Luci's diary: I can celebrate a birthday even if I don't understand it

Luci's Diary. I haven’t the faintest idea what a birthday is, but hey, who isn’t into celebration?

5 November

Today’s my birthday!

I have no idea what that means. Except that it’s mine, and I know what that means.

My cat Misty tried to explain.

“OK. Things go round in years,” he said.

I looked around the room. Everything seemed to be standing still.

“Nothing’s going round,” I carefully explained to him.

“No, OK. Not like that. Right now it’s cold and the leaves are red. In a while there won’t be any leaves at all and it’ll be colder still. And then the leaves will come back again, all bright green. And after that it’ll be quite hot again. Well, since we live in England, it’ll be quite hot when it isn’t cold and raining, but that’ll be pretty often. OK, let’s say quite often. More often than now, at any rate.”

It was coming back to me.

“Yes, I remember,” I said, “when things were like that.”

“Well, that’s it. That’s what I mean. Those things come, and then they go, and then they come again. So when the leaves are red, that’s autumn, and that’s how they were when you were born. They’re red again now – autumn’s come back – and it’s your birthday: a year since you were born.”

Born? What was he getting at? I’ve always been here. I can’t remember any time when I wasn’t here.

But Misty was still explaining.

“It’s your birthday. Your birthday’s here because autumn’s back. You’re an autumn dog. Each time things come back like that, a year goes by. You’ve had one year, you’re going to have another one now, and that means you’ll have all those things happen again.”

Luci, the autumn dog

I nodded and tried to look as if I’d understood. But I was still baffled. How can things happen again? I mean, I met Misty for the first time, ages and ages ago. Am I going to meet him for the first time – again? How can that make sense?

Oh well, I’ll just have to see how things work out. I often find that’s the best thing to do, because lots of things don’t make sense to me.

Like the other day. My human number 1 was all dressed to go out. So I was jumping around her waiting for her to put my lead on. And then she said to human number 2:

“I’ll just pop out then. I’ll be back shortly to take Luci out.”

Where’s the sense in that? Coming back in to take me out? Why not just take me out straight away? Honestly. Humans do talk a lot of rubbish sometimes.

That was almost as bad as finding Misty eating my food last weekend. His food is kept up high because he can jump all the way up there, and I can’t. But my food is kept down at ground level. Basically for the same reason. The trouble is that he can get at my food even though I can’t get at his. Which was only fair because he didn’t like my food.

Part of my food is this super good “eat me, eat me, eat me” mix of rice and bits of meat my number 2 human makes for me. Ah, one of the great joys of the day is when he puts out my portion for me. And it lasts me right through to just before we go to bed.

Well, Misty decided to have some of it the other day. My best meal. Now that wasn’t supposed to happen. I couldn’t believe my eyes at first.

It didn’t make sense, so I decided to make sense of it. I jumped on top of him. That often makes sense of things that seem incomprehensible. I’m getting quite good at it. He complains but he puts up with it.

“OK, OK,” he said, “you can get off me. I’ll stop eating your stuff. I don’t like it anyway.”

It may have helped that Number 2 was having a go too.

“Misty! Eat your own food. Leave Luci’s alone!”

So things got back to normal. I suppose the same will happen with this “year” thing Misty was talking about. It’ll start to seem normal after a while. I’ll get used to it.

Meanwhile, it’s my birthday! I’m going to enjoy it.

“There’ll be extra rice and turkey mince for you,” Human number 2 told me.

Birthday Treat

Yay!

Something for nothing: a dangerous mentality. Especially in government

There’s often talk of the science of business. In reality, though, it’s all about instinct. This is particularly true among many senior executives who just know their gut feel is somehow enlightened and leads them to excellent judgements, hidden to others.

So rather than laws and principles, business tends to spew out aphorisms. “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” And, particularly relevant here, “you never get anything for nothing.”

Just because they seem neither deep nor inspired doesn’t make these sayings untrue. In fact, they are often about as good a guide to what actually happens in business as anyone gets. One would, therefore, expect any reasonably experienced businessman to know them. One might even expect a political party pretty much in hock to business interests to be familiar with them too.

