AUGUST 27/28 2022

FASTER,
CHEAPER,
DEADLIER
War in the era of
budget drones
 August 27/28 2022
PRARTHNA SINGH

FEATURES
16. 20. 28.
Lingua franca TB2 or not to TB2 The spirit of resistance
How The Simpsons became What inexpensive Turkish drones Prarthna Singh’s photos from
a language for some millennials. say about the future of conflict. Delhi record a remarkable political
By Tom Whyman By Laura Pitel and Raya Jalabi moment for Muslim women.
By Simar Deol

INTELLECT APPETITES WIT& WISDOM

7 Tim Harford 12 Simon Mundy 37 Tim Hayward 44 Robert Shrimsley

The excruciating pain Getting tough on Small plates, big love at east Holidays in Hampstead-on-Sea
of uncertainty the climate crisis London’s Café Cecilia 45 Games
8 Dave Lee 14 Gillian Tett 38 Honey & Co recipe 46 The Questionnaire
Driverless cars minus all How shame is shaping Rice noodle salad Tom Chaplin,
the other humans too public life in the US 41 Tamlyn Currin singer and songwriter
10 Gallery Cooking with wine
Painter Errol Lloyd 43 Fantasy Dinner
in Notting Hill Food writer Ruby Tandoh

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FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022 3

 Letters
Tragedy of the birds
by Madeleine Speed
Marvellous if very distressing
article. Thank you, FT. This is
one of the reasons I subscribe.
Moly via FT.com
I walked along a remote beach on
Kintyre last weekend. There must
have been a dead seabird every
two metres or so at the high-tide
line, as far as the eye could see.
My girlfriend was moved to tears.
Kaiser Sozzled via FT.com
NYC enters its weed phase
by India Ross
As someone who very much
enjoyed the 1960s, I would never
condemn anyone smoking “weed”
(indeed, I would argue for the
legalisation of all drugs on the
grounds that criminalisation has
been a global disaster). However,
on a recent trip to New York I was
amazed at the pervasive smell
of pot: strong enough in lower
Manhattan to make the head reel.
Mixed with the odour of urine
on so many streets, the smell is
now a real turn-off.
JCA via FT.com
Each to their own. Personally,
I find it one of the most
delicious smells that exists,
but I am a lifelong weed user.
Ecstatic bear of Oxford and
Castelldefels via FT.com
What most people don’t realise
is that there is a large consumer
group that uses medical cannabis
because traditional or “accepted”
drugs just don’t work. I speak from
personal experience since I have
been battling cancer for the past
seven years. It is the only drug that
maintains my appetite, allows
me to get a good night’s sleep and
4 FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2020
generally feel healthy. Additionally,
I don’t “smoke” my cannabis,
I ingest it, and I make sure it is
certified organic.
Sitcom via FT.com
Algorithms don’t always hit the
back of the net
by Oliver Roeder
Very well written. Humorous too.
Could the major papers challenge
each other? Does the FT have a
journalist in the top 10 per cent
without AI?
Saporana via FT.com
Putting the prestige into
prestige TV
▶
by Emma Jacobs
As with any medium, it is possible
to consume it intelligently or
stupidly. I’ve read “classics” while
barely paying attention and ended
a chapter without a clue what’s
happened. Or you can watch
television and see what the very
intelligent and talented people
behind the scenes are doing.
Right Whinger via FT.com
Apprehension and reconciliation
in the Deep South
by Christopher Grimes
Too many Americans these days
lose their cool. But at least the sane
ones should stick with irrefutable
arguments brought forward calmly.
Thus, when someone alleges that
mass shootings in America are
simply “the price of living in a free
society”, then it suffices to point
out that societies in western
Europe are at least as free as the
American one, and experience
only very rare mass shootings.
And maybe add that freedom
from fear of being impacted by
a mass shooting is also a freedom
that enhances the quality of life.
GIEconomist via FT.com
Save the date for the FTWeekend Festival on September 3 when
more than 100 authors, scientists, politicians, chefs, artists and
journalists will appear at Kenwood House Gardens in London.
Packed with ideas and inspiration, there will be debates, tastings,
performances and more. Book your pass at ft.com/ftwf
AUGUST 20/21
The virulent new strain of
avian flu decimating birds
TO CONTRIBUTE
You can comment on our articles online
or email magazineletters@ft.com.
Please include a daytime telephone
number and full address (not for
publication). Letters may be edited.
Please, spare a thought for
holidaying journalists
by Robert Shrimsley
The era of low-cost international
air travel may continue for decades
to come. Yet if it does end sooner,
through policy, energy supply or
war, perhaps we will yearn for the
stale familiarity of airport lounges,
overpriced baguettes and the
emergency exit row. Perhaps we’ll
remember this time for what it is:
an economic, scientific miracle,
an anachronistic blip in the rich
human story. By then, at least,
holidaying columnists may find
other subjects to write about.
Ollie Reeder via FT.com
Reporters also use passports for
“broken services” stories but
88 hours after I applied for my
passport renewal, the new one
came through my letterbox. I’d had
notifications at every step, including
when it was printing. My old
passport followed five days later.
Paul Goss, Prestbury, UK
A taste of Sicily
by Ravinder Bhogal
Caponata and sardine pasta
are two of my favourite culinary
memories of Sicily, now regularly
made at home. It’s a shame that
the almond granita served with
brioche remains just a memory.
Or perhaps it’s for the best.
LYC Bailey via FT.com
Not all wine improves with age
by Dan Keeling
I would read the whole FT
backwards on the promise of one
wine descriptor (or any other
kind of descriptor) as inspired
as “celestial walnuts”. Please FT
editorial board, give Dan Keeling
some space.
Bearhouse via FT.com
Diana (statue in the Louvre) + Paul Ross = Diana Ross
Picture quiz
9. We Are the Champions 10. Galileo
5. News of the World 6. May 7. Flash 8. Richard Rodgers
1. Mercury 2. Lambert Simnel 3. Deacon 4. Taylor Swift
The link was the band Queen
Quiz answers
 Inside: The mob comes for university anthropology departments p14

Intellect
Undercover Economist
TIM HARFORD
It’sthe uncertainty,not thedelay,
that gets you inthe end

I first began to conceive of this column three and a half hours

before typing these words, as I stood with my wife and children
in an impossibly long queue for the Eurostar, snaking across
Gare du Nord in 35C heat. The problem was not the delay, but
the discomfort, the anxiety and the uncertainty. It was
impossible to read or even think because the queue moved
and bunched; it was dammed and redirected at unpredictable
points for unknown reasons. There was nearly a nasty accident
as an escalator pumped people into a space that was
already crowded.
It was not the most delayed I’ve ever been, not by a long way.
Thanks to an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano, I was once
five days late for my wife’s birthday. But the Eurostar experience
somehow packed a season of stress into a few hours.
Itwasafittingclimaxtoaless-than-smoothattempttotourthe
sightsofEuropebytrain.OurtrainfromGarmisch-Partenkirchen
to Innsbruck was replaced by two bus journeys. The train from
Innsbruck to Verona was late and, despite booking months ago,
we weren’t given seat reservations. We spent an hour in a 40C
waiting room at Verona, watching as our train to Milan was
repeatedly postponed: just another 15 minutes, the departure
board promised, over and over again. And the journey ▶

FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY GUILLEM CASASÚS 7

 Intellect

◀ from Milan to Paris was threatened by a cancelled connection, Notes from the Cutting Edge
giving us a couple of hours to fret over whether or not we’d be
allowed on the later train. I love the idea of rail travel, but reality DAVE LEE
sometimes disappoints.
The curious thing is that, when we were actually travelling, Buckle up.We’vehit peak
everything was a pleasure. Even a bus replacement is not
too shabby when you’re driving through the Alps. Although we
Human-AutonomyClash
spent an inordinate amount of time trying and failing to confirm
seat reservations, we rarely had any trouble actually getting
the seats themselves.
The problem, in essence, was not the travelling; it was the
queueingandthe waitingand,morethananything, theanxiously
never knowing. This is true not just for holiday travel but for I was at an outdoor concert the empty Cruise car sped off! The
le train-train quotidien (even “daily routine” sounds cool in recently in San Francisco. Near the officer got back into his car to go
French). A famous study by Daniel Kahneman and the late food trucks was a gleaming white after it. Once he’d caught up, two
Alan Krueger found that one of the least pleasant parts of Jaguar, two cheery people hovering officers – reinforcements! – then got
anyone’s day was the morning commute, with the evening by its side. But they weren’t selling out to take a closer look.
commute not far behind. The reason may be that the commute the car. It was their job to convince It wasn’t long before Cruise rep-
is not only unpleasant, but fraught enough that one could never me that this Jaguar, a Waymo self- resentatives hurled themselves on
quite get used to it. Commuters cannot afford complacency; driving car, wouldn’t kill me. to social media, saying, actually, all
they must always keep one eye on the grimness of their journey, They didn’t put it quite like that, had gone as planned. The car moved
lest it become grimmer. but that was their mission. You up to a safe spot to stop, the cops

N
could get in the car, look around, were in contact with the company,
one of this would be news to Pete Dyson and learn about the safety features. and no infraction had occurred.
Rory Sutherland, the authors of a delightful Waymo cars have been around San Franciscans as well as those
book called Transport for Humans. They cite for a while, but only recently with- in a small number of other loca-
various studies to back up some obvious-yet- out anyone behind the wheel. tions are being targeted with ads.
overlooked ideas. Cruise, the auton- Cruise tweets about
For example, time flies when you are omy company delivering from food
travelling but drags when you are waiting (subjectively, a minute owned by GM, also
Thinkacarwithout banks. It is trying
of waiting feels like three minutes of travel). One Dutch study has empty cars driv- adriverisstrange? to humanise its car,
found that journeys on clean trains feel about 20 per cent briefer. ing around. If you Waituntilyouseeone naming it Poppy.
I have nothing against faster trains, but running clean trains is think a car without goingalong without This strategy can
cheaper and we could start doing it tomorrow. a driver is strange, anyoneinitatall work. When food-
Dyson and Sutherland argue that transport providers should wait until you see delivery apps rolled
attend to the neglected task of explaining what is happening and one going down the out autonomous
reassuring people. How long is the queue? How late is the train? If road without anyone in it at all. robots on college campuses, they
I miss this train, what happens then? On the road, the cars can be attached googly eyes to the front in
If Eurostar had said, “Sorry, you’ll have to queue for a couple prone to moments of confusion. an effort to make them look more
of hours, and you’ll get to London two or three hours late, but A local news website reported friendly (and less kickable). But
we do promise to get you on a train tonight,” the time spent how one particular cul-de-sac self-driving cars will need more
queueing would have been easier to bear. Instead, we were told had been tormenting Waymo’s than googly eyes. One attempt is
why there had been some disruption, but nothing about the algorithms, leading dozens of cars Let’s Talk Autonomous Driving, a
implications for us as travellers, so we had no idea what to expect down a dead end every day. website funded by Waymo that lays
or what to do. Last week, a friend sent me a out some benefits of the technology.
I asked Eurostar for an interview to discuss why it seemed video of a woman in the street If public sentiment starts to
so hard for transport providers to provide information to shouting “Go! Go!” at a Cruise vehi- falter, these benefits will be pushed
passengers, but nobody could be made available to answer my cle temporarily paralysed. “It’s OK, hard. Stop the innovation, compa-
questions. At least they are consistent. car, it’s not your fault,” my friend nies will say, and you’re preventing
Travellers find explanations useful even when there is said, as it eventually drove on. a blind man from being independ-
no delay. It is easy to take some guesswork out of travelling We’re in an era when the unpre- ent, or a Girl Scout from getting
by providing large clocks, having departure boards display dictability of people meets the home safely. But potential shouldn’t
countdowns or simply telling people which direction the train as-yet not fully capable autonomous blinker scrutiny.
is coming from. car. In this moment, which I’m call- In time, self-driving cars will
There is also the question of what to provide passengers with ing the Human-Autonomy Clash, unlock economic opportunity.
while they wait at the station. Clean seats, tables, perhaps even there’ll be crashes, there’ll be anger. Roads will be magnitudes safer.
a power socket: a little of this sort of thing goes a long way. No And that’s why there was a Besides, the arc of innovation will
doubt space in older stations is at a premium, but it would be Waymo Jaguar at the concert: ultimately mean mass adoption,
helpfulifsomesmallfractionofthebudgetandattentiondevoted Autonomy needs a publicist. just perhaps more slowly than the
to high-speed rail links was diverted to relaxing and productive The companies are one incident companies might hope. Before
waiting rooms. away from council-meeting obliv- that, the Human-Autonomy Clash
As I draft this conclusion, it’s four hours after we arrived at ion, demands that local streets be will get testy. Companies have a
Gare du Nord, and two and a half hours after we were due to have protected from becoming Silicon right to a voice, but not to control
left. I’m still waiting, but I’m on a stationary train. I have (fitful) Valley’s testing ground. the conversation. As my dad would
airconditioning,acomfortableseat,andpowerandatableformy The publicists are on edge. When say on a long drive: “We’ll get there
laptop. As a result, my mood has hugely improved. It turns out a clip of baffled cops pulling over when we get there.”
there is more to the art of travel than actually moving. an empty Cruise car went viral, it
didn’t look good. The officer peered Dave Lee is an FT correspondent
Tim Harford’s latest book is “How to Make the World Add Up” in, tried to open the door, and then in San Francisco

