COUNTING BLESSINGS

HIT
AND

MYTH 

Separating fact and fiction in England’s History 

Proposed title for my new book (above)

It is a dark morning on the last day of the year as I write this at my breakfast table.  I come to the end of the year having, for the first time in my adult life, not had a paid job for the entire calendar year.  There are – thank God – no money worries because the government gives me a modest pension and I also have a rental income.

Next year will be different, if things go to plan.  I have bookings for a couple of talks which I will give over the internet and I hope to sell my book idea.  It is provisionally called Hit and Myth and looks at stories we often tell and wonder whether they are true or not – was Richard the Third a bad guy, did Shakespeare write his plays, etc. 

I miss work.  Getting out of bed in the morning has never been easy but I am up in time if there is a job to go to.  So far, I have also got going in order to write but I wonder if I will continue to have the impetus should I fail to sell the idea.  There is only so much self-motivation that can get you going in the mornings.

We are always being told to count our blessings.  While many others have fallen sick because of the corona virus, I have enjoyed pretty good health.  There are two wonderful children, both independent and successful, and a daughter-in-law and granddaughter now.  I have a partner, a roof over my head and money in the bank.

While the corona virus/covid-19 has been disastrous for some and fatal for others, for me it has been a minor inconvenience, depriving me of work which I do not really need any more.  It has also given me the impetus to write, which is an area I have often toyed with, but not taken on into a proper professional career.

To be a writer or just to write?  I suppose that is the difference.  Anyone can sit down and type or scribble away.  Getting your book(s) into print and seeing them sell is a step beyond.  Having worked in the commercial world, I know that I need to persuade others that I am worth taking a punt on.  No luck yet - but I am on my way.  

I am about two thirds through the first draft of my book idea and have hopes for it is a viable – and sellable – product.  If a salesman sells a product the process involves someone buying it.  If a teacher teaches something to someone, they should be learning form it.  In the same way a writer needs readers if he is to have validity.

Once established, many writers seem to take their success for granted.  William Boyd, who is a writer I have a lot of time for and whose new novel I am reading, wrote in the introduction to his collection of occasional writing Bamboo that he kept resolving to give up journalism but kept getting asked to contribute yet another piece. 

If only we had that luxury, I thought.  Boyd is a writer I enjoy and whose life has run close to mine without us ever meeting: we were both born in Ghana at about the same time and his latest novel is set in Sussex where I grew up.  He might recall his days of struggle when he next says what type of work he can decide to drop.

Yet I resolved not to beat myself up for not being brilliant years ago.  It was not particularly a New Year’s resolution, just a realisation that we cannot all be super successful and famous and that doing the best job you can and being true to yourself is the most we can expect and we should be thankful for being productive and useful

If success and its companion fame come along, that would be nice and it remains the hope but, as I am nearer the end of my life than the beginning, it is a bit late to be suddenly become ambitious.  The sun has come up now and it looks like a good day ahead - and, hopefully, a good year as well, if a vaccine proves effective and people can finally travel once more. 

Being satisfied with what you have achieved should be enough to be going on with if you have at least tried to be honest and usefu to your fellows.  As the old cliché has it, count your blessings.  

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com  

  

GET ON THE BUS

Loelia, Duches of Westminster
(picture from Wikipedia)

Margaret Thatcher's portrait
I took this photograph inside Chelsea Hospital,
outside which she and her husband are buried.

The real source of the famous bus quotation (r)

And the supposed source (above)

   

‘Anyone over the age of thirty who travels by bus ought to be regarded as a failure.’

There are various versions of the above saying.  Sometimes it is restricted to a man, sometimes to anyone at all.  Sometimes the age is twenty five, sometimes thirty. It has been attributed to Margaret Thatcher, although there is no evidence that she ever actually said it.  In The Guardian recently Zoe Williams said that it sounded right for her, so that would do.  Preaching to the choir there, Zoe.  We expect our journalists to base what they write on the facts not to pander to our prejudices.

Mrs Thatcher did say, ‘There is no such thing as society’.  I know that to be true because I heard her saying it.  It was a rather crass way of putting out the idea that friends, family and neighbours should help those who need it and we should not rely solely on the state.  It is a sentiment few of us disagree with, although many would take exception to the way she expressed it.  Quoting the line on its own, rather than in the context in which it was said, makes Thatcher sound like a cross between an anarchist and a libertarian – which was not true – and not over-endowed with compassion – which probably was.

