Vanity may be unavoidable but it does not mean we must allow it to be our master. By recognising our vanity, we can try to keep it as much at bay as possible and so keep pride in check. If we cannot see the vanity in what we’re doing or deny there is any, we are more likely to fall under its spell. The ultimate vanity is to believe you have none.
ReadWorkshop is one of a number of high-end food companies that says it is committed to fair trade, but doesn’t have the certificate to prove it. With the Fairtrade logo now appearing even on mainstream brands such as Starbucks coffees and four-finger Kit Kats, this absence is becoming more and more conspicuous, especially during Fairtrade fortnight, which starts this week. But for a variety of reasons, many speciality providers, which invariably boast about their impeccable sourcing policies, are choosing not to sign up to the Fairtrade labelling scheme.
ReadEvery child has a right to a decent education. But does that mean every child has the right to educational success? That might sound absurd, but many teachers are concerned that this is, in effect, precisely what the current cohort of schoolchildren thinks.
ReadImagine living in a community where people stay for anything from between a few weeks to a few months, where each member has a skill that she will teach to others and contributes work, not money. Its founder, the science writer Dylan Evans, describes it in The Utopia Experiment as “a cross between Plato’s Academy and The Beach”. It ended up more like Lord of the Flies meets I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. Within a year of his arrival in 2006, Evans found himself in a psychiatric hospital, his savings spent and his long-crossed bridges from academia smouldering in the distance. Evans’s account is a gripping, slow-motion car-crash. You can’t take your eyes off it, try as you might to hide them behind your hands.
ReadAnyone tempted to put the mockers on the rockers should remember that no one understands the absurdities of heavy rock like its fans and practitioners. You certainly can’t accuse Blue Öyster Cult of lacking a sense of irony when their opening song is “This ain’t the summer of love”, which they follow with another containing the line “Our best years have passed us by”. They even play “Godzilla”, inviting the taunt that they are dinosaurs, or even as Wishbone Ash’s Martin Turner’s kids call him, rock fossils.
Read