8 FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022

 Intellect

GALLERY
Painting by
ERROL LLOYD

“Notting Hill Carnival”, a series of

canvases by Jamaican-born British
painter Errol Lloyd, made over
more than a decade, depicts
contemporary carnival traditions,
many of which have their roots in
the cultures of enslaved people. In
“Notting Hill Carnival 11C”, a grid
of scenes from the annual three-
day celebration in west London is
punctuated by bold monotone
squares “to give the viewers’ eyes a
rest”, as Lloyd puts it, “as well as to
add a ‘modern’ Mondrian touch”.
The yellow square, which pops
against the more muted greens and
blues, “is to illuminate the rest of
the painting and to emphasise the
joyfulness at [its] heart”.
The painting was based on
photographs and sketches of
people at Notting Hill Carnival
that Lloyd made over the years.
Most were strangers, but “those
few revellers depicted in the
painting that I do know are from a
specific carnival band, Elimu”, he
says. He would visit the band early
on the August bank holiday
Monday, “the big day of the
carnival”, and photograph them as
they prepared. The top two right-
hand panels show figures from the
band holding greenery; their
theme that year was “Flora and
Fauna of Trinidad and Tobago”.
“Notting Hill Carnival represents
a particularly Caribbean
contribution to British culture,”
Lloyd says. But the series also
reflects how it has taken in
influences from all over the world
to become “truly diverse
and multicultural”.

The group show “Paint Like the

Swallow Sings Calypso: Impressions
of Carnival” is at Kettle’s Yard,
Cambridge, from November 12-
February 19. Notting Hill Carnival
runs from August 27-29

Errol Lloyd, “Notting Hill Carnival 11C”, 1988

10 FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022

 Intellect
World View
SIMON
MUNDY
The carbon footprint fixation
is getting out of hand
D
o you remember where you first
heardtheterm“carbonfootprint”?
Neither do I. For many of us, the
term was slipped into our subcon-
scious by an advertising campaign
that ran for two years from 2004
and was funded by oil giant BP. “What on earth is a
carbon footprint?” read one ad, emblazoned with
the company’s green-and-yellow sunflower logo.
“Every person in the world has one.”
One might wonder about the purpose of that
expensive campaign. Public-spiritedness? A
straightforward attempt to nurture a greener
image?Neither,accordingtoprominentUSclimate
scientist Michael E Mann, who sees the adverts as
part of a deflection campaign “aimed at shifting
responsibilityfromcorporationstoindividuals”.In
his 2021 book The New Climate War, he accuses cor-
porate messaging of helping to drive “a fixation on
voluntary action”, undermining the push for tough
new regulations and state policies, from carbon
pricing to tighter restrictions on industrial emis-
sions, that could make a real difference.
I was reminded of Mann’s warning during a BBC
debate last month between UK prime ministerial
contenders Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. The host
spurned the opportunity to grill them on their pro-
posalstodealwiththeclimatecrisis,instead asking
them: “What three things should people change in
their lives to help tackle climate change faster?”
Beyond distracting from serious policy debate,
the obsession with personal carbon footprints has,
Mannargues,beenagodsend foropponents of seri-
ous climate action. It has created a catch-all charge
of “hypocrisy” they can use to dismiss any argu-
ment for such action, as long as the person making
12
it travels by air. That logic seems to have been in the Lancet study said climate change made them
internalised by the environmental movement, too. feel “powerless”. Roughly the same proportion
Witness the criticism by the UK Green party’s Bar- agreed with the statement “humanity is doomed”.
oness Jones of the “hypocrisy” of Alok Sharma, No wonder, when we’re training our kids to
president of last year’s COP26 climate summit, for focusontacklingclimatechangeprimarilythrough
his extensive trips by plane to rally international changes to personal consumption habits, the
support ahead of the conference. impact of which, they know instinctively, will fall
Ishoulddeclareaninterestinthisdebate,having massively short of what is needed.
been accused of hypocrisy by some readers over In business, too, we’ve seen a focus on voluntary
my recent book on climate change, the research climate initiatives through industry alliances and
for which involved a large number of flights. But the rise of environmental, social and governance
the preoccupation with personal (ESG)investing.Itsproponentspoint
carbon footprints, I’d argue, is out, with justification, that business
leading the climate conversation Roughlyhalfofthe is filling a vacuum left by govern-
in strange and, in some cases, dis- young peopleinthe ments and regulators that have been
turbing directions. This is most Lancetstudyagreed woefully slow to act. But critics claim
conspicuous among the young. A withthestatement companies are using these voluntary
study of “climate anxiety” among ‘humanityisdoomed’ initiatives to reduce the pressure for
10,000 16-25 year-olds in 10 coun- ambitious government action that
tries, published in The Lancet last might threaten near-term profits.
December, found that 39 per cent said climate Among the most vocal critics is Tariq Fancy, who
change made them hesitant to have children. quit last year as head of sustainable investing at
That may reflect fears of bringing a new genera- asset manager BlackRock. Big financial companies
tion into a world of floods and wildfires. But it also are using ESG as a “decoy”, he told me this summer.
chimeswiththegrowingpopularityofanunsettling “The last thing they want to do is fight against a real
argument: that those who care about the planet argument that’s based in economics, that says the
should avoid procreation – that since everyone has obvious answer is regulation.”
a carbon footprint, the best response to the prob- There’s nothing inherently wrong with volun-
lem is to have less human life. This is a bleak line tary attempts to reduce emissions. But it would
of thought. Taken to its logical extreme, it could be be grim if this agenda distracted from progress
usedtojustifyeco-suicide,orthemadcapschemeof towards the serious policy measures that are the
Samuel L Jackson’s villain in the first Kingsman film real key to tackling this crisis.
to kill off most of humanity to halt global warming.
Then there are other youngsters who are giving Simon Mundy is the editor of the FT’s Moral Money
up on making any meaningful contribution to the newsletter and author of “Race for Tomorrow”.
climate struggle. Fifty-six per cent of young people Simon Kuper returns next week
ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY HAYSOM FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022
 Intellect
American Experiment
GILLIAN
TETT
How shame shapes
public life in the US
L
astmonth,JosephManson,aprofessor
of anthropology at California’s UCLA
for more than two decades, published
an essay titled, “Why I’m Leaving the
University”. He wrote that he loved
his research, but had decided to resign
because “the Woke takeover of higher education
has ruined academic life”.
Manson himself does not seem to have suffered
much personal attack, even though he has written
on controversial topics such as whether govern-
ments were too authoritarian during the Covid-19
pandemic. What horrifies him is that western uni-
versities are becoming, in his view, as tribal and
shame-driven as some of the ancient cultures that
anthropologists have studied.
Most notably, he says, colleagues are being
shamed, hounded or fired as a result of social
media mobs. He was particularly upset by the
recent “public torment and humiliation” by fac-
ulty members of P Jeffrey Brantingham, another
UCLA anthropologist.
Brantingham, who remains in post, has used
predictive data techniques to model the ecosys-
tem of urban crime, and marketed software via the
company he co-founded, Predpol, to law enforce-
ment agencies. Predictive policing algorithms
can have forecasting uses, but can also reinforce
existing prejudices since they are often based
on historic data that is biased and selective. A
resolution passed by UCLA’s Anthropology Grad-
uate Students Association accused the research of
“entrench[ing] and naturalis[ing] the criminali-
sation of Blackness in the United States”.
Manson dismisses such objections as “unschol-
arly”. But it’s the reaction to Brantingham of
14
department colleagues that really irks him. “Not and western political economy. I have a lot of
only was Jeff ostracised [due to this work], he was sympathy with academics who are critical of the
unpersoned [since] none of the faculty talked racism and sexism that has plagued intellectual
about him,” Manson writes. UCLA chief spokes- thought in the past, particularly in fields such
person Bill Kisliuk says the university not only as anthropology.
strongly supports the academic freedom of its My own leanings are socially progressive, so I
scholars but expects “equity and fairness, even understand why critics would challenge Branting-
when people strongly disagree”. ham’s work on predictive data and crime. Having
There have been explosive rows at other univer- written a book that explored elements of this, I
sities – about the work of Bo Winegard, an assistant know that blind reliance on algorithms can create
professor of psychology who believes it is disingen- miscarriages of justice, without oversight.
uous not to talk about differences But challenging an idea is not
between ethnic groups; and Peter the same as silencing it. I do not
Boghossian, an assistant philoso- Thesetrendsmakeme want to live in an environment
phy professor who wrote papers deeplyuneasyabout where there is leftwing or right-
based on fake theories in order to thefutureofliberal wing censorship. Or, as John
demonstrate how some academic valuesandwestern “Jay” Ellison, dean of students
journals would publish anything politicaleconomy at the University of Chicago, has
that aligned with their “progres- argued, if we turn universities
sive” worldview. into exclusively “safe” spaces, we
Friends in academia have told me these cases undermine the very point of them.
are the tip of the iceberg. Rising numbers of books My daughter is about to attend college in the
from school libraries are being banned by right- coming weeks, and I’ll be urging her to read Man-
wingcampaigners.Meanwhile,conservativefigures son’s letter and to ask herself whether she’s ready
allege that campuses are using processes such as to spend the next few years exposing herself to
“diversity and inclusion” to impose liberal views. ideas she might despise. I hope she will be. But
What should we make of this? An anthropol- my academic friends tell me that one depressing
ogist might suggest that some of the prevailing aspect of this new atmosphere is that it appears
stereotypes about American culture are wrong. to be more intense among the young, perhaps
Twentieth-century social scientists used to say because social media is reinforcing echo chambers
that Anglo-Saxon culture was shaped by a sense and social tribalism. Instead of book-banning on
of personal guilt, unlike other cultures, which the right and shaming on the left, we should all be
were defined by community shame. Now, shame prepared to engage in challenging ideas. Therein
is shaping public life in America. lies the essence of social science.
Whatever the reasons, these trends make me
deeply uneasy about the future of liberal values gillian.tett@ft.com @gilliantett
ILLUSTRATION BY KLAWE RZECZY FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022
 L
astyear,theLabourMPChris
Bryant accused Tom Usher,
a journalist whose main beat
is eating excessive amounts
of takeaway food for Vice magazine,
of threatening to have him “repeat-
edly hit in the head with hammers”.
Usher had responded to something
Bryanthadsaidbytweetingascreen-
shot from the 1993 Simpsons episode
“Cape Feare” in which Sideshow
Bob, having pursued the Simpson
family to Terror Lake, crawls out
from underneath their car, only to
be immediately smacked in the face
by a rake. And then another rake.
And then the camera pans to reveal
a vast semi-circle of rakes, each one
of which is now going to hit Sideshow
Bob in the face. In the screenshot,
Usher had captioned Sideshow
Bob “Chris Bryant” and the rakes
“Variousacademicsrepeatedlyham-

