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Hello and welcome to the Spectator Out Loud. Each week we pick a handful of writers from the magazine and ask them to read their pieces aloud. This week we're joined by the actress Joanne Lumley who recalls her meeting with the former champion wrestler of Mongolia, now the country's

president, as well as the joys of eating birdseed. Then, spectator columnist Lionel Shriver

argues that the truly novel thing about the novel coronavirus is just how terrified it's made us all.

Next, the satirist Andrew Doyle argues that the SMP's new hate crime bill would criminalise even the Bible.

And finally, low-life's Jeremy Clark on the sadness of seeing his neighbour selling up and moving out.

First up, Joanna up and moving out. First up, Joanna Lumley.

Rather like unpacking after a holiday, when you take unworn clothes from the case still neatly folded because the occasion to wear them didn't arise,

unshown film sequences from my travel programmes are carefully edited and

stored. The cancellation of this year's long trip along the spice route made us look at these

stories again. With not much prompting, we've made three whole programmes from them. In the few years

since we made these series, the world has changed. The champion

wrestler in Mongolia, the softly spoken Mr Batulga, for example, has become president of that country.

He told me of his plan to build an eco-city on the plains, the streets radiating from the focal point

of a colossal figure of the Buddha

as a young man. We drove to the remote site, cranes and diggers were at work, and sections

of the statue lay on the grass, gleaming gold under the cobalt sky. One holy hand lay apart,

each finger three times bigger than my whole body.

Batulga's utopian dream may not have been realised yet, but the thought of solar-powered factories

and windmills was attractive in every way. In Ulan Bato, Batur, Batulga's other huge monument,

...