Guns & Ammo:Matthew Barney's Redoubt.

Hunting! Shooting! Fishing! Proper macho pursuits for real men. Real men with big beards, big stomachs, and big coats. Real men like the American artist, photographer, and film and video director Matthew Barney whose Redoubt exhibition is currently on at London's Hayward Gallery. It's an exhibition you need to devote a lot of time to (its centrepiece film is 134 minutes long) and that is time, to be quite honest, you can't get back.

 Sawtooth Battery (2019) 

It's not so much that it's bad (it's not, the film is beautifully shot and some of the works are made with the utmost craftsmanship and intricate detail) so much as it all seems a bit pointless. We're told Barney is addressing cosmology, ecology, frontier mythology, the cultural significance of wearing camouflage, and a time in the 1990s when the reintroduction of wolves to rural Idaho (where San Francisco born Barney grew up) led to a bitter dispute between ecologists who supported this government initiative and the hunters and landowners who opposed it.

The word 'redoubt', a type of defensive military fortification, has of late become associated with the American survivalist movement and if you think they're all a load of conspiracy theory addicted crackpots and gun nuts, Barney is here to tell you you're wrong. But how convincing are his denials?

Cosmic Hunt (2020)

Disappointingly, not very. The two hour plus film looks very impressive. Lots of horses riding through awesome snowscapes and long slow scenes of naive artists at work but, my, it drags. My ticket was for late afternoon so it was impossible to watch it all and see the rest of the show. Even so, after a reasonably decent shift I feel I got the rough idea and continued on to look a collection of Barney's wooden militaristic sculptures (some using 3D printing techniques to, supposedly, recreate the fur of a wolf pelt) and, in stark contrast, delicately etched electroplated copper plates.

Some with names like Cosmic Hunt:Kyrtpek Artemis, ATACS Virgin, and Tactical Baroque (which at least impressed The Fall fan in me) and others with far more basic names like Slug or Diana. As the goddess of the hunt in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Diana features quite heavily - and so does Actaeon, the hunter who discovers her bathing naked in the woods and as punishment is transformed into a stag and hunted down.

Redoubt (2018)

Diana:State two (2018)

In the film, Diana is played by real life 'sharpshooter' Anette Wachter and the mysterious Engraver, a ranger for the US Forest Service, is played by Barney himself. There are dancers and wild animals (in their natural environment, we're informed, and not treated cruelly) as well and no doubt in Barney's mind this all made some very deep and meaningful points but all it seemed to say to me was that the natural world is fantastic (which I would wholeheartedly agree with), that it is dangerous (can't argue with that one), and that shooting animals is cool (yep, lost me there).

I actually enjoyed the outdoor sculpture Sawtooth Battery (cast in metal from a burned lodgepole pine tree in Idaho) but not because it included a snare to trap animals or because its brass base was inspired by the heavy weaponry of World War I. More because it was big, it was outdoors, and you could see the London Eye and the Royal Festival Hall behind it.

Slug (2018)

Diana (2018)

Cougar in Bearing Tree:State five (2018)

The rest of the exhibits upstairs in the Hayward were just that really. Exhibits. Oh look, there's Diana with her roots showing, there's something called Cougar in Bearing that's an unusual shape - I wonder what that means, here's another exhibit called Redbout that has doors that open and looks a bit different to the others, and there's one called Diana on Shooting Bench that looks a little bit like something Joseph Beuys might have made. 

Beuys displayed himself in a cage with a wolf (okay, a coyote then) once so perhaps he was an inspiration for Barney. That alone made it one of the more interesting articles on show. Most of the rest of it, though impressively made, had little impression on me. I felt little. I wasn't moved, I wasn't angered, and my interest was rarely piqued. Maybe I'm becoming a cynical old git but the Hayward Gallery is a huge and important arts space in London and I feel there are so many more interesting ways that it could be used than as a theatre to indulge Matthew Barney living out his Rambo wank fantasies.

Redoubt (2018)

Diana on Shooting Bench (2018)

 

 

 

 

Kakistocracy XIX:Yacht Rock.

"We are Britain and we have one dream. To unite all people in one great dream. Our nation survived through many storms and many wars. We've opened our doors and widened our island's shores" - One Britain One Nation.

