Astrology and ADHD

Many years ago, I owned a book on astrology. This provided detailed descriptions of the types of personality associated with each of the twelve star signs. I was born almost at the end of the month of August, and so fell within the Virgo range. Reading the book, I did find some congruity between my own character and that attributed to Virgo. However, I find it difficult to believe that the motions of the constellations affect individual character or the events in our lives, although seasonal variations may play a part. The school year in England begins on the first day of September, and so I was the youngest child in my primary school and in every year group throughout my education. I believe this had a profound effect on my personality - always being the youngest, struggling to be taken seriously by my more confident and more grown-up peers.

Few doubt that personality is deeply affected by the experiences of childhood and adolescence, and also by the culture in which a person is raised. But there are clearly variations between people raised in similar circumstances, and these variations have attracted the attention of philosophers and psychologists. The result has been multiple definitions of personality types and traits in levels of detail that rival those proposed by my old book on astrology. A recent approach is to define different types of personality as variants of psychopathology, of which the most popular is ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). This began as a diagnosis for a specific range of behaviour problems in young people, but has since been extended to include adults with milder symptoms. People in the latter group (which may include myself) tend to start more projects than they finish, have problems beginning tasks which do not interest them, are restless, sometimes disorganised, and may be loners. On the other hand, they are creative, recognise patterns where others do not, and are good in a crisis. They are therefore useful members of a team.

‘Team’ here is the crucial word. A good team has a balance of different types of people with a range of useful skills, and well-balanced teams of this kind are the major productive force in human society. Seeing society as a network of teams differs from the opinion that society is little more than a relentless competition between individuals. In organisations built on such principles, people with ADHD can be disadvantaged, and may compare themselves ruefully with people who are ‘neurotypical’. But this is a misconception. There are many other types of personality besides ADHD, and those who rise to the top in big organisations are often people with self-seeking, conformist, and ruthless personalities. As Lord Acton wrote, "Great men are almost always bad men". Another problematic personality type is found among those who are conformist, uncreative, fearful of change and diversity, and willingly subservient to any powerful individual they can worship. Thankfully, most people fall in neither group, and are kind, tolerant, and caring. I am lucky to be married to a wife with such a personality. 

The New and the Old Convenience of Everyday Life

We live in a world that is vastly more convenient than in the past. Official procedures which once took us hours now take minutes. An example in the UK is the process for updating car tax. This used to begin with a letter from the DVLA (the licensing authority) notifying you of the date by which you needed to pay the tax. You would indicate on the form whether you wished to pay for a year or six months and head off to a post office authorised to deal with car tax. The completed form had to be accompanied by an up-to-date MOT roadworthiness test certificate and an insurance certificate for the car. Payment would be in cash or by cheque. These documents would be scrutinised by the post office clerk, who would return the MOT and insurance documents together with a small road tax disk, which had to be placed inside the car windscreen. This showed the expiry date of the road tax and proved to the police that the car was taxed, insured and roadworthy. Not all post offices were authorised to process car tax. For some years, we had to travel to the next village to tax our vehicle.  

Taxing my car is now much easier. The DVLA emails notification of liability for tax. Vehicle insurance and the results of MOT tests are recorded on national computer databases linked to the road tax database. There is therefore no need to produce documentary evidence. Since this information is all online (and available to the public), tax disks are redundant and were abolished in 2014. Instead, police cars have devices that read the number plates of cars on the road, to check whether they meet the legal requirements. All payment are by instantaneous bank transfer, so there is no need to visit the post office at all. In any case, cheques are all but redundant. Most bills are now paid either directly from your bank account by direct debit or standing order, or by bank transfer. 

Cash too is becoming obsolete. In the past, cash was essential for purchasing smaller items. But it was a chore to get your cash out of your bank account. You had to visit your bank and sign a cheque to yourself. Banks did not make this an easy task - they were usually closed at weekends and even at lunchtimes. I remember when I failed to get to the bank before its early closing on Christmas Eve and had to face the long holiday without any cash. Now of course, cash is easily available by using your debit card in cash machines, even in foreign countries. But even more convenient is payment by contactless credit and debit cards, which are now used for three-quarters of all transactions in the UK. 

These examples show how technology drives social change. This new convenience of everyday life is a consequence of computers, the Internet, the credit card and high-speed electronic transmission. This has replaced an earlier form of convenience, based on the petrol engine, the refrigerator and the telephone. The old convenience involved travel by car to out-of-town supermarkets and shopping centres, as well as drive-in restaurants and even drive-in banks. People could park near giant stores to stock up their large fridges with a month’s supply of food. This pattern of life sustained, particularly in North America, very low-density suburbs where there is little practical alternative to using a car. Footpaths are irregular and services too dispersed to make walking to shops or other services practicable. This old form of convenience took the person to the service by car. The modern form instead takes the service directly to the person in their home. 

Home delivery is not new. When I was a child, the milk, soft drinks, bread and coal were all delivered directly to the house. The Birmingham area even had an excellent local brewery (Davenports) which delivered ‘beer at home’. But home delivery is now used for all food and almost any other purchase, large or small, all of which can be delivered directly to the doorstep at minimal transport cost. My wife buys almost all our groceries online, carefully checking through product reviews, offers and discounts. I visit the village shop (which is within walking distance) for a top-up. I have not been in a bank for a long time, although I have occasionally spoken to banking staff online. I still travel for the podiatrist and my eye tests, although both could be arranged on a domiciliary basis. I am retired, but many younger people I know work some days/week from home, attending workplace meetings online.

The new convenience is changing our towns and cities much as the old convenience did. Supermarkets and out-of-town shopping centres will decline and gradually be replaced by distribution centres and smaller convenience shops suitable for daily purchases by local residents. The large car parks around shopping centres will be used more profitably for new housing. Many banks have already closed, leaving several towns with none. The solution developed by the Government is a ‘hub’, shared by a post office and several banks, each operating one day/week. Shops in high streets will continue to close and be converted into housing. The result will be more densely-populated urban centres where key services are within walking distance. 

These changes are unsettling for many people. The closure of shops in town centres have make some places look bleak and neglected. This is unpopular - people choose not to shop in town centres, but dislike the consequences of their actions. Some people struggle with a world dependent on using computers and the Internet, and find themselves stranded in suburbs and villages and unable to get to increasingly distant local services. People are disoriented when they discover that what they took to be the modern world - of cars, motorways, drive-ins and supermarkets - is now becoming a thing of the past. 

Too many cars?

