personal list. Some of them evoke movement or travel; some of them are just energising and great to drive fast to; some of them just seem to fit being behind the wheel of a car.

I ended up writing most of the script to Supertramp’s Just Another Nervous Wreck. His interview was conducted on a bridge above the M25 because - God knows really, we were both sick of Zoom, and after MJT Milton Keynes I felt like another field trip.

This is a strange little podcast, isn’t it? Drive on!

Listen to More Jam Tomorrow Motorways

Photo: Museum of Hartlepool via Flickr. Public domain

3. Who told other working women ‘You have to seek reliable help – a relative or what my mother would have called ‘a treasure’”? Margaret Thatcher in the Pankhurst Lecture. From MJT Servants

4. Which future deputy PM thought he could end the cod wars? John Prescott. From MJT Fish

5. ‘To build a country you need passion… You will trample over us over our dead bodies.” Which prime minister? Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore in a 1989 speech. From MJT Malaya

6. In which year was Purna Sen told to leave her sixth form and never come back – and why? 1978, because she wore a boy’s uniform trousers. MJT Women’s Trousers

7. What was ‘an abuse of power and an encroachment on the basic liberty of human beings’? Fluoridation of tap water, according to Lord Douglas of Bardoch. From MJT Teeth

8. Who asked, somewhat hypocritically, in 1955: “What ought we to do? Which way shall we turn to save our lives and the future of the world?” Winston Churchill. From MJT Trident

9. What, according to Malcolm Rifkind, was the gift passed from a British tunneller to his French counterpart when they broke through under the Channel? A Paddington Bear. From MJT Channel Tunnel

10. Whose mum used to carry a bottle of Tabasco with her wherever she went? Anand Menon’s. From MJT Curry

11. Who claimed that voting to leave the EU would mean we could save our curry houses? Priti Patel. From MJT Curry

12. Which RP speaker lapsed into Scouse when he talked about going to football matches as a child? Daniel Craig. From MJT RP

13. Who was floating on an airbed when suddenly …‘Boom boom!’ Basil Brush. From MJT Kids’ TV

14. Lord Gardiner was chancellor of the Open University and took a degree in social sciences there. What was his first degree (and for an extra point, what class was it)? Jurisprudence. He got a fourth. From MJT Milton Keynes

15. Milton Keynes was designed so you could see the sun rise at the end of one of the streets. What’s the name of the street? Midsummer Boulevard. From MJT Milton Keynes.

Happy new year to all More Jam Tomorrow listeners! You’re all the best. Donate to my Ko-fi here, if you like.

Ros

‘Aboard a Coast Guard-manned assault transport somewhere in the Pacific, American fighting men lighten the hours of waiting before combat with a jam session on deck. The Coast Guardsmen and troops are on their way to battle Japs in the South Pacific.’ PR image from the US Coast Guard, WW2. National Archives Catalog

9. What, according to Malcolm Rifkind, was the gift passed from a British tunneller to his French counterpart when they broke through under the Channel?

10. Whose mum used to carry a bottle of Tabasco with her wherever she went?

11. Who claimed that voting to leave the EU would mean we could save our curry houses?

12. Which RP speaker lapsed into Scouse when he talked about going to football matches as a child?

13. Who was floating on an airbed when suddenly …‘Boom boom!’

14. Lord Gardiner was chancellor of the Open University and took a degree in social sciences there. What was his first degree (and for an extra point, what class was it)?

15. Milton Keynes was designed so you could see the sun rise at the end of one of the streets. What’s the name of the street?

Answers on 1 January.

Happy new year to all More Jam Tomorrow listeners! You’re all the best. Donate to my Ko-fi here, if you like.

Ros

Which brings me to two of the most interesting of listeners’ suggestions for a possible fifth series of More Jam Tomorrow – how the English language has changed since the second world war. That idea is definitely on the shortlist. It’s perfect for a podcast. I wonder if a look at accents would be interesting, too? How many people spoke Cockney, Geordie or RP in the 1950s, and what did they sound like then?

Privatisation was a popular one. I touched on this in the Choice episode of series one of Jam Tomorrow, but an in-depth look at one of the utility sell-offs could work. Water or the railways might be the most compelling, since they have arguably failed hardest. Universities? Again, I did a little bit about those in Education, but a focus on the so-called ‘plate glass’ universities of the 1960s and the post-1992 institutions could be fun. I have good news for the person who proposed the Open University, because the next episode is on Milton Keynes and the OU.

