Elon Musk, who I must remind you is the richest man on the planet, could afford to buy a top-notch £300k family home every day for the next two millennia.
However, he chooses not to do so. Which in one sense is wise. Who needs so many houses anyway? Other than maybe Elton John? But Elon doesn’t even have ONE house, which you have to admit is somewhat unusual for the billionaire class.
Can I crash on your couch tonight, man?
Apparently he couch surfs rather than purchase a home in the Bay area, where Tesla is based. He claims to rent a prefab from his own SpaceX firm in Texas, which I am entirely prepared to believe, because he’s definitely eccentric.
Since earning $58,000 currently would put you in the top one per cent of incomes on Earth, and since financial advisors recommend spending no more than 10% on discretionary expenditure, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Elon is talking a billionaire-sized amount of bollocks.
Even for the top 1% of earners, who should not be spending more than $5,800 annually on discretionary purchases like trips to space, that’s nearly TWO DECADES of saving.
It’s also worth adding that, if you DO happen to be fortunate enough to earn $58k, or the UK equivalent which is £44,400 at today’s exchange rate, you’d only be able to borrow about £144,300, so you’d need one helluva deposit to afford even the average UK house, which was priced at £274,000 in January 2022.
In other words, like I’ve been saying since the days of Occupy, it’s not actually the 1% who are the problem. Believe it or not, the 1% are actually now middle class too. It’s the 0.1% who are the problem. In fact, we could probably go further again.
I’d be quite gratified if Mr “I don’t own a home!” quietened down a tad about how allegedly cheap his space tours are and instead started buying some other people some houses, even if he doesn’t fancy one for himself.
We don’t all have billionaire pals who let us crash on their couches, after all.
From time to time, I (mis)translate poems from languages which I don’t speak, or at least, which I don’t speak well. I don’t claim that there’s any great artistic merit in this, but I enjoy doing it and there is some degree of effort, I promise. Anyhow, here’s the latest one.
Patrizia Cavalli is an Italian poet whose selected poems translates approximately as My Poems Won’t Change the World. I suspect neither will this (mis)translation. Nevertheless, her modesty is less appropriate than mine. Her poems are excellent and should be read by everyone.
So, what did they find? A whole bunch of stuff. They tested for 870 human traits in total, categorised in terms of the physical, the medical, the neurological, the behavioural and so on.
They cross-referenced their findings from contemporary European genomes against historical genomes of homo sapiens, including those from pre-neolithic hunter gatherers, early neolithic hunter gatherers, and near eastern farmers from the dawn of civilisation.
The study is dense, and it certainly helps if you are a trained geneticist, or at the very least a medical student, to read it. I am neither, but I was formerly a health correspondent, so I was able to pick out a few interesting discoveries.
Firstly, as might have been expected from the varieties of human skin tone among Europeans, this was one of the factors most prone to genetic selection over recent human history. Effectively, those in the south of Europe selected for ability to tan, while those at northerly climes selected for fairer skin. This was largely already understood to have happened.
Similarly, there is a positive selection for height. Gals have liked a tall guy throughout history, apparently. And there is also positive selection for blond and lighter hair colours, which again we could have deduced from the fact that these hair colours primarily exist among European populations.
Likewise already suspected, but perhaps less widely known, is the fact that Europeans positively selected for a predisposition to schizophrenia. It’s not clear why this is, given that schizophrenia is a debilitating mental illness. Nevertheless, the research indicates some positive selection for it, as well as, oddly enough, a predisposition towards anorexia.
Perhaps not so suspected are minor but yet statistically significant positive selections for a range of things, including raw vegetable intake and heavy alcohol drinking. Then again, Europe has a growing vegetarian and vegan population, and also tends to top the charts for excessive alcohol consumption worldwide.
The most significant evolved traits in recent history relate primarily to facial characteristics – not only hair colour but also things like nose shape and upper lip size. If this makes our ancestors seem somewhat superficial, more concerned with physical appearance than other traits, that may simply be because they are easier to immediately identify.
But much less easy to identify traits also show significant positive selection in recent times. Intelligence and insomnia have both been positively selected for in Europe in recent human history (by which I mean the past few thousand years). This makes sense of course, since it helps to be smart, and someone who stays awake at night is the first to notice nighttime dangers, but more generally this actually indicates that evolved traits go much deeper than the skin.
