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20 August, 2023

A great grey owl: hearing with “few equivalents in the animal kingdom”. Getty

The otherworldly bird with its “own breed of genius”

Owls have an “otherworldly aura”, says Rebecca Giggs in The Atlantic. Their calls are “ghostlike or inchoate”: of around 260 species, most are stealthily camouflaged and decked out with “decibel-dampening feathers” so the shrieks float without clear origin. Around 75% of their large, cortex-like forebrains are dedicated to hearing and vision, giving them “faculties so astounding in range and exactitude” that they seem a “variety of natural magic”. Their reactivity to sound has “few equivalents in the animal kingdom”: the great grey owl can not only pick up the swish of a vole’s footfall coming from a passage cored into the snowbank, but also figure out the elevation of the sound source, “so as to strike through the snow and hit that very point”. In the words of one biologist, their hearing is “its own breed of genius”.

Owls also have facial features that “map onto a human visage”. Their faces flex and feathers refashion to express alertness or relaxation. They play, especially juveniles. Young barn owls experience long spells of REM sleep, the part of the cycle associated with the “vivid and emotion-laden dreams in humans”, during which they cement skills they learn in the day. Male burrowing owls “festoon their earthen tunnel” with decorations: potato peels, nubs of concrete, old gloves and stolen fabric. But perhaps their most human-like quality is their ability to “swivel between symbolisms”: from summoning our “dark and powerful instincts” with their haunting howls, to “strutting and fluffing” to appeal to our whimsy. They’re every bit as “Janus-faced as we are”.

THE TOWNHOUSE This elegant, Grade II listed house is at the end of a Georgian terrace in Ramsgate, Kent. Spread across three floors (and a cellar), it has four bedrooms, a sun-drenched living room and a kitchen-diner that leads out into a courtyard garden. Ramsgate train station, which has 75-minute services to London, is a 15-minute walk away, while the beach can be reached in 10 minutes. £590,000.

One thing I don’t understand about the row over small boats, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph, is why British liberals are so keen on welcoming refugees. Don’t they think Brexit Britain “is a hateful, backward, crumbling, economically doomed dump”, and the EU a progressive “earthly paradise”? Surely there should be tens of thousands of them forming a human barrier along the Kent coast, bellowing at approaching dinghies: “Do not, repeat not, seek sanctuary in Britain! This country is a failing, bigoted, corrupt, austerity-ruined, sewage-sodden, virulently Islamophobic hellhole populated by ghastly Tory-voting gammon who worship statues of slave traders and despise anyone whose skin is any colour but crimson! So for pity’s sake, turn your boats around, and enjoy a glorious new life in elegant, cultured, joyously cosmopolitan France!”

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Wine buffs have long dismissed rosé, says The Economist. Some call it “bitch diesel”, because it is pink and often marketed to women. One top French producer recalls that when he first approached distributors, the door was slammed in his face. Traditional folk think it’s “not a real wine”, he says. “They think that it’s a Coca-Cola wine.” But things are changing. France, which accounts for 35% of the world’s rosé supply, has become a “leading consumer”: a third of bottles drunk there are pink. Exports of Provençal rosé have increased 500% in the past 15 years. In America, the most popular French wine of any colour is a pink number called Whispering Angel. Stuffy oenophiles will no doubt see all this as heresy. But the rest of us should welcome the fact the “ultimate summer tipple” is finally gaining the appreciation it deserves. 

😎🍷 The wine seller Majestic says there’s an “exact point” at which sales of rosé outpace those of red and white: when temperatures outside hit 26C.

Graduation day at Nottingham Trent University. Instagram

Universities are pointless – why not scrap the lot?

The government has got into all sorts of bother over its decision to axe university courses with “low intellectual content”, says Terry Eagleton in UnHerd. How on earth will we survive with no more “PhDs in astrology or ballroom dancing”? If you ask me, ministers aren’t going far enough. Plenty of so-called respectable degrees could be ditched with “no discernible loss” to the nation. Take history, which is basically just a “chronicle of hacking and gouging”. Students are already “pretty fragile”, and learning about the extermination of Native Americans and the like will only “deepen their anxiety”. We need “forward-looking citizens”, not depressive types overwhelmed by the nightmare in our rear-view mirror.

The same goes for literature, which is no longer full of the happy endings favoured by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. The canon now comprises depressing works like Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which ends with the protagonist walking home in the rain after his young partner dies in his arms. “Rather than turning you hopefully towards the practical world, it plunges you morbidly into your own innards.” Besides, you don’t need to be a student to enjoy plays or novels – some people enjoy a pint, “but they don’t need to take a degree in it”. Geography is pointless given we’ve left the EU; modern languages too, for that matter. So let’s stop pretending some academic courses are “garbage” while others are worthwhile. “Just cut the whole bloody lot of them.”

The Coutts branch on the Strand

The bank with an ATM under Buckingham Palace

For a “certain slice of the British chattering classes”, says Joseph Bullmore in Air Mail, there’s nothing worse than the idea of their money “mingling with that of the common man” in a “garden-variety” bank. So they go to the place where “the Queen saw fit to keep her cash”: the private bank Coutts. Entry requires crossing some sort of “financial drawbridge” – a threshold of assets and deposits – and the type of interview you’d expect from the “red-trousered president of an extremely expensive golf club”. Yet the institution never seems far from scandal: aside from the Nigel Farage “debanking” row, Coutts was fined $14m a decade ago for accepting a $3.3m payment in banknotes from a Qatari politician, handed over in “Fortnum & Mason carrier bags, as if Tony Soprano were from Surrey”.

Every member of the royal family since George IV has been a customer, as were the Beatles, Charles Dickens, Frédéric Chopin and Lord Nelson. It has a branch next to Eton College, “such is the concentration of Coutts account holders among the boys there”. There’s even a Coutts ATM in the basement of Buckingham Palace: Queen Elizabeth once alluded to the Queen Mother’s regular use of it, suggesting the bank would have “folded long ago, but for Mummy’s overdraft”. Non-royals must settle for the branch on the Strand, with its own Michelin-starred chef, and bees on the roof making honey for sweet-toothed clients. “People choose things that represent their own values and their sense of themselves,” explains one wealth management expert. “I think that’s the same with private banks.”

Sylvia Plath in 1953. Getty

If you suffer from insomnia, says Genevieve Gaunt in The Spectator, you’re in very good company – among literary figures, at least. As Marie Darrieussecq details in her new book, writers who grappled with sans sommeil include Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Haruki Murakami and Jorge Luis Borges. Immanuel Kant joined their ranks in his later years, “besieged by ghosts”. Proust said lack of sleep was a “sort of death”, and complained that sleeping pills “make holes in my brain”. Ovid wrote: “But I am wakeful, my endless woes are wakeful too.” One of the pleasures of literature is realising that “others in times long gone have felt what we are feeling now”. For anyone who struggles with sleep, Darrieussecq’s book may prove a real tonic.

Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq (translated by Penny Hueston) is available to buy here.

“Whatever you do, always give 100%. Unless you’re donating blood.”

Bill Murray

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