Good Tidings

The UK Health Security agency has today announced the 'encouraging' finding that those infected with the Omicron variant are 50-70% less likely to need hospital care. 

My suspicion is that they were in a position to do this before December 23, but needed some residual panic in the air to get Britons to the 44% booster level they now find themselves at. 

Needless to say, this little Christmas 'present' comes with a few strings attached. 

For the foreseeable future there will always be a non-trivial risk of covid complications for certain sections of the population, especially the older, so the Christmas dilemma many currently face is one that they will continue to face all year and for many years. 

The virus will most likely tend to become more contagious and less deadly. The more contagious part not only means that it will often slip past our antibodies, but that it will now also tend to evade the legal measures we have so far employed to prevent it spreading uncontrollably. 

An endemic pathogen is practically lockdown-proof and definitely 'circuit-breaker' proof. To "let it rip" or not will no longer surface as a political schism. It will rip, especially in the temperate zones in the cooler months. 

So called herd immunity will likely surge and dip. Periodic booster campaigns will help, but will probably never be regimented enough to prevent pockets of worrying outbreak for perhaps years to come. 

Rich nations will have full access to the vaccines and treatments like Paxlovid which could potentially put an end to the health service overload problem. Yet people will keep dying and the dent in life expectancy won't be fixed by next Christmas, or the Christmas after that.

At some stage in 2022 we will have updated versions of the major vaccines, more targeted to the Omicron spike protein, but we cannot rule out the emergence of further variants of concern with serious immune evasion tendencies. 

Currently booster effectiveness is said to wane after ten weeks, but new versions of the vaccines may stretch the ideal interval between jabs. 

So this takes us back to the 'common sense' that Boris likes to preach about yet possess so little of himself. There was a moment before they all went out into the number 10 garden with their cheese and wine where they should have thought 'naaaaaah'. 

We will all face similar moments in the years to come and we all have to assess them based on our understanding of both our personal risk and the risk that we could circulate and bring harm to others. 

A clear conscience (and relative freedom of movement) may require us to have an updated vaccine and a booster shot every year — that's three jabs in total. 

Meanwhile, the world may never be our oyster in the same way. Uneven control internationally will mean that travel may never be quite as open and frictionless as it had become by 2019. 

Important sectors of the economy like hospitality and entertainment are going to have to work really hard to reestablish the position they enjoyed pre-pandemic. 

We shall have to adapt and move on because there is no other way. 

Right now, wearing an N95 grade mask in all crowded situations seems the absolute bare minimum that common sense can ask of us. 

If Guatemalans can do it...

Remaining un-vaxed remains a dumb play...

Seasonal Distemper

I’m starting to get the vibe that perhaps much of northern Europe’s covid panic right now is really a case of seasonal Christmas distemper. 

It’s midwinter, cold and dark and it’s the festive season, which means everyone is basically looking for an excuse for being on edge and miserable. 

In essence though, as long as you have had some sort of valid vaccine, it’s the sniffles, not the Black Death. Get over it.

However, if you have not yet been jabbed and boosted, happy travels...

Grand Strategy (1) - Expert Opinion

Gaddis begins here by referencing the work of American political psychologist Phillip E. Tetlock*, who collected hundreds of predictions by experts in government, academia, think-tanks and other institutions in the 80s and found that WHO these experts were, their status, professional background and so on, made no difference to their judgment. 

Nor did the nature of their fundamental biases: liberal or conservative, optimist or pessimist, realist or institutionalist. A relative level of accuracy or ‘good judgment’ came almost entirely from the subject’s style of reasoning, especially when self-deprecating. 

Those bristling with big ideas and explanations, contemptuous of criticism were, quite simply more often than not, plain wrong. 

Tetlock concluded that "self-critical thinkers are better at figuring out the contradictory dynamics of evolving situations, more circumspect about their forecasting prowess, more accurate in recalling mistakes, less prone to rationalise those mistakes, more likely to update their beliefs in a timely fashion...better positioned to affix realistic probabilities in the next round of events”. 

