Hawking, happiness and homeopathy – it's been a week for black holes

Monday

One of the more bizarre Westminster set-pieces took place today when the Speaker, John Bercow, granted an urgent question about claims of bullying of parliamentary staff by MPs. As Bercow was one of those MPs against whom these allegations had been made, you might have expected him to excuse himself from the Speaker’s chair and allow his deputy to oversee the session. Not a bit of it. Bercow took centre stage, nodding his head even more theatrically than usual, as most MPs tried to avoid mentioning him by name. Though not all. Conservative James Duddridge broke ranks – the Tory backbenchers, many of whom dislike the Speaker for what they see as his pro-Labour, anti-Brexit bias, had been instructed not to score political points ahead of the prime minister’s statement on Russia – to question Bercow’s position. The embarrassment in the chamber was excruciating. To add to the sense of the surreal, the leader of the house, Andrea Leadsom, announced she would be recommending an independent inquiry into the bullying claims to the House of Commons commission, the cross-party group responsible for the administration of the Commons. As Bercow is chair of the commission, this effectively meant he would be in charge of appointing the people who would be investigating him. To round off a bad day for the Speaker, his car was photographed with a “Bollocks to Brexit” sticker in the window.

Tuesday

When Spurs announced they would be building a new state-of-the-art football stadium on the site of the old White Hart Lane, they promised that the fans would be “front, left and centre” of all their plans. That promise lasted as long as it took for the brochure inviting season ticket holders to choose their seats at the new ground to land on my doorstep. It quickly became apparent that two-thirds of the seating in the lower area of the ground where I used to sit had been given over to corporate entertainment and that if I wanted to remain in roughly the same place – assuming all the seats hadn’t already been taken – then I would have to fork out a 50% price hike for the privilege. If that wasn’t bad enough, the club has come up with an extraordinary eight-phase application process, which means that some families – and many groups of friends – who have sat near to one another for years and years are now likely to be separated unless they are all prepared to sit in the least popular areas of the new ground. Needless to say, all these unpleasant details were tucked away right at the back of the brochure. The opening pages were given over to the glories of the fabulous new artisan bakery and microbrewery that would be available inside the new stadium. A word to the Spurs board: most of us go to the football to watch the game and hang out and moan with our mates, not to pick up a loaf of sourdough. If the club isn’t careful, Spurs’ new 62,000-capacity ground could be half empty for fixtures against less glamorous sides within five years.

Wednesday

On the day that Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest minds of any century, died, YouGov conducted a poll into how many people had read his book A Brief History of Time. Eighty-five per cent of people said they had never owned a copy, while only 4% responded that they had bought the book and read it from cover to cover. I count myself in an even smaller group than that. Not only did I read every word of the book, I also bought and read his two subsequent books – The Universe in a Nutshell and A Briefer History of Time – that he wrote for those who had been too dim to understand his first book. So I must confess that for all Hawking’s many achievements in the area of theoretical physics, his attempts to educate me ended in failure. I came to be able to repeat that at the moment we call big bang, the density of the universe and the curvature of spacetime would have been infinite so all theories of cosmology break down. But not to understand what the hell that meant. Nor did I ever get to grips with the problems of resolving singularity through supersymmetery, string theory or 10-dimensional space. Hawking once wrote that if we learned why the universe existed, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason, “for then we would know the mind of God”. To which I would add, we’d also know a great deal more about the mind of Hawking.

Thursday

My first thought when I wake up most mornings is: “Well done, John. You’ve already failed at the day and you haven’t even got out of bed”. And that’s one of the high points as generally things go steadily downhill from there on. My sense of emptiness and disappointment in myself is profound. I am unable to hold on to any of the good things that happen to me for more than a few moments, while the bad things fester and gnaw away at me from the inside. So while part of me feels the need to apologise to the rest of the country for personally dragging the UK down a few notches to 19th in the UN happiness rankings, I mostly feel relieved to be living somewhere so miserable. Just imagine the pressure of living in Finland, which tops the charts. Or in any of the other Nordic countries that occupy the rest of the top four places. Knowing that the people around me were having the most brilliant time while I was unable to extract any enjoyment from my country being the best governed, the police the most trusted and the banks the most stable would send me into an even greater spiral of depression.

Friday

Given that the health service is already heavily strapped for cash and that some patients are being denied treatments because they are deemed to be too expensive, the news this week that the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine – formerly the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital – will no longer be able to provide homeopathic remedies on the NHS from next month comes not a moment too soon. The head of NHS England, Sir Simon Stevens has described homeopathy as “at best a placebo” and at worst a misuse of public funds. No doubt there will be some, Prince Charles possibly among them, who swear by homeopathy and will be devastated it is no longer freely available. But serious homeopaths should look on this as a win-win situation. Homeopathy has always worked on the “less is more” basis: some formulations have one part per trillion of the active ingredient and others are diluted so far that scientists have been unable to locate a single molecule of the substance involved. Homeopaths have explained this anomaly as water’s ability to retain the memory of something that was once in it. So on this basis the RLHIM should be more effective than ever now that it will be powered by the memory of NHS cash.

Digested week, digested: “Russia should go away and shut up.”