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For The Emigre

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For The Catholic Herald

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Because I once made the mistake of dabbling a bit in Egyptology, no less than every other week – in the year 2022 – some friend (‘…’) will schwack me with a meme, cartoon or article about people who still believe the pyramids were built by aliens.

FFS (I hear you cry). If only there were a handy single-volume book one could present to these loons, full of unarguable evidence putting this feeble business past all disputation.

Cry. no. longer.

In the final weeks of the 2013 season, excavators on the Gulf of Suez, in Egypt’s Eastern Desert, uncovered the world’s most ancient harbour installation at Wadi el-Jarf. In it, they unearthed a cache containing the world’s oldest extant inscribed papyrus (c. 2607-2605 BCE). And in that, they found a ‘unique and unprecedented testimony relating to one of the world’s most famous monuments’ – the Great Pyramid at Giza: inspiring and perplexing visitors, now, for almost five millennia.

The little-green-men/Atlantean/whatever stuff is simultaneously a failure and an over-use of the imagination. But the pyramids, of course, are fairly mind-boggling.

King Khufu’s quarrymen hand-sculpted over 6 hectares of rock to level the plateau and form a basic foundation, to legendary levels of accuracy with regard to both the earth and heavens. The block-hauling ramps alone are thought to have contained as much as 400,000 cubic metres of sand and rock… and perhaps only reached 1/5 of the way up the edifice. The masons dressed precisely ‘67,127 square metres of the outer surface of [the] pyramid casing with copper chisels the width of an index finger.’ The outer surface!

A ‘human disturbance on a geological scale’, the funerary complex of the Great Pyramid was so large that it incorporated other pyramids.

The building site also contained an entire administrative city – ‘a kind of Old Kingdom Egyptian equivalent of Versailles’ – complete with artificial inland port to take hydraulic advantage of the Nile flood.

Here, handwritten scribal records – the ‘oldest known explicitly dated Egyptian documents’ – pick up the story of the middle-ranking inspector Merer and his 40-man naval gang.

Merer was literally the captain of ‘Team Great’, an elite and adaptable outfit who transported the ‘grunt’ labour force and maintained the waterways round Giza, ferried limestone blocks up and down the Nile, provisioned and managed stores at the plateau, and undertook expeditions to Sinai and to Punt – lands of, if not quite milk and honey, then turquoise, myrrh, and much-needed copper for stone-working tools. ‘The builders of the gigantic pyramids of the 4^th Dynasty must have amassed more copper… than was being accumulated anywhere else in the world.’

Interestingly, Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehrer argue that Merer and his men represent not vast slave-labour exploited by a biblical despot, but ‘the employment of a highly skilled, well-rewarded workforce.’ Team Great worked in proximity to power – including royal guard duties and religious rituals – and were part-paid in the quasi-currency of luxury cloth.

But it is also estimated that four teams like Merer’s might have spent 20 years transporting just the facing stone for the Great Pyramid.

This daily diary, then, reflects not only these ‘individuals in history’, but also an early, centralised ‘territorial national state’, which subjugated and resettled provincial peoples, ‘absorbed all the wealth and agricultural surplus of the country’, and kept excellent paperwork – ‘the earliest expression of the bureaucratic mindset’ that enabled such colossal building projects, and which subsequently (soon, in fact) outgrew that purpose and came to embody the whole pharaonic state.

From Herodotus to the History Channel, the Giza pyramids have always been the focal point of Egyptology. And yet, somehow, there’s always more to learn about them.

A collaboration by two extremely senior hands-on Egyptologists, The Red Sea Scrolls is as rigorously detailed as a general-market hardback could afford to be. It also contains several once-in-a-lifetime archaeological discoveries (the loss of documentary record from the Old Kingdom is almost total: by extrapolation, there should be tens of thousands of these scrolls, just for the Great Pyramid), so it’s a shame the book, which does not even claim to know how 2.3 million huge blocks were put one on top of t’other, plays to the pyramidiots with talk of ‘secrets’.

Merer’s logbooks aren’t literature, either, and the authors acknowledge that administrative documents ‘may not make for fascinating reading at first glance…’ Some readers will find the chapters on the challenges of preservation to be dry work. Others will need do little more than skim the sections on the early pyramids for latest reasoning. But for the die-hard nerds there’s plenty of mapping, reconstructions and transliteration/translation to keep you busy – and a bibliography that would take a year to get through even if you skipped out all the German bits. The text is so abundantly illustrated that no thinking man or woman could conceivably gainsay the faintest aspect of either method or conclusions.