 

I recently returned from a holiday in Jersey. This is the largest of the Channel Isles, a compact 46 square miles with a landscape of lush rolling hills, surrounded by numerous sandy beaches. The most recent census recorded just over 103,000 inhabitants, a third living in the capital St Helier. Apart from a short stretch of dual-carriageway, the island’s roads are the kind of narrow lanes similar to those found in rural England and France. Travel is made easy by an excellent bus service. Bus routes all leave from the Liberation Square Bus Station in the centre of St Helier, and reach all parts of the island. Buses are frequent, punctual, clean and cheap, supplemented by many well-regulated taxis. There would seem to be little need for people living on Jersey to own a car. But own them they do. There are over 124,000 registered motor vehicles on Jersey, more than one per inhabitant. It is therefore not surprising that there are daily traffic jams in St Helier, with all the resulting pollution and nuisance. Car travel in Jersey can hardly be a fulfilling experience. The speed limit is 40 miles/hour throughout the island and 20 miles/hour in St Helier. Why, therefore, do so many people in Jersey go to all the expense of buying and maintaining a car?

The reason is the same as in most other European countries. The car is purchased only in part because it is it useful and convenient for everyday life. A major reason for owning a car and for the type of car owned is that it is a positional good. A car, for many people, defines their status in society, and generates the pleasure in being superior or at least as good as those of their neighbours that they compare themselves to. This can mean buying cars that are far too large and/or expensive for their needs. So some wealthy people in cities buy large ugly (and usually black) four-wheel drive vehicles that are inconvenient to park in and manoeuvre around narrow urban streets. These successfully assert an important personal presence, so that is usually disappointing to see the rather insignificant people that alight from them. Owning a car has also become a marker of adult life, so that it is common to see rows of cars outside a house, one for each member of the household.

The mass ownership of motor cars has had a devastating effect on ordinary life. Pleasant villages, towns and cities have been torn apart to create broad roads and parking spaces. Yet new roads built to alleviate congestion rapidly become noisy and congested. Children can no longer play safely outside their house, and are driven to schools because their parents see walking and cycling as dangerous activities. People walk less than in the past, and are prone to obesity. Their solution is to go to a gym, usually in a car. Motor vehicles are major sources of pollution and hence illness and premature death. These pollutants include particulates, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and airborne particles of soot and metal which cause skin and eye irritation and allergies, while very fine particles cause respiratory problems. Increased air pollution may also be associated with dementia. Other dangerous pollutants from motor vehicle exhausts include carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, benzene and formaldehyde. in the UK, motor vehicles generate 24% of greenhouse gases and are therefore an important factor in climate change.

Any government action to limit the use of motor cars in response to these problems faces major obstacles. People’s identities are now so attached to car-ownership that restrictions are experienced as personal insults. There are angry reactions to official attempts to tax the most polluting vehicles or to limit speed limits and restrict access in urban streets. Governments’ responses are therefore timid. Instead of proposing policies to reduce the number of private cars, they support the introduction of a different kind of car. Electric cars do have lower rates of dangerous emissions than petrol or diesel-powered vehicles, but will require a major expansion of electric power supply, a massive new infrastructure of charging points, and the large-scale mining of rare earth metals which are shipped around the world in large polluting cargo ships.

Humanity’s obsession with private motor vehicles will come to an end one day, probably as a result of catastrophe rather than action by governments. Until then, we will continue to drive to our holidays in picturesque villages with narrow pedestrian streets, free of fumes and the noise of traffic.

The madman on the street corner Internet

My grandmother spent much of her later years watching television. A lot of what she saw evoked discontent, including University Challenge. When a student failed to answer a question, she would say: “These people are at university. They should know everything”. This assumption that people could possess universal knowledge, strange as it is now, was once common. Parents bought encyclopaedias for their children, in the hope that this would give them access to the entire world of knowledge. My parents were no exception, and I spent many happy hours accumulating information from the ten volumes of my home encyclopaedia. As a result, I possess a wide span of superficial knowledge, together with a sense that I lack real expertise in any field at all. I have come to realise that, despite all my reading over the past 70 years, I am still strikingly ignorant about many things.

One consolation in my despair is the realisation that I am not alone. Most people, I suspect, know a great deal about their own lives and the lives of their family and friends. They have probably built up some expertise in their own line of work, and know a lot about the community they live in and the sports and other activities they enjoy. But compared to the great body of human knowledge, this amounts to very little. As a result, the human race floats on a vast tide of ignorance. This has implications for how our societies function, particularly since the expansion of the Internet in the 1980s. Before then, it was generally assumed that knowledge was hard-won, and thus mainly possessed by people who had spent years in education or vocational training. People were therefore inclined to respect experts and people with technical or academic qualifications.

Now, information and opinion is available almost instantly, usually with pictures. People can easily post to the entire world their own opinions or circulate those made by other people of which they approve. This can be immensely useful when information is posted by people about things they know. I have saved hours of otherwise-wasted effort by watching videos made by (usually middle-aged) tradesmen explaining how to fix cars, decorate the house, or do gardening. Unfortunately, the great bulk of opinion on the Internet is not of this kind. Since most people are ignorant of most things, the Internet has become the prime medium for circulating ignorance. Because it comes from a computer, this ignorance is treated with especial reverence. Now, millions of people in the USA repeat the bizarre paranoid inventions of websites like Qanon which, in days gone by, would probably have led to admission to mental hospital. The madman shouting obscenities on the street corner has become the guru of our age. 

Sofavision and the news

 There are four main modes for presenting the news on television. The first is for the reporter to be on the spot. At present, we can see brave journalists standing on balconies in Kyiv, looking out at ever-closer explosions. They describe what they have learnt and seen, and their reports gain great authenticity as a result. The second mode is for the news reporter to sit behind a desk. In the past, they usually had a sheaf of papers in front of them, which they could be seen shuffling once the broadcast was concluded. Now of course, they have a laptop to glance down at from time to time. The third mode, which became fashionable about 20 years ago, is for the journalist to stand up in front of the camera. This requires that the guests and other journalists they interview also have to stand up, which must become irritating after a while. Finally, the fourth mode is for both journalists and guests to sit on a large sofa. This is now the pattern for the morning news in both the BBC and Sky (who have recently abandoned the standing mode).

The problem with the sofa is that it looks too comfortable. You can not report the horrors of war from a big red sofa. Where sofas excel is in the experiential interview. This involves one or usually two members of the public being interviewed about their experience of some loss or other great adversity. They are often unused to being on television, and the sofa helps set them at ease. The experiential interview also gives the journalist an opportunity to show they have skills beyond just reading out what is put in front of them, providing them the opportunity to give a convincing display of sympathy.

The distress and joy of individual people is one of the ultimate measures of the importance of an event. But the problem with the experiential interview on breakfast television is that it an lacks an explanation of why the people in front of the camera have suffered adversity and who bears responsibility for inflicting it upon them. By focussing just on their distress, it accentuates the tendency of news programmes to live in the bubble of now. The result is that real distress is presented as a kind of random and ultimately meaningless event. Long interviews of this kind also veer on exploitation for the sake of entertainment. There are repeated shots of loved ones who have been lost, and repeated questions about the effects of this loss on those who remain.