Mrs Thatcher was also careful never to be photographed on a train, as though that was beneath her dignity as Prime Minister and a champion of free enterprise.  It would always be a limousine, preferably one made by a British firm like Jaguar, or a private jet for Maggie.  You can see how the bus quotation travelled across to her.

As soon as I heard it, however, my reaction was to get on a bus so that I could proudly proclaim myself a failure in the eyes of people who think that you have to lord it over others in order to be considered a success.  Whatever the age limit for travelling by bus I long ago passed it, but I still quite enjoying meandering journeys on public transport and sometimes feel a bit disappointed to arrive at my destination when you need to stop gazing out of the window.

Recently I did a little digging and found where the saying came from via a worthwhile organisation called Full Fact which helps to correct misapprehensions, counter fake news and debunk conspiracy theories. Their website says that it can be traced back to Loelia, Duchess of Westminster who was used to being ferried around by private chauffeur when she was married to the Duke.  He was one of the richest landowners in Britain – the family still own large chunks of central London – but, once they split up, she found herself waiting in the rain for the bus.  She was speaking from bitter experience.  

However, even Loelia admits in her memoirs that she borrowed the line from a poet called Brian Howard and passed it off as her own.  You do not normally think of poets as petrolheads.  One of my favourite poems, Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings, is the epitome of a looking out of a train window to watch the world going by poem. John Betjeman was also a champion of train travel and did a great deal to help preserve that ridiculous Victorian edifice, Saint Pancras station.  It was later used in a Harry Potter film as a stand-in for its rather duller neighbour King’s Cross.

Not only did the film makers use the wrong station because it looked prettier but they parked Harry and Ron’s ancient Ford Anglia outside it.  Unless magic powers were being used, the traffic wardens would soon put a stop to that, as there are red lines everywhere in London these days, especially outside train stations.  Central London is for public transport, or bicycles for the young and fit.  You can drive your car outside the city if a train does not work for your journey.

I enjoy driving mine and make no apologies for still running a car.  I try to keep the mileage down and use public transport whenever I can.  That is effectively never at the moment during lockdown.  When (if) it ever ends I will go back to riding on a bus – and not be in the least embarrassed if I am considered a failure for doing so.  Some people’s high opinion is not worth having – or worth not having.  

_____________

The full fact website is: here

My other blog is: diaryofatouristguide

Edwin Lerner

 

 

  

TALKING AND LISTENING

Samaritans are always on hand (from their homepage)

Some years ago I decided to work in the commercial world and became a tourist guide.  Several members of my family worked in public service but, possibly influenced by the early days of Thatcherism, I felt that I should get out into the private sector and make a living based on people paying for my services.  So I became a tourist guide (surprisingly lucrative once I found a niche) and a writer (forget about it, financially at least). 

Tourism died with the outbreak of the corona virus and I have not had a single paid job this year.  So I decided to forget about earning money and take an unpaid sabbatical for a year.  Fortunately, I had enough in the bank to be able to do this without too much pain.  However, although money Is not a problem now, boredom can strike if I do not have enough to keep me occupied.

I decided to volunteer to become a Samaritan and am now undergoing their training.  It is an idea I have contemplated before and have supported the organisation financially for many years. Samaritans was founded by a vicar called Chad Varah in 1953, the year I was born. He originally took all the calls himself but realised that he would need volunteers and they arrived year.  There are now 20,000 of them.  

While you have to be able to talk to be an effective tourist guide – and it certainly helps if you like the sound of your own voice – you need to be able to listen if you are to be a Samaritan.  We are trained to be non-judgemental and ‘empathetic’ rather than ‘sympathetic’.  This may seems odd  but it means that you are willing to share with people as an equal rather than to look down on them from above.

The training involves various exercises and I realise that my problem solving mindset is actually not what is wanted by Samaritans.  One pretend caller asks the trainee help her solve a problem with questions like “Can you do this for me?”  or “What should I do?”  The answers, frankly, are “No” and “Talk to me about it?”  This goes against the grain for me as, presented with a problem, my instinct is to try to solve it.

But that is not what Chad Varah intended when he founded Samaritans.  The object of the exercise was – and is – to listen not to talk.  It is an opportunity for people on their own to talk to someone who will listen to them without judgement.  There are opportunities to give practical help but these come through third parties who have the kind of expertise an ordinary person acting as a Samaritan might not possess.

This ‘ordinary’ person does not need to have any professional qualifications or skills, just the ability to listen to what the caller is talking about.  In a fast-moving status-driven society, people often do not have the opportunity to simply talk frankly about what is troubling them to friends and family, worried that they will seem weak or foolish and that well-meaning advice is often unhelpful and even counter-productive.

