'the outside of the club, indecently exposed by the rising sun'

(First performed 29th February 2010 at Jewish Book Week / JCC Writers’ Football Literary Event, London)

The first panel. The picture is drawn from a bird’s eye perspective, looking down upon cramped rooftops beginning to bake. Cables and wires stretch from one side of the road to another, and in the background are Bauhaus-style apartment blocks jutting with cuboids. The caption reads: ‘November 2008. Tel Aviv, 4am. The sun rises on a city still silent with sleep’.

In the next panel, the caption reads: ‘but downtown, on Carlebach Street, in a club called the Cat and Dog, the party is in full swing’. The picture depicts a scattered crowd of dancers in a darkened room, spotted with blue and pink lights.

The third panel.  The caption reads: ‘In the centre of the dancefloor can be seen members of the England writers’ football team. They are celebrating another dismal international defeat’. In the picture are caricatures of said footballers. There is Philip Oltermann dancing like C3PO powered by Vorsprung durch Technik. There is Marcus Du Sautoy with cartoon mathematician’s hair and a plastercast on his wrist. Jeremy Gavron is there, looking worried. Graham is grooving. And so on. At the bottom of the panel is another caption, almost an afterthought. It reads: ‘the defeat really was dismal’.

The fourth panel. Finally I am in it, though you probably wouldn’t recognize me as I have never been able to draw myself. I’m looking rather the worse for wear. A string of bubbles is rising from the crown of my head, which is comic-book shorthand for intoxication. I am talking to Jakob, Conrad and Graham, all of whom have rather red noses (an emblem of inebriation since Asterix). A speech-bubble is floating from my mouth. It says in wavy letters, ‘I’m heading back. I’m done in’. Graham’s expression is incredulous. His speech-bubble responds, ‘What? Not another drink?’ Jakob is saying, ‘this beer is expensive. I’ll come with you’.

The next panel portrays the outside of the club, indecently exposed by the rising sun. We are huddled around a taxi and I am haggling, in pigeon Hebrew, with the taxi driver. My speech-bubble reads, ‘the Melody Hotel. How much?’ The taxi driver’s speech-bubble responds, ‘forty shekel’. I reply, ‘thirty-five?’ The taxi driver says, ‘forty shekel’. I say, ‘ok’.

In the next panel we are piling into the back of the taxi and a woman is emerging from the club, teetering on high heels, waving to us through the glare of dawn. Graham has a speech-bubble which says, ‘isn’t that the girl from the club?’ I have a black cloud of disgruntlement hovering above my head. My speech bubble says, ‘that girl had me buying her drinks all night. She has a famous father or something’.

In the next panel the girl is in the front seat of the cab, talking to the taxi driver as we drive away. She wants to be dropped off first. In the back, I am looking flushed and irritated. My speech-bubble says, ‘actually we agreed forty shekel, straight to our hotel. Another drop-off will cost extra’. In the next panel she is turning aggressively to face me. ‘You agreed a price?’ her speech-bubble reads, ‘in Israel? You’re getting ripped off. You’re a tourist. You’ve got to use the meter. It will be far cheaper’.

In the next panel I am bright red and grinding my teeth. Clearly, I am suppressing my anger; to demonstrate the reason for this, I have a thought-bubble coming from my head, containing the Union Jack. Graham is laughing, slightly cross-eyed. His speech-bubble reads, ‘Jake, you’re such a tourist! You’re such a tourist!’ Conrad is saying, ‘ok, use the meter. Yes, use the meter’. The taxi driver is saying, ‘you want I should use the meter?’

There follows several panels depicting the taxi’s journey through the streets of Tel Aviv. Mist parts to reveal the sun; a skeletal street-cat noses through old cigarette-butts; half-torn-down posters cling to fences. Around a lamp-post is taped a piece of paper with a hand-written advert in spidery Hebrew; the bottom of the page has been cut into a fringe, and on each strand a contact number has been written for interested parties to tear off.  A tired-looking soldier waits at a bus stop.