There’s a lot more in this study, and no doubt it will prove extremely interesting to other researchers. It certainly raises some questions, not only about the traits we have inherited from the neolithic period or our early farming history, but about the traits which seem to be subject to positive selection up to the present day.
One suspects these results can likely be extrapolated to other global populations by replicating the extensive work that went into this study. Or rather, perhaps not these exact results, but rather similar sets of results, indicating similar ongoing evolution in slightly different ways among different global populations.
It would be nice therefore to see similar studies for other global populations, in order to understand the extent to which, for example, the positive selections for schizophrenia and anorexia predisposition are universal or to what extent they’re merely European.
But the bottom line is this: we sometimes assume that recent history is not enough time for humans to have evolved much more than some few superficial variations, like skin tone. However, as this study shows, such evolved variegation is much more than skin deep, and reaches into our very behaviour and psyches.
I attended the Bodleian Library’s fascinating webinar on unconventional maps of Oxford on Tuesday evening, where the star turns were easily the secret Soviet maps of the city from the 1970s.
It’s a fascinating, and not fully understood story. The Soviets produced top class maps of pretty much the entire planet between the 1950s and 1980s, which remained entirely secretly and unknown to the world until the early 1990s. So good are they, that the Bodleian itself still uses some of them for reference, particularly for Turkey and Greece, apparently.
Depicted, a detail from the Red Atlas featuring Dublin city centre, from c. 1980.
No one knows entirely why the Soviets did this, especially when you couldn’t even get a map of Moscow in Moscow until the very late 1980s. I can testify that when I lived in Minsk, there were no maps available. I ended up drawing my own in a notebook just to be able to get around.
The Red Atlas probably weren’t invasion maps, but they definitely were for restricted access. All sorts of fascinating locations are carefully marked up in purple, including the usual suspects like police stations, prisons and military bases, but also places of more curious interest, such as universities.
Chicago published a selection of them a few years ago, primarily of British and American locations, and called ‘The Red Atlas’. As for the Bodleian map librarians, ownership of this is probably useful if you can read a little Russian and don’t mind your maps being about five decades out of date.
It was a little disappointing though to discover that the Bodleian’s map librarians had never heard of the map of Lyra’s Oxford, from the fiction of Philip Pullman. Clearly they aren’t familiar with his work, despite it being probably the most famous and popular of speculative geographies of the city of dreaming spires.
Their other choices of alternative Oxfords included legendary town planner Thomas Sharp‘s vision of an automobile-enabled Oxford of the post-war period, and a civil war era map which may have been deliberately inaccurate in order to throw off enemy parliamentarian forces.
But the best of the rest, secret Soviet maps apart, was the 1883 ‘Drink Map’ of Oxford, produced in a spectacular example of an own goal, by the Temperance Movement. Its reverse featured a lengthy lecture on the dangers of alcohol and the evil magistrates allegedly facilitating excessive drinking in the city, but one gets the strong feeling that, as with other such drink maps of Britain at that time, they were more likely used by thirsty people seeking a nearby locale for some fortifying adult beverages.
Nowadays, such drink maps are basically pub crawls in cartographic form. They even come in formats where one may colour in images of pubs, like a drunken infant, thereby ticking off hostelries which you have deigned to feature with your sozzled presence.
Nickel is a metal used in electric cars and stainless steel. Russia produces 20% of the world’s supply. So when Russia invaded Ukraine, obviously people were concerned about that supply and the price rocketed, from around $29,000 a ton to over $100,000.
Ordinarily, nickel doesn’t move much and floats between $10,000 and $20,000. So this was a serious and unprecedented move in price. However, one Chinese company, owned by a guy known as ‘Big Shot’ (seriously) had attempted to short the market. His firm Tsingshan was apparently on the hook for tens of billions.
But the London Metal Exchange, which for some historical reason is allowed to set the global market price for most base metals, decided to undo the trading. Not suspend it (they tried that too) but actively cancel all the trades.
Bug, Pee-Wee and Shrek deciding the price of base metals on their nice red sofa.
This has made some people who thought they’d made lots of money very unhappy. It may be mere coincidence that the LME was bought out by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange a number of years ago, of course.
Lawsuits are now flying, and the price of nickel is back to around $30,000 a ton at the time of writing, only a little above where it was before the invasion.
