Author: Cosmo Adair

By Cosmo Adair

To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart. (Martin Amis)

There’s a mobile-game called New Star Soccer in which you’re a ludicrously gifted footballer – the sort for whom ninety goals-a-season constitutes a meagre return. As well as the more obvious gameplay (football), you encounter a sequence of in-game choices. Should you cheat on your girlfriend? Or go to the casino with your teammates? Or buy a sports car? You face all the no-win quandaries of a thick and morally bereft noughties footballer. 

Tough as being an adulterous spendthrift with a celestial right foot might be, it’s light work compared to dealing with the press. For post match interviews, several boxes appear on the screen, containing trivial if absurdly meaningless quotes. The boxes flash quickly in a sequence. In spite of how sheerly unmemorable the phrases are, you have to remember the order before tapping it into the phone. It comes out with, say, ‘Over the moon, y’know, great feet for the big lad, um, game of two halves,’ after which the press will be delighted. But if you mix up ‘y’know’ and ‘um’, for instance, then the Fourth Estate will come for your head. It’s deliberately comic, whilst not unrepresentative of most football-speak, the language in which a person with as quick and sybaritic a lifestyle as Kyle Walker comes across as impossibly dull. Not all the dullness is in the tone; in fact, most of it’s in the language. Football-speak is cliché, whether that’s the monotone reflections of the above, or else the cringe-makingly brilliant commentarial flights of Peter Drury which, for all their purported originality, still brim with cliché. Football-speak is inseparable from cliché. I think that is why we are so fond of it. 

I had planned to write this in the snottier voice of one who abhors the debased language with which the mobs discuss their footy-ball. But after the most basic preliminary research, I encountered that ‘Football Clichés’ are a well-trodden topic of discussion. There is a book, a blog, a podcast, and even an article in The Guardian—all by the same man, Adam Hurrey, a writer at The Athletic. 

In his book Football Clichés, Hurrey finds them endearing. They have ‘unhelpfully negative connotations,’ given ‘[they imply] a lack of original thought, of stifling stereotype.’ He acknowledges that football-speak can be guilty of this at times. But, ‘For 150 years, it’s been somebody’s job to relay what happens within the ninety minutes of a match and, as that coverage now reaches saturation points, a reliable formula for succinct description of the sport has become vital.’ So, they become a cipher through which fans, players, managers and commentators can speak. According to Hurrey’s helpful definitions, ‘The ball is in the net’ means it’s ‘Not strictly a miss, but if ‘the ball is in the net’ there’s a fair chance the goal has, in fact, been disallowed.’ Or else, a ‘Host of opportunities’: ‘Hosts tend to be fairly undesirable collections of missed opportunities or absentees from the first team.’ Hackneyed phrases are instead condensed, efficacious means of communication.

But Martin Amis makes the opposite point. More generally, clichés are ‘dead words’; they lack ‘freshness, energy and reverberation of voice.’ A cliché undermines our capacity for sincere thought and feeling. This is true. If you doubt me, you need only call to mind ‘Take Back Control,’ ‘Get Brexit Done,’ or ‘Make America Great Again,’ which testify to the hypnotic effects of sterile language. Those phrases attest to how, in losing freshness, cliché becomes ‘herd writing, herd thinking and herd feeling’. Hurrey says something similar; only, he gives it a positive spin. In football, clichés act as a ‘leveller—enabling conversation between those relative novices who believe the problem with Arsenal is that they try and walk the ball in and those who feel it’s a little more complicated than that.’ In a sense, then, it’s a kind of esperanto—a simplistic, classless language with which the herd can low.

If you’re unsure of how to use ‘the herd instinct’ in a sentence, the Cambridge Dictionary gives the example of ‘In large crowds, such as at a football match, the herd instinct often kicks in.’ Cliché is the language of the herd and, for better or for worse, football is a herd sport (playing it, watching it, talking about it). The worst moments of following football are bound up with the herd (mid-morning drunkenness, beating-up the French or anyone for that matter), but so too are the positive ones. In the subjugation of self to the crowd, in the Dionysian loss of identity, you become a part of an intoxicatingly cohesive, classless whole, which doesn’t care who you are but rather who you support. 

Reviewing a book on Hooliganism in the 80s, Amis described how its author ‘wrote the book because he liked it, too. He liked the crowd, and the power, and the loss of self.’ To succumb to a crowd, you must shed the uniqueness of your language and your personality, which cliché enables you to do. So, whilst clichés are no less crass when they’re referring to football, they’re somehow less immediately negative. The herd, in football, is more ambivalent—neither good nor bad. Cliché is the same. To idealise: football is cliché. 

