Why is chess stressful (but the Eucharist is not)?

Despite its image as a sleepy past-time, chess can be stressful. Players' heart-rates rise and fall dramatically during games. Top grandmasters can expend thousands of calories during tournaments, shedding alarming amounts of weight as a result. Players have even died of heart failure in the middle of competitive matches, crushed by the pressure they were putting on their system.

What makes this sedentary pursuit so stressful? Two things. One is the presence uncertainty and of threats - to your position, to your King, and ultimately to your pride - something which is bound to activate our hard-wired 'fight or flight' response and everything it brings in its train (like an increased heart-rate). The other is the need to make decisions.

Decision-making is, of course, the stuff of life. And it's exhausting - in a way that has now been tracked, measured, and given a label: 'decision fatigue.' The more decisions you make, the more tired the 'executive' parts of your brain get, and the worse you get at decision-making. It's why even top top chess players can make embarrassing blunders near the end of grueling matches. It's also why busy executives have taken steps to reduce the number of decisions they make in a day. President Obama had a chef decide his food for him. Steve Jobs always wore the same clothes.

If we find uncertainty and threats - and the related need to decide how to react to them - unpleasant, it should be no surprise that we also find environments in which we don't have to deal with these things more amenable. This is what a lot of rituals and religious practices do: they set up a programme of repetitive movements or phrases, repeated over time, which are almost completely predictable. That predictability removes any uncertainty. It removes any threats. And it removes the need for us to make, or take, any decisions.

The problem is, we actually like making decisions. More precisely, though we don't always enjoy the actual experience of having to make our minds up, especially when there's a lot at stake, we like being able to make decisions for ourselves, especially when there's a lot at stake. That's basically what autonomy or freedom is, something people often want to defend, even to the point of extreme hardship or death.

This, then, is what makes chess stressful and the Eucharist not. One presents us with threats (even if of a purely intellectual kind) and forces to make a series of difficult decisions quickly. The other temporarily suspends our decision-making, banishes all threats, does away with uncertainty. The philosopher Schopenhauer thought that this is also why we enjoy music. Listening to a sequence of notes, in fact, involves even less activity on our part. It is, in a sense, pure ritual.

But it also involves a suspension of our agency. And agency or autonomy, as we've seen, is also something we want. It's crucial, then, to find a balance between activities that allow us to rest by putting our agency in cold-storage, and those that force us to do things in the world - stressful as that is. And it might be crucial not just for individuals, but also for societies.

That's not just because both things are good, but because in this as in other contexts, rest, besides being pleasant in itself, improves and freshens action, and action, in the final analysis, is what life is made of. Occasionally surrendering our freedom - if only in specific, tightly-constrained ways - might allow us to defend and exercise it all the more energetically.

Wealth and health

One of the tropes of the current crisis has been that to re-open the economy is to sacrifice lives on the altar of profits. It's also been widely pointed out that this is a false dichotomy. In fact, wealth and health tend go together. Economic downturns lead to deaths as predictably as viruses. In this post I just want to re-state this view one more time, since I think it's a crucial one to grasp if we want to react sensibly to this (or any other crisis).

As the above graph suggests, there's a positive association between longevity and GDP. GDP and child mortality seem to be inversely related. Deaths from the five most lethal infectious diseases have declined as the global economy has grown.

Correlations like this aren't a slam-dunk case that wealth causes health. Studies that have looked at the association in detail have found it to be a slightly complicated one. But even if the exact causal mechanisms at various stages of growth can be difficult to disentangle, the basic picture seems clear: wealth and health tend to go hand in hand. That's the case not only if you look at individual countries through time, but also if you look the set of countries at a particular point in time and compare the well-being of people in richer and poorer parts of the world (even controlling for other factors).