In the next panel, the taxi has halted under an exotic-looking tree. The girl is getting out of the cab and being offered a book from someone in the back seat. ‘Nice to meet you’, her speech-bubble reads. ‘Here, have a copy of my book’, says the anonymous benefactor. ‘I’ve signed it’.

The next panel has the taxi driving away. I can be seen sulking, saying ‘humph’. The other team members are sharing a joke.

The next panel shows the taxi pulling up outside our hotel. Then there is a large panel depicting the inside of the cab, the occupants frozen in animated discussion like a cartoon version of a Renaissance painting. Speech-bubbles are everywhere. I am yelling, ‘forty-three shekels? Forty-three shekels? The bitch ripped us off! We’re paying three shekels extra!’  The taxi driver is shrugging, ‘forty-three shekels is forty-three shekels. forty-three shekels is forty-three shekels. Graham is saying, ‘come on. Bollocks to it’. Jakob is saying, ‘yeah, forget it. Let’s go’.

In the final panel, we are walking askew into the hotel. There is an embarrassing contrast between the well-turned-out staff and our bedraggled selves. An Orthodox man is walking past in the foreground, on his way to morning prayers. The black cloud above my head is indelible. A thought-bubble is coming from my head. It says, ‘three shekels. Three shekels’. At the bottom of the panel is a concluding caption. It reads: ‘three shekels is about 50p’.

'I was determined to give as good as I got'

Denis Avey, even at the age of 91, cuts a formidable figure. More than 6ft tall, with a severe short back and sides and a piercing glare, he combines the pan-ache of Errol Flynn with the dignity of age. This is the former Desert Rat, who, in 1944, broke into — yes, into — Auschwitz, and he looks exactly as I expected. He removes his monocle for the camera, and one of his pupils slips sideways before realigning. It is a glass eye. I ask him about it. He tells me that in 1944, he cursed an SS officer who was beating a Jew in the camp. He received a blow with a pistol butt and his eye was knocked in.

If Avey’s story is difficult to believe, it is worth bearing in mind that it is not without precedent. In 1944, the British PoW Charlie Coward, a sergeant-major from the Royal Artillery who had attempted escape 14 times, infiltrated the camp dressed as a Jewish prisoner to gather intelligence from a British Jewish naval doctor interned there. After the war, Coward testified at the IG Farben trial in Nuremberg. His life story was made into a film The Password is Courage in 1962, starring Dirk Bogarde.

Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust authority, is in the final stages of researching aspects of Avey’s story with the intention of granting him the title of Righteous Among the Nations. “For obvious reasons this honour cannot be based on Avey’s word alone,” says Susan Weisberg, spokeswoman for Yad Vashem. “Each case must be substantiated by eyewitness testimonies and archival documents of the period.”

Avey, born in 1919 on an Essex farm, lived a rough-and-tumble lifestyle and grew into a daredevil. “I once jumped from a branch 45ft high, just for the thrill of it,” he says. “I had a shock of red hair and a temperament to match.”

He also had an affinity for the underdog. As head boy of his school, he used his physical strength to protect the weaker boys. “If there is one thing I’ve always abhorred it is bullying,” he says. “I could dish it out back then. Legislation wouldn’t let me now.”

These traits would serve him well at war. In 1939 he volunteered for the Army — because he was too impatient to wait a week for the RAF. “I ended up in the 7th Armoured Division, the original Desert Rats,” he says. “We operated behind enemy lines in Egypt. In 1942 we were ambushed. I was wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans.”

Avey was a troublesome prisoner. In the summer of 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz, in Poland, and interned in a small PoW camp on the periphery of the IG Farben factory. The main Jewish camps were several miles to the west. “I’d lost my liberty, but none of my spirit,” he says. “I was still determined to give as good as I got.”

