Morning:
8°c
"Oh to be in England, now that April's here." There's a unique feeling - part-pleasurable, part-sad - about arriving back into a London airport after you've been away for a fortnight or so. I think it has to do with the architecture.
Sure, you coast in - if it's a sunny spring day - over green fields filled with buttercups and baa-lambs; but then you find yourself amid a soulless warren of concrete overpasses, the permanent grey of drizzle and diesel.
Papers blare at you from a mournful WH Smith; defeated punters sip yucky lattes in the Costa; a grim courtesy coach ferries you to a concrete holding pen where cars are lined up like coffins. The very words "Gatwick" and "Airparks" have their own despondent poetry.
Yet the odd thing, I realise, coming back from somewhere much warmer and nicer, is that I actually love, or at least savour, all the grim industrial in-between places with which we welcome our travellers home. I think many of us do.
The prose laureate of these spaces is JG Ballard, who made his home in the Heathrow hinterlands. When I heard he'd died, I was in Cuba drinking mojitos from plastic cups, and the news didn't seem real. It has taken coming home to bring properly to mind what, in that original and percipient man, we have lost.
• The London Marathon wouldn't have been a Ballard activity, I think. Still, if you want to dress up as a banana and injure yourself, chacun à son goût.
I wonder about the claims made for it as a spectator sport, though. We no longer regard a visit to a lunatic asylum as a fun day out. Baying as a mob of dry-heaving, purple-faced fun-runners "doing it for the kiddies" staggers past on the way to an embolism seems uncomfortably close. Let us stay at home and allow them to suffer in privacy.
• What an odd row seems to have broken out about the Jacobean Cobbe portrait, below. Professor Stanley Wells thinks it is a picture of Shakespeare. Other scholars think it is not, and - in the absence of conclusive evidence - the disagreement has become tetchy.
Now the public is invited to make up its own mind - surely the very last resort of academic inquiry. What's the difference between that, and those daft online polls that ask us to "Have Our Say" on whether, for example, global warming is man-made, or string theory offers an adequate account of quantum gravity?
The whole thing reminds me of the wise person who offered the last word on Shakespeare authorship disputes: the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were not by him, but by another man with the same name.