People tend to think of Samaritans as being ‘the suicide service’, helping to talk people out of ending their lives, there as a last resort for those who cannot cope.  Certainly, there is an element of suicide prevention in what the volunteers do, but I was somewhat surprised to find that a Samaritan should always respect a person’s right to end their own life and not always to feel it is their role to prevent it. 

If someone decides to end their life that is their decision.  To be a good Samaritan (in the non-biblical sense) you need to be able to put your own feelings to one side and to let people express theirs.  This may well result in them feeling better about their situation and finding a reason to carry on but, if it does not, that does not necessarily means that the Samaritan has failed, just that the caller has made their own decision. 

Although Samaritans was founded by a priest, it is a non-religious organisation.  Not many people go to church regularly these days and even fewer see the priest as someone they talk to regularly, certainly not for the purposes of confession, which at least gets things off your mind.  Thus, Samaritans act as a sort of priest-substitute.

For this they get paid nothing.  Anyone who takes on the role does so voluntarily and only a few largely technical staff are paid by the organisation, which relies on support from donations plus a few gifts from the National Lottery and the government.  Samaritans pulls in nearly £20 million a year but none of the volunteers are paid a penny.  

This is how it should be.  No-one who becomes a Samaritan should aim to take money from the organisation.  They should, however, be prepared to offer time to it.  As the organisation never closes, this might mean being available during the night or the working day, so many volunteers are retired from active work, which seems to include me.  Never mind: I have made my money.  Now it is time to give back some of my time.  Plenty of that at the moment.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

To contact the Samaritans, telephone 116 123 (free) or email: jo@samaritans.org

To find out more about or donate to the Samaritans go to: samaritans.org

THE GRUMP AND THE GRINNER

 

Philip Larkin - also at a station
A promotional photograph for
The Whitsun Weddings
(This is one of Larkin's best- 
loved poems about what he
sees on a long train journ

John Betjeman Statue, St Pancras
Photograph by author.

I usually read some poetry in bed before I go to sleep, finding it a good way to wind down at the end of the day.  There is a pile of poetry books by my bed, several of them anthologies I dip into more or less at random.  Recently, however, I have been working my way through two of my favourite poets: Philip Larkin and John Betjeman.

Neither are particularly original or outrageous choices but old favourites with virtually national treasure status now.  Both looked like bank managers, usually wearing suits and ties, bald, bespectacled and distinctly unsexy.  Being a writer, however, can win you success with women and neither lacked for female company in their lives, although Betjeman did famously regret that he had not enjoyed more sex and Larkin was reputedly jealous of his friend Kingsley Amis’s feats in that area.

Why do we read poetry?  Not to speculate about the sex life of the poet, although that inevitably occurs.  We read it to see the world clarified in a few words, to see a thought expressed concisely, as we recognise it but could not verbalise it ourselves. 

It was William Thackeray who said that it was the writer’s job to ‘make the new familiar and the familiar new’.  It is the second of these I value most, I suppose, in poetry.  A poem should present a familiar, almost banal scenario, and give it some kind of new life and both Betjeman and Larkin were capable of doing this. Train journeys, going into old churches, lusting after unobtainable women: they wrote about all of these.

Although they both had the look of conventional Englishmen and often dealt in similar subjects  their lives were very different.  Larkin was the son of a town clerk (who was an admirer of Hitler) brought up in Coventry.  He later became a librarian and moved to Hull.  He preferred a predictable world or work, which he referred to as ‘the toad’.  Betjeman was a child of the London suburbs, which he often wrote about.  He rejected the chance to run the family business, drifted through Oxford and then made a fair bit of money from his writings, both prose and poetry, and his television work.  He was something of a star, Larkin more a recluse.

You picture Betjeman with a grin on his face, smiling at the absurdity of a world in which bouncing girls beat him at tennis and thumping crooks hold hands with little women In a Bath Tea Shop.  Larkin seems grumpier then Betjeman, happier on his own than in company.  He becomes positively miserable in old age as he contemplates the extinction that will inevitably follow it in Aubade, one of the most powerful poems about imminent death ever written.  

Betjeman makes you feel good but occasionally – and not always successfully – lapses into satire when he parodies the town clerk or the ruthless businessman.   Larkin disturbs you more, but in a thoughtful way.  Sometimes he surprises you by raising smile in An Arundel Tomb where he notices the touch of the absurd in the little dogs at the couple’s feet and then concludes with 'our almost instinct, almost true, what will survive of us is love’.

