Many endings

We’re doing lots of things for the last time these days.

Our last dinner in our favourite curry restaurant, Punjabi Haveli, in the predominantly ‘Indian’ neighbourhood of Bury Park (Indian in quotation marks because the population is increasingly English – second generation or even, in many cases, third. But the food remains distinctly Indian and great).

Our last friend chicken from Chicken George, repeatedly awarded the prize as England’s best takeaway restaurant

Our last session at the Saturday badminton club, after perhaps 200 over the last eight years.

And these were just the things we knew we were doing for the last time. Earlier there were things we did for the last time without knowing there would be no further occurrences.

Our last Sunday afternoon chamber concert in a very little chamber with a minuscule chamber ensemble (never more than two players) in the lovely setting Wardown House.

Our last standup comedy evening where for a fiver you got to see six acts and, for an extra two or three pounds, you’d get a curry too

Even in winter, Wardown Park is a lovely place for a walk
Especially at sunset

Taking the dogs for a walk through Luton’s most wonderful feature, the string of parks, all grassland alternating with woodland and parkland, from People’s Park, to Pope’s Meadow, to Wardown Park and beyond, to ancient orchards and more woods by the stream that we like to glorify as the ‘river Lea’.

Still, though I’ll miss many of those things, what I shall miss the most are the people – and I hope that despite the geographical separation, we’ll keep in touch as much as possible. The friends from the Labour Party, including those who have become adversaries in today’s increasingly bitter battles; the friends from our two badminton clubs with whom we’ve spent many a wonderful hour on or off the court; and those who were just friends, and great to know. In a town where ‘White British’ is not the majority in the ethnic mix, it has been a delight to know this extraordinary mix of peoples, backgrounds, faiths, convictions, cultures, and sheer personality.

Many have asked me what I’ll miss the most, and that’s my answer.

This may all sound gloomy, but that’s just the nature of partings. This is the time of farewells, which are always cheerless. We’re looking forward to some new beginnings, but for now we’re dealing with endings, and they’re never happy moments.

Still, I can’t pretend that we’ll miss everything about Luton. And right at the top of the list of the things I shall be happy to see the back of will be the Luton Mall. It, as I see things, represents all that is least prepossessing about the town – and is also emblematic of what I see about Britain today that I’m only too happy to be leaving.

The Luton Mall was one of the earliest American-style malls in Britain, and it shows. It’s old and shabby, mildly claustrophobic which gives it a feeling of dinginess, lacking the airiness or light of more modern shopping centres. The only redeeming feature of the place is the quality of some of the shops.

Two of the best are Marks & Spencer and the department store Debenhams. I visited both last time I was there – another of that series of last-time moments – and reflected on the fact that both are threatened with closure. A Mall that badly needs redeeming losing two its most important redeeming features? What will be left? Just an empty shabby shell?

Luton Mall. Debenhams in front, M&S behind
Both slated for closure

That feels like the country writ small. What made Britain exciting was its openness and drive. It was the wealth of people from different places, with different concerns and different tastes, rubbing shoulders, learning from each other and building something better and more exciting together. Brexit has marked a break in that process, at least for a time. Like Luton’s Mall, the country is in decline.

The difference is that Luton didn’t choose its fate. Britain did and could stop it yet. Perhaps I should have stayed to help.

But, with two sons living in Spain, the prospect wasn’t attractive enough to prevent us deciding to go there. Hence the many endings. And I hope, after Saturday, a few new beginnings.

The spy who loved too much

Normally, I wouldn’t bother to write about a mediocre book, but this is a rather special mediocre book.

Not much of a spy novel...

It’s called The Mystery of Tunnel 51, and the action’s set in British India in the 1920s. I write ‘British India’ not because I think India was ever British – it was always Indian and never more than under British administration – but because the main characters of the novel clearly thought of it that way. They are engaged in a bitter struggle to protect the British Empire against an implacable foe, in this case the ‘Russian Soviet’. It has somehow managed to build a huge network of ‘Bolshevik’ agents inside India.