The fundamental problem is inherent to the five century old stock exchange system itself, and a small market like nickel with a singular point of price discovery like the LME simply exposes the flaws of this antiquated method for setting prices.
It shouldn’t be possible for a commodities market in an industrial metal like nickel to literally treble in a matter of a day, no matter how supply might be threatened. Nor should it be possible for a single man to short an entire commodity market to the extent that he did. Nor should it be possible for agreed deals to be undone.
Here we have an example of traditional rules-bound capitalism – a largely closed shop with its weird in-group habits – but as soon as the market became systemically challenged by its own methodologies, all those rules and traditions were jettisoned with shocking disregard.
I don’t think you get to come back from that. I think the day of the red sofa is likely over.
The world seems rife with conspiracy. Never before have we had a population so well educated, yet apparently so vulnerable to believing in vast conspiracy narratives. It seems like a contradiction. Researchers at UCLA have been using AI to work out how such conspiracy theories seem to emerge and subsequently collapse with ever greater velocity. But they struggle to explain why these ideas emerge at all.
The attraction of conspiracy theories is the promise that beneath the apparent chaos of the world is some underlying order and meaning, even if that meaning is negative and the order is destructive. It’s a desire to feel control, to possess agency over one’s own life.
In an ever more individuated and atomised world, the natural human desire for bonding en masse, for submerging into a gestalt and having a sense of belonging, therefore becomes subverted by such theories. Conspiracy theories are less ideas than they are communities.
The question is not why do conspiracy theories occur. They occur because of the human need for meaning and desire for order. Nor is the question how they may be combated or defeated. They can only be challenged and overcome by implementing transparent order in society. Transparent in this sense includes the underlying principles of fairness and dignity, because people will also strive for alternate explanations when they are treated unfairly or suspect they are being stripped of their human dignity.
The question that remains about conspiracy theories is why certain narratives prosper and others do not. To an extent this is a cui bono question – who benefits? Who makes money from proliferating certain conspiracies? And certainly, there are many who make a healthy living propagating nonsense and half-baked ideas to the masses. They may even be acting in good faith, believing in the attenuated and baroque web of connections they themselves are weaving. But more significantly, it’s an issue of what cultural anxieties are exposed by conspiracy theories.
The current most prolific conspiracy theory – that shadowy cabals of elites operating both in and out of the public eye are attempting to implement population reduction and totalitarian rule – is in this sense a throwback to the unequal and undignified social structures of the laissez-faire 19th century or even earlier, to feudalism. But it also expresses very contemporary anxieties about the Covid pandemic, and deeply held suspicions about the democratic unaccountability of transnational bodies in particular, be they the EU, the IMF, the World Economic Forum or the UN.
There are, in short, no easy answers to conspiracy theories, because conspiracy theories ARE the easy answers. They satisfy the atomised citizen’s need to bond in dignity with fellow citizens and they provide a simple and moralistic order against which to resist, thereby providing meaning.
History suggests that people, no matter how well educated, will be inclined to prefer such easy moralistic explanations of the world in which they live. The attraction of such explanations is as hardwired as the desire for sugar or animal fats, and as difficult to break as a habit.
Only a world which offers its citizenry ever greater fairness and dignity, which entrusts them with agency over their own lives, has any hope of competing with the memetic addiction to conspiracy. Until such a world is in place, people will continue to believe that shadowy forces secretly rule the world and wish them harm, be they demons, or Illuminati, Elders of Zion, or psychotic men in the boardrooms of Brussels and Washington.
I caught a head cold on a recent trip, and after a day immersed in reading about ancient Mesopotamia, I decided to take a restorative nap.
The ancients of course attributed all sorts of meaning to dreams. They considered many oneiric communications to be messages from the gods, or prophecies of future events, communications in short which appeared to hack time lines and causality.
One wonders whether the still obscure processes and purposes of dreaming might not have in fact inspired the religious impetus among humanity.
Anyhow, in my feverish dreamstate, I was having dinner with a friend, who in reality possesses an indomitable intellect, and who in this scenario was a world-renowned expert in the discipline of Invernetics.
A google search upon waking produced only a handful of results for the word, mostly typos of Internetics. My basic Latin education parses the term as the technology of winter, or the technology of inducing winter (perhaps a good technology to develop in an age of global warming?)