Betjeman’s cheerfulness is undercut by moments of mortality when he recognises that he is growing old and should not still be looking at athletic young women with an old man’s lustful eye.  Larkin’s aloofness hides his vulnerability, both his fear of being alone and his need to be by himself so much.  I always think that Larkin lost out by not marrying and having a family.  If there is a next generation to follow, your own oncoming extinction seems somehow to be easier to bear.  (It is for me anyway.)

Both men liked enjoyed a drink and liked going into old churches – ‘Yet, stop I did. In fact I often do' the unbelieving Larkin says in Church Going, one of my favourite poems.  Betjeman was more charitable towards the people he wrote about, while Larkin dismissed those near death as ‘old fools’, knowing he would be one before long.   

Betjeman fought hard to keep old buildings alive, even as they fell into disuse and his daughter helped to keep his memory alive in turn, unveiling a plaque to him at Marylebone station.  There is also a statue at Saint Pancras station, in which he looks a little like a commuter in a hurry to get home to his beloved suburbia.

Both Larkin and Betjeman were offered the position of Poet Laureate, a then unpaid position, but one of great prestige.  Betjeman, knowing that the laureateship would boost his book sales, accepted and even insisted on being given the traditional payment, which was made in sherry – 720 bottles of it, which would have kept him going for a while.  Larkin wrote about drinking sherry at a boring party, but turned the post down, thinking that his creative fires had burned out.  He spent his later years drinking cheap red wine instead.  He seemed to be waiting for death, which he both dreaded and welcomed.  There was no long and idle retirement and the end came when he was only sixty three, the year after he turned the laureateship down.  

Few people who write can hope to leave much behind that is well-known and much-loved by both their contemporaries and succeeding generations.  Larkin and Betjeman, Englishmen with many similarities, seem to have mastered the knack.

_________________

This post is early, as I am going to Ireland for a week and will try to do so without a computer.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com   Edwin Lerner.

Barack Obama - black but not Black

One of the things about being an editor is that you have to correct punctuation and spelling from material you receive from budding writers, not all of whom get it right. The most obvious example of a recent mistake is the gleefully pounced on misplaced apostrophe in the cover of a book by Donald Trump Junior.  It should, of course, be Democrats’ not Democrat’s as he is referring to more than one Dem.  He may wish there was only one but there are plenty of those pesky Democrats out there.  And a few democrats as well.  Thank God – or god, if you are an atheist. 

One theory is that the mistake was made deliberately in order to garner headlines through what is called guerrilla marketing.  For this editor it shrieks of ‘amateur’ (or ‘loser’ to use a Trumpism) but the people selling the book probably look on those like me who think that you should get these things right as humourless, elitist lefties who would never buy a book written by a Trump.  They got that bit right, at least.  Their market is elsewhere and they believe that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Then there are changes which reflect the mindset of the person doing the writing, maybe attacking the attitude of the person doing the reading – and the correcting.  The latest of these is the use of a capital B for the word ‘black’ when used to describe a person.  The N-word is obviously unacceptable and African-American – which does take capitals – does not apply to black people from outside the USA. 

To me, however, the use of a capital B for black is wrong.  It is wrong simply because black it is ungrammatical.  Black is an adjective and, as such, does not command a capital – just like the word ‘white’, which nobody is suggesting should be capitalised.  The argument of the capitalisers, as I understand it, is that being black should be on a par with being Chinese, Latin or Asian, all words that describe groups based on their country or continent of origin and are, therefore, capitalised.

Being black, however, is much less specific than being Asian, Chinese or Latin.  Although black people may have originated in Africa they are now found all over the world – just like white people, in fact.  As Lenny Henry said – and Donald Trump Senior failed to realise – there is no point in telling black people to go ‘home’ because their home is probably just a bus ride away. 

There is, admittedly, not a clear distinction here.  Many people described as Asian or Chinese with upper class denominators may never have been anywhere near China or Asia and Latin America is such a loose term as to include anyone of Hispanic origin who, again, may have spent their whole lives outside the countries their grandparents came from.  

White people who arrived in another country or continent often came as conquerors, while black people often came as slaves.  They are still struggling to achieve equality in a world where white people expect to rule.  Will capitalising a racial categorisation – going from ‘black’ to ‘Black’ – help or hinder that process?  Hinder, in my view.  In order to overcome racism we need to look on a human being’s skin colour as simply no big deal.  Capitalising it to Black makes it a big deal and, therefore, increases the difference.   This in turn could mean increasing the possibility of people of colour being regarded as inferior – without intending to do, it should be said.

