How the NHS showed up my Olympic fickleness

It seems I have to confess to a certain fickleness. Or perhaps even double standards. Not hypocrisy, though, nothing that strong.

For weeks I’ve had barely a good word to say for the Olympics. I loathed the hype. I loathed the celebration of corporate values. I loathed the way the rest of us trying to use London were being pushed around.

So my position was clear. Perhaps I’d watch a bit of the occasional event, if it seemed interesting, but otherwise I was going to maintain my position of superior detachment.

And then came the opening ceremony. Obviously I wasn’t going to watch that. It would be far beneath me. 

‘Shall we watch the opening ceremony?’ said Danielle.

‘Why, yes, of course,’ I heard myself answering. With no connection between cynical brain and emotional mouth.

And from then on the emotion just grew. That section in the middle? The NHS bit? I had a lump in my throat. Nurses and patients taking part. Some of them had spent 150 hours in rehearsals. And it was a tribute to the NHS itself and the icon for it all was Great Ormond Street Hospital, Britain’s premier hospital for children. 

The NHS at the Olympics

How could I possibly avoid the emotion? Because we love our NHS over here. We love the idea that whoever we are, whatever our status, however much money we have or how little, if we get sick the NHS is there. Sure, other systems can deliver healthcare that’s even more effective, even more technological, even more expensive. But we know, with all its defects, we can count on the NHS to look after us.

No wonder Conservative MP Aidan Burley denounced it on Twitter as ‘leftie multicultural crap’, only to be denounced himself, by his own party leader David Cameron, as ‘idiotic’. Which is amusing considering that few of us would view the top of the party as much more intellectually gifted than the bottom.

Burley’s denunciation is completely characteristic, though as always amazing. The Right likes to think of itself as the repository of Christian values, but what could possibly better express the values of the Good Samaritan than an organisation that helps people when they need it without any question as to their means?

By then, of course, I was completely hooked. I watched rest long after Danielle had gone to bed. Since then I’ve seen a lot more of the games themselves than I intended.

My only excuse is that this is typically English behaviour. We like to strike an air of disdain, but the reality is that we’re as sentimental as the best of them – or perhaps the worst of them – and the detachment is really only a defence.

But it does look like terrible inconsistency. Not hypocrisy. But perhaps a little fickleness.

‘Well, I insist on a blog post. Come clean. Admit it to the world,’ said Danielle the next day.

So this is it. My confession. Have I atoned sufficiently?

On Twitter as everywhere else: try to see the lighter side...

What a relief that Paul Chambers’ conviction for sending a ‘menacing electronic communication’ on twitter has been overturned.

If the first casualty of war (or terrorist threat) is the truth, then the second is the sense of humour. Chambers wanted to visit his girlfriend, but when he turned up at Robin Hood airport (hard to believe that’s a real place and not a joke itself) he found it shut. He sent out a tweet saying that he’d blow the place up if it didn’t reopen, and the next thing he knew he was a convicted criminal. 

Though not any more, I’m glad to say. 

Nearly thirty years ago, one of my sons, then 12, became so frustrated at how he’d played, or more precisely failed to play, a point in a squash game that he hammered his racket against the floor.

‘If you’ve broken that, I’ll break you,’ I growled. Menacingly. 

One glance at his expression told me had. But I didn’t. Instead I collapsed in laughter, astonished that he’d had the strength to break a racket that easily. We found another and finished our game. 

But what if someone like the people who convicted Chambers had been listening? Can you imagine the interviews with social workers, with psychiatrists, with the police? It would have been a clear case of child abuse. Or at the very least menace of child abuse. 

Chambers’ tweet may not have been particularly funny, but surely it was of the same order as my outburst. A cry of exasperation, above all not to be taken seriously. 

It’s part of the difficulty of learning to cope with the internet. We are still in the pioneering stage of the technology. Christianity, for instance, has been around the best part of 2000 years (though it sometimes feels a lot longer) and even it took three centuries to become truly established, as a state religion.

I often think about that. The day Constantine turned all those bishops and priests into representatives of the Roman Empire and gave them a nice state apparatus to play with. At last they had the tools to serve an all-loving God properly. They could send real soldiers round to the houses of people who called themselves Christian but thought, say, that God the father might be greater than Christ the son, and they could burn them on real bonfires. It must have felt like a coming of age.