That’s one of the threadbare tropes of the novel: creation of a paranoid atmosphere in which the ‘enemy’ is everywhere, with huge power to deploy its Machiavellian plots. This leaves the British administration out of account, though it would have given Britain a huge head start when it came to countering a foreign power’s intelligence activity.

But the book is full of clichés. The Bolsheviks turn out to be fiendishly cruel; fortunately, they are up against a couple of British agents who are fiendishly clever. So clever, in fact, that their leader, Sir Leonard Wallace, is able to see through all their diabolical subterfuges and turn them to defeat, usually at the eleventh hour. Sadly, he’s not quite clever enough to put the prisoners he captures under proper guard, so again and again they either escape or get themselves rescued by their dastardly accomplices.

This Wallace isn’t a mere agent. He is the Director of the ‘Intelligence Department’ back in London. Why the director is out in the field directly involved in a counter-intelligence operation thousands of miles from home isn’t made entirely clear, but who are we to question such decisions?

What kind of a man is Wallace? I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise to discover that he’s something of a superman. He’s not particularly tall and quite slight in build. He’s of extraordinary strength despite the build and despite having lost an arm – naturally, in the service of his country. Above all, he is supremely intelligent, always able to think himself into other people’s minds and be, in consequence, several steps ahead of them, wherever they may be going.

In addition, he’s a man of irreproachable domestic habits. His wife was, naturally, one of the most striking beauties of London, and the family they have built together is exemplary:

…with all her beauty, Lady Wallace was clever, sweet and charming, and she was as popular with her own sex as she was with her men friends. She adored her husband, as he adored her, and they were consequently an ideally happy pair, who jointly worshipped their small son Adrian, a merry little fellow of six.

The irony here is that the book is by Alexander Wilson. The BBC made an excellent series about his life, called Mrs Wilson. Some of the inspiration came from his granddaughter, the actor Ruth Wilson. As well as being one of the executive producers, she also plays her own grandmother, Alison. This, incidentally, produces a wonderful moment when Ruth Wilson, as her grandmother, meets a girl playing her.

Alexander dies in the first episode. After his death, and while she is preparing his funeral, Alison starts to make some puzzling discoveries about his past. In particular, she finds out that not only was she not the first Mrs Wilson, but also that Alexander had never divorced the woman to whom he was married when they met. Nor, indeed, was that woman his first wife – there was another before her, and she too had never been through a divorce.

So Alison quickly establishes that he had been a bigamist and then some. A trigamist? Nor was that the last of it, for towards the end of the series, a fourth wife appears who was also, to her knowledge, still his wife.

A quadrigamist?

Alexander Wilson: writer of sorts, spy of a kind, husband too often

In addition, Alexander Wilson was a genuine spy, who had worked for MI6. But then things had taken a strange turn. He had gone bankrupt, he had been gaoled for theft and, as Alison finds out, he had worked as a hospital porter. Was this all cover for his heroic work in the British secret service? Certainly, he always maintained that he was forced into some strange forms of existence to allow him to do his secret and dangerous work for the good of Britain and its Empire.

Except that MI6 doesn’t see things that way. Not all the papers on his case have been declassified yet, but what has been released suggests that he had been fired by the secret service as a result of having fabricated intelligence about the Egyptian Ambassador to London.

This may not come as much of a surprise, but it turns out he was quite the fantasist.

Unfortunately, the imagination on which he drew may have been fertile but it wasn’t particularly creative. Hence his mediocre Mystery of Tunnel 51. And a bunch of other novels I won’t be bothering with.

By the way, the novel ends as it should. I’m sure that’s not a spoiler as you are assuredly aware that such a book cannot end with anything but a British triumph. In any case, I’d be astonished if after this description you’d be inclined to read it. The ‘Russian Soviet’ is defeated and British rule in India is once more on a rock-firm basis set, no doubt, to last a thousand years. Which is ironic, since the book was published in 1928, just nineteen years before the British Raj came to its blood-soaked and ignominious end.

The TV series, on the other hand, is excellent. I strongly recommend it.

The Seven: Magnificent? Or misguided?