By Cosmo Adair

James Marriott is a columnist and podcast reviewer for The Times.

The interview began with the ping of a notification: James Marriott has joined your meeting. Zooming, as we were, I can only write a head-and-shoulders portrait of James, framed by the glistening shelves of the Times’s bookroom. He wore a salmon pink shirt and a pair of large wide-framed glasses, which donnishly slipped down his nose as his conversation grew more energetic. His hair was half-messy, fine, placing him somewhere between the respectable columnist and the abstracted poet. But how to render someone’s physical presence when you’re interviewing them online? So, as I watched the recording and copied out the transcript, I scribbled brief, italicised stage-directions: As I ask this, he leans forward, rubs his eyes to tease out a thought, and then jolts up and bursts into enthusiastic speech. That captures all the reader needs to know: the charming, if unexpected, engagement and enthusiasm of a renowned writer speaking to a provincial, student magazine. 

Marriott grew up just outside of Newcastle, where ‘I really didn’t want to grow up … It felt like I should have been born down south, and that it had been a cosmic mistake that landed me there.’ He spent his time reading voraciously (‘novels, poetry, all that kind of stuff,’ including ‘a lot of Dickens novels’ and ‘a lot of Iris Murdoch’) and listening to formative rants from his Nihilist father, who spoke ‘about how human beings are all just collections of atoms and that we live in this materialist universe where love was just a chemical … That’s not, you know, the most optimistic way to be brought up.’ And so he passed his schooldays, pacing about the playground as he recited Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (‘I was, unfortunately, pretentious’), and dreamed of moving south for university—his sights set firmly on Oxford, and having watched the Granada adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, ‘I’d convinced myself it was going to be, you know, befriending aristocrats and discussing poetry over port and driving around in vintage cars.’ On arrival, however, he was ‘hideously disappointed that people were normal’—in spite of which, he was resolute in enjoying it since if he didn’t ‘it would have destroyed the entire purpose of my teenage years.’ 

After Oxford, he hoped to ingratiate himself with Literary London since ‘at the time, it seemed like the most glamorous thing to write a book review for a national publication.’ But this took time. For three years, he worked in an antiquarian bookshop where he would ‘[sit] in monkish silence,’ cataloguing books.  During this period, he sent out poems and article proposals to newspapers and magazines until The Times took him on. Still there, he is a columnist, podcast reviewer, occasional feature writer, and a regular guest on Times Radio’s flagship podcast, Matt Chorley’s “Politics Without The Boring Bits.” His interview with Calvin Robinson (‘So you wouldn’t say that Enoch Powell was a racist, I ask, my incredulity doubtless signalling to him that I am a woke liberal of the most mindlessly ovine disposition’) and his feature “How I fell in love with Serge Gainsbourg (‘To anybody who has ever regretted being born on the pallid and puritanical side of the Channel, he offers an exotic vision of what might have been: semi-permanent drunkenness, a bohemian contempt for all shirt buttons above the navel, a career of chaotic offence-giving rewarded with public adulation’) cry out expectantly for an anthology of his writings. 

I’ve often found that what makes his columns distinctive is his tone. He has an excellent grasp of the ‘contemporary moment,’ all the while seeming rather uncharmed by it. He’s ‘a bit of a technophobe … sceptical that TikTok is particularly good for anybody and for people’s intellectual lives,’ and he worries about the ‘dumbing down of culture and people, and being passively accepted.’ Therefore, his columns can seem pessimistic—but isn’t that just the age? ‘The cultural atmosphere is pretty gloomy, and I know people have always thought this, but when you think Trump in America, the Environment, AI, massive tech companies, Biden losing his marbles, the Housing Crisis—it’s kind of reasonable to be gloomy.’ 

Fitzgerald once wrote that ‘the test of a first-rate intelligence … [is to] be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.’ I think that Marriott passes this test. He might not match the intensity of Fitzgerald’s clash of embittered cynicism and wilful optimism, but he shows a persistent attention to both sides of an argument: ‘I think that whatever you’re writing, you can accept that for any opinion which can be expressed in the space of a thousand words, there’s an opposite opinion that’s equally true and can also be expressed in a thousand words.’ 