Incidentally, my behaviour on the squash court shows I’d have been on a bonfire: I evidently think the father is superior to the son. 

The internet by contrast has only had fifty years. No wonder it's still feeling its way. And Twitter’s even more recent.

Still feeling it's way, still feeling my way

Twitter is where people who’ve never met can converse in messages 140 characters long. It’s fun, because writing anything moderately meaningful and grammatical in 140 characters is one heck of a challenge.

As you exchange messages you get to know some people better. But it’s still limited. After all, a real physical meeting might start something like this:

‘It’s a real pleasure to to get to know you, I’ve heard such a lot about you already.’

‘Oh, most of it’s true. I really am just the kind of person my detractors say I am.’

‘Yes, I can see that. Someone who thinks self-deprecation will diminish the impact of character flaws.’

Now even that has consumed enough for two tweets, and there’s another 58 minutes left of the interview (I didn’t get the job, by the way).

What this means is that while you can begin to know and like some people on Twitter, the reality is that with most, your acquaintance will be slight to non-existent.

A few days ago I made a casual reference to the parties who compose the present British government as the ‘ConDems’. It’s a term used with glee but no affection by detractors, built by conflating the names of the coalition partners, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats or ‘Lib Dems’. 

The way it sounds gives it good strong negative connotations, so it works well as a term of abuse. To me that makes it a good play on words, and since I like words far more than I like these politicians, I enjoy using it.

Imagine my shock, then, when a Twitter follower told me that using the word ConDem is an ‘immediate unfollow offence’. The implication seemed to be that the brutality with which he was divorcing me would deliver a salutary shock, teaching me to mend my ways. And yet I barely know the guy from Adam, except that I vaguely remember that his name might actually be Adam.

Out of courtesy I explained my position but that only seemed to goad him to further paroxysms of righteous irritation, so I wished him well and returned his favour of unfollowing me by unfollowing him.

It feels to me that something is still missing from Twitter and its devotees (among whom I count myself). A form of etiquette? A set of conventions or protocols? Or is it perhaps simply an ability to lighten up a little?

A lesson to be learned by Paul Chambers’ prosecutors in their reaction to Twitter. But also, I would suggest, by some of the users of Twitter themselves.

That's it for my Olympics

Well, that’s it. My last day in London, barring accidents, for the period of the Olympics. Two blessed weeks of working from home while Olympians and Olympics fans struggle through the traffic without me.

The whole thing doesn’t officially kick off until tomorrow but I had a couple of good Olympic experiences today. 

The torch came along Oxford Street this afternoon, two or three minutes walk from the office, so although I’d studiously avoided being sucked in by all the hype before, I tramped down with my colleagues to spend fifteen minutes standing around in the sun (yes, we’re getting some these days, after months of rain) for a glimpse of the flame going past. It was being borne aloft on the top deck of a bus (a bus! I'd expected a runner at least) and the historical moment lasted seconds and seconds.

See the torch? At the front of the bus?
And this is what we were waiting for?

The best moment of the experience came when a woman joined the crowd and asked, ‘have I missed it? Has the torch already gone past?’

‘Yes,’ I felt like answering, ‘I’m just hanging around here because I like standing in the sun in the middle of Oxford Street, and the rest of the crowd feels exactly the same.’

A while later, heading home, my eye was caught by a street sign. As you no doubt know, a number of London streets now have designated ‘Games Lanes’ running along them. Some people have re-christened them ‘ZiL Lanes’ in honour of the great Soviet tradition of keeping large chunks of roads for the exclusive use of members of the leadership in their ZiL limousines.

Granting permission or issuing an order?

What amazed me about the sign is that it seemed to be inverting the whole process.

Were they really saying that all traffic had to use the Games Lane instead of keeping out of it? In which case, what were they planning to do with the rest of the road?

Fortunately, that’s not something I have to give much thought to, as I start my break away from the madding crowds and the frenzy of the capital.

Happy Olympics, everyone. I intend to enjoy them to the full.

By keeping well out of the way.

Digestive travel

Amusing phone conversation I overheard today. A young man was explaining to a friend that, to travel to Paris for the weekend, she first had to ‘get the train to St Pancreas’.