The departure of seven MPs from the Labour Party is not the most significant political news of the last few days.

That was a poll published by the anti-racist group Hope not Hate which found that over two-thirds – in fact, 68% - of British voters felt that no party represented their views or interests.

Followers of Jeremy Corbyn in Labour will deny that, convinced as they are that the policies on which he secured significant support in the last general election are massively popular. That denial is part of a broader state of mind that denies anything that seems to conflict with their world view. They seem to forget that though he won far more votes than expected, he still lost that election, coming second in a competition where there is no sliver medal.

What they also deny is that times have changed. Back in 2017, Corbyn was the new kid on the block. He seemed to have a fresh message, to have come from a different mould that produces most politicians. Above all, he seemed honest, principled and courageous. Two years on, little of that remains.

He brought a great many people into the Labour Party, the vast majority of them opposed to Brexit as well as attracted by his stance. But then he spent eighteen months trying to hide his true position on Brexit, which left his reputation for honesty in tatters. And when he finally made a few grudging remarks on the subject, he revealed that he was indeed, as many had suspected, a Brexiter. He has yet to confirm that with a vote in parliament – so far, his Brexit voting record is unblemished – but many of his erstwhile supporters haven’t waited for that, but are already drifting away, disappointed.

Opposite him is Theresa May, chasing an impossible dream of a compromise Brexit deal which will allow her somehow to hold together the battling wings of her Conservative Party. She ducks and weaves and fails to deliver. The result is a growing lack of confidence in her, so that her fellow MPs only resisted voting her out for fear of provoking a general election in which their own seats might be in danger.

In other words, the leaders of both main parties are trying to be all things to all men, and failing, as always happens in these cases, to be anything to anyone.

It’s not at all surprising, therefore to see both parties in a race to the bottom in the polls. They are currently neck and neck on 37%, a level of popularity that, in the past, would have guaranteed defeat in a general election, were it not that the other lot are doing just as lamentably.

In the light of this fine track record it is, if anything, surprising that only two-thirds of the electorate feel let down by both main parties. Certainly, it’s hard to deny – well, if you’re not a Corbynista it’s hard to deny it, but they can deny anything – that the political system is broken and badly needs fixing. The departure of the seven MPs might trigger a political realignment that could be a first step towards that repair.

Certainly, that’s what they seem to hope. And they may be right.

Seven MPs quit Labour: but will they be magnificent champions?

It’ll only happen if they can draw some more MPs to them. Seven is far too few. Maybe less than a handful of Tories from the left of the Party, though it’s hard to see how you can really build a Centre-Left movement with the Tories – look at the disastrous damage that Nick Clegg inflicted on his party by trying to play that game. Above all, they need thirty or forty more Labour MPs.

If they reach a critical mass, they may pull the trick off. Then they may indeed emerge as the Magnificent Seven. The pioneers with the courage to break free from tribal loyalty, to set the political system on a new and more hopeful course.

But if they don’t, they’ll just be seven lonely voices clamouring in the desert. They’ll look as though they had merely jumped before they were pushed, which is hardly a path to the moral high ground. And it will be remembered about them that they may have damaged the best hopes of success of the anti-Brexit movement: as anti-Brexiters, they may have made their stance look anti-Labour.

It’s all down to timing. If they’ve got it right, they’ll look like champions. But if they’ve got it wrong, they’ll simply turn into an obscure footnote in history.

Quite a gamble. Times are going to be interesting...

Exceptional man. Exceptional life. Exceptional death

Molière, France’s best known comic playwright, died on 17 February 345 years ago. 

Just a few hours earlier, he had been on stage, playing the title role in his own play, The Imaginary Invalid. He was being watched from the wings by frightened members of the cast, who could see – and hear from his coughing – that he was a most genuine invalid. The audience, on the other hand, thought he was simply playing the role with extraordinary realism.

Writer, actor, theatre manager
An outstanding man who lived an unusual life with a dramatic end

A more recent comedian, Spike Milligan, asked for his epitaph to read “I told you I was sick”. Molière’s might have been “I fooled you! I really was as sick as I was pretending to be.”

