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. 

The failed magic of politics

Many years ago, when I was a teenager, I went canvassing for the Labour Party. This was for the General Election of 1966, and was in a part of my local constituency that had some Labour voters, and which consisted mainly of semi-detached houses and council estates. I called at one house and gave my usual little speech to the owner, an old woman. “I’m not voting Labour”, she said. “That Mr Wilson (the Labour Prime Minister at the time) has been in power for 18 months and he’s not done anything about the drive at the side of my house”. The drive was indeed pot-holed and unkempt. Had I been more politically astute, I would have replied by saying “Mr Wilson has a very busy job, but I can get in touch about the drive with the local council, and they may be able to help”. At the time, I put her comments down to a lack of knowledge about the functions of different levels of government. But looking back, I see it as part of something more fundamental - a belief that political leaders have magical powers, that they can change everything all at once. The lack of change, even to minor matters such as an unkempt drive in Solihull, must therefore be evidence that they have chosen to malevolently withdraw that power. 

Ignorance of how governments operate is widespread, then as now. This became evident to me when I became a social worker a few years later. Many of the people who most depended on public services, for housing, income and basic public safety, had little idea of how these services operated and how they could best influence them. This was compounded by poor literacy, so that official letters (this was well before the Internet) were left unread. I remember visiting people about to be evicted from their council house for non-payment of rent to find the warning letters from the council stacked unopened on the mantelpiece. For such powerless people, the route to survival was gaining the ear of someone they saw as powerful. They would approach social workers like myself because we were seen as  possible intermediaries with the elusive people of power. We would do our best to explain official communications and would contact agencies on their behalf. Our role was analogous to that of the priest or saint who could act as an intermediary to God.

There is, however, no need of a god when we have television. Television is a magic window on a shining world of plenty, inhabited by the beautiful and the powerful. People on television (or now the Internet), whatever their shortcomings in real life, are worshipped by millions of acolytes. Indeed, their shortcomings seem to make them more worthy of worship, almost as if they take the sins of the world on their shoulders. Politicians who can transfer this celebrity magic to politics (like Donald Trump) become popular with the powerless irrespective of the policies they espouse. Other, less fortunate, politicians can only mimic this celebrity identity. Tony Blair, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage were successful at gathering some such magic, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer much less so. 

Politicians blessed with celebrity magic are assumed by their worshippers to be all-powerful and capable of correcting all ills. But the gods always fail. Society can not be wished into perfection, resources can not be generated out of nowhere, complex problems can not be solved overnight. Politicians themselves in their autobiographies complain of the immense difficulties of achieving their aims, while those who do make significant changes, like Thatcher and Johnson, often make catastrophic errors. The response to failure among the supporters of celebrity political leaders is severe rejection. This has become the fate of Blair and Johnson, but not of the less charismatic prime ministers like Major, Brown or May whose worth is often appreciated more after they leave office. 

The science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke proposed that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Our ever-more complex world, with multiple sources of powers, innumerable interacting agencies bound by complex rules is already too advanced to be comprehensible to its citizens and even to its supposed rulers. We plunge headlong into darkness.
 

The fantasy of 'social care'

Many years ago, my late father-in-law developed a form of dementia. He was a kind and sociable man, but his memory and his ability to care for himself steadily deteriorated. My mother-in-law found it increasingly difficult to manage him at home, and he was referred by his GP to a rehabilitation hospital. After various tests, they recommended he be placed in a nursing home. We went through a painful search for a suitable home, until a nearby one was located. There was very little help from the local Social Services Department, apart from their completion of a financial assessment. My mother-in-law was not eligible for financial assistance from the local authority because she had a limited amount of savings. There were therefore substantial fees to pay which would have almost completely depleted these savings had my father-in-law not died within a few months. 

A few year’s later, my mother-in-law’s health declined. She had become physically-frail and depressed. She fell over (‘had a fall’) one day and was admitted to a local hospital for treatment of her leg ulcers. The hospital had a warm and caring atmosphere and provided the equivalent of good hospice care until she died after a few weeks. Because this was an NHS hospital, there were no fees to pay. 

This is a common experience for many families in England, and illustrates some key problems with our health and social care services. The first of these is that the boundary between ‘healthcare’ and ‘social care’, is not based on need but on who pays. A person with a diagnosed and acute physiological illness is usually treated as ill and receives free hospital or domiciliary health services. Some one with a chronic physiological disorder or a psychiatric disorder such as one of the dementias is categorised as the responsibility of local authority social care services and is usually required to meet all or a substantial part of the cost. Although dementia is an illness and intensive nursing care was recommended by the NHS, my father-in-law had been passed from ‘heath care’ to ‘social care’. 