ESSAY
mering his shit takes”.
To some, this exchange was yet
more proof that most public figures
on should never have been allowed to
go on social media. Really, this sort

‘THE of thing happens on Twitter every

day. But what made the incident
stickinmymind–thereasonI’mstill

SIMPSONS’ thinking about it – is the particular

sort of illiteracy it revealed.
Bryant is 60. Usher is in his early
thirties, as am I. To many people
How the television show my age, the image of Sideshow Bob
and the rakes is instantly familiar,
became a shared language for alongside countless other images,
sequences and lines from “classic”
viewers of a certain age Simpsons: the show’s great run,
generally held to have lasted from
By Tom Whyman season two (1990-91) to season
nine (1997-98). (Somehow the
show is still running; its producers
are currently working on season
34.) A lot of millennials, like me,
cannot help but communicate in
the language of rakes in the face,
footballs in the groin, Old Man Yells threat. Which would involve him
at Cloud and of “Good Lord, what is being killed with hammers.
happening in there?” YoumightthinkthatTheSimpsons
And so it was startling to me is just a TV show – perhaps one of the
when Bryant – someone who, greatest TV shows of all time, a show
after all, has been elected to make you enjoyed as a child or one you still
the laws in this country – not watch now. But really, the point of all
only failed to grasp what Usher this is that The Simpsons is not just a
was communicating by posting TV show. The Simpsons is a language.
this specific Simpsons image, but And Bryant’s problem was that he
appeared unable to understand does not speak it.
what was even being depicted. This is hardly Bryant’s failing. The
Usher had posted the Sideshow Bob Simpsons is a language that a man of
rakes image to make a jokey point. his age would never really have had
And Bryant interpreted it as a death the opportunity to learn. Younger

16 FT.COM/MAGAZINE
FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022
MARCH 19/20
 people don’t speak it either. I’ve
taught in universities for the best
part of a decade, and when I was
starting out I could share a Simpsons
image with my students and they’d
immediately grasp the point that
I was making. Nowadays I have
to spell it out to my students and,
anyway, they think it’s weird that I
like The Simpsons so much, probably
because it’s been bad the whole time
they’ve been alive.
If I want to explain something
to someone roughly my own age,
someone, say, between 27 and 41
FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST
MARCH 19/20
27/282022
2022
Many millennials years old, I can index it to some bit
from The Simpsons and the compar-
cannot help but ison will almost always be helpful.
communicate in the This especially goes if they grew
up in the English-speaking world,
language of rakes in although I believe that dubbed ver-
the face, footballs sions of the show were popular
elsewhere as well.
in the groin and Old If I want to critique Keir Starm-
er’s leadership of the Labour party, I
Man Yells at Cloud can share an image of Ned Flanders’
hippie parents complaining to his
childhood therapist, “We’ve tried
nothing, and we’re all out of ideas.” If
I want to tell someone they’re being
gullible, I can invoke the image of
Homer’s college nerd friends hand-
ing over their wallets to the criminal
Snake posing as the “wallet inspec-
tor”. And so forth.
Why have people in this age
bracket ended up speaking The
Simpsons as a language? The answer,
I think, is that for many of us, watch-
ing the show was a sort of ritual.
When I was young, my family
went to church every Sunday, and
that was the focus of our week.
Around the time we stopped going,
BBC2startedshowingTheSimpsons ▶
17
 ESSAY

◀ at teatime every Friday. School

would end, and we would get tea
from the local fish and chip shop. I
would always order a cheeseburger,
and the burger bun would have
this white dot at the bottom, where
something about how the batch
process worked meant it wasn’t so
thoroughly baked. The bite with this
dot in was, I thought, the best, so I
would save it for when The Simpsons
started. The entire week led up
to this: the whole point of endur-
ing school was so that on Friday at
6pm, I could eat a cheeseburger and
watch The Simpsons. Some days, The
Simpsons was unexpectedly can-
celled, so that the BBC could show
golf or snooker instead. I have never
known anger like that since. I once
punched a hole in my bedroom wall.

I
n his book The Disappearance of
Rituals, the South Korean-born
German philosopher Byung-
Chul Han describes rituals as
“symbolic acts” that “represent,
and pass on, the values and orders
on which a community is based”.
Rituals, he writes, “bring forth a
community without communica-
tion”, by allowing participants to
recognise one another through cer-
tain symbols. This, Han implies, is
required for real communication to
take place: without rituals, our lives
lack structure, and we are unable to
recognise one another as shared par-
ticipants in life, in the world. Thus
Han names “manners” as a form of
ritual: good manners “make possi-
ble both beautiful behaviour among
humansandabeautiful,gentletreat-
ment of things”. But one might also
think of going to church, or partic-
ipating in festivals at certain times
of the year. Rituals are characterised
by repetition: in ritual behaviour, we
do the same thing whenever we are not know The Simpsons, I experi- over and over. That’s true for those
placed in a particular situation; at a
The writing was ence a strange sort of vertigo, as if I other shows as well, but I don’t want
certain point in the week or year. characterised by an am encountering someone who has to watch Malcolm in the Middle over CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION; SKY MAX SERIES 33

Ineverparticipatedinmyteatime grown up on a different planet. and over.

© 2021 20TH TELEVISION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
SKY ONE SEASON 32 EP 6 © 2020 BY TWENTIETH

Simpsons ritual with anyone other
than my siblings. And yet, just as one
might not need to have attended the
same church as a fellow believer to
recognise another member of the
faithful, the experience remains one
that other people of a similar age and
background to me are likely to have
shared. True, I am more fanatic in
my devotion than most, but if I ever
meet someone of my age who does
obsessive attention After The Simpsons aired on BBC2,
to detail: even it was always followed either by Mal-
colm in the Middle or The Fresh Prince
incidental gags of Bel-Air. And while these shows
were brainstormed might evoke a feeling of nostalgia, I
cannot now really remember what
for hours happened in any of the episodes.
The Simpsons ritual has been so well-
preserved in my memory because
technology has since allowed me
to play it back whenever I want to,
Classic Simpsons was defined by
a small team of writers who worked
together on every episode, pack-
ing in as many jokes as they possibly
could, both around the plot and to
advance it. The writing at this point
was characterised by an obsessive
attention to detail: even incidental
gags were brainstormed for hours,
as the writers competed to find the
absolute funniest name for, say, the

18 FT.COM/MAGAZINE
FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022
MARCH 19/20

magazine Marge is reading (“Sponge
and Vacuum”, perfect).
And so one can rewatch a classic
Simpsons episode indefinitely and it
never gets boring: like the miracle
of the Eucharist, for believers, there
will always be a point to it. One can
always bring it into what is happen-
ing right now.
For Han, rituals allow us to be
“at home in the world”. By stabilis-
ing the world, by giving our week
(for instance) its basic structure,
rituals anchor us in the life that
exists around us and allow us to
FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST
JUNE 20/21
27/28
2020
2022
explore it for ourselves. Certainly,
The Simpsons has always done this
for me: the canon of my general
knowledge is “things that once got
mentioned on The Simpsons”. I have
no interest in baseball, for example,
but I know the names of the players
who guest-starred in “Homer at the
Bat” (Steve Sax, Wade Boggs, Roger
Clemens…) better than I do those of
my extended family (just what is my
brother’s wife’s surname?).
But of course a big part of being
“at home in the world”, is being there
with others as well. New languages
can form when communities are
brought together. Nicaraguan sign
language was born when the coun-
try’s first school for the deaf was
opened in 1977 and the children who
attended it merged the respective
signing vocabularies they had been
using at home up to form an entirely
new sign language.
T
he ritual aspects of The
Simpsons have provided
those who have engaged in
it with a shared perspec-
tive: a stable, collective context,
the ground of which they are able
to place their feet on as they talk.
This is what it means to speak The
Simpsons as a language: one under-
stands the deeper, silent meaning
communicated in words or phrases
like “Chanel suit”, “Ogdenville” or
“steamed ham”. (The Simpsons has
also contributed neologisms to the
dictionary: from “d’oh” to “yoink” to
“cromulent”, the latter invented as a
pretend word for a throwaway gag.)
Of course, on this view of lan-
guage, a lot of things might also be
one: any intense fan community
might count as speaking a “lan-
guage” together (some much more
obviously and literally do: see Klin-
gon, Elvish or Dothraki). By that
Still the world burns; same token, various dialects have
still the economy flourished among groups marginal-
isedfromthemainstream.Polari,for
balances on a instance, was a mixture of Romance,
precipice. Nothing Romani and rhyming slang used
in London criminal and theatrical
seems to stitch us circles in the 19th century, which
together any more became popular as gay cant. When
homosexuality was still criminal-
ised, gay men found it useful as a way
of bamboozling undercover police.
What is interesting to me about The
Simpsons is how generationally spe-
cific it is.
As one might imagine from a man
who called his book The Disappear-
ance of Rituals, Han is not optimistic
about their future. For Han, neolib-
eral capitalism and the rise of the
internet have taken a world in which
we were able to form “communi-
ties without communication” and
given us “communication without
community”. We are all constantly
compelledtopostandtextandemail,
to get het up about the big issue of
the day, to raise awareness and to be
made aware. Yet we don’t seem to do
much with the utterances we make,
beyond provoking an emotional
reaction: some people, for whatever
reason, will like what we say; other
people will get upset. And still the
world burns; still the economy bal-
ances on the precipice of collapse.
Nothing in particular seems to stitch
us together: no shared context exists
any more. And so sometimes you’ll
make a joke about The Simpsons, and
a politician will think you’re threat-
ening to have him beaten to death.
My son has just turned three. Like
his father, he gets obsessive about
themediaheconsumes.Hereisaboy
who will sit and narrate his favour-
ite shows at exhaustive lengths while
they are on TV, before getting off the
sofa to make his toys act bits of them
out. But the way TV works now, he
never has to wait for these shows to
come on: almost certainly, my son
will never know the sweet pain of
anticipation for his equivalent of The
Simpsons at teatime on a Friday. He
can watch whatever he wants, when-
ever he wants, limited only by the
streaming services we’ve subscribed
to and the “screen time” we’re will-
ing to give him. The same goes for his
peers. Time does not bind them in
the same way: freed from the shack-
les of its necessity, no ritual can ever
take place.
I wonder, then, how my son will
communicate when he’s older. What
might he have to take the place that
The Simpsons has come to occupy
in my brain? If ritual behaviour
were to become completely secular
– become, that is, completely indi-
vidual – would we even be able to
talk to each other at all?
Tom Whyman is a philosopher and the
author of “Infinitely Full of Hope:
Fatherhood and the Future in an Age
of Crisis and Disaster” (Repeater)
19
HOW
TO WIN
A WAR
ON THE
CHEAP