That makes it slightly ironic that our present government, here in Britain, spends so much time trying to convince us that you really can get something for nothing.

Generally, the people accused of trying to get something for nothing are the poor or disenfranchised. It’s people who are dependent on benefits, or who are asking for a little more to make ends meet. Business leaders or Tory Ministers are quick to condemn them. And yet that’s precisely the approach Tories are taking to some of the most important parts of our society.

It seems to be their philosophy towards the NHS, for instance. Their mantra is “get more for less.” You can actually do that, for a while, as you drive out inefficiencies. But we’ve been driving them out for a good twenty years or so. There comes a point where you’re not cutting out fat any more, you’re cutting into muscle or even bone.

But the government keeps going. It’s demanding that junior doctors do more work at weekends, so that we can move to a seven-day NHS. But it expects them to do that for no extra money.

Can you imagine one of the great consultancy companies, or financial advisers, or even lawyers agreeing to do extra hours for no more money? Surely the government, so close to such people, knows that they’d never wear it. What makes them think others would go along with it?

Another key element in the government’s healthcare strategy is to get more care delivered outside hospitals. In particular, by the social care sector. So it’s a concern that Britain’s biggest chain of care homes, Four Seasons Health Care, is apparently in serious financial difficulty, with only a few months of cash left ahead of it.

A home run by Four Seasons Health Care

A concern, but not a surprise. Social care is funded by local government, and central government has been starving municipalities of funds. Inevitably, that’s working through to the care providers, like Four Seasons. Again, it’s simply a matter of trying to get something for nothing: social care able to relieve the pressure on the NHS, for less money than it had in the past.

One of the factors that’s made life so hard for the care home sector is the government’s promise to move the minimum up to a level that will make it the “national living wage.” There is a thing called the “living wage”, calculated by independent bodies, and it’s substantially higher than the government’s “national” version. But even the lower level is hard for social care to absorb.

And yet the government has to see wages of the lowest paid rise, to justify why it’s cutting the support it gives them at the moment, through so-called tax credits. 

Follow the reasoning carefully: the Tories want to cut the benefits, justified by moves towards a living wage, even though their target for wage rises falls far short, and in any case they don’t intend to help out the care homes who are suffering, and on whom they depend to take cases from the NHS.

Sound like voodoo economics to you? That’s because it is voodoo economics. No one believes in it, not even the government. It’s all based on the idea that you can get something for nothing, which it knows it can’t.

So basically it’s just a smokescreen. It’s cutting back the state and leaving people dependent on it in even worse conditions than before. All the rest is just words to cover up the onslaught.

Meanwhile the Tories’ friends and paymasters are doing just fine, as top pay continues to rise astronomically.

Maybe there is such a thing as a free lunch after all…


And an update: The UK government has now made an 11% offer to junior doctors. I don’t want to be curmudgeonly, and I’m pleased the offer's been made, but I have to say that it’s an admission that the Tories had it wrong before. Besides, it would be good to see something done for other groups than doctors – such as workers on or little above the minimum wage.

A children's story with sad roots; women fighting for their rights; a man struggling to survive on a lifeless planet

The thing I really liked about the Mary Poppins books is that there was absolutely nothing soft of candy-flossy about her. She was stern. Smiling didn’t come naturally, if it came at all. She was briskly efficient and businesslike and no one messed with her, or at least, not twice.

So it was a bit of a surprise to see Julie Andrews in the film regularly sporting her trademark endearing smile, as though the hills were alive with the sound of music. Not Mary Poppins at all. Dick van Dyke likewise, apart from the unspeakable parody of a cockney accent, also had an unbearable niceness about him that had little to do with the P L Travers’s writing. And yet, somehow, in common with millions of others, I found the film as enjoyable as the books – if in a completely different way.

The beauty of Saving Mr Banks is that it shows how the bridge between those two creations was made. It’s a tear jerker and if that isn’t your cup of tears, then it’s probably worth keeping away from the film. Within its genre, however, it has to be one of the best.