Slaves were defined and categorised simply and brutally by their skin colour.  White people (like me) did not have to endure slavery.  They (we) never knew what it was like to be denied freedom and be bought and sold like cattle.  They (we) never knew what it was like to struggle against prejudice and achieve equality against the odds.

Just ask Barack Obama.  His father was from Africa, which led to all sorts of birther nonsense and ill-disguised racism from people who wanted to keep him in what they saw as his place. Obama never forgot his blackness or his African heritage.  He never disrespected or condemned the people who remained in the place his father had left but he just ignored those who thought – and sometimes said – that he should be sent back there.  

He showed that the colour of your skin does not need to define you because he rose to the top in a world that had not so long ago condemned people of colour to a life of automatic inferiority.  He demonstrated that slavery and racism are not only evil but stupid because they judge people by that skin colour.  Look at me, he said, my being black has not held me back.  He led the way out of racism by example. 

Just as racism will never be truly dead until we can watch a white person playing Othello and not bat an eyelid, so will we never overcome the evil of racism until black is simply an adjective, not a celebration, not a condemnation, just a description of appearance.  Capitalising the word will not accelerate that process, but slow it down.  This editor, for one, intends to keep black as an adjective with a lower case ‘b’.

Edwin Lerner

 

PEOPLE WITH A PENIS

JK Rowling

Gerain Greer
Both are in trouble over their views on trans rights 

How do you define who is and who is not a woman?  The problem arises because people can now transition from male to female or female to male, either through surgery or simply through self-definition.  This has left those who want to create and protect what I call penis free zones in conflict with those who assert that a person can simply change their gender by self-definition, ie by saying that they are now a woman rather than a man, the gender they were born into.  There is even a term for people (like me) who are happy with their birth gender.  We are ‘cis’ men or women.

You would not be human if you did not smile a little at the thought of right-on feminists like Germaine Greer and the journalist Suzanne Moore finding themselves turned from radicals into reactionaries because they want to maintain women-only zones and cast doubt on the validity of gender self-definition.  Even J K Rowling has found herself in hot water because she holds a more traditional view of gender.

Non-cis people who transition are twice as likely to move from the male to the female gender.  This may be a reflection of male anxiety in a feminist era.  (If you cannot match them, join them.)  It could also be a result of the greater practical difficulty of a woman becoming a man.  Put bluntly, it is easier to remove a penis than graft one on to the human body, so the surgical procedure needed for someone to transition from being a woman to a man costs twice as much as the alternative.

If you do not fancy – or cannot afford –surgery but want to change gender, you have the option of simply declaring that you are now either a woman or a man, whatever it says on your birth certificate.  In certain countries (but not yet Britain) this is legally binding and a man can simply declare him/herself to be a woman. This then allows  a trans woman to enter what was previously an exclusively cis-woman space.  The problem is that this allows people with penises to go into places they were previously excluded from like the Hampstead Ladies Pond where women could swim, sunbathe and lie around semi-clothed or naked without being subject to the male gaze.  

I see no good reason why people should not be allowed to congregate in areas which are shared with those of their own gender if those spaces are for used social rather than political or financial purposes.  In other words, it was right that Mrs Thatcher was entitled to go to the Hampstead Ladies Pond – she was after all the local MP – but wrong that she could only go to the Connaught Club in Pall Mall if accompanied by her husband.  It was the club of the Conservative Party and she was its leader so it was absurd to exclude her.  (Most Pall Mall clubs realised this and have now dropped their male-only membership policies.)  People like to gather with those of their own gender and women, in particular, need to feel safe when they do so.  They do not unless they are convinced they are in a genuine penis-free zone.  

Germaine Greer thinks that a woman who used to be a man has not become one simply through a process of self-definition – or even with the aid of surgery.  The trans person insists they have and the two sides end up shouting at each other, which gets nobody anywhere.  The problem is being framed in terms of who people are, which will always be a matter of individual interpretation.  Surely it is better to define it in terms of what they are allowed to do - or forbidden from doing.

Some people might call this transphobic but everyone is subject to legal restrictions on their rights if those rights should clash with the safety or security of others.  I can have sexual relations with anyone I choose to provided I have that other person’s consent. If that is often not forthcoming, I have to do without.

How should the rights of people who may want to transition be restricted? I would say in three ways – in sport, in surgery for young people and in sexually safe areas.