The boundary between ‘heath care’ and ‘social care’ has shifted in the last few decades because the NHS has progressively withdrawn from providing long-term inpatient care. Hospitals which once housed infirm elderly people and people with mental disorders have long since closed. This has been presented as a move toward ‘care in the community’, but the reality is that NHS units which were free at point of use have been replaced by residential and nursing homes operated by private providers and which charge their occupants. In other words, it has been an exercise in privatisation, with the cost of care shifted from the state to chronically sick people and their families. 

Successive governments have avoided dealing with this problem, largely because of its complexity and the cost (both political and financial) of resolving it. There are two contradictory problems with cost. The first is that the need for expensive long-term ‘social care’ strikes individuals and families at random. It thus resembles the cost incurred by people with severe acute disorders who receive intensive hospital treatment. The most common political response is to propose a lifetime cap on the payments made for ‘social care’, with the remainder to be met from public funds. This was proposed by the Conservative Government in 2021 with a lifetime cap set at £86,000, but implementation was delayed and eventually cancelled. The second problem with cost is the grossly inadequate funding for ‘social care’, whether this comes from public or private sources. Funding for social services has fallen by 22% since 2010, taking into account the rise since that date in the number of elderly people. Local authorities have consequently frozen the fees they pay to providers of nursing or residential care. The private providers have responded by increasing the fees they charge to those residents who do pay for their own care, and by cutting costs. They have done so by following the old institutional strategies of building ever-larger institutions, keeping staffing levels at the legal minimum, and paying staff the minimum wage. This has led to high staff turnover (about 30%/year), a high proportion of unskilled staff, and probably a poor quality of care.

These two problems with cost are incompatible because setting a cap on individual contributions will not by itself increase overall funding for ‘social care’, and may have the opposite effect. Governments may respond to the cost incurred in paying for the lifetime cap by cutting back or at least freezing central funding for local authorities. In the end, an effective and fair system of care for chronically-sick people will require a substantial increase in public funding. This might take the form of an additional scheme of social insurance combined with an annual or lifetime cap, as used in France and Germany. Or the NHS could once again accept responsibility for the care of people with dementia in their final years. Either way, this will not be easy to implement. Much of the the electorate has slipped into a fantasy land where they demand better public services and lower taxes.  

Days of Lost Hope

In 1975, the BBC screened a television series called ‘Days of Hope’. This was directed by Ken Loach and portrayed the lives of a working-class family from 1916 to the General Strike in 1926. It showed how the revolutionary fervour of the time concluded when it was ‘betrayed’ by Labour leaders when they called off the General Strike. The programme thus followed a narrative common on the left, in which failure is explained by the cowardice or malevolence of the leadership. This explanation is selective because only some politicians are deemed to be traitorous. The greatest betrayals by left-wing leaders were in the communist states of Soviet Union, China and Cambodia which slaughtered millions of their own people.

There is a wider significance to Days of Hope, and that is that it marks the conversion of left-wing movements and specifically Marxism in Britain from hope to nostalgia. The predominant intellectuals on the left by this time were historians rather than economists. There was little attempt on the Left to understand how changes to the production and distribution of goods and services were radically changing society. Instead, the Left became committed to heroic retreats in a futile defence of declining industries. The extreme example is the miners’ strike of 1984-5. An heroic organisational effort supported coal miners opposing the closure of loss-making pits, and its defeat had catastrophic results for miners and their communities. But other European countries managed a similar decline in coal-mining as cheaper and less polluting forms of energy were introduced. The difference there was that governments did not regard miners as enemies to be crushed but as people to be helped. In one former mining town in Western Germany that I visited ten years ago, the Land and Federal governments had funded a new university and shopping centre, and invested in re-training former miners.  

My own days of hope were less radical than those experienced after the First World War. The election of a Labour government in 1997 brought in many reforms, economic growth and significant improvements in public services. I remember a sense of optimism, as well as a shared commitment to common European values of peace, welfare and respect for different cultures. All that is now in retreat. We have domination by staggeringly wealthy oligarchs, who have discovered that electoral success comes from spreading hate and fear without regard for the truth. They fund compliant political parties led by mediocre salesmen and journalists who dutifully minimise taxes on the rich and direct massive public funds in their own direction. The public purse has become a resource to be looted instead of the means for supporting a better quality of life for the population. This criminality is supported by spreading hatred and suspicion, which in turn legitimises violence against people of different ethnicity or appearance, all of whom are falsely designated as ‘immigrants’. 

We face a difficult few years ahead. It is up to us to do what we can to oppose the oligarchs and assert our common values.  

