Send Help (2026)

V loved this movie, almost every moment of it, entirely unperturbed by its tonal wobbles.*

Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian was way more censorious, stating that Sam Raimi, a horror genre native, must have felt obliged to dish out periodic goriness which served no real purpose within the narrative.

I pondered this for a while and have concluded that these moments are amongst Send Help's strengths not weaknesses, probably also necessary for a mainstream movie like this to land its chosen and slightly outrageous ending.

Hollywood likes to hedge its bets these days with audience worldviews, so Linda from Accounting/Strategy and Planning can be read as either a bunny boiler or as a vengeful rather than vindictive feminist revanchist. That this ultimately works is down in large part to a really outstanding and memorable performance from Rachel McAdams.

* May also be worth mentioning that she is usually turned right off by projectile vomiting and hasn't seen Triangle of Sadness.

Let's not be instinctual ostriches...

This is overall a very well-considered and structured piece tackling a complex issue.

It does however repeat an all too familiar liberal fallacy: the imaginary or wishfully-thought level playing field. e.g.

"If you’re someone who is against all forms of worship in a public space then fair enough – but don’t single out one group."

It's not even so much a fallacy as a failure to think. WHY NOT single out one group if all groups are not in fact the same...beyond being, in this instance, religious or ideological groups?

Some religious groups are more externally orientated than others. Islam is one such. And after a very brief period of persecution at the start, it became one of the more recognisably aggressive of the 'traditions' with regard to non-adherents. Christianity in contrast took roughly 300 years to really start murdering heretics and unbelievers.

How relevant these peculiarities of the belief system might be to the modern world and British society in particular is at the heart of the complexity of the issue.

If we extend our concern from religion to other forms of delusional ideology, Nelson's Column has been the UK's ground zero for their large gatherings for some time now.

How ought we to compare men praying to a far more diverse group of anti-vaxxers and crackpot conspiracy theorists?

When England beat Germany 5-1 in Munich in 2001 V and I hurried to Trafalgar Square to join the celebrations, which were irreproachably joyous — at least at first — but the longer we stayed the more we noticed a 'sectarian' drift in the proceedings with the singing and chanting addressing certain political matters, foreign and domestic, in strident, often unpleasant tones.

So maybe here you have your level playing field, not between harmless public spirituality, but between discreet groups in society who use Trafalgar square as a microcosm of the whole society around them and demonstrate therein how shouty — and shout-downy — they would really like to be in the wider public context…like governments that use airport security to show us their ideal MO.

We have to match our desire to be tolerant with an appreciation of the composition of certain groups which choose this space to reveal the drift of their political sociability. Crowd management in Trafalgar Square, a few thousand people in one small part of the capital, can be a canary in the coal mine.

It's a performative space and many of the performances are demanding to be critiqued.

How it works...

 

THIS is how it works.

You can hate a foreign government without this hatred taking over your entire political personality. 

You can hate a foreign government without hating the people ruled by that government, by consent or otherwise, but if you consistently apply different standards to the behaviour of that government than others, you will inevitably reveal something which deserves a probing searchlight: is your hatred fundamentally discriminatory and in a sense fundamentalist?

You may believe that you can hate or demonise virtuously. This may be possible. 

But whether you think you can unfailingly separate good and bad hatred personally is not the issue (nor does it matter at all if you can find a few members of the foreign nation in question who seem to hate in the same way that you do.) 

For the key questions are these:

— Of all the people worldwide (there have to be millions) whose political personality has been overrun by this particular hatred, how many of them are truly hateful in the old school, deeper, highly toxic way? (I would suggest that the majority would fail the simplest of purity tests. Check the comments of a post like this.) 

— Does your version of this hatred, however ‘above board’ it might seem according to your self-examination, inevitably feed into a dogmatic discourse that actively foments twisted ethnic animosity and sporadic acts of violence, much of which is only tenuously linked to the matters which have driven you to hate the foreign government? 

Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die (2026)

 

Yet another one of those movies that is simultaneously quite smart and quite dumb.

Charlie Brooker may have something to say about some of the smart bits (they’ve not only pinched a few of his ideas, but some of Black Mirror’s cast members as well) — and he won't be alone.

