The great escape
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My three-year bike ride around the world
In April 2022, Andreas Graf left his industrial engineering job in Norway and set off on his bike, says Rachel Dixon in The Guardian. His goal was to reach India within nine months, cycling through Europe, the United Arab Emirates, Iran (he had to fly over Turkmenistan, which was still closed for Covid), Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Pakistan. By the time he made it, he realised “he had no intention of stopping”. He continued through south-east Asia, Australia, New Zealand, most of South America and a chunk of Africa. Some 55,000km, 50 countries and five continents later, he returned to Oslo, three years and eight months after setting off.
The trip was by no means plain sailing. It took Graf two months to cross the Australian outback in the height of summer, during which the temperature dropped below 40C on only one day. In the Sahara, it hit 51C, and his bike, thanks to the 38 litres of water strapped to it, weighed a whopping 87kg. Graf survived a 7.4-magnitude earthquake in the mountains of northern Chile, and endured 95% humidity in Vietnam’s monsoon season. One night in a rural part of India, he was woken at 2am by a bunch of men wielding knives and machetes. When Graf explained why he was camping there, the gang dropped their weapons and invited him to breakfast the following morning. In Australia, after a couple had seen his adventure online, they gave him the keys to their house for a weekend of respite while they were away. Travelling without a phone for most of his trip, Graf tended to get up and go to bed with the sun. Once, a woman wished him happy new year in a petrol station. “He had no idea it was January.”
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The annual brawl that’s still going after 350 years
Every Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, says Jack Burke in Dispatch, hundreds of men from the Derbyshire town of Ashbourne take part in “England’s wildest football match”. The two sides – “Up’Ards”, born north of the Henmore Brook, “Down’Ards”, born south – gather at the local war memorial to belt out Auld Lang Syne and God Save the King before an “ornately-painted” football is thrown up and the crowd collapses into a “heaving mosh”, desperately wrestling to “goal” the leather ball against stone posts two miles apart, one at either end of town. The memorial and churchyard are no-go zones, but beyond that, “there are few formal rules”. Last year, when the ball landed on someone’s roof, the mob “went clean through their living room”. Shops board up their windows. Men stagger from the scrum, “blinking, bruised and limping”, drifting towards the waiting St John ambulance. Despite the lawlessness – and undeniable violence – the 1667 game has survived industrialisation, two global conflicts and the smartphone. “Which,” says one local, “is why it is so special.”
These sorts of rituals aren’t really for me, says Catherine Morrisette in The Free Press, but I do think they are “supremely important”. In a world in which men are plagued by unprecedented levels of depression and loneliness, and in which safety and “correctness” dominate, there’s something distinctly worthwhile about letting boys intentionally challenge one another, and themselves. Hardship is important, and knowing you’re capable of discomfort is valuable. This has been happening since the dawn of time: the Spartans, Inuits, Vikings and Maasai all sent young boys into the “gaping maws” of extreme hardship and danger, only to emerge as men, freshly bound to their communities. The outcome of such gnarly activities isn’t, as pearl-clutchers claim, lifelong PTSD. After doing something hard, together, young men emerge on the other side “as brothers”.
Comment
A protest march in Lyon following Deranque’s murder. Olivier Chassignole/AFP/Getty
The political killing that’s rocked France
The brutal killing of Quentin Deranque is proving to be a “turning point for the French far right”, say Corentin Lesueur and Abel Mestre in Le Monde. The 23-year-old right-wing activist was attacked in Lyon earlier this month by masked thugs belonging to the Jeune Garde, a proscribed group of anti-fascist ultras with close links to the radical left party, La France Insoumise. The violent encounter was filmed and Deranque died of his injuries two days later. The shocking death has elevated Deranque to the status of “political martyr”, sparking a wave of marches and uniting the fragmented radical right into a movement with the potential to become a “fully fledged political faction”.
The video of this attack has “transfixed France”, says Simon Kuper in the FT. The scene – a grey, graffiti-covered street, a violent mob, three figures being kicked and beaten on the floor, one staying down – evokes a country of “political street battles” where nobody is safe. That’s not the reality for most in France, of course, but it doesn’t matter. The impression is indelible. This is why videos of deaths have become “prime movers” in politics worldwide. Think of Charlie Kirk, George Floyd or Renée Good. These ultra-rare cases derail all other political arguments because they hijack our most fundamental impulses, triggering the deepest human fear: a violent death. The precise context of these killings is irrelevant. Seeing them is more emotionally powerful than any appeal to mere facts. I experienced this myself after the Parisian terror attacks in 2015. I live around the corner from the Bataclan, and was trying to soothe myself by reading out the long-term homicide statistics to a friend. He replied: “Tell that to your brain.”
🇫🇷🇬🇧 To understand the political repercussions in France, says Charles Moore in The Spectator, it’s worth bearing in mind that one of the attackers was a parliamentary adviser for La France Insoumise. It’s as if Seumas Milne, Jeremy Corbyn’s sidekick, had been part of a gang besetting a young supporter of Rupert Lowe’s Restore.
The Knowledge Crossword
Comment
Disraeli, not on Twitter
If only our politicians would pick up a novel
Harold MacMillan was so fond of reading, says Tom McTague in The New Statesman, that he would frequently tell Cabinet colleagues to go home and read a bit of Livy to put events into perspective. Today, by a rather sad contrast, most of the Cabinet return home and do what too many of us are prone to: “open their phones and scroll”. This matters. As Dominic Sandbrook put it recently, a world in which our politicians are “basically spending their evenings on Twitter” rather than having “time and space to reflect and think about things other than politics” produces, directly, “worse politicians”. The magic of reading is that it transports you into the minds of other people. Even a few minutes of this, instead of just looking at nasty little spasms of opinion online, vastly improves your ability to understand and sympathise with your fellow man.
This is perfectly captured in the late Michael Foot’s excellent essay – in his wonderful book Debts of Honour – on Benjamin Disraeli: “The Good Tory”, as he calls him. Disraeli’s genius, says Foot, was to cloak his inherent radicalism in the “comforting clothes” of “romantic old Toryism”. He was, according to Foot, a visionary, with the novelist’s greatest trait: imagination. “In imagination, I shook thrones and founded empires,” Disraeli once wrote. “I felt myself a being born to breathe in an atmosphere of revolution.” Disraeli lived like a hero in one of his novels, “a hero whose whole instinct was to join, indeed to command, the revolt against the existing order”. There is radicalism in the air today, but little imagination. Our politicians seem incapable not just of escaping politics into a novel, but even of thinking beyond what already exists. We could use a Disraeli or two about now.
Quoted
“I like to have a martini. Two at the very most. After three I’m under the table, after four I’m under my host.”
Dorothy Parker
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