Tsar Boris of London and his cereal boxes

‘The harder you shake the pack the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.’

These were the words of the Mayor of London and wannabe leader of the Conservative Party, Boris Johnson, man of charisma, but above all of charm, since he devotes all his political effort to charming his supporters with a bumbling, buffoonish persona. Charmingly, he used this phrase at a time when rather a lot of people are having to choose between buying a packet of cornflakes, or heating their homes his party colleagues in national government have created a situation in which that is the stark choice facing a great many families.

Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and would-be Conservative leader
Man of destiny. Many of charm. Man of charisma.
And top cornflake

What he was talking about, however, was the need to allow the ‘best’ people to rise to the top. 

‘Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85.’

Only 2%, he went on to claim, had an IQ over 130. For him, the question is whether there’s much point doing anything about the 16% who are simply condemned to stay at the bottom; should we not be doing more for the 2%? The kind of thinking that lies behind all this became particularly clear when he pointed out:

‘I don't believe that economic equality is possible; indeed some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.’

Greed and envy, these are the qualities that make a society truly great, in the Gospel of Boris. Equality? It’s for the fairies. I know the US has fallen short in many ways to live up to Jefferson’s stirring words, but for Johnson, it isn’t even a self-evident truth that all men are created equal, and derive unalienable rights from that equality.

On the contrary, people are created unequal, and a measure of that inequality is their IQ. The best people, with the highest IQ, will rise to the top if only we can give the cereal box a good shake from time to time. We can see how well this system works by the quality of the people we have at the top right now.

Take David Cameron, who’s been shaken right up to the top of the British cereal box, into the post of Prime Minister. Terribly upset about the damaging effects of smoking, he was initially in favour of forcing plain packaging on the tobacco industry. Then he took on a new adviser, Lynton Crosby, who also works as a lobbyist for that industry, and the idea was, coincidentally, shelved. But there’s a pretty powerful tide running in favour of plain packaging, and only last week the government announced that the idea was back on the table and its decision on whether to proceed with it would be based on the evidence.

Perhaps Boris would argue that it shows how intellectually superior Cameron is that he’s now prepared to give evidence a whirl, having previous exhausted all other bases for reaching decisions.

Similarly, increasing poverty has driven a great many people into dependence on pay-day loan companies. Given that they charge interest at several thousand percent a year, there have been calls for the amounts lent to be capped. Cameron was opposed. Last week he decided it was a good idea.

That’s what you get with a really talented individual: an ability to recognise an idea as good, if enough people shout it at you loud enough and for long enough.

What about Boris himself? When he was first elected Mayor of London, he picked a fight with the Home Secretary, then a Labourite, to determine which of them would have most control over the Metropolitan Police. He came out on top. Over the next eighteen months, Johnson held nearly twice as many meetings with bankers as with the police. Despite having gone to such trouble to get the police firmly under his wing.

It takes a superior mind to recognise a superior mind, and Johnson clearly feels more at home with the top-rank cornflakes who run our banks. The incisive intellect they bring to the job has been repeatedly revealed by the quality of the decisions they took in the run up to the great crash of 2008. And they’ve certainly shown no shortage of greed or envy, happily raking in huge amounts of taxpayer money to dig themselves out of the hole they dug, and then using a portion of it to keep paying themselves eye-watering bonuses.

However, when it comes to truly outstanding minds, there can be little doubt who Boris feels is at the very top of the packet. He is, after all, manoeuvring constantly and effectively to replace Cameron as leader of the Conservatives. Just how qualified he is for that role is revealed by the stance he took in the speech itself. After all, he based himself on the notion of IQ as a valid measure of ‘intelligence.’

No one really knows what intelligence is, but one thing that’s absolutely certain is that IQ doesn’t measure it. IQ tests reveal one thing and one thing alone: the ability to take IQ tests, and that’s an ability that can be trained and which reflects cultural concerns – the very kind that Boris picked up during his education at Eton.