For this is also one of those mid-budget, detached IP releases that finds it needs to be lightly yet pervasively derivative across the board, as if aware that audiences now need constant twinges of the familiar in order to compensate for the absence of franchise.

These don't ever result in an experience that is simply dull or just shamelessly second hand or uninventive. It's fun, but has self-imposed limits.

A common enough delusion...

Believing that you can be virtuously Anti-Zionist without being an antisemite is a common enough delusion these days.

It's a bit like being one of those anti-feminist blokes who insists he isn't a misogynist. Taking a committed and discriminatory stand against the aspirations of a distinct group in society to which you do not belong ought to set off alarm bells inside almost any 'progressive' head, but it frequently seems not to. 

Anti-Zionism as a set of tenets was first fabricated behind the Iron Curtain as a way for ideologically-befuddled materialist-atheists to vilify Jews in a more secular fashion. 

The key elements of the world's oldest hatred were retained, almost on a wicked trope by wicked trope basis, but crudely camouflaged so that they might appear somehow detached from the age old bigotry which had engendered them. 

The Collective Jew is recognised as a people for the purposes of this covert-racist and suppressive dogma, but simultaneously denied any of the usual positive consequences of this identity, beyond this new form of fabricated distrust leading — with near inevitability — to demonisation. 

The Anti-Zionist is like a crouton bobbing around in the soup of demented hatefulness. Sure, you might have started out all crisp and untainted, but the longer you stay there the soggier you are going to get. 

What might have been gained...

The Anglo-Norman chronicler Henry of Huntingdon paused roughly halfway through his book The History of the English People 1000-1154 to address the humanity of the year 2135. 

In science fiction literature this is generally not a great time to be on planet earth. Though in some cases we have already vacated the premises.

Henry’s message to his contemporaries was however that the end of the world was probably not as near as they might have been anticipating.

He served as Archdeacon of Huntingdon within the bishopric of Ely, up until his death c1157.

Like his father, he was a married priest. Clerical celibacy was only just being enforced by a reformist papacy keen to prevent the loss of church property through inheritances.

(When they tell you that it exists as an imitation of Christ's undivided heart, blow a raspberry.)

No Map

Over the years I have grown a little wary of initiating any discussion primarily relating to global affairs with Americans. (I'd probably need to carefully qualify this caution as relating to 'many' Americans, but down here this usually segues into 'most'.)

For years we had a neighbour from up there who was patently well-read, intelligent and broadly receptive to other opinions, but just minutes into any debate would start mentioning something clearly very significant to him called the 'New World Order' or NWO.

A populist conspiracy culture seems to run deep in the American psyche whichever end of the spectrum one is dealing with. Maybe they find their surfaces are sometimes so monotonous that they must constantly be looking beneath them.

But this is not the essence of the problem. This is more broadly the use of matters outside the USA as a fairly primitive filter for whatever fairly rigid and tribal perspective they have on matters inside the USA. You might think you are discussing global affairs with them, but in reality you almost never are.

Before their minds have boarded the mental flight beyond the international border, they have usually abandoned any attempt to pack any kind of analytical flexibility for the journey.

So, if the domestic politicians they don't like are in any way involved in global affairs, whatever they are involved in must be a practical and moral morass. And vice versa. And if their politicians — appreciated or unappreciated — are not substantially involved, is it even happening?

An extension of this projection, is that foreigners in general appear lack any real agency of their own. Their actions, and the needs driving them are as of children. (The exception is Israel, typically seen as little more than a malign extension of whatever is already darkest in America's own apparent conspiracy against the world. It's the only occasion when they consider that their own POTUS might not be the ultimate puppet master.)

And any foreign politician who in any way pushes back against an unloved domestic one is immediately heralded as some kind of lionheart, no matter how big a muppet they might actually be. (viz Petro in Colombia, Sánchez in Spain.)

On some levels this is worse than trying to converse with people wearing those distorting ideological googles, because a US passport often seems to add an extra 10-stop filter.

It’s not that Brits aren't ever like this, just not all the time.

There's no question that we spent several centuries treating the world as our plaything, yet today we are more of less capable of talking about large parts of it without mentioning members of our own government in every sentence.