Moreover, unlike in the case of spurious associations (scores for M. Night Shyamalan's films going down on Rotten Tomatoes in line with newspaper sales, for example), it's not hard to think of reasons why these two variables might be linked, and why the wealth of a country might help its people be healthier. Richer countries can give more funding to health services. They can invest in better-quality housing, safer infrastructure, and a more comprehensive social safety net. Its citizens are wealthier, and they can spend more money on their well-being.

So far we've been looking at the positive side of the story, with better wealth being associated with health. But there's also a dark side to the association, with poverty being associated with disease and shorter life-spans.  You can see this effect with economic downturns even in the rich world: opioid deaths rose by 85% in parts of the US where car factories had closed down (and here too it's easy to think of how this might have happened, with unemployment leading to despair and addiction). A 1% rise in the unemployment rate makes working-age men 6% more likely to die of any cause.

And that's in the rich world. Economic growth is even more vital to the developing world, since increases in wealth just make the citizens of rich countries even healthier, whereas people in poor countries live much closer to death and disaster. They're highly dependant on trade and exchange with the rich world. It's no surprise that UNICEF is now predicting a 45% rise in child mortality because of lockdown-related disruptions.

The relationship between economic downturns and health does have its complications. Some studies suggest fewer people die in the actual course of recessions than normal (although more people die of particular causes, like suicide), but there are lasting health costs over the longer term. So even if the coronavirus lockdowns are followed by a V-shaped recovery, with locked-up demand immediately bursting out again, then we might expect our health (on average) to be slightly worse than it otherwise would have been over the next few decades.

There probably are a few people out there who would put profit for themselves ahead of other people's lives. But most of the people raising warnings about the lockdowns are probably just trying to draw attention to the harm we can do to ourselves if do too much damage to the economy. Whether Covid-19 is dangerous enough to justify the public-health costs associated with the economic downturns that are now starting to bite - that's a different question, and one that's best left for another day (and maybe even another website). But it's not a simple question.

'Your money or your life?' isn't a question that, in ordinary circumstances, anyone would want to be asked. But it's actually a much easier question to answer than the one many countries are faced with now.

Parkour for the course

A few years ago, an old friend from my rugby-playing days started telling me about his new workout ideas. Henry kept on playing rugby union long after I stopped, and had gotten to semi-professional level in England. Whatever sport he was doing he always worked out a lot in the gym, and had started doing so back when it wasn't yet seen as an automatic thing for rugby players to be doing. Now Henry had left the gym behind for a looser routine of kallisthenics in the park on the way home from work. He'd started making fitness videos based around some of the new moves he'd been practicing. And he talked about how his wife, a yoga and pilates instructor, had helped him think more about 'mindful movement.'

Now, if all of this sounds like a bunch of hippy horseshit to you, let me me just up the ante before I explain why I think there might be something to it. Another person I remember using some of the same language was a yoga instructor on one of the unreasonably pricey and slightly cultish places on Valencia in San Francisco. He talked about how he used to do a lot of cycling, and how that had taken a toll on his body, so he gave it up for yoga. I thought at the time that it made very little sense: there was so much good evidence for the benefits of aerobic and resistance exercise (both of which are offered by cycling), and, actually, relatively little for the benefits of yoga.

With a crick in the my neck from doing more cycling than usual because of the lock-down, I've started to reconsider. That's partly because of the former massage therapist Paul Ingraham's admirably skeptical and empirically-focussed blog Pain Science, which is slowly bringing me round to a slightly new way of thinking about muscular health and sickness. (Ingraham sees a lot of chronic muscular pain syndromes of the sort I've long had in my neck and shoulders as caused by 'sick muscles' - muscles in dysfunction either because of over-use or under-use).