So his belief in the validity of IQ as a measure of talent is, well, touching. Like a child’s belief in Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy. It has charm, which as we saw is a central preoccupation of Boris’s.

Trouble is I’m not sure I’d want a charming child running London. As for the whole British government – well, the present lot’s quite bad enough.

Seems to me that the rest of us, the ones with all those fine cornflakes weighing down on our heads, might do well to use our votes to ensure Boris goes and cultivates his charm elsewhere. He seems to like rattling cereal boxes. Perhaps we can persuade him to go off somewhere nice and quiet to enjoy that pleasure all on his own.

Walking off from slavery by slipping invisible handcuffs

Three women enslaved for more than thirty years have just been freed in London.

Yes. That’s right. In London. In 2013.

Curiously, they weren’t kept shackled. They did go out. They even had mobile phones. But somehow they couldn’t bring themselves to make the break, despite – unless perhaps it was because of – their physical ill treatment.

One of the most striking phrases used in connection with this case came from Commander Steve Rodhouse, in charge of the police investigation: he wants to understand the ‘invisible handcuffs’ that were used on the captives. 

Invisible handcuffs. Yes, that’s a concept worth understanding, if only because I’m sure it was such handcuffs – emotional, psychological, built on oppression and fear – that were just as effective as whips and chains in holding slaves in place in the days when slavery, open and legal, was an institution in Western countries.

As they are bound to be still today, when though hidden and illegal, slavery remains as powerfully as ever: according to the Guardian, Kevin Bales, who leads work on the global slavery index, calculates that there are 29.8 million slaves today, well over twice the 12.5 million or so who were transported from Africa to America when the slave trade was lawful.

Interestingly, the slavery index is published by an organisation known as the Walk Free foundation. I find that interesting because the three women ended their captivity after contacting the Freedom charity, which in time was able to win their trust to the point that they left the house where they had been held. In other words, in the event, they walked to freedom.

And that’s even more interesting because a long time before them someone else described her experience in much the same terms. The state of New York abolished slavery in 1827, but one slave had been promised her freedom a year earlier. When her master changed his mind, Sojourner Truth, to give the name she took for herself in 1843, in preference to her slave name, quietly finished her work for him, and then left with her youngest daughter. Walking.

‘I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right.’

Sojourner Truth. Who walked to freedom

When all slaves in New York were made free, she discovered that a son of hers had been illegally sold to a slaveowner in Alabama. She took the owner to court, and set judicial history by becoming the first Black to win a case against a White in the US.

She became a leading figure in the Abolitionist movement. But she decided that it wasn’t enough to campaign for the freedom of slaves. She threw herself life and soul into campaigning for equal rights for Blacks too and for Women.

Having walked to freedom, having shaken off a set of invisible handcuffs that bound her to a master, she spent the rest of her life working to persuade us all to shed a great many more such shackles – whether we apply them or wear them ourselves.

What’s more, she did that with great humanity and self-deprecation. Rising, exhausted, to address one particular rally, she started with the words:

‘Children, I have come here like the rest of you, to hear what I have to say.’ 

Oh, boy, I wish I could claim I’d never risen to speak to an audience unclear as to what I was going to say. But I’ve found myself far too often in Sojourner Truth’s position.

Now there is much that I could not accept about this woman, not least her embracing of Seventh Day Adventism, but her courage and tenacity are admirable indeed. So I felt that today, the 130th anniversary of her death, was a good moment to celebrate her qualities. Especially at a time when Britain is trying to understand how, so long afterwards, three women could just have been released from slavery themselves.

She showed that invisible handcuffs can be slipped. There are a lot of people still in them, and not just the slaves. I watch our fellow citizens, in societies as free and democratic as they appear to be, again and again choosing to be ruled by those who ensure that they never accede to their rights. Each time someone on the wrong end of privilege puts a cross on a ballot paper by the name of a candidate working to keep the privileged in power, don’t we see invisible handcuffs at work again?

On Sojourner Truth day, let’s all remind ourselves – and each other – that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Turning down an empty glass for Breda

It’s such a cliché, someone discovering that you live in London, or Belfast, or New York, and asking ‘I have a friend who lives there. Do you know him?’