As such we can appreciate a play of forces 'out there' in which we are mere spectators, tempted to actually see...or at least more readily comprehend on some intuitive level that beneath whatever mask we might habitually apply to the map, there is beneath it a face written over with complicated features laid down by historical experiences — a 'road map' to a life which is other.

Habermas

Jürgen Habermas, who has died aged 96, had a lot of interesting things to say, even if many of these tend to sound a bit like the text on motivational posters in a German office.

Anyway, here are some nuggets which shone at me...

"One never really knows who one's enemy is."

"One cannot lead a war against a network if the term war is to retain any definite meaning."

“The scientistic faith in a science that will one day not only fulfill, but eliminate, personal self-conception through objectifying self-description is not science, but bad philosophy.”

"Since our complex societies are highly susceptible to interferences and accidents, they certainly offer ideal opportunities for a prompt disruption of normal activities."

"Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems."

“Only by externalization, by entering into social relationships, can we develop the interiority of our own person.”

“A 'post-truth democracy' [...] would no longer be a democracy.”

― Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays

(And one from the tea room: "Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.")

The Krankies...

In the 'good old days' of Westminster there were two main aka traditional parties, plus a third, the primary purpose of which was the opportunity it provided to register a protest vote, usually, but not exclusively, between general elections.

This 'spare' block in Parliament had its cranks, ideological and regional, but they were never really at the forefront of the proposition, so 'floaters' could do their floaty thing without self-recrimination for indirectly endorsing complete nonsense. You weren't an insurgent, you were like...cross.

The new format which appears to have taken shape over the post-Brexit period resembles that which emerged, albeit briefly, in Spain almost a decade ago, whereby Crank Left and Crank Right appear to have their own dedicated political silos offering the opportunity for something more than a mere temporary tantrum.

The conclusion would almost have to be that Labour is now bollocksed.

Its three main cohesive collective voting blocks — pompous, self-consciously upright metropolitan elites, culturally-marooned white working classes and communities with an imported antediluvian mentality — are now leaking away steadily towards a set of alternative candidates that offer them a credible chance for acting out their distinguishing chips via the various mechanisms of the state.

Labour could dump Starmer, but would likely end up looking like one of the other shrieky newcomers...just with extra baggage.

And all this while the other traditional party, the Tories, is basically still on life support.

All that really remains to be seen is whether, in the context of a general election, the ambitious premium-crank parties will in some way cancel each other out.

The chances are though that 🇬🇧 is heading towards something more like the extremist flip-flop chaos of Spain rather than the (usually) more dignified coalition regimes of say, Germany or Denmark.

Shelter (2026)

The Stath is still out there...making 'uplifting' Stath movies, with no signs of decrepitude and decline. And so all is well with the world.

The Stath is a tried and tested formula, and Ric Roman Waugh (Greenland, Angel has fallen...) has successfully carried forward what he must have gleaned from those preparations of the Gerard Butler recipe.

The dish has to be immediately unmistakeable as an authentic variant of the archetype, nothing too groomed or gourmet, like a cheeseburger at Claridges, or beyond the paradigm, like Jamie Oliver's 'take' on ceviche.

And what we get here is in fact a proper lesson in how 'derivative' can act as a spur to very pleasant sensations, chuckles even, rather than yawns.

One can practically play a form of Bingo as this entertaining pattern of checked genre boxes plays out.

It's been a while since I've visited Canary Wharf, so maybe they do now have one of those louche underground night clubs where a swarthy underworld boss lounges on sofa on a dais beside the dance floor. This scene was the kind that more usually appears in movies set in Paris, but the precursor which spontaneously appeared in my mind's eye was the club fight in Lethal Weapon. (Having the 'crack squad' all self-identifying with the same bold fashion statement was a nice added touch here though.)

I was also reminded of my one and only brush with the British security services, which began right there in Cabot Square one evening when we were calling Guatemala from a Mercury payphone on the north side of this open area. According to media reports the next day what happened that evening was that a group of IRA terrorists appeared with intent to place an explosive device and were chased off by brave private sector security guards. That is not in fact what happened, but anyway the next day the person we had been speaking to here in Guatemala had a follow up call from the anti-terror bods. It's nice to know that they dot their Is and cross their Ts.