One year earlier, on the same day, Madeleine Béjart, for many years the leading lady of his company, had died. She had been the love of Molière’s life. It seems no coincidence that his death came on the anniversary of hers.

And yet, thirteen years before his death, Molière married not Madeleine but the far younger Armande. This young lady had turned up in the theatre company as a baby some seventeen years before. She had been brought by Madeleine, when she returned from a mysterious absence, announcing that the child was her sister.

It seems fairly clear that Madeleine was not merely mothering her younger sister Armande but was, indeed, genuinely her mother. Which means that Molière married his mistress’s daughter. Did he marry his own daughter? There is at least one other candidate to be Armande’s father, so probably not, but the evidence is scanty.

In any case the marriage was by no means Molière’s smartest move. Armande fell for a long succession of petty, irrelevant and deservedly forgotten lordlings, giving him a lousy time. And when he needed solace for his wife’s many betrayals? Why, he turned to his long true mistress, Madeleine.

Making it all the more poignant that he survived her by a year to the day. Dying practically on stage, mortally ill as he played an imaginary invalid. On the anniversary of Madeleine’s death.

345 years ago today.

Corbyn: the sheen fades

It’s slightly embarrassing to watch a man not gifted with great wit trying to be clever. How much worse it is when he tries to be devious…

The assessment of Jeremy Corbyn that sticks most strongly in my mind is the journalist Nick Cohen’s: Corbyn’s a man “not overburdened with intellect”.

Jezza: not the sharpest knife in the drawer

His fans, on the other hand, see him as a new brand of politician opening a fresh perspective on the future. In particular, they regard him as a man of courage and principle but also, in a slightly contradictory way, as a wily political operator. These claimed qualities are never more clearly displayed than in his approach to Brexit.

There are constituencies, especially in the North of England, that Labour must hold if it is ever to form a government, where a majority of electors voted to leave the EU. On the other hand, Labour members are overwhelmingly in favour of staying in the EU, as is the majority of the electorate in a great many other Labour seats. Because he needs both groups, Corbyn has decided to take no position on Brexit, in the hope that neither will be put off by his backing the other.

This is a policy known by his admirers as “constructive ambiguity”. To most other people, it’s hypocritical opportunism: sitting on a fence in order to hang on to support from two camps without honestly backing either. To such critics, this stance simply means sacrificing principle to electoral calculation, and is distinctly short of either honesty or courage.

Indeed, his approach suggests that far from introducing any kind of innovation into politics, he’s just the same old, same old political calculator, who tries to be all things to all voters to try to win elections.

What’s worse, we know him to have been a lifelong Brexiter. It’s true that he campaigned for Britain to remain in the EU at the time of the 2016 referendum, but without any great enthusiasm. So there is a second suspicion about his ambiguity: that it may be a way of covering up his true hostility to the EU, which he dare not reveal in a party 80% of whose members take the opposite view.

Since he frequently claims to want to campaign only for policies endorsed by the membership, this too is seen as a stance not overburdened with bravery or integrity. It is also not likely to endear him to the majority in the party membership.

His reputation for wiliness is based predominantly on this careful triangulation over Brexit, designed to retain support from both sides of the debate. But, as I said before, being this devious requires brains. If intellect is not your strong suit, the deviousness becomes too obvious and, far from retaining support, it puts people off.

That’s precisely what’s happening today. While Corbyn was still the new kid on the block, and seen to be bringing a refreshingly innovative approach to politics, his support soared. That made Labour Europe’s biggest party, and propelled him to a far closer defeat by Theresa May’s Conservatives in 2017 than most of us had expected.

Today, though, the gloss is dimming fast. Many of those who joined the party at that time are remainers, and while they might have been in doubt about Corbyn’s true position on Brexit then, today they increasingly understand that he opposes their aspirations. So now they’re leaving in droves. The party’s still huge but it has begun to shrink.