20 FT.COM/MAGAZINE JANUARY 22/23 2022

 Cut-price Turkish drones
helped Ukraine keep Russia
at bay in the early days of
the war and catapulted
Turkey into the ranks of the
world’s top drone powers.
They also herald a
disconcerting new era

By Laura Pitel and Raya Jalabi

FT.COM/MAGAZINE JANUARY 22/23 2022
Illustrations by Saratta Chuengsatiansup21
A
bout three months after Russia invaded Ukraine,
Serhiy Prytula launched a counter-campaign from
Kyiv. Prytula, a well-known Ukrainian TV person-
ality with salt-and-pepper hair and small, piercing
eyes, appeared in a YouTube video, asking for
donations. “I invite you to join this noble cause,”
the 41-year-old said solemnly over rousing music,
referring to something he called “the People’s Bay-
raktar Project”. He wasn’t proposing to buy food or
medical supplies; he was raising funds to buy three
drones known as the Bayraktar TB2.
A sleek aircraft with a 12m wingspan and a
relativelyaffordable,seven-figurepricetag,theBay-
raktar gained a reputation for blowing up Russian
tanksandartilleryinthefirstweeksoftheinvasion.
(It’s pronounced “bye-rack-tar” and means “stand-
ard bearer” in Turkish.) In Ukraine, the drone’s
effectiveness made Bayraktar a household name
and inspired a hit song penned by soldier-song-
writer Taras Borovok. “He turns Russian bandits
into ghosts: Bayraktar,” goes one of the verses.
Money began flooding in to Prytula’s campaign
from around the world. “Go go Bayraktars,” com-
mented a supporter in Poland on Twitter. “Kick
some ass!” an Australian donor tweeted, adding a
GIF of boxing kangaroos. In less than three days,
Prytula exceeded his $15mn target. Then some-
thing unexpected happened: the Turkish defence
firm that manufactures the TB2, Baykar Tech-
nology, announced it wouldn’t accept the money.
Instead, it was giving the drones to the Ukrain-
ian armed forces for free. The company repeated
the stunt last month, gifting a drone to Ukraine
instead of accepting cash raised by crowdfunders
in Poland.
Savvy PR isn’t the only thing that distinguishes
Baykar, which is run from Istanbul by two broth-
ers, one of whom is married to president Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan’s youngest daughter. The com-
pany conducted its first armed-strike test less
than seven years ago. In 2021, it became Turkey’s
top defence exporter, beating established indus-
trial giants such as Aselsan and the state-owned
Turkish Aerospace Industries by selling $664mn
worth of drones to foreign buyers, according to
data from the Turkish Exporters’ Assembly. The
Bayraktar TB2 is at the centre of this success. In
addition to becoming a cultural icon in Turkey, it
hasprovedpopularwithgovernmentsfromPoland
toQatar.AaronStein,anAmericanexpertonTurk-
ish foreign policy, has dubbed the TB2 “the Toyota
Corolla of drones”.
The weapon has catapulted Turkey into the
ranks of the world’s top drone powers, along
with the US, Israel, Iran and China, and is the
most significant result of a two-decade drive by
Erdoğan to foster a national defence industry.
22
The Bayraktar brothers, who declined to be inter-
viewed for this story, have achieved celebrity
status at home. Selçuk Bayraktar, the second-born
and the company’s chief technology officer, has
two million followers on both Twitter and Insta-
gram. Each post he publishes generates hundreds
of adulatory responses from fans. Tens of thou-
sands more turn out for Teknofest, an annual bash
run by the government and a foundation with close
ties to Baykar, at which the president, his children
and grandchildren don red aviator jackets and
join what has become a celebration of the Turk-
ish defence industry. Even for some of Erdoğan’s
staunch political opponents, the company’s suc-
cess is a source of national pride.
Erdoğan, meanwhile, has used the weapon
to help crush an insurgency at home and flex
his country’s military muscles abroad. Among
eager buyers of Baykar technology are Ethio-
pia, where the government of Abiy Ahmed used
them to beat back Tigrayan forces in a brutal civil
war last year, and Azerbaijan, which used them
to crush the Armenian military in 2020. In addi-
tion to heralding Turkey’s ascendancy in global
defence, the TB2 embodies a new phase in the era
of drone warfare in which lower-cost technology
becomes increasingly accessible to regimes that
cannot buy from the world’s more-established
arms producers.
The Bayraktar TB2 has a gently curved body,
narrow wings and three small wheels. From
a distance, the overwhelming impression to the
inexpert observer is one of lightness. Capable of
staying in the air for up to 27 hours, the TB2 can fly
to a height of 7,600m (25,000 ft) to conduct intelli-
gence and surveillance missions. An onboard laser
can mark a target and hit it with one of four laser-
guided micro missiles.
Itcan’tflyasfarorcarryasheavyaloadashigher-
spec drones such as the US-made $32mn Reaper.
But the TB2 has a unique advantage: its cost, which
is likely about $5mn per aircraft, according to ana-
lysts. Military experts agree that the TB2 strikes a
unique balance between price and performance.
“It incorporates Nato-standard design and per-
formance characteristics,” says Arda Mevlütoğlu,
an Ankara-based defence analyst. “It is combat-
proven in various conflicts and operations and is
relatively cheap.”
The drone’s origins can be traced to Akçay, a
village on the edge of a scrubby mountain range
in south-east Turkey. In the early 2000s, an engi-
neer and amateur pilot named Özdemir Bayraktar
visited the area with a local military commander.
He “showed us the blood of the martyrs”, Bayrak-
tar told the Turkish newspaper Milliyet in 2010, ▶
FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022
 ◀ speaking metaphorically about the Turkish sol-
diers killed fighting the Kurdistan Workers’ party
(PKK), a leftwing group that embraces Kurd-
ish nationalism and has been fighting a violent
campaign against the state since 1984. Bayrak-
tar, who died last year at the age of 72, added: “I
said we would do what we could to help.” Soon his
company pivoted from making car parts to build-
ing weapons.
Turkey’s leaders had long harboured doubts
about the reliability of their foreign arms sup-
pliers, even though the country has been a Nato
member since 1952. “Turkey’s relations with the
US or Israel or some of the European countries
go up and down,” says one senior former official
involved in the Turkish drone programme. “So if
you take a long view of 10, 20, 30 years, a couple
of times in that period, relations will be frosty.
And you don’t want to be in that period when you
need the equipment.”
Turkeyboughtitsfirstunarmeddronesfromthe
UK and US in the late 1980s and 1990s. In the years
that followed, Ankara was told it could not acquire
lethal drones, which were much more tightly con-
trolled, because western allies were worried about
how they would be used, particularly in the con-
flict with the PKK. “Turkey is a proud nation, and
it [was] really insulting for us to hear that,” says
İsmail Demir, head of Turkey’s defence procure-
ment and export agency, which is also responsible
for fostering domestic production. Demir’s Ankara
office is filled with models of Turkish-made planes,
helicopters and tanks.
By the mid-2000s, unmanned aircraft had
become a key component of international military
conflict, border control and surveillance. Turkish
companies began producing prototypes and jos-
tling for position as the state sought to kickstart
a homegrown defence industry. The Bayraktar
family stood out with its up-by-the-bootstraps
story and flair for self-promotion. In a 2005 video,
a baby-faced Selçuk stands on a strip of tarmac, his
sleeves rolled up, addressing a group of military
officersandofficialsafterademonstrationofamini
drone. He tells them: “If this project and others like
it get support, then within five years we could be
number one in the world.” Because it is a private
business, the company’s finances are not publicly
available. But the number of people it employs
– about 2,500 today, up from 800 two years ago –
offers an indication of its recent growth.
After studying at Istanbul Technical University,
Selçuk received a scholarship to pursue a mas-
ter’s at the University of Pennsylvania and then
at MIT, where he investigated control systems
for pilotless helicopters. At the same time, he was
experimenting with prototype unmanned aerial