The covid pandemic has seen a multitude of different expert opinions jostling for position, and politicians in many countries have deferred to them, perhaps a little too readily, or at least without discriminating against those who are “prisoners of their preconceptions” as Tetlock put it, as opposed to those with a little bit more “sense and sensitivity”, as Gaddis does, while admitting that the better kind of expert tends to be more discursive and struggles to hold an audience or indeed politicians with short attention spans.

* Ironically enough, the very idea that foxes are better forecasters than hedgehogs has a whiff of TED-talk hedgehoginess about it. 

#Me(too)

Arguably, the real plague behind covid has been a plague of selfishness. Individual, collective, international.

It is irredeemably selfish to not even try to participate in collective efforts to inhibit the spread of the pathogen, and a wounded political conscience makes for an especially poor excuse.

Yet it is also selfish to want government to shut down the whole of society just so that one can feel safe — particularly when one has a relatively lockdown-proof source of income.

I was surprised to hear Haruki Murakami apparently suggesting in an interview with La Vanguardia the other day that it is never right for states to restrict individual liberty in the name of a social good. I hadn't previously tagged him as a fan of The Purge franchise.

All civilised modern existence is based on some sort of explicit plus implicit compromise on the above aka the social contract first outlined explicitly for the world by our own great thinker John Locke.

For Locke, as has generally been the case in the United Kingdom, liberty exists primarily as a vehicle for the secure prosperity of all. We are famously the nation of shopkeepers not libertarian fanatics and it this form of liberalism which must now condition our attitudes to the pandemic response at the social level.

Locke's predecessor Thomas Hobbes advocated that the nanniest of states should decide everything, for everyone. Locke understood that we are actually all capable of adjusting our attitudes and behaviours to the situation without the need for constant, absolute and unbending diktats from above. Imperfect perhaps, but generally workable.

Take a look around the world. States are important and carry out valuable functions, but they are clearly not capable of solving humanity's most pressing problems, pandemic included, all by themselves. (And when they try to do it collectively, things often tend to go further downhill.)

And, a gentle reminder to the trumpeteers of personal liberty in the UK, often the same people inclined to tut tut about the 'submission' implied by Islam, have a look at your passport — you are all subjects of Her Majesty, no matter which set of liberal values you personally choose to espouse.

"I couldn't believe what I was living..."

On a slightly different note, where I am right now it is high party season. The clubs are bursting with maskless revelers, mostly from the USA.

I have long associated this track with Playa, and at this precise moment, more than ever. 

Yet the new case numbers in Quintana Roo have sunk to near zero and the tequila-chugging gringos did not all arrive yesterday.

These people will all need to be tested before departure, so the system should be picking up any spikes from all that carefree mingling. And Playa should be packed with people who can't go home because they failed an antigen test.

I have another pet theory about a dynamic that will affect the course of the pandemic now: all these individuals who behave in a manner that might appear ‘irresponsible’ to a good many of us have been doing it all along.

And so many of them may well have had covid already which, combined with a vaccination, does seem to confer a kind of super-immunity.

 

Of course some will pointing to the corruption in Quintana Roo and the possibility of under-counting (Or Donald accounting: the more tests you do, the more cases you get.)

But then we enter that absurd world where the numbers are correct when they conform to our present thinking, and emotions, and when they don't, someone must be telling porkies.  

Tsunammi

Stupid people say some pretty gormless things with an attitude of smugness. But then so too do clever people. 

Next time you hear an expert or, heaven forbid, a scientist, state that Omicron is going to be far worse than any previous variant because more contagious strains, albeit less severe symptom-wise, will always end up killing more people, you might have to tell them to go and stand in a corner until the pandemic ends.

Don’t let them easily bamboozle you with their cherry-picked and sometimes rather abstract charts. 

 

If Delta and Omicron were fresh out of natural selection and lined up together on the starting line, rearing to go, the whole of untouched humanity in their sights, then yes, maybe. But that is not the situation we are in.

Delta started earlier and is now perhaps flagging. The human hosts have been transformed into a more complicated set of populations each with their own essential characteristics, acquired protections, pandemic-conditioned behaviours and so on. The differences of culture, season and geography remain. And the variants may vary quite significantly this time in their basic potential to harm us. And we all remain fundamentally ignorant, one way or another.