Fortunately, this is usually interrupted by the local news broadcast. Five minutes are allocated to the affairs of the five million people living in the Midlands, summarised expertly by a newsreader behind a desk. Then it is back to the big red sofa.

Moving the hedges

Many years ago, I was attacked by an angry farmer and his son while walking across his land on a public right-of-way. I had not caused any damage and his anger seemed extreme and utterly disproportionate. After I had escaped, I spoke to our village policeman (who was also a long-distance walker) and he told me that the farmer was notorious. He accused every walker on his land of damaging his property. He locked up two walkers who were off-duty firefighters on the grounds that they were potential arsonists. He had disputes with all his neighbours, who he accused of the near-impossible activity of moving the boundary hedges. Although he did not use the term, the village policeman was describing a man with a paranoid personality disorder.

I have since encountered two or three more people with this disorder, and recognise common features including a belief in elaborate conspiracies against them, an extreme suspicion of others they meet, and hostility to what they regard as an invasion of their boundaries. Paranoid people see no point in debate or compromise because they regard their opponents as inherently malevolent. Instead, they believe in shouting down or otherwise silencing those with whom they disagree.

For some people with paranoid personality disorder, the invasion of boundaries may involve more than just hedges, and focuses on people who cross what they regard as inviolable boundaries of definition. One such definition is nationality. This became important from the Nineteenth Century onwards, with the creation of many new states which defined themselves as the home of a particular nation. Governments of these states usually sought to establish the boundary between those who were to be included as true members of the nation and those excluded. The definition of this boundary varied from country to country, but was usually based on language, religion or ‘blood’. This all proved a disaster for millions of people who found themselves on the wrong side of the nationhood boundary in what they had previously regarded as their own homeland. Even worse, they became the object of hatred from politicians with paranoid personalities who were able to mobilise populations against this supposed ‘enemy within’. This became particularly effective at times of war or economic collapse when it becomes easier to persuade people to adopt a paranoid way of thinking.

The consequences were organised humiliation, forced transfers of population and mass murder. This process began in Spain in the 16th Century, with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews. But it reached its apogee four hundred years later with the deaths of millions, forced transfers of populations and millions living as refugees. Many of the historic multi-national port cities of the Mediterranean, such as Alexandria, Istanbul and Salonika, were stripped of their diversity. By the middle of the 20th Century, most ‘nation-states’ in Europe had eradicated most of their national minorities. Even so, there remain people, often living near the borders, who nationalist politicians regard as having the wrong religion or language or appearance and which they seek to eradicate. In the recent past, Burma has driven out a million Rohingya people who have been denied citizenship. China is currently imprisoning hundreds of thousands of Uyghur people in the North-West of the country, and there are reports of children being separated from parents and forced sterilisation of women.

Younger populations today tend to be less nationalistic, and the new boundary that has attracted the attention of the paranoid is sexual identity. There are many conditions which result in a small proportion of the population having abnormal development of the sexual organs. Many of this group (such as those with Turner’s Syndrome) have no doubt about their gender identity. A rather larger group of people, whose sexual organs have developed in a conventional manner express concern about their gender, some of whom choose to use medicines and/or surgery to change their outward appearance to conform to what they regard as their true gender. There is nothing new about this phenomenon, and many human societies identity valued roles for men who choose to live as women or women who choose to live as men.

What is new, however, is the politicisation of transgender identities. There are three elements to this. In the first place, socially conservative people (particularly those with religious beliefs) view a change of sexual identity as a threat to the normal order of society, which some regard as divinely-inspired. The second element is the view of some feminists that men who choose to identify as women are encroaching on the special and distinctive status that distinguishes a woman from a man as well as on spaces that are traditionally reserved for women. The third element is a sympathy for transgender people because of the hostility they often encounter, the cruelty inflicted on them in various forms of ‘conversion therapy’, and the impact all this has on their mental health.

These differing views could probably be resolved by discussion and debate. But instead, the paranoid style of politics has come to dominate this new boundary of definition. Attempts are made to ban people with opposing views from speaking in public, while academics are hounded out of university for views that are deemed incorrect. In the USA, some states have passed absurd laws to ensure that people must use the toilets that are appropriate to their sex assigned at birth. Equally absurd are the two extremist definitions of gender, which mainly concern male-to-female gender transition. The first is that such people should always be defined as ‘male’, even though they identify as women, live as women, and have undergone hormone therapy and re-assignment surgery to resemble women. The second is that a man should be defined as female if they state that this is their wish, even though they continue to live as man, and have the body of a man.

At the heart of these absurd definitions is an intolerance of ambiguity. Sexual boundaries, like national frontiers, include people who do not fit within simple clear definitions. There are, and hopefully will always remain people who have multiple national allegiances, who belong to minority and diverse cultures, or who are uncertain about or wish to change their sexual identity. They will sadly remain targets for the paranoid people who seek to enforce simple definitions by inflicting suffering, but it is the responsibility of the rest of us to defend the true diversity of the human race. 

Before we had feelings

 The most banal question asked by sports reporters on television goes something like this: “Jim, you have just scored the winning goal in the Cup Final/won the Olympic marathon gold medal/come first in the Tour de France, how do you feel?” This is lazy journalism, but it also illustrates a wider trend: a belief that what matters most is the sportsman’s immediate emotional response, rather than any reflection on the tactics they used to secure victory, the mistakes they made, or  the significance of the victory for their team. A similar primacy is given to ‘feelings’ in some news programmes, particularly those in which the newsreaders sit on sofas rather than behind desks. Great events are presented in terms of the emotions of those that have experienced them, rather than an analysis of why these events occurred and what their occurrence means for the future.

This emphasis on ‘feelings’ is something that has occurred in my lifetime, dating from the early 1970s. I remember a time when no-one was asked how they felt, and the resulting confusion some people experienced when they were first asked this question. Trying to explain this increasing dominance of ‘feelings’ over analysis is difficult, but one factor may be change in the nature of work and our relationship to the material world. When I was young, most people’s work was with material goods, doing things like welding, assembling products, digging coal, cooking or laundering clothes. In work of this kind, success or failure, competence or incompetence, was usually evident immediately. Most workplaces were dominated by men, and had the kind of boisterous and critical banter characteristic of much of male society.

But work with things has been increasingly replaced by a more abstract kind of work, in which groups of people collaborate to provide services to other members of the public, or design and market goods which are produced far away. There are many more women in the workplace, and female society seems to be characterised by mutual support and a particular concern (at most times) to avoid hurtful remarks. In workplaces of this kind, success or failure is less easy to observe, and it becomes harder for people to understand how the organisation as a whole functions and generates its outputs. In such circumstances, people are judged by the what they say and how they respond emotionally, rather than by what they achieve.