So, back in 1983, I reacted with derisive scepticism to an Australian friend who told Danielle, my wife, ‘I met a great couple of Irish doctors in Grenada. They’re moving to England. You must meet them.’

‘Yeah, right,’ I thought. England’s smaller than Australia but that doesn’t mean we all get our bread from the same bakery.

Still, my incredulity was a bit dented when I heard soon after that they were moving to Witney, a market town in West Oxfordshire. We were moving there too. We moved and discovered they were living three minutes walk away from us.

I’d been right that England was larger than our friend thought. But the world’s a lot smaller.

That was the start of a friendship with Ronnie and Breda that’s lasted thirty years.

Breda with her hallmark smile
After mushroom picking with Danielle

It started with watching each others’ children grow up. Danielle even took the notion of babysitting to unusual heights: because their pregnancies were almost synchronised, she was able to breastfeed Breda’s elder son while she was looking after him; Breda had to admit she found that slightly shocking, though with her head she realised it made perfect sense if the child was crying. 

Breda sets the pace
for one of our sons and a daughter-out-law

For me too the shared kids experience wasn’t always easy. 

Breda was one of the world’s warmest and most generous people, her hallmark smile always available and full of affection, in good times as much as in moments of adversity, of which she had more than her share. However, she was also gifted with exceptional intelligence that could make her gentle wit as mordant as it was insightful: at a time when I was travelling a great deal for work and leaving the children with Danielle more than I should have, she remarked to me ‘you’re a bit of a bachelor father, aren't you?’ 

The best reproaches are those delivered with humour, and that one is forever engraved on my mind.

Even after both they and we left Witney, we continued to visit each other, and also, as often as we could, visit other places together.

On one occasion we had a magnificent camping holiday, with all the children, at Royan in Western France. It’s unforgettable for the number of times Ronnie and I went chasing their teenage adopted daughters through the night-time dunes – chasing the girls back to camp, the circling boys away.

But Royan was also the site of a memorable hunt by Danielle and Breda for the best local Pineau des Charentes. For anyone who doesn’t know this excellent drink, it’s made of one-third cognac, two-thirds grape juice, giving it a deliciously healthy and innocuous fruit flavour, that covers one heck of a kick.

There are two schools of thought on how to approach tastings. There are those who spit out. Danielle and Breda belonged to the other school. The striking image of the Royan holiday was therefore their return to camp, rolling back unsteadily on their bikes, heavily laden with bottles, and fully loaded with Pineau.

There would be many more trips down the years. We went round Copenhagen by boat. We shivered at the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. We gazed in slightly dizzy wonder at the whirling dervishes in Istanbul. We listened to Smetana on the Charles bridge in Prague.

Breda (left) and Danielle share a moment of culture
Over cocktails in an Istanbul bar

In Prague, it was Danielle who organised the accommodation and, in a spirit of economy, booked us into a backpackers’ hostel. It reminded Breda, she told us with distaste, of dormitories in the convent where she’d been educated. 
But all her reservations dissolved when she met the barman, a cheerful Czech who could make any tropical drink you might like, and many other cocktails besides.

‘Excellent choice of place to stay,’ she assured Danielle, smiling over the brim of a brimming glass.

Ronnie and Breda in Christiania, Copenhagen
With your humble narrator becomingly in the background

It was only in January that we had our last trip together, to Lanzarote in the Canaries. The setting was glorious and Breda’s irresistible joy in conversation on any topic, was a boon to us all. And yet she didn’t contribute as much as she wanted to, or as she had on other trips: she was suffering from a terribly debilitating digestive condition that left her in terrible pain. 

Even so, the visit to Lanzarote was a great success, though that was in part because it wasn’t until her return that we realised that she wasn’t suffering from any banal digestive problem. What she had was cancer at an advanced stage. With her oncologists’ encouragement, she put up a brave fight, but a few weeks ago it became clear it was a losing one. She was admitted to hospital and hope faded that she would ever go home.