Chris Witty himself trotted out a version of the faster+weaker=more deadly paradigm and then added something he must have known undermines it: Delta and Omicron are possibly not even racing against each other, but are instead on different racetracks.

Yet that hypothesis, for which the research will have to play catch up, was surely designed to give us the public on the end of it a sense that TWO pandemics operating in parallel were of course going to double the load on the NHS.

At what point to do we start to tune out of all the screaming about record case numbers? Nicola Sturgeon kicked it all off in the UK with her ‘Tsunami’ alert, but has since gone a bit quiet, and for once the Scottish Parliament is not trying to outdo the English with preventative measures.

 

Meanwhile, London's mayor Sadiq Khan has come up with at least a temporary solution to the absence of a proper crisis, a kind of variation on the Mohammed and the Mountain proverb. If there aren't enough patients heading to the hospitals, don't worry, because the real problem now is that there are now not enough front line staff to receive them due to Omicron-driven absenteeism. 

 

 

 

Guatemala's Booster Bingo

Remember when they told us that if you choose to mix the mRNA vaccines with Astra Zeneca you needed to have had the latter first. Keep remembering?

While some sort of mix and match strategy appears beneficial, especially because of the ‘compressed’ approach to spike protein antibodies in Pfizer and Moderna, it should never be mandatory, especially as we now know Moderna carries an albeit small elevated risk of heart inflammation.

Sputnik V, of course, has its own booster (Sputnik Light) and if anyone has the data on which other jabs combine well with it, Putin isn’t sharing. And Guatemala no longer appears to be buying.

It had been my working assumption that nobody in Guatemala either knew or cared that the Moderna booster dose is different from the first pair. This chart nevertheless suggests that in fact they have a team in a freezer compartment carefully pouring from vial to vial. 

Last time I checked Moderna was the formula Guatemala had the least of. Maybe a little can be made to go a long way.

Giving out a third dose to the few when the initial programme is incomplete seems a tad ruthless, n'est pas? 

The latest Omicron data from South Africa suggests that previous infection gives a high percentage protection from serious illness and death, especially when you are already dead.

 

Tsunami or Turning Tide?

The media, vaccine manufacturers and Scottish politicians are currently content to stoke up a pre-Christmas panic about the diabolically transmissible nature of Omicron. 

Viz yesterday both Nicola Sturgeon's 'tsunami' simile and that report about the inmates at a Hong Kong quarantine hotel who had somehow passed the virus between their rooms without ever having left them.

Early data does seem to suggest that Omicron is significantly more transmissible than even Delta 2. But when one looks at the data with a level head — at the household level as opposed to the modelled mass-population level — one finds that the contagion potential is perhaps less seasonally chilling than one might have immediately suspected. 

 

This is not smallpox or even bubonic plague. You can live in the same house as someone carrying this pathogen and still have a better than 4 in 5 chance of not picking it up.

This thread on Twitter reflects level-headedly on the threat from a South African perspective. 

Relative to the community case rate covid-19 hospitalisation in the country remains low, at least compared to previous surges. The death rate is especially low. 

One can imagine all sorts of reasons why the likes of Pfizer would be encouraging people to have not just three but four jabs now, just to be safe. And as I said a week or so ago, we should begin to start engaging our critical faculties in booster mode when the fourth wave and any measures to flatten its curve are anticipated — especially when the suggestions are being made by entities with skin in the game. 

The South Afican data suggests that Omicron is 5x more antibody-evasive than Beta, but it remains unclear whether individuals possessing relevant antibodies — as say up to 95% of Brits — end up with symptoms little worse than a bad cold. T cells still come into play and may continue to suppress the more damaging consequences of infection. In the UK the current estimate of government advisors is that Omicron is 25-50% less severe. 

So far muscle aches, headaches and lethargy are the most prevalent clinical manifestations of an Omicron infection, which leads me to suspect that I might not even notice that I'd had it.

Plenty of footballers in the UK are flagging as positive right now, but the current rules state that they all need to be tested every day. How many would even have been aware of the virus?

Behind the more naked (private sector) scaremongering, one will also perceive the voice of scientists fretting over the phenomenon illustrated by this chart...

