A Citizens UK meeting

 

From the Citizens UK website: smiling citizens interacting

I’m always interested in events and ways in which people interact, so when I was invited to a Citizens UK meeting, I went along. The confusion started there, however, since the meeting was actually entitled a Weaving Trust meeting.

What is a Weaving Trust? Nothing to do with weaving, although a comparison was made during the evening, with mentions of wefts and warps, which I didn’t quite see the relevance of. The meeting was enjoyable – it’s always fun to meet new people – but I was left afterwards rather mystified about what the meeting was trying to achieve. This post is an attempt to try to understand what Citizens UK is about. 

What happened at the meeting

We (about 20 of us) had a series of 1-to-1 conversations, lasting about six minutes each, starting with general chat, as a way of getting to know each other. Then we had conversations with others about issues such as hopes and fears for our community. By the end of the evening, about two hours later, we had practised our arts of rapidly getting to know others – in fact, it must be just like speed dating, although, I hasten to add, I have no experience in that area. I will say, however, that those partners I spoke to who managed to talk about themselves for the whole six minutes would not be the ones I would choose to talk to again.

By the end of the evening, what had I learned? This event was at a local C of E church (other venues have included a college and mosque), and, perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of the participants were involved with the Church in some form. That doesn’t invalidate the evening, but the mix of people was somewhat one-dimensional.

I felt we had got to know each other, but for what purpose? The Citizens UK website describes (and someone in the tea break confirmed this) that the idea of the group is to get together to eventually campaign on “issues”. But we didn’t discuss what these issues might be! From the website, I gathered, some groups in other areas have taken on issues such as misogyny and Islamophobia on the Underground, which of course would be worth campaigning about. But, typically, you don’t form a group and then think about an issue’

What interests me is exactly what happens in practice when you have an issue to discuss. For example, I observed a group of residents in our street campaigning for the local authority to provide planters for the pavement, since the houses have no front gardens. I was surprised to hear the negative comments from some residents: “people will just throw rubbish in them!” “The leaves from the trees will block out all the light”. My interest, then, was not how to campaign, but what to do about disagreement. It looks to me like any issue you care to mention will have people with an opposite view. How do we resolve that? The answer, or at least one potential answer, came almost accidentally, from an interfaith counsellor at a local university. She described how religious groups can come together by recognising difference; you can’t reconcile religions, but you can accept and learn about different practices and points of view. Now that’s an interesting angle, which might be a way forward … but only if we agree which issue we are talking about !

Even an issue such as “taking action on Islamophobia and misogyny on public transport”, which I wholly support, looked to me to be an unlikely target for our group, since pretty much everyone in our group would accept this should be eliminated – clearly, the people in this meeting weren’t the ones causing the problems! A wider group might reflect a bigger range of opinions, but I don’t imagine the kind of people who would shout racist slogans would be people who joined a Citizens UK group.

I was intrigued to learn more about the organisation. Citizens UK appears to operate on a membership model, but membership is only for institutions. How does that work? We came to this meeting as individuals, and I for one am not a member of any of the suggested groups who were invited to become members.

One further question: how is this operation funded? The website is pretty slick, with pictures of citizens happily interacting, and the event had refreshments and lots of clever people presenting it. Are they all volunteers? It turns out this operation, or at least much of it, is funded by The National Lottery Community Fund, which would explain how the group can have 16 local organisations (Cambridge is just one).

Finding out more

Looking for “Weaving Trust” I came across a report by Amanda Tatersall, based at the University of Sydney, “a globally recognised social change researcher and community organiser”. The project has for its goals three strategic aims:

1.      Develop leaders

2.      Strengthen institutions

3.      Make change

This sound alarming! It sounded to me when I read it much like early Fascist groups in Italy or Germany. Why develop leaders when we were carrying out an exercise in communication?

I’m happy to be corrected about any of the above, but I can’t help feeling that if I come away after two hours having to look up what this initiative is all about, perhaps others will have the same response. 