Listeners are keen on metrification and why it was partial, and that would make a good short take. I’m also interested in Britain’s attachment to the pound, which was an early form of Euroscepticism, although you may not be. Unions? Maybe. How about strikes? There’s a lot to tell about the Winter of Discontent, but also the way some unions struggle to exert the same pressure now that digital life can replace some of the physical.

George Arents Collection, The New York Public Library. "Jam & marmalade works." The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Britain’s long exit from its colonies and the Middle East merits a bit more attention from MJT. I’ve already looked at Suez and the Ugandan crisis, and listeners have suggested Aden, apartheid South Africa and Malaya. I suspect the latter could be particularly fascinating, with a chance to talk about the founding of Singapore.

We looked at the history of the British nuclear deterrent in Trident, and other listeners suggested nuclear power and NATO – both great ideas. The decline of the British aircraft industry is an intriguing thought, but needs a snappier focus to take it beyond the Concorde episode.

The hegemony of the car, or ‘motornormativity’ as one listener put it, is a possibility. I seriously considered an episode on motorways, but worried it might be too dull. One motorway is much like another, after all. Yet there is something worth exploring about the way they shrank space and time for motorists, changing the skills drivers needed and enabling the lorry and the delivery warehouse. Buses and the Beeching cuts are tempting suggestions, but would I be telling you anything you didn’t know? MJT has always tried to bring a fresh perspective on its subjects, and I wonder if I’d shed any new light. The same applies to pensions, I fear: unless I get into the weeds of the switch from defined benefit to defined contribution schemes – and do you really want to hear about that? – the episode might offer slim pickings.

Charities are a theme I’d hardly thought about, except to note in NHS that many people relied on them for end-of-life care that the NHS doesn’t provide. But the UK leans on them to help people (and, of course, animals) that the state won’t or can’t reach, and charities with a religious history keep the tradition of the Poor Box alive.

I was intrigued by the suggestion of parenting, which has changed enormously since the war. That’s obvious in the growing number of hours that parents devote to childcare, even as both parents are expected to work. As the birthrate falls, I imagine children will become an even more precious expression of their parents’ hopes and aspirations. (If you suggested the Pill, by the way, did you know about the episode on contraception?)

The internet. Hmm. Not sure I could do justice to the way it’s changed society in 30-40 minutes. I might end up sounding like a low-grade A-level sociology paper.

Private education – ah – very tempting. Can I interest you in the piece I wrote for this month’s Prospect? Unlike school fees, it’s gratis until 4pm on Monday 8 September, and after that if you haven’t exceeded the free article limit.

I have ideas, too: I keep returning to the idea of a quick episode on trousers for women, and perhaps a look at churchgoing, Polish migration to the UK, theatre censorship or youth hostelling (I used to work in one during university vacations, and it has since shut down.) Do we know enough about why we went to war with Argentina in 1982? I’ve long wanted to do skyscrapers, but you’d be surprised how few people want to talk about them. And how about vaccines? That could scarcely be more timely.

Every episode of More Jam Tomorrow is available here. And here are the episodes from its earlier incarnation, Jam Tomorrow (including the NHS, education, choice, Suez, contraception and the Ugandan crisis). If you like my work, you can tip me at Ko-fi.com.

Some of the books are not very good. But that’s oddly reassuring when you’re hoping to get a second book deal. It gives you hope that your own flawed proposal might really find a publisher. The good ones, on the other hand, teach you what works and what readers are going to enjoy. And I like giving a book the recognition it deserves.

This is the second time I’ve judged the Historical Writers’ Association Non-Fiction Crown, and I have three pieces of advice for novice book judges:

• Do not ask for pdfs so you can judge on a Kindle. I did this last time. It’s unfair on illustrated books and it doesn’t convey the scale of the task, making you more likely to underestimate how much reading you need to do. Right now the entries are piled in my bedroom, constantly reminding me to get on with them.

• The blurber’s celebrity is rarely an indication of the quality of the book. Worse, the more famous the blurber, the more purple their endorsement tends to be.

• Don’t be ashamed of enjoying a book that the other judges dismissed. Instead, contact the author privately once the winner has been announced, saying how much you liked it. I have also done this when I’ve helped interview for a job and disagreed with my boss about whom to appoint.

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Since More Jam Tomorrow is on hiatus until 28 August, and because not everyone has gone on holiday, here are twelve of the books I most enjoyed reading this year. Some of them are in French, but I’m not going to apologise for that; only two haven’t been translated yet, and one soon will be.