Saving Mr Banks
Tom Hanks genial as Walt Disney, Emma Thompson less so as P L Travers

What the film explores is the gulf between the fantasy world of fiction and the real story that may well have inspired it. Travers had grave misgivings about allowing Walt Disney to make a film of her books, fearing precisely what happened – far too sweet an interpretation, a musical and, worst of all, cartoons. The film shows Disney, well portrayed by Tom Hanks, trying to convince Travers, superbly played by Emma Thompson as an adult and by Annie Rose Buckley as a child. Eventually, she gave way, but not before a great deal surfaced, about an adulated father wrecked by his own failings. It turns out that Mary Poppins really wasn’t there to help the children, but to save Mr Banks, the father. And we find out why.

Most films about the suffragettes focus on the wealthy ones who would suffer terribly while imprisoned, and force fed, but nonetheless returned to homes not utterly destroyed by their absence, because nursery maids had looked after the children and the family was able to eat without their mother’s wages. That makes Suffragette refreshing, because it focuses on a working class woman, powerfully portrayed by Carey Mulligan, for whom going to jail for her principles means far more than a few weeks suffering – it means jeopardising her family life and her ability to earn a living.

The film also shows one of the tougher problems of the British suffrage movement, its use of terror tactics. Admittedly, they used rather special forms of terrorism, designed to avoid injury to people, let alone loss of life, but bombs are bombs. It’s courageous of the film to confront the use of such weapons, by characters presented as sympathetic.

What it ducks, on the other hand, is the question of whether those tactics, and indeed the wing of the suffrage movement represented by such luminaries as Emmeline Pankhurst, actually did much to advance the cause. It also fails to answer a question that it raises itself by making the protagonist working class: had the movement achieved equal voting rights for women as for men, Carey Mulligan’s character would still not have had the vote – 40% of men were deprived of the suffrage at that time by a property qualification, which she would certainly have failed too. 

I was left wondering whether Pankhurst (played my Meryl Streep), or indeed the pharmacist (Helena Bonham Carter) who befriends Mulligan and makes the bombs, would have settled for votes for themselves or would have fought to extend them to all adults.

Helena Bonham Carter, Carey Mulligan and Meryl Streep in Suffragette
The one in the middle would have been no better off with rights equal to men

Such small gripes apart, the film’s well performed and gripping.

Finally, The Martian is a refreshing new take on stories which have titles of that kind. The Martian is not a little green space creature, a native of Mars. Instead he’s a human being, Mark Watney, excellently played by Matt Damon, left behind in error by his crew mates, who believe he has died in the storm that forced their evacuation of the red planet.

The strongest feature of the film is its pursuit of realism. Watney works out how long he has to survive on Mars – nearly four years – with supplies that were designed to support a month long mission. Even though they were intended for a crew of six, rather than a single individual, it’s clear they won’t keep him going anything like long enough. So he has to find a way of growing food in the arid environment of Mars.

That’s a daunting challenge. So he doesn’t take it on. Instead he breaks it down into component tasks, and tackles each of them in turn. What does he have that could be made to grow? How can he turn sterile Mars soil into something capable of supporting plant life? How can he produce the water needed?

A step at a time, he finds solutions for problems which taken as a whole, seem insurmountable.

That spirit of realism and the philosophy of taking on a job at a time, as necessity requires, informs almost the whole film. It’s only at the very end that we get a moment of more traditional science fiction, where in the pursuit of drama, the makers have Watney do something completely brainless in a heroic gesture, a gamble on a single throw of the dice. Otherwise, the film only demands our acceptance of one or two minor inconsistencies and a single major piece of suspension of disbelief: we know that, in the present state of science at least, it’s impossible to get human beings to Mars, since they would be exposed to so much radiation that the journey itself would kill them.

Tom Hanks in The Martian
The loneliness of the long-distance gardener

Those seem small concessions to demand of an audience, to tell a great story. And the story’s a good one, well told. With plenty of tension. And a lot of humour.

The trouble with Halloween...

For a long time, I found Halloween attractive in a slightly perverse way. 

It provided me with an annual opportunity to be terribly British and tediously older generation.