Tales from Long Ago No. 3

For some years in the 1970s, I was employed as a social worker in a medical centre in what a rather grim town called Blackburn in West Lothian. The social work team included a kind and sociable clerk called Cathy, who was also a rather puritanical adherent of the Church of Scotland. One Monday she told me that she and her husband had gone to the cinema at the weekend to see the film Emmanuelle under the impression that it was a biblical epic. It soon became apparent that this was not the case, and Cathy told her husband that they had to leave because the film was “dirty”. He responded that they should not waste the money they had paid for their tickets. Impressed by this spirit of frugality, she agreed to stay. “The things they did - I would never have imagined”, she said. 

I suspect her husband was rather less innocent in this episode than she believed. 

Tales from Long Ago No. 2

Sometime in the early 1970s, I decided to backpack in the Scottish Highlands. I took a train and then a bus to the pleasant market town of Callandar. I then trekked through a pass between the hills to Comrie. This was a splendid walk of 26km, and I felt young, energetic and fit. Comrie is one of the fine small market towns at which Scotland excels. I found a campsite, and the next day set off over the hills along Glen Lednock for Killin. I reached Loch Tay and then plodded along to the village. I arrived in early afternoon and my next destination was Bridge of Orchy. I should have stopped at Killin for the night and enjoyed staying in such a scenic location, but I had caught walker’s disease - the desire to keep moving at all costs - and decided to plod along Westwards. This turned out to be a foolish decision. Scotland dose not have the English system of rights of way. As a result, Ordnance Survey maps of Scotland show few tracks or paths. I followed instead a book on Scottish hillwalking, which showed a clear track across to Bridge of Orchy. This turned out to be narrow road which became an increasingly fictitious track along Glen Lochay, through a landscape ever less inhabited. It got dark and I needed to find somewhere to pitch a tent.

My tent was the one I had used in an earlier walk in the Dordogne. But what sufficed for late summer in South West France proved inadequate for a very stormy night in the Highlands. I was forced by condensation to abandon the tent, and instead found shelter on a concrete floor in a large open-sided Dutch barn which was used for sheep-shearing. The metal sides of the barn rattled and the sheep fleeces hanging from the rafters swayed in the wind. Miles away, across the Glen, I could see the lights of a house. In the morning, I rose, packed, and headed off for Bridge of Orchy.

I soon encountered a burn which proved difficult to cross without getting very wet feet. Eventually I reached a track which led me to my destination in mid-afternoon. I decided to abandon life in a tent (as, it turned out, forever), and stay in the hotel. I ran the bath in my room, jumped in, and found it icy cold. I went to the reception desk and was told “We don’t run the heating until the evening”. This example of Scottish hospitality was all I remember of the hotel. I am sure it is much more welcoming nowadays, but even in the time of my walk its great saving grace was proximity to a railway station. I decided to end my walk and catch a train to Glasgow.

A few years later, the West Highland Way opened. I completed this in splendid weather one summer. I stayed in small hotels and bed and breakfast accommodation. The Way passes through Bridge of Orchy, but I avoided the hotel and continued on the Way up a hill to see one of the greatest sights in Scotland. In front of me was the great expanse of Rannoch Moor, encircled by mountains. Below, was Inveroran Hotel surrounded by a copse, next to a lovely burn. Some tents were pitched nearby. I was greeted by a  hospitable landlady (with a very posh voice) and placed in a comfy room. The dining room was crowded and friendly, and the food was excellent. The next day, I strode along the old military road across Rannoch Moor to Kinlochleven, and the next day on to Fort William.

Tales from Long Ago No. 1

I have had a career in the sense of careering from one type of work to another. In the late 1980s, I careered into working as a planner in a mental health service in Birmingham. This involved working with psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses to set up a range of innovative services. These included setting up supported housing for people with long-term disorders discharged from inpatient care, a task which required co-operation from local housing associations.

So one day, I went with a consultant psychiatrist to meet the manager of a local housing association in his office in a street of terraced housing. We waited in his office for him to arrive, while the consultant looked wistfully across the street. “I lost my virginity in that house”, he said. The manager arrived and asked his rather glamorous personal assistant to arrange coffee. This she did, using an ornate cafetiere and pouring our cups.

A few months later, I visited an area manager in the Social Services Department. By way of small talk, I commented on her unusual surname and asked if she was related to the manager of the housing association I had met. She went red with rage: “That bastard”, she said, “He dumped me for that bloody personal assistant”.

After that, I have always avoided asking if people are related, however unusual their surname.

Roads that were once familiar

There are journeys you make over and over again - to work, to visit family, to go to favoured places. You get to know every turn and feature, the best places to stop for a coffee, a rest or a view, the faces you recognise. The journey becomes so familiar that time becomes abbreviated. And then, you make the journey no more.