Leaving aside that the lyrics aren't even true (we haven't opened our doors and we haven't widened our island's shores - quite the opposite), One Britain One Nation - the song that Tory politicians hoped all school children could sing to celebrate OBON Day (a made up celebration) even though Scottish kids had broken up for the summer holiday's - is a clearly terrible idea.

We've already got a (terrible) national anthem. We don't need another one - and we certainly don't want to pressgang children into singing it like North Korea or something. Former West Yorkshire police inspector Kash Singh who wrote the song seems to have had good intentions but the fact it was backed by Gavin Williamson, Brandon Lewis, and Lord Tebbit should be enough to tell you what an utterly shit idea it was.

Kids would be better off singing the Funky Chicken at school - at least they'd enjoy it. The government seem to genuinely think people love them so much they will sing songs about how good the country, and - by implication - the government of that country, is. The government of bullies, serial philanderers, liars, cronies, and incompetents.

Obviously, like everything they do, the reason Singh's idea was taken on was because it was divisive. While some, quite reasonably, stated that it reminded them of Nazi or Soviet propaganda, Williamson said that it was "amazing" and that it was "incredibly important" that schools took part. A rare occasion in which the Education Secretary took time out to think about schools.

Instead of properly funding the NHS, or giving doctors a nurses a long overdue and deserved pay rise, or helping kids in poverty whose education has suffered during the pandemic, what have the government proposed spending taxpayers' money on?

A yacht. A fucking yacht. In 2003, after England had paraded the Rugby world cup they'd just won around central London, me and my friends Billy and Andy were having a pint in The Toucan bar in Soho when a man sidled up to me as if he recognised me. "Do you yacht" was his opening gambit? To which I replied "no" forgetting to add "because I'm not a cunt". The keen, and refreshed, yachtsman returned to his friends and launched into a medley of racist songs about people from Pakistan.

That's the kind of person that likes yachting and so it's no surprise to find that Boris Johnson too is a fan. His suggestion was that we could buy a massive yacht, call it Prince Philip, and float it around the world. To what purpose it is unspecified. I can only assume to prove to everyone we're a complete bunch of cocks with a very muddled sense of priorities.

Even The Queen wasn't having it. Other divisive ideas Johnson has stoked up to keep himself and his party in power have been suggesting making Dido Harding, who presided over the test and trace debacle - according to Polly Toynbee "the most notorious public administration disaster in living memory", head of the NHS and refusing to condemn those that boo England players for taking the knee. Priti Patel went further on this until Johnson backtracked. But not until he'd used it to cause a bit more division.

He's also refused to even allow a vote about lowering the amount of money given in international aid (something that even Tories like Teresa May and David Davis - DAVID DAVIS - consider to be both cruel and ruinous to Britain's global reputation). He's also floated the idea of letting the 'UEFA family' (for which read a bunch of freeloaders) fly into Wembley, without having to isolate, to watch the final of the Euros under threat of UEFA who have hinted they could move it to Budapest (despite Hungary having the second highest Covid death rate in the world, stadiums there are packed).

But all of this has, of course, been overshadowed by what Matt Hancock has been doing with his cock and who with. The man who has been telling us all not to hug our grannies or visit our friends, it turns out, has been shagging his aide Gina Coladangelo all along. As well as paying her with taxpayers' money, appointing her without due process, and lying about it all along.

Boris Johnson, of course, refused to sack him (the only thing Johnson will sack you for is competence or disloyalty - which in a Johnson administration are almost the same thing) but Hancock fell on his (pork) sword and has now gone (though remains an MP - much to many of his constituents' disgust). Replaced by Sajid Javid which is actually not as bad as it could be or as I feared.

Though still not great. But Hancock's resignation, necessary though it was, doesn't address a much deeper problem. Why did he not go for presiding over one of the world's worst Covid results, for moving Covid patients in to care homes and then lying about 'protective rings', for giving contracts to his mates down the pub, or for the many many other lies he told the country. Why did Boris Johnson not sack him?

Clearly, Boris 'let the bodies pile high in their thousands' Johnson doesn't give a fuck about public health and never has done. The new Tory technique, a Johnsonian classic, is to call anyone who points out governmental errors 'Captain Hindsight'. Even though the people they are calling this have, in most cases, made these points before but were shouted down by Johnson and his boorish chums.