No woman has yet run a four minute mile, a sub ten second hundred metres or a two hour marathon, all records that have been broken by men who are simply stronger, faster and fitter than women.  For this reason athletics competitions are divided by gender with men and women’s events.  It is wrong that men should be able to call themselves female and take all the prizes in sports from cis-women. It amounts to bullying and greed of the most unattractively masculine type and should be banned.

Surgery for children is not currently a major issue in transgenderism but it is absurd to perform life-altering operations which could impact on their fertility in later years.  If they want to transition when young they can do so.  If they want to go under the knife they will have to wait until they become adults and are free to decide for themselves. 

Penis-free zones are a trickier area.  I do not think it matters where people go to pee but the penis is used for sexual purposes as well as urination and it is not unreasonable for cis-women to exclude it form certain areas which they want to remain female only.  You only need one idiot to remove that safety barrier and this happened in Toronto where a man gained access to a woman’s shelter in by self-defining as a woman and, while there, raped at least two people.  That was inviting the fox into the hen-house and should never have been allowed to happen.    

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

     

COLSTON COMES DOWN

Colston upright

...and coming down

As usual, Shakespeare got it right, not with one quotation but two: “Use every man according to his desert and who shall ‘scape whipping” (Hamlet) and “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones”.  The later remark is from Mark Anthony in his famous speech in praise of Julius Caesar in which he expertly whips up a mob against those who had assassinated Caesar.  

We saw, for want of a better word, a mob whipped into a frenzy by the sight of a statue of Edward Colston in Bristol recently.  Colston was a benefactor of Bristol who endowed schools and other institutions there but his money had come from trading in slaves so that put him beyond the pale and down he came, ending up in the River Avon before he was fished out.  After it is restored Colston’s statue will be displayed in a museum in which his misdeeds will be put into context.

These misdeeds had already been highlighted in a plaque attached to the statue.  The people of Bristol had debated what to do about this embarrassing monument, wanting to both acknowledge his generosity towards the city and the terrible trade which had made it possible.  In a good old British compromise they decided to leave Colston standing and to confine their condemnation of slavery to the new plaque.

That was not good enough for the anti-racism campaigners, however, who felt that his slave-trading had put him beyond the pale so down he was pulled and pushed into the harbour by a group of demonstrators who displayed a mixture of self-righteousness and jollity in ridding Bristol of its slaver statue.  The police stood back and allowed the crowd to take the law into their own hands.  This might seem like a sensible move but, if strength of feeling is allowed to override local democracy, what is to stop a group of racists from taking down the statue of the black nurse Mary Seacole outside Saint Thomas’s Hospital and dumping it into the River Thames? 

This is not an argument for leaving every public statue up forever, just for going through a rigorous discussion every time we see that someone had bad aspects to him as well as the good ones that he (usually) is being celebrated for.  This is what Sadiq Khan is proposing for London - a commission to examine statues.  This may be a bit slow and long-winded but it is better than mob rule, no matter how much fun it might have been in Bristol recently.

Cecil Rhodes will probably go next.  Although slavery had long gone by the time he had made his money, he believed in the innate superiority of white people, even if that same money paid for a lot of both black and white students to study at Oxford.  Lord Nelson may stand on top of his column in Trafalgar Square but he too was a keen supporter of slavery.  You had best stand well clear if he comes down.  

Even rugby union is now ‘reviewing’ the song Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, which was written by a slave, Wallace Wills, and became an unofficial anthem for the England team.  Yet singing a song written by a slave is surely not an endorsement of slavery.  It is rather an example of destroying the achievements of an enslaved people in the name of condemning their lack of freedom.  While the civil rights movement adopted the song, the Nazis banned it in 1939.  Which ship do you want to sail in? 

While the institution of slavery was despicable - and sadly still is in some places - individuals almost always have redeemable features.  Even Donald Trump is a good father to his children, if not a very loyal husband to his wives.  A crowd full of righteous anger, however, is not interested in the redeeming aspects of someone’s life and makes judgements based on just one aspect of those lives.  To dredge up another quotation, from Benjamin Franklin: “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation and only one bad one to lose it.” 

I can imagine it was satisfying to topple Colston.  In the wake of the protests after the terrible killing of George Floyd in the USA, the righteous anger against a white man who did not question the inherent racism that made slavery possible was understandable.  In the words of local writer Philippa Gregory (who once attended a Colston school) slavery was ‘a respectable trade’, the title of her book which may have been inspired by his life.  Respectability does not make it right, however.