Nine years on, restorers are still readying the Wadi el-Jarf scrolls to be displayed. For everybody else, meanwhile, £30 is a bargain if it means you never again have to converse at length with someone who believes the pyramids cannot be rationally explained. Take this book everywhere you fear you might run into same. If all else fails, well, I guess you can always hit them with it.

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For The Spectator

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Born when we were born, and embarking on writing ‘careers’ (LOL) just as the web ripped the financial guts out of the paper industry, my idea of a good time is to phone my best mate every couple of months and bitch about how, ten years before us, even the lowliest hacks had an expense account, and, ten years afterwards, world-famous ‘media’ types make actual fortunes from unboxing videos.

I’m not on TikTok. I’d never heard of Clubhouse til last week. Hell, I don’t even have a LinkedIn account. Why would I? My idea of self-promotion is to post my articles on Facebook. Once. I would sooner shit myself in public than use an unironic hashtag.

Then, last October, said mate sent me a Wall Street Journal bit about a 21-year-old Texan ‘electronic music producer’ who, having amassed 52,000 followers on social media, dropped out of college to go full-time, and in the last two years has made… just under $70.

Damned if I didn’t feel an ounce of sympathy for the poor fellow.

Symeon Brown’s Get Rich or Lie Trying opens around the same time, 15-20 years ago, when hip-hop up-and-comer Soulja Boy used LimeWire, YouTube, and appropriated 50 Cent song titles to send his breakout ‘Crank That’ viral, and net himself $7m in the process. ‘By design or good fortune, [Soulja Boy] created a formula for viral success that is still being used today by artists, companies and social media influencers.’

Still, at least he was creating something.

That shift away from the dominance of the traditional media ‘generated a new global currency: influence.’ The current highest-earning influencer, Kylie Jenner, can make over a million dollars from just a single post on Instagram – most often in association with brands like Fashion Nova, ‘a market leader in ghetto chic and timeless hoochie wear’, which has paid rappers for shout-outs (i.e. product placements) in their songs, and signed up ex-reality TV superstars like Cardi B as employed brand ambassadors.

But the apparent glamour of Fashion Nova’s couture is somewhat at odds with the reality that it is hastily ripped off and poorly made in rat-infested wage-thieving sweatshops, and by and large even marketed for nothing on – literally – the backs of young women, many of whom have paid for kit decked out with slogans of female empowerment.

The majority of GRoLT‘s investigations into the corrosive influence of influencing are saturated with this and every other conceivable flavour of dishonesty.

Turkish cosmetic surgeons offering ‘aggressive discounts’ to surgery obsessives (some of the least alluring paragraphs you’ll ever read) who then proceed to advertise on their behalf. Meme-humour accounts built up and sold on with their followings (one offered me a dildo just the other day). Borderline-non-existent dropshipping ‘businesses’ that at best sell cheap Chinese crap, and at worst take your money and then simply evaporate. ‘Traders’ who flat-out fabricate high-flying lives, recruiting – for cold, hard monetary gain – ‘fellow investors’ to finance their own dreams, while it turns out they are living with their mothers.

Inexorably, of course, we come to cryptocurrency: ‘A culture where nothing needs to be intrinsically valuable or true about a commodity…’

Many of Brown’s targets are little more than good old-fashioned ‘direct selling’ pyramid schemes – ‘the default business model of the social media age’ – get-rich-quick wannabes duped into paying fees and subscriptions for supposedly elite training/goods/access privileges. In one instance, students signing up to market nutrition drinks (as an avowed alternative to mountainous post-college debt!) found that ‘97% of them would have made more in a minimum-wage job.’ Another company – in a nicely circular bit of legal logic – had to pay out $4.75m in a consumer (sic) protection suit brought by its own ‘staff’.

And in almost every situation, from breast-implants to bitcoin, ‘the challenge was to make as much money as possible before the game was up.’

In this eye-watering environment of chicanery and cynicism, the abuse of language is, naturally, endemic. ‘Platinum 150’ is the lowest rung of one particular Ponzi scheme. ‘Boss Babes’ routinely turn out to be ‘young women, single mothers and housewives short of money.’ When a fly-by-night plastic surgery outfit is eventually embarrassed online they respond, ‘Clinichub pays great attention to BODY AWARENESS and BODY POSITIVITY.’

