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Caring classes' crassness
STEMMING the tide of bien pensant prejudice is like swimming in treacle - certainly unpleasant and probably impossible. For all his fighting talk, that is, unfortunately, what Mr Jeffrey Greenwood will discover when he starts his new job as chairman of the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW). Mrs Bottomley deserves congratulations for appointing, at long last, someone to shake the nonsense out of CCETSW - nonsense like its Humpty Dumpty pronouncement of 1989 that ' race is not a biological fact but a concept which has been socially constructed'. Mr Greenwood, on the other hand, deserves nothing but sympathy in his very sticky situation.
It is not just the ideology of professional social workers that he will have to deal with. He will also have to contend with a much more diffuse kind of silliness, which, by some perversity of nature, often seems to afflict the caring classes as a whole, including fellow-travelling journalists. Take for instance the village of Upton upon Severn, near Malvern. Recently a local journalist explained to a BBC radio interviewer that a home for convicted sex-offenders is to be set up in this village, despite local opposition, and the inmates, as part of their rehabilitation, are to take part in the life of the community. Local people were very upset and worried. 'What about?' asked the BBC woman, rather sharply.
The reporter repeated the story, imagining, possibly, that it speaks for itself, ending again with the community's anxiety. At this the BBC woman, even more aggressively, asked again: 'What about?' For a moment I wondered whether she could possibly be sincere. Villages are marvellous places for sex-offenders - I narrowly escaped a terrible fate as a child on the (admittedly rather inflammatory) Giant Hill at Cerne Abbas in Dorset. I don't know which is more infuriating in such a case - hypocrisy or such patronising silliness. And what about the sense or integrity of those who wish to give sex-offenders community care in a small village that expressly says it does not want to have them? And with reason - you do not have to be a Sun reader to know that sex offenders often re-offend.
In the same vein, the Guardian ran a piece on the recent DoH survey of attitudes to mental illness. The reporter made much of the fact that behind a 'surface' of 'enlightened tolerance' only 19 per cent of those interviewed said they would trust a former mental hospital patient to babysit.
How can this possibly be seen as unenlightened or intolerant? It is purely common sense. Finding a reliable babysitter is hard enough, scraping the barrel among one's few sensible friends and relations, without taking on the extra risk of someone wit h psychiatric problems. There is a treacly sentimentality in not facing up to this hard fact. It is the same sentimentality that wishes the right to marriage and parenthood upon the mentally handicapped. I feel passionately committed to the greater understanding of the mentally handicapped and the mentally ill, yet this silliness never ceases to amaze.
The sad truth is that common sense is not so very common. It is mistaken for heartlessness and it tends to fall victim to wishful thinking. But there is a terrible paradox in wishful thinking: it makes things worse than they are by believing that things are better than they are.
THERE will soon have to be a Society for the Preservation of Cockcrow. Not long ago I wrote about the suppression of Corky the Cockerel by some town-bred person intruding into what remains of our countryside. Now this suburban fastidiousness seems to have spread to the country-bred as well.
Mr and Mrs David Jones, dairy farmers of Llansanffraid in Wales, have set health officials on to a neighbouring bantam cock called Sidney, with a view to silencing him. It seems that their bed-and-breakfast guests object to being woken up at dawn.
Farmers are famous for their lack of sentimentality; as Mrs Jones says, perhaps not entirely disinterestedly: 'Cockerels crowing in the countryside are a thing of the past.' It is fortunate for her that Sidney's owner does not object to the smell of her cows' slurry wafting through his restaurant.
Personally I think the sound of cocks crowing at dawn is one of the greatest pleasures of staying in farming country. I like the smell of slurry, too.
That is another disappearing pleasure as well - the last small farmer in my mother's village is being bankrupted by EEC regulations on the proper disposal of farmyard waste, which exclude his current system of funnelling it straight into the village stream - but I do not know that I could really devote much quality time to a Society for the Preservation of Slurry.
I DO wish people would leave things alone as much as possible. This is the essence of conservatism, of course - judicious neglect, as practised by the best doctors - and something we seem to have forgotten. It was rather a surprise being reminded of it by none other than Gerald Kaufman, the former Labour Industry Minister, in a wonderful piece about the ancient and noble art of doing absolutely nothing. I know he meant it unkindly, but I found it rather rallying. When it comes to interference, less is better.