No wonder people are losing faith in politics:
two unpopular main parties.
But Corbyn is taking Labour even lower than the Tories 

The same seems to be happening to Labour’s electoral support. A first poll finding that Labour was seven points behind the Conservatives was only a straw in the wind – a single poll can easily be an outlier. But then there came a second poll with a similar Tory lead; a third with the parties exactly tied; and a fourth with a five-point Tory advantage.

It’s looking as though the Conservatives are building a small but sustained lead.

The only surprising thing about that would be if anyone were surprised. Voters like strength. They like resolve. They certainly don’t like “creative ambiguity”, which they respond to as evasiveness.

Above all, many voters turned to Labour as a party that would oppose Brexit and the Tories’ stance. But now they see Corbyn offering nothing better than a different version of Brexit. No wonder their backing is dropping.

Not that the Conservatives are doing well either. Both parties are now well below the 40% level. In other words, they are both seen as discredited, untrustworthy and a less than attractive choice to lead the country. It’s just that under Corbyn, Labour’s seen as even less attractive than one of the most unpopular governments I have ever seen in Britain.

Ah, yes. There may have been some shine on the Corbyn phenomenon when he got started. But, boy, is it fading now.

Fake news and the MSM

Donald Tusk, President of the EU Council, wondered this week about the ‘special place in hell … for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.”

In Dante’s Inferno the deepest circle in hell is reserved for traitors. Sounds about right for people who lure their nation down a road with no idea where it leads.

There was, inevitably, an outcry in response to Tusk’s comments. But an EU source confirmed that he stood by his words. “He remains of the view that while the truth may be more painful, it is always more useful.”

That’s not just true, it’s far more significant than the “special place in hell” remark it followed. The truth isn’t always comfortable. Indeed, it’s often challenging.

That’s something that needs to be said and repeated . Especially today. There is a spirit in the air that says “only what I want to hear is true”. The spirit is entirely non-partisan, embracing both left and right. Corbynistas in Britain or Trumpists in the US are as eager as each other to denounce the ‘MSM’ (mainstream media) for peddling ‘fake news’. But when you look more closely, you find that what they’re really objecting to is news that makes them uncomfortable.

There is, for instance, an inclination in certain circles of the left to feel that the government of Venezuela deserves unqualified backing because it proclaims itself to be Socialist, and in such circles, merely to make the claim is enough to win support. It isn’t true of everyone. Emily Thornberry, for instance, the Labour Party’s foreign affairs spokesman recently pointed out that, while calling himself a socialist, President Maduro has betrayed every principle of socialism.

Emily Thornberry gave a thoughtful and thought-provoking speech on Venezuela
and, remarkably, the Guardian reported on it fairly and extensively

It was interesting reading the report of her speech, in that MSM outlet the Guardian, which gave it balanced and extensive coverage. For instance, she argued, in my view courageously and convincingly that, for all Maduro’s failings, it was wrong to recognise the legitimacy of the self-proclamation as interim president of his opponent Juan Guaidó:

We need to give them time, and that offer has been made internally and externally. We need to ensure that happens – that is the best way to proceed, rather than to suddenly say: ‘That’s it, we’ve had enough. We recognise X. We do not recognise Y any more.’ It’s not the way to treat another country, even a country in as desperate a situation as Venezuela.

Such good sense and moderation isn’t universal in the Labour Party. Many in Labour still claim that the desperate state of Venezuela is all the fault of US sanctions. They refuse to accept that Venezuela is an oil economy and has faced sanctions for a far shorter time than Cuba, which does at least manage to feed its people and provide them with healthcare.

But these people don’t read MSM papers like the Guardian. Instead, they read outlets like vezenuelaanalysis.com which tell us that what is happening in Venezuela is an attempted coup against Maduro. And what is this source of information? It’s an online paper founded with money from the Venezuelan government and which claims to be supported today entirely by its readers – though we don’t know who those readers are. A recent reposting of a link to one of these stories included the comment “You won’t see this in Western media”. Well, that’s true. And I would hope not. Because the media I read – the Guardian, the Independent, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others who aspire to professional journalism – don’t take their information from sources whose background is unclear, whose standards are unknown, and whose bias is obvious.