If the ancients considered such dreams as ontological intrusions into our reality, might we not do likewise, especially given the dearth of solid research into why we dream of what we do? Given the current popularity of multiverse theories, I am inclined to consider my fever dream as an intrusion from another timeline, wherein the science of Invernetics is a well-developed academic discipline.
Perhaps in that timeline, they likewise dream of us, and chuckle to themselves at the preposterousness of a Donald Trump presidency, Leicester City winning the EPL, or the strange prominence of pronouns?
Dreams may be brain froth, as most neuroscientists insist. But perhaps, like pronouns, they might carry more semantic weight than we acknowledge.
One looks forward to the day when the role of dreaming may be more accurately understood and developed. And one also now looks forward to the day when we develop Invernetic technologies to address the gradual heating of our planet.
Last week I was fortunate enough to revisit Jerusalem. It was nearly two decades since my last visit and much has changed in the interim, though equally much has not.
Previously, security was tense in the holy city. It was not possible for me to visit the Temple Mount at that time. I’m not entirely sure if it was even possible for devout Muslims to do so. This time, during one of the designated hours for non-Muslims, and via the sole route permitted to non-Muslims, I was fortunate enough to visit what is probably the most sensitive and contested site on Earth.
Temple Mount
The site itself is a plaza constructed on the top of the ancient mount Moriah. It features the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, the third most sacred site in Islam. It is equally the most sacred site in Judaism, having been the location of both King Solomon’s temple and the Second Temple, built by Herod and destroyed by the Romans in the first century CE.
Not to be left out, there is a Christian claim here too, somewhat less significant than those of their fellow monotheists, but real nonetheless. The Crusaders left their mark here, and while Christianity reveres the Church of the Holy Sepuchre nearby rather than Temple Mount itself, nevertheless the site retains importance for Christianity, in particular the Well of Souls, a cave located beneath the Rock, as well as the Muslim Al-Aqsa mosque, which was previously the site of a Templar church.
This one small location, approximately the size of 20 soccer pitches, is therefore highly significant to the more than half of the world’s population who adhere to one of the Abrahamic monotheisms.
One might ask, especially if one is not an adherent, why this is so? Taken in chronological order, the Jewish claim is the earliest. For Jews, it is the site where King Solomon built a temple for the Jews where they could gather regularly to be in the presence of God. For those of the Jewish faith, this site, and the subsequent second temple, was the sole location on Earth where God would descend to be present among his chosen people.
The exact site, or temenos, was known as the holy of holies, קֹדֶשׁ הַקֳּדָשִׁים in Hebrew, and access was limited to the high priest alone, on very limited occasions. This model was replicated in the second Herodian temple, which was built following the return of the Israelites to Jerusalem after their Babylonian exile. Notably, almost none of either temple remains today, and hence it is impossible to know the exact site of the holy of holies. For this reason, devout Jews refrain from setting foot on the mount, for fear of stepping inside God’s sacred space.
As if this were insufficient, the site is also traditionally believed to be the location of the binding of Isaac. Additionally, modern historians suspect that the site was chosen in part because it was likely already a sacred location for the Jebusites, whom King David displaced from Jerusalem.
Of course, the choice of location is a blend of both Bronze Age beliefs and canny realpolitik. King David’s unification of the twelve tribes of Judaism required a capital which would be acceptable to all the tribes, and not solely his own. Hence the choice of Jerusalem, an otherwise poor choice for a capital city, given its limited fresh water supply and low terrain which was difficult to defend.
We might say likewise about the Islamic claim to Temple Mount, which emerged early in the Islamic era and helped to inspire the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem. According to Islamic belief, Temple Mount designates the location from which the prophet Muhammed ascended into heaven to consult the prophets, having flown there from Arabia on a flying horse as part of his night journey.
Of course, by the time of the Islamic conquest, Mount Moriah had already served as a sacred location intermittently for over a millennium. Given Islam’s descendancy from Judaic faith as an Abrahamic monotheism, it was perhaps inevitable that a claim over Jerusalem and Temple Mount in particular would emerge. Notably, it is never stated in the al-Isra sura of the Quran that this was indeed the site of Muhammed’s ascendance into heaven. This is a result of interpretation and tradition, primarily in the Hadiths, and perhaps also some realpolitik.