Talking about AI, he shows this: ‘My original take was that I think the crucial thing will be that people do care about the fact that something comes from another human being. We have these strong intuitions about art and literature coming from human beings, and the whole point of art is to connect us with human beings.’ His interview with John Gray—whom Marriott paraphrases as arguing ‘disaster looms, AI’s going to replace everyone’s jobs, we’re all screwed’—led him to a more despairing position. That was eased by a conversation with someone who had read his article who said that ‘there’s this kind of mindless optimism about what the technology’s capable of.’ Now, he thinks that ‘we shouldn’t extrapolate infinite potential from something that can just write plausible sentences.’ 

Despite his concerns ‘about how natural text will be to people’s experience in the future,’ he remains a passionate advocate of literature and the literary. Last year, he found himself in the somewhat absurd position of being criticised by The Bookseller for arguing that some books are better than others. ‘The thing is, I find it really hard to believe that many people do actually believe that all books are the same. I think that’s also just not true either.’ This leads to the “Culture Wars” and the recent tendency to value a literary work according to its political message as opposed to its aesthetic triumphs. But this isn’t new: ‘In the 30s there was an awful lot of incredibly pious and tedious stuff written about, like, the importance of the voices of the workers and the voices of the working class … and it’s really fascinating, as well, if you go back to 19th century Russia, there was so much stuff about, was Turgenev a Liberal, or what exactly was he? Was such-and-such a Socialist? … I guess the kind of unifying theme of those moments is that those are societies which were undergoing dramatic social and political change.’ In any case, the freedom of expression—whatever the climate—is one of his most deeply held values: ‘I think that whether or not you’re on Salman Rushdie’s side is historically a pretty good test of whether you’re a serious person or not.’ 

But the anxiety and self-criticism of a “Culture War” can benefit a society. ‘It is easily forgotten that the intellectual history of the West is much more turbulent than we remember,’ and that the narratives we often study of a ‘West [that] has been unruffled and triumphalist in its progress’ simply isn’t true. He discusses Isaiah Berlin’s “Three Critics of the Enlightenment,” a book which discusses Giambattista Vico, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Johann Georg Hamann, all of whom cast doubt on the Enlightenment’s relentless progressive march. ‘From the very beginning, [they were] furious and righteous critics of all the Enlighten—, of the self-confidence of the Enlightenment, about Western Civilisation, the superiority of Western Civilisation and I think it’s—I mean, Herder, especially, can at times sound like he’s writing now [and] tweeting. [Herder says] how it’s ridiculous to think that Western Civilisation is superior to any other civilisations [since] all civilisations are fitted to this particular people and this particular place.’ Therefore, ‘doubt and self-criticism have always been in our culture.’ And whilst it’s ‘really annoying to live through it when it erupts as viciously as it does now … Perhaps it’s reassuring to think that this may just be a part of our culture in a liberal society. You know, we’re not in a Totalitarian state, we can’t impose one viewpoint on everyone. Everything will be furiously criticised because that’s what happens when you have free speech and liberal values.’ 

There are many on the hard right who view this doubt and self-criticism as a sign of decadence. But people have been saying this for what seems like forever—with both Gibbon in the 18th century, and Spengler in the 20th, trying to link cultural decadence with the ‘decline and fall’ of political or imperial orders. But Marriott takes a much more nuanced view, considering it to be endemic in the cultural lifecycle: ‘I do think that society does go through periods of cultural efflorescences, of brilliant innovation, followed by decadence, followed by renewal, and I think that we are all living in the aftermath of the sixties, which was one of the kind of extraordinary cultural moments in all of history.’ Referencing Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society—which argues that culture hasn’t developed since the 60s, since ‘you can still go and see the Rolling Stones, follow the same superheroes’—Marriott then ponders whether the “Culture Wars” are simply ‘a part of us throwing off that inheritance and making something new.’

As I shut my laptop and shuffled down to Greggs for lunch, I thought of how I had come away with a renewed sense of Marriott and his ideas. I found he wasn’t as much of a pessimist as he self-deprecatingly claims to be. He’s more of a sceptic, perhaps: what he distrusts, I think, is the notion that any political or cultural viewpoint is wholly correct, and that if there has ever been such a woolly thing called ‘Truth’, it can only be found in the interaction of opposites, in conversation, and—perhaps, most of all—in reading.

