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It's not what you eat, it's who you know
This game of acquaintances lured everybody into the most delightfully indiscreet gossip and boasting, with some very surprising confessions
HOLIDAYS define the man, or indeed the woman. There are those who busily rock climb or snorkel, those who laze voluptuously on the best beach they can afford and those who seek self-enhancement in a Gothic cathedral or Buddhist retreat. For many years our holidays, somehow (since I did not embark on adult life with any such thing in mind), have been extended group holidays in rented houses, with large numbers of friends and their children. And we play games. It may sound worthy, it may sound pretentious, it might actually be alarming, but we do. I don't mean tennis or snooker, though those are fine too, facilities permitting. I mean group games.
The days have long gone by, when, childless, we used to play some of the more tasteless forfeit games. Even now it is only among adults that we play some of the riskier conversation games, such as humiliation - that is the long-drawn-out lunch or dinner trick, in which everybody except one unwitting person, has conspired to finesse that person into uttering a particular cliche - "say what you like about people who hunt, but the real snobs are the hunt saboteurs", for instance. This makes for strange and hilarious conversation, particularly when the victim has no desire to talk about hunting and just wants some more Sangre de Toro.
It is cruel, I know, and only for the robust in spirit, but then only the robust in spirit would tolerate such a holiday more than once. Our games are mostly gentler now, intended to include more sensitive souls, such as teenagers and lacerated halves of divided couples. So the guest with a new game that is both fun and acceptable is doubly welcome. One such good guest arrived a couple of days ago at our rented house in Andalucia. She had brought a very witty column from The Independent by Terence Blacker which was a test, with questions, of the width of your knowledge of life, as expressed by the extent of your acquaintance. Do you know someone who knows how to bribe a policeman, for example, or someone who navigates by the stars?
This seems to me a brilliant idea. For it is, of course, true that we are not what we eat, but what and whom we know. We are limited and defined by the nature of our friends and acquaintances. It lured everybody into the most delightfully indiscreet gossip and boasting, with some very surprising confessions. However, it occurred to me that quite a few of the acquaintances that might seem exotic to readers of Left-liberal establishment tendencies might not seem odd to Daily Telegraph readers. What seems bizarre to them does not seem bizarre to us, and vice versa. So a quite different set of challenges ought to be set in these pages, for end-of-holidays light entertainment. So here is a different list, in no particular order. (For the purposes of my quiz, knowing someone means being able to reach him or her easily on the telephone, and not having to ask someone else for the number.)
Do you know:
a. Anyone who has died of Aids (this is virtually a badge of identity of the Left-liberal establishment, who sadly know lots, and who are astonished to be told that millions of other people do not know a single one)?
b. Anyone who owns a yurt, or uses one?
c. Anyone who has had liposuction?
d. Anyone who owns a Harley-Davidson with a sidecar?
e. A famous eco-warrior?
f. A serious drug dealer?
g. Someone who could introduce you to a drug dealer (excluding your own teenage children)?
h. Anyone with more than five children?
i. Anyone who can genuinely trace his or her ancestry to the Norman Conquest?
j. Someone who admires Tony Blair?
k. Anyone who has killed anyone?
l. Anyone who can do a "pop shove it"?
m. Anyone who knows whom to ask what a "pop shove it" is?
n. Any cohabiting, self-acknowledged lesbians?
o. A pigeon fancier?
p. An illegal immigrant?
q. Anyone who knowingly employs an illegal immigrant?
r. A self-confessed, card-carrying Communist (highest possible score here for rare sighting)?
s. Anyone who uses any of the following expressions: "tickety-boo", "Egyptian PT", "Heavens to Betsy", "mountain oysters", PNG, PDQ, PPC, "four by two" and "you're not in Kansas now"?
t. Anyone who has personally killed an animal (other than for sport) e.g. has strangled a chicken to eat or run over a badger?
u. An Australian who hasn't seen meat on the bone?
v. A spy?
w. A director of social services of a local authority?
x. Anyone who can introduce you personally to Puff Daddy?
y. Anyone who knows who Puff Daddy is?
z. Anyone who has eaten the meat of a swan?
aa. Anyone who knew Bruce Chatwin?
ab. A successful art forger?