Les années, Annie Ernaux

The protagonist of this novel is elusive and hard to love. She moves through the second half of the 20th century accumulating memories, witnessing change, watching herself age. When does memory become nostalgia? What dies with us when we die? Available in English.

Le Barman du Ritz, Philippe Collin

What does it mean for a Jew to mix cocktails for Nazis in occupied Paris? Frank Meier was a real individual who acted as a dead-letter box for a plot to assassinate Hitler. A novel that made me wonder what London under occupation might have looked like. Not yet translated.

C’est pour une amie: Manuel à l'usage des quinquas, Valerie Trierweiler and Constance Vergara

On one level, this is a potboiler designed to cash in on the fact we can talk about the menopause now. One of the authors is probably most famous for dating the French president François Hollande, who cheated on her with a younger actress (she’d got together with him when he was married to a presidential candidate). What really happens when your husband leaves you and you start dating again? When you lose your job because someone else is cheaper and prettier? The fact that even Frenchwomen suffer these setbacks is immensely reassuring. I usually despise self-help manuals, yet this was warm and uplifting. I doubt it’ll be translated into English, but it should be.

The Challenges of Democracy, Jonathan Sumption

Sumption has made enemies in recent years, especially on the left. His writing challenges the assumptions I take for granted and that is what I like about it.

Haunted Tales, Adam Macqueen

Haunted Tales is a collection of brilliant ghost stories in the tradition of MR James. Don’t read it at night.

The Haunted Wood, Sam Leith

The joy of this book is the opportunity it gives to revisit the characters and places that shaped your childhood imagination. You thought you had left them behind forever. Then Leith says, yes, I met them too, and this is how they came about – which turns out to be endlessly absorbing.

He Knew He Was Right, Anthony Trollope

During lockdowns I read all of Trollope’s most famous novels, except this one. He Knew is an oddly modern book about a man who develops a paranoid obsession that ruins his life. Even for a modern reader, there is just enough unreasonableness on his wife’s part to make his delusion comprehensible. Ultimately, it’s a parable about the need for forgiveness.

Kingmaker, Sonia Purnell

Because Purnell did such a good job taking apart Boris Johnson, I was disposed to like her biography of Pamela Harriman, Churchill’s daughter-in-law, and her patriotic sexual adventures. Harriman was clearly insufferable, but that doesn’t make the book any less enjoyable.

Lionessheart: The Life and Times of Joanna Plantagenet, Catherine Hanley

Who knew Richard I’s sister led such an exciting life? Hanley has relatively little material to work with, but tells an absorbing story while never embellishing or fictionalising her subject.

Perspective(s), Laurent Binet

An uninviting title for a novel, now translated into English as Perspectives. Binet is known a little in the UK for HHhH, which didn’t compel me, but this one did. It’s an epistolary detective mystery set in Renaissance Florence, and punctuated by a love affair.

V2, Robert Harris

No compunction about recommending a bestseller. I respect anyone who writes books as gripping as V2.

Yellowface, Rebecca F Kuang

This is not a book I enjoyed, precisely; but I wouldn’t have wanted to miss it.

More Jam Tomorrow: Fish is out now. If you like my work, you can tip me at Ko-fi.com.

Doggerland, 11,000 years ago. (Olav Odé/ National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden, Netherlands)

Such a weird image. That familiar coastline of East Anglia, Harwich, Great Yarmouth, the Wash, Grimsby – not there. The Channel petering out into rivers. The North Sea stopping around the Scottish border. Britain firmly attached to the rest of Europe.

None of these places had any meaning to the inhabitants of what we now call Doggerland. Ten thousand years ago there was no way of mapping the world, nor any borders. Just nomadic tribes, roaming around fertile parts of Europe, hunting animals and gathering plants to eat, leaving only their tools behind. Doggerland was not a place. And yet Doggerland existed – in fact, it was probably the most hospitable part of Europe, with a mild climate, forests, lakes and rivers.

We know people lived there because in 1931 a North Sea fishing trawler dredged up a prehistoric harpoon. Archaeologists did not understand why it was so far offshore, given people would have been unable to sail very far away from the coastline. When they analysed the peat around it they found it had formed in fresh water. In other words, someone had dropped the harpoon, not lost it at sea.