“What?” I would say, “when I was a kid, the thing we celebrated at this time of year was Guy Fawkes Day. What is this Yank custom we’ve imported? Do we have to do everything they do in the States?”

Then I’d go all misty-eyed and nostalgic as my audience wondered how to vanish, or shut me up, without actually being openly rude.

It’s true that Guy Fawkes celebrations of my youth were special. We’d make Guys, of course. Well, those of us who could bother would. Misshapen effigies of a human being made of straw, old clothes and a balloon as a head, with a hat glued on top. Get it done on time, and you could wheel it out on the street for a few days beforehand and ask for a “penny for the Guy” from all the passersby. That wasn’t begging because it was tradition.

I never could be bothered to make my own Guy, so instead I went to other people’s Guy Fawkes parties. They were wonderful. Huge bonfires with someone else’s Guy perched on top. This was an uplifting allusion to the burning to death of the original Guy Fawkes, who’d had the shocking idea of wanting to blow up Parliament, with all the politicians in it. That’s an idea which no one today could contemplate with anything but horror.

The nice thing about the bonfire is that, if it burned fiercely enough, it would make the rain drops evaporate around it. So if you could stand getting close enough, you kept reasonably dry, only getting soaked when you stepped away to eat one of the burned sausages which people carbonised for you in the flames.

Ah, the joy of the Guy Fawkes bonfire!
Great for getting one side of you burned while the other froze

The other great benefit of the fire was that it meant only one side of you was cold (the festivities take place on 5 November, after all). The other side could get itself toasted. When you couldn’t bear the first degree burning of your face any more, you could turn around and get your back seared while your nose froze off.

Oh, wonderful times, wonderful times.

These days, instead of this time-honoured and cherished tradition, we get Halloween. I’m given to understand that in the States this is managed in quite a civilised way: it happens in daylight, with kids up to about 8 or 10, and they only call on houses of people who have set up a pumpkin in their windows. This indicates that they’re happy to be “trick or treated”, a curious notion, since treating to avoid the threat of a trick sounds pretty much like the text book definition of extortion.

Britain has a long tradition of enjoying extortion. As in “nice little country you have here. How about giving us monopoly access to your markets? You wouldn’t want my Royal Navy here to do anything nasty to it, and I have trouble controlling its commanders, in the face of uncooperative behaviour.” 

So when we introduced Halloween, it took rather a nastier edge to it than the kids’ party in the States. Why, this year there was a regular riot leaving four policemen injured, over a Halloween “scum party” in London, which sounds altogether less gentle than the US model.

Of course, it doesn’t help that that the celebrations start when it’s dark over here. The clocks go back a week or two before, so it’s pitch black by 5:30. That makes it a little harder to conjure up a family atmosphere.

Still, I have to admit that round here, it’s become nicer over the last few years. Little kids go out in witches’ costumes or dressed as cartoon zombies, and they knock politely on the door to ask us to chuck some terribly sugar-rich, nutrition-low sweetmeat into their baskets. The whole thing takes place under the watchful eyes of their mothers, so the threat level stays agreeably low.

As a result, Danielle and I have been adapting to the occasion. Getting into the spirit. We buy lots of tooth-rotting produce in the run-up to the 31 October. I’ve become less curmudgeonly and actually welcome the arrival of the kids. I hand out largesse with gusto and enjoy the pleasure of the children in response.

Why, I even apologise for the behaviour of our assault poodle Luci, who likes to go flying out making a terrible racket and looking as awe-inspiring as a dog six inches tall can. It doesn’t seem to matter, as the mothers like to stroke her anyway, describing her as cute, while I concentrate on the kids’ baskets.

Indeed, such was our enjoyment of this event, that we were disappointed last year when we ran out of goodies by about 8:00. To make sure that it didn’t happen again, we got extra stocks in this year.

And then – the unimaginable happened. We only had three parties of kids coming to our door. We were left with a large quantity of unclaimed merchandise. I’ve had to give it away to the grandmother next door, who assured me “it won’t go to waste.”

I can’t believe it. What’s happened? Aren’t people taking Halloween seriously any more? Where’s their sense of tradition? Don’t they see the importance of maintaining links with the culture their ancestors formed for them?