Milder, faster diseases can end up killing more people than deadlier, less transmissible ones. That there is truth in this is confirmed by the history of SARS-Cov-1, a virus that tended to terminate 10% of its hosts. But in absolute terms, its numbers were 'disappointing' relative to the early dread. 

Yet these charts are subtly forcing us to think that Omicron resets the pandemic to zero, when in fact many of the key vulnerabilities have shifted   over the course of two years and governments have had a chance to advance beyond the one-size-fits-all policy package. 

This time, protecting the vulnerable while allowing a milder mutation to pass rapidly through the vaccinated population could be markedly less of a kamikaze option. 

We can see in Japan for example that a set of controlled measures without lockdown has recently led to a drop in case numbers and an even more dramatic suppression of fatalities, and in many different localities the relative death rate (or even ICU rate) amongst those infected has been tailing off for some time. 

Do the un-vaccinated* deserve some sort of protection? I know what I would be inclined to say were it not for the fact that the clogging up of hospitals by these recusants is likely to have a knock-on effect for the standard of care everyone receives, and will also provide the media and others with further grounds for propagating trepidation across the community. 

And regardless of everything said in this post the drift towards complacency in Guatemala is extremely worrying. Even before Omicron I was anticipating a new wave here in late February/early March — it is the heat, not the cold, that drives people indoors and into mass events here. 

The patchy and variegated nature of the vaccine roll-out, coupled with the apparent lack of an imminent, comprehensive booster programme suggests that here, as elsewhere in Latin America, 2022 could be extremely difficult for all sorts of reasons. 

* I'm referring who have had a decent chance to get the basic shots and have no socio-demographic excuses to make. 

2022´s Stag-do

Miltomate growing on the slopes above Chitaburuy (Parramos). 

These little green tomatoes look like becoming the canaries in the coal mine threatened by the impending regional — perhaps global — economic suffocation of stagflation.

In Mexico, where consumer prices were rising at a rate of 7.37% during November, tomatillos already cost 148% more than they did at the start of the year, fresh chiles not far behind at 137% and then avocados at 46% pricier. Latin America, as elsewhere, is experiencing paired inflationary pressures from the global supply chain crisis and an extended period of monetary stimulus, but unlike the governments further north, many administrations in the western hemisphere's less developed economies have already started to lift interest rates, arguably before many small businesses have yet had a chance to fully recover from the pandemic restrictions of 2020. 

Central banks in major economies like Brazil are resorting to rate hikes in part because of the strengthening of the Dollar, yet also in anticipation of an end to the loose fiscal conditions up north — a transition which could result in marked capital outflows, a traditional harbinger of Latin American financial crises.

The worrying thing is that the rate hikes appear not to be making any difference to the surging cost of staples — simultaneously fed by extreme climate events — and food makes up around 25% of the average household budget across the region. 

And many younger consumers have almost no direct personal memories of stagflationary conditions to guide them.

Diablo Difunto

 

This year it seems that the diablo has somewhat prematurely croaked — finally surrendering his long lost, bricks and mortarl soul. This sudden shift to the virtual sees Old Nick in a suitably cheapo box at his usual spot in Barrio La Concepción, lying in Satan, flanked by a guard of dishonour. 

Las malas lenguas murmuran that it must have been covid, but now that we are not quite so all in this together as we were last year there is a growing social stigma surrounding "la gripona", and as Beelzebub and the boys are still running the family firm from home — Pandemonium — it was thought best to put his demise down to metastasizing corruption and thereby not lose any friends over it. In truth his little anti-heart packed it in one weekend watching Antigua GFC. 

Has there ever been a bigger conspiracy theorist? One can imagine what The Father Of Lies thought about the vaccines.  

Like James Bond, he will return. There are after all cien mil diablos.

Back in the day.

(That mask looks oddly familiar...) 

Schei...

Had time to sleep on events in Jeddah yesterday.

An enthralling piece of entertainment no doubt, perhaps one of the most 'can't take my eyes away' GPs of recent memory, and yet somehow also oddly disappointing and disturbing as a race, leaving an unpleasant sporting aftertaste, especially for the penultimate Grand Prix of the season and one upon which much appeared to hang.

