Onegin and Slippers

 Every once in a while, Radio 4 takes a break from being unlistenably woke and springs a welcome surprise. Last week, from Monday to Friday in the Book at Bedtime slot, it was Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, in the excellent 1990 translation by James E. Falen, which made use of Nabokov's literal prose translation but turned it back into sparkling Pushkin stanzas. What's more, it was read – by Rhashan Stone, who I discover is a black American actor and comedian settled in the UK – with a perfect balance between the drive of the action (inward and external) and the structure of the verse (and he clearly understood what he was reading, which is so often not the case with readings like this). It was a joy to hear – and you can still catch it, all five episodes, on BBC Sounds.

And another good thing. Yesterday I had occasion to buy a pair of slippers, which I did from a stall in the market place. 'They're made in England now,' the stallholder told me as he handed them over. They were very cheap, so I was surprised to hear this, but he explained that this firm used to have all its shoes made in China, but now transport costs have risen so much that they find it cheaper to make them here. This struck me as excellent news, and I hope it applies across more areas of manufacturing – it would be wonderful to be taking back at least some of all that manufacturing we cheerfully outsourced to a totalitarian country which makes no secret of its ambition to take over the world at the first opportunity. Let's hope my slippers are a straw in the wind.