From the age of 11, I took buses to school and then to college. These familiar journeys stopped at 19, when I went to university in London and a more complicated life began. But the family home in Shirley, Solihull always provided comfort and continuity. Memories become selective with age, and grow warm in nostalgia. My most nostalgic memories are of my brother and I playing on the mat in front of the fire on a Sunday morning. I also had the job of polishing the collection of brass ornaments. My mother would make the only cup of coffee we drank in the week - made with instant Nescafé and milk. There would be the smell of the Sunday roast from the kitchen. The Sunday sequence of radio programmes would begin.

There are other such nostalgias. My father cooking lunch (we called it ‘dinner’) for my brother and me on the alternate Saturdays when my mother was working at a nearby shop. This was always the same meal: fried gammon steak, mashed potatoes, and peas. It was followed by treacle pudding (from a tin and heated in boiling water) covered in custard.

These are warm memories because my mother and father were kind and loving people, taking great pride in how well my brother and I did in our education and careers. 

The family home remained the destination for my familiar journeys after I went to university. I lived in ten different houses between then and 1983, when my wife and I moved to the home we still live in. From then on, the familiar journey would be through country lanes to the M5, onto the M42, the A435, and then country and suburban roads to the semi-detached family home in Shirley. My father died in 2000, many years after cancer of the throat had taken away his warm speaking voice. My mother lived another 18 years as a widow. Over time, her friends and siblings died, and she was not able to access the networks and friendship groups of the kind that provide support for widows in a village such as my own. A botched eye operation deprived her of much of her sight. Nevertheless, she continued to live in her own home until the last two years of her life.

Today (June 6th) is my father’s birthday, and I visited my parents’ grave in Widney Manor in Solihull. I did not go to the old family home in Shirley, a once-familiar road I will never travel again.

Grand Christmas Quiz

In my spare time, I am secretary for a group of Alumni of the London School of Economics. We held a short quiz for our members justt before Christmas last year. There were no prizes, and there are none here. But you can have a go in aswering these questions.

British politicians
1. Which prime minister was booed by the 10,000 assembled members of the women's           institute?

2.   Which two politicians were prime minister on three or more occasions in the 19th Century.

3.   How many ministers for housing have there been since the 2010 general election?

4.   Who is the current minister?

5.   What is the fourth largest group in the House of Commons?

Science
Which of these statements is true?
1.    Short people have on average a longer life-expectancy than tall people.
 
3.    People lose an average of a centimetre height during the day because of the effect of gravity.

4.    Bananas and carrots are radioactive.

5.    The Atlantic Ocean is growing wider by an inch and a half each year.


Connections
What do the following have in common?
1.    Mrs Glum, Mrs Daley, Elizabeth Mainwaring, Maris Frazier..

2.    Robert Peston, David Miliband, Oliver Letwin, Emily Thornberry.

3.    Lagos, Auckland, Zurich, Rangoon.

       
Geography
1.    Which historic English county is named after a river which flows between two different counties?

2.    Which Asian country is named after a river which flows entirely through another country?

3.    Which European country is named after a river which flows entirely through a neighbouring country?

4.    Which country has the largest banana plantation in Europe?


The arts
1.    Which European city is the location (in or near) of five grand operas?

2.    What was the nationality of prima ballerina assoluta Alicia Markova?

3.    What are the national origins of the following dances: the tango; the salsa; the rumba; and the samba?.

4.    Which famous impressionist painting includes the oldest registered trademark in the UK?

5.    What is the more familiar name of Ozymandias, King of Kings?


Wars
Which decades did these wars begin?
1.    The War of Jenkyn’s Ear?

2.    The Taiping Rebellion?

3.    The Grand Chaco War?

4.    The Great African War?


Quotes
1.    Who wrote: “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misdeeds of mankind”.

2.    Who described whom as being: “Mad, bad and dangerous to know”.

3.    Who started a work of fiction with: “It was a dark and stormy night”?


Last words
1.    Whose last words were (allegedly): “Bugger Bognor” or “God damn you”.

2.    Whose last words were these (allegedly) “I am dying beyond my means. I can't even afford to die.” or “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go.”

3.    Which film ends with the leading man saying: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a dam”.

4.    Which comedy film ends with “Nobody’s perfect”.

Tribalism in politics

 Almost 50 years ago, I lived in a council estate in Falkirk in Central Scotland. I was interested to learn that our next-door neighbour had once appeared in the Borough Police Court for assaulting a council workman. It was then common practice for local councils to repaint the doors of all their houses on an estate in a standard colour over a period of a week or two. In this case, maroon doors were being repainted green. But the next-door neighbour was an ardent orangeman and green was the colour of Catholicism. Hence the assault. It is doubtful whether he had ever suffered at the hands of Catholics, took religion seriously, or even knew the doctrinal differences that distinguished the Catholic and Protestant versions of Christianity. Instead, he knew which tribe he belonged to, and which tribe was his enemy.