One last major selling point for Shelter: William Francis 'Bill' Nighy gets to give us the dark artist at the summit (though a bit off piste) of MI6 that we was surely born to play.

Mercy (2026)

Set in one of those near-generic near-future gone awry environments which you would probably hesitate to describe as 'speculative', Mercy does have one or two interesting observations to make about the potential use of AI within a justice system — though for plot purposes these have been shackled to the need for an all-encompassing 'public' cloud which offers zero protection for personal privacy, plus a really quite ludicrous imposition of time pressure.

For this set up to work things have to be paced 'just so'. By this I mean the director needs to be able to throw a given quantity of detail at the audience such that they will likely remain satisfied even if they really only take in c80% of it, and the action must propel itself forward in such a way that nobody really has that much time to ponder some of the sillier conceits on display. (Or indeed dwell too much on the overall predictability.)

I have to say that Timur Bekmambetov came through for us in these respects.

Rebecca Ferguson is excellent again, because another of the tightrope walks here is the projection of empathy in the simulation, entirely through facial signals.

It did make me ponder whether AI judges like Maddox might even be a good thing here in Guatemala. In a case in which I was involved a couple of years ago one of the witnesses for the defence (who was not actually a witness at all) claimed to have had a clear vision of the events from a window at the front of a house here in Panorama.

The way that the audiencias are structured here makes it very hard for the 'other side' to point out discrepancies in a timely manner, but an AI judge would probably have immediately detected and commented on the complete lack of windows on the exterior facade in question.

Exit 8 (2025)

I went into this Cannes crowdpleaser unaware that it is a video game adaptation. This belated knowledge adds a substantial gloss to my impressions of what worked here and what didn't. 

The game concept is experimental and sparse. You are trapped in M.C. Escher’s take on the Tokyo Metro. You must traverse the loop (at least) 8 times, attentive to any anomalies which would require you to turn around and reverse your personal flow. 

Kawamura has clearly thought hard how he could embrace the minimalism of this conceit while at the same time extracting a maximal amount of metaphorical meaning, all within a cinematic packaging that never goes easy on the eerie. 

In the movie making trade transitions from a first person source to the third person perspective are often irredeemably lossy, at least in my experience. 

Here it generally works, as we are presented with one key protagonist ('The Lost Man') whose personal crossroads threatens to become an inescapable cycle and although his crisis and sense of existential traped-ness is not one that I might immediately identify with, the film does carry the apparently universal intuition that we are often inclined to settle into life's loops, and perhaps need to be looking out for those missable (and un-missable) anomalies, which will show us the way to move ahead more fruitfully.

I particularly enjoyed the use of Ravel's Bolero — beginning and end — as a kind of musical emblem of a spiral with a sense of progression.

Primate (2025)

So 'dangerously close' that one might even say that Roddy McDowall was marginally more convincing as a chimp in terms of both appearance and behaviour.

The critics seem to be against me on this, but I am certain that Dr Jane Goodall would have been with me — this is a profoundly absurd movie, veering towards the reprehensibly so.

Even the Jurassic Park flicks, of which this is a very poor cousin, make a bit more effort with the personalities on both sides of the munch munch divide.

A muse glimpsed between leaves...

 

Now would seem like an extremely appropriate moment to once more plug this sophisticated and significant contribution by FFA...

'History is a muse you glimpse bathing between leaves. The more you shift your point of view, the more is revealed...

'Citizens of the United States have always learned the history of their country as if it unfolded exclusively from east to west. In consequence, most of them think their past has created a community essentially—even necessarily—anglophone, with a culture heavily indebted to the heritage of radical Protestantism and English laws and values. Immigrants with other identities have had to compromise and conform, sacrificing their languages and retaining only vestigially distinctive senses of their peculiarities as “hyphenated” Americans. The heirs of slaves have had to subscribe to the same process. Natives who preceded the colonists have had to surrender and adapt...

'Of course, the Andy Griffith version of US history is not wrong. The country, like the stripes in the flag, is woven, in part, of a horizontal weft, stretching across the continent. But no fabric exists without a strong warp crisscrossing at right angles from bottom to top...