24
 A DRONE STRIKE HIT THE CAR.
THEN ANOTHER STRIKE KILLED
THE THREE YOUNG MEN 20M
FROM WHERE THEY’D PARKED
vehicles (UAVs) for the family firm. The first big
breakthrough came in 2006, after the company
won a government competition for the best small,
hand-launched drone. “It was very clear that they
were actually ahead of the game, compared to the
others,” says the former official, who helped run
the contest. Selçuk embarked on a PhD at Geor-
gia Tech but quit in 2007 to return to Turkey and
work as Baykar’s CTO. His older brother Haluk, an
industrial engineer, would become CEO.
In 2014, the company delivered the first,
unarmed TB2 to the Turkish armed forces on con-
tract. Within two years, Turkey’s state-run news
agency was publishing videos, taken by the drones’
in-built cameras, showing strikes against PKK
members. One of the earliest shows a vertiginous
rock face on the border with Iraq before cutting to
a puff of smoke. This was the moment that six PKK
fighters were “neutralised”, the state news agency
said. The release of drone footage was a tactic that
would be deployed repeatedly in the years to come.
Videos of Russian or Armenian military targets
being locked in a Bayraktar’s crosshairs and then
blown up became a propaganda tool for Turkey’s
armed forces and an advertisement to Baykar’s
international customers.
The emergence of the Bayraktar TB2 coin-
cided with a particularly dark episode in Turkey’s
conflict with the PKK, which has claimed an esti-
mated 40,000 lives over the past four decades,
most of them Kurdish. Erdoğan, who had pursued
a peace process with the militant group in the late
2000s and early 2010s, presided over its collapse,
as domestic politics and the war in neighbouring
Syria changed his calculations. The PKK is loathed
by the majority of the public in Turkey. After the
breakdown of a ceasefire in 2015, cities in the
south-east of the country were engulfed in violent
clashes between armed youths affiliated with the
PKK and state security services. The group, which
is classified by the US and the EU as a terrorist
organisation, responded with a wave of bombings
across the country, killing police officers, soldiers
and dozens of civilians.
After the Turkish state quashed the urban con-
flict, fighting moved to rural areas, especially
the rugged border with Iraq. For decades, it had
been difficult for the armed forces to root out PKK
guerrillas from the region’s cave-riddled moun-
tains. Weaponised drones were a game-changer,
helping to push the group out of Turkey and into
neighbouringIraq.TheimpactonthePKKhasbur-
nishedtheweapon’sheroicimageinTurkey,aswell
as that of Erdoğan. “No longer are we beggars at the
door,” he declared in a speech to military recruits
last year, praising the drones. “Quite the opposite:
everyone is asking for them from us.”
O
naJunedayin2020,Azadwasbored.
A shepherd from the northern Iraqi
town of Shiladze, the 26-year-old
decided to spend the day at a nearby
picnicspotwithtwofriends.Theidea
made his mother nervous because
there had been a series of drone
strikes in the area over the preceding
few months. Still, Azad got up early
to meet his friends, careful not to
wake the rest of his family, who slept
together in one large room.
Around 11am, Azad and his friends parked by
the side of a craggy mountain and got out. Soon
after, a drone strike hit the car. Then another
strike killed the three young men 20m from where
they’d parked. On the carpeted floor of the family’s
modest home, Azad’s younger brother Osama says
hestilldoesn’tunderstandhowthetriobecametar-
gets.“MaybetheTurksthoughttheywerePKK,”he
says. “It’s like that around here. If you go to certain
areas… they just kill you for no reason.”
Shiladze lies between two mountain ranges
in Iraqi Kurdistan’s northernmost Dohuk
province. Its hills are revered in local folk
tales, the scenes of legendary battles in Kurdish
history. Since the early 1990s, there have been
clashes here between Turkish troops and the
PKK, which has long made the Qandil mountains
on the Iraqi side of the border its headquarters.
But the conflict has intensified since Erdoğan
launched a series of operations three years ago
to root out militants, part of a shift towards an
increasinglymilitaristicforeignpolicybytheTurk-
ish leader, who also launched operations in
Syria and Libya.
The number of civilian casualties from drone
strikes has risen. In the absence of public Iraqi
records on civilian deaths, a local official in
Shiladze tries to keep count. At least 47 people
have been killed in the Shiladze area in the past
15 years or so, he says. Although seven of those
were killed by the PKK, “most were killed in the
past three or four years and most by Turkish
drones”, he says.“We can’t go anywhere without
fearing our lives will be cut short by an air strike,”
says Nusret Mohammad, Azad’s mother. Like
many other residents, she now rarely leaves the
house: “The only place I can go is the graveyard to
visit my son every day.” The local official corrobo-
rates the family’s account to the FT, saying Azad
Mehdi Mem was a “pure civilian, with absolutely
no ties to the PKK”.
There are even more clear-cut cases of Turkish
drones killing people without links to the Kurdish
militantgroup.Astrikethatassassinatedaregional
PKK commander in 2020 also killed Zubair ▶
25
 MANY OF THE FOREIGN
BUYERS BAYKAR IS COURTING ARE
INTERESTED IN USING DRONES
AGAINST ADVERSARIES WITHOUT
ADVANCED AIR DEFENCES
◀ Tajeddine Hali Bradosti, a commander in Iraq’s
federal border force. Bradosti and the PKK com-
manderhadnegotiatedatemporarytrucebetween
their forces and were travelling in the same car, a
giant Iraqi flag adorned on the roof. “Turkey has
said because a PKK commander was in the car, that
my father was a fair target,” says Bradosti’s son
Ardawan, adding that he learned this from conver-
sations with political figures and through his own
job with the border guards. He says the family have
waited two years for an official explanation. “He
wasn’toutthereonapersonalmission,itwasamis-
sion for Iraq. Why did they bomb him?”
As well as conducting surveillance and recon-
naissance work in Iraq, the Turkish military and
intelligence services use drones, including Bay-
raktar TB2s, for “high-value counterterrorism
operations”, according to Can Kasapoğlu, director
of the security and defence studies programme at
the Istanbul think-tank Edam. In Shiladze, drones
have successfully pushed back most PKK fighters,
who locals say now come to town only in winter,
when the snow gives them cover from the weap-
ons overhead.
But they have wreaked havoc on the area.
Famed for the beauty of its rivers and valleys, it
used to be popular with tourists. The drones now
keep them away. Real estate prices have dropped
by two-thirds. Locals speak of the psychological
toll their entrapment is having. Many of the thou-
sands of migrants who attempted to reach the EU
via Belarus last summer were “young men from
Shiladze, fleeing the drones”, the local official says.
He also noted an uptick in suicides in the past two
years: “People here feel forgotten by their govern-
ment, by the world.”
Senior political figures in both Baghdad and
Erbil, the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional
Government’s capital, decry Turkey’s expand-
ing military footprint and lament their inability
to do anything about it. Turkey rarely gives Iraq a
heads-up before most air strikes, according to
senior officials in Baghdad and Erbil. There are
currently 33 Turkish military and intelligence
bases in Iraq, with about 4,000 soldiers at last
count, Iraq’s foreign minister Fuad Hussein says.
“It’s a delicate dance we’re doing with Ankara,”
says another senior government official in Bagh-
dad. “But our chaotic political dynamics and
Turkey’s growing influence mean they’re able to
stomp all over Iraqi sovereignty and we can’t say
a damned thing.”
In response, Turkey’s defence ministry said
it respected the territorial integrity and sover-
eignty of its neighbours and that its armed forces
acted “with great sensitivity” to ensure they did
not harm civilians. It said the allegations of civil-
26
ian deaths in Iraq outlined by the FT were “untrue
A
andaretheproductofpropaganda”bythePKKand
its affiliates.
fter the Bayraktars’ initial success
in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s armed
forceschangedtactics.“TheRussians
went after them with ground-based
air defences primarily,” says Jack
Watling,aresearchfellowattheRoyal
United Services Institute think-tank
in London. “Today [the TB2s] are
mainly being held in reserve or used
by the Ukrainian navy for patrol-
ling the coast.” Kyiv also lost drones
because they were being used to per-
form operations that would be too dangerous for
manned aircraft, Watling adds. “These are objects
that you take risks with, and they get shot up.”
But their role in the Ukrainian campaign against
Russia has been a coup for Baykar. Many of the
foreignbuyersthecompanyiscourtinglacksophis-
ticated air forces of their own or are interested in
usingdronesagainstadversarieswithoutadvanced
air defences. “Drones allow states that don’t nec-
essarily have the resources to buy advanced
fighter jets to have that capability,” says Erik Lin-
Greenberg, an expert on emerging military tech-
nology at MIT. “A TB2 isn’t going to substitute for a
fighter jet. [But] many states view drones as allow-
ing them to leapfrog generations of tech.”
The intense use of Bayraktars, both in Turkey
and abroad, means the aircraft has racked
up 400,000 flight-hours in its short lifetime.
That real-world, battlefield data is vital to honing
and improving the product, Haluk Bayraktar
explained in a 2020 interview with the FT. “You
need a lot of feedback to develop the system
according to the needs of the arena,” the CEO said.
“Because we fly a lot, Turkey gained a lot of opera-
tional experience.”
The marriage of Erdoğan’s youngest daughter,
Sümeyye, to Haluk’s brother Selçuk in 2016 cre-
ated the appearance of a symbiotic relationship
between the president’s foreign military adven-
tures and the success of the company. Turkish
officials have become de facto sales agents for Bay-
raktar drones, pushing them in conversations with
foreign governments as part of a drive to boost
exports at a time when a chronic trade imbalance
has contributed to a succession of currency crises.
“Wewillsellthemtowhoeverwantsthem,”saysone
senior Turkish diplomat. Demir, the Turkish offi-
cial, bristles at that suggestion. He insists there is a
“very strict export-control process” and that some
potentialbuyershavebeenturneddown,thoughhe
declines to name them. Today, Baykar has export
contracts with at least 22 countries, including
Morocco, Niger and Djibouti. The company is pro-
ducing about 240 TB2s a year as it races to clear a
three-year order backlog. It is also in the process of
launching the Akıncı, a bigger, more sophisticated
drone that can carry a much heavier payload.
Not all Turkish citizens are enthused about
Baykar’s rapidly growing status. Dirayet Dilan
Taşdemir, a member of parliament with the oppo-
sition Peoples’ Democratic party, says that UAVs
havecontributedtoaclimateoffearintheKurdish-
majority provinces where her party draws much of
its support. PKK members “didn’t come from outer
space”, Taşdemir says, but rather from angry and
disillusioned families who have sympathy for the
group’s claim to be fighting for their rights. “I wish
that,insteadofpraisingthegreatweaponswemade,
we’d say, ‘Look at the great things we have done in
literature,culture,art,’”shesays. “I’mnot someone
who feels very proud of technological weapons.” A
prominent human rights defender in the country,
who agreed to talk on the condition of anonymity,
concurredbuthasdecidednottocampaignpublicly
on the issue of drones because of the deluge of crim-
inal investigations that might result.
Turkey’s apparent willingness to sell drones to
any foreign government that wants them is also
a source of alarm for western powers who used
to have a near-monopoly on drone power. Last
year, the US expressed “profound humanitarian
concerns” about Ankara’s sale of armed drones
to Ethiopia. It also responded angrily to Tur-
key’s use of the drones against Kurdish militias
in northern Syria that are affiliated with the PKK
but were backed, armed and trained by Washing-
ton in its campaign against Isis. The US, which has
faced questions of its own about civilians killed in
American drone strikes, could now find itself in a
“very difficult position” over Turkish drones, says
Lin-Greenberg. “On one hand you have this asset
that is making a difference, that most western
powers would like to see continue to be exported to
Ukraine,” he says. On the other, there are the ques-
tionable human rights implications.
Some in Washington question whether the US
should loosen its ultra-stringent drone-export
rules to gain leverage by selling its own weapons.
Many nations might still prefer to skip the intense
scrutiny and cost that come with buying Ameri-
can. “If you’re a country that faces an existential
– or perceived existential – threat, are you willing
to wait several years for US export approval?” says
Lin-Greenberg. “Or are you going to just turn to
suppliers in Turkey?”

Laura Pitel is the FT’s Turkey correspondent.

Raya Jalabi is the FT’s Middle East correspondent

27
 On a freezing December evening in
Delhi, I followed my friends towards
the Shaheen Bagh neighbourhood
with little idea of what I was getting
into. A sit-down protest in the area
had been going on for 10 days. We
were descending the steps of Jasola
bridge, exchanging remarks about
the murky Yamuna canal, when I
caught sight below of a large blue
tent flapping in the wind.
As we got closer, I saw hundreds of women under
the tarpaulins: young mothers holding babies
wrapped in dupattas (shawls), sitting cross-legged
on the ground; frail grandmothers under piles of
colourful duvets. Other women were handing out
cups of hot chai and making space for newcomers.
The men, presumably husbands and sons, stood
on the periphery, creating a barricade with their
bodies. As I sat down, huddled between women I
had never met before, I felt engulfed by a warmth
even the winter chill couldn’t penetrate.
TheprotestinsouthDelhibeganonDecember15
2019 after parliament passed two bills, introduced
by prime minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, that critics
argued would have a disproportionately negative
impact on India’s Muslim population. The Citizen-
ship Amendment Act offers Indian citizenship to
persecutedreligiousminoritiesfromneighbouring
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, but Islam
is excluded from its list of recognised religions. At
the same time, the government put forward plans
for a national register of citizens to weed out ille-
gal immigrants. Many Indian Muslims fear such a
register would effectively strip them of their citi-
zenship if they lacked the necessary paperwork.
Both bills, especially when working in tandem,
were seen by critics as a part of the state’s larger
mission to create an ethnically Hindu India,
and were rejected by Muslim communities and
their allies. Protests cropped up across the coun-
try, from Mumbai to Lucknow, with some, such as
28
at Jamia Millia Islamia university in Delhi, turning
violent. Two and a half years on, neither law has
yet been implemented, but an atmosphere of fear
and uncertainty persists.
WhatmadeShaheenBaghuniquewasthatitwas
organised by working-class Muslim women, one of
the most disenfranchised demographics in India.
In the face of persecution and violence, they sat
peacefully for 100 days, protesting by way of the-
atre, poetry and prayer. At its height, in the first
weekofFebruary,therewere100,000protestorsat
the site. I witnessed an extraordinary atmosphere,
one defined by the tenderness and generosity of a
movement led by women.
This spirit caught the eye of Indian photogra-
pher Prarthna Singh. When she first arrived at
Shaheen Bagh on January 6, she knew there was
“something magical” happening there. A few days
later, she set up camp at her grandmother’s house
in neighbouring Sarita Vihar and began making
the daily pilgrimage across the police barricades to
the protest site. Over the course of three months,
she developed strong bonds with the women and
girls there. The portraits she made between Janu-
ary and March, mostly at a makeshift photo studio
put together by local residents, convey the mixed
emotions of the protesters, fear and anxiety cer-
tainly, but also pride and hope. The project grew as
the girls brought their mothers, aunts and grand-
mothers to see the jadoo ka kagaz (magic paper) By Simar Deol
of Singh’s Polaroid photos for themselves. Such
interactions cemented the photographer’s sense ▶ Photography by Prarthna Singh
FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022
FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022 29
30 FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022
 ‘Read and Resist’, a
painting by artist Sameer
Kulavoor depicting the
Shaheen Bagh protest
site and children at the
crèche drawing

