It turns out it isn’t that bad. I actually don’t mind the time I spend mulling over my day with the warm, soapy water flowing over my hands, for once neither tapping nor scrolling. And it’s all been much easier since my flat-mate brought home a “Scrub Daddy” — not an obliging older boyfriend, but a grinning, all-American sponge.

Fear not: this isn’t the start of some trad-wife manifesto, calling all the hunnies back to the kitchen to be kept barefoot and pregnant. But rather, as technology and Artificial Intelligence take control of our everyday existence, to hail those mundane tasks which allow space for thought. As if we were to forsake them, what would we do instead? The chances are we’ll just spend more time in a high-tech trance: already, we spend nearly three hours a day on our phones, and even longer on laptops.

Consider the dreamy tranquillity of Vermeer’s muse The Milkmaid as she pours milk from a terracotta jug. While there is nothing to envy in her domestic servitude, there is something beguiling about how lost in thought she is while engaging in a mindless task. Her thoughts seem away: perhaps on a lover, or perhaps she has just struck upon the idea of oat milk. Such moments of serene reflection are vanishingly rare nowadays, as we whip out our phones to kill time as we sit on a train or wait for the kettle to boil.

Yet it’s not just our thoughts we are surrendering to technology; it’s our memory too. When my grandfather was a child, he was made to learn great chunks of poetry by heart. I by contrast, like my whole generation, have outsourced my memory to my phone, where I set reminders, keep phone numbers and compile vast to-do lists. Why bother to remember the words of the Bard — or even my new postcode — when I can look them up in an instant? And you can forget about learning a foreign language once we each have our very own Babel fish.

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By Sam Leith

I hear of small acts of defiance: one acquaintance is memorising everything that matters to him, from phone numbers and flapjack recipes to the most elegant of maths theorems. It might seem foolish — resistance is a little futile at this stage. But just because we can delegate our duties to machines, does that mean we should?

Unlike a human, AI can’t find fulfilment in the fruits of its labour. The sense of pride, identity and community so familiar to Philip Roth’s glove-cutters in American Pastoral is alien to the machines that replace them: “Though they considered themselves to be men more aristocratic than anyone around, including the boss, a cutter’s working hand was proudly calloused from cutting with his big, heavy shears. Beneath those white shirts were arms and chests and shoulders full of a workingman’s strength — powerful they had to be, to pull and pull on leather all their lives, to squeeze out of every skin every inch of leather there was.” These noble men were the last of their kind, soon to vanish into the pit of industrial decline.

But maybe there are finer ways to fill your days than a vocation. While AI doomers fear an age of melancholic unemployment, others preach a glorious utopia of unlimited leisure. In this future paradise, we will be liberated from the drudgery of work and chores. Our working days could be shortened, leaving us time to devote to higher things: family, culture, nature, charity, contemplation, amusement. We could revive and democratise the ancient Roman concept of otium, cultivated leisure practised by the elite. And thanks to a generous form of Universal Basic Income — supposedly to be procured through Sam Altman’s iris-scanning crypto Orbs — every one of us could become a lady or gentleman of leisure. It would be an aristocracy for all.

In this Eden, AI could bring an end to the tyrannical rule of Lord Time, which began with the chiming of medieval church bells and intensified during the Industrial Revolution with the invention of railway timetables, factory shifts and the working week. It was not long before every human breath was commoditised, deployed for maximum utility in the labour market. And rest became strictly defined and heavily regulated. Now, however, we could simply clock off.

But free time doesn’t necessarily translate into actual freedom. Who can afford to recreate the charmed existence of a Roman philosopher — all splendid villas and strutting peacocks? It’s more likely we morph into WALL-E-style consumerist marshmallows — all Deliveroo meals, Hinge and TikTok reels. We would live for dopamine kicks and little else.

How, then, might we balance the human desire for meaningful work with the need for AI-fuelled economic growth? Already, PwC has predicted that global GDP could be up to 14% higher in 2030 as a result of AI. Perhaps, with AI to grind away on our behalf, work will become a dalliance. Much as the appalling KidZania allows children to pay to spend the day pretending to work “jobs” for corporate sponsors in Westfield shopping centre, similar capitalist playgrounds might emerge for adults; we would pay for the satisfaction of doing a good day’s work: blowing glass, bricklaying, or writing a chapter of a novel.