On Thursday evening, 14 November, the thought came to me that I was quietly relaxing in front of an enjoyable TV programme while my friend was lying in hospital, drugged and facing death. But only a few minutes later, a phone call from Ronnie revealed that I was wrong and the truth far worse: at the time I’d thought of Breda’s declining life, it was already over.

Yesterday, Saturday 22 November, we said our farewells to her. My eulogy, saying much the same as I’ve written her, was just one of three. It was followed by a local doctor who had worked with her and told us about a woman who consulted him because she was having trouble conceiving. When he saw her again a few months later, she was already pregnant. 

Apparently, in the meantime Breda had seen her and told her ‘relax. Make love, not babies.’ It worked a dream.

Breda was a great doctor, above all because she was so fundamentally human. That’s why her place is still set among us, though it remains empty, her glass untasted, and I can think of no more fitting tribute for an excellent friend than the last quatrain of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:

    And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass
    Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on the Grass,
    And in thy joyous Errand reach the Spot
    Where I made one – turn down an empty Glass!

I’ll be turning down many an empty glass for Breda. But first I’ll raise it, full, to her memory.

It's still a pleasure even if you just think you're enjoying it

‘What is all this swimming business?’ a friend asks me, after reading my latest dirge on how ghastly the whole experience is.

Well, I should perhaps set the record straight. It isn’t, in reality, anything like as bad as the impression I may have given of it. In fact, there are occasions when I derive great enjoyment from ploughing up and down the pool. Even at one of those horrifying times of day when the only kind of water that seems remotely attractive is the kind that fills a steaming bath, and even that prospect barely tempts one away from a sheet and a toast-warm duvet.

Just the other day, the pleasure practically tipped into triumph. I was racing up and down the pool, eating away the lengths as though there was no tomorrow, far more quickly than on any yesterday. I was achieving a staggering increase in pace. OK, I knew that the kind of speed I was managing was probably little better than what you might call sedate, but that was a huge step up from my usual performance, best described as downright laggardly.

In fact, the improvement was so colossal that it did occur to me to wonder whether it could be real. But I drove that unworthy thought away and enjoyed the pleasure of the moment. Isn’t that what the best philosophers always recommend?

Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday, why fret about them if today be sweet?

So I rose from the pool, shoulders squared, chest puffed out, full of my sense of accomplishment. Only then did I notice that the partition, which usually splits our 50 metre pool at the 32 metre mark, had been placed bang on the centre point.

I stood stupidly staring at this chastening evidence of my own vainglory.

The pool had been super-short. I’d been racking up the lengths, but they were just over two-thirds of my normal ones. Even a swimming-atrophied brain at a mind-numbing time could work out that far from achieving anything out of the ordinary, my performance had been right down there in the bargain basement I generally inhabit. There’d been no improvement at all.

No, it wasn't me.
However much I'd have liked to believe it was

So it turned out that the one time my swimming gave me tangible pleasure, it turned out to be entirely illusory.

But, hold on, that’s not really right, is it? It was the perception on which my enjoyment was based that was illusory. The pleasure itself was genuine. Now that’s got to be worth celebrating.

After all, how many of the pleasures we enjoy have any stronger basis?

The salesman's 'yeah': businesspeak scales new heights

Far too little attention has been paid to businesspeak, a language second to none in subtlety and indirection, leaving it with enough levels of meaning to make it the lasagne of international linguistics.

No doubt you all know, ‘this is urgent. We need action immediately’ which translates as ‘I’m calling a meeting for the middle of next week. No, damn it. The week after when George gets back from leave.’

You may be less familiar with ‘that’s not a suggestion we can take up at once, but don’t let’s lose sight of it, it’s a really good idea,’ which means ‘I can’t believe you came up with anything that dumb, but HR has told me I have to be encouraging towards the little people, so I’m letting you down gently.’