By Cosmo Adair

I sleep better when I’ve had something to drink. Apparently, that’s impossible—at least, my brother likes to say so. Everytime I come downstairs on a Saturday morning, having had a few drinks before and after supper, and I say, ‘God, I slept well last night,’ he squints a little before telling me, ‘That’s impossible, scientifically.’ Those five forbidding, unbalanced syllables, with their maliciously rushed ‘ti-fic’ and the slick arrogance of the concluding ‘ly’, exist for the sole purpose of disproving the intimations of my own body. I hate them. 

I’m sure that scientifically, it’s true; I reckon that technically, it might even be correct. No doubt that fictional character, adored by Pollsters and Populists alike, the ‘Man on the Street’ (Who is he? Tell me!) has been rigorously monitored and tested and that was what the results said. So I’m not going to sit here, tapping away, arguing against the scientifically correct. Instead, I want to question how on earth we’ve allowed ourselves to return to some barbarically puritanical mindset in which our own personal experience of what makes us happy, what makes us tick (given that, of course, it’s in moderation: don’t do crack, etc.) means precious little. 

Until recently, the only salvation was that no matter how much said pursuers of the SCIENTIFICALLY-proven might judge your habits, they couldn’t do much about them. But then, last week, the UK’s expiring PM Rishi Sunak announced an imminent ban on smoking for those born after 2009 in what strikes me as a cynical ploy to secure a legacy beyond the immoral expulsion of immigrants to Rwanda. As David Hockney rightly said:  ‘There are too many bossy people in England … Bossy people are humourless. This is just madness to me. Why can’t Mr Sunak leave the smokers alone.’ Sunak (tee-totalist and faster) doesn’t propose to take cigarettes off everyone, only those born after 2009: imagine in 2050, then, the farce in which a forty-two year-old can smoke and a forty-one year-old can’t. It shows the hour hand is moving yet closer to midnight: that midnight being, once again, scientifically proven to occur in Derby in 2050 when the UK’s last cigarette will be smoked, according to a 2019 report. 

Obviously, smoking kills. But, as Hockney writes, ‘The National Health Service will always have to deal with birth and deaths. They are part of life: the cause of death is birth. On the cigarette packet it says “SMOKING KILLS” … well, what do I reply? “LIFE IS A KILLER.” I’m one day nearer oblivion today than I was yesterday. This applies to everybody on the planet.’ As ever, Britain’s preeminent artist (who should live in Britain, but moved to France due to our intrusive smoking laws) is onto something.

As thick and naive as I was when I smoked my first cigarette, I never doubted that it was pernicious. In fact, I reckon that’s why I did it: when you’re young, danger seems sexy and mature, if almost heroic. If smoking is, really, considered ‘cool’ then I think that’s why: because it kills you. Most cool things tend to. (Guns, Flamethrowers, Sports Cars, Alcohol, etc.) But the assumption of Rishi Sunak is that he can tell people how bad smoking is, at which point they will immediately stop and then thank him for this unprecedented enlightenment. In positioning himself against it, I daresay Rishi Sunak has made smoking more cool and more appealing to a lot of people. 

In any discussion of smoking, or of the debates between happiness and longevity, it seems right to recourse to Martin Amis’s novel The Pregnant Widow, in which he writes: ‘He thought, Yeah. Yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer. Which seven will be subtracted by that god called Time? It won’t be that convulsive, heart-busting spell between twenty-eight and thirty-five. No. It’ll be that really cool bit between eighty-six and ninety-three.’ Yes, smoking ends what non-smoking extends. But we must never let ourselves look at human lives as if they are statistics. In this Bureaucracy of Happiness, in which illegality and social pressure take away each slightly individualised form of pleasure, I feel we are all becoming like Auden’s “Unknown Citizen,” of whom the poet asks: 

“Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:

Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.”

In arguments of this kind, I always remember a Times interview with France’s leading cancer specialist, David Khayat, who spoke in opposition to what he perceived to be the tyrannical intrusion of an Anglo-Saxon puritanism (diets, teetotalism, avoidance of red meat) on French customs: he spoke of how “The risk we face is of a life without pleasure, a life without enjoyment … And if you force that upon people, they will explode.” He goes on to say that with an immaculately healthy lifestyle, ‘you will be able to avoid old age, illness and death. But that’s wrong. We are all going to grow old, we are all going to fall ill and we are all going to die.’ Thus, we should aim for balanced lives: never the excess of an addict, nor the zeal of an ascetic. And, with Khayat’s backing, I suppose I’m correct here (scientifically).