It's not entirely clear what's going on when people get the kind of muscle knots that are associated with long-lasting muscular aches and pains. What does seem relatively clear (as far as I can tell) is that overuse of particular muscles correlates with more of these 'knots.' At the same time, as Ingraham points out, under-use of the muscles can have equally unpleasant effects. One point he makes is about static-ness, at work or at home - that is, keeping the same position for hours on end. He's skeptical about workplace ergonomics programmes which, for him, encourage people to try to find the 'perfect' posture, where what causes discomfort and pain isn't really what static position you're in, but the fact that you're in any static position for big chunks of each day. The solution is to engage in a regular series of 'mobilizations,' moving and stretching your limbs and joints through at least forty or so repetitions.

The point Ingraham makes about immobile postures made me wonder about mobile ones as well. Is spending a couple hours in the same position on a bike any better? Sure, you're moving, and you will get all the benefits of the exercise involved in spinning your legs (which are considerable). At the same time, the rest of your body is basically immobile. Running is a bit better, but your body is still going through a reasonably restricted range of movements. Using the weight machines in the gym will get you moving through a variety of shapes, but only a set number. Even yoga classes can focus on only a few classics poses, powerful though these classic poses can be. Squash is probably the most dynamic thing I do, but that, too, ultimately involves a set palette of movements, and it's quite one-sided (something I very much feel down one side of my body after a long match).

Ingraham's 'mobilizations' are apparently just his version of a new line of 'mobility drills' that physios are getting into at the moment. One of the key things about them, though, is their looseness and freedom. He suggests that they're 'exploratory.' And that's where the mindfulness comes in - not, in this case at least, as hippy horseshit, but as a kind of fine-grained empiricism. The idea is just to be aware of where the muscular pain and discomfort is and to move and stretch there, in whatever way you feel like moving and stretching. (Assuming, of course, that it's the chronic, tiring-feeling kind of muscular pain we're talking about, not something like a tear.) No need to do things that have a name or a history - you can do whatever the hell you want, as long as it involves moving and stretching, and you'll be doing a mobilization.

All of this explains why I've become a late convert to parkour. The lockdown has meant the gym and the pool -  two of my weekly standbys - are no longer a noption, and neither are yoga classes. (For some reason it's always harder for me to have a good yoga session at home - I need a third-party enforcer to take up a series of awkward postures and take five sounding breaths in them.) That's led me to wander around town doing pull-ups in scaffolding, climbing trees, jumping off concrete ramps, throwing large rocks a short distance into the harbour, jumping up and down onto plinths, swinging on lamp-posts, doing one-arm push-ups on bollards, doing two-arm pushups on bits of grass (34 is my current record), doing leg lifts on bits of grass (34 is my current record), going up and down any ladders that cross my path (3 or 4 is my current record), and occasionally even engaging in 'jumping-jacks'  (7).

You can see a picture of me engaging in hyper-legit urban-jungle street-running above. I'm too old and wise to go in for any of the actually risky parkour that the cool kids do (why bother?), but I can see why they like running around and swinging onto things and jumping off them. They're going through their exploratory mobility drills in just the right spirit, of creative freedom and fine-grained empiricism.

Speaking of empiricism, my theory of why unstructured exercise might be better for keeping aches and pains at bay may of course turn out be complete bollocks. I don't know of any studies that compare more unstructured forms of exercise with more regimented types. If you do, feel free to put them in the comments. Paul Ingraham often talks how most doctors and research scientists are too busy thinking about the really harmful stuff (major diseases) to have much time to spend on aches and pains. But chronic pain can be a major downer, and it's surprising from the economic standpoint if no other how little research seems to have been done even on such widely-used concepts as muscle-knots. After all, people spend a lot of money on massage and various sorts of complimentary therapy, even if even the less wacky-sounding ideas they depend on (smoothing out muscle tissue, say) don't have all that much research behind them. So surely it's time for us to start running some tests on the free-runners.