But he knew immediately that this was a different order of prison. “The Stripeys — that’s what we called the Jewish prisoners — were in a terrible state. Within months they were reduced to waifs and then they disappeared. The stench from the crematoria was appalling, civilians from as far away as Katowice were complaining. Everybody knew what was going on. Everybody knew.”

Remarkably, Avey was able to think beyond the war. “I knew in my gut that these swine would eventually be held to account,” he says. “Evidence would be vital. Of course, sneaking into the Jewish camp was a ludicrous idea. It was like breaking into Hell. But that’s the sort of chap I was. Reckless.”

According to the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, Avey’s hunch was right. “Auschwitz would not become known as a place of extermination until the spring of 1944,” he says. “When the world found out, there was outrage. After the war, British war crimes investigators were desperate to find PoWs with information about the camps.”

Avey’s audacious plan was made possible by Ernst Lobethall, a German Jew from Breslau, who worked alongside Avey at the Farben factory. Although fraternising was forbidden on pain of death, the two men became friends. “We spoke out of the corner of our mouths,” Avey says, “a difficult thing to do in German.”

He discovered that Lobethall had a sister, Susana, living in England. “I wrote to my mother, who told Susana that Ernst was alive. She posted 200 cigarettes to me via the Red Cross. Miraculously, four months later, they arrived. The cigarettes were worth a king’s ransom. Ernst suddenly became rich.”

With the cigarettes, Lobethall was able to buy boots and scraps of food that would later save his life. He also used them as bribes to help Avey to gain entrance to the Jewish camp.

“Despite the danger, I knew I had to bear witness,” Avey says. “As Albert Einstein said: the world can be an evil place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing. I’ve never been one to do nothing.”

The operation was planned meticulously. Avey found a Dutch Jew with a similar physique and persuaded him to exchange places for a day. Avey knew that they marched past each other at the same time every week. “The Nazis were rigid, you see,” he says. “To them orders were orders, to be carried out exactly. That was what allowed me to find a way round them.”

Avey shaved his head and blackened his face. At the allocated time, he and the Dutch Jew sneaked into a disused shed. There they swapped uniforms and exchanged places. Avey affected a slouch and a cough, so that his English accent would be disguised should he be required to speak.

“I joined the Stripeys and marched into Monowitz, a predominantly Jewish camp. As we passed beneath the Arbeit Macht Frei [work makes you free] sign, everyone stood up straight and tried to look as healthy as they could. There was an SS officer there, weeding out the weaklings for the gas. Overhead was a gallows, which had a corpse hanging from it, as a deterrent. An orchestra was playing Wagner to accompany our march. It was chilling.”

They were herded through the camp, carrying the bodies of those who had died that day. “I saw the Frauenhaus — the Germans’ brothel of Jewish girls — and the infirmary, which sent its patients to the gas after two weeks. I committed everything to memory. We were lined up in the Appellplatz for a roll call, which lasted almost two hours. Then we were given some rotten cabbage soup and went to sleep in lice-infested bunks, three to a bed.”

The night was even worse than the daytime. “As it grew dark, the place was filled with howls and shrieks. Many people had lost their minds. It was a living hell. Everyone was clutching their wooden bowls under their heads, to stop them getting stolen.” Lobethall had bribed Avey’s bedfellows with cigarettes. “They gave me all the details,” he says, “the names of the SS, the gas chambers, the crematoria, everything. After that, they fell asleep. But I lay awake all night.”

In the morning, Avey joined other prisoners for a roll call, followed by “breakfast” — a husk of black bread with a scrape of fetid margarine. “It wasn’t enough to sustain life. Everything was designed to make you waste away.” They were formed into groups and marched out of the camp, again to the accompaniment of an orchestra.

“When we passed the shed again, I slipped in to meet the Dutch Jew,” he says. “That was hair raising. Although I trusted him, I couldn’t be sure that he’d turn up. And if an SS officer had looked in the wrong direction at the wrong time, that would have been it.”