But the beauty of this Venezuelan paper is that it tells its readers what they want to read. And to many people that’s what matters today: not to learn from what they read, as I did from Thornberry’s remarks, but to have their faith confirmed. Because they aren’t looking for evidence, they are driven by belief. And that seems to be a deeply ingrained need in many circles today.

Look at the anti-vaxxer movement. It is having some success, with vaccination rates too low in more and more countries. But somehow anti-vaxxers see no connection between those low rates and the rising numbers of infections, and even deaths, from entirely preventable diseases.

We even see believers in a flat Earth growing in numbers, even though in one instance at least, their very attempts to prove their faith depends on systems based on the Earth being round.

There’s a widespread thirst for belief, not knowledge. Independent of evidence.

The other end of the political spectrum is entirely symmetrical. In the US, the National Enquirer is trying to pressurise Jeff Bezos over some compromising texts and images a hacker has passed them. There can be differing views over whether or not Bezos should have sent those messages. What, however, seems clear is that he is being targeted because he’s the owner of the Washington Post or, as Trump calls it, the Amazon Washington Post (Bezos is also the founder of Amazon).

Here’s the Tweet in which Trump reacted to the first announcement of the revelations about Bezos:

So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!

What doesn’t Trump like about the Washington Post? In the same way as the Maduro fans who can’t cope with Guardian, he hates the fact that the Post sometimes publishes information that isn’t – how shall I put this? – entirely flattering about him.

Both the Maduro supporters and the Trump fans reject the ‘mainstream media’ that sometimes challenges their beliefs with evidence – because those pesky publications insist on standards which involve such boring things as confirmation of sources and careful editing of material for accuracy. That’s not to say they never make mistakes – they certainly do – but it does mean they don’t just spew out propaganda.

No good if you’re flat earther. And the anti-vaxxers, Trump worshippers and Corbyn cult adepts aren’t much different from the flat earthers. Belief trumps information. The truth, as Tusk made clear this week, can sometimes be more painful, and they don’t want that pain.

But the truth’s also much more useful. As I found from Thornbery, in the Guardian this week, when she opened my eyes to another way of seeing things.

A salutary experience which, sadly, the true believers deny themselves.

Glimpsing a different world

The great advantage of FaceTime is that you can see the person you’re talking to as well as being able to talk to them. On the other hand, the disadvantage of FaceTime is that if you don’t turn off the video link, the other person can see you too.

The other problem is that, if you can’t get your earphones to work on your laptop, the people in the train carriage around you will hear your entire conversation.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve given an account of an overheard conversation here. So I was glad to hear this one, if only so that I could regale you with it too.

Behind me in my carriage was a man – my apologies, a gentleman, though that term has nothing to do with gentleness and everything to do with class – with what I’d have to say was a perfect example of a plummy accent. That’s an accent that’s rich and round. Not rich as in food, but rich as in bank balance. Round not as in personally fat, but as in being born to live on the fat of the land. It was redolent of the best, by which I mean the most expensive, kind of public school – in Britain, the name we use for the more pricey private schools. 

In short, his voice dripped with the kind of confidence that comes of years of study – or at least attendance – at a school designed to train its pupils to the highest and most acute levels of belief in entitlement.

The FaceTime call came in to him at what would have been around 9:00 in the morning in the eastern United States, which was where it was made. The speaker was an American woman and she clearly had financial responsibility for a venture in which she and the gentleman had some kind of association.

“I’m afraid I didn’t realise,” she was saying, “that he would run up $50,000 in costs crossing the Atlantic in just six months. I hadn’t budgeted for that.”

Mumble, mumble, mumble came the reply. It seems he realised he could be heard.

“I understand,” she replied, a little louder, as though trying to beat down unfair criticism, “I’d budgeted that amount for a full year. Can a pilot really run through that sum in just six months?”

Clearly whatever he said next got under her skin a little.

“I know,” she said, “I realise I made a mistake. I realise it was my mistake. Thanks for helping by pointing it out. Thank you.”

Something in her tone suggested that the gratitude she was expressing wasn’t entirely sincere.