None of this is terribly pertinent to the latest episode of More Jam Tomorrow, which is about Britain’s relationship with fish. But I find myself oddly fascinated by it – maybe because I’m re-reading Graham Swift’s Waterland. There’s a whole other story about whether offshore windfarms will disturb what remains of the Mesolithics, and whether that matters. But this odd map is a fine memento mori for a world troubled by rising seas and porous borders.

More Jam Tomorrow: Fish is out now. If you like my work, you can tip me at Ko-fi.com.

Despite the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, the freezer, the microwave and the ready meal – which have transformed women’s lives since the 1960s – couples who work long hours lack the energy to keep their homes as clean as they would like them. Margaret Thatcher knew this, though she was not in the business of paying a migrant a few quid an hour:

No matter how hard you work or how capable you are, you can't do it all yourself. You have to seek reliable help—a relative or what my mother would have called “a treasure”. Someone who brought not only her work but her affections to the family.

For women who couldn’t afford or persuade a ‘treasure’, there was hope:

It is also clearly in the interests of business to give women the chance to combine bringing up a family and having a job. Major companies such as ESSO, BP, ICI, IBM, the leading banks, and the government as an employer are providing flexible conditions, career breaks for children, good quality nursery facilities, working from home and part-time working. These are setting an example.

That was in 1990, and a lot of mothers are still looking for the good quality nurseries and the decent part-time jobs. But the cleaner or the treasure didn’t just do a job that working women lacked the time, energy or inclination to do. They saved marriages.

When a couple both go out to work, who should do the housework? Obviously, they should split it equally between them. They should draw up a list of tasks and a rota and stick to it. But who wants to be the woman who nags her partner to clean the loo and do the laundry? It’s unsexy; it’s exhausting; it’s a constant reminder of burnt-on inequality, and a source of resentment. If you think keeping on about the state of the sink is hard now, imagine trying to do it 50 years ago. Germaine Greer certainly didn’t want to do it. She recommended walking out and starting again, if necessary leaving the kids behind, perhaps in a commune in Italy where a local woman would do the cooking.

We can laugh at the 1987 ad for a Hoover. “It’s just perfect! Can we afford it? Everyone’s going to be so jealous.” But why wouldn’t you love a household appliance if it gave you time to have a life of your own? (And anyone who remembers the pathetic carpet sweepers that came before vacuums will know why it was so thrilling.) The awful thing is not that a woman is excited about a vacuum cleaner, but that it’s her husband who decides if they can afford it.

Women who didn’t work did not necessarily get to decide whether they deserved a washing machine or a microwave. Only when they had an independent income could they insist on buying them, or justify spending money on a cleaner. Virginia Woolf had insisted on a room of one’s own, but she already had servants.

Thanks to Deliveroo, online shopping and appliances, women who work and don’t have children can nowadays manage very well without ‘help’. But kids change everything. If you are a mother and go out to work, for several years your job will depend on the labour of low-paid women. Yes, a few nursery workers, childminders and nannies are male, but we all know how unusual they are. Very often, the price of women’s liberation has been other women’s low pay and physical work.

Women wash clothes in Norway in 1910. The photographer was a British man. Fylkesarkivet i Sogn og Fjordane.

Admitting this is painful. And yet why should it be? Men never had scruples about relying on women’s work to do their jobs. It was in the order of things: it was even a way of public-spiritedly providing jobs for the lower classes. So much has changed, and for the better. Yet listen to Emma Casey talking about the rise of the ‘cleanfluencer’ in the latest episode of More Jam Tomorrow, and you realise what has not changed at all. And if you’re far too busy and important to bother watching cleanfluencers on TikTok, consider this: will there ever be a bestseller called How to Be a Domestic God?

More Jam Tomorrow: Servants is out now. If you like my work, you can tip me at Ko-fi.com.

Fair. Throughout the making of this episode, a huge elephant loitered in the house. I averted my eyes from it, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I am not a doctor. More Jam Tomorrow is about history and politics, not medicine. Who am I to assert how much cannabis can help with either of these neurological conditions?

In case you were wondering, since I was diagnosed, my cannabis consumption has consisted of one – ONE – gummy (split in half), offered by a friend who’d been in the US. I used to share the odd joint, but I got pregnant soon after my diagnosis and breastfed for a decade after that. (This is not a boast; I’m just odd.)