The Rediscovery of Johnny Baloney

Another thing it turns out I'm ignorant about (although I might have suspected it) is the short-lived but spectacular flowering of cast-bronze sculpture in southern Germany around 1600. This took place mainly in Munich, seat of the Wittelsbach princes, and Augsburg, home of the HNW Fuggers - no coincidence, since casting large-scale sculptures is bronze is enormously expensive. The 'Neptune ...taming a sea-horse...which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me' that the speaker of Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess' draws his guest's attention towards is supposed to speak loudly about his spending-power. It's also a quiet reminder of a river of artistic influence on which bronze deities of all sorts flowed between northern Italians states and southern German ones as the 16th century drew to a close. 

At the head of this river was a Dutchman, usually known by the less than compellingly Dutch name Giambologna (French Jean de Boulogne). A portrait of him by Hendrick Goltzius (more convincing Dutch name) is above, partly so that he'll stand at the head of a river of images in this post. And partly as a thanks for leading, directly or indirectly, to the flood of monumental bronzes that visitors to Munich can now wade into. 

There's at least one weighty tome on this topic by others who know vastly more about it than I do. So instead of trying to write anything much about it, here's a quick intro in images.

Let's start with two works by Giambologna himself, both on classical themes: the Rape of the Sabines (1574-82) and Hercules and Nessus (1599), both now in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence.

Literal tonnes of smaller bronze versions of these are around (including in a room in the Bayerisches Staatsmuseum  in which my personal rediscovery of Johnny Baloney was made). Some are better than others; here are two chosen at random:

One bronze in Munich that is by Giambologna himself is the towering crucifix in Michaelskirche, a gift to the Wittelsbachs by their fellow jet-setters the Medici. There was a connection there, with Albrecht V of Bavaria's sister-in-law marrying Francesco de Medici in 1565. And, of course, their wedding forged a link in the bronze-casting chain, with Hubert Gerhard, a student of Giambologna,  going on to work for both the Fuggers in Augsburg and the Wittelsbachs in Munich. Here are two examples of his efforts, the archangel Michael defeating Lucifer on the facade of the Michaelskirche, and Perseus holding up the head of Medusa (this one in the Wittelsbachs' Residenz palace in Munich):

Soon the Wittelsbachs decided to breed their own sculptors by sending talented sons of Bayern to Florence. Two of the most successful of the new crop were Hanses Reichle and Krumper. Here's another Michael by the one Hans, above the entrance to the Zeughaus in Augsburg; and the tomb monument of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV (a Wittelsbach) by the other Hans, in the Munich Frauenkirche:

I've saved probably the most recognizable of Giambologna's works for last, the Flying Mercury from around 1580. This one has been extensively copied and played off, and has turned up all over Europe - including, of course, in the Wittlesbach's home in Munich. What better image of the swiftness and borderlessness of artistic influence could there be?

Meditations on the rosary

Recently I started praying the rosary. That may not sound unusual, but it was something of a surprise to me, since I'm not a Catholic, nor a Christian (except in an attenuated, cultural sense), nor even a theist (that is, I don't believe in a personal God distinct from the world yet active in it). So why am I doing it?

The proximate cause was the power of context. Specifically, I was lucky enough to have time in the first couple months of this year to wander around some of the dozens of beautiful Gothic and baroque churches that are dotted around Munich and its environs. Poking my nose into the Theatinerkirche one day, I heard a prayer being recited over the loudspeaker, and I decided to sit for a while to figure out what it was.

It helped that it was in German, a language I thought I knew but was trying to get back up to speed with. It also helped (if that's the word), that six of the years since my last stint in Germany were in California, where I got deep into a hippy version of Buddhism.

The California hippy Buddhism I got deep into encouraged us to look at religious activity just as a kind of practice, and an experimental one at that. (Unlike Greco-Roman religion, it's not even 'orthopraxic,' since engaging in certain practices isn't seen as madatory.) 

After I'd recited a few hundred verses of Japanese (a language I really don't know) as a kind of psychological experiment on myself, I started looking at Christian worship with fresh eyes. Why couldn't I just look at Christian practices like the Eucharist as a practice, without getting into the question of whether the claims made about it were true?