So: where there’s bullshit there’s brass. But at least social media enables us to come together for the most-obvious (and least-monetisable) causes such as social justice, right?

Wrong. ‘The infighting between the most prominent figures attached to #BlackLivesMatter has become a lesson in how social media incentivises competition and disincentivises collectivism.’ One leading light became a brand ambassador for Twitter itself. Another amassed a private million-dollar property portfolio ‘while publicly proclaiming socialist values.’

Dreams can be a dreadful poison, and ‘the addictive rewards of accruing followers by any means necessary are warping human behaviour both on- and off-line.’ Influencers get their teeth, tits, and everything else done to mimic Insta filters. A modish (and highly marketable) preference for the ‘racially ambiguous’ has even caused a few to ‘fake their ethnicity’ (cue hatestorm). Funnily enough, there are some mental health issues arising from this need to ‘live a life of performance disguised as authenticity.’

So what possesses anyone to compete in these ‘attention hunger games’?

A late-millennial black man from a Tottenham school that gave out more free meals than it did GCSEs, Symeon Brown is well placed to empathise with the ‘immeasurable pressure to be rich, especially among young men and working class racial minorities.’

Boosted by mantras of Blair-era ‘aspiration’ (‘the internet’s most exploitable economy’), his generation grew up at the roiling convergence of celebrity culture, high fashion, hip-hop, and the technology explosion, and went to work between the 2008 financial crash and Covid, in a world of instant gratification where ‘modern apprenticeships barely pay and rarely lead to job progression’. Many of them have, if anything, gone backwards since. It is perhaps forgivable that they would be receptive to any message (Brown notes some striking echoes of the evangelical church) which says the meek are on the fast track with regard to earth-inheritance.

It’s nonetheless noticeable that few of GRoLT’s chaotically-failed influencers ever conclude that they should get a ‘proper’ job. But then why would they? In the context of the current, desperate, gigging economy, a Cameroonian immigrant paid to be racially abused by livestreamers says it is ‘child’s play’ compared to being homeless. Besides, the ‘hustle’ ethos, epitomised by rap musicians and the likes of fraudster Jordan Belfort, is now ‘so pervasive that even having a well-paid job is regularly derided as selling yourself short.’

‘We are all influencers now,’ Symeon Brown declares. Well, no. But Get Rich or Lie Trying is nevertheless a depressingly instructive read – and the nightmare of the influencer (and ‘influenced’) economy is probably still only halfway through getting started. So if, as Brown asserts, social media is now ‘where the first draft of history is written and where the discourse that informs our civic institutions is set,’ please take this opportunity to look up ‘Influencers in the Wild’, and see just how much trouble we’re all really in.

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For The Critic

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Stepping slightly sideways from where she left off in Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, Emma Marris now turns her attention to a series of ‘exercises in practical philosophy’ on the ethics of humans versus(?) wild animals.

From the conservation of songbirds in Hawai’i to the extermination of rats in one part of New Zealand (and protected status in another), she asks what, in our overwhelmingly-human-dominated 21^st century, the very concept of ‘wild’ might still even mean. Outside of Yellowstone National Park, for instance, almost no wolves manage to die from natural causes. The Great Condor, meanwhile, had to be rendered 100% captive in order to ‘save’ it.

And to what extent are our domestic pets and livestock distinguishable, ethically, from ‘wild’ animals? Should we feed struggling Arctic polar bear populations at the expense of many thousands of seals? Are species even inherently valuable? The argument is made that helping animals might constitute a lack of respect. Besides, some chimpanzees are jerks.

Since when were humans not a part of nature, anyway? All ecosystems are built on death – and the ‘obligation’ not to hunt or kill is purely human. (Even vegans cannot ‘fully opt out of ecological existence.’) Marris is openly disconcerted by her conclusion that evolution and biodiversity are not objectively ‘good’, per se, but rather ‘completely amoral… just time and sex and death and mutation and chance.’

She cites renowned philosophers who say it is catastrophic human arrogance to play God (yet further) with animals, and others who recommend a scientific ‘extinction of all carnivorous species’. Amid the conflicting ‘claims’ of natural processes, species and individuals, predicting the ripple effects of any intervention is extremely tricky. Time-frames could run to many generations. And it is hard to find enough terrain where animals can truly be left to their own devices.

These are deep ethical waters, and I don’t think it’s unfair to say there are more questions in Wild Souls than answers.