I remember this transition happening in my own life. After several short-term manual jobs while a student, I eventually became a social worker. Most of my colleagues were women, although men were usually in charge. I realised that I had moved into a very different workplace culture, in which there seemed to me to be acute sensitivity to almost anything anyone said. There were few words of criticism, but that meant that there was little opportunity to learn what mistakes were being made and what could be done better. But more important was the absence of analysis. Social work existed in a world without evidence or even data. We had no statistics on the types of problems experienced by our clients, no results from research about the most appropriate ways of responding to them, and no data about whether our efforts were successful or not. Almost all our interviews with clients were conducted individually and in private, so there was no opportunity to observe how others performed in their work. In the absence of relevant information, analysis would have been pointless because there was nothing to analyse, except the emotional reactions of individual clients. We worked in a world of feelings without meaning.

Public transport by air

When you hear the phrase ‘public transport’, what comes to mind? Probably a bus or train, often crowded, with time spent waiting on a platform or at a bus stop before you can board. Few people seem to regard air travel as ‘public transport’. But travel in modern scheduled airlines is often the most uncomfortable and sustained form of public transport most of us ever endure. We sit for hours in cramped seats, in close proximity with other passengers, whose airborne diseases are circulated round the cabin and shared among us. There may be a two-hour waiting-time before we can board, being patted down by security staff, as well as (in some cases) a walk over a windy and wet tarmac to and from a crowded shuttle bus.

Why then do many people exclude air travel from the concept of ‘public transport’? One reason may be snobbery. I remember a colleague at work turning her nose up when travel by bus was mentioned. “I don’t use public transport”, she said. This was just after she had returned from a distant conference travelling in economy class by air. Snobbery is a kind of social museum of things that once signified status. Once, air travel was confined to the wealthy, and airliners carried only a small number of passengers, each in the kind of spacious seats now only enjoyed in first class. The first jet liner, the de Havilland Comet carried only 36 passengers. I remember watching the film From Russia with Love in 1963, seeing James Bond flying to Istanbul in a Boeing 707. At that time, I had never travelled by air, and both James Bond’s destination and his means of travel seemed unimaginably out of reach for me.

But the Boeing 707, which could carry 189 passengers, really began mass public transport by air. In 1965, the first of over 10,000 Boeing 737 planes entered service, followed in 1970 by the Boeing 747, carrying over 400 passengers. Mass-produced planes with more fuel-efficient engines greatly reduced the cost of air travel, so that cheap pre-paid ‘package holidays’ in Spain became popular for people in Britain from the mid-1960s., followed by a massive growth of independent tourism to the furthest destinations. My experience is common in the UK: my wife, two children and I have, between us, been to over 40 countries, almost always by air. Air travel has become mass transit: astonishingly cheap but often crowded and unpleasant. Nevertheless, the snobbery lingers - almost as if we were still all James Bonds travelling in luxury.

This month we’re loving

Supermarkets now all hand out free monthly magazines to their shoppers. These are usually glossy publications with recipes and promotions of particular products. The Co-op magazine is particularly good and the Marks and Spencers food magazine (‘What’s Fresh at M&S’) is particularly bad. I only noticed this because I rarely shop for food at M&S, but their August 2019 edition includes an article that intrigued me. This is headed:
    ‘This month we’re loving... Our celebrity tasting panel take their pick from our new summer-ready treats’.
The four celebrities are Emma Willis, Paddy McGuiness, Amanda Holden and Rochelle Humes. Each have supposedly selected a different M&S food product and include a sentence in its praise. For instance, Emma Willis says “I’m picking the Smoky Chorizo Slices, they really fill you up, they’re tasty and make you feel like you’re on holiday”.

This all invoked a volcano of cynicism within me. Can we believe that these four people take a break from their busy lives to gather and taste a range of food and wines before finally selecting their favourites? Did they actually compose the sentences in the praise of each product? Or is it more likely that they just attached their names to this advert drafted by an advertising agency in exchange for a fee plus a smidgen of the publicity needed to maintain a celebrity career? If my cynical views are correct, then there is a further question: why should anyone be influenced by what three presenters and an actress recommend? None have, as far as I know, claimed any expertise in the appreciation of food and wine. But I suspect that the marketing men know what they are doing. People are most likely to be influenced by those they admire, and the greatest admiration is for people who appear on television.

How to be a celebrity

Let’s compare two people. The first is Sir Paul Nurse. He is a geneticist who researched the process of cell-division associated with cancer. He has won a Nobel Prize, is President of the Royal Society and Head of the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation. Sir Paul is very famous among medical researchers, but is not known to the wider public. He does not appear in gossip columns, has not been on Strictly Come Dancing or similar shows, and does not promote commercial products on television. He is therefore not a celebrity.

The second person is Kate Hopkins. She became famous as a singularly unpleasant contestant on a television programme The Apprentice, but has subsequently taken her unpleasantness to I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and Big Brother. Her second marriage was filmed on a television programme, and she has made various guest appearances on television. She writes newspaper columns (in The Sun and now The Mail), which have become famous for their vicious remarks. On drowned migrants, she said: “No, I don't care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in the water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don't care“. Kate Hopkins is a celebrity.

The word ‘celebrity’ is used loosely to designate anyone who is famous. But ths is misleading. There are many famous sportsmen, singers, actors and politicians who seek  publicity to promote their careers but also strive to maintain a private life. Yet because they are famous, they become the focus of public curiosity and adulation, and hence the targets of the stalkers in the mass media, with their long-distance cameras, raids on refuse bins, and offers of cash to former confidantes and lovers. A more appropriate definition of a ‘celebrity’ is therefore someone who, like Kate Hopkins, makes money by achieving fame from a relentless quest for publicity.

How then do you become such a celebrity? The first step is to come to public notice,  through either some positive or negative achievement. From there, it is essential to market in the mass media your personality and intimate revelations about your personal life. This provides an impression of intimacy for the voyeur-public, but, more importantly, can generate income from guest appearances, articles in the press and so on. A measure of your successful attainment of celebrity status is when you become a subject for gossip, revelations, and moralising. This achievement, however, can not be taken for granted, and you will need to constantly generate news through repeated changes of appearance, personal revelations, well-publicised outbreaks of shocking behaviour, or the expression of bizarre opinions. These do not need to be true or authentic: the press are eager for copy and the public believe what they want to believe. Many celebrities seem to be pleasant and charming people, but it is bad behaviour that most attracts attention. Revelations about shocking behaviour range from giving silly names to the celebrity’s children, relationships or disputes with other celebrities, sexual incontinence, and extreme personal extravagance. Weddings are a particularly occasion for the latter because film and photo rights can be sold, and product brands can be advertised. The production of revelations has now become industrialised with the development of social media. It is claimed that a celebrity should aim at a minimum output of six twitter feeds a day, although this work can of course be devolved to agents. Similarly, celebrities will usually employ a ghost writer to pen their ‘autobiography’. These can become almost an annual production - Katie Price produced four in six years. Ghost writers can also be used to generate novels, published in the name of the celebrity.

