There is a long and disastrous history of entitled Englishmen redrawing border lines. In an interview published last week, Michael Heseltine revealed that in his political youth he, characteristically, had created the new English county boundaries of the 1972 Local Government Act simply by hiring a light aircraft and flying over the green and pleasant land.
Ancient territories were erased or reshaped from 2,000ft in the creation of five extensive new urban authorities. “You could see where [conurbations] began and ended,” Hezza recalled, “and I would just tick local authorities in, out, in, out whatever it may be.” I remember one minor effect of that shift from ground level; overnight, my school exercise books lost their distinctive Warwickshire bear-and-ragged-staff coat of arms, as the town in which I lived was subsumed into the ahistorical sprawl of the West Midlands – part of a new Britain bluntly demarcated into urban and beyond. Heseltine’s comment came as part of a comprehensive Harvard University study into the reasons why the country’s regional inequalities have in the years since, only grown. As instructive as his airy reorganisation strategy were his comments on the ways that efforts at “levelling up” have always been undone by ministers abandoning the better plans of predecessors for grand schemes of their own. As our history proves, the easy bit is redrawing the map; what follows, less so.
Magic kingdom
The British Library’s Fantasy exhibition offers, among other things, a fabulous thousand-year backstory to the dressing-up-box goblins and witches trick-or-treating this Halloween. In selections from the manuscripts of fantasy writers from the Gawain poet through to Ursula K Le Guin, it freeze-frames twilight moments in creative lives. Seeing the mundane inspirations for stories that have shaped generations of young minds – JM Barrie’s map of Kensington Gardens, say – makes those imaginative departures all the more magical. I remember experiencing the almost physical freefall of Alan Garner’s collapsing of a recognisable teenage present into timeless Welsh mythology in The Owl Service. Seeing an owl-patterned plate from Garner’s dinner table that provoked that time travel triggered a 40-year-old vertigo again.
Eggs is eggs
As a document of our times, it would be hard to beat Unilever’s 2021 report into the higher values represented by its brand-leader Hellmann’s mayonnaise, which, it was claimed, “inspired more than 200 million people across the US, Canada and the UK to waste less food …” Investors, it seems, were deaf to such messages. One UK fund manager, Terry Smith, despaired at Unilever’s efforts to attach save-the-world philosophies to each of its 300 mass-market products. “The Hellmann’s brand has existed since 1913 so we would guess that by now consumers have figured out its purpose (spoiler alert – salads and sandwiches),” he wrote. Buyers seemed to agree. Falling sales have prompted a change of heart from Unilever’s new chief executive: “I believe that a social purpose is not something that we should force on to every brand,” he said last week. Sometimes salad dressing is just salad dressing.
Amen corner
Mike Johnson, the unhinged new Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, explained his wife’s absence from the swearing-in proceedings by the fact that “she’s spent the last couple of weeks on her knees in prayer to the Lord. And she’s a little worn out.” His remark brought to mind the only persuasive scientific experiment into the power of prayer, conducted by Voltaire in 1765: “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one,” the philosopher declared. “‘O Lord make my [religious] enemies ridiculous.’ And lo, God granted it.”
• Tim Adams is an Observer columnist