Tribal identity and consequent hostility to other tribes explains much of political behaviour. Policies and actions are applauded or derided not on their merits, but because they symbolise the favoured or the enemy tribe. Violent actions by one’s own tribe are denied, minimised or excused, while similar actions by the opposing tribe are denounced, even as genocide. An army of compliant journalists exists to support these claims. Crude tribalism of this kind is unacceptable to intellectuals or other sensitive souls, so tribalism is disguised by abstract nouns. So intellectual warriors denounce their tribal enemies by opposing ‘colonialism’ (ie the USA and Britain), ‘multiculturalism’ (ethnic minorities), ‘Zionism’ (the Jews), or ‘wokeism’ (women and gays).

Intellectuals also play a crucial part in converting tribalism into nationalism. They do so by concocting a pseudo-history of their tribe/nation, in which it is usually portrayed as the innocent and gallant victim of an evil oppressor. A key consequence is a belief that the exclusion or elimination of this oppressor will of itself produce ‘freedom’ and wellbeing. The real complexity of historic events and the motives that drive events are thereby reduced to a simple moral tale that can mobilise millions. So convincing are pseudo-histories that they attract people elsewhere looking for a cause. This kind of proxy tribalism tends to shift from country to country. In the early 20th Century, the Left in Britain supported the ‘gallant little Boers’. Later, many people idealised the Soviet Union, with subsequent shifts of the idealised foreign country to China, Cuba, and even Albania. On the Right, support for Franco and Hitler morphed into an admiration for the descendants of the gallant little Boers and then to the ruthless capitalists of the USA.

This can all have bizarre results. There have recently been attacks on Starbucks outlets across the world by people who oppose Israel in its war with Hamas. This might seem puzzling because Starbucks has no outlets in Israel, but has many elsewhere in the Middle East, all owned by a Kuwaiti family. Starbucks is not even on the Palestinian BDS list of pro-Israel firms to be boycotted. But Starbucks is seen as a representative of US culture, and the USA is Israel’s main ally. So local branches of Starbucks are attacked and tribal warriors can feel satisfied that they have struck a blow against their hated enemy.

The 1964 Shakespeare exhibition

This year is the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s first folio. This was prepared by two of the late bard’s colleagues, and includes the text for 36 of his plays. This anniversary has been celebrated by programmes on television but is not the first or most important commemoration of Shakespeare’s life that I remember. In 1964, the 400th anniversary of his birth was marked by an exhibition in Stratford-upon-Avon, located on the meadows in front of the Memorial Theatre. This was an easy journey from my home at that time, and I visited the exhibition several times. ‘Several times’ because I found it an overwhelming experience.

The exhibition followed the life of the great man describing his life in the first person. Attendance meant walking through a series of rooms, each prepared by a different set of artists. Two rooms in particular stay in the memory. The first was a long gallery, decorated in Elizabethan-style wood-panelling with portraits on one side and a view through windows of the City of London across the Thames. The second was a reproduction of the Globe Theatre, with the voices of famous actors reading select speeches from the plays.

A modern version of this exhibition would no doubt use CGI and other technologies to impress its audience. But the exhibition in 1964, like theatre itself, reaches us through our imagination and through the power of words. Many years later, I went to a performance of The Tempest in Vancouver. This may have been Shakespeare’s last play, and there is speculation that he himself acted the role of Prospero. Near the end of the play, this character reviews life and art thus:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And — like the baseless fabric of this vision -
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep…”

I found this speech, like the exhibition all those years ago, emotionally overwhelming. Our little lives pass into history, but some words live forever.

The Coronation before last

Like almost everyone in Britain, I spent some time last month watching the Coronation. But I am one of a diminishing number of people who remember the previous Coronation, in 1953, when Elizabeth II was crowned. Few people at that time had televisions, and so the event largely took place through street parties. I was six years old, and the family then lived in a rented semi-detached house in Stroud Road, Shirley, Solihull. My memories of the event are uneven. The weather was cold and wet, but I can not remember if there were any tables laid in the street or any party food. I do remember that there was a children’s fancy dress competition and that I won first prize. I was dressed as what we then called a ‘chinaman’, complete with traditional robes that did indeed look Chinese. I carried a pole over my shoulder, holding what I was told were two genuine Chinese lanterns. Second place went to a girl dressed as Britannia, who shivered from the cold. My younger brother and the girl next door were three years old and carried a bucket between them, as Jack and Jill. This was the last time I ever went to a fancy-dress event.

I have better memories of my later years in Stroud Road, which I eventually left at the age of 11. Street then had few cars, and children played outside at any available time. It was possible to walk to woods and open countryside and fish for sticklebacks in a local stream. Shirley still had some quirky older buildings, inherited from its time as a country village. In the next few decades, the fields became housing estates, and the older cottages were demolished. I became an inhabitant of the staggering blandness of the English suburbs.