Visiting Rye with Pevsner

 

It’s always a pleasure to look at towns with Pevsner (The Buildings of England) in hand. For this trip, I used the original edition of Sussex, dating back to 1965. Today, of course, the series has greatly expanded and the feel of Pevsner has been greatly diluted. I don’t have the latest volume of Sussex for comparison, but I would guess that the text is at least 50% longer, and the text coverage much more comprehensive. But it is not only that the later editions have more text. As Pevsner explains in the Foreword, he only did East Sussex, while Ian Nairn wrote West Sussex, which enables the reader to compare the two approaches. In an interesting comment, Pevsner writes: “Mr Nairn has a greater sensibility to landscape and townscapes than I have, and he writes better than I could ever hope to write. On the other hand, those who want something a little more cataloguey and are fervently interested in mouldings and such-like details, may find my descriptions more to their liking.”

 

Well, Pevsner covers the Rye in around 1,400 words (three and a half pages). This is amazingly concise. The perambulation of the town omits many buildings that in the later edition would certainly have a mention, not just the more recent buildings. Most intriguing is where Pevsner pauses, to see the workings of his mind when he spots something that interests him. Generally, Rye is covered with simple brief mentions, although he notices the widespread Rye checkerboard pattern of red and black bricks. He only really pays attention to three buildings in the whole town, apart from the church: the Town Hall, the old Grammar School, and the Old Hospital.

While for the most part he records dates and styles of buildings, no doubt following the working notes prepared from him by his dutiful, but not necessarily inspired, assistants in advance of the perambulation, for these three buildings he seems to come to life. It is certainly dating and detail that fascinates him.

The Old Grammar School

For the Old Grammar School, he is intrigued by the use of brick for giant pilasters and Dutch gables. He immediately runs through a checklist of early uses of each motif, and satisfies himself that here they are “remarkably early”. For the church, as usual, the focus is on dating as well. The transepts are “still essentially Norman”. In the South transept (sorry, S transept) “slightly post-Norman (dogtooth) bits have been reset.” It feels almost as if he was too frightened to relax from his academic dates and styles focus to let go and respond to the surroundings – for pretty much everything else in Rye, we get just the  date and a few words about notable features.

You cannot help feeling that the essence of  Rye hasn’t been captured. Rye, which was full of visitors on the Friday and Saturday we visited, is one of the great exemplars of a rural English town; but you feel somehow that Pevsner would never have lived there; not enough issues of dating and precedence to engage him fully. 

In contrast, Pevsner shows almost no interest in Lamb House, one of the largest buildings in the town (“clearly of the early C18 with its panelled parapet and its angle pilaster strips”). Of course, even if the building is unmemorable, the situation is astonishing. The view from the living room facing the church is right along West Street; you could not hope to have a more central location in the old town. You can’t help feeling this must have had an effect on Henry James’ writing. Why otherwise seek out this obscure rural location and live there for 19 years? 

Pevsner’s introduction is sketchy and raises as many questions as it answers: “The E part of the town has largely disappeared, owing to the action of the sea”, yet the town “started to diminish in the second half of the C16, when the harbour silted up”. For him, the two themes of Rye are the brick, already mentioned, and “the open view to the plain”. Actually, for a hill town, there is not much of a view to the plain. There will be a view from most of the private gardens facing S or W, but the only large-scale public view in Rye is to the E. For example, I was not able to make out Camber Castle, about a mile to the W, when looking from the old town.

In contrast, Nairn is highly aware of the surroundings, whether positive (“Up Waltham … a wonderful group in a download valley … from the S, church, farm and barns look like a monogram in flint”) or negative: “Southwick … A bit of everything and not quite anything … The genus loci seems to have gone on strike, or to have been locked out.” As the man himself states, Pevsner feels his primary role is to establish those dates: which giant order of pilasters came first, Rye, Kew, or Blickling? And I have to say, I’m not really that bothered. I'd be more interested to know what Rye represents to all those day trippers.  