Changes of appearance can be either in clothes (particularly at red-carpet events), hairstyle or plastic surgery. In the ultra-competitive celebrity marketplace, there is trend towards ever-more extreme modifications. Lady Gaga attracted publicity by wearing a dress made of meat, which clearly exceeded Madonna’s earlier attire of cone-shaped bras. The former ‘glamour model’ Katie Price became famous for plastic surgery to increase her breast size to a grotesque 32FF. She has subsequently had various other operations on her breasts, as well as liposuction on her hips and thighs, fat implanted into her lips to boost her pout, and a nose job. Most female celebrities will at some point appear naked, either in photo-shoots, music videos, vlogs, or sex videos (which they will usually denounce as pirated).

The ultimate achievement of a celebrity career is to become a super-celebrity. The person then becomes a 2D icon, converted from a human being into a brand, which can be exploited to develop new and diverse product-lines such as perfumes or clothes. The super-celebrity career is extremely profitable. Maria Sharapova has endorsed Motorola, Land Rover, Canon, Tag Heuer, Tiffany (her own range of earrings), Nike (her  own collection), Gatorade, Tropicana, Cole Haan (her range of shoes and handbags), Prince and then Head racquets, and Porsche (‘brand ambassador’). She also brands a line of sweets called ‘Sugarpova’, and at one time considered changing her name to help promote it. In 2014, she earned $22 million from endorsements, compared with a measly $2.4 million from winning tennis matches.

It is wrong to see super-celebrities as some kind of capitalist conspiracy to delude the public: celebrities thrive because they meet an urgent popular demand. Super-celebrities provide for many people an idealised version of the self, in image, possessions and behaviour. The stream of news about the celebrity’s supposed ‘private life’ provides a pseudo-intimacy, such that millions of people around the world eagerly follow the most banal information about their deeds. Needless to say, this appearance of intimacy is spurious because celebrities carefully control access, often for their personal protection. A large entourage surrounds each super-celebrity.

The culture of celebrity has significantly changed how people see the world and how they believe they should behave in it. One of the distinctive features of celebrity is the combination of an elevated status and wealth with revelations of a supposedly mundane daily life. This creates an illusion that celebrities are like the rest of us, and therefore that all could become rich and famous instantly, without any special talent or endeavour. Since this is untrue, it also creates a sense of frustration and anger, which can be exploited by a new breed of celebrity politicians such as Donald Trump. These pose as defenders of the common man and woman against unspecified ‘elites’, display their vast wealth and behave badly. In so doing, they act as an intermediary for people to project their own resentments and inadequacies on to others. The power this gives can bewilder even the celebrity politician. Donald Trump said “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters”.

Celebrities can of course be brought low. The public can switch their adulation to another person, although why and how this happens is not clear. It may just be that the public gets bored and a more entertaining competitor comes along. The only sure way of maintaining celebrity status in the long term is to die tragically young. The deaths of super-celebrities then become vast public events, in which the immortality and great virtue of the celebrity is asserted. An example is the death of Princess Diana in 1997, in which a million people lined the streets of London in a massive display of collective grief. In the four weeks after her death, the suicide rate in England and Wales rose by 17%. In other words, the pull of celebrity was so great that significant numbers of people wished to join her in death.

See also: New gods for old http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/new-gods-for-old.html
               The rise of the celebrity wedding http://stuartcumella.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/rise-of-celebrity-wedding.html

Eating a steak in Glasgow in 1968.

In 1968, I became a student at the University of Strathclyde, studying for an MSc in Politics. I was attracted by the reputation of Professor Richard Rose, a young and enthusiastic head of department with a major public profile. I stayed for the first year in a ghastly postgraduate hall of residence in Rotten Row, very close to the University’s McCance Building - the location of the Department and also the University’s library. There was of course no Internet, which meant that students spent hours reading in the Library, often the back issues of the (then very few) academic journals. Towards the end of that academic year, I met an attractive library assistant who I later married (and eventually divorced).

My income came from a postgraduate studentship, which (just) covered my living costs and allowed me to eat out at a restaurant about once a month. But there was astonishingly little choice in Glasgow restaurants at that time: almost all were steakhouses owned by Reo Stakis, who had come to Scotland from Cyprus many years before. Stakis knew what sold and his restaurants were well-run and produced tasty and economical food, albeit from a restricted menu. There was a Stakis steakhouse just below the McCance Building on George Street, and this was my usual spot for dining out.

I remember this experience well. Like most British restaurants then and for many years after, the steakhouse was dimly-lit. There was an open kitchen and grill, which was used for cooking the steaks. There was a choice of sirloin, rump and rib-eye, in different weights. The restaurant also served gammon steaks and (I think) a fish dish. I would usually start with either a prawn cocktail or egg mayonnaise. The latter comprised two halves of a boiled egg, covered in mayonnaise with some paprika. Both the latter ingredients were at that time quite exotic. For the main course, I usually ate the cheapest rump steak, which would be accompanied by a single large cepe, a grilled tomato and some hand-cut chips. When this was finished, I would be offered a selection of puddings from a ‘sweet trolley’ which was wheeled round to the table. I usually chose either black forest gateau or trifle. After the meal, there was then a fashion for Irish Coffee (coffee with whiskey, with cream floating on top), but I preferred my coffee unadulterated.

I had thus eaten the characteristic 1960s British restaurant meal, now utterly out-of-fashion and even mocked by comedians. But the food tasted wonderful, and the restaurant gave me a warm feeling that I had enjoyed a special treat. Suppose I were to be transported back to 1968 to eat the same meal at the same restaurant - would I still find the food as tasty? In the years since then, my tastebuds have experienced many different types of food in several countries, but I think that a Reo Stakis steak and chips would still be satisfying. This is because steak and chips, egg mayonnaise and trifle can be some of the tastiest food on the planet. This of course involves the radical idea of judging food primarily by its taste rather than by fashion (ingredients which you have never heard of and which are unobtainable outside central London), by arty-farty arrangements of food on the plate (towers, drizzles, foam etc), or by the expensive ambience of the restaurant in which it is served.

Why has taste declined as the main criteria for judging food? The main reason is probably the importance of television and its many celebrity chefs. Television is a visual medium utterly unable to transmit taste or smell to its viewers. To keep the viewers’ attention, its celebrity chefs must generate a succession of innovative recipes, often filmed in exotic locations and using strange ingredients. People thus come to judge food by what it looks like and whether it succeeds in being strange and different.

See also:Dining in yuppieland

Another reason to be nice to your turkey this Christmas

There are lots of reasons for eating turkey meat at Christmas: pound-for-pound, turkeys are a cheap way of feeding a lot of people; turkeys are traditional at Christmas (well since the 1960s anyway); and there are lots and lots of recipes, online and in books, for how you can improve the tasteless dry meat of the turkey. The last reason gives the game away: no-one enjoys the taste of a turkey. I have asked numerous people and have yet to find a single one who believes that roast turkey tastes better than roast chicken, goose or duck, or roast beef or lamb. People eat turkey for non-food reasons - to stuff themselves with tasteless food and to conform to some idiot tradition. So follow the words of the great Brummie poet Benjamin Zephaniah and be nice to your turkey this Christmas.