Ultimately, Marris makes a plea for faunal ‘physical autonomy, not genetic or ecological purity’, and advocates humility and limits on our interference in troublingly vague states of ‘wilderness’ and ‘nature’. ‘Make room for other species and fight for climate justice,’ she says: take the path of least harm, and try to live with the ‘moral residue’.

‘Note: there may not be a correct answer.’

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For Geographical

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About mid-February last year, we were sitting around one afternoon, exchanging the usual disenchantments on the subject of St Valentine’s Day, when my best mate’s mum casually dropped into conversation the fact that in her younger days she once co-wrote a book for Mills & Boon.

Well. I was agog, I don’t mind telling you. My cup of furtive, post-adolescent imagination ranneth liberally over. Slavering and drooling may have been involved.

The rest of the room went rather quiet. “Is there, erm, any chance that I could… see it?” I asked, trying not to sound too excited. My mate (we’ll call him ‘Dominic’) was now looking decidedly uncomfortable.

His mum got up and went to fetch the volume from wherever heirlooms of inestimable value are kept hidden away from prying eyes. Returning to the living room, she placed this Holiest of Holies gently in my hands. “Enjoy yourself,” she said, in the voice of Charlotte Rampling.

I was not disappointed. Spine rent asunder, pages falling out through excessive consultation, and a familiar but unplaceable tacky residue all over the dog-eared and faded cover, the image whereon showed a young gentleman in C.18th servant’s garb, surrounded by a good many permutations of Great British flora and fauna. The jacket copy alone promised ‘girls’: ‘attractive’, ‘interesting’, ‘expensive’, and ‘repeatedly used’. Not to mention ‘evidently enjoyed’!

And inside, oh my…! It was everything that I could possibly have hoped for. 239 pages of sizzling – not to mention educational – elaborations on the finest and most ancient of arts, up to and very much including the latest hand-held technologies, comprehensively accompanied with dozens of ‘specially drawn illustrations’ (even if, rather disconcertingly, it said ‘the artist has relied for reference on diagrams’).

As befits a manual of this nature, the introduction warns of ‘disappointment’ and ‘frustration’, and cautions against being ‘too ambitious,’ or ‘making excessive demands on skill or resources’. But it hopes ‘a girl who has been shown a given method may try [X, Y or Z] with a good chance of success’. ‘Freedom to experiment’ is key, and the ‘collective teaching experience’ highly rewarding in the case of ‘girls who work enthusiastically’. ‘After a demonstration lesson,’ the reader is all-but-promised, ‘girls go eagerly to the bookshelves…’ And not just the girls, I thought! I could feel myself moving rapidly along the predicted spectrum from ‘very slow’ to ‘very hot’.

Dom’s mum had used a pseudonym, I noticed. And tended to refer to ancillary lace-wear (e.g.), rather coquettishly, as ‘doyleys’. But who can blame her? North Derbyshire in the early Seventies wasn’t exactly a hotbed of open-minded cosmopolitanism. So in general the language tends towards the blunt and technical (the narrative not being of the utmost importance in these situations, if you catch my drift), but already one can detect the signs of a pervading Continental influence – ‘in the French style’, and so forth – counterbalancing the slightly staid, Victorian English fare.

It’s a classic tale of ‘fools’ and ‘tarts’, ‘Swedes’ and ‘beef’ – an oyster-laden romp of liaisons involving maitres d’hotel and maids of honour positively dripping with ‘almond essence’. There is, it is true, no clearly identifiable heroine; but I like the sound of an evening with Bain-Marie, and Chicken Maryland seems like she ought to be a game bird. The sub-plot of Rich Short-Crust (seeks Quiche Lorraine) reads like an outré outtake from the Pilgrim’s Progress. And the delectable Chelsea Buns ends up with a nasty case of rose hip (something to do, no doubt, with overuse of her Rabbit fricassée™). She’s partial to a bit of ‘cod Portugaise’, is our Chelsea. But frankly she’ll take anything, even, asked nicely, a ‘chocolate truffle’. We get more than a few glimpses of her friend Eve’s ‘pudding’.

The dramatis personae are not all from the top end of the social spectrum, mind you (‘We have often preferred margarine to butter’, remarks a Bertoluccian sub-protagonist, unblinkingly. It makes it ‘easier to cream’) and in the seamier passages there is much otherwise unremarkable dialogue concerning ‘raw weight’ and ‘average portions’. One of the minor characters contracts, at one point, a touch of ‘small mould’ on his ‘Welsh rarebit’. (SPOILER ALERT: they make you wear an arrowroot cup.)