The right result perhaps. Though thanks to a small techicality in the scoring the spectre of a Senna-on-Prost or indeed a Prost-on-Senna conclusion just beyond the grid next Sunday in the Abu Dhabi dusk still lingers.

Why is Christian Horner such a chip-munk? He's not even a former colonial. He's somewhat French president in stature and has much of that knee-jerk stroppiness.

Toto has his moods but still manages to come across as gracious and charming even after those occasional setbacks.

Horner almost never shows appreciation for Lewis as a driver, limiting himself to vague compliments directed at the other lot's car.

I mean, Mercedes vs Red Bull. Anywhere else this would be a no contest.

Leprosy Bell

Professor Tim Spector, founder of the Zoe Covid symptoms app, has just estimated that around a quarter of common colds people have been suffering from in recent months were probably covid. 

There are sometimes not-so-hidden incentives to keep it hidden — unacknowledged, at least in public.

There have been several cases of rather sudden deaths of people we know in the past couple of years which have not been attributed to covid, but perhaps ought to have been.  

There appears to be a social stigma attached to the pandemic pathogen in Guatemala which only seems to worsen as the collective response dissolves into more personal etiquettes. 

Death by covid portends an undignified send off. It can also threaten the livelihoods of surviving close family members, many of whom run businesses out of their homes. 

Attitudes adapt as we are no longer quite so all in this together and the sick and dying pop up as an unfortunate reminder of a not entirely distant threat we are either ignoring or at least being told to ignore as best we can.

Last year it was 'the moment you feel it coming on call us and we will come and pick you up and take you to that nice new facility'. Now it is 'the moment you feel it coming on we don't want to know about you, just stay indoors, out of sight...go away.'

And 'you are probably unvaxed and that has to be your own fault, not ours.'

Azor (2021)

Martin Heidegger suggested that "making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy" and the same might be said for the very best Argentinian cinema and the Swiss private banking system. 

This film is about the meeting of two cabalistic worlds, that of Yvan de Wiel and his wife Inès, on business from Geneva in the Buenos Aires of 1980 and his family firm's client base from amidst the monied elite there, formerly handled by Yvan's now mysteriously absent partner René Keys. 

From behind layers of symbolism and doggedly obtuse dialogue we are given a fascinating glimpse of the social and commercial underpinnings of South American dictatorship*. (And this is the end-phase, even though none of them seem to know it.) 

Feature-length debutant Andreas Fontana has indirect personal experience of both milieux in this blend, drawing out the creepy adopted amorality and arcane argot of Yvan's business — `Azor' being their handy code word for keep quiet, pretend you haven't really seen or heard — and that insular, sophisticated yet unsophisticated Argentinian establishment, seen here to be consuming itself around the edges as some of its own youth have had to be sacrificed to the need to 're-educate' the nation. 

Borges was alive at the time and his affection for unchanging Geneva is noted. The contention, sometimes attributed to him, that "Argentinians are Italians who speak Spanish, think in French and consider themselves English" is solidly illustrated here, along with the sense that the Swiss in particular might find themselves a bit bamboozled by this. 

Not a great deal happens, but there is much menace, especially during a series of set piece interviews between Yvan and his contacts. 

My favourite was an interchange with "his Holiness" Monsignor Tatoski, who speaks of a "purification phase" and "unrecoverable elements", and while noting that the missing Keys was occasionally and atypically indiscrete and Azor-less with regards to local political matters, he apparently liked the cut of his jib when it came to kamikaze forex trading tips. 

I watched that scene three times. Enjoyable too were Yvan's bar room chats with an ambassador and a lawyer called Dekerman, whose principal client is a crass former racing driver turned racehorse owner and would-be politician. 

The drama lies, in a sense, between the lines. As does the black comedy. Nobody is quite saying what they would be expected to under the circumstances. 

This is one of those films one could watch over and over, getting more out of it with each incremental viewing, and yet never fully crack its ciphers. 

With the possible exception of the size and shape of the men's collars, this seems to be an uncannily accurate rendition of a year I have very strong memories of myself. I have lately felt a bit let down by over-stylised recreations of the fairly recent past on both big and small screen, but this is as close to note perfect as one is ever likely to see. 