Previous page: a portrait

by Prarthna Singh of a
protestor, made at the
makeshift photo studio in
Shaheen Bagh

FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022 31

32 FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022
FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022 33
 Above: Shaheen Bagh ◀ of belonging at Shaheen Bagh. “I began to feel
footbridge was like the space had become an extension of my
covered in posters,
own home,” says Singh, 39. More than merely
poems and artwork
during the protest
documenting her surroundings, she hoped to
communicate the friendship, love and joy that
Right: Prarthna Singh’s she was experiencing in her pictures.
hand-drawn map of In late April 2020, Singh published her pho-
the protest site, tographs as a book. Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh,
originally circulated
meaning “every evening belongs to Shaheen
between friends and
family who wished to
Bagh”, is Singh’s attempt to encapsulate a
join the movement moment in history and to reveal, and make per-
manent,thedeterminationandbraveryofthese
Page 32: a series of women. The photographer, whose work has
Polaroid portraits appearedinthismagazine,TheNewYorkTimes
Singh made on site
and The Guardian knew that she didn’t want to
and shared with the
women and children
bring external elements into a space that felt
during the protest sacred. Shaheen Bagh was a community where
theprotestorswerefedbyvolunteerswhosetup
Page 33: a portrait of kitchens and chai stalls, stayed warm with
one of the women at donated winter clothing and kept their children
the protest, layered
entertained in volunteer-run crèches and draw-
on an image of a shawl
of a fellow protestor
ingcentres.Theywereshownsolidaritynotonly

34 FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022

 through chants of “Azaadi!” (“freedom”) but also
through small gestures of love. In some of her
images, Singh layers the women’s portraits over
images she made of their colourful shawls and
quilts, items protestors would give each other for
warmth and comfort.
The peaceful sit-in at Shaheen Bagh, which
withstood many attempts by the police to dis-
perse it over its 100 days, came to an abrupt end
with the arrival of Covid-19. On March 24 2020, the
site was shut down when emergency lockdowns
came into effect.
When she returned to the site of the protest
in October that year, Singh found no evidence of
what had transpired there. “It was so strange. All
the signs had been removed, harshly painted over
with black strokes, cars were passing by and it
felt like a regular weekday in Delhi,” she says. All
remnants of the protest had vanished. The tarpau-
lin had been taken down and posters and children’s
drawings removed, graffiti painted in their place.
The months at Shaheen Bagh seemed almost like a
FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022
The bridge on dream. Over the eight years of Modi’s tenure, there
Prarthna Singh’s has been a drastic increase in communal violence
return to Shaheen
in India, from street lynchings to the destruction
Bagh in October 2020,
when all evidence
of historic mosques. The government has made
of the protest had Muslim communities feel that they are not safe or
been removed welcome in their own homes.
Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh, then, is both a photo-
book and an act of resistance against the erasure
of a political moment. It is a compilation of much
thattranspiredinthisspace,completewithahand-
drawn map, transcriptions of speeches and poems,
and letters by the mothers who sat in for their chil-
dren’s futures. In a country where Muslim women
must constantly negotiate how to occupy space,
Singh depicts them in moments of strength and
individuality. Her photographs celebrate the sense
of sisterhood that has outlived the protest itself.
In this sense, Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh is both an
object of love and an offer of friendship.
“Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh” is available at
harshaamshaheenbagh.com
35
 Inside: “Artists of any variety often need turmoil in order to be inspired” p46
Appetites
The Gastronome There are lots of good things to say about Café
Tim
Cecilia, but may I start with the shallowest? You
can come off the motorway from way out in the
flatlands, zigzag through the surface streets of east
Hayward London, turn on to Andrews Road and park. Right
outside. You can sit in a window seat, look out over
the canal, the narrow boats, the vast Victorian gas-
Small plates, works–andyourcar.Itisdisorienting.Idon’tthink
it impaired my critical faculties, but I was halfway
big love through the main before I could stop myself gazing
through the glass at my decomposing SUV and
idiotically mouthing, “Look, my car!” I mean,
this is “gritty E8”. I’ve only previously managed
Restaurant Dream Parking in LA.
OK. Enough. I’m sure you’ll go on a bike, an
electric scooter or on foot. Whatever. But I do know
you’llgo,andI’lltellyouwhy.CaféCeciliawassetup
FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST
MARCH 19/20
27/282022
2022 ILLUSTRATION BY R.FRESSON
by Max Rocha, scion of the fabulous fashion family,
in a thoughtfully designed new build in the most
aggressively gentrified bit of Hackney. The staff are
beautifully and quirkily dressed by sister Simone
Rocha, the maître d’ in a parachute dress and
rubber clogs, the wait staff looking like the winners
of the Most Stylish Apparatchik contest at a tractor
fair in Magnitogorsk. The punters are even slicker.
Couture-vultures,drawnbythefashionpedigreeof
the place, arrive in elegant dribs and understated
drabs from the four postcodes in London that still
contain enough disposable income to dress up for
lunch. Everyone except me is thin.
My waiter at lunch had a level of intense hyper-
engagement that betrayed theatrical training.
He began by drawing my attention to the chalked
specials board whereon, he said, everything – the ▶
37
 Appetites

◀ pork pie, coppa steaks, prosciutto and braised shoulder – came

from the same pig. “Might I know its name?” I enquired rogu-
ishly, and the poor bloke shot back “Arthur”. Then he paused for
a beat, just slightly unsure, and offered, “We know what he ate
and that he lived two Christmases…” at which point something
died behind his eyes, and he sort of trailed off. I enquired after the
lemon sole, which remained nameless.
I ordered a salt cod brandade (also suspiciously anonymous.
Why? Why does he hate fish?) which came with deep-fried
polentaandradishesfordipping.Dippingradishesmarkaplaceas
a descendant of the Hendersons at St John and Rochelle Canteen,
or the River Café, the latter of which this set-up interestingly
resembles. The brandade was faultless; smooth mash, plenty of
oil and the fish soaked enough for politeness, but not so its soul
had entirely sublimated. It’s a thin line and chef Rocha treads it
well. The polenta fries were pleasant, a little oily and perhaps,
ultimately, de trop.
It was an odd quirk, but though the portions were really quite
healthy, I can’t ever remember a restaurant with smaller plates.
All of them – starter, main, dessert – tiny. But then, standing in
expensive spaces, being served by younger, thinner people and
wondering why nothing is big enough constitutes my whole
experience of fashion.

P
oor Arthur’s shoulder, when braised in milk with
summer savory, was consummate. Very slowly cooked,
so the meat shredded at a glance, and interspersed
shamelessly with joyous lumps of healthy adipose
tissue. Coco blanc beans, also stewed in plentiful fats, were
dotted with fresh girolles. With an austere palette of muted earth
tones, this was not overly primped or easily ’grammable food,
CAFÉ CECILIA
but it scored high on flavours and artisanal integrity.
Canal Place
I mightily enjoyed the lemon sole, grilled à point with
32 Andrews Road
lashings of butter and a small salad of marinated tomatoes. London E8 4FX
No failings here save my own preference that a sole, even when 0203 478 6726
served “whole”, should have the extreme edges trimmed away cafececilia.com
with scissors before cooking. It’s a pleasure to remove the Starters: £3-£11
spine and large ribs at the table, but the hundreds of tiny Mains: £13-£26
fin spines right around the edge bring nothing to the party Desserts: £4.50-£9
but inconvenience and unnecessary frustration. The chips were
ideal for dipping contemplatively into the herb mayo as the
afternoon progressed.
There was a very competent-looking ginger cake for dessert,
all dark spice and brooding complexity like Tom Hardy, only
smeared with a thick layer of Jersey cream. But I would not
let it distract me for, wondrous to tell, there on the menu, as
bold as brass, was deep-fried bread and butter pudding with
cold custard. I’ve put away kilos of B&B pudding in my day
and consider myself an aficionado, but this stuff was way off
any recognised scale. Not slabby, rubbery or jellified, but
light and airy, almost like a pain perdu. Deep-fried for heat
and crispness of casing. A perfect square sitting in a pool
of custard at the ideal temperature to complement and
support. I’m sorry. I just can’t “be there” for people who take
their custard hot.
Theparking,thebeautifulpeopleandafirst-ratemethodactor
taking the orders are all exotically Tinseltown, but the core of
Cecilia could not be more thoroughly British. It’s 28 years since
St John launched, and the River Café served its first food in 1987.
I’m not sure why but only now are we seeing enough restau-
rants “inspired” by them, burgeoning so simultaneously as to
risk cliché. I’m comfortable with this as a working definition of
Modern British and I’m happy to embrace it, but I’m aware that
others will call it tired.
This sounds like a strange conclusion to draw about a place
that’s fashionable in every sense, but there’s almost nothing new
about Café Cecilia, and I believe that suits me rather well.

@timhayward; timhayward

38 FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022


FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022
Recipe
Honey
&Co
Rice noodle salad
The Korean supermarket across
the road from our restaurant
provides a welcome respite from
our cumin-and-lemon-scented
cooking life. After a day in the
kitchen immersed in the flavours
of the Middle East, it is nice to get
lost in the neat aisles and wonder at
the contents of bags and bottles with
labels that read to us like cryptic
crossword clues. Once home, we
set off on little culinary adventures
that distinguish our evening meals
from our working days. Like any
adventure, this has not been
without its lows, such as a mishap
involving green bean noodles that
will forever be remembered as
“the night of the rubber bands”.
But it is worth it for the highs.
We are never without our favourite
brand of tamari and never set a
table without our new favourite
seasoning, crispy chilli oil.
This salad is both incredibly
fresh and sufficiently satiating.
There’s very little heat involved
and no cooking whatsoever:
the noodles only need soaking in
boiling water for them to become
silky (no rubber bands tonight).
The crunchy vegetables should
be sliced as thinly as you can
manage. Depending on your speed
with a knife, bringing this to the
table shouldn’t take longer than
20 minutes – the quickest way we
know to freshen up your palate.
By Itamar Srulovich. Recipe by
Sarit Packer. @honeyandco
PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICIA NIVEN
SERVES 4
• 200g thin vermicelli
rice noodles
• 2 tbs sesame oil
• 2 small cucumbers
(or 1 large)
• 1 large red chilli
• 4-5 spring onions,
thinly sliced
• 8-10 salad radishes,
thinly sliced
• Zest of 1 lime
• 1 tbs freshly grated
ginger
Dressing
• 30ml rice wine vinegar
• 30ml mirin
• 30ml lime juice
• 30ml soy sauce
Toppings
• 100g roasted cashews
• 60g crispy shallots
• Crispy chilli oil
1. Place the noodles in
a large bowl and cover
with loads of boiling
water. Cover the bowl
and soak for 20 minutes
until the noodles are soft
and loose. Strain and
toss to coat with the
sesame oil and place in a
large bowl.
2. Halve the cucumbers,
scoop out the seeds and
slice thinly. Deseed the
chilli and slice thinly, mix
with the sliced spring
onions, radishes, lime
zest and ginger. You can
prepare this mix a
couple of hours in
advance.
3. Add all the dressing
ingredients, mix well to
coat then serve. Add one
or all of the toppings,
as per your preference.
39
 Appetites