Boris Johnson is on record as calling Hancock "totally fucking hopeless" so why keep him in position as Health Secretary during the most serious health crisis in a generation? Some would say incompetence, some would say because Boris Johnson is cruel and/or vain but the smart money says it's all three.

John Bercow, the former Speaker and Tory MP, clearly thinks so. A fortnight ago he crossed the floor to join the Labour party and left with a withering attack on Johnson who he called a "lousy governor" who presided over a party that have become "reactionary, populist, nationalistic and sometimes even xenophobic".

What took you so long, John? There is hope, elsewhere, too. The voters of Chesham and Amersham rejected Johnsonism in shocking numbers. I think the media considered the odds of a Tory victory so likely the story was barely covered but Sarah Green of the Liberal Democrats took 56% of the vote (the Libs took just 26% in 2019) and the Tory candidate Peter Fleet only 35% (down from 55% for Cheryl Gillan in the 2019 election). 

It shows how many people are sick of Boris Johnson's lies, incompetence, hypocrisy, divisiness, and cronyism, his endless culture wars, and his constant pandering to the basest of some of his voter's desires. As the Tories, bizarrely, continue to knock down the red wall, it seems the blue wall of the home counties is in danger of falling too. A progressive alliance between Labour, the Liberals, and the Green Party would be the best way to ensure this but I just can't see Labour, sadly, getting on board with that.

I cling to these positives as surely as I cling to the hope that the pandemic is, if not ending, at least abating. The postponing of lockdown easing makes sense bearing in mind the spread of the delta variant (previously called the Indian variant and, to some, known as the Johnson variant as he did so much to help spread it by not putting India on the red list until way too late) but, so far, though cases are rising rapidly, hospitalisations and deaths are not on the same scale, or anywhere near it, as they were over the winter period or at the start of the pandemic.

Caution makes sense but steps must be taken to come out of this. It's a difficult balance and unity will help us more than division. The government only have division so you can be sure they will make things worse but in the rest of my life, at least most of it, there is unity, there is friendship, and there is even joy.

It's been twenty-six days since I last wrote one of these Kakistocracy blogs and in that time I've been surprisingly busy. I've chatted on the phone to Mum, Dad, Vicki, Michelle, and Adam and I bumped into my friends Gareth and Bec and their new, and tiny, baby Etienne. I've watched England v Croatia in The Roebuck in Hampstead with Ian, Mike, Chris, and Sanda (to say some of us got more drunk than others would be a massive understatement) and England v the Czech Republic with Ian and Mike in The Priory Tavern in Kilburn.

Other than football I've watched The Pursuit of Love, and attended Skeptics in the Pub - Online talks about babies and the meaning of life (much better than it sounds, honest), evolutionary pscyhology, bad medicine, and cancer as well as a slightly disappointing London Fortean Society talk about twins. I've physically visited exhibitions by Jean Dubuffet, Charlotte Perriand, Ellen Gallgher, John Akomfrah, and Matthew Barney and, best of all, the walks have continued.

TADS finally kicked off their 2021 season with a walk from Rye to Camber Sands and last weekend we took a lengthy wander along the Wandle. This Saturday we're off to Canvey Island and I can't wait. Next month we're finishing off the Capital Ring and I'm off on holiday to Wales where I will see my god-daughter Evie for the first time since February last year. I can't wait for that either. One other thing I can't wait for, though, is for Boris Johnson to join Matt Hancock and fuck off.

Do I yacht? What do you think?

Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller:Ellen Gallagher @ Hauser & Wirth.

Waves, tadpoles, ripples, dapples, and even what appears to be an octopus unfurling a curious tentacle. There can be no doubt, and the title confirms it, that Ellen Gallagher's 'Ecstatic Draught of Fishes' at the Hauser & Wirth gallery on Savile Row in Mayfair has what can only be described as an aquatic theme.

Despite, however, the washy sun soaked colours that Gallagher uses, the seas she paints are not tranquil ones. Like fellow African-American artist Kara Walker and the Detroit techno outfit Drexciya, Gallagher's work has a retrofuturistic aesthetic that remains, at all times, political. Elliptically political for sure - but political all the same.