The Crusaders came later, and built a Templar Church on the Mount, which after the retaking of Jerusalem by Muslim forces was transformed into the Al-Aqsa mosque. The Christian claim to Temple Mount is thus much less acute than those of Islam or Judaism, but the site’s proximity to the more revered Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as well as its domination of the Old Jerusalem skyline, no doubt made it a critical location for the Crusaders.
The current political situation on Temple Mount is therefore hugely complex and sensitive, as one might expect. Following the Israeli capture of Jerusalem during the 1967 war, the site is now administered by a Muslim religious council, but secular power rests with the Israeli defence forces. Though this is itself a somewhat tense arrangement, it seems to work adequately on the ground, as it were. Muslim religious police will confront visitors to insure they dress and act appropriately, and will request the intervention of the Israeli soldiers if they are not obeyed.
While I was there, pondering these centuries of worship, contestation and sensitivity, I began thinking about the future of the site, and the future of sacred spaces in general. Temple Mount has passed through the hands of many polities during its existence, and perhaps the sole continuity, as buildings rose, fell or were repurposed, has been its primary role as a sacred location, perhaps the most sacred location on the planet.
In short, what is the future of the Holy of Holies, the sanctum sanctorum, the al-Ḥaram al-Šarīf?
One could speculate about any number of potential futures, from the contentious building of a third Jewish Temple, to a restoration of Islamic rule over the territory. But primarily I’m wondering about issues which are more likely to develop, and indeed are already emerging.
Some five decades into the space age, technological development continues to issue complex challenges to Bronze Age beliefs. Careful consideration had to be made, for example, to define how devout Muslims in space might pray in the direction of Mecca. The further we progress from the period of religious emergence, the more difficult it becomes to translate their behavioural proscriptions or miracle-based narratives into contemporary human experience.
Closer to home than near Earth orbit, we have the rapid emergence of the internet’s evolution into a virtual reality environment, the metaverse. How will sacred spaces emerge in such a virtual state? In what manner will they be sanctified, and how will religious devotees prevent them from being hacked or erased? How will their emergence affect existing religious practices? Already it is possible for people to attend religious services online. Is it possible to envisage a digital hajj or other pilgrimages too?
And what of the metaphysical ramifications of the metaverse? Which pixels or bytes will be sanctified by God’s presence? Could a third Temple of the Jews be constructed in cyberspace? Would a digital Mecca offer password-protected access only to the world’s growing population of Muslims?
It’s not far-fetched to consider such possibilities, as we migrate further and further into an existence bifurcated into physical and online activities. And, in an optimistic vision of mankind colonising the solar system, such as we see in The Expanseand other SF depictions of the future, where would that leave physical temenoi such as Temple Mount?
For around three millennia, the site on top of Mount Moriah has served as a physical location of worship for the ancient Jebusites, for the Jews, and for Christians and Muslims alike. Perhaps technological development might finally sever the connection between place and belief, or perhaps it might merely serve to provide additional modes of religious contestation.
Any academic working in the past half century or so has come to understand that their research lives or dies, not by its quality, but by its ‘impact’.
This has a particular meaning in academic circles. It means how many citations your work has received, how widely it’s been read, how many times it got tweeted about, and so on. It’s a vain attempt by bean counters in academic administration to implement yet another performance metric and apply it to researchers.
A similar term is ‘outreach’, which is again a vain attempt to quantify and measure (and set targets about) the extent to which an academic’s research gains traction beyond academic circles. This is of course easier to achieve in some disciplines than others. If you’re researching cures for cancer or some sexy aspect of history, there’s always an outside chance a newspaper might pick up your work and mention it. If you work in politics or social policy, you might even get mentioned in a government report.
All academics are now under pressure to achieve impact and outreach with their research. Sometimes their jobs depend on hitting targets over which they have no control. Little wonder, then, that people have seen a financial opportunity in this.
Last month, I received an email from “Julian” at an entity called ‘Research Outreach’. They offered to do all sorts of sexy things with my work on Buddhism and Pulp Fiction, creating ‘resources’ which I could use to publicise my work and achieve higher impact and outreach.
Sounds good, right? But I’m the suspicious type, so I googled them. In my response I then clarified that I didn’t have hundreds of pounds to spend, that I am myself a trained journalist who produces online content, and that I didn’t want to speak to them by phone (where I feared I’d be inflicted with a hardsell). And so they went silent.
Then today I get another email, this time from “James” at “Science Animated”. The wording of the email was almost identical, except they offer a slightly different package, involving making little videos which can be disseminated on YouTube about my work. I noticed that James and Julian had the exact same telephone number. So again I googled.
