Dignity

  

We have a neighbour who is a (now retired) Major in the Blues and Royals, a regiment of the Household Cavalry. When he. was about to be sent to Afghanistan at the height of the war on terror, his mother came to Sunninghill to have dinner with him and his wife before he left for his tour of duty. His wife told me that his mother said to him “You might die.” He was sent to a very dangerous place in Helmand Province; so much so that all supplies were flown in by helicopters travelling low and at speed, and dropped by parachute. When a British Minister came to visit, the troops were to have a special breakfast of eggs and bacon, but alas the parachute failed to open and the eggs arrived ready-scrambled. Fortunately, my neighbour did not die, and he never mentioned any colleague who was killed, but he did visit wounded comrades in hospital in Birmingham. According to the BBC the rate of casualties (but, of course, not the absolute number) of British soldiers was higher than that of the US military.

 

The reason for telling you this anecdote is that today’s news in the UK is dominated by remarks made by President Trump in an interview with Fox News, that NATO troops did not serve on the front line in Afghanistan. Mr. Trump contends that we Europeans are cowards who have been protected by the USA, but have never done anything to support America. Our Prime minister has called the remarks “insulting and frankly appalling,” and added that if he has “misspoken in that way … I would certainly apologise.”

 

At a dinner in Oxford last night a visiting professor from the USA brought up Mr. Trump’s behaviour. Those of us who had spent time in the USA (in my case over some forty years) agreed that the default behaviour of Americans is an innate courtesy, but not, it seems, of the present President nor of his colleagues in government. This morning I was reminded of an old friend (now deceased) Colonel Robert Nichols, who is buried in Arlington Cemetery, and of his daughter who served in the army like her father. Bob believed without qualification that it was his duty to uphold the honour and dignity of America’s armed forces. I do not doubt that he would have been appalled by his current Commander-in-Chief’s lack of dignity and innate moral coruption, and of his Secretary of War, and other government officials.

What did YOU read?

 

In the UK 2026 is the National Year of Reading. The National Literacy Trust estimates that some 5 million adults in my country are functionally illiterate (defined as having a reading age equivalent to that of an 11-year-old child). At the prize giving of one of my sons’ schools the speaker said that he often visited the building of the Trades Union Congress for meetings and came to know a security guard who worked there. This guard was always reading his newspaper at all hours of the day. However, the speaker later discovered that the apparently avid reader was absolutely unable to read – he bought his newspaper to conceal his shame.

 

I have spent my working life in a world of literate people, and find it difficult to comprehend a world in which an adult cannot read.

 

The Today programme on BBC Radio 4 has been promoting the National Year of Reading in 2026 by inviting writers to talk about the book that encouraged them to read, and to read an extract from it. A few days ago, Val Mcdermid chose The Wind in the Willows and read an extract in which a young woman proposes a plan to Toad, in jail for diving too fast, to escape dressed as her aunt, the prison washer woman. Thisreminded me of reading of Toad’s stay in prison. He is brought a plate of toast lavishly buttered, so much so that the butter drips through holes in the toast. I remember my mouth watering as I read.

 

Jan recalls reading The Wind in the Willows and Toad of Toad Hall. Also, girls’ books, which I would have avoided of course: Ballet Shoes, the Heidi books, Little Women, What Katie Did. The public library had a collection of biographies of great figures from history, which she recalls borrowing.

 

The Central Library in Ipswich also had a section of those biographies. I worked my way steadily through the shelves, I had a thing for history: great favourites were Rosemary Sutcliffe’s books (The Eagle of the Ninth and so on) and Robert Graves.

 

Which has made me wonder what you remember reading. Send me your lists and I’ll compile them for the blog.

 

We will be making our own contribution to the National Year of Reading in Sunninghill on 20 April when six authors will visit our primary school to fill the day with talk of books:

 

Fiona Barker (https://fionabarker.co.uk/)

Tilly Rand-Bell (https://www.tiliarandbell.com/)

Nicholas Allan (https://www.nicholasallan.co.uk/)

Laura Mucha (https://lauramucha.com/)

David Barker (https://davidbarkerauthor.co.uk/)

Ally Sherrick (https://allysherrick.com)

 

Nicholas Allan is also a member of the Magic Circle and proved his ability to read my mind over lunch.

Calibri: not so woke after all

 

One reason for maintaining my blog is that it keeps me in touch with friends in many different places, who often know more about a topic than I do. Toby Bainton wrote the following to me about the question of the Calibri and Times New Roman typefaces prompted by Secretary Marco Rubio’s designation of Times New Roman as the official typeface of the State Department, suggesting that the adoption of Calibri had been a wasteful DEIA initiative of the Biden administration:

 

“I have a strictly amateur interest in typography. Stanley Morison designed Times New Roman fulfilling a commission from The Times, which wanted, not surprisingly, a type which is legible in newspaper columns at very small sizes. The design is brilliant for that purpose. It is also very good as a normal-sized type for letterpress work, and was for many years the standard type used by HMSO.  It is pretty useless as a display face, for example in very large sizes, such as on the side of an aircraft. In those instances it looks bland and lacking in style. That's because it was designed for a quite different purpose.

Sans serif faces are nowadays generally preferred for reading on a computer screen. This has less to do with the serifs themselves than with the gradations of width in the appearance of letters with serifs. You only need to take a look at a lower case e in Times New Roman to see that it has marked variations in the thickness of the letter-form across its curves. This helps legibility on the page but causes problems once computers come in.

In computer-based work, typefaces are routinely blown up or shrunk down optically. If you do this with a thick-and-thin serif type, you get less legible results than with the more uniform cross-section of sans serif type. This is because when you enlarge or shrink something optically, the height and breadth of the letter may be (for example) doubled or halved, but if you double or halve the x-height, the *area* of shading on the thick-and-thin strokes then increases or decreases by a factor of four. This is simple arithmetic but it makes a crucial difference to the appearance of the letter.

Personally my ideal when reading is a serif type in good crisp letterpress. Very rare these days. Sans serif types are generally best as display faces (for example, the ubiquitous Gill Sans is fantastically successful as a display face but quite tiring to read in small sizes as a text face). But sans serif faces have their value in text on the screen for mathematical reasons. You can get away more easily with optical re-sizing, with less apparent distortion to the letter form.

 

So my conclusion regarding Times New Roman versus Calibri is that in the computer-based text age, Calibri is (unfortunately) better for everyone, whether visually-impaired or not. This has nothing to do with wokery – you just have to do the math.”

 

Another friend, Colin Ridler, a colleague from Thames & Hudson days, commented:

 

“In fact, Ian, serifs are there to AID readability because they hold the eye on the line left to right.
As for T[hames] & H[udson], while I agree the best designers consider readability, much depends on leading and typesize as well as typeface. Often designers, who come from graphic design courses, are trained to think about pictures on a page, with text readability a secondary concern. Moreover, some designers are not READERS and set text too small or with too long a line length. But in your field of textbooks, readability is emphasized more. “

 

Lastly, I discussed serif and sans serif with my brother-in-law, a former graphic designer.  He said that his designs maintained a consistent look (including typeface) across the different elements of a campaign (ad, brochure etc.). For his work, serif was generally selected for work that referred to tradition and history. Sans serif conveyed a sense of modernity.