We may, however, never reach such fantastical extremes. But the trick with AI is sensing when to stop. We should hold up every aspect of our lives to the light and wonder where AI could enhance or degrade our humanity. While inaction is the bête noire of humanity, it can sometimes be the wisest course; as Pascal wrote in 1654, “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”. For every AI innovation we discover, we should consider: what, exactly, are we saving all our time and effort for?

I still remember her magnificent tail vanishing into a tangle of leaves. Or at least, I think I do. It’s all slightly hazy. But I don’t believe she was just a large badger, as one incredulous friend suggested. Though as a Londoner, my idea of a panther (or a badger, for that matter) is probably rather like Carpaccio’s idea of the lion of Saint Jerome. Neither of us had much experience to work with.

Perhaps I was willing it to be true, but no other explanation seemed to fit. And I wasn’t the only one to think so. Only yesterday, a construction worker claimed to have seen another legendary leopard, the Beast of Cumbria, while strolling across a field. The British Big Cats Society, meanwhile, receives reports of between 300 and 500 sightings per year, the vast majority regarding black panthers. But though I was in good company, it was still bewildering for me — a liberal “normie” in every respect — to face such a mystical assault on my Common Sense.

Believers squabble over how big cats ended up roaming the Cotswolds, but most trace the story back to the Sixties. Then, exotic pets were the height of fashion, with Harrods stocking a fine range of big cats, alligators, and even a baby elephant, which Ronald Reagan bought in 1967. But that all changed with the Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976, when, at least according to big cat enthusiasts, bohemians secretly released their pets into the wild to dodge the new ownership fees. Some later confessed. And in 1980, a puma was captured in the Scottish Highlands.

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This theory does, admittedly, have one slight flaw: there has never been any conclusive evidence of a big cat colony in Britain. And that’s not for lack of state cooperation. In 1983, 50 of our toughest Royal Marines, aided by a pack of beagles, went hunting for the Beast of Exmoor — but they found not a whisker. Later, in 1994, after a grisly sheep massacre was blamed on the Beast of Bodmin Moor, the then-junior agricultural minister, Nicholas Soames, commissioned a six-month inquiry into the matter. The report concluded that there was “no verifiable evidence for the presence of a ‘big cat’”. More recently, in 2012, a National Trust-commissioned DNA test into a suspicious roe deer carcass, which bore the marks of a ravenous feline, pointed to a lowly fox.

And while there is some talk among Big Cat trackers of state cover-ups and leopard corpses in government freezers, this is limited to an extreme fringe. What is fascinating, in fact, is how this theory has remained largely localised, unpoliticised, and untainted. Unlike UFO sightings, it has not yet cascaded into a sinister global conspiracy, nor has it set the internet aflame with coded talk of malign forces: the World Economic Forum, the Great Reset and the global capitalist elite.

This isn’t because Big Cat theory lacks the right components. If I were to conjure my own conspiracy, I dare say I wouldn’t find it too difficult. I would simply invent a cabal of rogue Rewilders, living in splendid stately homes in the Cotswolds, who had concocted a Plot to release panthers into the wild to wipe out local livestock — and, in the spirit of the Highland Clearances, drive honest farmers from the land. These wicked Rewilders — all Davos Men, of course — would then appropriate the empty farmland, fill it with enormous peat bogs, and live royally off the lavish government Net Zero subsidies that would soon roll in. Given the scarcity of land and livestock, the poor would be herded into packed cities and forced to eat mealworm porridge instead of meat, while the rich would feast on free-roaming venison and frolic in fields of wildflowers.

As with all the best conspiracies, mine would contain an acorn of truth. Many British farmers now fear for their livelihoods, as the Government rolls out a radical post-Brexit farming subsidy scheme that rewards green initiatives such as planting woodland or rewilding. In other words, it pays farmers to cease farming. Indeed, in order to meet the Government’s environmental targets, a quarter of UK farmland will need to be reassigned. All I’d need to do is pour this very real crisis into my potion of venomous half-truths. And there is no shortage of rage to ignite: farmers are already blockading European cities and hurling eggs at the European Parliament. How long until British farmers join the resistance?

My fantastical Plot would perfectly embody Richard Hofstadter’s definition of the “paranoid style”: “a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life”. But as the real Big Cat theory has not yet spiralled in this manner, it seems more like a lost fragment of folklore than a conspiracy.