At this most recent Coronation, I live in a country village in a neighbouring county. But suburbanisation has followed me. A new estate of suburban houses has just been approved by the Planning Inspectorate. This, like all the others, will be a group of breeze-block houses on minimal plots, arranged in cul-de-sacs, with patches of ‘green space’. It is promised that the latter will be landscaped, but we have had promises of this kind before. What the residents of such estates usually end up with are mowed lawns, with some fitful planting of trees, most of which soon die. There are fortunes to be made in developing such estates, in planning and promoting them. But those who make such fortunes choose to live far from what they have created, in land they have yet to despoil.

This (not very) old house

The oldest construction in my village is an iron age fort, which now resembles a series of mounds on a hilltop. The oldest building, the parish church, is much more recent, dating from the 12th Century. The oldest house, called the ‘Old Hall’, started life two hundred years later and was extended in the later Middle Ages. Dotted round the parish are several farmsteads and cottages built from 1500 onwards. This might give the impression that the English build to last. But of course most houses in the past were insubstantial hovels, most of which fell down before they were demolished. This tradition persists with modern housebuilding in England.

My wife and I moved into our house in 1983. We were the first occupiers of a three-bedroom bungalow on a recently-completed estate. The house was constructed of breeze-block with a brick outer layer, and low-pitched tiled roof. The low pitch meant that there have been longstanding problems with leakages and the resulting damage to ceilings. The windows were single-glazed and there was only a thin layer of loft insulation. The bathroom suite was an awful orange colour (‘sunburst’) and there was a gap between the bath and the wall, and a hole in the wall between the bathroom and the kitchen. The en-suite toilet had a toilet and washbasin in a grim brown colour, and the basin did not sit properly on its plinth. The tiles in the bathroom and in the en-suite began falling off the wall in a matter of weeks. The internal walls were plasterboard and provided no sound-proofing. The front door had a simple lock and could easily have been kicked in. All the floors (even in the bathroom and en-suite toilet) were covered by a cheap bottle-green carpet. There were persistent problems with condensation. The garage, like almost all those that were and still are built in England, was too small to house a car.

We spent our first few years getting repairs done under the NHBC guarantee, and every year after that in making the house more habitable. We have employed squads of roofers, followed by a plasterer to repair the ceiling. We have replaced all the windows (now all double-glazed) and had a conservatory built. The boiler, front door, internal doors, garage doors, soffits, barge boards, kitchen fittings, curtain rails, bath, toilets and washbasins have all been replaced. We have installed wooden floors and ceramic tiles and a much thicker layer of loft insulation. We replaced the paving along the side of the house and all the fencing in the back garden. We installed a dehumidifier to cure the problem with condensation.

Why did we not just move house instead? Mainly because short-term contractual employment made it risky to increase debt. But there were other reasons. We have had good neighbours, the house faces woodland but is still close to the centre of a small rural village surrounded by hills. We can walk to the shop, the garage, the bus stop, and the GP clinic. The village has a good primary school, a good high school and a large sports centre. My children always walked to school, at first accompanied, and then proudly independent.

An estate of new houses has since been completed in the village. This has an attractive layout, and building regulations have improved considerably since 1983. The houses all have double-glazing, better insulation and central heating. The kitchens were fully-equipped on completion, and all were decorated in the currently-fashionable black, white and anthracite. But there were still problems with the construction, requiring residents to move out for a short period while corrective work was carried out. One major change from our house is the diminished size of the gardens. New houses, apart from the most expensive, now have just a small patch of front garden, and a back garden only large enough for a trampoline and a barbecue. The total plot size is sometimes half that found in interwar council houses.

In place of proper gardens, new estates have ‘green space’. This is a planning requirement that 40% of the land area must be allocated for open space. In the past, this would have been looked after by the district or parish council. But to cut costs, district councils now allow developers to set up contracts with maintenance companies which charge the residents a monthly fee. The fees keep increasing, but most green space usually amounts to little more than flat plains of mowed grass and a few short-lived spindly trees. This is so much less than could be achieved, and a challenge to those of us who believe a house is characterised by its setting as much as by its contents.

The Commonwealth Games experience

 

On the 6th August, I went to the Commonwealth Games with my wife Marion, son Andrew, and Andrew’s partner Kate. We saw the rhythmic gymnastic competition in the Indoor Arena in the centre of Birmingham. Here are some random observations.

