The starting point is where you are

After a month of June in which I had to spend some part of every week away from home, it’s a relief to have a month of relative calm with minimal travel.

In fact, the first time I’m going to have to take a flight again is only at the beginning of August, when I plan to fly back to England from Spain. So I decided to call up the British Airways app this morning and see about booking the trip.

What amused me is that the default screen came up with the option of flying from Glasgow to Austin (Texas) this very day, flying back tomorrow. Across the Atlantic and half of the United States one day, and back the next? Gracious living that certainly isn’t.

Can we make sure you’re at least taking me
from where I am, to where I want to go?

But I found the selection of route most amusing because I’m nowhere near Glasgow. Indeed, I’m in Spain, not in Scotland at all. As for Austin, it would leave me a lot further from where I need to go than I am now.

Indeed, since I want to get to London, I’d be a lot closer if I stayed in Glasgow than if I went to Austin. If, that is, I were in Glasgow at all. Which I’m not.

In fact, I loved the idea that I would even struggle to get to Glasgow in the first place, in order to catch the flight to Austin. I mean, if I wanted to get to Austin, (which I don’t), why wouldn’t I start from where I am now, rather than travelling somewhere else first?

All of which put me in mind of one of my favourite stories, one I’ve told more than once before right here. It’s the story of the tourist in an Irish village who asks a local if he’s going the right way for Dublin.

“Dublin?” replies the old man, “if I were going to Dublin, I wouldn’t start from here.”

It’s mainly as a metaphor that I like that joke. Every time someone starts a sentence with the words “If only…” I think of it: “If only we’d invested in the product last year…”; “if only we’d taken out insurance sooner…”; “if only we’d reserved a table…”

We are where we are. If we still want to get where we were planning on going, we’re going to have to start from here. An invaluable piece of wisdom which isn’t always immediately obvious to us.

But my experience with BA today suggested that the story’s has its value at the literal level too.

If I’m going to book a flight, I’d rather it took me where I actually wanted to go.

And it would help if it suggested I start from where I actually am.

Just a thought, BA. Maybe a small enhancement to the app?

Labour: read the writing on the wall!

It’s said that one of the worst problems with having your back to the wall is that you can’t see the writing on it.

Following the local elections in Britain, the writing is in letters a metre high for the Labour Party. The say, “you’ve been weighed and found wanting. You’re driving straight at a cliff edge”.

Labour no longer controls a single council in Scotland, once its bastion. In terms of councillors, it has fewer even than the Conservatives. Seven years ago, the Conservatives seemed to be a spent force in Scotland; today they are resurgent.

In Wales, which Labour has dominated for a century, it has lost over a fifth of its councillors and control of three councils out of the ten it had before.

It was beaten to the new mayoralties in Tees Valley and the West Midlands in England, both in areas that would once have been regarded as heartlands for the Party. Overall, the pollsters and academics were seriously wrong in their forecast for Labour in England: they predicted losses of as many as 75 council seats. In the event, the Party has lost 145.

Tories exultant as the victories keep flowing in

Reading the writing is no good if your back is firmly to the wall. But the problem is far worse than that. A majority of Party members, representing a tiny proportion of voters as these results show, is determined to cover its eyes with virtual reality goggles. Those goggles show them a sunlit upland where voters are charmed by the honesty and integrity of the present Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and impressed by his commitment to justice and decency, backing his policies in droves until they project him into Downing Street.

It’s a fairy tale that many of us might like to subscribe to. But it has nothing to do with the painful reality that the local election results reveal. Labour does not win power with its traditional bedrock so completely eroded.

Now this is not all down to Corbyn. The decline started under his two predecessors as leader, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. Both were poor leaders – Brown had been a fine Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he was far too gaffe-prone to lead the party; Miliband was simply gaffe-prone. Corbyn supporters keep pointing out to me how weak they’d been and how the rot had set in on their watch, and that’s true.

However, the implication behind these criticisms is that Corbyn would turn things around. Indeed, he was uniquely qualified to do so. His political persona made him the best choice to right the ship and get it back on course.