ac. A night club bouncer?
ad. A man who has danced with a girl who danced with a man who danced with Diana, Princess of Wales?
ae. Someone who has had a rose named after him or her?
af. Someone who has no fillings (over 40 only)?
ag. Someone who goes to a dental hygienist at least twice a year
(extra points if the person is English)?
ah. Someone who dares to wear a fur coat made from the skin of a seriously endangered species, e.g. leopard (without pretending it is fake)?
ai. A woman who rolls her own cigarettes?
aj. Anyone who drinks his or her own urine (for health reasons)?
ak. Anyone who has slept with James Hewitt?
al. Anyone who can land a kick flip?
am. Anyone who admits to using Viagra?
an. Anyone who regularly reads The Guardian?
ao. Anyone who went to Woodstock?
ap. Anyone who's been shot by a gun in cold blood (not a sporting accident or "accident")?
aq. Anyone who has read the Bible cover to cover?
ar. A convert to Islam?
as. Anyone who can explain the difference between syringa and philadelphus?
at. A lifelong teetotaller?
au. A granny under 40?
av. A Morris dancer?
aw. Anyone who has been in the Foreign Legion?
ax. A convicted arsonist?
ay. A croupier?
az. Anyone who has been "inappropriately" touched by a teacher and does not consider himself or herself traumatised?
ba. A woman who has been to both a Tupperware and an Ann Summers party (attending only one or other may be unremarkable, but the combination strikes me as poignantly try-hard)?
bb. A man who has been to either?
bc. A girl of good family and good education who turns tricks?
bd. Anyone who has personally made more than pounds 10 million?
be. Anyone who got his or her job through obvious nepotism?
bf. An atheist vicar?
bg. Anyone who has won anything on the National Lottery?
bh. Anyone who has hired a male nanny?
bi. Anyone who has been to Butlin's?
bj. Anyone who was born in Havana?
bk. Anyone who could survive in the wild?
bl. Anyone who has recently planted leylandii?
bm. Anyone who has been to The Priory?
bn. Anyone under 35 who can recite large chunks of verse?
The Daily Telegraph | Friday, August 25, 2000 | Comments (0)
Blame the teaching, not the boys
I have a son as well as a daughter, a son who is not particularly academic, and who is tired of his sister's success at school and her wonderful results
WHY can't a woman be more like a man?" asked Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. Today the question has been entirely turned on its head: "Why can't a boy be more like a girl?" That seems to be what everybody is asking, especially now that girls have this week outperformed boys at A-level.
In one way, of course, I am delighted. I grew up in a state of suppressed rage at being patronised by less intelligent boys. I was also made miserable by the poor performance of girls in exams; this seemed to me to be pretty good evidence of something I didn't want to believe in, which was the conventional wisdom that girls weren't as clever as boys. It seemed to make a nonsense of women's claims that they could do anything a man could do. Besides, I have a daughter who must by now, as I write, have heard her A-level results; I expect the telephone to ring at any moment from her in Edinburgh to us here in Andalucia. Of course I want her to outperform every boy in the country. Girls are great. As the heroine sings to a mere man in another out-of-date musical, Annie Get Your Gun: "Anything you can do, I can do better."
However, the good news for girls, that they're proving not just their equality, but their superiority at A-level, sounds like bad news for boys. I feel so sad for boys. I have a son as well as a daughter, a son who is not particularly academic, and who is rather tired of his sister's constant success at school, and her wonderful results in exams, at least so far. He is not so hard working or well organised; he doesn't even appear to be so competitive; school does not appear to interest him and certainly he has not yet done nearly so well in exams.
It is almost absurd how well our household fits every contemporary cliche about the crisis of schoolboy machismo and the rise of schoolgirl feminisma. There seems to be a certain sense of public panic about all this. Not only have we had Anthony Clare and his well-disseminated thoughts on a supposed crisis in masculinity. Now we have God's gift to misogynists, Baroness Blackstone, announcing to the nation that the Government intends to do something.
What on earth does she imagine she can do? What on earth makes her imagine she understands what is going on, any more than the rest of us? One suspects that she understands rather less. However, there is no shortage of explanations and theories and accusations. If we may start with accusations, I will begin by pointing a finger at unrepentant Left-liberals, who believed that order, tradition and discipline could be abandoned in schools, in favour of pupil-centred learning, unstreamed classes and other fashionable orthodoxies.