No place to take a train

Now it’s certainly true that there are aspects of St Pancras station that occasionally make me bilious, but I’d have thought a weekend in Paris might have more effect on the liver than the pancreas. Who knows, though? I suppose it depends on exactly what they choose to eat. And drink.

As it happens, the idea of sneaking off to Paris for the weekend evoked many pleasant memories for me. Before Danielle and I decided that we really couldn’t afford the phone or travel costs and moved into together, and long before we decided that we ought to legitimise by marriage the bump that would eventually turn into a Michael, we used to meet there regularly. It was about as inconvenient for her, travelling from Eastern France, as for me, travelling from London.

Have to say it wasn’t my pancreas that took the worst beating during those weekends.

But I hadn’t finished with the young man’s travel recommendations. ‘You then have to catch the Euro Tunnel.’

Now that’s the kind of idea I enjoy, because it sets me musing.

Who’d be throwing the tunnel, exactly?

Could it become an Olympic event? ‘Nah, I gave up on the discus and javelin. I throw the tunnel now.’

And what strength do you need to catch a tunnel? After all, it’s basically a long hole, which is presumably weightless. On the other hand, it doesn’t offer much purchase, much to hold on to. Intriguing problem.

Curious the kind of people you can find to raise challenging philosophical conundrums.

Or should that be conundra?

Donne punning

I've always loved the Tom Lehrer line, ‘it’s a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years’. 

It was just as chastening for me to discover this morning that I’m the age John Donne was when he died. I’ve thought it through, and on balance he probably achieved more in his 59 years than I have in mine.

Not, of course, that I would in general compare myself to Donne. After all, I don’t have the slightest pretension to be thought of as a poet: whatever I write, and whatever it’s worth, it’s strictly prose not verse.

But in one respect I’m like him: I love the simple pun. My readers can attest that I take great pleasure in puns, perhaps rather more than they do. But Donne was a master where I’m a mere dabbler.

John Donne: master of the pun

Donne was a love poet and he lived his life with the intensity that informs his poems. A promising career in diplomacy beckoned when he fell in love with Anne More, niece of his then patron. Ann and John married with neither her uncle’s blessing nor, more seriously, her father’s.

Though Donne would recover his father-in-law’s goodwill eight years later, his unauthorised marriage killed his career hopes, prompting his punning remark, ‘John Donne, Ann Donne, Undone’.

He continued writing love poetry, including the magical To his mistress going to bed, with the glorious couplet:

License my roaming hands and let them go

Before, behind, between, above, below.

It’s interesting, and not a little attractive, that the ‘mistress’ of his title was his wife.

Following Ann’s death, unsurprisingly after childbirth – when it came to eroticism within marriage they set the bar high, and had twelve children in sixteen years – Donne focused increasingly on divine themes. He wrote often of his sense of sin, and of his hope of winning God’s mercy coupled with his fear of missing it.

You don’t have to be a Christian yourself to be moved by this writing, for instance in the three verses of A Hymn to God the Father. The middle verse goes:

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won

Others to sin, and made my sin their door?

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun

A year or two, but wallowed in a score?

When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.

It’s better to listen to the words than to read them, because then you can't tell whether they’re saying ‘when thou hast done’ or ‘when thou hast Donne’.

And is he saying ‘have more’ or ‘have More’? It was his overwhelming love for Ann More that opened his way to great love though, he would doubtless have argued, also distracted him from its divine form.

The last verse is:

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

He appeals to God to give him the light of Christ, his son, who is also his shining sun. If God will do that, then he will have Donne, and the achievement of Donne's hope will banish fear. And is that not also a fear of More? Of the object of an earthly love which might have prevented him achieving the divine love he longed for?

Now that’s the way that I’d like to pun. Sadly, though, I'm not convinced that even another 59 years on Earth could teach me how.

Aurora massacre: no place for the hand of God

Overall, there’s only one possible judgment of the events in a Colorado cinema yesterday: the massacre of innocents was vile, incomprehensible, unconscionable.

Aurora: a community mourns

But the details reveal some even grimmer aspects.