One of my personal favourite is, ‘I’ve glanced at the document but I haven’t had time to read it in detail,’ which means ‘I know you’ve sent me something but I suspect it’s more than two paragraphs long, so I can’t be bothered to plough through it. Why don’t you take up the first half of the meeting telling me what it contains, while I interrupt with irrelevant questions?’

However, as you’re certainly aware, it isn’t always the most complex creations of humanity that are the most striking. Sometimes it’s pure simplicity that wins the prize. That’s why I’m particularly pleased to be able to present to the world my most recent study of businesspeak, and one of its most phenomenal of structures. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s powerful precisely for its brevity.

I’ve come to call it ‘the salesman’s yeah’. Yes. A single word. And it’s definitely ‘yeah’, not ‘yes’. Here’s how it’s deployed.

‘Did you set up the meeting with Mr Howard?’ asks the worried executive.

‘Yeah,’ replies the salesman, and pauses just long enough to ensure that everyone has fully absorbed the fact that he’s given a positive response.

‘I spoke to his assistant last week,’ he goes on, ‘and she says she’ll make sure he gets my message just as soon as he’s back from his conference in Singapore.’

The master businessspeaker
Masterly. Confidence-inspiring.  Charming

Or then again we have:

‘Have they signed the agreement?’

‘Yeah.’ Pause. The pause is key. ‘Galactica from Legal thought a distributor agreement would be more suitable, so she’s drafting one.’

And a final example.

‘So will we get the order this month?’

‘Yeah.’ Pause. ‘There’s every chance they’ll give us the nod in the next fortnight, ready for the final meeting to authorise the order in six weeks.’

See how it works? If you or I had to communicate the message in the long sentence following the ‘yeah’, we’d probably be inclined to start with a ‘no’. But that’s because we’re naive speakers of that tediously transparent language, everyday English. The really proficient businesspeaker who has mastered the ‘salesman’s yeah’, knows how to give bad news a positive spin. Far better, his ‘yeah’ makes you feel good, and you cling on to that feeling while he gives you the less satisfactory information that follows. So it's outstandingly effective: he manages to communicate a misleading message without telling a lie.

Brilliant.

How can one avoid admiring such talented and ingenious use of words? It takes them out of the realm of the banal, ordinary communication of information in which most of us indulge. It takes us to new heights of communication and miscommunication, rarely seen outside the world of conservative politics.

When things are going swimmingly and only the coin is terrifying

I may not be crazy about swimming, but persisting in going at awful o’clock in the morning does seem to be revealing a surprising streak of craziness in me. 

One of the delights of early morning swimming, and there are so few I make the most of any I find, is trying to decide exactly what’s grimmest about the experience. And, funnily enough, it turns out not to be getting up at 6:00 a.m.

Nor is it that terrible moment when you’re half into the water but haven’t quite let yourself slip beyond the point of no recovery, so you could still, in principle, change your mind and climb back up the ladder. That’s pretty ghastly, because it’s the instant when every nerve at last realises that it’s true, that your wayward mind is really going to do that terrible thing, again, and immerse the whole of your protesting body in that frightful wet stuff.

But it isn’t that. It isn’t even the moment when I realise that I’ve left something crucial – towel, goggles, shampoo – in the locker and have to reopen it with the consequent loss of the 20 pence coin I dropped in the slot to lock it.

No, it’s that 20p coin itself. This has become the terrible, obsessive object of all my fears as I prepare for early morning swims.The 20p bit haunts my thoughts.

The humble 20p bit. The stuff of obsessional nightmare

Not, you understand, for any inherent value of its own. Why, it wouldn’t buy much more than 10% of a large latte. In fact, if you take your coffee in more fashionable establishments than I frequent, it wouldn’t cover even that. 

What concerns me is not the value it represents, but its value as an object in itself. 

Our swimming pool has lockers that will only accept those coins. Two tens? Out of luck, pal. Four fives? You must be joking. Ten twos? A suggestion not even worth dignifying by a refusal.

It’s odd, though. I’ve forgotten lots of things when going swimming but never, as it happens, a 20p bit. But the fear of doing so never leaves me.