The Government has been embarrassing its supporters for too long with its targets for suicide rates by the year 2000, its dreams of educational videos for parenting and so on - with, in fact, its pussy-footing back-door dirigisme. But now, a clarion call] It may be out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, or former Labour ministers, but so be it.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, August 29, 1993 | Comments (0)
Beauty and the beast
UNACCUSTOMED as I am to watching sport on television, I was completely dazzled by the triumph of the great Linford Christie at Stuttgart. As far as I am concerned he has given new meaning to the idea of spectator sport. He has also given new meaning to Virgil's Aeneid Book V, which I studied for A-level long ago and which is all about sport. It was lost on me then, but now at last I see what Virgil was getting at - the princely brooding of the great champion before the final trial, his manly beauty and his manly modesty, the elegance of extreme effort, the roar of the crowd, the simplicity with which the great athletes in the first three places embraced each other in victory and in defeat, and so on. It is all in the Aeneid, but both the classics and young men are rather thrown away on young girls, all too often.
I even felt something like a sob when Christie began to sing the national anthem. But my raptures were rudely interrupted by a gigantic rabbit. It may sound incredible, but so it was - a grotesque, human-sized, pot-bellied rabbit on its hind legs, posturing and fussing about the winners' podium as if it had some function in the proceedings. Indeed he was the official emblem of the World Championships, Runny the Rabbit. The presence of this ludicrously ungainly figure at such a moment seemed to me deeply insulting to the athletes and, incidentally, demeaning to all natural-born rabbits as well.
To add insult to injury, our national hero at this solemn moment of triumph suddenly had a huge toy bunny thrust into his arms, and then an outsize toy Mercedes, for all the world as if he were on that old children's programme Crackerjack. Are these occasions felt by our commercial masters to be incomplete without some monstrous emblem, logo or mascot? Certainly at the end of the Barcelona Olympics, according to the art critic Robert Hughes, an eight-foot, grinning, foam-plastic foetus suddenly appeared on the stage and was announced as 'Whatizit', the official emblem of 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
'Semiologists, if one wanted to get fancy about it, would call him a floating signifier,' wrote Robert Hughes. One does not actually want to get fancy about it, but what Whatizit and Runny the Rabbit do signify, yet again, is the infantilisation and the vulgarisation of popular culture, and the deep contempt in which we, the masses, are held by those who want our attention and our money.
PEOPLE tend, in the long run, to resent being bamboozled, especially when it comes to voting, so I have a helpful suggestion to make to the Prime Minister. I recommend striking out for ever, and consigning to oblivion, the words 'National Insurance'. The phrase has become a lie. I am not sure that I object to paying more taxes but I do object violently to paying higher contributions to NI, as recently proposed, when it is no such thing.
National Insurance does not insure us all adequately against hardship, old age, serious illness or long-term disability. That is what Mr Elphick discovered when, having paid his National Insurance contributions, not to mention huge amounts of tax on tobacco, he nonetheless found he was denied a test to determine what sort of life-saving operation he might need. Had he been privately insured he would have been tested at once, and very likely still be alive today.
I do not think his NHS doctors can be blamed. They have to make difficult decisions about the best use of inadequate resources, and people will always disagree about these hard choices. What we need is an honest admission that the state cannot provide good quality womb-to-tomb care for everyone, as envisaged after the war. And perhaps more people will realise from Mr Elphick's experience that it may actually be preferable not to hand one's destiny over to state-run industries, but to buy and to control one's own insurance policies.
IT is now well known that testosterone is responsible for almost everything that is wrong in the world: almost any schoolgirl will tell you so. It is testosterone that drives the politician, the speculator, the warmonger, the rapist, the over-demanding husband and the over-enthusiastic council tree surgeon. The good news is that men produce less of it as they get older. But will they ever learn? There is now testosterone replacement therapy for men who feel their libido flagging, provided in the form of buttock implants by a Dr Carruthers of Harley Street. Not for them the wisdom of Socrates, who was grateful for a falling away of lust.
I suspect they are only doing it to keep up with their wives, who are dosing themselves with testosterone as part of female HRT, which is said to have the effect of spinach on Popeye.
However, I am delighted to report, in the interests of a balance in nature, that the women of the Peruvian Andes grow a carroty potato-like thing called mashua, which tastes delicious and lowers male testosterone levels and lust -by up to 50 per cent in experimental rats. They use it regularly to control their men. This was reported at last week's International Congress of Genetics in Birmingham, which has been making sensational reading for days - all those teenagers who think that science is not exciting need their brains testing.
Mashua has the enormous culinary scope and charm of the potato; it is considered a natural method of birth control, and it is also an insect repellent; the possibilities seem endless. If this wonderful plant is not immediately promoted on Gardeners' Question Time, with full cultivation instructions, we shall have to face the fact that the beloved old team may genuinely be a bit behind the times.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, August 22, 1993 | Comments (0)
Treating us like babies
DESPITE repeated warnings in the press about the fearsome psychological perils of the annual family holiday, I have just returned from one in France, feeling extremely well and even faintly optimistic. At least I was until, driving home through northern France, I saw, blazoned across the motorway on an immense electronic signboard, the words 'Chantier. Je leve le pied'. (Roadworks. I lift my foot.)