Wine

Tamlyn
Currin
Which wines work in
cooking? Time for an
unscientific experiment

W
hatever its colour, the
wine must be clean
and without a harsh,
ag gressive taste.
Very cheap table wine sometimes
does not react well in cooking, and
it is better to use something superior
in quality, although this does not
have to be a great wine.” So says
the distinguished encyclopaedia
Larousse Gastronomique.
My mother, who spent most of
her cooking years in Zimbabwe and
used wine in many dishes, may not
have complied with this advice, as
anyone who has tasted Zimbabwean
winewouldunderstand.Heroptions
were limited, but her food was
always delicious. This brings us to
a question that has divided chefs,
cooks and wine lovers since time
immemorial: which wines should
you use for cooking?
French chef Marie-Antoine
Carême codified the four “mother
sauces” in the early 19th century,
but it was Auguste Escoffier who
introduced the “daughter sauces” a
century later and with them made
wineastructuralelementofclassical
cooking. But cooking with wine as an sweetness. It marinates, macerates
ingredient (as opposed to the all- Tamlyn recommends... and adds piquancy splashed on the
important cooking with a glass of finish. It is used to poach, boil, stew,
wine on the side, which is a vital part GREAT IN THE GLASS AND THE PAN braise, steam and blanche. Reduced,
ofpreparingalmostanymeal)isafar Wines that make for both enjoyable drinking and successful cooking or used to deglaze, it becomes a
older tradition. DeReCoquinaria, one defining component of sauces, jus
of the earliest known cookbooks, • Schloss Lieser, it to thyme-infused puy • Barbadillo, Solear and glazes.
probably collated by a Roman called Wehlener Sonnenuhr lentil and bacon braise. Manzanilla NV Sherry, I was commissioned to update
Riesling Kabinett 2021 • Marion, Borgo 2019 £12 Lightly smoky, nutty
Caelius Apicius in the fifth century the “Cooking with wine” entry in
Mosel, £17 Abundant, Valpolicella, £13 and tangy. Made for
AD, contained numerous recipes bright fruit with racy Supple, red-fruited and mushroom soup.
the upcoming fifth edition of The
that called for wine. acidity. Perfect in a sappy, slosh generously • Harveys, Signature 12 Oxford Companion to Wine. I was
Wine is a key ingredient in many creamy coq au Riesling. into spaghetti alla Year Old Cream Sherry, stunned to discover how little
centuries-old recipes, peasant and • Eugenio Collavini, puttanesca. £15 per half Candied scientific research there is on the
refined, particularly in Europe. Coq T Friulano 2020 Collio, • Barbeito, 5 Year Old peel, walnuts, medium subject. My own findings revealed
£17 Almondy and herby, Rainwater Reserva NV sweet. Use a whole
au vin, boeuf bourguignon, moules a lot of contradictory “rules”. Cook
it goes beautifully with Madeira, £16 Tastes of bottle in slow-cooked
marinière, oeufs en meurette, asparagus and in spring apricot jam and bitter lamb shoulder.
with cheap wine. Cook with good
cacciatore, chorizo al vino tinto… green asparagus risotto. orange. Deglaze the • Taylor’s, Late Bottled wine.Cookwithleftoverwine.Never
the list is long and sweeps around • Giant Steps, Pinot Noir pan you’ve seared your Vintage 2015 Port, £17 cook with leftover wine. Cook with
the Mediterranean. Like stock, 2021 Yarra Valley, £21 venison in and make a For peixe Oporto (baked tannic wine. Cook with wine without
wine adds flavour. Like vinegar or Full of juicy charm, add velvety sauce. fish in a rich sauce) tannins. Cook with fruity wine.
citrus, it adds acidity. It can also add Cook with dry wine. Cook with ▶

FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY LEON EDLER 41

 Appetites
◀ redwine.Don’tcookwithredwine.
Cook with wine you like to drink.
Cook with wine you don’t want to
drink. Almost every piece of advice
has its opposite. Choose your myth
and wing it.
I set out to do some empirical
research of my own, although this
is a generous description of the
unstructured, unscientific kitchen
chaos that ensued. If I had learnt
anything by the end of it, apart
from that one doesn’t undertake an
exercise like this without a full team
of kitchen porters, it was that proper
scientific experimental trials would
beexpensive,wouldtakeagreatdeal
more planning and would require
more equipment than a home
kitchen could possibly support.
I scribbled a scrap-paper plan
(if you must know, I used the back
of a customs invoice attached to a
box of wine samples) encompassing
all the different wine styles and
quality levels espoused by the
various experts. The first hitch
proved to be cost. Even though I’d
bought all the vinous variables at
MORE TASTING NOTES
Tasting notes on
Purple Pages of
JancisRobinson.com.
International stockists
on Wine-searcher.com
42
the cheapest local supermarket,
my grand plan was starting to push
a budget of well over £500, and
that was without the food. The
second hitch was the sheer range
of vinous variables that should be
investigated. Did I really want to
taste-test a couple of dozen versions
of mussels, or turbot poached
in different types of sparkling
wine? The hitches were piling up
at an alarming rate. The task I’d
set myself, I realised, should be
undertakeninlaboratoryconditions
with a large team.
I had the luxury of neither, but my
elderly parents did sign up as willing
sous-chefs. Their energy and their
commitmenttothemadcapschemes
of their middle-aged daughter are
strictly limited, but there was no
option but to plough on. Give me
enough wine and I will plough on.
To keep the application as
broad as possible, including taking
note of the interests of vegetarian
and vegan diets, I decided to cook a
very simple base dish of mushrooms
and onions without dairy and finish
it with different wines. In a perfect
world, one would consider the
variables of different ingredients
as well as the impact of adding the
wines at different times during
the cooking process, heating it to
different temperatures and cooking
it for different lengths of time. This
could be the work of a lifetime. I had
one Saturday.
We cooked like crazy people. I
did the mise en place; I aproned up
The expensive wines
made nomore
impactand added
nomore depth than
the cheapwines
my team, lined up the ingredients,
turned up the Top Gun soundtrack
and, with military precision, we
chopped and chopped, sautéed and
stirred, measured, reduced and
gossiped over the relentless hum of
the extractor fan. Unlike Top Gun,
the kitchen looked nothing like
the surgically neat landing strip of
an aircraft carrier by the time we
had finished. A paintball fight in
a mushroom soup factory might
have been closer to the reality.
How is it possible to get sauce on
ceiling beams?
Job done, we lined up small
plates. We’d tested the recipe with
a number of wines, from cheap to
expensive, fruity to oaky, low to
high acid, dry to sweet. Considering
the limitations of the exercise, the
results were strikingly simple and
clear cut. Acidity and sweetness
had the biggest impact on the
finished dish and, in combination,
proved to have the most profound,
positive influence. Fruitiness, as
opposed to sweetness, was the third
contributing component.
Sweet wines with high acid,
such as medium-dry Riesling, and
fortified wines, dry or sweet, such
as Madeira, sherry, Marsala and
port, were by far the best wines to
cook with. Dry wines, red or white,
disappeared, sometimes leaving
dishes needing a bit more acidity.
They didn’t seem to add much depth
of flavour, no matter how simple or
complex they were.
The expensive wines made
no more impact and added no
more depth than the cheap wines.
Tannic wines and oaked wines left
a bitterness in the aftertaste of the
dishes. Fruit matters – the wines
with real juiciness of fruit added
more to the dish than wines that
were more on the savoury spectrum.
I didn’t try cooking with a faulty
wine, so I can’t support or refute
the theory that wine faults are
exaggerated by cooking.
It is, of course, the crudest of
experimentsandIappealtoculinary
institutes around the world to lean
in with some proper investment in
scientific research in this field. But
in the meantime, all I can say is that,
whatever you’re cooking, you can’t
go wrong with Madeira. It covers all
the bases and if you don’t use it up, it
will last until the next time you need
it. It also tastes delicious. In fact, you
won’t have any left for next time.
Tamlyn Currin is sustainability editor
and staff writer at JancisRobinson.com.
Jancis Robinson returns next week.
More columns at ft.com/jancis-robinson
FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022

FANTASY DINNER PARTY
An evening of spiky and spooky stories from
Truman Capote and Toni Morrison proves
therapeutic for the food writer turned reluctant host
Thereisadegreeofhatredinvolvedinmyinviting
a person to eat. It isn’t really about the washing up
after the guests have gone. It’s not about social
faux-pas either, although that’s what I will grum-
ble about after the last dish is dried. The situation
is this: for as long as I have wanted to be close to
people, I have needed to be free to hate them. In the
case of dinner parties, this manifests as a kind of
fearful resentment that makes the evening fraught
and me an unwilling host. This prickliness embar-
rasses me. “If I can’t be gracious,” I often think, “I
shouldn’t be anything at all.”
It was only by chance, then, that my fantasy
dinner party even happened. I was wandering
alone one day, my mind as thick as soup, when I
stepped into the path of psychotherapist Donald
Winnicott as he was cycling to work. Rather than
being angry, he laid an elfin hand on my shoulder
and said I looked like I needed a party. We need
hate to love, he explained. Even parents hate their
babies, sometimes, and what is a parent if not the
originalhost?Onceyouacceptyou’llbegrudgeyour
FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST
MARCH 19/20
27/282022
2022
By Ruby Tandoh
guests, just a little, you’ll be free to enjoy their com-
pany too. We began to draw up plans.
That’s how Winnicott and I have ended up in
the assembly hall of my old secondary school on a
blue-black autumn evening. What better place, in
what better company, to battle old demons? He has
offered to serve the food and recom-
mended a colleague, psychoanalyst
Melanie Klein, to pour drinks. She
refuses to serve the peanut punch
over ice that I requested and instead
produces bottles of Tokay, a sweet
Hungarian wine, that she stole from
a conference last week.
All day, Winnicott has been spin-
ning through the room like a sprite, suspending
tiny glowing orbs and lengths of peach-coloured
silk across the hall until everything is sweet and
bathedinlight.WhenauthorToniMorrison walks
in she gasps and pretends not to notice the smell of
damp coats and old trainers from the locker room.
Writer and composer Francis Bebey has arrived
ILLUSTRATION BY AARON MARIN
Appetites
too and is singing a song as expansive as laughter.
The room feels full. At first I feel a familiar prick-
ling of resentment. (Why should you force me to
dance? Or to feel?) But then Morrison begins to
sway,andwriterGracePaley enters,bellowingand
swinging her hips, and I allow my body to move.
Winnicott is circulating on roller blades with a
tray of tsofi, Ghanaian fried turkey tail. By the time
we sit for dinner, greasy-fingered and glistening
with sweat, he has laid out a spread of McDon-
ald’s double cheeseburgers and prawn-stuffed tofu
and aubergine, from Wong Kei in London’s China-
town. There are bowls of steamed rice. There are
fish finger sandwiches. None of it makes sense but
each thing is perfect because it is exactly what it is
supposed to be. Paley is weaving stories between
mouthfuls of silken aubergine and we are all rapt,
which distracts us from our thirst. (I’d thought that
psychotherapists,whoareinthebusinessof veiling
theirtruefeelingsarounddifficultpeople,mightbe
natural waiters, but Klein has spent the past couple
of hours asking my guests, with barely concealed
glee, about their mothers.) I decide I should serve
theremainingdrinksmyself–champagneforthose
who want it, vanilla Coke for the rest.
We have nearly finished by the time Truman
Capote arrives. Sat at the head of the table, he
reclines in his chair and fixes his gaze on us, hold-
ing a bowl of La Grotta ice cream (Puglia lemon,
topped with a rococo cloud of whipped cream) like
a brandy glass in one hand while gesticulating with
the other. At first he is scintillating, then terrible.
Morrison rolls her eyes at Bebey, who kicks me
under the table. But just when we are on the brink
of hating him, he slides drily into a wicked anec-
dote about someone we loathe. “How darling,” we
all laugh. “How bitchy.”
Asthenightcondensesaroundus,Morrisontells
usaghoststoryandremindsusthatallthegoodand
the bad is here at once, that there’s no pulling apart
thethreadsofalife.Afinalguestissummonedfrom
the shadows: the fictional Toni Erdmann, spirited
in from the film of the same name, in
a huge Bulgarian kukeri costume and
Justwhenweare carrying a tray of Cadbury’s Creme
onthebrinkof Eggs. In the film, he is a father who
hatingCapote,he adopts a series of increasingly extrav-
slidesdrilyintoa agant disguises to find a way into the
wickedanecdote heart of his jaded adult daughter. He
is indecipherable, just absurd enough
to break through her prickliness and
entice her to have fun. Amid the debris of the even-
ing we stare at him, hating him for a moment, then
laughing, and we invite him to dance.
Ruby Tandoh is a food writer and the author of
books including “Cook As You Are: Recipes for Real
Life, Hungry Cooks and Messy Kitchens”
43
 The Humourist
Robert
Shrimsley
Sun, Seasalt and Waitrose vans
Wit & Wisdom
There was a certain demographic
in this queue, and it wasn’t that of a
quiet seaside town. The man ahead
of me in the chip shop line was on the
phone to his wife, who was at home
waiting for the Waitrose van. Behind
me, a woman was talking about an
issue with her cleaner. Range Rovers
and Jaguar 4x4s weaved along the
high street.
Although we were a good three
hours from the capital, it felt as if
we had brought a large part of well-
heeled London with us. Retrievers,
dachshunds and cockapoos queued
alongside us, and I’m pretty sure
they were also talking about their
cleaners and the issues with the last
Waitrose delivery.
There were other things wrong
with this picture. One was that we
spent 20 minutes queuing for fish
and chips, which is odd because we
don’t actually like fish and chips.
Or rather, while we like the idea of
them, heavily fried food no longer
44 ILLUSTRATION BY LUCAS VARELA
agrees with me. These days, it is not I began to fear for
so much fish and chips, as fish, chips certain districts
and two Rennies. But the rules are
clear. You have to eat fish and chips
of the metropolis.
on the beach. Had Barnes
As I listened to the conversations become a ghost
around me, I began to fear for cer- town? Did Kew
tain districts of the metropolis. Had stand silent?
Barnes become a ghost town? Did
Kew stand silent? Were the baristas
of Hampstead kicking their heels?
I imagined a new dystopian novel
– part of that upper-mid-lit genre – in
which someone wakes to find him-
self the last resident of south-west
London. The comfortably-off have
mysteriously disappeared over-
night, leaving London without
management consultants, lawyers
and journalists.
It turns out they have all fled to
a handful of seaside towns like Sal-
combe in Devon, or Aldeburgh and
Southwold in Suffolk, each denoted
by the presence of overpriced chain
boutiques. Basically, anywhere with
FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST 27/28 2022
 a Seasalt or a FatFace or a Jack Wills, Games 1 2 3 4 5 6
and all those other retailers you fear A ROUND ON THE LINKS
for in the coming recession. by James Walton 7 00 00 00 00 00 00 8 00 9
These are not your mainstream
10 11
seaside towns. They are a niche
group catering for a certain type. All the answers here are linked 00 00 00
The beaches are not long and golden in some way. Once you’ve
but mostly shingled. There are fancy spotted the connection, any 12 13
bakeries and art galleries, and the you didn’t know the first time
00 00 00 00 00 00 00
houses sell for near-London prices. around should become easier.
True residents are either as well- 14 15 00 16
1. Which planet in the solar system
heeled as their visitors or are pushed
has the most eccentric orbit?
totheouterreachesofthetown,near 00 00 00 00 17 00 00 00 00