The changeover went smoothly, and Avey returned to the PoW camp. “The Dutch Jew perished, but I’m certain that this short reprieve prolonged his life by several weeks,” he says. “Whether that was a good thing, I don’t know.”

In 1945, as the Soviet Army closed in, the Nazis abandoned the camp and herded 60,000 prisoners in the direction of Germany, in what would become known as one of Death Marches. Avey, who by then was suffering from tuberculosis, was among them. Around 15,000 prisoners died on the way. “The road was littered with corpses,” he says. “I saw a chance to escape and seized it.”

He found his way to Allied lines and was transported back home. Two days before VE Day, he arrived at his parents’ Essex farm half-dead with exhaustion and sickness. They had not expected to see him again.

If Avey’s story still sounds implausible, there is no doubt about the help he gave to Lobethall. Last year the BBC screened a moving documentary, during which Avey learnt for the first time that his old friend had survived the war and died in New York in 2001. Before his death, Lobethall recorded a video testimony for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, during which he emotionally recounts how his life was saved by Avey’s initiative and Susana’s cigarettes. This is the only moment that I see Avey’s steely façade falter.

“I was hospitalised for two years after the war,” Avey continues. “In 1947, I went to the military authorities to submit my information about Auschwitz. Their eyes glazed over. I wasn’t taken seriously. I was shocked, especially after the risks I’d taken. I felt completely disillusioned, and traumatised as well. So from then on I bottled it up, and tried to piece my life back together.”

Sir Martin Gilbert says: “By 1947, the trials of Nazi war criminals had been and gone. The war was over and people just wanted to get on with their lives. There was a whole mind-set of not really wanting to know what had happened any more. Many people had stories that nobody was interested in. It must have been very painful.”

Readjusting to normal life was hard. Avey became addicted to adrenalin, racing fast cars, travelling to Spain for the running of the bulls. He was plagued by nightmares and flashbacks. Even today he shows signs of trauma. He always carries an expensive gold watch, so that “if ever I find myself in a fix again, I’ve got something to fall back on”.

Sixty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, when eyewitnesses are dying out and Holocaust denial is burgeoning, Denis Avey’s extraordinary tale has finally found its moment. “I’m talking to you so it will do some good,” he says fiercely, pounding his fingers on the table for emphasis. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

'the men of happiness'

It is a most unlikely scene. I am in an elegant sitting room in the Royal Society of Arts. Opposite me, sitting uncomfortably side-by-side on a too-low leather sofa, are an English peer and a French Buddhist monk. The contrast is striking. Lord Layard is white-haired, well-dressed and unobtrusive; the Venerable Matthieu Ricard is larger than life in flowing, burgundy robes. Yet despite their differences, these men have a common denominator: both have devoted their lives to the study of happiness.

Layard is the UK’s leading happiness economist. In his bookHappiness: Lessons from a New Science, Layard — a devotee of the 18th-century Utilitarian thinker Jer-emy Bentham — argues that governments need to take their responsibilities for our happiness seriously. “We need a wider debate about what lifestyles are conducive to happiness,” he says.

“Far more public funding should be allocated to mental-health services, parenting support networks, and positive-living education in schools. Everyone is concerned with avoiding poverty, ill health, conflict and enslavement. But these things are nothing but versions of unhappiness. So what we’re all really concerned with, although we might be afraid of the simplicity of the term, is happiness.”

Ricard, on the other hand, a celibate monk who lives in a Himalayan hermitage, has a different perspective. He is a proponent of the Buddhist theory that cultural change can start only with the individual. His latest book, The Art of Meditation, which came out last month, focuses on matters of the mind, such as meditation and altruism. Whereas Layard believes that there are seven areas of life — family, work, health, mental attitude and so on — that influence fulfilment and happiness, Ricard believes that the mind trumps all. “If you have inner peace,” he says, “then whatever happens, you are going to be fine.”