Watery Ecstatic (2021) 

Inspired by three historical artworks about slavery (Peter Paul Rubens' 'The Miraculous Draught of Fishes', Gericault's 'The Raft of the Medusa', and Turner's 'Slave Ship'), Gallagher has worked up her own language of signs and signifiers to tell stories about the history of slavery and colonialism. A subject that, despite the BLM protests last year and the throwing of a statue of mass murderer Edward Colston into the harbour at Bristol, many Western societies are fearful of addressing.

That, I think, is because the scale of injustice is almost too horrific to contemplate. Some live in denial, some live in ignorance, and some, sadly, still cling on to the racist beliefs that allowed these crimes against humanity to happen. That is a textbook example of white privilege. You can be white and consider these crimes - but it's very easy not to. To be black is to be unable, without great difficulty, to ignore them.

Paradise Shift (2020)

Ecstatic Draught of Fishes (2021)

Ecstatic Draught of Fishes (2020)

Of course, a few paintings in a Mayfair gallery doesn't even begin to address this but small conversations grow into larger ones and the art world, as with the music and film world, has a role to play as surely as the worlds of politics and religion do in trying to understand what happened, why it happened and to make sure it can never happen again as well as realising that these events have affected how we, everyone, looks at race.

To return to Drexciya. They proposed an alternative history, or future, set in a submarine realm populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women who had been thrown off slave ships during the centuries long Middle Passage slave trade. Surviving beneath the waves long enough to give birth, their offspring adapted gills and proliferated as unidentified floating objects (UFOs).

It's a science fiction that, like all the best science fiction, is inspired by real life events. Gallagher's personal cosmology is full of floating sperms, proud African warrior princess heads, and unknowable deep sea creatures. She tries to make a dream out of a nightmare. That is the privilege of the artist and it is to the betterment of all of us that artists are able to ponder dark thoughts in ways that enlighten us. 

When I visited Ellen Gallagher's small exhibition at Tate Modern back in 2019 the message behind her work only really sunk in when I began to write about it afterwards. That left me hoping for a larger show, perhaps a full career retrospective, in one of London's larger galleries (the RA or the Hayward would do nicely). Ecstatic Draught of Fishes, which was even smaller than the Tate show, was not that exhibition but it did, prismatically and gradually, reveal another side to Gallagher's work. To view an object through water is to see it slightly obscured. The same is true of history, not least the history of colonialism. So perhaps it is highly appropriate that Ellen Gallagher's art also has this effect.

Watery Ecstatic (2021)

 

Where Partridges Dare:This Time with Alan Partridge S2.

"The letterbox is at the bottom of his door which is where some people have them - I DON'T KNOW WHY" - Alan Partridge

The second season of This Time with Alan Partridge (BBC1/iPlayer) was, in many ways, much like the first one. The premise was the same, the humour was the same - a mix of hit and miss but more hit than miss, and the storylines, as ever, were merely vehicles for the monstrous and yet ever fascinating Partridge (Steve Coogan of course) character to riff over.

Partridge is once again presenting lightweight teatime television show This Time with his co-host Jennie Gresham (Susannah Fielding) and, once again, he's jealous of her being paid more than him, being more popular than him, and, in his perception, hogging the limelight from him. Not least when her partner Sam Chatwin (Simon Farnaby) proposes to her live on air.

Partridge is, of course, a mess of anxieties, prejudices, insecurities, and biases but, crucially, he knows that to operate in the modern world he needs to at least to try to cover these up. Which, far more than his loud ties and colourful socks, gives the show much of its humour. A brief Jimmy Savile impersonation is immediately regretted yet a joke about Kirstie Allsopp's bridesmaids probably being called Fizz, Bubbly, Bolly, and Champers just about passes muster.

It's this straddling of the modern world and the old, phallocentric, one that Coogan does so well when, as he so often is, he's being Partridge. His comparisons are crude ("the equivalent of driving from London to Aberdeen with a permanent erection", describing a cocktail as "fizzy soup"), insulting (he tells the chief monk of a monastery that they only bang tambourines to confuse people into believing in God and asks mixologist Rosie Witter (Rosie Cavaliero) if her top is from M&S and if she bought it especially to go on the show), and patronising ("nosh is cockney for meal").

But they're also tinged, or daubed, with surreal and delusional touches. An awkward interview with the manager of a prison is interrupted by a boy looking through a spy hole in the door ("it's a boy's eye" - shrieks a distressed Partridge) and Alan boasts of staying up all night watching a complete box set of Judge John Deed. His reference points are scattered and hilarious. Clare Balding, Lewis Hamilton, Jenga, It's a Knockout, Pan's People, Michael Gove, Grant Shapps, and Ann Widdecombe. You just know the inner Alan is bursting to say more about them and that it might not always be an opinion that fits with the zeitgeist.