Well, one of the reasons is that official Catholic teaching, in particular, requires you to believe certain claims in order to take part. That's an impasse I'll come back to in this post and, no doubt, on this blog. But nobody has questioned me on what's going through my mind as I work through the rosary, at least not so far.

One of them is that I don't believe some of the things I'm saying (like that Mary is the mother of God), though others strike me as possibly true (like that Jesus was crucified with a crown of thorns). But that's probably not the most interesting thought I've had praying the rosary (if it turns out it is, the rest of the post will offer you diminishing returns). Nor is the way I feel it's such an unexpected and interesting thing, something I need to explain (surely a product of being Protestant by upbringing, a kind of cultural identity it takes occasions like this for me to even notice, but is apparently there.)

A couple of other things have occurred to me too, in the odd way they seem to when you're engaged in a meditation practice focused on focusing on something else. So here are some rather secular meditations on the rosary, with hopes that Christian readers will forgive me.

One interesting thing about the rosary is how it features a combination of repetition and variation - variations on a theme, as it were. The main bit, the Ave Maria ('Gegrüßet seist du, Maria,' etc.), is recited fifty times, but there are also five 'Our fathers' between each set of ten Ave Marias, and there's a distinct lead-in to the whole exercise. And on top of that, after each 'Gegrüßet seist du, Maria,' there's a different descriptive phrase about Jesus which varies depending on what set of ten you're on, what day of the week, and can also vary depending on the season (Lent) say, and what specific tradition you're following.

Catholics will no doubt find all this pretty familiar and banal, but it's interesting to me as something you see in so many religious traditions - in fact, this combination of repetition and variation is basically what ritual of any sort boils down to. In the San Francisco Zen Center, I remember a lot of the California Buddhists offering explanations of that sort of thing in terms of mindfulness practice. (Justifications in terms of tradition didn't seem to have as much purchase in the Haight as in some other places I've lived.) Paying attention to bowing correctly was meant to snap you out of your thoughts and bring you back to the present moment.

But I'm also interested in how the variations might add to your attentiveness. It's something scholars used to write about poetry - that the slight variations poets introduced to regular metrical schemes kept the readers' attention. When you have to perform or recite something yourself, it makes you use that bit more cognitive energy. You could mindlessly recite the Ave Maria a hundred times, but whether you could do so while getting the added descriptive phrases about Jesus right is another question.

All this talk of Buddhist meditation has reminded me of another thing that caught my attention - the theory that this Christian form of devotion using a chain of beads might actually have originated in Buddhist practice. (I've also recited 'karmapa chenno' and such things with beads in Buddhist contexts.) I have no idea how respectable this theory is, and I can't find any solid evidence for it. But having recently read Thomas McEvilly's huge book on possible transmissions of philosophical and spiritual ideas from East to West, I do believe I'm credulous. 

The final thought, as often at the end of a meditation session, is a practical one. This time it isn't 'Right, I'm going to send him that email' or anything like that, but a modest proposal to the Catholic Church to transform the way it presents itself. More precisely and generally, I do wonder whether Christianity isn't losing out on a big opportunity.

There's an enormous market of attention for meditation in the West, and (as I exemplify) young people in the West are quite willing to recite things they don't believe, and seem alien to them, if it's presented as a way of calming the mind.

Personally, I believe that's actually the most honest way of presenting practices like the rosary, since I don't personally believe many of the religious claims that often go along with them (as with the rosary). But even if you do believe in those more concrete claims, presenting them as a practice others can share in might be an interesting way of reaching out, and of inviting outsiders into your own contemplative tradition.

Don't get me wrong: some people really believe what they're reciting, and I respect that. What isn't clear to me is what trouble it causes to have others who don't believe them reciting them for their own reasons. In any case, as I say, so far nobody has objected to me praying the rosary with my own funny thoughts in my head.