Presumably it means is that drivers should slow down by the time-honoured method of lifting the foot from the accelerator.
But this is baby-talk. Addressing motorists in this infantile way shows a contempt for the masses worthy of Jacques Attali.
This is not simply baby-talk. It is also a thoughtless intrusion into our identities, a shift from the adult, second person - slow down] - to an insinuating invasion of our first person - the private 'I', which I alone should use. It is the way you talk to those over whom you have power, like children or the very old. It is the idiom of the district nurse bossily intruding on her patient in the bogus first person: 'We'll take our medicine now, and then we'll feel better, won't we?' Some apparatchik is trying to put himself not just into our place behind the wheel of the family Renault, but into our heads as well.
The same thinking applies at our local chemist in France. There is a notice on the front window saying: 'I can't give up breathing, I can't give up eating, I can't give up loving, but I can give up smoking.' Who is this moronic 'I'? In the same pedagogic spirit there is an enormous photo of two manicured fingers, one male and one female, nestling together in a shared pink condom: you cannot go into the main square of the village without a nagging reminder of safe sex.
This nonsense is not peculiar to France. In Wales this summer I brought an official list of walks in the Black Mountains. This pamphlet actually instructs the reader to take a long list of useful things including waterproofs and extra woollens, compass 'and be sure you know how to use it properly', pencil and card, coins 'for phoning' and a 'torch (in colder months with spare bulb and battery)'.
'In snow and ice,' it points out helpfully, 'you need special equipment and skill.'
These bossy intrusions, in our own best interests, of course, are increasing all the time. Blasted with instructions (helpful), Muzak in shopping-malls and car-parks (soothing), blaring from speakers in tourist towns (scenic), in underground caves (atmospheric), with almost every sense organ assaulted, we are acquiescing in a slow rape of our private consciousness. The next onslaught will be olfactory: Hull City Council's independent public telephone kiosks will soon, for our pleasure, be fitted with air-fresheners in apple and orange 'fragrance'. Oh, brave new world] CONDOMS have been on my mind a lot recently, partly since we were staying next to the pharmacy, but also because of the Pope's recent pronouncement on contraception. Much as I loathe condoms, I really think I dislike Pope John Paul even more. It seems incredible that he should be prepared to inflict on millions of faithful Catholics, and indeed on the rest of us, the terrible misery of children they cannot support, and even children born of rape.
Perhaps we should admire him for sticking to his principles, but I cannot.
He is said to be opposed to what he calls 'the pick-and-choose church'. This suggests to me that he has the principles of Western civilisation entirely back to front.
Howard Jacobson, the English Jewish novelist, made a documentary series in Israel recently and in one memorable scene he stood on a cliff-top ecstatically intoning his own version of the Sermon on the Mount. One line I remember with particular pleasure was: 'Blessed are the pickers and choosers' - I don't know whether he was referring to the Pope's phrase, but he was right.
Blessed are those who think and judge for themselves and are not bamboozled by fashion or by dogma or by bossy bureaucrats. Picking and choosing, according to one's conscience, according to the evidence and according to one's lights, is the essence of Western thought since the Enlightenment.
I WAS rather startled to read last week about the delinquent youths who are currently enjoying adventure holidays with social workers, camping or mountaineering in exotic places abroad at huge expense. But my attention was distracted by a photograph of a good-looking man on the obituaries page - it was the late Lieutenant-Colonel Denis Worrall, MC, who had died at 80. He was, among other things, Master of the Portman and of the South Dorset hunts, and also District Commissioner of the Pony Club in Dorset when I was a child.
Memories came flooding back of pony-club camp peopled by retired Army officers. One particularly wonderful instructor, an ancient and moustachioed colonel, had us doing massed cavalry charges, wheeling in columns and doing other hair-raising manoeuvres at the canter. This was something much sterner than Betjeman or Thelwell: it was frightening and difficult and exhilarating. Then there was all that work - cleaning tack, manically mucking out, and the naming of parts - lorimer, stifle, pastern and martingale - and always 'horses before men'.
Was this how a hankering for a life of crime was drilled out of us fortunate children by means of self-discipline, hard work, challenge and responsibility? If so, I have a modest suggestion, which would save the taxpayer enormous sums, for the treatment of young offenders - compulsory pony-club camp. It would give all those newly redundant officers and soldiers something useful to do as well, as it did in my childhood.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, August 15, 1993 | Comments (0)