So, I implore you to stave off the social condescension, the bossiness, and the arrogance which you might adopt in the face of those who seek a healthy balance in their life which includes a bit of pleasure and happiness as opposed to posting a double ton of miserable and waning years. And if not drinking, not smoking, not eating red meats and fatty foods, makes you happy, so be it: your happiness delights me. I do not mean to criticise or infringe upon your happiness. I merely want to shout, alongside Hockney: ‘END BOSSINESS NOW.’

By Cosmo Adair & Maggie Baring.

Bishop Auckland, November 29th — grey with a smattering of drizzle. Standing in the town square, it’s obvious that this isn’t a typical, left-regional town. In the windows of an old, listed, one-time bank, characters from paintings jest with one another, speech bubbles spilling from their mouths onto a dark, tenebrous background. That’s The Spanish Gallery, home to pictures by Murillo, Velazquez and El Greco. Then, ahead, there’s a strange, church-like building — modern, in the openness of its glass and steel, but hinting at times past in its striving Gothic upwardness. That’s Auckland Tower. 

What’s this all doing here? It’s here because Bishop Auckland is home to The Auckland Project: an ambitious regeneration project, instigated by philanthropist Jonathan Ruffer. Passing the tower, we can see him standing on the doorstep of Auckland Castle’s Gatehouse, which he has made his home, waiting for us. He wears an old v-neck jersey over a checked shirt. He greets us with an instinctive, avuncular kindness which is almost disarming. Ruffer behaves as I had once expected University professors might — prone to mental flight, all the while retaining a formidable intellectual sharpness. He seems to belong to an England of yore, one of ‘the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning’ which Orwell so vividly described. But he is simultaneously a very modern man: his wealth comes from finance, with his firm Ruffer Investment Company listed on the FTSE 250, and The Auckland Project is not quite as quixotic as the tendency to focus on its promotion of Spanish Art would suggest. He is not some Aristocrat of yore spilling cash in the belief that what the North really needs is an exposure to Spanish Art: no, he is motivated by his belief that County Durham needs considerable investment and education in order to kickstart the local economy, create employment opportunities, and in doing so remind the region of its local identity and hopefully encourage its citizens to take more pride in that. 

Ruffer was born in the Northeast of England in 1951. His father was a sea-going Royal Marine during World War II, and he met Ruffer’s mother whilst his ship was being repaired in Newcastle. They settled down just south of Middlesbrough. Ruffer would later attend Cambridge University, where he studied English Literature, despite the fact that ‘[he] didn’t ever discover where the English department was’: something I questioned, at first, given his impressive erudition. He ended up in the City where, he claims, his degree came in handy, given that ‘English is an everyman subject, and losing money in investments is an everyman subject as well.’ To call him ‘successful’ would be an understatement; he went on to become one of the country’s wealthiest men. But inspired by a ‘coup de foudre’ — related, no doubt, to his Christian faith — he decided that ‘What [he] wanted to do was to change the emphasis of [his] life, and the form that took was to be involved in regeneration somewhere in the Northeast.’ Thus followed The Auckland Project. 

Bishop Auckland was not always the inevitable location, but County Durham certainly was. Because, he remarks, whereas Northumberland and Yorkshire still possess a distinct local character, ‘County Durham has lost the sense of who it is.’ And so when the Church of England decided to sell off Auckland Castle and its famous Zurbaran pictures, he went one better: he bought the castle as well. Here was a town in County Durham, rich in history and in possession of some important but little-known Spanish Golden Age pictures — and Ruffer had for a long while been a devoted admirer of both Baroque Art and Spain. It has also ‘turned out to be, strategically, a really astute place.’ It might only have a population of 25,000, ‘but the catchment area is 125,000 and if you look at its sphere of influence, it’s about 350,000 which is bigger than Cardiff. So, in other words, if Bishop Auckland improves, then actually more than half of County Durham improves.’ 

His Christianity and his interest in Art are both important in the direction which The Auckland Project has taken. Much has been said before of the relationship between Religion and Art, but we were both quite spellbound by the acuity of how he described his understanding of it. 

He refers to himself as “Goddy” — a rather charming, if English, manner of lightly and inoffensively describing such a life-defining belief. “I do think … that for  all of us as human beings, there are things that define the nature of who we are. And one of them is power, one of them is sex, one of them is money, and one of them is faith. Now … if you look at Victorian times, what you’ll find is that nobody ever talked about sex, but if they put up a new building, the foundation stones would start with the words, ‘to the Glory of God.’ Now, today, it’s the exact inverse of that … and everybody is very happy to talk about sex. But, in fact, these are fundamental things that drive us, and it is simply that at the moment, that element is in the shadows, but it doesn’t go away.’ 