The time when boys used to do as well as, or better than, girls was the time before the leftists got at schools. It was a time when schools offered old-fashioned teaching of reading and writing, and children were forced to pay attention and work.
I admit it was all rather nasty. I agree that the best and most inspired teaching is much more free and much more tailored to the individual - more carrot than stick, in short. However, the best and most inspired teachers are inevitably in short supply, and teaching that works for almost everybody needs to be teaching that can be done by the less good, and even the least good teachers.
No one really knows why the loss of this basic system has been so much more disastrous for boys than for girls. Theories abound. I subscribe to the view, which does not lead to any obvious catch-all solutions, that boys are innately different from girls, generally speaking, and need a different kind of teaching. Girls mature more quickly, and seem more cooperative, more anxious to please, less disruptive, more hard working, more persistent, less attention-seeking, quicker to take responsibility for their own shortcomings and less likely to be naughty and stay away from school. Furthermore, there are great differences, generally speaking, in the cognitive aptitudes of boys and girls; it may be controversial to think so, but not for long.
At the moment, the very great majority of teachers are women; both intellectually and psychologically, this must make very great differences to their pupils of either sex. To say that this has been true for a long time, since long before boys' performance came into question, is irrelevant. For in the old days, women teachers could instill strict discipline; any boy who would not take carrot got stick, in one form or another. Now women teachers have no stick of real authority and discipline to use. Nor do they have the natural authority (if any) that a man might have over a boy.
I am tempted to say that I suspect men teachers may be better than women in one important respect; they tend to be less neurotic, about their teaching at least. Women teachers tend to be overconscientious, and to transfer to their pupils an anxious over-industriousness, without the swashbuckling charm of the male classroom painter of big pictures and teller of jokes.
While men teachers may be less conscientious, by being more laidback they are less likely to burn out an able child, and less likely to drive a less able boy to lit out altogether, like poor Huckleberry Finn. It is no accident that the boys who do best at A-level come from schools with unusually high numbers of male teachers. However, since there is clearly almost no chance of bringing thousands of male teachers into the nation's classrooms, given the current pay and prestige of teaching, these speculations are rather futile.
I suggest instead that there is something wrong with the exam itself. It has changed radically during the past 30 years. One should ask oneself: what were the purposes of those changes? They were designed to enable many more children to get A-levels through an emphasis on course work and the constructive use of help; all this is well known to favour girls. It is a good bet that if sixth-formers now took the old A-levels of my youth, exactly as we did, the boys would perform just as well as the girls, if not (given girls' increasing confidence) any better.
What has changed is the exam and the agenda of teaching. What we have now is a very different, much easier exam, done by very different people, with a clear bias in favour of girls, and the way girls behave and respond to women teachers. All one can sensibly conclude from all this is that there is something seriously wrong with education, and with its theorists. We knew that anyway.
The Daily Telegraph | Friday, August 18, 2000 | Comments (0)
If we spare discipline, are we spoiling our sons?
It is hard for boys to develop proper self-respect when disrespect for them is the currency of conversation, even among highly educated people
IT'S just one damn crisis after another. The latest thing to be in crisis is masculinity. Women are taking over male roles, men are becoming redundant, and are turning, in their confusion and frustration, to violence against others or themselves; the suicide rate among young men is rising. Masculinity is in crisis. This, at least, is the view of the glamorous television psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare, who is busily, and efficiently, publicising his book and radio series on this theme. You can hardly open a paper or turn on a radio or television without hearing some earnest discussion of these alarming matters. My own view is that it is the word "crisis" which is in crisis. We seem to have crises all the time; the culture of publicity and celebrity and product promotion demands ever more excitement, and crisis is a top-selling form of excitement. All that's required is a little simplification and exaggeration. Exaggeration sells, but exaggeration is the enemy of real understanding. I say this because I am often tempted by exaggeration myself.