His awkwardness is key and comes through even in the strange way he says the word "bike" when predicting soon that we'll be able to swap said item for an hour of silence and his interview with a man who claims to have met Princess Diana and that she had used the terms "cheers, pet" and "aye" during their brief conversation in a northern leisure centre.

In series two, Partridge gets to visit a monastery as well as a borstal, pretend to be a murderer called Nero Costa, read a poem about the history of the BBC from the roof of Broadcasting House, dance to a steel band, hang out with the SAS in Herefordshire, go undercover on a chemsex expose, and, in a piece that was supposed to be celebrating the unsung achievements of female pilots in the war, fly a Spitfire over Beachy Head and Seven Sisters.

When the 'action' (if you can call it that) veers too close to slapstick or physical comedy (at one point, Alan has gone deaf after getting water in his ears diving into a pool) it falls flat and the passive aggressive exchanges with Ruth Duggan (Lolly Adefope) get quite tired as the series moves on but his exchanges with feature presenter Simon Denton (Tim Key), and his long suffering aide Lynn (Felicity Montagu) bring occasional comedy gold and the flirting with the make up lady Tiff (Nastasia Demetriou) allows Partridge, or here - you suspect - Coogan, to show there's life in the ol' dog yet.

The guest stars work pretty well on the whole. There's John Thomson as former drunken ventriloquist, now cleaned up, Joe Beasley, Tanya Moodie as therapist Izzy Barnes, and Nick Mohammed as Jennie's apologetic online troll Bhavit Sharma whose father, Partridge discovers, owns a car showroom and strikes a deal with. 

There's also former Dr Who Matt Smith as Guardian journalist Dan Milner who takes offence at the show's blandness and its premise/promise to deliver everything "from zebras to Zionism" and with "chit-chats about Kit Kats, chinwags about binbags, and natters about matters". Lynn's getting a new hip (PVC, not titanium - although that's good enough for her according to Alan), the theme tune has been remixed to Partridge's chagrin, and Alan fulfils a life long dream of meeting HRH Princess Anne with predictably obsequious, and catastrophic, results.

But that's all there really is terms of a plot and that's fine. Alan Partridge is, and always has been, a character study in one man's vanity, vulnerability, and into his delusions and his sense of somehow not quite fitting in with this, or indeed any, world. Coogan plays him to perfection and though this vehicle is far from the sleekest Partridge has ever driven, the character is now so foolproof, and yet so multi-faceted, he cannot really fail. As long as Partridge messes up, Coogan succeeds. But it would be good to see Partridge out of his comfort zone, properly, next time round.

Blasphemous Tumours.

Just over two years ago, one of my oldest and closest friends, Bugsy, died. Of cancer. He wasn't the first person I know to succumb to this disease and I seriously doubt he'll be the last. But it was a painful time for him, his girlfriend, his son, his family, and his friends. Made bearable by the love and support everyone provided for each other and for the humour and kindness Bugsy demonstrated from his hospital bed. 

I can only hope the lame Depeche Mode pun I've made to use as a title for this blog would find favour with him but I expect he'd have suggested something much darker and funnier. I imagine that a lot of people who have lost somebody close to them to cancer would not want to spend an evening listening to a talk on the subject but, for me, the talk was more pertinent than ever. It can't save Bugsy, nothing can, but I truly believe that it is important for even lay people like myself to take an interest in medical developments and Skeptics in the Pub - Online, among many other things, provide quite a handy service for this.

Speaker Dr Alice Howarth (a researcher who has worked in the Institute of Translational Medicine at the University of Liverpool) was an ideal speaker for Skeptics. Despite some very confusing graphics, she was knowledgeable, articulate, and enthusiastic and, at all times, kept in mind that this was not an academic audience but one, for the most part, consisting of keen hobbyists as well as, just possibly, people who are close to those suffering with cancer.

Cancer Cures - Are We Nearly There Yet? was, however, a bit of a misnomer for the talk as it didn't, and couldn't, really answer that question. Dr Howarth has spent years working in, and putting a Phd together about, cancer research and she said that whenever she told someone, taxi drivers, people at parties, what she did for a living the first question was pretty much always "do we nearly have a cure"?

