Does Russia hate us? Do we hate Russia? Is this the new cold war? First there was a literary-diplomatic froideur when a poster ad from Penguin quoted Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons – “Aristocracy, liberalism, principles … useless words! A Russian doesn’t need them” – and a Russian news website complained that this quotation had been misleadingly taken from a single nihilist character, and alleged anti-Russian bias.
Meanwhile, at Euro 2016, Russian football hooligans may be unaware of Penguin’s Turgenev campaign, but they have no qualms about seeing the English as the enemy. After the horrible crowd violence, the Russian politician Igor Lebedev tweeted about the supporters: “Well done, lads. Keep it up!”
Later he told the news agency life.ru: “In nine out of 10 cases, football fans go to games to fight, and that’s normal. The lads defended the honour of their country and did not let English fans desecrate our motherland. We should forgive and understand our fans.”
Desecrating the Russian motherland? How does Mr Lebedev think English fans were doing this? By chanting that Trollope was superior to Turgenev? If our bizarre proxy war with Putin’s Russia is going to continue, I think this is something else best settled from inside the EU.
Wine-upmanship
I’ve been drinking wine all my adult life, without ever achieving any expertise other than being able to distinguish between red and white and roughly knowing the difference between really good and really bad.
So I was intrigued by the news that Asda’s £4.37 bottle of Chilean red has been named the best in the world at the Decanter World Wine Awards, albeit in the under-£15 category. Already Asda’s website has crashed as everyone tries to get some. An unfettered free market might cause the price to go far above that £15 ceiling.
I wonder if anyone has ever tried the anti-oenophile trick suggested by Stephen Potter, the inventor of Oneupmanship. You invite the insufferable wine expert to dinner, and serve up a fantastic wine on which you have spent hundreds of pounds, but sneakily decanted into an empty plonk bottle.
Then, with a modest shrug, you apologise for only having this cheapo rubbish – and sit back as the expert tastes it, looks at the label and crumples in suppressed agony as his worldview crumbles. But maybe the £4.37 Asda red means this trick wouldn’t work anyway.
Chopper for Mr Bradshaw!
I have travelled in a helicopter just once, from Penzance to the island of St Mary’s in the Isles of Scilly (a service now cancelled on economic grounds). And so, while most people think of Scilly as a sedate place of deckchairs and seagulls, I associate it with helipad excitement and drama, like the roof of the US embassy in Saigon in 1975.
My only other experience is the Chinook simulator in the RAF Museum in north London, with my 11-year-old son: you stand in the mock helicopter’s shuddering interior, to the recorded sounds of rotor blades and shouting air crew. So it’s intriguing to see Uber provoking its critics with a new service: short-hop helicopters.
The idea is being tried out in São Paulo, Brazil – a four-mile trip across the traffic-choked heart of town will cost just 12 quid. And there’s no fumbling for cash: it just gets charged to your account. Of course, this has to be to and from an approved helipad spot. But I’d like to see an Ubercopter come to whichever built-up place you happen to be, and lower a rope to pick you up. Afterwards, you can give the pilot a grumpy one-star review for refusing to play Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries over the PA.