1.    Sport is a form of entertainment, but a key part of that entertainment is the skill displayed by the competitors. Most athletic events are derived from the earliest form of martial arts, based on fighting, running, throwing and jumping, supported by horsemanship and various regulated forms of group conflict such as football. Gymnastics owes more to circus arts: the female gymnasts wore sparkly leotards and were marked for artistry as well as dexterity. But it was impossible not to admire their great skill nor to feel the disappointment with every small error in their routines. The venue enhanced the entertainment of the event, by providing a disco during intervals, and issuing spectators with wristbands which glowed in unison at certain points in the show.

2.    The Games were a model of efficiency. The Commonwealth Games involved over 5000 athletes from 72 countries, taking part in multiple venues in different cities and towns across the West Midlands (including a velodrome in London). Despite having limited notice after Durban withdrew from organising the Games, the venues in Birmingham were all ready on time, the athletes and officials were all housed, the media operated without a hitch, and there was a constant supply of entertainment for the crowds in the City Centre. There were thousands of very helpful volunteers, and public transport to events was free.

3.    There was great pride in the City among local people. UK media is dominated by London, and shows limited interest in the distinctive history and culture of each of the other great cities in this country. The opening and closing ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games was a celebration of Birmingham’s industrial past and its significant contribution to popular music. The City centre looked splendid in the sunshine, and local people expressed pride in their city, albeit in the usual downbeat Brummie way.

4.    Crowds are fun. When we left the Arena, a vast host passed over the canal bridges, through Centenary Square, Chamberlain Square and Victoria Square. There was no jostling, and everyone looked happy. This was my first experience of going to a large public event for some years, and I had forgotten the exhilaration felt by people who are part of a large purposeful crowd. I realise that this must be a common experience among people who go to football matches or festivals. 

5.    The best art is that acclaimed by the public. The highlight of the opening and closing ceremonies was the huge mechanical Raging Bull, which moved and appeared to breathe fire and smoke. During the games, this was placed in Centenary Square, and was immensely popular - so much so that the City Council agreed to find a permanent indoor venue to house it after the Games. The public acclaim for this artwork contrasts with the annual awards of the Turner Prize for art, which are usually known to few and approved by even less. Turner prize-winners do, however, seem to enhance the fortunes of a small number of London art galleries and their patrons who purchase artworks as a form of ‘wealth-protection’. The public have a more refined taste in art because they value it for its appearance and the emotional impact it has, and not for what it does for their personal bank-balance. 

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. 

Living among the ghosts

In sleepless nights, I live among the ghosts of the past. There are the ghosts of the person I once was: the happy child playing with my brother on the floor in the living-room on a Sunday morning while my mother cooked a roast dinner; the ardent young man romantically proposing marriage to the wrong woman in a ruined abbey on a small island in the only lake in Scotland; the lonely divorced man striding across the hills of Britain and France; the much wiser man proposing marriage on the Prince of Brittany to the right woman; the head of a happy little family travelling further and further afield, from Cornwall, to France and Spain, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; the retired senior lecturer, glad to have escaped from commuting each day to the university rat-race. There are also ghosts of places that are lost: the quiet streets of my childhood in Shirley, now packed with traffic and parked cars; the stream where I fished for stickleback, now a culvert in a housing estate; and much later, my daughter playing with a friend making houses from straw bales in a field now covered with houses.

As we get older, the ghosts accumulate, which is why we could not bear to live forever - the ghosts of our past lives drive out any dreams for the future.

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.

How I wrecked several marriages in West Lothian

After I qualified as a social worker in 1975, I went to work with the West Lothian division of Lothian Regional Social Work Department. I was based in a team located in a crowded primary healthcare centre in the small town of Blackburn. Besides the town itself, the team covered a string of unappealing villages originally built for mineworkers but subsequently used to rehouse what we then called ‘problem families’. Blackburn itself was not short of problems. The town had expanded rapidly with Glasgow ‘overspill’, many of whom lived in poor-quality maisonettes with all-electric heating. The oil crisis had led to substantial increases in electricity prices, with a resulting spate of disconnections. Tenants in such circumstances bought cheap paraffin heaters, which in turn made their houses almost uninhabitable because of dampness. There was also the usual undercurrents of poverty, alcoholism, crime and domestic violence.

The social work team was as a result under considerable pressure. The team comprised a senior social worker, an occupational therapist, and four or five social workers, almost all of whom were recent graduates with limited experience of the kinds of lives lived by their clients. Some, including myself, had completed social work education, and were designated as ‘qualified’. But, at least in those days, our courses provided us with knowledge rather than skills. We were taught a mixture of social policy, human development and psychotherapy (called ‘casework’), and learnt about the problems of the different groups of clients we were due to encounter. In real life, we had little time to practice casework skills, and mainly acted as intermediaries between members of the public and the various official agencies with which they struggled to cope. I found this work suited my particular skills and was puzzled to find that some of my colleagues did not understand how social security was calculated or the rules regarding disconnection or eviction.  