It's not, you won't be surprised to read, that easy a question to answer. Cancer is a very very complicated disease and Dr Howarth thought it would be instructive, and indeed it was, to give us a dummies guide as to what cancer actually is. I for one would find it hard to explain precisely so I was very grateful for this. As one in two people born after 1960 will contract cancer at one point in their life (higher probability for males and a statistic that has continued to rise over the last century) it seems it would be a good idea to understand more about this dreadful disease.

Humans are made of organs and organs are made of cells. Lung cells, liver cells, muscle cells, skin cells etc; etc; Each of us has about 37.2 trillion cells in our body (to give you an idea of how ludicrously large that number is here it is written in full - 37,200,000,000,000, that's five thousand times higher a number than there are people on planet Earth). I say 'about' because elsewhere the figure is given as fifteen billion and forty seven billion. 

Either way, there's A LOT of cells in our bodies and each cell, typically - there are a few exceptions, has a membrane on the outside, a nucleus in the middle where the DNA lives, as well as other parts with names like lysosome and mitochondria that do various jobs. These cells need to communicate with each other and tell each other where they are so that they can work and so that our bodies can work.

They also need to know how to die and when to die. If they did not we would develop, among other things, webbed fingers and webbed feet. The communication the cells use is encoded in genes from our DNA (the human genome code) and, for most of us - most of the time, these cells work together and do their job with minimum fuss.

Cancer, put as simply as possible, is what happens when cells start misbehaving. When they get out of control, grow too big, start to appear where they are not supposed to, or refuse to die when they should. Cancer cells are, essentially - without treatment, immortal. 

Because we have so many cells - we have so many cancers. Admittedly that number is not in the trillions but it is above one hundred and much of the confusion about cancer comes from lumping them all in together. Different cancers have wildly different survival rates. Rates that cover almost the entire spectrum. With some cancers there is a 98% chance you will survive it (testicular cancer, apparently, has a good survival rate as it's relatively easy, though hardly pleasant, to lop a bollock off) and with others the survival rate is as low as just 1%.

Depressingly low. On average, and leaving specifics aside, if you get a cancer diagnosis in the UK there is about a fifty per cent chance you will survive for at least ten years. That is good - but nowhere near good enough - and it certainly wasn't good enough for my friend Bugsy or, before him, other friends like Kelly and Warren.

The section on how we treat cancer did involve some quite complicated science stuff that I must admit I didn't fully understand but generally the treatment can be split into two categories. There is general anti-cancer treatment (using drugs, surgery, and radiation to kill everything that looks like cancer - blunt, painful but sometimes effective) and there are specific anti-cancer treatments like immunotherapy, as well as other drugs, that are more fine tuned to specific mutations.

There are also, at the moment, interesting and ongoing developments that are looking in to how the Zika virus might be able to be used to kill cancer cells. Of course, the danger with this is making sure that the Zika virus can be introduced to human bodies without causing any harm in the first place.

 

Watch this space. While the talk necessarily failed to come up with a cure for cancer, you would have heard about it if that had happened - I feel fairly confident, it was perhaps at its best when Dr Howarth donned her Skeptical cap and launched into some of the dangerous pseudoscience that surrounds cancer. 

When it comes to diet it IS good to eat brown bread, brown rice, rolled oats, beans, lentils, and chickpeas and it is inadvisable to consume too much red or processed meat or drink too many sugary drinks but the reporting of this as a factor in people contracting cancer has been widely exaggerated and mostly inaccurate.

Bad diet can be a factor in contracting cancer but smoking is still far far worse. Comparisons are not even close. Stopping smoking and improving your diet can help (help - there are, sadly, no guarantees with cancer) prevent cancer but those actions can't cure it. Another thing that most definitely cannot cure cancer is Gerson therapy.

Named for the German born American physician Max Gerson, this quack remedy proposes that those with cancer should, every hour on the hour, consume raw juice and have five coffee enemas per day. It's ineffective, it's dangerous, and it's very expensive. A two week stay in a Gerson clinic will set you back £7,000, you are expected to buy a Gerson approved juicer for £1,600 as well as spend over £650 on supplements and £700 per month on organic food for a period of at least two and a half, and often a lot longer, years.