That said, this particular reader can now consider himself enlightened as to the ‘savoury tricorne’, one (or more) ‘toad(s) in the hole’, the ‘tossing of salad’, and the timely application of a ‘Viennese finger’. ‘Macaroni a l’Americaine’ sounds a lot like something I might want to try, and ditto the enigmatic ‘Victoria sandwich’; but trust me, you don’t want to know about ‘cheese butterflies’. The ‘Russian pie’ sounds positively non-consensual.

All animal, vegetable and mineral life is here. No two pages pass without something being either on or off ‘the bone’, the pinching of fat, or the kneading of knobs of one kind or another, and altogether too much talk of liquids on the whole. Considerable space is given over to the forms and attendant etiquettes of ‘rough puff’. I am still not sure which is more difficult on the sensibilities, the stomach-turning passage about ‘removing the skins from nuts’ (‘the nuts are immersed in cold water, then brought to the boil…’) or the frankly harrowing ‘loosen each segment from its enclosing skin with a grapefruit knife’!! And I am pretty sure the ‘Yule log’ is illegal in most UN signatory countries.

You can have things ‘plain (rubbed in)’ or ‘rich (creamed)’, and with or without a succession of ‘melting moments’, ‘roly poly’ and ‘kebabs’, or any one of about 37 different types of ‘stuffing’. There’s even a section relating to the manufacturing, and use of, ‘stuffing balls’ – though I believe those are now called something slightly different.

‘Strain’, ‘taste’, ‘refresh’, the book exhorts us. ‘Decorate with half a glacé cherry!’ ‘Suggestions for piping’… ‘Making a cream horn’ (or was it vice versa?)… But never forgetting that this is, in the end, an instructional text – to wit, the mindful, prophylactic advice: ‘Pack your joint in a polythene bag, foil or moisture-proof paper[!?]’ Well, it is an old book, and perhaps back then times were, um, hard.

Discerning readers of a certain vintage and/or persuasion will by now have twigged that the magnum opus in question is, of course, a cookbook. Specifically, The Alfreton Cookery Book (M&B: London, Sydney, Toronto, 1972) by the maidenly threesome of Gillian Crompton, Mair Boothby and Jean Smith, with drawings by Eileen Posteen: a GCSE-level collection of recipes for the edification of 15-year-old Home Economics students. And while Mills & Boon do indeed produce many themed erotic sub-genres (Historical, Intrigue, Medical Romance and so on), cookery – alas – is not yet one of them.

But too late! Once you have set off down this single track (as any schoolboy, current or retired, could tell you), pretty much everything becomes ridiculous. The index alone becomes an absolute snort-fest (not a sex-move…), from ‘cream-cheese balls’ to ‘coating’ via ‘vegetables: general methods’. There is, disappointingly, not a single mention of ‘tongue’. But the ‘Manchester tart’ comes, as it were, right before the ‘Mandarin tartlets’. Or so I’ve been told.

To tease out just one (randomly-selected but) obvious euphemistic theme: ‘clear gel’, ‘savoury jelly’, ‘apricot glaze’, ‘economical batter’, ‘barley water’, ‘stuffing marrow’, ‘lattice jam’, ‘lemon curd’, ‘shellfish cocktail’, ‘egg wash’, ‘celery soup’, ‘scotch broth’, ‘almond paste’, ‘savoury milk’, ‘American frosting’, ‘yoghurt dressing’, ‘chuck casserole’, ‘white sauce’, ‘Dutch sauce’, ‘mock Hollandaise sauce’ (obviously, anything with the word ‘sauce’ in it), and – I absolutely promise you – ‘devilled butter’, and ‘confectioner’s custard’. It’s enough to make Fanny Hill blush.

Left unmolested, of course, a typical paragraph will more usually run: ‘All the recipes have been repeatedly tested, and the 25g basic unit is the same as that recommended by the Working Party of the UK Federation for Education in Home Economics. Oven temperatures have been left in degrees F, as we understand that cookers marked in degrees C will not be available for some considerable time yet. However a conversion table is provided.’

Still. A boy can dream.

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ASH Smyth is a happily-married man. For now.

The Alfreton Cookery Book remains, tragically, out of print.

Readers interested in exploring the ‘Swedish tea ring’ are encouraged to write in for details. No perverts, please.

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For The Spectator

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For The Critic

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For The Critic