See also: Have yourself a merry/melancholy/some other emotion Christmas

A bar in La Herradura

There came a point in the life of our family when we could afford to go on holiday to a villa with a swimming pool. So in April 1994, we flew to Malaga, picked up a hire-car, and drove to a villa on a hillside overlooking the sea near the village of La Herradura. After a week there, we moved for the second week to a villa in a quiet street near the centre of Nerja. This was a happy time. My children were nine and five years old, and were full of curiosity and excitement. The villas were excellent, and the surrounding area has many fascinating places to visit. My wife and I could lie on our bed in the villa at La Herradura at night, and look out across the sea at the distant flickering lights of fishing boats. We travelled to Frigiliana (a beautiful white village full of flowers), visited  the Alhambra, threw snowballs at each other on the Sierra Nevada, wandered round the old city of Almuñécar, and travelled through the white mountainside villages of Las Alpujarras. We visited the caves of Nerja and strolled along the Balcón de Europa. We ate fresh fish cooked in a small café on the beach.

One day I walked down to the village centre of La Herradura, and went into a local bar for some beer. Sitting against the bar, smoking, was a gloomy-looking Englishman. He told me he was not on holiday, but was a local resident. “I left England because the country’s going to the dogs”, he said. “It’s full of bloody immigrants. They don’t learn our language and don’t learn our ways”. “Do you speak Spanish”, I asked a little later. “No, never bothered”, he replied.

The next week in Nerja, I saw a more impressive example of the English abroad. It was clear that the town had a substantial population from North-West Europe. The British had contributed to the culture of the place in a positive way. There were some pleasant cafes selling salads, tea and cakes, and an English-language bookshop. An English-language  newsletter reported meetings of ramblers (walking in Winter rather than Summer), a local history group and an animal welfare society. The British residents were essentially re-creating the middle-class life of their home country in a foreign land. But their very success in this task may have impeded their participation in the general life of Spanish society. Did the English immigrants to Spain ‘bother’ to learn Spanish? The magazine advertised Spanish classes, but it is hard to become fluent in a second language, particularly when you start learning late in life.

I too was struggling to learn Spanish. On the last week we stayed in Nerja, I saw a big headline in one of the Spanish papers. I translated it to read that Ayrton Senna was dead. ‘That can’t be true’, I thought. 'I must have made a mistake'.

Some reasons people do stupid things

Network Rail has issued the video above, which shows the stupid things people do at railway level crossings: people who ignore flashing red lights, loud sirens and descending gates (or descended gates) and still cross the railway line. All the people in the video escaped death, but only just. In fact, level crossings are still the main location for fatalities on the British railway system. In 2013/4, there were eight deaths on level crossings, none of which were found to be ‘industry-caused’ according to the subsequent enquiries. There are many other kinds of hazardous stupidity on daily view in our city streets: cyclists on busy roads who wear earphones and are thereby unable to hear traffic behind them; people who start walking across a road junction just as the lights change; people who walk out into the road looking at their mobile phone and not at the traffic; and people who drive their car while on their mobile phone or even while reading a map.

There are many explanations for stupidity of this kind. One is alcohol, which magically robs us of the burden of thought. Drunks have been seen sitting on the railway tracks in the town of Poole, where there is a level crossing between the high street and the shopping centre. A second explanation is that some people (especially young men) enjoy the sensation of danger, while at the same time believe themselves to be immortal. A third explanation is the simple failure to appreciate danger. For instance, children may not understand why it is important to wear a seatbelt until they see a re-enactment of an accident. Many adults too respond more to visual than written information, and hence may not appreciate that their behaviour is dangerous until they experience its consequences, personally or vicariously.

But I think that the main reason people behave stupidly is because of they way in which they process information. More specifically, many people typically to respond to only one stimulus at a time. So the people who crosses the road even though the pedestrian light is on red do so because they have glanced ahead and seen stationary cars in front of them. They then react to that information and walk, ignoring other contrary information (such as the red light). At level crossings, the one dominating piece of information is a clear road ahead, which eliminates awareness of the red flashing lights and the descending gates. Mobile phones are an extreme example of a dominating piece of information because they emit an alarm signal (their ringtone). When hearing this, people are tempted to suspend all practical activity, such as driving a car in busy traffic or even speaking to another person in front of them.

For some people, the dominating piece of information is not what they see in the road or the level crossing, but what other people are doing. This means that they cross the road despite the warning signs because they see other people doing it. Indeed, some people live their entire lives as an act of imitation. This can be a successful life-plan, for people who are wrong with the crowd are usually more popular than those who are right by themselves. But crowds can err, can panic, can even carry out acts of violence and cruelty. Saying “I did it because everyone else did” is no defence in law. Nor will it protect you from getting run over by a train.

See also: Not staying focussed

The secret geography of childhood

All children have a personal geography, of places they know well and regard as their own familiar territory. There are the usual roads, streets and fields, but also special hiding-places, places for exploration and places with their own names, unknown to adults.

It is strange to visit these places as an adult and realise how small the houses are and how compact are what once seemed limitless fields and woods. But for me, the biggest difference between my childhood memories and the world I now see is not size, but the absence of children playing in the roads. I attended Haslucks Green Primary School in Shirley, a suburb of Birmingham. My family lived in Stroud Road, one of several long straight roads of semi-detached houses, each with front and back gardens. There were no garages attached to the houses because, when they were built, few people owned cars. Instead, there was an unpaved access drive leading along the rear of the properties, and some families had built small garages at the end of their back gardens.

Stroud Road and the surrounding estate in the 1950s was astonishingly free of cars. I could look down the road from my front gate, and could see no parked cars, let alone moving ones. The lack of traffic also applied to what are now busy main roads. On the way back from primary school one dinnertime, I walked along Haslucks Green Road. One boy at school was notoriously naughty (we would probably now regard him as having a ‘challenging behaviour’), and one day sat in the middle of this road. “Come back”, we shouted at him, “a car might come”. No traffic meant safe places to play, and I spent a lot of my childhood in the street outside my home, among large groups of local children. There was a craze at one time for trolleys, and my father made one for me from pram wheels and planks. It could be steered with strings attached to the movable front axle. There was of course no brake. It was possible to lie head-first on the trolley and speed down the middle of Stroud Road.

Sometimes, a small group of boys would head off on an expedition, usually visiting the long stretches of waste ground that lay between the back gardens of neighbouring roads. These could be accessed by numerous small alleys: old rights-of-way across what had once been farmland. A longer expedition was to the River Cole, which was then a brook between open fields. We would fish for sticklebacks and eels. Even further was the Aqueduct. This is a vast brick construction which carries the Stratford-upon-Avon canal over both a road and the River Cole. We could get to the top of the Aqueduct via some gravel yards, or along the tow-path. This was all amazingly dangerous. There were no guard rails or fences on the top of the Aqueduct, and the canal was at that time semi-derelict.