There are other expenses too. Which is very nice for those who make money out of this stuff but not so good for people being fleeced and subjecting themselves to multiple coffee enemas which can cause constipation, infections, and, in some cases, can kill you.

Patrick Vickers from the Northern Baja Gerson Center in Mexico, and just forty minutes from San Diego, is a chiropractor and thus is not qualified to provide cancer treatment. But that doesn't stop him. He claims that not only can signing up for Gerson cure cancer but that it can cure 'virtually' every other disease known to man too.

How convenient! He claims the science is "perfect" and "indisputable" and he has encouraged people, let's not call them patients when dupes or gulls are more fitting words, who seek his help to distrust advice from their family, friends, and from medical professionals. When Dr Howarth went to see him speak in Liverpool she witnessed him telling people with cancer, directly, to stop all conventional treatment.

According to Vickers, and those involved in Gerson, those that do die of cancer when undergoing this 'therapy' have failed. It is not, it never is - is it?, the fault of the quacks or their supposed therapy but the fault of the sick people they are supposed to be helping because they have not, or have been unable to, meet the hourly raw juice and five coffee enemas per day target.

Admirably, when Patrick Vickers booked future lectures in the UK, Dr Howarth and others raised the alarm and had them cancelled. She believes it is too late for the people she saw in Liverpool, some she is certain will already have died because of this dangerous advice, but this is why it is important to raise the alarm when we see people falling for, and into, quackery.

We should have learned that during the pandemic but it seems we have not. All of this is, devastatingly, too late to save my friend but people like Dr Alice Howarth and the good work they do will, undoubtedly, go on to save many lives as surely as Patrick Vickers makes money ending and destroying lives.

I could never have logged on to this talk and expect to come away feeling good about cancer. That's not possible. But I did come away feeling good, as so often, about Skeptics in the Pub - Online and about people like Dr Alice Howarth who are out there trying to make the world a better, and safer, place for everyone. I also truly believe there are more people like her out there than we sometimes like to imagine. The world is not such a bad place. That's why we want to stay alive and that's why we want our friends and family to stay alive.

The Terrible Twins? Gods and Monsters in the Sign of Gemini.

Jacob and Esau, the Olsen sisters, Jedward, Tegan and Sara, Ronnie and Reggie Kray, Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National, and Gayle and Gillian Blakeney who played the Alessi sisters in Neighbours. All twins. As are many of my friends' children - Isaac, Joe, Grace, Izzie, Peter, and Poppy. That's three separate pairs of twins, by the way - not sextuplets.

That's a lot of twins and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Twins, it seems, are all around us but, it also seems, very little thought has really gone into what that means - if anything! For the twins' relationship to each other - but also to how they relate to everyone else in the world via the prism of their twindom - or, in fact, if they do. For many, surely all, twins being a twin is merely a fact of life. To ask one what it's like being a twin is the same as a twin asking you what it's like not being one.

You don't know. Because you never have been one and never will. Twins have never not been twins. So, in a way, it's quite a tricky thing to get a grip on and, just maybe, that's why last night's online (though a small number were in residence at Conway Hall for the first time since the pandemic began) London Fortean Society talk, Twins - Superstitions and Marvels, Fantasies and Experiments with William Viney (a researcher in the Department of Anthropology of Goldsmiths in London), was slightly unsatisfying and more than a little piecemeal.

The tech gremlins that bedevilled the talk (and my attendance of it - thanks to both Adam and Scott for sorting that out) didn't help and seemed to knock Viney's confidence a bit but, more than that, the talk lacked any sense of over reaching narrative, any real thrust or, even, point. It was merely a clever man stood behind a laptop reading out, rather academically, some observations he'd made about twins over his career.

They weren't all dull (how could a drawing of a woman pregnant with twenty-eight foetuses or a callback to an ancient belief that the sexual desire of women was so powerful its only equal was the libido of a horse be so?) but they did rather lack coherent structure. Much, I suppose, like life itself. When I finally joined the talk, Viney was talking about the sense of uncertainty ("so - which one are you?") which comes as part and parcel of the twin experience but he soon moved on to how twins can exploit their similarities and cited examples of twins travelling on each other's passports and getting up to all kinds of other mischievous shenanigans by fooling people into thinking they were each other.