There is a certain romance in this idea. While British folklore largely died out after the Enlightenment, it still evokes a pre-industrial age before trains, television and 4G stripped the nation of its cultural diversity, belittled its local beliefs, customs and dialects, and forged a Great British Monoculture. Those were the days when Britain’s peripheries weren’t pining to resemble its centre; when people didn’t drink from the same fountain of knowledge, but from their own unwieldy springs. And if hobgoblins were said to wander the forests of one remote county, an outsider would hardly dare to suggest otherwise.

It was a time most tenderly depicted by George Eliot in Silas Marner. She writes that, “to the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery”. And her heart aches for those rare few who are forced to leave their native towns for a “new land where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas — where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished”. It was as if other realms were ruled by different gods.

This dappled land didn’t just vanish. It was crushed by middle-class Victorians in their quest to rid the nation of uncivilised superstition, and to forever replace the scourge of Magic with Enlightenment Science and Reason. The idea that “primitive” belief systems lingered not just in the colonies, but at home too, haunted the intellectuals of the age — and led to the creation of folklore as a field of study. It ultimately came down to class: the historian Thomas Waters argues that there was a “growing sense that supernatural credulity was a distinctly proletarian trait”. And that middle-class Victorians, having been enfranchised in the 1832 Great Reform Act, were seeking to define themselves through their devotion to reason.

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We can see Big Cat theory, then, as a vestige of this bygone world; a bottled cry against industrialisation. After all, as The Economist’s Jem Bartholomew argues, “the mythical beasts of the British imagination often appear at moments of modernisation”. Early sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, for instance, coincided with an upgrade to the Highlands road network. And after the Second World War, fearsome felines seem to have kept local tabloids in business, from the Beast of Bodmin Moor and the Cougar of Cupar to the Fen Tiger, the Nottingham Lion and the Sydenham Panther. Nowadays, when most British children will never know the song of a turtle dove or the scuffling of a hedgehog, the image of a panther padding over a neurotically well-tended lawn is a bewitching one.

Yet what if we have lost something more than folklore? By eroding local beliefs, ridiculing superstition, and insisting on uniformity of rational thought, we have perhaps made ourselves more, not less, vulnerable to conspiracy. Of course, the paranoid style is as old as time, its long cast of villains assuming many masks: Jesuits, Templars, Freemasons, global Capitalists, Communists. But I can’t help but wonder whether we have created a belief system so rigid and coherent that the slightest doubt can cause it all to crumble.

There once was a time when you could believe in witches, fairies, and hobgoblins, and still have absolute faith in God, Science, and your King. There were many contradictory authorities and infinite ways of seeing. But now, truth has become an all-or-nothing game: if you start to question the “Establishment” in one respect — whether over Covid vaccines, 5G or urban planning — the chances are it won’t be long until you’re drawn into an upside-down, Manichean world of conspiracy. And in this dark wonderland, as Hofstadter describes, there is “no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities”; everything is evidence of malicious intent. To the paranoid soul, the flick of a panther’s tail at twilight is enough to cast doubt over the entire system.

Luckily, there’s a cure for our heartache: Venice for Pleasure. This irreverent guidebook by the English art historian J.G. Links promises “a guide to the pleasures of Venice without its pains”, which, in our era of frantic mini-breaks — of Instagramming and TikToking our way around as many must-see landmarks as possible — is a marvel and a revelation.

“Very few travellers seem to enjoy their first visit to Venice,” Links cautions. “They are awed, dazzled, overwhelmed… [but] above all, they are exhausted by it; physically, mentally and emotionally, its assault is too much for the ordinary human being to withstand.” This is a book for that wild curiosity: a tourist in pure pursuit of pleasure. If they follow Links, they may end up skipping their three-hour tour of the Doge’s Palace, but “Venice will have woven its spell around them, and they will be captives for life.”

Links asks just one thing: that everyone be a walker, “or, at least, a dawdler”. And that is because his guide consists of four narrated walks around Venice, from the shimmering Zattere to the lonely Cannaregio. The streets, Links says, have “a miraculous spring in the paving which makes fatigue almost impossible”. And he is careful to stop at “as many cafes as possible” for coffee or apéritif, from where he enchants us with stories and architectural details about nearby palaces, churches and bell towers contemplating collapse.