If Faith, then, is so important, what is its object? ‘It’s to encounter something bigger than yourself. And clearly, the Christian God is like looking at a burning sun without any shade. It’s agonisingly painful to do, because it’s just such a powerful and intense and concentrated thing.’ How, then, do we approach the unapproachable? For Ruffer, we approach it through art, which for him is ‘not the light of the sun, but the light of the moon. The moon isn’t overpowering; moonlight is caressing. It woos you and settles you. But what we know from physics is that moonlight is actually the same as sunlight; they both come from the same place. So I don’t feel, at all, that when I’m talking about art or when I’m talking about the Christian God, that I’m really talking about different things at all.” 

There’s one acquisition which he’s especially focussed on: that’s St. Paul’s Burning of the Hebrew Books, a tapestry by Pieter Coecke van Aelst. It ought to be in the UK because of how well it conforms to the Waverley Criteria, the process by which an object might be deemed a ‘national treasure.’ These are: Is it closely connected with our history and national life? Is it of outstanding aesthetic importance? Is it of outstanding significance for the study of some particular branch of art, learning or history? To Ruffer, the tapestry ticks all three boxes. In fact, he believes that only the coronation spoon is of equivalent importance. 

It was made for Henry VIII during the Reformation. It depicts St. Paul to symbolically represent a break from Rome, where St. Peter and the Petrine liturgy were dominant. But, historically, the liturgy in England had been Pauline, and so Henry’s ‘effectively saying the Pope is the head of the One Church, but I’m the head of the other church. And so the rest of the depiction which is the burning of the heathen books is a quotation of what St. Paul did in Ephesus in Acts. And what Henry was doing was saying, ‘I’ve done that, I’ve burned all the Tyndale bibles, killed a few of them too.’ Here, again, Ruffer excels: he explains church history and a complicated artistic work in a way that’s both rigorous and accessible. 

The problem is, however, that this tapestry is in Spain. It had been missing since 1770 when it disappeared from Hampton Court Palace until it turned up with a dealer who ‘worked out that this was the thing which had gone missing in 1770, whereupon the Spanish Minister of Culture slapped on an export ban. And so that’s what [he’s] fighting.’ So far, his campaign’s going well. ‘We’ve got both archbishops, the top four bishops: Canterbury, York, London and Durham. And we’ve got Prime Ministers behind us, and we’ve got Wayzgoose behind us,’ he jokes. 

Naively, we ask whether he has any Spanish connections who could help him out. ‘Yes, yes, I mean I’m a trustee of the Prado. And I must say one of the things I’m quite allergic to is titles, you know, people who go around … saying ‘I’ve got an OBE.’ But … one of the things which did randomly come my way is I’m a Spanish Knight, I’m an Encomienda of the Order of Isabel the Catholic, Isabella la Cattolic, who is Catherine of Aragon’s mum, so I play that one for all it’s worth. But I’m about as Spanish as an English mousetrap.’ Given his connections, and given what he has managed to acquire so far, I have a feeling that the Encomienda Ruffer will acquire the tapestry eventually. And much like the Greeks awaiting the return of the Elgin Marbles, he has set up The Faith Museum, which awaits the return of the tapestry. ‘Its temperature and humidity are controlled, which costs some millions to do, with nothing in it … we’ve got what those historical old palaces and the V&A haven’t got, [which is] somewhere suitable to put it. 

Our discussion drew to an end. Initially, we had been booked in for a half-an-hour chat but he kept us for an hour and fifteen minutes in a thrilling, wide-ranging discussion. Coming away, one thing struck both of us about him: it was the sheer thrill and interest he took in other people. Throughout our session, he asked about us, about the magazine, about university, and about where we both grew up. This was not some elaborate diversion tactic, but a reflection of his natural curiosity. He treated us with a seriousness that made it feel — at least for us — as if he did not differentiate between The Times, The Telegraph, and Wayzgoose Magazine. He is so passionate about his project that he would take hours to proselytise anyone — from the Prime Minister to a Student Journalist — about the importance of what The Auckland Project is getting up to. 

But this welcoming curiosity of his extends beyond mere journos. Later, chatting to one of the gallery attendants about Jonathan, we said how impressed we’d been by this aspect of him. To which, she simply replied: ‘That’s Jonathan for you.’ Which, I think, it really is.