the larger supermarkets. 2. In 1487, which pretender to the

00 21

N
English throne was the figurehead 18 19 20
ot that this is not wholly for a rebellion against Henry VII? 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
22
new. These quiet coastal
3. In the Catholic, Anglican
towns built up their tour- 23 24 25
and Orthodox churches, which
ist trade over a century
ordained minister ranks below a
– Southwold’s pier opened in 1900 – 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
priest – although often goes on to
but part of their current appeal is to
become one? 26 27
a certain type of person, yearning for
theseasidebutwithoutthenoiseand 4. Since 2008, who has won 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tat of larger resorts. Waitrose deliv- Grammys for Album of the Year
eries, upscale bakers and boutiques with Fearless, 1989 and folklore? 28
ensure one is not denied home com-
5. Piers Morgan, Rebekah Brooks
forts. There is fresh fish from shacks The Across clues are straightforward, while the Down clues are cryptic.
and Andy Coulson have all been
on the beach and cortados and
editors of which newspaper?
pastéis in the high street. Deliveroo
towns made flesh. 6. Which month of the year THE CROSSWORD
Why was the fish shop conversa- contains the zodiac signs Taurus No 604. Set by Aldhelm
tion discomforting? What rankled, and Gemini?
I think, was hearing myself played
7. Which cleaning product was
backandrealisingIwasanarchetype ACROSS DOWN overcoming group
advertised with the slogan “Cleans
following the herd to a better class of 1 Weakness, flaw (13) 2 Red suit’s not head’s battle for
floors without scratching”?
Butlin’s, albeit with artisan cheese 10 Heap up (5) right for games leadership (5, 8)
shops and music festivals instead of 8. Who wrote the music for 11 Armour-plated before finals (5) 15 For instance,
Redcoats and talent shows. Oklahoma!, South Pacific and mammal (9) 3 Pause painting, German gun
Perhaps this is a silly argument. The Sound of Music? 12 Teetotaller (9) perhaps, and somehow is
Maybe I just like places my father 13 Aunt’s husband (5) begin again (7) overcome by the
9. Which children’s game show
liked.Surely,moresimply,thisisjust 14 Learner’s car 4 Clever to hide king French with time (8)
– based on a school sports day
a story of people seeking nice seaside sign (1-5) inside little space (6) 17 Put off daughter
and originally presented by Ron
spots. But England has a lot of coast- 16 Octopus-like 5 Second currency with children taking
Pickering – ran on the BBC from
line.Whyaresomanysimilarpeople creature with found under Maine a degree (8)
1973 to 1995?
drawn to these Hampstead-on-Seas? a shell (8) monument (8) 19 Soprano with New
Isitbecausetheyreflectourtastes 10. On October 31 1992, Pope John 18 Viking vessel (8) 6 Bound to be York opera company’s
back at us? Or perhaps that people Paul II acknowledged that the 20 Ecclesiastical different, for one accompanying a
who enjoy comfortable lives have Catholic Church had been wrong assistant (6) sure (2, 5) Czech composer (7)
a complacent nostalgia for places to condemn whom? 23 Light fabric for 7 Regular figure’s 21 Stick up with
that seemed to be how things were, dressings (5) expected number the heartless
although I can’t recall a L’Occitane in 24 Yelling (9) with legal and moral decree, initially,
Bournemouth when I was a kid. We 26 Be provocative troubles (13) as legislated (7)
hear the call of the simpler seaside towards, annoy (9) 8 Strike-breaker’s 22 Suspend releases
we think we remember, part of that 27 Utter, complete (5) to plead about for the listeners (6)
elusive quest to taste again the fish 28 Made weaker, deprivation to line (8) 25 Following
and chips without the Rennies. Solution to Crossword No 603 diluted (7, 4) 9 Violently wrestle on with endless
Anyway, the challenge is now on P I G L E T A A G I T A T O R with group, changes (2, 3)
to find the same thing somewhere U A A A X A A A O A R A R A E
else not too far from London. Whit- B U L G E A P H O N E T I C S
C A A A M A U A D A M A A A I
stable has promise but it’s probably
still too real. Rye is quaint. West Wit-
R E P A P E R A N O O D L E S THE PICTURE ROUND
A A A A T A B A A A L A A A T
tering has a great beach but lacks W A G E A B E E T R O O T A A
by James Walton
infrastructure in the town. You can’t L A O A A A C A U A A A H A S
Who or
find a FatFace for love or money. A A S H I R K E R S A R E S T
B A A A G A M A E A M A R A R what do
Or maybe we’ll just keep going to
+ =
GETTY IMAGES; ALAMY

A L B A N I A A D I O C E S E these
Aldeburgh. It’s a lovely town, and L A A A O A R A L A U A F A T
pictures
you get a nice class of people. T O L E R A B L Y A S T O I C
I A T A E A L A A A S A R A H add up to?
C H I L D R E N A R E M E D Y
robert.shrimsley@ft.com
@robertshrimsley
ANSWERS ON PAGE 4

FT.COM/MAGAZINE MARCH
AUGUST19/20
27/282022
2022 45
 Wit & Wisdom
The Questionnaire
Tom Chaplin
Singer and songwriter
Interview by Hester Lacey
1. What is your earliest memory?
Ironically, tidying my bedroom,
aged three. I was quite a messy and
disorganised child and, as my life
went on, messy and disorganised
in many ways – emotionally,
physically and mentally. I haven’t
had a drink or taken drugs for
probably seven years now.
2. Who was or still is
your mentor?
I have been seeing a psychoanalyst
for about 12 years. Without
question, he saved my life.
3. How fit are you?
Pretty fit and healthy. I run, play
football, play golf. I wanted to be
fitter than I’d ever been when I hit
40. It’s a very important part of
keeping me happy. The healthier
your body, the better you sing.
4. Tell me about an animal you
have loved.
When I got together with my wife,
nearly 20 years ago, she had a
miniature poodle, Big White.
46
He accompanied us through the
first half of our time together as a
couple. Our goldendoodle Glorious
is lovely, an irreplaceable part of the
family. Dogs are so unfailingly loyal.
There’s less certainty with humans.
5. Risk or caution, which has
defined your life more?
Risk, in terms of decisions about
what to do with my life. I went to
a very old-fashioned private school
where most of my peers were going
to end up in the City or in big law
firms. Forming a band felt like an
act of rebellion. Everyone thought
we were ridiculous: there are no
prospects in a band! I like to take a
bit of a gamble on who I work with.
Making this solo album, I worked
with a producer called Ethan Johns.
He’s a bit of a one-off; he doesn’t do
things in a conventional industry
way. He’s all about integrity.
6. What trait do you find most
irritating in others?
A lack of self-awareness.
ILLUSTRATION BY LAUREN CROW
7. What trait do you find most
irritating in yourself?
When I get angry, particularly with
the children. They are eight and
two, so they can test your patience.
I always feel crap about myself
when I lose my temper.
8. What drives you on?
Artists of any variety often need
turmoil in order to be inspired.
My life went from being very
chaotic, with huge ups and downs,
to a gentle ebb and flow. I saw that
as a challenge. Whatever feels
interesting and wherever there’s
a kind of energy, that’s where I want
to go. Instead of needing to search
inside myself, I’m looking outwards.
9. Do you believe in an afterlife?
I was brought up a Catholic.
From an early age I used to think,
this isn’t right. I reacted by
becoming a staunch atheist.
I’m more moderate now. It’s beyond
our comprehension, so why worry
about it?
10. Which is more puzzling,
the existence of suffering or its
frequent absence?
The world is very unfair. One of the
problems I had with God is why
can’t he create a world without
suffering? But we wouldn’t have the
capacity for joy and happiness if we
didn’t have pain and suffering. It
would be quite a vanilla world. That
Talking Heads song: “Heaven is a
place where nothing ever happens.”
11. Name your favourite river.
I lived near the Rother [in Sussex]
when I was a kid, and I’ve never
been too far away from it.
12. What would you have done
differently?
I wish I’d made more of the early
success of Keane, but I was unhappy
at the time. I wish I’d been more
capable of enjoying it.
“Midpoint” by Tom Chaplin is out
on September 2 on BPG. His UK tour
starts on October 6
FT.COM/MAGAZINE AUGUST
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27/28 2022