'My Week' by Dan Stevens | The Telegraph

Dan Stevens column in The Telegraph

My week: Dan Stevens

Dan Stevens By Dan Stevens
6:30AM GMT 20 Nov 2011

Farewell then, Silvio Berlusconi – the Frankie Cocozza of European politics.

I notice that Berlusconi nobly delayed the release of his album of love songs to deal with his country’s financial crisis. Maybe now Silvio is indisposed, Simon Cowell might favour his musical fortunes over those of the disgraced Dohertini and recoup some of the Italian deficit with a multi-platinum album.

There’s one question that bugs me more than most: “What are your interests?” It’s probably why I could never fill out a job application properly. Anyone who can answer this succinctly tends to unsettle me. I suppose I’ve always been interested in “Teds”: Superted, Bill & Ted, Father Ted or Ted Hughes. In the past year I’ve also discovered TED, an organisation that brings together people from the worlds of technology, entertainment and beyond to share innovations and beautiful thoughts. This week I attended my first Ted “salon”, a delightfully 19th-century-sounding event with a distinctly 21st-century edge. Imagine a series of short talks on topics ranging from memory to the possibilities of 3D printing to Lady Gaga, punctuated with mind-bending digital photography and polyrhythmic percussive guitar. It was as if someone had created the perfect day at college and handed me a glass of wine. Most of these talks are uploaded to ted.com, where you can hack the bracken from your neural pathways in your pyjamas, should you so choose, and click away your curiosity. It may have killed the cat eventually, but before then it made for pretty fascinating paw prints.

Remember it was Armistice Day recently? Not far from where you are reading this, there will no doubt be a war memorial – often simple, sometimes beautiful structures. We need municipal space devoted to the memory of servicemen and women and the sacrifices that form our national bedrock. Memory is an act of revisiting, both mentally and physically: a tangible memorial site is not a political symbol but a touchstone with our history, without which we are nothing. The Sunday Telegraph is doing a good thing in launching its campaign for more Lottery funding to be invested in their upkeep and for harsher punishments for vandalism. The value of these memorials far exceeds the worth of their copper or brass, and anyone defacing them should be seen as destroying vital cells in our collective human consciousness.

Dan Stevens is Editor-At-Large for thejunket.org