But Gregory’s novel was written two hundred years after the period in which it was set and attitudes have changed since then.  “That was then this is now” is what I say to people who want to take down all the statues of people who accepted slavery.  Even William Wilberforce, who opposed - and effectively ended - the trade in human beings had reactionary and what we now consider unacceptable views on the rights of men to organise themselves to campaign for better wages.  He was someone who wanted to preserve the status quo but to reform it and to give it greater humanity. This humanity would always be granted from above and would not be tainted with dangerous ideas like democracy, which allows campaigning for justice from below.

Wilberforce is one of my heroes, even if I disagree with many of his views.  He had the energy and determination to rid Britain of slavery without undermining the society of which he was a privileged member.  In fact, he probably succeeded in his campaign because less enlightened men in power did not see him as a dangerous revolutionary but as a fundamentally sound chap, if a little soft-hearted at times. Wilberforce should be celebrated as a great reformer who achieved a massive advance from a position of white privilege.  

He was also – as he would have been the first to admit – a flawed human being and might not expect to escape whipping if he put forward those some of those views today.  We should honour people for their achievements without forgetting their faults.

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My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

                                                                                       

WORK AND WORTH

Hockney - still going strong into his eighties

David Hockney said recently that the only two important things in life were love and food.  But surely he left one out by not mentioning work.  He paints or draws every day – not because he needs the money, or the fame, or even because the world is short of Hockney paintings.  He does so because it his passion – and he is lucky that it is his profession as well.

Predictions of the future often paint a picture of a society in which most of the work is done by machines and people are free to enjoy almost boundless leisure.  I have two problems with this vision: first, that people seem to be working harder than ever and second, that who wants to have loads of free time anyway?  Time to get bored to death, maybe.

Although feminism was mostly about women having equal pay and status in the workplace, this is still more of a male tendency.  Men gain a good deal of their identity from the work they do while women seem to be better at taking it easy.  My partner is quite happy to look at her phone, ride her horse and sleep until she wakes up.  I, on the other hand, have to get out of bed when (or before) the alarm rings and pretty soon get down to something ‘useful’.  

Who am I kidding?  The person who gets most use out of me being busy is myself.  I edit a magazine, write a weekly blog about my (currently non-existent) work and write a monthly essay like this to get things off my chest.  I am under no illusion that the world will cease to rotate if I do not do these things, but they make me feel better about myself.

The lockdown, which is starting to ease now, has given us a glimpse of what a leisured life would be like, if it ever comes about.  A few people are snowed under with caring for the sick and get that Thursday evening clap – and a fairly lousy income – for their pains.   The rest of us have time on our hands and need to find ways to fill it up meaningfully.

My own suspicion is that human ambition and greed, not to mention the fight against boredom, will see us working as hard as ever once we have the chance to do so again.  Reading books, watching films and laughing at silly videos on the web are all very well, but will never be as satisfying as doing a good day’s work for an honest day’s pay.  

Pay?  That is the thing that measures whether what we do is useful or not.  If someone is prepared to part with their hard-earned money to see the fruits of your labour, then that gives it a validation which a hobby does not have.  That is one of the reasons I enjoy being tipped so much – it is an unnecessary payment which shows that the tipper has enjoyed themselves.  Although, I do things for free – such as giving talks – and do not need the money, I still enjoy being paid for what I do.

Coronavirus has altered the usual cycle of life, which alternates times when I am busy with periods when I can reflect.  It is the lucky man who never feels the need or urge to retire and ‘take it easy’. Filling the parts of the day when you used to work with activity is not as easy as it sounds.  Aged film directors like Woody Allena dn Clint Eastwood still crank out a film a year because it is natural for them to go to work.

Another man who has not stopped working and is now as busy as ever is Anthony Fauci, the Director of the USA’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  He has held the post for over twenty five years and his next birthday will be his eightieth.  Once hated by the gay community, he listened to them when AIDs started and is now looked on almost as a modern saint.

Fauci knows that his job is to give advice to people who have been voted into positions of power and that he can never presume to override them. In fact, most Americans trust him far more than their president to get this advice right so he is now taking flak from those who want to reopen the economy quickly, who blame him for his more cautious approach.

Fauci, presumably, has a fairly thick skin and can take the heat.  The USA is enduring a high death rate and a crippled economy.  He knows that he can do nothing about the economy so he concentrates on the death rate instead.  As long as he does not try to overrule Donald Trump, he is more or less unassailable in his role as a smart boffin talking to the politicians.