Pablo Larraín's Tony Manero might make an interesting double bill. 

* It is usually that much more unnerving to be shown the inner workings — the machinations — of evil than its undoubtedly horrific end product. Which is why Javier Bustamente's take on La Llorona (2019) was so striking. 

Soft Reboot?

Reassuring nosies have been coming out of official sources to the effect that Omicron will not 'reset' the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic. 

To a certain extent that is inevitably true. But hold on. The early signs are that the new variant bypasses the two main vaccines used in certain countries (such as the US), even the three-dosers, and re-infects people that have had covid already. 

So on some levels it does need to be (pre-)considered as a new-ish pathogen. 

The key issue now will be disease severity. Anything equivalent to or worse than Delta will be bad news. Less severe disease might give governments the wriggle room they need to fix the mRNA vaccines by Spring. It may also help get us to where we need to go in terms of endemic, non-pandemic covid. 

The mRNA vaccine tech was exciting and new and does offer concrete possibilities for tackling endemic infectious diseases, but we might have to admit that in the rush to deploy it against the more urgent threat, we neglected to consider how pandemic conditions would expose some of its inherent weaknesses — such as only targeting small sections of the spike protein. (17 in the case of Pfizer, just 11 in the case of Moderna.)

A virus in full Ghengis Khan expansion mode would be enjoying just the right conditions to mutate over and over again and it would only be a matter of time before that part of the vaccines' targeting became compromised. 

It does seem that those who have availed themselves of jabs built upon a more old fashioned antibody arousal system — AZ, J&J, Sputnik, Sinocrap — may be more in a position to consider Omicron as a minor bump in the road.

It currently takes a subset of available PCR tests plus a chunk of time to establish whether any given positive test result was triggered by Omicron. This data then needs to be cross-referenced against vaccination and infection histories before we can fully understand the new situation. The UK — mostly AZ and with a large number of prior infections — could be the canary in the coal mine. 

And good luck to anyone in charge of working out the rules for travel in 2022. 

Perhaps not...

UPDATE

It is surely too soon for anybody to make definitive prognostications about either the healthcare or economic impacts of a potential Omicron surge. 

Nevertheless, both Biden and Boris are starting to make glass-is-half-full statements that they may later regret. Boris fairly typically so. 

The Germans may be getting a bit goose-steppy about this, but they have seen the most alarming increase in case numbers and like the US and Israel, they have largely been Pfizered up to now. (Even the UK is seeing case numbers not seen since July.)

Biden seems suddenly keen to offload his Pfizer stockpile on the ROW! How considerate of him.

Let's just suppose that, worst case, he has to go cap in hand to the Russians, the Chinese or the Brits for an order of one of those oldy worldy, no compression, full spike vaccines, which one do you think he will pick?

Pfizer and Moderna may have a fix by March, but it will still be a JPG not a TIF formula, so the problem might just come around again in 2023.

The Last Duel (2021)

One of the truisms that the fans of La Antigua's alleged rapist Diego Ariel Stella keep pumping at us is that 'every story has at least two versions'. Here we have three. (Rashōmon had four.)

It is the 29th of December 1386 and two men fight to the death to establish the truth. The wife of one has accused the other of rape. If her husband prevails she will be seen to be an innocent victim, if he falls, she will burn and their child, whose paternity is also somewhat up in the air, will become an orphan. 

We are given the backdrop to this duel (Ridley Scott has some notable previous with the subject matter) firstly from the perspective of the Norman knight Jean de Carrouges. His truth is followed by that of his long-standing frenemy Jacques Le Gris and then that of Marguerite de Carrouges; the truth. These are an odd hybrid between showings and tellings. 

If you come to this wanting in the main an illuminating take on some of our modern world's biggest issues — a medieval #metoo parable — then you may end up less than fully satisfied, and although as a student of the period there was more in it for me than most, I think I can honestly say that there is a lot more in it. 

Early critical appraisals at Venice were lukewarm, perhaps because one might descry too much maleness in the tale relative to Jodie Comer's final third, overseen by Nicole Holofcener. 