What the local election results have shown is how wrong this view was, how justified that of the people who tried to prise the leadership from Corbyn’s grip. Far from turning things around, he has made a bad situation far worse. Instead of bringing a breath of fresh air to the party, he has merely continued the decline from Brown to Miliband, making him the weakest of three weak leaders.

The sad truth is that the virtual reality goggles are still firmly in place. In only one way is Corbyn an innovator: he is the first Labour leader who takes no responsibility for the disasters that happen on his watch. The poor performance is all down to the Parliamentary Labour Party that rebelled against him – although the election results only show how legitimate their aims were – or the media, or even the vile behaviour of the Conservative Party (which seems unfairly committed to the notion of what is known, technically, as “winning”).

His supporters simply can’t read the writing on the wall. It will take a huge effort to get them to abandon the comfort of their nice goggles. But the attempt must be made, yet again.

Because it really, seriously, does say on that wall: “you’re heading straight for a precipice. Change driver!”

Minor success in the battle against testosterone blindness

Testosterone blindness is a notion to which my wife introduced me decades ago.

That’s “introduced” in the widest possible, not to say euphemistic sense. You’ll understand what I mean when I tell you that testosterone blindness is the deplorable condition which prevents a man finding the sports bag that he has absent-mindedly, and inappropriately, left on the dining table.

A slightly modified variant prevents him seeing the pile of washing up that might usefully be done while his wife is out, to say nothing of the child who needs his nappy changing/his face washing/helping with his homework. It does not prevent the man in question finding the remote control that allows him to tune into the international rugby match taking place that afternoon.

It’s a sad affliction without, it would appear, hope of a permanent cure for those touched by it. That, however, doesn’t stop women trying to treat it, by forcefully expressed pointers towards the location of car keys, the floor that needs mopping or the child who needs taking out.

That form of treatment is like chemotherapy: it sometimes feels as bad as the disease it’s intended to cure and it leaves scars.

It was, therefore, a wonderful curative to have a little counter-experience today. Just before heading for Glasgow airport and a flight home, I received a message from my wife: “if you have time, please collect me some Occitane Lavender hand cream and a Refreshing Aromatic deodorant.”

I was at the airport early so time wasn’t a problem. I made for the Occitane corner in the Duty Free shop.

“May I help you?” said the pleasant woman who was standing by the shelves.

I explained my need.

“Ah, yes,” she said as she started examining all the shelves in the left-hand section of two dedicated to the products. She went through them all and then turned to the right-hand section, perusing them thoroughly from top to bottom. When she’d finished, she turned to the little island behind me which I hadn’t noticed before, and which had two sets of three shelves full of more Occitane products.

All to no avail. Neither of the products was on display.

“We don’t stock the entire range,” she explained apologetically, “I’m sorry.”

“Glasgow,” I began to think to myself, unjustly as it turned out. For my eye was caught by some tubes with purple labels.

“Hang on,” I said, “isn’t that lavender?”

I picked one up and examined it more closely.

“Oh, look,” I said, “it’s hand cream.”

“So it is,” she said, “now why should it have been there?” she went on, making me think of nothing so much as my frequently-voiced complaint, “Good Lord. I could have sworn I’d taken that upstairs/hadn’t left it there/had already put it in the car.”

“Now,” I went on, “I need a woman’s deodorant.” I thought perhaps I could find an acceptable alternative to “refreshing aromatic”.

I bent down to look at the little group of such deodorants, down near the floor. One caught my eye.

“Oh, look,” I said, “fraicheur aromatique. That sounds a bit like refreshing aromatic, doesn’t it?” Indeed, as I lifted the little bottle I saw that the English was printed underneath and confirmed my translation.

“Why, you’re right,” she said, in a near whisper. 

She sounded humble. As well she might.

Testosterone 1, Oestrogen nil

For we had just shared a moment that was exceptional, if not unique: a one-off triumph of testosterone vision over oestrogen blindness.