I’m sure it wasn’t like that in my young day.

Callous indifference and lack of compassion: they may just reflect a Prime Minister's inability to make an effort

The Devil, they say, makes work for idle hands.

With an idle mind, however, it’s far worse: the Devil makes its owner his tool.

Underneath the surface, and despite the crass indifference of the entitled, David Cameron may well be a not entirely unpleasant human being. He’d probably be most upset, say, by the sight of a woman starving with her children. He’d almost certainly want to help.

The problem is that he has no imagination. He can’t see that woman when she’s out of sight. He can’t connect the effect of his actions as UK Prime Minister with the damage they do to women such as that one. That’s not because he lacks the capacity for compassion, or even the intellectual ability to picture someone else’s suffering, it’s because he simply doesn’t make the effort to exercise them on a scale above the individual.

It was fascinating to read a piece by Fraser Nelson in the Daily Telegraph, in other words by one of the most outspokenly Conservative commentators in one of the most loyally Conservative of newspapers, which warned us that “it’s David Cameron’s laziness that should worry us.” 

Cameron: no effort is too small

Nelson points out, among other incidents from Cameron’s time in office, that when he lost the parliamentary vote on military intervention in Syria, “it was the first time in two centuries that a Prime Minister lost a vote on war and peace – through a basic failure to prepare.”

A failure to prepare. Yes. He simply can’t find it in himself to do the work that’s needed to understand what he’s doing and the effect it will have. Fraser Nelson claims that Cameron didn’t read the NHS Reform Bill, which led to one of the most disastrous reorganisations of the NHS we have seen – and there have been many others that have been dire – until the draft legislation was published.

Nelson’s account is wholly plausible. After all, recently Cameron ruled out any kind of tax on high-sugar foods and drinks to fight obesity. He then admitted that he hadn’t read the report which recommended such a tax. That didn’t stop him rejecting its recommendations.

Nelson also describes him as “utterly loyal to his inner circle” which is perhaps why he stood by the hapless Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, who introduced the NHS measures. It took years before he was shifted away from Health, and even then it was a while before he was dropped from government entirely.

Returning to our fictional woman, Cameron presumably simply can’t imagine the suffering he’s causing by actions over the NHS which will deprive her, or her family, of the kind of care which her own mother’s generation had come to regard as a right.

Now, though, there’s worse news for her. She’s struggling to get by on a minimum wage job while bringing up her children alone – yes, I’m assuming she’s a lone mother – and Cameron’s government intends to reduce her benefits, in the form of cuts to tax credits. She is likely to lose £1000 a year or more, which is painful since she only earns £15,000.

The move to cut her benefits has suffered a setback, with the House of Lords voting for transitional arrangements to be put in place to lessen the impact on people like this woman. That was effective opposition from the non-Conservative parties. The leader of the biggest of them, Jeremy Corbyn of Labour, followed up that powerful move by demanding of Cameron that he guarantee to the House of Commons that there would now be no negative impact on tax credit recipients.

Corbyn dedicated the whole of his ration of six questions at Prime Minister’s Question Time to this theme. Six times he asked. And six times Cameron failed to answer.

At one point Corbyn claimed that “he must know the answer.”

Actually, Jeremy, I think you may be wrong. It does sound like standard politician’s deviousness, ducking and evading a question he’s uncomfortable with. But Cameron’s not a clever politician. It’s far more likely that, actually, he doesn’t know the answer.

To know it, he’d have to read some of the background briefing material. Which is quite boring. He simply can’t find it in himself to make the time for it.

And so, with his idle mind, he ends up doing the devil’s work.

The Tory Tax Credit cuts: observations and warnings and even a few ironies

It’s painful when the party you’d like to see in government is, in fact, in Opposition. But it’s even worse when it fails to oppose.

Not that opposition is useful for its own sake. We need to oppose government when it’s doing something unconscionable. Something like, say, the British Tory government’s decision to cut tax credits drastically.

These are not in fact related to tax. They’re simply payments to help those working poor who aren’t earning enough, and are more generous still to those who have children. One advantage of the system is that it makes sense to get into a job, even a low-paying one, rather than remaining in assisted unemployment.