 

Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (1986)

 

Bertha Wegmann, The Artist's Sister, 1882

Top marks to Rybczynski for choosing such a great topic: “home” is something we all think we know, and take for granted, but which doesn’t quite correspond with anything we learn in our academic studies. Nobody studies “home”. He describes it as follows: ““This book is an attempt … to discover … the meaning of comfort” [p vii], and indeed he does (on the very last page) define the term, but his book achieves more than that. In the course of describing how architecture and interiors moved towards our present-day ideas of comfort, it is at the same time a very revealing depiction of the architectural profession, based on Rybczynski’s own experience, which is perhaps what makes his books so readable: he is honest enough to admit when his experience clashes with his reading. When Rybczynski designed houses for clients, “I found that the architectural ideals I had been taught in school frequently disregarded – if they did not altogether contradict – my clients’ conventional notions of comfort.”

So this book isn’t just about home, or comfort; it’s about architects and their changing relationship, and sometimes actual discomfort, with the term “comfort”. It is the story of how architects followed style at the expense of comfort and technology, at some point in the C19, and as a result, have had only a subordinate role ever since, for many aspects of home design, specifically, kitchens and bathrooms. When we have a kitchen extension, the architect might design it, but we hire a kitchen designer to plan the layout. Why this split?  Because we don’t believe the architect has comfort as the main goal.

In this account, Le Corbusier represents a perhaps depressing milestone in that strange divergence: the moment when the architect fails to respond to people and their preference for such things as kitchen and bathroom design, or to the intelligent use of technology. By the C20, Le Corbusier could design a house as a “machine for living”, yet turn his back on the great comfort-based innovations, and way of thinking, described by R in his historical chapters.

Criticisms

I loved Rybczynski’s book, but it has some faults. Inevitably, tackling an inter-disciplinary and wide-ranging subject such as comfort would be difficult to do with primary sources.

I would feel happier about Rybczynski’s text if he provided better citations, and better illustrations. For example, he claims (ch4 p84) that the first sloping-backed chairs since ancient Greece appeared during the reign of Louis XV. It should be possible to provide pictures, in fact, a book of this kind cries out for illustrations.  

I don’t believe that comfort appeared first in C16 Netherlands – there are plenty of examples of comfort in earlier Renaissance paintings, even if they were not primarily studies of interiors. The birth of the Virgin, for example, is a common subject for depicting a domestic interior.

Hans Fries, Birth of the Virgin, 1512

Much of the book is a historical survey of interior design as it is affected by architectural styles. We begin with medieval times. As we move through history, he gives us  a potted history of major movements, which are sometimes only tenuously related to comfort. As he acknowledges, the “Georgian style” (for want of a better word) was fixed in the C19 and remains the style of comfort to the present day. Although he makes the fundamental split between comfort and style, I think he should have concentrated on that topic. For example, he makes a  clear and interesting distinction between French and English styles: the former remained formal, and based around the court, while English style was less formal and more practical (“The preference for country homes … resulted in a style of living that was much more relaxed than its French counterpart, and that eventually produced a different domestic ideal”. [p106, ch 5]. But having made this distinction, Rybczynski then continues to focus on the fashionable at the expense of comfort, by describing C20 styles that look to me anything but comfortable, such as Art Deco (although he later valiantly claims that Art Deco was more human-centred than subsequent styles such as minimalism, which wouldn’t be difficult). As an architect and architectural historian, Rybczynski tries to show some solidarity with architects, even doing his best to defend Le Corbusier, but it’s cleaer from the author’s own description that C19 architects, by concentrating on the visual, lost the opportunity to take responsibility for interior design, and never regained it. Worse, they showed little interest in technology and the infrastructure of buildings. If we want evidence of modern architects rejecting comfort, we have only to browse the many depressing accounts by family members growing up in their father’s (inhuman and impractical) architectural statement, such as Elizabeth Garber’s Implosion: A Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter (2018).