I missed the next few exchanges. Firstly, because I was trying to focus on my work a little. Secondly, because you’re not supposed to eavesdrop on strangers’ conversations, are you? And thirdly because, in any case, the train went through one of those super-rattly bits where I couldn’t have heard anything even if I’d tried.

But then suddenly the voices boomed out more loudly than ever. Hers at least.

“Well, Italy comes under my responsibility. Maybe I should go. Though the only place I really like there is Florence.”

Really? We’re writing off Arezzo? Milan? Turin? Rome? Venice, pearl of the Adriatic, for God’s sake?

“I could go there,” she went on,

“Ah,” the plummy one replied, now loud enough to hear him and as plummy as they make them, “if we forced you, you’d be prepared to go there, would you?”

It was rather a flat joke and it was delivered in a flat tone. It missed its mark entirely.

“What? What?” she asked.

He repeated his witticism, which seldom has a good effect even if it starts out supremely witty, and this one hadn’t.

‘Ah,” she said, “yes. I could stand Florence if it becomes absolutely necessary.”

But there was no laugh, no cheerful acknowledgement of humour.

I missed a few more sentences and when I picked up the conversation again, it began to appear that their association wasn’t merely a business one.

“I have to go to work,” she was saying, “I’m just a poor defence attorney having to appear for mere criminals.”

I couldn’t help feeling that the sarcasm was really beginning to ooze now.

“We’ve just got into Market Harborough,” said Plummy Voice. 

That was strictly true, as I quickly verified by looking out of the window, but it struck me as not entirely relevant to her comment. It seems she agreed.

Nothing remarkable about Market Harborough station
And yet Plummy Voice remarked on it

“Oh my God. That is so English. That’s you being English, isn’t it? It’s your way of saying that you don’t give a damn about me. That you don’t even like me.”

I didn’t catch his reply but it clearly wasn’t satisfactory.

“Well, you’re dull. I don’t like you either. I don’t like you at all. You’re dull. You’re very dull. No one likes you. You’ll end up alone.”

I’ve got to admit that he struck me as profoundly boring, but then I may not have been predisposed to like him from the moment I first heard his voice.

“I’ve got indigestion,” he answered, which struck me as a remark completely in the same category as “we’ve arrived in Market Harborough”.

“Well!” she cried, and I mean cried, as in shouted, “at least you’ve got that!”

What did she mean? That having indigestion made him marginally less dull? That it meant he had some company? You know, “you’re never alone with indigestion”?

But pretty soon she was being winsome.

“Before I go, you’ve got to say something nice to me. Something really nice.”

A pause.

“You don’t have to say it out loud.”

There was another slightly longer pause. And then she gave a little peal of laughter. Was it silvery? Was it dirty? Was it a cross between the two?

I couldn’t tell. So I was left trying to work out just what he’d said by way of farewell. Still, there are things I don’t need to be explicitly told. My imagination can supply plenty of possibilities.

As I expect can yours.

To lose two vehicles sounds like carlessness

The definition of a pedestrian, according to a former boss who was married with two adult sons, is a man with three adults in his family and three cars.

Pedestrianism: good for the soul, hard on the soles

I now have another. It’s someone in a household preparing for its escape from Brexit by selling off most of its major possessions: the house, of course, but also the two cars my wife and I used to use. Selling my wife’s took seven weeks so we decided not to wait too long to sell mine. Inevitably, we had an offer, at an attractive price, within days instead of weeks.

What should we do? We’d just spent a little money removing some scratches which I’d managed to put on the car (those pesky columns in car parks, you know). The longer we left on the street (the only place we could park it) the greater the risk that it would suffer further damage.

Besides, would we get as good a price another time?

We went ahead and sold the car. Reducing ourselves to enforced pedestrianism. Much better for health. Much better for the soul. Not so hot if you want to nip out for a bunch of bananas or a pat of butter (at least, one that isn’t beyond its sell-by date, the specialty of our corner shop just up the road).