He has demonstrated this in his own life by eschewing intimate relationships, children and a career in favour of a life of the mind. Leading neuroscientists have said that Ricard is the happiest man in the world. While this epithet is unashamedly hyperbolic (how many men in the world have been tested for happiness?), the results of experiments are remarkable. Brain scans found that Ricard’s grey matter produces a level of gamma waves — those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — never “reported before in the neuroscience literature”, according to Dr Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin.

In addition, his brain is dramatically asymmetrical. The left prefrontal cortex is swollen, while its counterpart on the right is shrivelled and prune-like. No prizes for guessing what each cranial bedfellow is responsible for; Ricard has an abnormally large propensity for happiness, and his capacity for negativity has all but withered away.

“It’s not just the brain that is measured,” the monk elaborates. His gaze is steady and he speaks in a gruff French accent. “Scientists study a combination of factors, the brain, the movements of the muscles in the face, the ability to remain calm, and so on. Those things, when taken together, can indicate a more optimal healthy mind.”

Be this as it may, I am sceptical about the happiest man in the world. Partly it is the notion of a celebrity Buddhist monk, which I find rather disingenuous (memories of the Dalai Lama appearing on advertisements for Apple come to mind). Partly there is something suspicious about people writing books about how happy they are.

But most of all it is the fact that I spent several years practising Tibetan Buddhism, and ended up rather disillusioned. I became unconvinced by the disproportionate focus on mental development at the expense of other aspects of life. The Dalai Lama, although believed to be the embodiment of the Compassion Deity, said in a 2004 interview that he shoots at birds from the roof of his monastery; he also admitted to having “a bad temper”. Additionally, he is involved in factional infighting, a pervasive element of Tibetan history. My conclusion, therefore, was that although Buddhism can improve your wellbeing to a certain extent, the complete transcendence of human frailty is impossible.

Feeling obliged to strive towards it is a burden. As Edith Wharton put it “if only we’d stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time”.

“I’m not saying everybody has to take on Tibetan beliefs,” the monk says. “If concert pianists were the only ones allowed to play the piano, millions of people would be deprived of the pleasure of music. I am suggesting that the idea of secular spirituality, which the Dalai Lama has been promoting for many years, is an important one.

“I do not think you will attain enlightenment through secular spirituality, but at least you will become a happier person.”

This may be true. However, I know from my time in Buddhism that while many practitioners may look happier, all too often they are repressing their emotions. I saw a monk snap once. He assaulted a member of the public with a pair of woks. Science may have found that Ricard experiences great levels of happiness, but what about the dark mysteries of the unconscious?

Neuroscientists have found “that advanced monks have extremely lucid insights into what is going on in their minds”, he says. “For example, in experiments where meditators must recall their emotions after watching a horror movie, they are able to write three pages describing what they experienced, but normal people can only write two lines.”

Monks watching a horror movie? He shrugs and purses his lips in a distinctly Gallic fashion. “It was an experiment.”

Having established that Ricard does not expect everyone to share his beliefs, I am starting to warm towards him. There are no forced smiles or the excessive displays of physical affection common to many Western Buddhist converts. He isn’t putting on an act; he wears his robes lightly. Nevertheless, there seems to be a discrepancy between his secular advice and his deeply religious life. I turn to Lord Layard, director of the wellbeing programme at the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance.

“I was particularly struck at the end of the 1970s by evidence that although people were getting richer, they were not growing any happier,” he says. “That is why I have been putting a huge emphasis on schooling. If we could be taught at an early age to observe and manage our emotions, people would become calm in themselves and more able to give to others. I’m not starting from a monastery, I’m starting from an interest in public policy. But the overall vision of a good society is very similar.”

Ricard, who has been murmuring his agreement, takes up the baton again. “Many schools are starting to incorporate silence into the day,” he says. “Of course elaborate meditation is inappropriate for children. But a simple daily meditation on altruism, for example, can change the whole character and mood of the school.”