All the same, it is true that these are hard times to be a man, and harder still to be a boy. I don't think there is anything new about this; I can clearly remember a time in the 1970s, groups were demonising men, and actually put up notices outside women-only meetings saying "girl children only", as if wicked old Adam lurked in the breasts of tiny toddling boys. And I shall never forget the look, many years later, on the face of my three-year-old son when my eight-year-old daughter angrily told him that boys do all the bad things in the world; boys kill and hurt and rob people and make a mess. Girls don't.
This wasn't new either; it is not very different from the sentiment behind the Victorian nursery rhyme which asks what little boys are made of. "Slugs and snails and puppy dogs' tails. That's what little boys are made of." Girls, by contrast, are made of sugar and spice and all things nice. The antagonism between men and women, and the tragic mismatch between their interests, and the tragic misunderstanding that accompanies it, are ancient. What's different today is that girls and women feel free to express their resentment and their contempt, and have somehow acquired the power, in their turn, to silence boys and men. Besides, they have what they see as evidence for the general ghastliness of men - football hooligans are men, violent criminals are men, boys do worse at school, crash more cars and so on. Though not exactly a crisis, this seems to me a regrettable overreaction to centuries of repression. It is hard for boys to develop proper self-respect when disrespect for them is the common currency of conversation, even among highly educated people; my son, now 13, would agree.
However, I believe that this will adjust itself; women are mothers and sisters as well as anything else, and have a natural bias in favour of understanding their own men, and of supporting them. Where I believe there is a crisis, if one must use the word, is not in masculinity but in authority. I mean the authority mainly of parents, but also of teachers; masculinity hasn't changed, but the restraints upon it, and the ways in which it used to be civilised and redirected have changed radically, and in a short time. Boys have not become worse, though some have indeed become more delinquent and disruptive; it is their parents and those in authority who have got worse.
We (and I regretfully include myself) lack any real conviction that it is our duty and our right to control and discipline our children. I do not mean by smacking them; I am entirely against smacking or hitting anyone. I mean a constant, determined effort to show them how to behave properly, and to see that they do. I mean the persistent, loving, immensely time-consuming attention to the learning of self-discipline. I really do not understand what happened to this conviction, but many parents of my generation feel unable even to tell their children when to go to bed. The most extreme example of the delinquent parent I've met was a man with an expert interest in child psychology who started shouting abuse at me at a dinner party; I had said that sometimes I told my children to do what I asked simply because I was their mother and said so. This man was truly shocked at my presumption that I had the right to impose my will on my tiny children. My suggestion that that is a duty of parenthood (feeble though my own efforts were) reduced him to fury.
This astonishing abdication of authority goes right across the spectrum, from depressed, exhausted, ill-educated single mothers to married parents with every advantage in life. The problem in all this for boys is that they appear (generally speaking) to need firm guidance and rules much more than girls do; those slugs and snails require different treatment. Most boys seem to find it much harder to turn into social beings. At least they appear to have more powerful inclinations in the opposite direction. Perhaps there are biological, evolutionary reasons for this. Perhaps not. I am deliberately avoiding the argument. But experience suggests, as my mother used to say, that boys are in many ways more "difficult" to bring up than girls and, however unexpectedly, more sensitive.
Anthony Clare and one of his guests did consider the possibility that boys are more innately vulnerable to poor parenting and bad parenting than girls. That may be controversial, but it is certainly my guess. In any case, if we look around and wonder why we have feral, illiterate, unemployable youths in some sink estates, or why we have such nasty football hooligans, and why boys are skipping school and failing exams in larger numbers, we ought to look at what their mothers and fathers are doing about it.
I am told that some of the best private schools are beginning to have problems with discipline because the parents will not support the teachers - where have we heard this before? On the contrary, some parents insist that rules should not be too strictly applied to their offspring, if at all; after all, these rules are not observed at home. I heard of one parent speaking to a housemaster of "the right" of a young teenager to smoke occasionally at school. It takes only one or two to break a culture of discipline. Earlier this year, Westminster School experienced widespread disorder at the end of term; many such private schools apparently have a budget for repairs after pupils have completed their post-exam trashing of the premises. What is relatively new is that most of the children of today suffer from a miserable combination of neglect and indulgence; bad for anyone, it appears to be worst for boys. Calling that a crisis of masculinity is pointing the finger in the wrong direction.
The Daily Telegraph | Friday, August 04, 2000 | Comments (0)