 

The present day

To complete R’s fascinating journey through architectural history from the point of view of convenience and comfort, we should move to the present day. The modern home really is a “machine for living in”, even if Le C would have been dismayed at our lack of attention to style. More important than a specific style, we expect all devices in the home to be linked, and to respond to our controls. We want to be able to play music and video from our phone to the TV. We want to charge our electric car, and to be able to control domestic appliances, such as dishwashers and blinds, with our phone. We want the home to be intelligent enough to transfer energy back to the grid when the domestic generator (from solar power or heat pumps) has a surplus above the house’s own requirement. If we want advice on all of this, do we go to an architect? I don’t think so. Architects lost touch with technology over 150 years ago. Yet the joined-up house would be central to what we today define as comfort. And comfort, in the broad sense that Rybczynski defines it, as the tailored and appropriate use of technology, has led to the growth of the design and build movement, with an architect frequently not even involved in the project. Visit any recent hotel or hospital building: these are spaces where function is far more important than any style. They do not look like designed spaces, even though they are highly functional.

Oh, and, in case you are wondering, what exactly is comfort? Rybczynski defines it as “a cultural artifice” involving “convenience, efficiency, domesticity, ease, privacy, intimacy” – whatever environment provides a feeling of well-being, in other words. 

Boston, Lincolnshire

Our visit to  Boston presented many overlapping and even contradictory impressions. Which one is the real Boston?

The Market Place presented a prosperous 18th- and 19th-century town, with an enormous parish church visible from everywhere around. A few hundred metres away was Fydell House, an impressive 18th-century merchant’s residence, with a lovely garden. The house was preserved by the Boston Preservation Society, which indeed was founded to save this specific property.

Yet, revealed the warm and engaging curator, most of the garden disappeared when Boston build an inner-city bypass, John Adams Way, built as recently as 1976, but situated pretty much through the centre of the town. There does not appear to be any other bypass. There was an aroma of dope in most of the public spaces. In the Market Place, there were many adult males in ones and twos doing very little – I guess these were out-of-work immigrants. There were several employment agencies with people hanging around outside. There were people sitting or lying in doorways. Yet, as Jane pointed out, the immigrants, largely from when the UK was in the European Union, are still here, which suggests that what they left must have been worse. 

Just a few yards from Market Place, the parish church of Boston was busy with a wide range of people visiting, games available (there was a Lego model of the church, and people playing Connect 4), and a café. We were greeted on arrival. The church, one of the largest in England, has a stunning tower (the “Stump”), and some of the most fascinating misericords (carvings under wooden seats) I have seen anywhere. They date from the 14th century; I don’t think many people notice them.

The town had hanging baskets and planters everywhere. I saw two council workers collecting rubbish from the pavements. At various points in the town there are examples of street art; the one I saw was a repurposed buoy from the channel in the North Sea on the approach to the port.

One shopping area, around Rosegarth Square, seemed to be completely derelict, with a large empty B&M supermarket. There was a sign on the wall stating that the UK Government is investing £14.8m to regenerate the square. There was no sign of any progress to date.

Pescod Square shopping centre, in contrast, was a pedestrian walkway with pretty much full occupancy by shops.

 Many of the listed buildings were in a woeful state of disrepair. One eighteenth-century house had shopfronts inserted on the ground floor, and half the sash windows replaced (but only half).

Boston’s MP, the Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice, is a multimillionaire property investor, educated (and formerly vice chair of trustees) at Uppingham School. Boston and Skegness is the most deprived constituency in Lincolnshire (although only ranked 112th most deprived in the UK, which makes me worry about the 111 below it). You could ask what connection there is between the privileged background of the MP and the poverty of the constituency he represents. Why would people vote for him? You could of course point out that many of the people sitting on the benches in Market Place would not be eligible to vote; who would they have voted for? Until 2024 the seat had always been Conservative; Tice overturned a Tory majority of over 25,000. The constituency had the highest vote in favour of leaving the European Union in the 2016 referendum.  

Before visiting Boston, I consulted guide books, and even a recent book about Lincolnshire (Edge of England, by Derek Turner, 2023), but there was no mention of the clear lack of work and opportunity here in Boston.