Yet over-dominant men who think the whole thing is very much about them — more generally concerned with the big death than the little one —  is a large part of what the film itself is about. And it is not a bad thing that Affleck and Damon's screenplay takes the time to make its central male characters interesting, the two duellists, like the lady whose testimony has set up the fight, have made compromises in order to survive in this complex feudal world and none of them is entirely secure within it. 

In spite of his excellent cape-work Adam Driver's Jacques Le Gris is not a boo-hiss pantomime villain. He is as grey as his name suggests. His vision of the rape has the mufflers on compared to Maguerite's, but the really damning part of the central section is an exchange between Jacques and his 'boss' Pierre in which the former reports how Maguerite had made all the necessary protestations one would expect of a lady of her class who knows how the game was played. 

But Pierre doesn't much care for the wriggle room for vulgar interpretation this self-exculpating interpretation implies. "Deny, deny, deny..."

The Last Duel is evidently aware that it carries a modern message, yet also knows that it is underpinned by 'true events' and does not simply use the feudal society of fourteenth century France as a one dimensional backdrop for delivering a sermon. Sexual politics are a chunk of its thematic payload, but so too are inter-masculine struggles and the wider social dynamics of what historians tend to agree was the worst century within an already dubious series. Perhaps not unsurprisingly it is not an epoch Hollywood has previously paid much attention to. 

We are reminded how the Black Death in the middle of it has upset the social and economic order. At the time Richard II was on the throne of England and his peasants were revolting. (And I find it telling that when they rose up the first group they vented their rage against were not landlords, but lawyers.)

Harriet Walker, as part of a quintet of well-developed characters.

If there is anything 'Pythonesque' about the production — one of Mark Kermode's charges — it lies in a depiction of the obvious disconnect between the courtly ideal and the courtly reality, something the late Terry Jones picked up in his exegesis of The Knight's Tale by Chaucer, in which he concluded that the narrator, in spite of all his high chivalric self-branding, was little more than a brutish mercenary. 

Very much in that mould is Damon's chippy and maladroit Jean de Carrouges, a sort of French ultra with a mullet whose competence doesn't extend far beyond roughing up the rosbifs and even then his decision-making is decidedly ropey. His wife is left vulnerable (his property rights subjected to carnal abuse) largely because he needs to ride to Paris to collect payment in coin for a mismanaged campaign in Scotland, when he really should have been attending to his affairs at home. 

One slightly jarring yet nevertheless enjoyable presence is that of a blond Ben Affleck as Pierre d'Alençon, a delectable character seemingly straight out of GOT, but given his clear and obvious Frenchness, perhaps his thing for wine, women and dodgy sartorial decisions is not so anachronistic after all. 

His delivery of a single, rather anglo-saxone expletive around the mid-point of the film proved to be one of its high points. 

Maguerite may only have one of three different stories but hers is the conclusive one, because it is the way we see her operating outside of any victimhood that definitively shows up the men around her. 

Under interrogation clerical lawyers suggest to her that she may have dreamed or even desired the incident* and still they cannot quite get their heads around the idea that she would expose herself to so much scrutiny and personal risk...for a lie. 

ç

Le Coq

Confirmation that Jodie Comer is now a proper alpha female star and that she is the only actress I could currently consider to play Lady Brett Ashley. She now rejoins Ridley Scott (and Joaquin Phoenix) as Empress Joséphine in the upcoming Napoleon biopic that already feels un-missable.

* Though nothing quite as gruesome as our local Tia Tomasa Licda Claudia Paniagua's query in the Diego Stella case:  ‘¿Qué mujer que se pone en cuatro no está pidiendo ser penetrada?’

Just what the doctor ordered?

Omicron is likely to be a game changer, but possibly not in ways we can immediately anticipate. 

There are early, encouraging signs that the severity of disease the variant induces will be reduced compared to Alpha and Delta. 

This could conceivably be a consequence of the manner in which Omicron's mutations occurred within the immuno-suppressed HIV+ communities of southern Africa. 

An essentially pneumonia-free version of covid, infectious enough to largely displace all its older relatives, could end up saving the world. 

At the very least it would save the world's ICU units from overflow while saving governments from having to make unpopular one-size-fits-all dictats in the interests of preserving the healthcare systems they oversee. 