Lo and behold, it turns out that there are quite a few such entities based in the same Gloucestershire office, all dedicated to providing promotion “services” to fraught academics, promising impact and outreach. I kept googling.
As far as I can tell, their business model seems to run like this: they have multiple similar or identical operations all running out of the same office, which is red flag number one. Number two is that they spam academics from all disciplines with the exact same email. There is mention of a “cost” and a request to speak to them for five minutes by phone. Many of their staff appear to be sales operatives, and few to none seem to be academic experts in any particular discipline, so we can surmise how that phone call goes.
According to some people on the ResearchGate post, they seek hundreds of pounds (the figure of £890 was mentioned) to produce promotional and PR material in relation to your work. This seems to then get disseminated solely in their own publications (which of course are not peer-reviewed, though at least they don’t claim they are.) I have no idea who is reading these publications. Possibly no one. And their fees for making an animation are notably higher again.
This was the LOWEST quotation on offer!
James later got back to me to clarify that, yes, there’s a whole bunch of similar companies with shared ownership operating from their office, and that they “aim” to provide 80,000 “impressions” during a four week campaign. An aim is not a promise or a contractual agreement needless to say, nor does an internet page impression equal engagement (try arguing that one with your academic administrator!) Furthermore, there’s no way of knowing how many of those impressions are generated by bots.
This business model isn’t illegal, but to my mind it’s not ethically much of an improvement on predatory publishers. They too are attempting to leverage large sums of cash out of the desperation of gullible academics panicked by target-hitting in the ‘publish, promote or perish’ arena of contemporary academic research.
It’s a strange hybrid of vanity publishing and excessively expensive DTP services. I’d hesitate to even call it PR. It’s not like they’re going to press release your work to the BBC, after all. Again, it’s an issue of caveat emptor. Buyer beware, just as with the predatory publishers.
Foolish academics will part with their cash (or with some of their hard-achieved funding) in the desperate hope that paying these people will lead to more citations, more people reading their work, more “outreach” and “impact”. It most likely won’t twitch the needle much if even at all.
Is there an alternative? Sure, I can think of a couple of good ones, neither of which cost a penny, and both of which are much more likely to be impactful and outreachful (yes, it is a word now!)
You could touch base with your Research Office and/or Public Relations Office in your own institution and work with them. It’s literally their job to do this kind of thing. Alternatively, you could pitch an article on your work to The Conversation, which publishes articles by academics worldwide, and then offers them for syndication to the world’s media. I’ve had colleagues reprinted in the British broadsheet press, and online in places like Yahoo News.
In summary, let me formulate Clarke’s Rule of Academic Emails: If someone sends you an unsolicited email asking you for money in return for promising to assist your academic career, what they’re offering is unlikely to assist your academic career and may actually hinder it.
I appreciate there may be exceptions to this rule, but thus far I haven’t come across one.
I was somewhat surprised to learn this morning that one of the earliest chess world champions was a chap from Belfast called Alexander McDonnell, whose day job was lobbying in parliament on behalf of the slave owners of Guyana.
This job paid £1200 per year, the equivalent of £150,000 today, and allowed him plenty of time to practice chess when parliament wasn’t sitting. He held ownership of plantations himself, and was the author of such dubious tomes as “Considerations on Negro Slavery.”
Not a lot is known about McDonnell. There appears to be a few errors on the brief wiki page dedicated to him, including the name of his father. He was renowned as a surly and taciturn man who took up to 90 minutes per turn at the chess table, and would often later spend his evenings pacing up and down in his room replaying the games in his mind.
His opponent in his most famous match, a Frenchman called Labourdonnais, by contrast had lost all of his money in property speculation and was forced to make his living from chess. While McDonnell paced his room, the Frenchman would continue playing all-comers for a sixpence a game late into the evening, all the while fuelled by endless pints of brown ale.
Labourdonnais, no doubt looking forward to a few beers. No image of McDonnell exists.
The match was abandoned with Labourdonnais leading, when the Frenchman had to urgently return to Paris to deal with his creditors. Alas, it never resumed, because McDonnell suffered from acute kidney disease and died soon afterwards. In fact, both men died young, and are buried in graves, now lost, in Kensal Green cemetery in London. ABBA should do a musical on that match.