How can you sum up Boston, given all the above? Of course, there is no single vision of any place. But it’s a challenging question: if you were running the government, what would you do for Boston? What could you do for Boston? 

All Fours: the menopause is neither fun nor sexy

 

 

I wouldn’t mention this novel except that it seems to have become some kind of reference object, the novel about the menopause (although by no means the first). It was reviewed in the TLS, and then mentioned in the Guardian, in a piece about erotic fiction. As if that wasn’t enough, just after I had written this post, Zoe Williams, also the author of the erotic fiction article, in her regular Guardian column gave the novel a big write-up and asked, “Can menopause be fun and sexy? Yes, says Miranda July” [Guardian, 13 August 2024).

Reader, I warn you, this book is not erotic. It’s not fun, and it’s only sexy in the sense that it contains a lot of sex: most of it masturbation, if you find that sexy (and more about that later). Until I read Miranda July, I never realised how entertaining the world of Charles Bukowski was. There is no humour here.

The hero is a 45-year-old woman, a mother with a non-gendered child, Sam, aged seven, and a partner, the patient and long-suffering Harris. She starts a long drive to New York, but encounters a younger man, who works for Hertz Car Rental, and whom she fancies. However, her desire is not consummated, despite her frantic attempts, although she does manage to go to bed with one of his former partners. Panic-stricken because she believes the female libido drops off a cliff at the menopause, she agrees with her husband to have an open relationship, and has encounters with women. Some time later, she watches her non-boyfriend dance and has a kind of mystical experience. That’s it.

Most of the focus of the novel is about the concerns and anxieties of middle-aged American women, what the narrator describes as the perimenopause, and it doesn’t make for pleasant reading. FOMO is one of the anxieties: specifically, the fear that she might not want to have sex any more. The narrator pads out her self-absorption with regular exchanges with other women, finding out how they behave, and hence determining how she should behave (the author states in an afterword that the novel was partly based on a number of interviews with women).

So obsessed is the focus on the emotional state of the narrator that several aspects of the novel seem sketchy or inadequate:

• She requires a space where she can have her meetings with Davey, the would-be lover, and has a motel room refurbished at a cost of $20,000, with the work done by Davey’s partner, without (at least in the beginning) Davey’s knowledge. Her work seems to be occasional, but very well paid. There are no money concerns in the novel.
• I thought an open relationship was when you had sex with people other than your long-term partner, but for the most part, there is no sex with her partner. When the narrator achieves a sexual relationship with another woman, she behaves appallingly when her partner breaks it off.
• For the most part, the narrator behaves abysmally, taking everyone around her for granted, including her partner and child, and repeatedly texting her would-be lover in a way that would be considered stalking.
• The ending is a damp squib. Instead of consummating her desire, the narrator watches him dance in public, suggesting that the Hertz Rental assistant is really a consummate, world-class dancer; her dream man is a prince after all. In other words, this brutally realist novel, so blunt about the real-life problems of a middle-aged woman, drifts off into a vague fantasy at the end.
• Highly questionable is the hero’s attitude to stardom. She is some kind of artist, and later author, with an agent. Throughout the book, strangers approach her because of her reputation. The narrator expects special treatment as a result of her status – when she attends a performance by Davey as an invited guest, she is disappointed there is no designated area for her, but she has to sit in the audience.
• The narrator treats her child as a child-minder would: despite repeated protestations of love, the parent shows little interest in what the child does. The child is just an irritant and an interruption in the way of the narrator’s obsessions. For example, the narrator is on the phone to a friend:-           

“I have some questions about menopause and libido”.

“Where is my Lego book?” Sam screamed outside the garage door.

“Under the couch! Sorry, Mary.”  