But it would represent an unexpected catastrophe for the likes of Moderna and Pfizer, who must already have been anticipating the share price gains from predictably regular boosters and tweaks to their formulas for years to come. 

Moderna's CEO has been out jabbering this week, making a lot of people poorer in the short term, but perhaps it is time to cover our ears.

Think of all the investment which has gone and continues to go into the fight against SARS-Cov-2. Not just vaccines , but therapies. If the need for these suddenly became less urgent, imagine how many might be left out of pocket rather suddenly.  

It's too soon to say whether this is the scenario which now presents itself, but it is certainly one we should at least be entertaining. 

We don't really want to live in a world where vaccine boosters and renewable vaccine passports for basic activities are a near permanent feature of everyday life. 

We don't really want covid to be suppressed artificially, we want it to be an endemic pathogen to which we have natural defences and for our most vulnerable groups to be no more threatened by it than say seasonal flu. 

Many people can and should continue to wear masks, as many have done in Asia for over a decade, but in the end this should be voluntary where possible. 

There may still be some severe economic consequences in the immediate term, but these are perhaps likely to come as a result of a failure to control inflation. (Consumer prices rose 4.9% in the eurozone in November according to an early flash reading, a level not seen since the currency's inception in 1999.) 

Little Red Book

One has to wonder whether all those cerebrally-impeded types who have been banging on about the restoration of blue (actually black) UK passports also have a thing for red driving licenses. 

This one was my mother's, from 1962. She was a catwalk model at the time and possessed a suitably glamorous boyfriend — author, politician, surgeon and society sexologist — who talked her into taking the advanced driving test. 

I do believe she was generally a very competent driver throughout her time behind the wheel. 

There was however one smallish incident of note during my early childhood when she left the hand-brake off during a visit to Lidstone (local butcher, now Olivomare) on Lower Belgrave Street, having possibly double parked outside the Plumber's Arms.

I vividly recall watching our car trundling slowly downhill towards the lights at the Ebury Street intersection, seemingly intent on an unscheduled arrival at Victoria Station. 

These licenses had a duration of just three years and had nine pages for stamps/endorsements. They were just a bit larger than a credit card. 

I can see where I might have acquired my tendency to hoard stuff.

Spencer (2021)

As one would expect from Pablo Larraín, this is an extremely competent and intriguing piece of film-making. Authentic it is not. 

The Chilean director flags this up at the start: 'A fable based on a true tragedy'. He's giving us a Diana, not the Diana, along with a version of modern royalty. 

The setting, supposedly the Queen's Sandringham estate at Christmas 1991, is a grand, Baroque (and very) German castle — Schloss Nordkirchen, aka the Versailles of Westphalia — and the goings on inside immediately reminded me of some of the opening scenes of Marie Antoinette (2006) by Sofia Coppola. 

The effect felt to me like a spoken, somewhat gothic opera, serving as a vehicle for several set-piece duets with well-crafted, almost too cute and metaphor-laden lyrics.*

The excellent score from Jonny Greenwood leans towards jazzy discordance. 

There's an out-of-place ghost from the past — Ann Boleyn — though at times one also glimpses a ghost from the future, that tense we learn doesn't exist for majesty: Meghan. 

I tried to get it into my head that this wasn't history, but struggled from start to finish. 

The 'POW' protagonist is depthless. And Kristen Stewart's attempts to replicate her coyness and listing head can really become irritating. Yet her performance, rather like the drama around her, has moments when it is uncannily precise. 

Everything feels contrived, except in those fleeting moments when it doesn't, and for that reason I am going to have to say that the film didn't really work for me overall. This may not be such an issue for those with fewer personal memories. 

My mother's step-sister Joan, Baroness Mischcon, had a close-ish relationship with the Diana of that period — she was married to the lawyer whose counsel the Princess sought shortly after the events depicted — and would surely have found this caricature synthetic at best. 

Sean Harris has suddenly emerged as one of our major big screen thesps, on a par here with the likes of Sally Hawkins and Timothy Spall. 

* Oddly enough Joseph Losey's Don Giovanni (1979) was another movie that sprung into my head while watching Spencer.