How has modern traffic affected children’s personal geography? In the village in which I now live, children still seem to wander around the streets and nearby fields. But it is possible that they do so less often in the Stroud Roads of today. It has become less safe for children to cross main roads, and children (and even adults) are increasingly seen as ‘vulnerable’, in need of permanent oversight. So some parents drive their children even quite short distances to school, thereby increasing the danger on the roads and the risk of child obesity. It is also possible that children may be less eager than in the past to explore their neighbourhood in each others’ company. Homes are now full of personal entertainment. Children need no longer stare out of the windows with frustration on rainy days, but can instead look at the little flashing screens of their toys. Parents may also prefer to see their children in front of a computer screen than exploring their locality or noisily playing football in the park. Parents too play with their toys. I often see parents walking with their children, not talking to them but instead giving all their attention to their mobile phone. In this new world of electronic toys, children may lose the social skills they would otherwise have learnt in play - more will be diagnosed as having an ‘autistic spectrum disorder’. Indeed, this has already happened.

My father and the books

The 6th of June 2014 was not just the 70th anniversary of D-Day, but also the 100th anniversary of my father, George John Cumella. My father died as long ago as the year 2000, but I think about him every day. I had considered writing here about his life, but it has proved difficult to make a narrative of a mass of incoherent memories of my father, from when I was a child and an adult. Almost all of these are fond memories of a kindly man who loved his wife, children and grandchildren. But there are also memories of the quirks of behaviour that mark one personality from another. I can not fit these into a single short account, and so I will speak instead of one part of my father’s life that says much about him and his influence on me.

My father came from a reasonably prosperous family that lost its money. The only secondary education available was at a local fee-paying school. He passed the exam for a free place, but ‘failed’ the interview. As a result, he left school at 14 with no qualifications and did not become apprenticed. He worked in a wide variety of unskilled occupations, including lorry driving (before any driving test was required), chauffeuring, coal-hauling, and being a clerk in the local workhouse. He had psoriasis, and so was found medically unfit to serve in the forces in the Second World War. At some point after the war, he completed a trade qualification as a welder, and from then until retirement worked at the Land Rover factory. I remember him cycling to work through rain and snow, with his sandwiches in an old bag across his shoulder and a beret on his head.

Nowadays, my father would have gone to university and been a good student. He had considerable powers of application, loved reading and had a great respect for learning. In the absence of formal schooling, he educated himself by reading the books in our small local public library. Each Saturday afternoon, he would visit the Shirley Library and stay until the desperate staff begged him to leave at closing time. He was initially limited to the maximum of four books/lender allowed by the library. But as first myself and then my brother went to university and left home, he took over our tickets (as well as our mother’s tickets) and would return home on Saturday with a collection of 16 books. No-one could read this many at once, and so they were renewed from month to month. I suspect that he took pleasure from simply having the books around him.

My father’s respect for learning combined with his own lack of educational opportunity  made him transfer his frustrated ambition to his children. My brother and I were sent to the best local grammar schools and were encouraged to apply for university. Secondary school was for me a miserable experience, but I still became a sort of educational guided missile, eventually collecting three university degrees. My father did not seem to have any clear ambitions for us after we left university - it was sufficient that our education gave us the chance to escape work on an assembly-line, and he was very pleased that we had escaped his fate and had succeeded in finding well-paid white-collar jobs.

See also: Surviving school

Overheard in the Turk’s Head in Penzance last week

A waitress approaches elderly American couple and asks them what they would like to drink. The American woman asks what beers they have. The waitress describes the various real ales available (including one brewed on the premises). A long pause follows. Eventually, the American woman replies “I’ll have a glass of water”. After bringing the drink, the waitress asks the couple what they would like to eat. The American woman asks what fish dishes they have (even though the menu and the daily specials blackboard lists these in detail. The waitress goes through the various options. This takes some time because the Turk’s Head has an excellent cook and the meals use a diverse range of fish and ways of cooking them. Another long pause follows. The American woman then orders: “I’ll have fish and chips”. 

This American woman, needless to say, is not typical of other Americans my wife and I met during our brief holiday in Penzance this month. As a group, these (mainly elderly) Americans were well-travelled and adventurous. The woman in the Turk’s Head is more a representative of the phenomenon of choice-exhaustion. This is when, presented with a bewildering range of unfamiliar and complex options, we resort to the simple and familiar. Choice-exhaustion occurs when we go to very large supermarkets, and see 20 different brands of mayonnaise, or 30 types of vinegar. We are daily presented through the mass media with an endless range of food, sofas, cars, holidays, bank accounts, clothes, and products which reverse the signs of ageing, and make us slimmer and more attractive. To help us make appropriate choices, there is another and increasing range of websites and publications which compare and rate financial products, consumer goods, motor cars and so on.

Rather than revel in this wonderland of choice, many people experience a sense of inadequacy and threat. How much easier if someone could make the choices for you. This, in fact, is the strategy used by some wealthy people - they employ ‘lifestyle advisors’ and ‘personal shoppers’ to make choices on their behalf. These will usually choose whatever is fashionable at the moment, and, more especially, whatever can be recognised as expensive and fashionable. By these means, the wealthy become a kind of walking assemblage of brands, ever sensitive to how their personal appearance and possessions compare with those of other wealthy people. Spouses and partners can also come to be regarded as a kind of brand, to be traded in when they age or cease to be fashionable.

In the absence of paid choicemakers, the rest of us struggle along as best we can, relying on our own personalities, being loyal to familiar people and places, living the way we have always done, occasionally venturing to try something new.

Doomism and the doomists

The greatest change in politics in my lifetime has been the replacement of hope and fear by gloom and despair. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, there was fear of imminent nuclear war. But set against that was a hope that a better society could be created, with a comfortable life for all people, free from the fear of poverty and free from the cruelty and humiliation suffered by many. This idea that people could hope for a better world was a creation of the 19th Century. Before then (and still in some parts of the world today), the lives of most people were short and hungry, at the mercy of the powerful, and with the probability of watching half your children die. Not surprisingly, most people believed that their only hope for a better existence would be after their death.

Yet despite living in an appalling century of war and mass murder, many people in Europe in the middle of the 20th Century voted for political parties that held out hope. This was true of the right as well as the left. The left held out the promise of personal security against illness and poverty through the creation of a welfare state, government action to maintain full employment, and restraining the economic power of the wealthy. The right promised to achieve more or less the same aims by facilitating home ownership and rewarding economic enterprise. One side emphasised social solidarity: the other personal responsibility.