Although I am nominally of retirement age, I am itching to get back to work.  I have no interest in the three Gs of male retirement: Golf (never cared for the game), Gardening (occasionally and under protest) and Gym, which I never go to any more.  You can only read so many books or watch movies you missed.  Now I need something to prove my worth. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

FULL HOUSES VERSUS SOCIAL DISTANCING

Aeroplanes standing idle - BA is laying off 12,000 staff

Once, when I was finishing off the paperwork at a hotel where I had been staying with a group, I noticed what the company I was working for paid for the rooms we had used.  It was well under half what an individual would have paid if he or she had walked in off the street and bought the same room.  By promising to buy in bulk over the course of a year the company were able to beat the hotel chain down to what seemed an absurdly low price.  (Empty rooms are of. no use to an hotel.)  An individual who just needs to rest his/her head does not have the same negotiating power as a big company and has to cough up the full price for a decent night’s sleep.

The basis of many businesses is achieving bulk volume.  Some concentrate on making a lot of money out of a little group but most aim to make a little money from a lot.  Each sale produces a small profit – or even a loss if it brings in further sales – and a strong business’s selling power increases its buying power with their own suppliers.

Airlines are the classic example of making money from full houses and crowded spaces. They no longer rely on businesspeople charging the cost of their travel to expense accounts and not worrying too much about the size of the bill.  Today they need to attract ordinary travellers, who invariably opt for the cheapest fare, even if it means flying on a crowded plane.  The flight is over quickly enough and the savings are permanent.  Tony O’Reilly, who made a fortune from packing people into planes, and for whom I have a begrudging admiration, has said that they will all go bust if they have to observe social distancing.  British Airways has already laid off twelve thousand people as people stop flying.  

One of the main jobs of those who deal with clients in crowded conditions – whether they are cabin crew, tourist guides or organisers of queues – is to make people feel welcome and wanted even as they are being packed together in uncomfortable crowded conditions.  

Forgive me for stating the obvious here because in a month or two it will be far from obvious.  When we go for a walk, usually in the late afternoon, we weave in and out amongst our fellow-exercisers keeping the required two metres social distance between us.  People are understanding and good-humoured about this and we are more likely these days to say hello to and smile at other people even as we avoid coming too close to them.

It is not always possible, of course, and sometimes we come a little too near, particularly if we are shopping.  The closest I get to another human being (apart from my partner) is once a week when I go to the checkout and pay for the weekly shop.  I choose the shop on the basis of it not being crowded and I go when it is quiet, but you can never be fully safe.

What will happen when we start going back to normality as the lockdown ends?   My business is tourism which, almost by definition, involves bringing large numbers of people into a small space.  As I wrote in my other blog, when we go to Windsor, we often spend more time in the queue than in the castle.  We would not mind a queue at the moment.

But in a queue, you are inevitably crowded together, cheek by jowl as Shakespeare says, and this is a great meeting place for germs and people.  Two metres apart is simply not possible with lots of people all aiming for the same place at the same time.  Likewise, nobody makes a living from an almost empty pub, hotel or theatre.  The overheads remain the same while the income dries up as people avoid crowded space like, well, the plague.

Plague has come to us before, of course.  Back in the Middle Ages about a quarter of the population died in many European countries as the black death spread through contaminated communities.  A century ago we had the black flu which killed fifty million people, many of them soldiers who had survived the war only to be struck down by a deadly virus that arrived unseen as the fighting drew to a close.  The crowded insanitary conditions in which the soldiers were billeted was ideal breeding ground for the virus and, without today’s social distancing, there was little chance of staying safe, as try to do today.

People were not even warned about the dangers.  Newspapers were not allowed to spread news which might lower morale in wartime.  Being neutral, Spain was able to report with more accuracy – and honesty – on the disease and this gave the impression that they were worse hit.  In fact, the people of Spain were simply being given more information.

Today it is almost compulsory for news outlets to spread gloom.  My experience, has been that most people have been reasonably cheerful about the outbreak, adjusting to the new normal of avoiding crowds, dodging and weaving during walks, missing the football and other events that have had to be cancelled and using video conferencing in which the sounds and images do not always match each other and those little signals saying who is going to talk next are strangely absent, so we alternate interruptions and awkward silences.

We will come out of this sooner or, preferably later, to be on the safe side.  The habit of giving others a wide berth to stay on that safe side, will not die out for some time, however.  The problem will be to rebuild a functioning economy while still allowing social distancing.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com