You could not say the sex is sketchy. There is a lot of it, in a lot of detail. But sex, for the narrator, is not an equal activity. Sex is not about pleasure, it’s about winning and losing. As for the masturbation, there is a lot of it through the book, and it seems to have cast a spell over reviewers (and Zoe Williams), as if the idea that a woman might refer to masturbating as somehow liberating, rather than pleasurable. Yet the narrator doesn’t seem to masturbate for pleasure – she even admits to something I find difficult to imagine, angry masturbation (“I masturbated angrily to the thought of Harris fucking Caro”).

In short, I found the narrator an unpleasant character to be alongside. I found her neuroses tiresome, her obsession with herself very self-indulgent and unhealthy. Making the menopause the subject of your novel does not make it great. A serious theme is not invalidated by creating an enjoyable and entertaining work, and this is neither. The narrator would benefit from thinking about something (or someone) other than herself.

The Kröller-Müller Museum and sculpture garden

 

The 1970s extension

What could be more enticing than a gallery in the middle of a vast wood, where (for the most part) you have to cycle or walk to reach it? What’s more, it has a vast open-air sculpture park, with over 150 objects spread over several acres. Finally, there is a ravishing café with views over the gardens outside. The Kröller-Müller Museum has all of these, plus one of the best collections of Van Gogh.

It turns out that the story of the collection is quite involved. Helene Müller, born in Essen,  married a Dutchman, Anton Kröller, and on her father’s death, he became director of the family iron and coal company (which later includes a shipping line). Helene, Now Kröller-Müller, starts to buy art from 1905 – mainly from the 1870s to the present day, but with a few older works. Between 1909 and1917, the couple buy a vast estate on the  Veluwe. They commission H P Berlage, architect of the fabulous Hague Kunstmuseum, to build a hunting lodge (1915), but their plans for a huge art gallery are never realised. In 1935, the collection was acquired by the Dutch state, while the park became the property of a new Kröller-Müller Foundation. In 1937, a much smaller building than originally envisaged, a “Transitional Museum” was designed by Henry van de Velde (with a sculpture gallery added 1952 with large windows onto the park). This is the older part of the building housing the collection today. Helene died in 1939, and after her death a new focus on collecting sculpture began; the sculpture garden opened in 1961, and includes the ravishing Rietveld Pavilion, a reconstruction of a 1955 work shortly after the architect’s death in 1964. But what the visitor notices first today is the major new wing, by the Dutch architect Wim Quist, finished 1977. However, neither the old nor the new building really provides the space I would expect for such a major collection.

The permanent collection was, like any collection built by an individual, rather subjective. I wouldn’t have had quite so many Van Goghs (he must be the only artist to have painted the potato harvest, hardly the most visually appealing of topics) but the experience of the magical spaces was magical. Coffee and cake while looking at the trees was ravishing. And there was one sculpture room with big windows, enabling both the indoor and outdoor pieces to be seen. To the credit of the trustees who now manage the foundation, the buying policy has continued with a lot of contemporary pieces, to provide discussion, rather than run the risk of the collection being seen as a fossil (apparently, the founder herself thought the collection was complete and would never need expanding).

On visiting, the other thing I noticed was, for a building surrounded so entirely by trees and parkland, it seemed paradoxical and rather unnecessary to have temporary exhibitions (“The Wood for the Trees”) about “conversations with nature” that were filmed in forests in Finland, rather than simply by walking outside the gallery. This doesn’t seem to me to be environmentally necessary – you could have plenty of conversations with nature in the surrounding park, and save the travel.

But why complain? The building was ravishing, the setting was ravishing, and almost unique (The Burrell Collection is the only art gallery in a park that seems similar). After visiting the museum and the sculpture garden, on a wonderfully hot summer day, it seemed the only appropriate thing was to lie on the grass for a few minutes and just enjoy the surroundings, before cycling back to the car park, and back to the real world.

Bringing up Baby (1938)

 

After a few weeks of watching films made in the past few years, it was a shock to see how accomplished Bringing Up Baby was - a film made almost ninety years ago! Remarkable too was the incredible journey of Hollywood movies from silent to sound – this film was made within a few years of the introduction of sound. Yet the whole movie is based around such exquisite dialogue! What makes it so appealing is the way all the major characters, but especially Gable and Hepburn, use hesitation, interruption, murmurs, and gesture to communicate. The quality of the print is poor, the resolution appalling, but the dialogue sparkles and is on a par with anything made today. 