Both these routes to a better world now seem blocked. It is proving increasingly difficult to fund the welfare state because of population change. Most people now join the labour-force five or six years later than was the case in the 1960s, while greater life-expectancy has produced an increasing proportion of elderly in the population. As a result, there are fewer people in work to fund a comfortable retirement for the elderly, whether this be through public provision (taxation or social insurance) or private means (personal savings or annuities). The right-wing promise of a property-owning society is also threatened. Rapid rises in house prices make purchase out of the reach of most people, particularly since many young people are also paying off student loans.

This has led to two typical responses. One is to abandon politics altogether and resort to fantasy. The fantasy is that wealth and happiness will be achieved by winning the lottery, being recognised as a new singing star on the X Factor, or having a son talented enough at football to be signed for the Premier League. An alternative fantasy is that the purchase of some new consumer good will transform your personality and very identity. This is exploited by advertisers, who now offer mystical experiences or at the very least utter bliss as the result of buying a new car. Driving a BMW or an AUDI has now become the modern equivalent of attending mass.

The second typical response is ‘doomism’. This is the belief that our current way of life will end catastrophically within our lifetimes, and that only a few will find shelter in some distant retreat. There have, of course, always been people who predicted the imminent end of the world based on their reading of the Bible, with survival in paradise available only to the select few who joined their particular version of Christianity. While awaiting the apocalypse, believers often gathered in Godly communities here on earth, perhaps so that they could be easily identified when the end came. They attempted to make their Godly communities very models of the just society or heaven. Some became cruel habitations of conformity. But others, like Rhode Island or Pennsylvania, became tolerant and progressive societies.

Belief in an imminent apocalypse is still strong in parts of the USA, but in Europe it has been supplanted by a new secular doomism, based on the belief that the natural life of the planet is fatally imperilled by over-population, pollution or, alternatively, by the excessive consumption of natural resources. Doomists attribute these problems either to capitalism (now labelled as ‘Thatcherism’ or ‘neo-liberalism’), or just to the innate greed and stupidity of human beings. For this kind of doomist, shelter is found in small self-sufficient communities away in the hills. And so they gather to await eco-doom in towns like Totnes, Stroud, and Machynlleth. Like the earlier religious doomists, they try and implement their ideas, in this case with local currencies, community gardens, recycling exchanges and cycleways. In the process, they turn their shelters into some of our most desirable and innovative communities.

Memories of memories: the Great War

A few conversations between the old and the young take us back centuries. When I was a teenager, I knew two old men who had fought in the Great War. One I knew when I was a volunteer for the Visiting Service for Old People in Birmingham. He had joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment just after the start of the war in 1914, after lying about his age. He spent most of the war in the trenches of the Western Front, but was later transferred to the Italian Front. He had been wounded, was sent to the field hospital and missed some action. When he returned to his squad, he found that all his friends were dead. The second old man was a next door neighbour in Shirley. He too had been on the Western Front, and after the Armistice had advanced with the Army into Western Germany. He told me that he and his fellow soldiers did not like the French civilians they met, and were amazed when they occupied Germany to find people who seemed far more like themselves. “We’ve been fighting on the wrong side”, the soldiers said. 

These are memories of memories of events almost a hundred years ago. Both these men, when themselves teenagers, also may have talked to old men who in their youth had fought in distant wars: perhaps the Crimean War or the Indian Mutiny. Assume a 50 years span of memory for such conversations, and only seven link me with someone who saw Shakespeare perform at the Globe, and the first settlers leave for New England. The past is closer than we think.

Can't read, won't read

One morning last week I went to the orthopaedic clinic in Worcester. By the door, in large letters, was a sign. It told patients not to go straight to the desk, but to collect a number from a box below the sign, and sit in the waiting room for their number to be called. This message was repeated on another large sign above the reception desk, which also told patients not to stand near the desk in order to maintain the privacy of individual patients speaking to the receptionist. I collected my number (21) and waited. After five minutes, my number was called. Another man (number 22) hovered round the desk and tried to barge in front of me, but I held my ground. I was registered by the receptionist and waited to see the physiotherapist and consultant.

While I did so, I noticed that half the people entering the clinic failed to pick up a number from the box and had to be told to do so by the receptionist. Some could not even find the box, and had to be guided by other patients. Why this manifest failure to follow a simple instruction? The reason did not seem to be age or infirmity. The great majority of patients in the clinic were young or middle-aged, and this group included almost all those who failed to read the signs. I suspect the main reason was simply functional illiteracy.

By ‘functional illiteracy’, I mean not just the inability to read, but also the unwillingness to do so. Many people are able to read, but find that it requires an unwelcome effort of concentration. When faced by a sign with words (even large ones like those in the clinic), they look the other way. There are many other examples of this. When I go to Foregate Street Railway Station in Worcester, I note the screens that indicate for each train the time, destination and platform (there are only two at this station). Around the window where you buy tickets, there are lists of the next trains to the main destinations. Yet sreveral customers do not read any of this written information and ask at the ticket office.

Many people therefore live in a world where they depend entirely on the spoken word, whether face-to-face, on a mobile phone, or on television. There may be few if any books in their homes, and parents do not try and help their children learn to read. People can lead a satisfactory life with functional illiteracy until they encounter the world of formal bureaucracy, whether public or private. In such cases, there is a wall of mutual incomprehension between an organisation dominated by written rules, job descriptions and standardised forms, and an individual whose understanding of the world is based on the spoken word. People with functional illiteracy faced by an official-looking letter must either show it to someone with greater expertise, or just ignore it. The latter course of action can be catastrophic. When I was a social worker in West Lothian in the 1970s, we were routinely told by the Housing Department of impending evictions (usually for non-payment of rent). This information was usually received on the day of the eviction. We would visit the tenant to see if there were implications for childcare, or if a disabled person was involved. I visited the S Family, and found they were utterly unaware of what was due to happen at 11am that day. I found a series of letters from the Housing Department, unopened and unread, behind the clock on the mantelpiece. Later, Mrs S told me in distress of her life with an abusive husband, a son in prison and an estranged daughter. “Mr Cumella”, she said with feeling, “I feel so thingy”. So functional illiteracy was coupled in her case with a lack of vocabulary to express emotions.

Much of the debate in education about how to improve literacy seems to be about teaching techniques. English spelling does make learning to read a bit more difficult than would be the case in a language like Spanish, in which spelling is phonetic. But literacy levels are high in Japan, where the written language uses three different orthographies. I think the main problem is not teaching technique or the quality of primary school teachers, but the lack of commitment among some parents to education itself and the low expectations they have of their children.

It is not easy to see how we can deal with this problem, but in the meantime we need to help people with functional illiteracy cope better with formal organisations. This means using symbols and colour schemes to supplement written signs. At the Orthopaedic Clinic, this would mean using a sign of a large arrow (in a contrasting colour to the wall) pointing to the box, with a picture of a hand picking a card. The use of symbols of this kind is widely-accepted in services for people with a learning (intellectual) disability: we just need to recognise that there are very many more people who have problems in reading and learning than we have previously estimated.