Labour’s plan is deadly dull. I love it.

Sex scenes in Hollywood’s brave new world

Ewan McGregor has said that, while filming A Gentleman in Moscow, he used an intimacy coordinator for sex scenes with his own wife. Oh, brave new world, says the actor Simon Williams in The Oldie. Today, intimacy coordinators not only “choreograph the lusting and thrusting”, but also referee what’s acceptable and what isn’t. Rumpy-pumpy is no longer confined to the bedroom and is “seldom done horizontally”. With scant regard for comfort or safety, on-screen couples are asked to “thrash about on the stairs or against the Aga”. Before kick-off, shivering actors are sprayed with glycerine because it “looks like sweat”. It also has a sweet taste, so it’s “like snogging a boiled sweet”.

Some things never change: young actors “apologise for their wayward stiffies”; older ones excuse a no-show. Roger Moore used to tell his Bond girls: “Don’t take it personally, love. You can lead a horse to water and all that…” Other things have definitely improved. “Poor Susannah York had ice-packs held against her nipples between takes to keep them pert.” When Oliver Reed and Alan Bates were filming their al fresco naked wrestling scene in Women in Love, they used hot water bottles to keep their manhoods from shrivelling in the cold. People sometimes think of love scenes as a fringe perk of being an actor, “like free oysters for a maître d’”, but not everyone enjoys them. One chilly morning in 1976, I had a sex scene with Glenda Jackson. We weren’t really each other’s cup of tea, and I was reminded of an old cartoon of a middle-aged couple pausing mid-coitus, with her saying: “Can’t you think of anyone either?”

🎥🛶 My first on-screen kiss was when I was 16, in 1962, with Jane Birkin, in a home movie directed by her brother. He cast us adrift on the boating lake in Battersea Park, and left us “kissing away the afternoon”. Afterwards, I asked Andrew if he really needed so much footage. “Oh no,” he replied, “I ran out of film after 30 seconds.”

Give politicians a break – not all problems have solutions

Politicians have been promising to revive Britain’s deindustrialised regions for as long as I’ve been alive, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. The reality, never acknowledged in Westminster, is that this is a problem that “might have no solution”. You can only do so much to counter foreign wage competition, automation and other global forces. “Ask the American Midwest.” Another “insoluble” issue is the baby bust. With birth rates too low to maintain current population levels, developed nations are desperate to persuade people to have more children. But how? Subsidised childcare hasn’t made Nordic nations “ultra-fertile” – Sweden and Denmark have the same birth rate as the US. You could offer giant cash incentives instead, but at what cost?

The “ultimate” unsolvable problem is immigration. “It is impossible, politically if not physically, for America or Europe to accept all, or most, or even a large percentage of the people who seek refuge there.” Yet it is also “unconscionable” to leave them all in poverty, extreme heat or “bandit-ravaged failed states”. The issue can’t be remedied by government policy because it’s the result of “tectonic stuff”: rich nations being geographically close to poor ones; Africa bucking the birth rate decline. Admitting that some issues are intractable invites accusations of callousness. But pretending that “all questions have answers” is far worse, because if – or when – the problem persists, politicians are decried as incompetent or indifferent. And that’s “poisonous to a nation’s civic health”. What we need, in short, is more “can’t-do spirit”.

The masterpiece that took 12 years to write

As someone who has been working on a book since 2008, says Lauren Alwan in The Millions, I’m interested in how slow writers “tolerate the uncertainty that comes with a long project”. After all, some of our finest writers seem to “work best at a clip”. Saul Bellow produced “four massive books in 11 years”. Muriel Spark wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in less than four weeks; Anne Rice knocked out Interview with the Vampire in five. Kazuo Ishiguro drafted The Remains of the Day in a month, implementing a process he calls “The Crash”: nothing but writing from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday to Saturday, taking one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. “I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail,” he says, “and would not go near the phone.”

But among the slower cohort, what’s remarkable is how many seem not to have worried at all, instead seeing a gestation period of a decade or more as a chance for “openness and discovery”. JRR Tolkien, who spent 12 years writing The Lord of The Rings, once explained the hidden joy of it to WH Auden: “I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me.” Donna Tartt embraces the famous gaps between her books: “Things will come to you and you’re not going to know exactly how they fit in,” she says. “You have to trust in the way they all fit together, that your subconscious knows what you’re doing.”