The team, like most other social work organisations at the time, struggled to allocate scarce staff resources between clients with long-term difficulties and the daily influx of people who called at the office. The latter were termed ‘self-referrals’, and were dealt with by whichever  social worker was on ‘duty’ that day. My duty day was usually Monday, which meant that I had to deal with the consequences of the preceding weekend. One frequent consequence was a request for help from women who had been assaulted by their husbands. Violence was in all cases not a sudden or solitary act, but something sustained over several years, dating in some cases even before marriage (in those days it was normal for couples to marry before they lived together). Violence from husbands generally occurred at weekends and was associated with alcohol. Women’s expectations of their husbands were not always very high. One told me: “You don’t mind your husband knocking you about a bit, but it’s a bit much when he breaks your arm”.

There was an unspoken assumption in social work at that time that married couples should be helped to remain together. This was a bit like another social work assumption that young unmarried women could not cope with raising children and should be encouraged to place them for adoption. But this all coincided with the break-up of my own first marriage. When I realised what a blessed relief it was to free of wedded misery, I saw no point in helping others keep together and face daily violence. This view was supported by the determination of the women themselves: none asked for help in repairing their marriage. So I developed a set of measures to help battered wives split from their husbands. Almost all lived in council houses, so I advised them how to change the tenancy into their own name. I told them how to contact Social Security and the legal action they should take to confirm the custody of their children. None of the women I met needed to find a place in a refuge, although many years later I met several women who had fled to refuges when I did my research on homeless families.

I do not know what long-term effect my advice had on the women I met. None returned to the office or told me that they had returned to their abusive husbands. But I suspect that there were many more women in Blackburn who continued suffering from abuse that never managed to escape.
 

Educating for the arts

I have been very fortunate in life. The greatest benefit of all was to have been born to two parents who loved each other and loved their children, and who were able to support their family to a decent and reliable standard of living. When I was a child, my mother worked as a shop assistant and later in a (pre-computer) clerical job. My father was a welder with Land Rover, first in Solihull and later at Garrison Street in Birmingham. Both were emphatic about the need for their two sons to be educated to the greatest extent of our ability. Many working-class families shared this drive for education and saw it as a way of ensuring that their children had a better life and more fulfilling work than they had experienced themselves. In my father’s case, an additional motive may have been his failure (at the final interview stage) to gain a scholarship for his local grammar school. He must have been keenly aware of how different his life would have been had the interview panel decided he was the ‘right kind of chap’.

This view of higher education as a means to a more prosperous life still predominates in England, both popularly and in government policy. The expansion in the number of university places is often presented as a means of improving the long-term productivity of the labour-force, while, at an individual level, enhancing the earning power of graduates. Neither argument is totally convincing. Productivity in the UK has been near-stagnant since 2008, despite the increase in the proportion of school-leavers going to university. Graduates do indeed earn about £100,000 more across their lifetime than non-graduates. However, this benefit varies greatly according to which course and which university people attend. There is also the possibility that some graduates would have boosted their earnings by a similar amount if they had chosen to take an apprenticeship or learn a trade rather than go to university.

Those actually doing the educating often have different ideas of what higher education is for. They usually love the subject they teach and have pleasure in seeing their students come to appreciate it. Students themselves often see going to university as the key stage in attaining adulthood, leaving home and often being based near the centre of a big city with all its cultural attractions. That was certainly my experience, moving from a dull suburb of Birmingham to a university in the very centre of London. For the first time, I saw a live ballet performance and attended a concert of classical music. I had already spent many hours in Birmingham Art Gallery on my way back home from school, but now I was able to visit the great art galleries and museums of London. In place of endless rows of detached and semi-detached houses, I could view the great sweep of Regents Street, and visit the Palace of Westminster, St Paul’s Cathedral and the surviving alleys of the City of London and the Temple. I had often gone to the local cinema with my parents, but now I could join the British Film Institute as a student member and see classic films from around the world.

You do not of course need to go to university to appreciate the arts. My father had a friend who worked with him on the Land Rover assembly line, who had a beautiful counter-tenor voice and performed in concerts. Another of my parents’ friend was an ardent follower of the Russian composer Scriabin. My wife’s father worked as a toolmaker and her mother as a hospital cleaner, but both had a deep love of music and ballet. Her father played the organ and attended the organ recitals by George Thalben-Ball in Birmingham Town Hall. Her mother took my wife to the Birmingham Hippodrome to see ballet performances. There is also widespread active participation in the arts. All round the country, there are many brass bands and other groups of amateur musicians, amateur choirs and amateur theatre groups. Most of these, however, are now in temporary abeyance because of coronavirus restrictions. People have been forced to drop participation in the arts for the passive receipt of mass culture via television and home computer.