'The Hispanic United States encompasses more than migrants. Hispanics preceded the United States in what is now national territory. Their presence has been a longer part of the history of the land than that of any other intruders from across the Atlantic, including Anglo-Americans.'

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States.

Keeper (2025)

This what happens, I believe, when a smallish budget, indie horror, otherwise painstakingly made, is not 'joined up' creatively.

That the writer and director are distinct individuals is usually a bit of a red flag on such productions, unless they share an origin story or marriage certificate.

The director has certainly pulled his weight here. Location, performances, atmosphere etc all point to something worth engaging with.

But the underlying mechanism is deeply shallow, so to speak. One quickly finds onself asking questions of both the background mythology and the foreground plot action which this film seems unable or unwilling to answer. Which is a shame, because there's much to appreciate otherwise.

V: ‘No hubo vómito…sólo babas.’

Miskito Repellant

Almost uniquely amongst the major regions of the modern world​, the Caribbean is set up as a patchwork of ​often remarkably distinct cultures and histories ​— an abundance of mini-civilisations, if you like — which nevertheless insist on being addressed in some respects as a coherent whole.

And in as much that Belize is determined to be taken for a properly Caribbean nation, it is thus an almost ideal sample of some of the issues that this state of affairs to presents to 'truth seeking historians'.

​I ask Google for the history of Dandriga, for example, formerly known as Stann Creek...and I am served with a plethora of pages insisting that it was founded by ​the Garifuna people.

The arrival of the Garifuna is 1797 is celebrated every November 19 in these parts, ​t​ypically with a re-enactment involving one or more small boats​, though the majority were ​in fact rather unceremoniously dumped on ​B​elize's southern coast ​by fairly ​substantial Royal Navy vessels.

And ​when that happened, Stann Creek had already been founded​ some time before...by white English Puritans.

They too had been victims of ​a general dumping that was going on around the ​Bay at the end of the eighteenth century.

One hundred years previously a group of strict Protestant traders and farmers had established a colony on an island just off the coast of what is now Nicaragua, naming it​ — as the credulous are inclined — Providence (Providencia today).

The Spanish evicted them in 1689 and they were forced to look elsewhere for the imposition of their ​G​odly ​p​rogramme. Some of them found their way to the lands around the Belize River where a tiny group of ​buccaneers turned loggers were ​already set up, the so-called Baymen. (My ​current understanding is that the village of Placencia on the long sandy peninsula south of Stann Creek was also ​laid down as a Bible basher settlement to begin with.)

In 1783 ​via the 'Paris Peace', the British struck a deal with the Spanish which involved them giving up ​most of their min​iature would-be colonies along the Caribbean coast of Central America (from Honduras to Nicaragua)​, while at the same time achieving some recognition of the ​lucrative wood extraction operation going on behind the cayes.

Spain retained notional sovereignty — until 1862 — but the Baymen would in theory be permitted ​a semblance of their own civil administration ​along with the right to manage a tract of land down to the Sarstoon River, effectively under lease. (A border which remains a source of considerable controversy today​.)

What the Baymen had not ​really bargained for is that the Brits would then attempt to use the opportunity to dump an entire new community right on top of them.

These were mainly refugees from the ​aforementioned lost ​Miskito coastal territories (known as Shoremen)​, plus a whole load of other miscellaneous, ​also multi-ethnic colonists from locations like Jamaica, deemed surplus to requirements by the authorities.

​This stage-managed exodus reminds me somewhat of Golgafrincham Ark B in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, a vessel conceived as a way of permanently offloading the 'useless' component of that civilisation, such as hairdressers, telephone sanitisers and marketing girls (tasked with constantly re-inventing the wheel).

In the case of ​the new British-administered Bay of Honduras settlement, the Shoremen were soon joined by rum dealers, Irish labourers, ​army deserters, Quakers, shipwrights, indigenous or semi-indigenous people, freed slaves from the ​island sugar plantation​s, and a whole host of other would-be Caribbean entrepreneurs​ and chancers.

The colonial ministers in London also considered setting up a penal colony, but the shrill complaints of the Baymen and the eventual availability of Australia finally dissuaded them.​

The new situation quickly became what we tend to refer to as 'combustible'. A crucial incident would develop from July 1787, which takes us to the heart of historical matters currently being relentlessly politicised in Belize.