Tax credits are generally credited with reducing child poverty in England from 35% of the child population to 19% over the fourteen years from 1998/99 to 2012/13 (twelve of them under Labour).

The Tories have decided that they simply cost too much. In their single-minded drive to cut the deficit on government spending, they have decided to reduce them massively. They never calculated the impact of their policies on the poorest, but the estimates there have been suggest a loss of between £1000 a year and £1300 a year, on average. For some, that could mean a loss of 10% of their income.

That’s for the poorest working families – and the stress is on working: these are the people for which David Cameron and George Osborne claim to speak, even to the extent of calling themselves the “new workers’ party.” We can’t afford to support these strivers, Osborne and Cameron seem to claim, so they must suffer. This at a time when there seems no end in sight to the growth of top salaries: between 2013 and 2014, the incomes (I refuse to call them “earnings”) of directors of Britain’s biggest companies climbed 21%.

It’s the inequity of this arrangement that is particularly shocking. The Tory view is that the economy has to be fixed. That’s not contentious. However, they feel that to fix it, the burden must be disproportionately borne by those least able to shoulder it. Meanwhile, at the top end of the scale, there is no sense of obligation to share in any of the pain but, on the contrary, an unfettered drive to take more and more – even though many of the organisations involved were responsible for the economic problems in the first place, through a crash caused by the irresponsibility of bankers.

Surely, if there were a time for an Opposition to oppose, this had to be it. And yet Harriet Harman, interim Labour leader until the September election of Jeremy Corbyn, let it be known in July that, with a heavy heart, she would back the Conservative plans. Sadly, expressions of sympathy, however well-meant, don’t actually feed children or prevent evictions.

So it was with some delight that I watched the Labour and Liberal Democrat peers, with a smattering of others, win a crucial vote in the House of Lords last night forcing the government back to the drawing board, to come up with plans to soften the impact of the tax credit changes. 

Ironically, it’s the House of Lords, home of a privileged elite
that had to take a stance against regressive policies

That leads to a number of observations, some not a little ironic, and a few warnings.

The first observations is that it’s good to see the Lib Dems doing some opposing. For the five years up to May this year, when the Tories won the election on their own, the two parties were in a Coalition government. Lib Dem Ministers tried to soften some Tory measures, but they naturally didn’t oppose them. They seem to have learned their lesson, after being slaughtered in the May election.

Secondly, following Harriet Harman’s weird stance in July, it’s good to see Labour too learning to oppose again.

Third observation: it’s a little sad that we had to rely on the House of Lords, an unelected chamber, to force the government to reflect a moment. The Tories have been swift to point out that the convention is that the Lords do not block financial measures adopted by the Commons. There is now talk from within the government about reforming the Lords, which is deliciously ironic: it’s the Tories who have most impeded Lords reforms down the years.

Fourth observation: such reform is badly needed, but not to shelter a Tory government from opposition. It’s nonsensical to have to rely on an unelected chamber of parliament to scrutinise and question government policy. We should move towards elections to a revising chamber in Parliament, and then increase its powers to challenge government, rather than reducing them. Will the Tories move in that direction? It’s probably best not to hold your breath. 

In passing, I ought to point out that supporters of the move in the Lords argue that they were within their rights. Frankly, the technicalities hardly seem to matter. The fundamental point is that the measure needed opposing, and they did.

Now for the warnings. 

The government will have to reconsider its approach. That doesn’t mean it’ll drop it. George Osborne has already announced he’ll press forward with the cuts anyway, even if he softens the blow a little.

Secondly, it has left George Osborne with a bloody nose and made the government look inept. That, however, won’t have a lasting impact on its grip on power. We’re still four and a half years from an election. In 2012, Osborne put forward such an incompetent budget that it came to be known as an “omnishambles”. Three years on, his party won a majority on its own.

Thirdly, Labour has to show that it’s learned the lesson and will keep on opposing. It shouldn’t sit back and wait for the Tories to slip up, as happened under the previous leadership, of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. The blows need to keep landing, or the Tories will turn things round in their favour again (see the second point above).