Come to think of it, that may be the reason I always remember to bring one.

In any case, even if I didn’t, the fee for Danielle and me leaves us with a 20p coin in the change. And, as often as not, the receptionist asks us if we need one anyway.

On one occasion, I did turn up without my coin purse. I know, I know, coin purses are deeply unfashionable, please don’t think I haven't been told, but they are convenient when you’re sick of clinking coins around in your pocket.

My apprehension was intense when I forgot mine. How was I going to be able to overcome the terrible obstacle I’d created for myself?

‘Your change and your tickets,’ said the receptionist.

And there lying in my hand, small, shiny and apparently winking at me in good cheer, was one of those funny little seven-sided not-quite-silver coins. The relief was overwhelming. Which just made me feel stupid.

Especially as, when I came to put my possessions into my rucksack, preliminary to dumping them in the locker, I found several more 20p pieces in its front pocket. Where I’d put them as a reserve, just in any case I ever did what I’d done that morning and left without my change.

It made me wonder just how crazy swimming was making me. Until I remembered that I’d put the coins in my bag one morning at about 8:00, when I’m tolerably rational. And I’d worked myself into a panic over their absence before 7:00, when I’m certainly anything but. Perhaps I can put the whole embarrassingly dumb behaviour pattern down to time of day.

After all, we don’t call it stupid o’clock for nothing.

Hell is other people. Or how one woman's music became another's noise pollution.

Spare a thought for Laia Martín, a promising young pianist from Catalonia, now facing charges that could land not just her but her parents in gaol for seven and a half years. 

Why? Because she practises the piano.

Yes, that’s right. You’d expect a budding concert pianist to have to play rather a lot. And when her parents bought her a piano and encouraged (I suppose the prosecution would say ‘incited’) her to play it, they thought they were behaving as devoted parents should.

Sadly, they were living next door to a woman called Sonia Bosom, clearly someone with a lot to get off her chest.

She sued for noise pollution and physical impairment. She’s moved away, which strikes me as sensible, but in the meantime the matter had been picked up as one for criminal charges. It’s true that Martín practices for eight hours a day, but that’s pretty much what I’d expect from a professional musician (particularly a soloist). She also keeps it to daytime only. 

All of which makes me feel that in asking for a seven and a half year sentence, the prosecutor who’s taken up the case is being just a tad excessive.

Noise pollution.
Seriously? Noise pollution?

And, believe me, my wife and I have plenty of experience of noise pollution. Our neighbour goes in for it less often than she used to, but when she lets herself go, we certainly know about it. First she starts off apparently enjoying herself. She and her friends laugh a lot; then the music comes on; and next it’s Karaoke, an invention, it seems to me, with only one purpose: however awful you may feel professional singers are, you’ll go back to them with alacrity once you’ve heard the amateurs.

Hard though it is to believe, things actually deteriorate after the Karaoke. That’s when the mood turns rough. Voices are raised but no longer in joy. Epithets are exchanged, accompanied by encouragements to engage in procreative activity. Elsewhere. 

Doors are opened and doors are slammed as various people are included or excluded from groups. In the latter case, they usually protest at a length that belies their words, that they care very little about their fate, in speeches generously larded with further procreative allusions.

As a general rule, there are tears, occasionally blows, sometimes even the sound of crockery being broken.

We think of her as our neighbour from Hell.

I imagine, however, that Ms Bosom and the Martíns feel exactly the same way about each other. Ms Bosom must have regarded the hours of piano as hellish; Laia and her parents must feel the same about the prospect of being gaoled for their devotion to music.

Which I suppose only goes to prove the truth of Sartre’s idea that hell is other people. The Spanish case seems to confirm it. So does our neighbour.

Fortunately, however, in my experience other people also provide the means to get as about as close to heaven as we’re ever likely to be. The existence of friends consoles us for the persecutions of the hellish other people of Sartre’s vision.

Right now, I hope Laia Martín and her family can find some friends of their own, in high places if at all possible, because they really, really need them.