“You see,” Layard says, “I think our common ground is more important than our differences. It is the responsibility of government to create a society where we have the space and support to be happy. Meditation and altruism can help to fill this space, enhancing our happiness as individuals. The philosophies of East and West do not need to be mutually exclusive. We can both learn from one another, and combine our approaches to good effect.”

My cynicism begins to recede. Perhaps this unlikely pair have hit on something. Clearly the world would be a better place if governments geared social policy more towards happiness; and if meditation has been proven to make us happier, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to incorporate those parts that are in tune with secular society?

They are gesturing towards a vision of how Eastern and Western philosophies of happiness might one day harmonise to the common good. The outside-in approach of Bentham, combined with the inside-out philosophy of the Buddha, might work together very well as long as repression and superstition are left at the door.

'You don't have any bananas, do you?'

First performed at the Literary Death Match Oxford, 4 November 2009

Spotlight on SPEAKER, dressed in smart suit, standing impassively. SPEAKER reaches into inside pocket and takes out a pair of sunglasses, puts them on, clearly impeding vision. SPEAKER delivers monologue in the rhetorical style of a preacher or a politician, without showing any sign of humour, whilst walking amongst the audience. SPEAKER returns to the stage for the final lines.

SPEAKER: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Man walks into a doctor’s surgery. Actually, stop. Man and woman walk into a doctor’s surgery. Not just any woman. Partner. Man and partner, not a business partner, or a writing partner, but what is sometimes called these days a life partner, LP. So they walk into a doctor’s surgery. An important point which I am obliged to weave into the narrative is that they are living in Norwich, and the doctor’s surgery is thus there. They have only lived in Norwich for a few months. Doctor says – no, not doctor, nurse, with whom they have an appointment, because woman is pregnant again, and just when she was getting her figure back. Nurse says – actually most of what she says is irrelevant, it’s routine stuff. But at the end of the appointment Nurse says, I have to fill out this form now, an ethnicity form, it’s a requirement. What ethnicity are you? And Man and Woman exchange glances, because this is no easy question, it’s knotty. How far back do you go? You could always be safe and say Africa, because that’s what everyone is, in the end. Woman, the more practical of the two, thinks around the problem and realizes that if they are from ethnicities with the possibility of hereditary diseases, this may affect things vis a vis pregnancy. So she says well, we’re both half Jewish, thinking, some Jews carry Tay Sachs, which is nasty, and they are supposed to be tested before, only we weren’t tested, we went right ahead, now she’s worried. So. Nurse says, Jewish? And she gets rather flustered. There’s no box here for Palestine, she says. Shall I put down something else? How about Germany? And she puts down Northern Europe, and then, as Man and Woman are leaving, Nurse delivers the punchline: oo, I bet you have lovely food. Man thinks, Feb 6th 1190. All the Norwich Jews are found slaughtered in their houses, except a few who found refuge in Norwich Castle.

Ok, so stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Man and Woman now live in Golders Green with toddler. The reason they live in Golders Green is that they are dirty broke, and are living rent free in Man’s uncle’s house, which happens to be in Golders Green. Yes, with a toddler. I know. Anyway, so they’re there, and Woman joins local NCT group to get to know other mums, because NCT means National Childbirth Trust, and two and two make four. The first meeting is in December, during Hannukah, you know it? Like Christmas only not. And Woman, being half Jewish, understands a little about Hannukah and decides to bring along doughnuts, because on Hannukah you eat doughnuts because they’re fried in oil, which is important to Hannukah because, well. Google it. So anyway, it’s immaterial, the point is that the meeting takes place in a house belonging to one of the NCT members, and as soon as she arrives Woman realizes she doesn’t fit in, being twenty-eight not thirty-eight, and not entirely Jewish. But nevertheless she is friendly, keeps an open mind, and she puts the doughnuts that she brought on a plate made of fine china, and she puts it on the table, and nobody eats a doughnut. The whole hour nobody eats a doughnut. Everybody leaves, and nobody has eaten a doughnut. Apart from her, she had three. And never does she return. And never is she invited back.

