Photo: the sacralised baroque cityscape of Salzburg, Austria.
I was recently ensconced in one of the last all-male environments permitted in contemporary society – a barbershop – and, as I had my haircut, the free-wheeling conversation inexorably turned to the current COVID episode and from there to the wider Western crisis. After my barber voiced a familiar litany of many of the woes afflicting Western civilisation and I nodded along sympathetically, he eventually sighed and asked, so…