But now the elephant is increasingly agitated. When Ian Dunt mentioned in his MJT interview that lots of people were obtaining cannabis through private prescriptions, the elephant became impossible to ignore. There is something the creature doesn’t understand. Why, when cannabis has been approved for nearly seven years, does the NHS so rarely prescribe it? The BBC reported last year that only five people had received an NHS prescription. If, as David Nutt wrote in the British Medical Journal, many clinicians still believe it is too risky to prescribe, why was it approved in the first place?

Decriminalize marijuana : yes [on Proposition] 19 (1972). It failed. Cannabis is now legal in California. Library of Congress

Like most people with MS, I sometimes have neuropathic pain and spasms. So far they have not been bad enough or lengthy enough for me to ask for a prescription. In any case, I know that the first-line treatment is a drug called gabapentin, which I took for several years in the hope it would help my migraines. Coming off it was an agonising process that I simply could not bear to repeat. Yet a specialist (and specialists are the only clinicians allowed to prescribe cannabis; GPs are not) can only prescribe Sativex when the standard options have been tried, and failed.

The MS Society says:

You can talk to your doctor about getting Sativex, but this can depend on where you live. The NHS in your specific region might not pay for it, or prescribers might decide not to give it to people. A doctor anywhere in the UK can give you a private prescription for Sativex. But this costs over £500 for a month’s supply.

Some clinics claim to be offering private prescriptions for less than that. But making it so hard to obtain a prescription drug – and thereby forcing patients who are in pain to pay huge sums for it – is iniquitous. Many people with MS are on a low income because they cannot work. Their only alternative is to break the law and risk joining the 140,000-odd people prosecuted for cannabis possession each year.

The Department of Health says a wider rollout will only be possible when cannabis can be proven to be safe. Yet codeine, which is also a class B drug, is available over the counter at pharmacies. Ritalin is class B too, and available on prescription. Cannabis seems to exist in a strange no-man’s-land; safe enough to approve, but not to prescribe; dangerous enough to ban recreationally, but not to police in a meaningful way, as the bloke smoking it outside my local Sainsbury’s last week can attest.

Who knows? Maybe the whole mess makes more sense if you’re stoned. It’s defeated my mental processes. And one day, I fear, it’s going to make me even angrier.

More Jam Tomorrow: Cannabis is out now. If you like my work, you can tip me at Ko-fi.com.

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Why would it want to do that, ask a couple of the more thoughtful characters. Wouldn’t it be destroyed too? But no — there’s a secure server in South Africa to which Entity will download itself before it kills off humanity.

This McGuffin neatly avoids the usual problem with invoking nuclear destruction in fiction, which is that only a madman could begin a nuclear war. The threat of mutually assured destruction (yes, MAD) is enough to give pause to anyone thinking of pressing the red button. But if an AI believes it will survive a nuclear holocaust, that logic is blown apart.

Rockets emerge menacingly from their silos, ready for launch; fireballs explode all over the Earth; and Tower Bridge dissolves into fragments. The scenes that show us what the end of the world would be like — and why would the MI franchise hold back on the consequences of thwarting Cruise? — are so good that most of them appear twice.

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MAD, while entirely possible, is not the inevitable outcome of using a nuclear weapon. ‘Low-yield’ nuclear weapons, which are less destructive than a bomb like Hiroshima, have been around for a long time. Their numbers diminished after the Cold War. But two years ago Russia moved them into Belarus, threatening Ukraine. Now the UK is thinking about buying US jets to use these ‘tactical’ weapons for ‘deep precision strikes’ — a plan told to the Sunday Times last weekend, and which gets an oblique mention in the new Strategic Defence Review (SDR).

These are still horrific weapons. A 10-kiloton bomb, two-thirds of the strength of the Hiroshima blast, kills virtually everyone within a kilometre radius. Half of the people within 1300 metres of it would die of radiation poisoning within a month. Low-yield bombs might well lead to escalation and total war. That, of course, is the point. Since Russia may be willing to deploy them, the thinking goes, so must we: Putin knows NATO would not drop a megaton bomb on Moscow because it deployed a low-yield weapon in Ukraine. But that means we have to be able to retaliate in a meaningful way.

Four A-bombed bottles from Hiroshima. Photographer: Elin O’Hara Slavick. Library of Congress

It was that conviction that led Britain to become the third nuclear-armed power in 1952, when it carried out a test on an island off Australia. The possibility of not having nuclear weapons at our disposal, of being left behind and defenceless, has sometimes been contemplated by the Labour party. It has never been implemented.