Now this one you must have heard. It takes place in Hampstead Garden Suburb, just next door to Golders Green. Man walks into the Suburb. Wait – Man walks into the Suburb pushing baby in Bugaboo darling. He is doing this to encourage the baby to sleep, because the baby rarely does, and it’s an irony of parenthood that if someone wanted you to go to sleep you’d jump at the chance, but the baby is the opposite, and that’s the paradox. Anyway, so Man with buggy walks into the Suburb, and suddenly is accosted by a random woman, Jewish woman, also with a buggy, in which is a howling toddler. The woman is stary-eyed and disheveled. She is, as the phrase goes, at the end of her rope. The very end, the frayed bit. She runs up with this buggy and this screaming toddler and Man is a little put out because this threatens to wake up his baby, who is awoken by the slightest change in the light, never mind anything else. And the woman says, please, excuse me, please. You don’t happen to have a banana, do you? And Man does happen to have a banana, for what self-respecting parent would ever be caught without one? He has pity on her, hands it over. The toddler stops crying; the woman does not thank him, too stressed perhaps; she vanishes. Man thinks: in 650 AD, Islamic conquerors brought the banana to Palestine, and Arabic merchants finally spread the banana throughout Africa, and from there, the world.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Man walks into practically anywhere. Ouch.

CURTAIN

'a bit of a banker'

When the Chilcot Enquiry came on the television last week, I was in the waiting area of an office complex. Blair was on, and the volume was off. Not being able to hear what he was saying, I found myself focussing on how he looked. His body language was assured and domineering, with the trademark broad shoulders, floodgate hands and zipping-up fingers. But most striking of all was his complexion. Gone was the slightly grey, rather haggard face that had graced our screens daily until it was replaced by the loose-hung Brown visage in 2007. In its place was a Blair with a tan. Not a sun-bed tan, or a makeup tan, or an artificial spray-tan. A genuine, skin-pigment tan. It made him look smug, and insincere, and tremendously rich. He looked like a bit of a banker.

In the run-up to the Chilcot Enquiry, Nick Robinson remarked that Mr Blair was being prepped by various ‘friends’ in tactics and the art of evasion. Was I the only one to wonder what old Spinning Tony could possibly have left to learn on these subjects? Nevertheless, a great deal of forethought had obviously gone into his appearance in the Chilcot dock. So how did his wardrobe assistant, or personal grooming adviser, or whoever, neglect to note that the man’s overt tan was the moral equivalent to a flashy Rolex on the wrist of an RBS Director? Surely they must have tan-remover for emergencies like these? Or some form of herbal grey-out? Couldn’t Cherie have leant him Carole Caplin?

The public are angry at Mr Blair. So angry, in fact, that his newly bronzed countenance has eclipsed the pasty mugs of scoundrel MPs as the focus of the nation’s wrath. And with good reason. Not only has Blair fudged, manipulated, squirmed and spun his way from here to Baghdad and back again, he has been quietly amassing a fortune on the after-dinner circuit (not to mention the book deals). None of us, of course, would give up the opportunity to earn money by talking guff. But then, we weren’t the ones who were responsible for sexing up the dossier and sending hundreds of our troops – not to mention the Iraqis – to their deaths.

The Blair team neglected to appreciate that their man needed to look wan, contrite, ashen, as if he were feeling some modicum of the pain in the hearts of the bereaved families sitting behind him. He needed to smile rarely, if at all; he had to demonstrate, in his body language as well as his words, that he was treating the enquiry with the gravity that befitted the thousands of innocent deaths. Instead we had the tan, the gleaming teeth, the swagger. What all this communicated, of course, in a way that Blair’s highly polished words never would, was a central, shocking truth. In a modern democratic country such as ours, one man is beyond the reach of the law. Blair is untouchable, and obviously he knows it.