It's an interesting irony of my own spiritual life that I was raised in a tradition (Christianity) that has its own rich mystical history, but when I felt the need for contemplative experiences I headed increasingly Eastward (all the way, in fact, to California). Was that because hippies seemed more hip than Anglicans, and Buddhism more exotic? Yes. But it's also, I think, because Christian churches are, in my experience, oddly embarrassed about the more direct mystical strains that most of them have holed up, like eccentric elderly relatives, in their attics.

Epic drop

A few months ago, it was announced that Oxford is proposing to drop Homer's Iliad and Vergil's Aeneid as compulsory first-year texts. I found this particularly interesting, since I did Classics at Oxford, and hence studied the two texts in question in my first couple of terms. In fact, though by the time I started college (2002), I don't think we were required to read the whole of the Aeneid in Latin (only 8 books out of 12, if memory serves), the whole of the Iliad in Greek was still compulsory. I believe that requirement was watered down as well the following year, to 22 books out of 24. I'm thus one of the last hundred or so people to have read the whole of the Iliad at Oxford in my first term (and the following vacation - I have a bittersweet memory of working through Hector and Achilles' duel on Christmas Day). And I'm definitely among a dwindling number of people anywhere who've read the whole thing in the original. Looking back, I feel quite ambivalent about the whole experience, as I do about my degree as a whole.

First off, it's worth pointing out how unusual it is to read that much Greek these days. Even when I was doing my PhD exams in the US, we weren't asked to read either of the Homeric epics complete, only a few books. Some European Classics undergraduates from outside of Oxford will have read that much by the time they finish their first degrees, but not many, and North American Classics majors will be lucky to have read more than a couple books all the way through in Greek. Is this a boast? In part, yes. Reading the whole of the Iliad through took me a lot of time and effort - at least an hour a day for months. It did give me a deeper experience of the work; nothing quite brings home the futility and horror of war like reading through endless descriptions of pitiless bronze slicing through people's limbs. But it was also frustrating and deeply stupid.

That is, the way we were asked to do it was. One of the problems with Oxford's Classics course is that it's still slowly coming down from a 19th-century high in which it could be taken for granted that anybody embarking upon it would have spent the lion's share of their schooling on learning the living daylights out of Greek and Latin. (My favorite example of just how nuts they went on that is Aldous Huxley's reminiscence of spending a full day every week during his time at Eton just on Greek composition.) In those days, first-year undergraduates probably could just read through Homer without much help. (William Gladstone would later look down on the undergraduates who came after him for being able to have recourse to cribs like lexica - he, of course, improvised his own vocabulary lists, which built character.) Nowadays, things are different, even among the two hundred or so undergraduates who turn up having done A-Level Greek.

I know, since I was one of them. I turned up with an A (the top grade in those days!) and having read Iliad 16 as a set text, and...couldn't really read the Iliad to save my life. I did make use of all the aids I could find - lexica (sorry Gladstone), commentaries, and so on. But Homeric Greek is quite hard, and I still think it makes very little sense to ask first-year undergraduates to read more than half of it on their own. In fact, I'm increasingly convinced of that, since I've been teaching Greek to undergraduates for going on ten years now, and (somewhat to my relief), they find reading Greek hard too. They need a lot of help, and there are a lot of things you might well want to ask about or discuss along the way, so we tend to move through texts quite slowly.

So it might be all to the good to move the Iliad to the second part of the course ('Greats'), where students particularly keen on Homer can work on it with more attention, and with their Greek in a better state. (The old 'Early Greek Hexameter' course would seem to be just the place.) That would also give students more choice in general. There's a macro version of this point that's been ably put by Solveig Lucia Gold: the Oxford Classics course is in general quite narrow compared to North American-style à la carte degrees. I'm definitely among those who think UK degrees could and should become more like that; in the meantime (as Gold notes), both systems have their strengths and weaknesses.