There was even suggestions of sleeping with each other's partners but that was a subject touched on rather than explored. Perhaps for the best considering how many twins were in the audience. The truth of the matter, though, was that many twins don't find the experience to be at all magical. Or at least no more magical than anyone else's life. For many twins, being a twin is simply a fact, even a mundane fact, of their existence.

So, already Viney's speech was in trouble. As his intended mission, to consider twins as a 'category' and to suggest theories that provoke conversations, was a little doomed from the start. In times gone by, he may have had more joy. Twins in myth have often been used to tell stories about the past (or the present) and to provide some kind of moral framework for the future. In Greek mythology, Castor and Pollux - who somehow manage to be both celestial in spirit AND some kind of horsemen - provide some supposedly useful information about the stars, the moon, and the sun but such was the fragmented nature of the talk I couldn't work out what exactly.

I gathered they'd been mentioned as early as the 8th century BC in the works of Homer (before they were even Gods, although they were 'intrepid' at the time) and that they were unusual twins in that they had different fathers though the same mother - Leda. The Spartan queen.

One of their fathers was more unusual than the other, it's fair to say. While Castor was produced from Leda's union with her husband, the king Tyndareus, Pollux was the result of Leda being raped by a swan. Not just any old common or garden swan rapist either. But Zeus, the king of the Gods of Mount Olympus. Zeus apologists would have it that he seduced Leda rather than raped her but I would contend that disguising yourself as a large and graceful aquatic bird to gain sexual favours is duplicitous at best. 

Perhaps this is why twins were held in such low esteem in ancient Greece. Even celebrated thinkers like Aristotle considered twins to be 'monstrosities' while others, in the old times, held twins to be 'abnormal', 'deformed', and, this one stings, 'human kinds made by physical excess'.

Moving forward to the medieval period in Europe and our knowledge of science was equally unenlightened. Twins were seen as signs of adultery, disease, and general poor health and women who gave birth to twins were deemed to be having too much sex - and with too many people. Sometimes at the same time.

The social stigma - and, one imagines, the financial burden - of having twins was such that many twins, either both or one of them, were simply abandoned. Fortunately, modern medicine means giving birth to twins is no longer anywhere near as dangerous and, in fact, in the last decade birth rates for twins have nearly doubled both in the UK and the US.

It wasn't that long ago, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, that twins were still seen as an anomaly. Something funny, creepy, or even dangerous. Take a look at a list of films that feature twins and disagree. There's The Shining, Dead Ringers, The Boys From Brazil (featuring Gregory Peck as the famous twin 'fan' and Nazi Dr Josef Mengele), Star Wars, and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as unlikely twins in, er, Twins.

These days we're not being told to be scared of twins, to laugh at them, or to worry about them getting it on. There are 'twinfluencers' on Instagram and TikTok and Viney listed a few of them. I'd not heard of any of them (I am far too old for TikTok and it looks shit anyway) but apparently the Dolan Twins, Ethan and Grayson from New Jersey, have ten and a half million followers on YouTube.

Doing what it is unclear. While this was interesting enough it didn't really tell me anything about twins. There are loads of people doing boring and moronic things on YouTube and Instagram and making lots of money from it, unwrapping presents anyone?, commentating on old music videos?, and the Dolan Twins don't seem any different to them except there's two of them.

I wasn't really sure how this was even relevant to the subject in anything but the most tangential way. Far more interesting was a rather touching film we were treated to at the end in which various twins, sometimes both of them, sometimes just one, spoke about what it's like to be a twin. While some stories were profoundly moving (death, claustrophobia, the myth of 'twintuition', and a sense of abandonment featured but a general sense of sibling affection shone through clearly) and others were quite amusing (one set of twins claimed they couldn't be more different, one liked pasta, the other lasagna) the most pertinent piece was perhaps the twins who railed against being allocated roles (good twin, bad twin, handsome twin, ugly win, clever twin, stupid twin) at an early age.

That's because, like everyone else, twins contains multitudes and concepts of good and bad, ugly and handsome, clever and stupid are neither binary nor are they fixed in the mind of even individual observers let alone wider society as a whole. My guess, and it's an uneducated one but I think I'm on to to something with it, is that's because twins and their experiences, ultimately, are just as unique as the rest of us. Double trouble? Don't wish that on them. Life's tough enough as it is.