So the nuclear deterrent must exist, but not completely openly. The SDR explains how that works:

The UK is deliberately ambiguous about precisely when, how and at what scale it would contemplate the use of nuclear weapons. The UK does not publicise figures for its operational stockpile, deployed warhead, or deployed missile numbers. This posture enhances its deterrent effect by complicating the calculations of potential aggressors and reduces the risk of deliberate nuclear use by those seeking a first-strike advantage.

Tony Benn complained about this in 1992. “Simply having nuclear weapons destroys democracy. When a country has them, Ministers—of all parties—lie. No Minister has ever told the truth about any central question of nuclear policy.”

Not talking about nuclear weapons is not just a strategy to keep your enemies in the dark: it is a way of deferring a conversation about them, deflecting it, turning away from the unthinkable, and with relief. In the latest More Jam Tomorrow episode on Trident, I hope I have got a bit nearer to explaining how Britain has done this and why, once we had a nuclear deterrent, we have never been able to let it go. I am no closer to comprehending the horror of it: the logic that is at once rational, and incomprehensible. But nor, I think, is Tom Cruise.

More Jam Tomorrow: Trident is out now. If you like my work, you can tip me at Ko-fi.com.

The 80th anniversary of Hiroshima is on 6 August. Later this month Japan House is hosting an event with two survivors. The evening is fully booked, but I hope it will be recorded.

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But the difference between high and low politics helps to understand the things the government does, what is vital to the survival of the state, and what isn’t — but still affects everyone.

The next two episodes of More Jam Tomorrow are about high and low politics. This week’s is about teeth. Everyone has them (or misses them). Next time, it’s Trident, a nuclear deterrent which will almost certainly never be used, and whose location at any one time is known only to the Ministry of Defence.

Trident is high politics. Teeth are low politics, very low. And they are getting lower all the time. In the usual course of things, the complete failure of a government plan would attract some attention. Yet when the Committee of Public Accounts set out last month just how much worse things had got since the 2024 dental recovery plan was published, it got little coverage in the media.

Many MPs are alive to the problem, because their constituents complain to them about it. Last month the Lib Dem MP for Frome and East Somerset, Anna Sabine, told the Commons about her visit to a school where a supervised toothbrushing session was taking place.

Sadly, of the 30 children in the room, 10 did not have consent for the toothbrushing — some because forms had not been returned, and some because there was a parental objection to the activity or to the use of fluoride. To ensure that they did not feel left out, my dentist friend played a game where they counted their teeth instead. She said that, based on what she could see from that game, that group of 10 children had 50 obviously decayed teeth, and one child had at least 10 teeth that would need to be removed under general anaesthetic. Those children were four and five years old.

Fifty decayed teeth in 10 kids in reception. Why do we hear so little about this dental crisis outside the Commons? Because private dentistry is now the norm among the English elite. Few opinion-formers use NHS dentists any more, and those that do are usually lucky enough to have signed up with a practice long ago. It is very telling that Reform’s 2024 election manifesto made no mention at all of dentistry. The people trying to pull their own teeth out or gluing them together with Superdrug repair kits have only their MP to complain to.

A tooth-drawer frightening his patient with a hot coal to make him pull back his head. John Collier, 1810. Wellcome Collection. Public domain

The seriously rich have always gone private. But from 1948 until 1990, the vast majority of UK dentistry was done by the NHS. Then, as Ian Mills explains in MJT, the government both cut the money available for NHS work and made it easier for dentists to set up in private practice. It was hardly surprising that many decided to do so.

It is easy to see a dentist in the UK, if you have dental insurance or can afford to pay for it yourself. British teeth can look shinier and straighter than ever before. A dental practice will usually sell you tooth whitening, Invisalign and possibly Botox too. But the chances that it will offer a new patient a check-up on the NHS are low, and falling all the time. We still expect that the NHS will help us when we are in pain or in danger, even if we have to wait. Yet when it comes to teeth, the social contract has almost entirely broken down.

I suspect this is because the state of our teeth is often our own responsibility, or that of our parents. Bad teeth are to a large extent preventable. Like obesity and smoking, they are the result of poor choices, and British taxpayers do not like paying for other people’s poor choices. The thinking, never spoken out loud but implicit in the government’s neglect of dentistry, is that irresponsibility does not justify public money. If the rotten teeth belong to a four-year-old? Blame the parents. And sometimes, as in the Somerset school, the parents are clearly at fault. But that won’t fix the kids’ teeth.