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With Links as a guide, the idea that Venice is somehow not real — that it is a circus, a Disneyland, a fossil — is banished. On my own strolls, I have seen drowsy postmen loading Amazon parcels onto little delivery boats at dawn; babbling Venetians spilling out of a bar onto the canal, eating baccalà mantecato and drinking wine from paper cups; families fleeing the stink of the summer to the furthest beach on the Lido; a seagull losing a brawl with a lagoon squid, turning the water jet black; a distressed elderly gentleman who has misplaced a valuable miniature he was hoping to sell. This is not a city without a soul.

There is another side to Venice: the merciless tour guides; the menageries of Murano glass animals; the overpriced, often-disappointing food (there is nothing worse than that fearful “delicacy”, the Venetian soft-shell crab, plucked from its squalid existence on the lagoon floor for your displeasure). Even Jan Morris, a lifelong admirer, admitted to feeling that tourism was “in some sense a prostitution of a great city, a degradation, a shame”.

But who’s to say that this carnival of profit isn’t real in its own way? The Venetians have been playing this same game since the 16th century, when, long after their blood-soaked earnings from the Crusades dried up, Venice devoted herself to readying pilgrims for the Holy Land. The piazza was full of Venetians flogging guidebooks, insecticides, and religious tat. Five centuries on, they’re still at it — and next Spring, we’ll be charged €5 entry to the city.

Earlier this year, my devoutly romantic friend took a photograph of a gondolier teaching his son to row in the moonlight: passing down his trade to the next generation. If he were canny, he would have also advised his boy on how to squeeze the most money out of unsuspecting tourists. But would this have made the scene any less remarkable? Any less Venetian? Certainly not.

There is a strong case in Venice for leaning into the artifice, for ditching our snobby disdain for anything that feels touristy. It is the burden of the Brit in Italy to live in dread of encountering a fellow countryman: to be sat next to another British tourist in a restaurant is the ultimate catastrophe. But what do we gain from this manic pursuit of authenticity? And what counts as an “authentic” experience abroad anyway? Is it to surround yourself with Venetians chatting and drinking in Campo Santa Margherita — even if the most you can say in Italian is ciao bella? Perhaps we’re simply chasing an illusion.

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Nowhere is this question more relevant than in the gold-leaf excess of Florian’s Cafe in San Marco. I went there one morning on the advice of Links (whose book is, admittedly, now a little behind on the cafe scene), and was so horrified at the thought of paying €12 for a hot chocolate, only to sit amid a throng of fellow tourists goggling and waving selfie sticks, that I upped and left. I later regretted it. Florian’s, I imagine, has been fleecing foreigners for 300 years. It is hardly inauthentic.

In fact, having lost her empire, Venice revelled in her duplicity, fashioning herself a new role as entertainer of the world. “Venice had given herself over to pleasure — but she still made it good business,” Links writes of the 18th century. “Her pageants and carnivals, her theatres and balls, were as much designed to attract the tourists as to make the Venetians themselves forget past glories.”

Yet Venice never let herself fade completely into gilded irrelevance. Even now, she is more than just a honeymoon city, a reliquary of bygone beauty. She is the home of the Biennale, the Film Festival, the Peggy Guggenheim collection, and a mother to the finest exhibitions of Venetian art. It is part of the fun to walk into a prim-looking church, only to find soft-porn playing above the altar, with humourless aesthetes watching from Play-Doh beanbags. Venice is both the art world’s greatest muse — and its harshest critic.

For Jan Morris, this was never enough. She dreamed that the city would once again become a noble marketplace. “East and West might meet once more,” she writes in Venice, “to fuse their philosophies at last, and settle their squalid bickerings… Venice is made for greatness, a God-built city, and her obvious destiny is mediation. She only awaits a summons.” It’s a beguiling vision, and one that could perhaps inspire Britain too, as it struggles to accept its waning status in the world.

As for the “perennial tourist”, we have begun a love affair with Venice that will last a lifetime — unless, like all the great romances, she sinks before we do. We can choose whether to drink hot chocolate at Florian’s or to amble along the quiet streets of Dorsoduro, knowing that each experience is just as authentic; just as Venetian. Because Venice has always been an exhibitionist. And in Venice, as in life, it is often the performance that is most real.