'The masterful literary photographer'

“I’m crazy about Chekhov”, Woody Allen once remarked. “I never knew anyone that wasn’t.” Today, on Chekhov’s 150th birthday, that statement rings more true than ever. Much has been written about the enduringly modern quality of Chekhov’s work, and with good reason. He is one of the most frequently cited influences of contemporary writers, and it is possible to argue that echoes of his brevity, impressionism, and disregard for traditional plot resonate through the majority of modern literary fiction and drama.

Chekhov’s genius is not limited to his plays and stories. He was a prolific letter-writer, and his correspondence offers a tantalising glimpse into his revolutionary approach to aesthetics. He often offered pieces of advice to other writers, and several have since hardened into accepted principles of writing. The most famous of these is commonly known as Chekhov’s Gun, which he defined in a letter to Lazarev-Gruzinsky, his one-time co-writer, in November 1889: “one should not put a loaded rifle onto the stage if no one is thinking of firing it,” he wrote. “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one, it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” The essence of the metaphor is clear: economy is everything.

It is this mastery of succinctness, in which even the minutest detail is loaded with disproportionate meaning, that forms the kernel of Chekhov’s legacy. Chekhov was a writer of increments. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Three Sisters, his 1901 play of domestic verisimilitude, in which the characters yearn to leave the drudgery of the provinces and go to Moscow. Like the pistol on the wall, every detail is vital to the story. As the protagonists grow more preoccupied, the realisation dawns that the journey will never be made; the atmosphere is unbearably pregnant, but ultimately nothing happens. It is not difficult to see this as a forerunner of Waiting For Godot. Indeed, Masha’s final line, “We’ve got to live … we’ve got to live,” would sit comfortably alongside Beckett’s famous articulation of the human condition, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Chekhov’s short stories, too, are discussed frequently in his correspondence. In an 1886 letter to his brother, he enumerated six core principles, all of which iterated a single belief: authentic writing seeks to depict the world itself, not an interpretation of it. The Lady with the Little Dog, which portrays a developing affair, has no point of origin or conclusion. The beginning and end of the story lie outside of the text itself. But beginnings and endings are irrelevant. As Chekhov summarised in a letter to Alexei Suvorin in 1888: “One has to write what one sees, what one feels, truthfully, sincerely … my concern is to write, not to teach!”

One of his key innovations was to break with the realist school of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, which sought to elevate the reader through moral messages couched within literature. Chekhov aimed to write about life as it is. Tolstoy famously missed the point. “Chekhov is a photographer”, he is said to have remarked, “a very talented photographer, but just a photographer”. How could he know that 150 years later, “show don’t tell” would become the mantra of the modern writer?

Chekhov’s accomplishment as a masterful literary photographer can be seen most sharply in the transmutation of Wood Demon, one of his earlier plays, into the work that became known as Uncle Vanya. Wood Demon was such a flop that Chekhov gave up writing for months. First performed in 1889, it was a melodrama featuring a predictable plot, an Aristotelian climax (the suicide of Vanya), and a positive resolution at the end. A decade later, Chekhov revisited the play and re-wrote it. The result was a masterpiece. “The writer is not a pastry chef,” Chekhov wrote to Maria Kiselyova in 1887. “Not a cosmetician and not an entertainer. He is a man bound by contract to his sense of duty and his conscience … the writer should be just as objective as the chemist.”

In Uncle Vanya, we see Chekhov writing not just as a photographer, but as a scientific observer. The play is a masterpiece of unblinking empirical impressionism, rejecting all the norms of plot and dialogue in favour of fragmented dialogue, a pseudo-climax in the form of a bungled murder attempt, pervasive understatement, and unseen events and characters acting as sources of dramatic tension. Along with works such as The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya became hailed as a great work of drama whose influence could be seen in the work of such diverse playwrights as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Bertolt Brecht.

Chekhov will be remembered for the innovative brilliance of his stories and plays. But nowhere is his genius more apparent than in his codification of what would become the founding principles of modern writing. He wasn’t just ahead of his own time; in many ways, we are still trying catch up with him.