The first ​British military superintendent was Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, a friend of Nelson and later a notorious 'revolutionary' executed in London in 1803 for supposed treason. (He was an Irishman of French descent, so that probably didn't help.)

Despard​ decided that the way forward would be an equitable distribution of land without "any distinction of age, sex, character, respectability, property or colour"​, ultimately based on a lottery rather than the first come first served process that the Baymen themselves had in mind (particularly now that they were outnumbered five to one by the motley crew of newcomers).

The project began with an area Despard duly named Convention Town, to be established as a collection of lots, 100ft x 50ft.

In the first phase of the lottery, Lot 69​ was drawn by ​a chap called Joshua Jones, a recently arrived free black man, and Despard escorted him to his plot​ which, it turned out, had a little hut on it that had earlier on been constructed by one of the ​Baymen's own magistrates, Aaron Young​.

Jones was given permission to demolish said hut and this led to the so-called 'Battle of Convention Town', kicking off first with some diplomatic manipulations by the Baymen, who attempted to circumvent Despard with a direct appeal to Lord Sydney at the colonial office in London, arguing that ‘in the whole of the West India Islands, negroes and mulattoes are considered in a very inferior light’​.

Sydney was inclined to agree, but as British law at the time was un-prejudiced with regards to skin colour, only actively ​discriminating against Jews and Catholics​, the Baymen had to take things a notch further, and so they abducted Joshua Jones​.

Colonel Despard approached the courthouse where Jones was being held — accompanied by a crowd of Shoremen later reported as a 'rabble' — and demanded the release of Lot 69's new owner.

The Baymen ​surrounding the building refused, claiming that it went beyond the superintendent’s authority to ‘accommodate a set of men of colour calling themselves the people of the Mosquito Shore’.

​B​ut Despard just pushed his way through the courthouse door​ and finding Jones sitting inside touched him on the shoulder and ​proclaimed, ‘I declare this man free in the King’s name.’

​For the time being this brought a temporary end to the wider confrontation, but Despard was soon replaced. The Baymen were steadily warming to the idea that you could have all the benefits of British rule without most of the obligations. (Sounds somehow familiar...)

Yet one awkward little fact that tends to slip through the cracks of contemporary Belizean historical consciousness is that Joshua Jones was himself the owner of 17 slaves.

The modern creole inhabitants of this small nation are keen to position themselves as the descendants of oppressed peoples, not of oppressors, but at the time of the Treaty of Versailles the Belize River logging operation was quite small and made use of around 300 slaves, so it's a bit of a stretch to imagine that every dark-skinned person in Belize today descends from this microscale group of highly oppressed people.

And when PM Johnny Briceño tells the government of Sir Keir Starmer that the citizens of the UK collectively owe the people of Belize a considerable debt in the form of reparations, he's definitely hoping that historical imaginations are not stretched to include the dark skinned people who owned other dark-skinned people as chattel property in the Bay of Honduras Settlement, or indeed to consider the undeniable fact that the whole place was still the sovereign territory of Spain until several decades after Britain had abolished the institution of slavery.

But this is 'Caribbean' history as it is now typically constructed, collectively: Briceño wants a share of the smoothed out macro-perspective, where all the tricky and occasionally embarrassing complexities have grown rather faint to the gaze.

Stupor Mundi

 

Sudden and very shocking.

He supervised me one on one for a single week in 1987 during the temporary absence of my regular supervisor that term.

Earlier, during my senior year at SPS, where he had himself been a pupil two decades previously, he had been something of a legend, his precocious levels of scholarship spoken of with awe.

He was then possibly most famous for his work on Frederick II Hohenstaufen (1194-1250), HRE and King of Sicily, one of those medieval figures that even people with minimal interest in the Middle Ages ought to know a bit about, I had long surmised.

So I chose to write about said unconventional German monarch that week, though unfortunately Professor Abulafia and I were not to see eye to eye once my essay was complete.

I believe this was largely down to the fact that he saw me as a rather irritating intrusion from the northern wastelands — not a Caius man — and perhaps, if I am to be honest, because he'd spotted my own lack of hellbent scholarship, let alone genius. 