The narrative is fairly simple to describe. The entire action takes place within a few days. David Huxley (Grant), a palaeontologist, is about to get married. His actions and intentions are hijacked by Susan Vance (Hepburn), who manipulates matters in seeming chaos to prevent him carrying out any of his plans, wedding included. The bulk of the film is occupied by madcap farce, involving not one, but two leopards, a big game hunter, a dog, a spell in jail, and so on. Eventually, Huxley decides he has had so much fun with Vance that he would rather marry her than his fiancée.

When you watch a farce, you willingly forego a lot of your critical attitudes. If a film or play can make me laugh and keep me laughing, I am happy to ignore problems with the plot or character. But I can’t help feeling that the underlying premiss of the film is somewhat misogynistic. A woman sets her eye on capturing a man, and stops at nothing, including stealing all his clothes and sending them off to be cleaned, to ensure her success. Anyone other than Grant (a James Bond character, for example) would not tolerate for a moment being ridiculed, dressed in a fluffy dressing gown, or falling in a lake, or being sent to jail. But although Grant is repeatedly exasperated, for the purpose of the continuing laugh, he has to go along with the lunacy. Nonetheless, it leaves a bad taste. Consider one (imaginary) reel after the end of the film, when the two are married. Hepburn has shown herself to be irresponsible (for example, a wildly dangerous driver, crashing cars repeatedly, and stealing cars without concern). This is not the sort of person you would want to marry.

This is where Grant’s character is so perfect. He is the perfect male sex symbol: tall, handsome, not a hair out of place, impeccably dressed. When a man has such incredible assets, the viewers don’t want to see too much perfection. They want to see his perfection jolted, which is why he is so often in drag, or having pratfalls, and looking ridiculous: because we all know that within a few minutes he can return to being a sex god. He has the looks that we will never have, but he’s not insufferable, and able to take a joke.

One reason for the zany, surreal air of the film was, as noticed by director Howard Hawks, “there were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball and since that time I learned my lesson.” Certainly the staggering achievement of the carefully choreographed jail scene, where at various moments Grant is inside or outside his cell without anyone (including himself) noticing, is one of the funniest moments in all cinema. Without the Will Hay-like character of Constable Slocum, that scene would have fallen flat. It’s not surprising the scene took several days to film. So inured are we to the frantic action, that by the final scene, where Hepburn destroys an entire dinosaur skeleton and is held around fifteen feet up in the air by just one arm, we take it for granted, instead of being frightened.

One other aspect of the film struck me, something that is common to much Hollywood of the thirties (and later). The emphasis by Hollywood on popular entertainment is very visible here. Although Grant is a scientist, his knowledge is  mocked and he shows no ability to deal with a leopard. Even his job, palaeontologist, is mistaken by Hepburn, who calls him a “zoologist” – as if Hepburn establishes a line in the sand above which cleverness should not go. Her cleverness is all directed at getting her man, which (in populist terms) is an OK goal. Completing a dinosaur skeleton is something quirky and not really an accomplishment. Throughout the film, the populist tone is reinforced. If, like Hepburn, you are brazen enough in your actions, like stealing a car, you can get away with it without sanction. Laws are for idiots, Hepburn seems to say; if you exist on another plane, like (for example, Elon Musk) then everyday rules can be ignored. This disturbing background didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the film, but I noted afterwards that the anarchy in the film is a rather right-wing, society-accepting anarchy. You can be wild, but you want to conform with the rich around you, and to be one of them. Your anarchy is not, in the end, revolutionary.

But let’s not get too serious. How many films could have lines like this. When Huxley finds out his precious dinosaur bone is missing, he complains:

• David Huxley: It took three expeditions and five years to find that one!
• Susan Vance: David, now that they know where to find one, couldn't you send them back to get another one?