Still, for all that, I can’t deny that it’s an unqualified joy to see an Opposition learning to oppose again. 

We’ve missed you for the last five years, Oppositionists. Good to see you’ve found your tongue again. This time – don’t forget you have one.

600 years on, haven't the few, the happy few, done well?

It’s a good time for the centuries-old English sport of Frog-bashing, or being nasty about the French.

In fact, it’s a good year for it, since the second centenary of Battle of Waterloo occurred on 18 June. That ’s the battle where the French were so comprehensively beaten by the Prussians.

Apologies, of course I meant the British. After all, one of the commanders arrayed against Napoleon was the Duke of Wellington, who was English. Well, Irish actually, but you know – Anglo-Irish.

He commanded 25,000 Brits, out of the nearly 200,000 men eventually engaged, which really underlines the extent of the purely British victory. A majority of those 25,000 were probably English, so Waterloo certainly provides some kind of basis for Frog-bashing.

This week was another high point within that year. Wednesday was the 210th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, a much more solidly British triumph. Nelson led a British fleet against a joint French and Spanish force off Cape Trafalgar, providing a name for one of London’s most spectacular squares. I always make a point of taking French visitors there, to remind them of one of those occasions when we came out on top.

John Gilbert's Morning of the Battle of Agincourt

Today, the 25th of October, is an even more significant day. It’s Saint Crispin’s, dedicated to Saints Crispin and Crispianus, or Crispian. That’s as in “this day is called the feast of Crispian: he that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a tip-toe when the day is named, and rouse him at the name of Crispian.”

Yes. 600 years ago today, that fine Englishman, Henry V, led his gallant band into battle against the French on the field of Agincourt. They were hugely outnumbered, of course, some claiming by as much as 10:1, others by just 6:1. This made the English victory not just all the more glorious but also puts it hors concours, as we like to say in English, as the greatest ever case of Frog-bashing recorded.

That huge disparity in numbers also gave rise to another fine moment in the Shakespeare speech, from his play about the King cleverly entitled “Henry V”, which I’ve already quoted above.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition

Great stuff, isn’t it? It also tells us so much. 

For instance, “gentle” clearly didn’t mean sensitive and delicate or anything that soft. It meant being part of that select brood that called itself “gentlemen”, and as the speech makes clear, you didn’t get access to it by being gentle – on the contrary, you did it by shedding your blood with the King on St Crispin’s day.

Presumably, though, Henry would have preferred it if you shed the blood of the dastardly enemy. He was quite a soldier, so I imagine he’d have shared the view expressed some centuries later by US General George Patton: “no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

Shakespeare puts into the king’s mouth a smart contrast to “gentle”: the opposite is, it seems, “vile”. Clearly it’s being used here to mean common, base-born, of inferior standing. So if you’re vile, it seems you can raise your standing – gentle your condition – by killing a lot of Frenchmen and showing them (or at least the ones still standing) that, whatever their numbers, they can never be the match for fine upstanding Englishmen.

Funnily enough, it’s worth taking a look at those numbers again. Anne Curry, who did a book about Agincourt ten years ago, argues that the odds were more like 4:3 in favour of the French, and may indeed have been closer still than that to equality. Still, we won’t insist on that point here, since it rather reduces the Frog-bashing quality of the incident, and hence the anniversary.

Instead, let’s focus on the great achievements of the victory. The things we value deeply and which wouldn’t have been possible without that famous English victory. Off-hand, I can’t think what they are, but they have to be there somewhere. Surely.

It is, no doubt, to those gains that we, in the nations that think of themselves as civilised, owe the blessings we enjoy today. Most notable of those blessings is by the rule of gentlemen, made gentle either by birth or by the skilful use of lethal force, caring for the rest of us vile commoners with all the tenderness we’ve come to expect. And never being vile themselves, of course.

In that spirit, let’s take up the suggestion from Shakespeare’s Henry to celebrate this day in “flowing cups”. Then we can help ensure that

Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d

Well, OK, they shall be remembered, not we. But, hey, you know what I mean.