And also because I found the whole experience rather unsettling.

He was something of a Stupor Mundi himself. His rooms were possibly the most apparently disordered personal space I have ever visited, a labyrith of piled papers, journals and hardback books. Though I have no doubt he correctly recalled the precise location of every single line of text contained therein.

And I think if you'd told me then that he was still only 38 I would have been gobsmacked.

Just this morning I was pondering whether there were any serious public intellectuals in Britain who might be inclined to weigh in on the Beckham row, and it then occurred to me that there aren't that many left. Definitely a dying breed.

Following his 2017 retirement as Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History, Abulafia had certainly been cropping up with increasing frequency in the UK's right-of-centre media, often as a champion of free speech, but also occasionally leaning into pro-Brexit and anti-Woke narratives.

He believed that the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Greece, but wrote in the Spectator last November that the Rosetta Stone 'does not belong in Egypt'.

His lasting legacy will be his tomes on the human histories of what Ishmael refers to as the 'watery part of the world', most notably The Great Sea, his grand account of the importance of the Mediterranean within human history.

Dumped

 The delightfully named Belizean village of Dump...

It kind of marks the spot where we Brits were supposed to carry the Southern Highway onwards, straight, past Blue Creek and into Guatemala, where it would have joined up with the CA-13 in Petén after it clips the bottom left corner of Belize.

Instead, as you can see, it makes a hard left and heads to the coast at Punta Gorda.

Just to the west of Dump there is a Qʼeqchiʼ Mayan community in a township called San Antonio who possess a colourful cosmological myth relating to the origins of the larger celestial bodies in the sky, in the form of a soap opera.

The Sun and the Moon were just starting to enjoy their first home together as a married couple when the Sun invited his bachelor older brother to come and stay and generally play third wheel. (Albatross, we used to say at Cambridge, or 'Albert Ross'.)

But the Sun had to go out to hunt leaving wife and brother behind, and eventually 'er indoors ended up in bed with 'im indoors.

The Sun figured out what was going on and hatched a cunning plan, collecting bile from the bladders of various birds, such as a turkey and then a chicken* he had bumped into, and used these noxious liquids to prepare a particularly vile tamal for his housemates.

As their eyes watered and throats burned after this dinner, and all the water indoors was used up in an attempt to assuage the discomfort, the Sun gave a big speech covering how he felt about the whole situation.

He sent the Moon out to fetch some more water, but feeling sick and miffed about the very awkward scene, she sat down beside the river and began to cry.

Soon after she was joined on the bank by a vulture who told her about his boss, who lived in the sky in a huge gaff made of guano and she quickly decided she'd rather be up there with him than go back to face her husband and his brother.

Meanwhile, the latter was sobbing relentlessly and the Sun decided that it was time for him to go.

So he tricked him into jumping on a plank which, after three tries, broke and sent him tumbling into a deep ravine. (The people of San Antonio now identify this adulterer as Venus, and in their version of the tale this 'superstar' eventually scrambled out of this hole and found a place in the firmament.)

The Sun’s next ruse was to get himself carried up to the vultures' lair by pulling the skin of a dead deer over his body and waiting for the carrion alert to sound amongst the birds.

Once up there he was denied a room in the guano mansion, but found a nearby hut where he started to play musical instruments and fiddle with a pile of red maize kernels, which induced a severe toothache in the Moon's new feathered lover.

Over the course of several days the pain steadily worsened and the Sun, having drawn an audience with his tunes, claimed to be an accomplished healer — yet the vulture lord still refused him permission to enter his abode. He finally relented, but the face to face cure would send him into a slumber and the Sun was able to retrieve the Moon.

Just how keen she was to go back to her old conjugal existence varies across versions, but in the San Antonio take she's already quite bored with the carcass removal lifestyle and the pair duly commandeer a pair of vultures in order to first return to their home, before later taking up their more familiar roles above Central America.

* Chickens are often mentioned in the context of the so-called Columbian Exchange, yet there is evidence to suggest that they had already taken up station in the trees of the Americas, most likely owing their introduction to Polynesians perhaps a century or so before the Admiral showed up.