Paul Kirkley: Why the opponents have got it wrong over that Cambridge statue

I’ve watched, with some bafflement, the recent debate over the statue of “a bound woman” outside Cambridge railway station.

On the one hand, the complaint by city Green councillors that the sculpture, depicting Greek goddess Ariadne covered in a dust sheet, “mainstreams violence against women” and sends “a misogynistic message to visitors and Cambridge residents” feels comically reductive.

Are these philistines not aware that much of the world’s great art has been born of tragedy and oppression and pain? Have they never seen Munch’s The Scream, or Goya’s cheery Saturn Devours His Children – or a statue of Christ on the cross, come to that? Or maybe they think public art should only depict nice, happy scenarios – some lambs gambolling in a field, perhaps? Or a statue of that lovely Alex Jones off The One Show holding some kittens?

It really does show a depressing lack of critical thinking, along with a fashionable resistance to considering small matters like context and artistic intent.

That said, the sculptor, Gavin Turk, hasn’t exactly helped himself, by ‘explaining’ that the piece is “sort of about anticipation – about the idea of how we see and what we want to see, and how we unpack things when we look at things”. It is also about ‘transience’, he told this newspaper. “This moment of something transforming into something else”.

Well thanks for that. It all makes perfect sense now.

In September, I went into Cambridge for an eye test, and found the roads all closed for the Chariots of Fire race. Two weeks later, I went back in to pick up my glasses, and found the roads all closed for the Town and Gown race.

I offer this not as a complaint – on the contrary, it made me feel rather good about our city’s dedication to running about for charity – merely as an observation.

Within the space of those two weeks, the Lion Yard branch of Specsavers, where I’d had my eye test, had moved – but only a few feet, to the other side of Boots Opticians, and opposite Vision Express. You’ve heard of sniper’s alley? Welcome to blind alley: it seems poor eyesight is a booming business in bookish Cambridge, with the number of opticians only rivalled by Harry Potter shops. (He was another speccy swot, of course.)

I also popped into WH Smith, which is still hanging in there (for now) and was dismayed to read a sign telling me all the magazines had been moved to the back of the store. I know, as someone who makes his living from writing for magazines and newspapers, that I’m biased, but if even WH Smith has decided print is a busted flush, then the industry really is in a death spiral.

Anyway, I did eventually track down the magazines ‘department’, but was rather reminded of that bit in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, from that great Cambridge satirist Douglas Adams, where Arthur Dent finds the planning application to demolish his house ‘on display’ in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.

I was supposed to pick up a pair of glasses and a pair of sunglasses from Specsavers, but they’d forgotten to put the tint on the sunglasses. Well obviously – you’d expect nothing less from #BareMinimumBritain (see this column, passim). A nice man in the store was very apologetic, and said they’d post the sunglasses out to me instead. Which obviously they didn’t, so I phoned the ‘store’ (ie the call centre, where my call was apparently very important to them) to chase it up, and they said someone would get back to me. Which obviously they didn’t, so I phoned again a few days later, and they said someone would definitely get back to me this time. Which obviously they didn’t. (They did keep trying to sell me a hearing test, though – even though they were the ones that seemed to be having trouble understanding what I was saying.)

I know this isn’t the most dramatic story, and Watchdog won’t be beating a path to my door for the exclusive TV rights. But it’s annoying, and an illustration of the millions of tiny frustrations endured by people every week, in a country where even the most basic transaction, like being able to wear the sunglasses you paid for more than a month ago, seems to be beyond the wit of man.

It also tells a wider story about Britain’s chronic productivity record. How can we ever hope to get the turbines of this once great industrial nation moving again, as Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves would like us to, if we can’t even send out a pair of specs?

Anyway, in the end I gave up and went into the store, where the glasses were waiting to be collected, though no-one had bothered to tell me that. So now I finally have a pair of sunglasses – just in time for the winter.

If you’re reading this on the morning this newspaper comes out, then chances are you’ve just woken up into Trumpworld 2.0. (I know everyone keeps saying the election is too close to call, but the Trump vote has always been underpriced, because some people are still a bit circumspect about their fash views.)

Call me Nostradamus, but I’m guessing Kamala Harris will have won the popular vote, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016. But winning the most votes doesn’t seem to matter in America’s wonky version of ‘democracy’.

Anyway, it’s tempting to say we should just sit back and enjoy the next four years of chaos. But everyone knows this will be a very different story to the previous Trump administration. For a start, there won’t the protective layer of cooler heads that surrounded him last time: they’ve all been weeded out, and this will be the full MAGA show. He’s also packed the courts with his pet judges, as any good autocrat worth his salt should, while women’s reproductive rights look like being somewhere on the scale between The Handmaid’s Tale and the Taliban.

It’s also a very different geopolitical landscape to 2016, with the Middle East on the brink of all-out war, Putin readying to take advantage of a weakened NATO to expand into Europe, and China’s President Xi eyeing up a similar move on Taiwan.

Does rather put my missing sunglasses into perspective, doesn’t it?

See you next month. Hopefully.

Read more from Paul every month in the Cambridge Independent.