Still, our aim is to unburden ourselves of possessions that tie us down (and a right-hand drive car is not a particularly useful asset when moving to continental Europe), this is at least one step down that road. Every time we walk down roads where we previously drove, we can be reminded that it’s becoming real, our exit from Brexit. We’re on target for the end of February still.

If we can just close the house sale with as little pain, we’ll have taken a major stride towards our goal.

Still, it does make me think of Oscar Wilde and The Importance of Being Earnest.

To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

To sell one car may be regarded as a judicious step towards freeing oneself of unnecessary bonds. To sell both doesn’t just look, it really is carelessness. At least in our case.

Forecasts: crystal balls or a load of balls?

It is said, often by me, that it was the Danish physicist Neils Bohr who quipped ‘it is very difficult to predict — especially the future’.

It seems he may have been quoting an old Danish proverb, but ancient proverb or physicist’s witticism, it’s certainly true. I know that myself. I predicted, back in 2017, that Jeremy Corbyn would lead Labour to a catastrophic defeat in the general election that year. In fact, after a huge surge in support, he managed to lead the party only to a narrow defeat.

Sometimes I’ve got things right. After campaigning around the town where I live, Luton, to stay in the European Union, I was left with the distinct impression that we were heading for defeat. And, indeed, the nation voted by a narrow margin, and Luton itself by a substantial one, to leave.

So now I don’t know what to predict. It’s hard to see just where we’re going today. Corbyn could still pull off the trick, sadly, of leading Labour to a rout – certainly, his position in the polls gives little grounds for optimism. And as for Brexit, it’s beginning to feel unstoppable and even that the worst possible option, departure from the EU with no deal, a so-called hard Brexit, is now the most likely outcome.

Still, both those disasters may in the end be avoided. Corbyn may pull off another remarkable escape from complete meltdown, and Britain may still find a way to keep its Brexit soft. It may even find a way to avoid one altogether, though that hardly seems probable right now. Still, I’ve been wrong before, and predictions being particularly challenging when they concern the future, it seems wiser to wait and see on both counts.

H L Mencken: not always likeable, but sometimes right —
and funny with it

Instead, let’s focus on someone who seems to have got a couple of ideas spot on, even if they were only verified long after his death. That’s H L Mencken, American journalist and writer of the early part of the last century. Not the most likeable of men, not even admirable, as he was in private at least a racist in general and in particular an anti-Semite, he did get a few things right. And expressed them with a certain wit which at least makes him fun to quote.

No great democrat – he was suspicious of a system that seemed to give people he regarded as inferior to him a say over their superiors – he did at least come up with one view which later history verified in the most powerful way:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Consider recent Republican presidents.

There was Reagan, almost certainly as we now know suffering from incipient Alzheimer’s while in the White House. He was followed by George Bush the first, who couldn’t put a whole sentence together. We thought him bad enough until we had his son, George Bush the second or simply Dubya – and boy, was he simple – who clearly entirely fulfilled Mencken’s prediction. So entirely out of touch with reality was he, that he allowed affairs to be run by Dick Cheney, the most powerful Vice President in US history, and one of the more dangerous politicians of recent times: he is responsible, in particular, for the Iraq War, dragging the US with Blair’s Britain in its wake into a conflict that left thousands of soldiers dead and killed maybe as many as 600,000 civilians.

The Republicans seem to have developed an extraordinary skill: providing us with a series of presidents, each of them making us regret the one before, awful though he seemed to be at the time. Who would have thought that anyone could make Dubya look like a statesman, but isn’t that just what Donald Trump has done?

With the Republicans: downhill all the way
Making sure the White House is adorned by a downright moron

At any rate, either of the last two Republican occupants of the White House would have entirely fulfilled Mencken’s inspired prediction. And one could make a case for saying the same of Reagan and the elder Bush too.

Now it’s our turn, in Britain, to verify another of Mencken’s aphorisms.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

I always thought that was just a tad too condescending for my taste. Too much of a caricature to be true. But now we’ve had the Brexit vote.

The people have spoken. Brexit is coming. And today it looks like it’s going to be good and hard.

It’ll be interesting to see just how much the people who voted for it find they like it.