One of the strengths of the European system is that it allows students who want to to specialize much more quickly, and to get a really solid grounding in what they've chosen to study. That's nowhere more evident than in the Oxford 'Literae Humaniores' course, in which reading the Iliad and Aeneid has always been only the first step in a very extensive tour of Greco-Roman culture (especially its literary texts). And if you want a really solid grounding in Greco-Roman culture, it makes an awful lot of sense to start by reading a lot of Homer, who was always seen by subsequent Greeks as both the first and the best of their poets. Homer may not have quite been their Bible or their Koran (though theological readings of Homer were a thing, his text wasn't the Revelation of a monotheistic religion); but he was their Chaucer and their Shakespeare at once. The best comparison is probably to say that he was like Dante for the Italians.

It's also nice, I might add, to read whole works. I don't know if this is a dirty secret, but this is getting to be something that classicists very rarely do, at least at undergraduate level. I know, because I'm one of the instructors failing to get through whole texts in the time allotted to me. But I don't blame myself - it takes time to prepare and discuss these texts, and that means it can be hard to get through even a play in a single, six- or seven-week block of classes. Arguably, though, it does make sense for people getting majors in Greek literature (or even Greek or Classics) to have read one or two works all the way through in the original language by the time they finish.

That, of course, needn't mean it's the Iliad students have to read all the way through. They could read one or two shorter works entire. And shorter works make up most of the rest of Greek literature, including, come to think of it, the Odyssey. Why didn't they make me read the Odyssey in my first term? The conventional answer is that the Iliad was always considered the weightier and greater work in antiquity, and while that may be true, the Odyssey was hardly straight-to-DVD either, at least not to the point of justifying me being made to read 24 books of one epic and 0 of the other.

This brings us to one of the reasons that Oxford has given for proposing this change. The main reason I've seen is that this will make things easier for female students, for a range of reasons. One is that they might be less into all the killing that takes place in the Iliad than the lads. I think that's true - after all, preference for rough-and-tumble play is one of the most well-documented of the many natural differences in interest and disposition between men and women, and that seems to be reflected in differing tastes for things like violent movies. The most I think this argument would justify, though, is for students to be given a choice between the Iliad and the Odyssey. Then students, male or female, could choose to spend their time on what most called to them - the harrowing world of the Iliad, or the magical narratives of the Odyssey.

Oxford's main line of reasoning, though, appears to go as follows. More boys than girls take A-Level Greek and Latin. That's true, especially for Greek, with most of the 200 or so pupils who take A-Level Greek coming from all-male boarding schools (which was also, by the way, the case for me). Because of that, male students will on average have a big advantage in reading through the Iliad and the Aeneid in their first two terms. That's also true. Therefore, the argument runs, we shouldn't make understanding those two epics such a major part of the first phase of the degree ('Mods'). That's where I'm not so sure.

One reason is that if having done A-Level Greek gives you an advantage with Homer and Vergil, it'll also give you an advantage with all the other texts on the course (which has a lot to do with reading Greek and Latin texts). If students from certain schools have already read some Homer, students who haven't could be put at even more of a disadvantage by not having a thorough exposure to these fundamental works at an early stage. Besides, Oxford already has a series of variations of the traditional Classics course for students who've done A-Level Latin but not Greek, Greek but not Latin, or neither.

In the end, I don't really mind whether Homer and Vergil's martial epics remain compulsory for first-year students at Oxford. I don't think it would be a disaster if they didn't, and obviously there are bigger issues out there. But if the proposed change doesn't concern me all that much, some of the reasoning behind it does. In the end, it may be that reading Greek and Latin, like other advanced skills - chemistry, maths, or playing football or an instrument to a high level - is the kind of thing that you get better at if, for whatever reason, you've been able to spend more time on it. To what extent it might make sense to change the requirements of highly competitive training programmes for people who've done less of these things - well, that's a complicated topic, and one best left for another time. But the answer's probably not 'to an infinite extent.'