First, there are the adjectives used to describe the attack. The most common seemed to be ‘senseless’ and ‘evil’. Now ‘senseless’ seems appropriate: an action that can bring no good of any kind can only be senseless. But what about evil? I distrust the word, since I think few people believe their acts are evil, but convince themselves they are serving some higher good which requires to break legal or moral codes.

Even so, we may decide that the ‘evil’ lies not in the man but in the act itself. But I think it’s not enough for an act to be destructive to make it evil, it has to be deliberate. A random violent act may be reprehensible, or even repulsive, but before we can call it evil surely we have to see a mind at work, carefully and rationally making it happen. So were the killings senseless or were they evil? It’s hard for them to be both.

As it happens, the evidence suggests that the attack was carefully planned and meticulously carried out. A mind was at work. This wasn’t mindless violence but thoroughly mindful violence. So perhaps ‘evil’ is not a bad word for what happened.

That, though, gives me my second problem with accounts of what happened.

Jennifer Seeger was one of the survivors of the shooting. The gunman came towards her, the gun pointing at her face. Then he fired, not on her, but on the person behind her. Later Seeger told her mother, ‘Mom, God saved me. God still loves me.’

Now that’s a chilling statement.

Perhaps we should just dismiss it as a spontaneous outburst by someone traumatised by an experience that I’ve never had and hope never to face. I’d like to be able to write off the statement in that way, because to take it at face value makes it shocking to the point of obscenity.

If she survived because God loved her, then the person behind died because God no longer loved him. Is that what she’s saying? The God makes that kind of choice? Save her, not him?

But even more shocking is the idea that the hand of God, of the Christian God, was at work in that cinema at all. If you believe the world is ruled by an all-loving God, a view I can understand though I don’t share it, then surely you cannot possibly believe that he can have ordained the arbitrary killing of twelve people and wounding of 59 others? After all, the choice of one victim over another owed nothing to love, and everything to a game of power and cruelty made possible only by the possession of lethal weapons.

To suggest that God was making any of those choices strikes me as a denial of anything that could be called Christian values. Which is shocking because I suspect Seeger thought she was affirming them.

Olympics fatigue

Travelling across London the other day, I found my mood distinctly curmudgeonly.

Now, isn’t that a good word? Not one we hear enough these days, I feel. I don’t know exactly what it means but I’m sure it summed up how I felt.

Everywhere I went, the Olympics had left their mark. Specially reserved road lanes for Olympic traffic. Signs showing me how to get to the stadium, whether I wanted to or not. And the worst thing of all: the voice of that ghastly windbag, Boris Johnson, mayor of London, telling me on the public address system that I needed to plan my journeys carefully during while the games were on.

London Olympics: a blessing for the city 
or a curse as bad as the naff logo?

London is a city of around eight million inhabitants. During the day, nearly a million and a half more, often including me, add to the multitude. Of those nine and a half million souls, I’m sure I’m far from alone in not giving a stuff whether the Olympics are taking place in London, Rome or Johannesburg. Same time zone within an hour or so, just as easy to watch on the box.

So why do we have to have our lives disrupted this way for two weeks? Why in particular do I have to hear that insufferable voice on the loudspeakers? The tube is bad enough without having to put up with Boris Johnson talking to me, making an unpleasant experience downright creepy.

It’s my city as well as everyone else’s, and I don’t know why a bunch of bureaucrats should be allowed to take it over and get in the way of my using it because they want to organise a sports gig.

I explained all this to my wife when I got home.

‘Oh, what’s your problem?’ said Danielle. ‘Lots of people love it. Let them enjoy themselves. It’s hardly going to cause you a major problem is it?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked querulously (another of those good words). I was beginning to feel deflated. ‘They’re going to close down a lane on my bus route home.’

‘So what?’ She pointed out, always much more sensible than I am. ‘Your office is closing for the whole period.’

This is true. The company’s decided we should work from home for the whole period of the Olympics. No commuting. No 6:00 a.m. starts. No crawling back through the rush hour on the way home.

Hey. I could get used to that. I mean, why should it bother me if they take over our roads but I don’t have to use them? I’m beginning to feel we ought to have major sporting events a bit more often. Every few weeks, perhaps.

Danielle smiled at my obvious change of mood.

‘See?’ she said, ‘no need to be such a dog in the manger.’

Now I wonder whether that isn’t pretty much the same thing as a curmudgeon?