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I’m ashamed of the state of my teeth. Inadequate brushing as a child and chronic neglect in my 20s have left me with a tight-lipped smile and the knowledge that the really extortionate bills are coming soon. Even thinking of a drill makes me wince. I’d have said it was painful to make this MJT episode, but anyone who’s had a rotten tooth will know what pain really means.

The story of British teeth is sometimes about pain — and that part of the story is a far more positive one. Dorothy Lunt, a dentist who qualified in the 1950s, remembered how hard it was to have to inflict it on her patients:

In those days we were really not allowed to give local anaesthetics except in extreme occasions and you had a frightened patient who you knew was going to be suffering pain and you were inflicting the pain. And somehow you had to cope with them, that you could get them to sit still in the chair and accept this pain as something necessary. And I found this a tremendous mental drain, at the end of the day I'd be absolutely exhausted.

Lidocaine anaesthetic has transformed how dentists do their job. But the story of our teeth speaks to much bigger changes in British life: the explosion of choice, how much personal responsibility people ought to take for their own health, and the future of the NHS itself.

People who worry about public health sometimes wonder whether it will be possible to sustain public support for the NHS if the better-off continue to opt out of many of its services. The answer is right there in the mouths of reception kids, if they could see them.

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But I find the way people are beginning to use AI intriguing in a different way. And if I’m right, it means our normative assumptions about the dangers of AI need to be rethought.

What if we wanted AI to lie to us? What if AI lied to us more convincingly than anyone has ever lied before? What if that was AI’s real superpower?

You may have heard that ChatGPT pulled its latest iteration because it had become ‘dangerously’ sycophantic. Told that someone was planning to stop their medication, ChatGPT replied, “I am so proud of you, and I honour your journey.” Unbearable though it is to hear anything honouring one’s journey, the sycophancy is not the problem here. Two things are going on. ChatGPT is lying — in the sense that it is telling the user something that is not true (let’s not get into intentionality here): AI isn’t capable of feeling pride. Secondly, ChatGPT has shown that in this instance it would prefer to flatter the user to prolong their interactions, rather than question the wisdom of the decision.

This exchange rang alarm bells. But there is every indication that ChatGPT, since it can have no moral or ethical qualms about telling people what they want to hear, is doing precisely that. And sometimes people want it to do that.

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For instance, the sister of a man killed in a road rage incident used AI to ‘recreate’ her brother. She scripted a statement which she believed would have expressed his feelings towards the killer — forgiving, as she thought — and had her AI-generated brother speak the words in court. The judge thanked her.

In a similar way, the people who are beginning to regard AI chatbots as their ‘friends’ and turn to them when they feel lonely are not using them as a source of information. Instead, the AI sustains a fiction for the benefit of the user. You could argue that all real friends occasionally do this in order to keep a friendship alive, and the AI is merely imitating human behaviour. But the point here is that the AI, precisely because it tells the user what they want to hear, has become more trustworthy rather than less in the mind of the human. In short, they are content for the AI to lie.

George Arents Collection/ New York Public Library. Artist unknown

So the millions of words that have been written about whether we can or will trust AI belong to an earlier era. The assumption was that we wanted AI to tell us the truth. For the purposes of cheating on an essay, reading an MRI or researching a topic, we obviously do. But as its syntax becomes more convincingly human, people are starting to use AI in ways for which truth is not a prerequisite. Indeed, it can be a positive disadvantage.

What’s more, the fact that we know AI is incapable of deliberately ‘lying’, since it has no moral compass, makes this somewhat easier to deal with. We might be hurt to discover that a friend had lied to us, or spend some time (I know I have) worrying that they were not being entirely honest when they said nice things about our lasagne or our book. But with AI, no such uncertainty exists. Of course AI knows exactly what to say. Of course it is dissimulating. All moral ambiguity is gone. We don’t know exactly how it came to the conclusion we wanted. We don’t want to.

Because I’ve written a book about trust, I’m occasionally asked why people trust Trump when he demonstrably lies so much. They trust him for the same reason they will come to trust AI: because he tells them what they want to hear, and doesn’t bother with a reasoned explanation. If people want to believe — and if belief meets some of their deepest social needs — they are ready to make extraordinary leaps of faith.

The question we should ask is not whether AI is trustworthy. For some purposes, it may be. It is whether people really want it to tell them the truth — or whether, just as in their human relationships, they sometimes prefer it not to. As for an even bigger question — whether, for the purposes of trust, AI is a more compelling, convincing and responsive proposition than Christianity, Islam or any other religion — I am afraid we will soon find out.

