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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