What are my chances like?

One evening in that bygone age known as a few weeks ago I was at a dinner party, and the conversation turned to this new virus everyone was making such a fuss about, the coronavirus (or the novel coronavirus known as Covid-19, to be completely accurate). Like a lot of other people, I'd looked at this breakdown by age groups of people who were known to have died from the virus in China. So I told the other people at the dinner party, 'In our age group, we have a 0.2% chance of death. You probably have about as much a chance of dying going scuba-diving or sky-diving - maybe even riding a motorcycle. We're just not that good at comparing risk.'

I was dead right about that last point, and I even managed to exemplify it in the examples I gave, which were, as I later discovered, well off the mark. It turns out that the 2-in-1000 chance you probably have of dying if you get coronavirus before your forties is much higher than the 1-in-about-34 000 chance you have of dying while scuba diving, or the roughly 1-in-100 000 chance you take skydiving. As for riding a motorcycle, it's only if you were doing it in a race that you'd approach the kind of danger you'd face as a thirty-year-old with coronavirus - with a 1 in 1000 chance, you'd only be about half as likely to die as a thirty-year old with Covid-19.

So what kind of thing does give you a 0.2% chance of dying? And, come to that, what sort of activity puts you at something less than a 1% chance of dying, which is starting to look like the best bet for the overall case fatality rate for Covid-19?

The best match for a 2-in-1000 chance (at least on this pretty well-sourced chart I found online) seems to be hang-gliding, whose 1-in-560 risk makes it just slightly less deadly than that. Four bouts as a boxer will get you somewhere near the same amount of risk.

(I'm assuming the chance accumulates when it comes to activities like this, rather than decreasing as it does in the case of multiple coin flips. Dying of a head injury is unfortunately something that increases the more times you get punched, whereas what side a coin lands on isn't affected by what side it fell on last time.)

The closest comparison for the less than 1% risk that a random person with Covid-19 has is Formula 1 racing, which 99 our of every 1000 people are also going to survive. (Of course, those figures likely apply to experienced race-car drivers - if you just jumped into a McLaren and had a go at the next Grand Prix your chances would probably be less than that.) Something that has about twice the risk factor as getting Covid-19 is base-jumping, which has about a 2% fatality rate.

So, if you're under 40, your chances of dying from Covid-19 if you get it are about the same as if you went hang-gliding once (probably assuming you've done it a few times before), or took part in four boxing matches (again, assuming you're not completely untrained). Across all age-groups, getting Covid-19 is about half as likely to kill you as jumping off a cliff or tall building (with a parachute), and presents you with something very like the risk that Lewis Hamilton faces every time he competes.

In conclusion, I clearly under-estimated the risk that even a 0.2% chance of death represents. It's a significantly bigger risk than something like going deep under water with an air-tank strapped to your back. Having said that, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's very dangerous - it may just mean that scuba-diving was even less of a risk than I'd previously thought it was. We don't call off motorcycle racing or Formula 1 because 0.1 or 1% of the competitors are probably going to die (although we have now called them off to stop the spread of Covid-19, interestingly).

Of course, it needs to be noted that these figures represent the (best guess at) the risk for someone who actually contracts the virus, and lots of people won't. (How may will and won't get it over the next few months is something else the experts aren't quite sure about, but I don't think anybody's predicting an 100% infection rate.) It's also worth bearing in mind that these are average figures, and your risk will be higher or lower depending on your other risk factors (especially if you already have other medical conditions).

But, on the whole, it's interesting to think that the overall chance of dying if you get Covid-19 is somewhere between a motorcycle racer's and a base-jumper's. Motorcycle racing and base-jumping aren't activities that we ban, though they're also things that you'd probably want to avoid, unless you were a bit foolhardy. And they, of course, don't really increase the death-risk for anybody else (except maybe rivals you might take out in a crash during your Superbike race).