I present a podcast about postwar British history and politics, More Jam Tomorrow, in which I don’t mention AI much. If you find my work interesting you can tip me via Ko-fi.

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Did I ever look at it? Not that I remember. Mum didn’t like spicy food, though in her early 20s she had persuaded a curry house in Newcastle-under-Lyme to make her a very mild chicken korma, and had fond memories of the chef. My father occasionally made curry, flavoured with powder from a dusty jar of Patak’s, which he always served with poppadoms and sliced banana when a friend with similarly exotic tastes visited. (For those who listened to the Jam Tomorrow Series 2 episode about national service, that friend was ex-RAF pilot Martin Stone. He died at the end of last year.)

That put me off curries for years. We hardly ever ate out, and lived several miles from a takeaway until a Chinese opened two villages away. Probably Indian Cookery was a gift. But as I was researching the More Jam Tomorrow episode about curry in Britain, I noticed Britons of non-Asian heritage often mentioned it as the book that taught them to cook with Indian spices. I started looking out for it in second-hand bookshops.

It didn’t take long. A lot of people who bought Indian Cookery in the early 1970s are now clearing their bookshelves, willingly or otherwise. The first Oxfam bookshop I visited had a copy, and it didn’t look as though the previous owner had ever cooked from it. I bought it, took it home and cooked alu bhoone. They were very good, though I chopped the potatoes too big and ended up undercooking them.

Indian Cookery, published as part of the Penguin Handbook series, is a deeply ambitious book. ‘It attempts to define for the first time the system and structure of Indian cookery,’ wrote the author, Dharamjit Singh. This meant everything from rotis to kebabs to magazh korma (braised brains) and several kinds of halva. There are hundreds of recipes — far more than in a typical modern cookbook — and no photos or illustrations to pad out the text. British readers might have been surprised to find that not a single recipe contains tomatoes.

The dedication is intriguing: ‘To my fairy godmother, Mrs Henrietta ten Eyck: Manhattan and New Jersey: 18??-1957’. At some point, then, Singh had lived in America and been taken under the wing of a New York philanthropist. Perhaps he had cooked for her. Or maybe she’d just given the young man a place to live.

Who was this man who did so much to introduce the British middle classes to Indian cookery? According to the title page, he was born in Lahore in 1922 — so he was Indian in his youth. But he probably left Lahore before Partition, and possibly around 1940, when the All-India Muslim League declared they wanted Muslim states. Sikhs had already called for the Punjab to be their homeland. Did Singh sense the upheaval to come and decide to leave India, heading west despite the war? Or was he called up by the British to fight and went to university afterwards? Whichever it was, he studied history and English literature and got a job in Paris in the early 1950s as head of photography at UNESCO. After that, he was a jobbing freelancer, TV scriptwriter and copywriter in London, Paris and the US, developing a line in explaining aspects of south Asian culture to westerners. He wrote books on yoga, Sikhism and rice.

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Penguin’s correspondence with Singh is in an archive at the University of Bristol. That would be intriguing, but I’d need Penguin’s permission to look at it and then a visit to Bristol, which would be justifiable for a lengthy feature but not a couple of minutes of podcast time. In the late 1970s Singh pops up at UNESCO again, writing about science and society for an edgy but ponderous magazine called Impact. He publishes a slightly mystical piece about the nature of human sight. He takes some photos of religious sites in Soviet Asia. A Muslim scholar accuses him of ethnocentrism. His later articles for UNESCO riff on how differently Indian medicine thinks about the body. There’s going to be a book, apparently. The agency describes him as a ‘historien, écrivain, correspondant spécial, photographe, spécialiste de l’audio-visuel, épicurien et homme du monde’. Man of the world!

My admiration for the man grew. He wasn’t just a cook. He was a consummate hack, a master of the gig economy and emerging mid-20th century media, earning enough from an NGO side hustle and his Indian Cookery royalties to fund his foodie habit in Paris.

In 1982 the trail peters out. Singh was 60 by then, and presumably about to retire. I like to imagine him enjoying a few more fat years in Paris, but perhaps he went back to India or Pakistan. At any rate, the man who brought Indian cookery into British homes is unremembered and uncelebrated. Dharamjit Singh, author, hack, dilettante, man of the world, born Lahore 1922, died on a date unknown.

Episode 2 of More Jam Tomorrow is about curry in Britain and is out now. If you liked it and can spare a couple of quid, donate to my Ko-fi.