The battle that made Nelson a national hero

Hero
Gukesh Dommaraju, who at the age of 18 has become the youngest ever chess world champion. The teenager dethroned China’s Ding Liren in Singapore last Thursday, shattering the age record set by Garry Kasparov when the Russian won the title aged 22 in 1985. Gukesh’s victory sparked jubilant scenes on Indian TV (watch here) and he was greeted by hundreds of fans at Chennai airport on his return to his home city this week.

Villain
The Saracen’s Head Inn in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, which is being sued by a convicted terrorist over its “deeply offensive” sign. Khalid Baqa, who served a jail sentence for distributing jihadist propaganda, wants £1,850 over the pub sign’s depiction of a brown-skinned, bearded Arab. “I’ve always been offended by pub names like these,” he tells The Sun. “I’ve stopped all the terrorism stuff now.”

Heroes
Brussels sprouts, which are 25% bigger this year than they were in 2023. Vegetable wholesaler TH Clements says its average sprout is 30mm in diameter, compared with 24mm last year, thanks to better weather and the introduction of hardier varieties. The quality is “among the best we’ve had in recent years”, says Simon Tenwick, a buying manager at Tesco. “Sprout fans will be delighted.”

Hero
A deer that ran on to the field during an amateur rugby match and performed what one of the teams described as “the best tackle of the weekend”. Footage of the incident shows the muntjac haring on to the pitch, flooring one of the players (and itself), then haring off again. Marlow rugby club, which narrowly won the game against the Aylesbury Rams, said: “When they told us we were playing Rams we clearly didn’t take it seriously.”

Villains
Scientists who are trying to create microbes that present an “unprecedented risk” to life on Earth. That’s according to an international group of Nobel laureates and other experts, says The New York Times, who warn that so-called “mirror bacteria” – synthetic organisms made from mirror images of natural molecules – could evade the immune defences of natural organisms, causing an “unstoppable pandemic, devastating crop losses or the collapse of entire ecosystems”. Happy Christmas!

The joys of flying by private jet

The first time you fly on a private jet is the moment you “leave the human race forever”, says Tina Brown on Substack. Having hitched a few rides with gilded friends, I’ve become convinced it’s the “single most seductive experience in the world”, and realised there isn’t anyone you wouldn’t “kill, betray or sleep with” to ensure a lifetime of access. Most of Henry Kissinger’s inner circle was dictated by “who could fly him where and when”. The host of any speaking event invariably had to “sleuth out some ponderous plutocrat” to fly him from New York to Stuttgart. And regardless of their experience or know-how, the plutocrat would then have to be given some sort of “role” on the event’s agenda.

The Obamas “won’t even cross the road these days” – or in Barack’s case, play a round at an exclusive golf club – without the use of a plane belonging to one of their billionaire circle. Who did and did not make the cut at his notorious Martha’s Vineyard 60th birthday party in 2021 seems to have been based primarily on “whether or not the guest in question could provide future access to wings”. And poor old Bill Clinton has never heard the end of his decision to use Jeffrey Epstein’s Boeing 727, later dubbed the “Lolita Express”, for the travel needs of the Clinton Foundation. The trouble is, there are no points for those who nobly resist the temptation. “I will never forget catching sight of former vice president Al Gore, a month after his loss in the 2000 election, trundling his own wheelie bag towards the passenger welcome area at Newark airport.”

🛩️🙅‍♂️ A leading M&A lawyer once told me that corporate merger negotiations often run aground on a vague-sounding contractual term known as “the social issues”. What these “issues” boil down to is generally: can the exiting big shot still have use of the company plane? How often? With how many co-passengers? “No plane, no deal.”

When I was teaching at Winchester, says Tom Lawson in the Trusty Servant, one of the other dons, Tony Ayres, used to do a physics experiment measuring the speed of sound by firing an air rifle into a block of wood. On one occasion, the shot ricocheted off an already-embedded pellet. As the whole class searched for the stray projectile, one boy patiently sat at his desk with his hand up. Eventually, an “exasperated” Mr Ayres asked him what he wanted – whereupon the student told him the pellet was “safely lodged” in his buttock. The teacher’s misery was compounded at A&E, when the boy revealed that his father was none other than the head of the Health and Safety Executive (who thankfully found the whole thing very funny). Mr Ayres, who died earlier this year, told us all this after house lunch one day, introducing the topic by saying, with a deadpan face: “I shot a boy, once.”