Obama gets Osama, but the war goes on

How would the global media have coped if Obama had finally caught up with Osama on Friday rather than Sunday?

I reached page 24 of my broadsheet newspaper on Saturday before I found a single mention of anything other than the royal nuptials. That was a story about the need for larger than expected hospital cuts, released by some strange oversight when all eyes were on Westminster Abbey. Even an ardent monarchist like myself could not help wondering whether a sense of proportion was being lost.

For me, the most remarkable thing was not that dress, or the maid of honour’s striking figure, or even the alleged billions who watched the ceremony on TV. It was the hundreds of thousands who turned out in person to snatch a passing glimpse of this piece of history and to roar their approval of those kisses on the palace balcony, even though they could have seen far more in much greater comfort on their sofas at home.

I am glad to live in a country where huge crowds turn out to rejoice in a royal love match. The hatred that motivated the flag-waving crowds celebrating the death of bin Laden in Washington and New York yesterday was entirely understandable, but still demeans those taking part. Just as the footage of Palestinians whooping in the streets at the fall of the Twin Towers provides one of the most revolting memories of 9/11.

I have friends who are currently climbing Mount Everest. It sounds like hell on earth. Still, at least I had been consoling myself with the thought that bin Laden and his sidekicks must be enduring similar discomforts in a filthy Stone Age hiding place high in the Hindu Kush. Instead it turns out that he had been living comfortably about 800 yards from the Pakistani equivalent of Sandhurst, and presumably receiving regular deliveries from their version of Ocado (as he would surely have raised an eyebrow or two if he had been regularly pushing a trolley around the local answer to Tesco).

Clearly the solution for William and Catherine, in their quest for privacy, is not a remote cottage on Anglesey but a floodlit palace in the centre of London with soldiers marching up and down outside.

No doubt we will find out in due course what contribution Britain made to this belated triumph against al-Qaeda, whether through the intelligence services of GCHQ or the lessons Northumbria Police were able to provide from the search for Raoul Moat. And perhaps the question may also be asked why our forces are in action in Afghanistan when the chief instigator of the terrorism we are supposedly fighting was holed up a completely different country.

If President Obama had acted 24 hours earlier, he could have claimed the scalp of his public enemy number one on the anniversary of the suicide of Adolf Hitler. But that truly was an ending. The demise of bin Laden is just another act in a saga of death and destruction to which no one can see a conclusion.

We can be sure that cruel retribution will follow, and the victims are unlikely to be well-protected heads of state. It could be me. It could be you. We can do nothing but be vigilant. The traditional way of ending terrorist campaigns, like the IRA’s, is to give in to their major demands. But the Islamist movement, fuelled by perverted religion, has no rational goals that the secular and materialist western world can even begin to comprehend, let alone discuss.

The bottom line is this: love is good, hate is bad. That is why we were right to celebrate on Friday, and the Americans wrong to rejoice on Sunday. Not least because, like the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s marriage, the war with terror has only just begun.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A world much in need of an agony aunt

Dear Auntie

I was driving past my favourite chip shop the other evening when I spotted the two brothers who run it having the most tremendous fight.

Naturally I did what anyone would have done in the circumstances. I pulled up, charged in and killed the elder brother who, in my opinion, had been throwing his weight around for far too long and seemed to be about to gain the upper hand.

Naturally I expected the younger brother to welcome my intervention and show a bit of gratitude, ideally in the form of free chips for life. But in fact he now seems distinctly sullen and resentful, claiming that he quite liked his brother, really, and certainly preferred him to me.

He also seems suspicious of my motives, and has emptied the deep fat fryer because he imagines for some reason that I was “just trying to get my hands on his oil”.

To make matters even worse, it now turns out that they were arguing because the younger brother has turned into a bit of a religious fanatic and wants to run things on a strict scriptural basis. He has now cancelled the shop’s orders for potatoes and everything else apart from five loaves and fishes, which he seems to think will last indefinitely. He just keeps looking at me in shining-eyed sort of way and asserting that “God will provide”.

Finally, he has thrown out all the shop’s materials for cleaning and pest control, making a bit of a nonsense of my attempts to smarten it up by instituting a “no fly” zone.

In short, the whole situation seems to be a complete mess and I am now wishing that I had just driven by instead of getting involved. What should I do?

Dear Keith

I am sorry to say that I receive letters like this all the time, usually from politicians and military chiefs after they have got themselves embroiled in troublesome conflicts in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Sooner or later it usually becomes clear that the one thing the people concerned have in common is their dislike of foreign intervention. Even though British politicians piled in, like you, simply to be helpful, they find that people are ungrateful and suspicious that the real motive is to get hold of their assets on the cheap.

It also often turns out that the people we hoped to assist are even less malleable than the evil dictators they ejected. Say what you like about Saddam Hussein, for example, but at least he kept a lid on militant Islam.

It’s going to be a frightful mess whatever any of you decide to do. Walk away and the odds are that everything will descend into total chaos, the price of oil will shoot through the roof, the world economy will collapse, and you will run distinctly short of chips. Stay on, and we will rack up huge bills at a time when we keep being told there is no money, servicemen will continue to die and there will be not one shred of gratitude in return.

Personally, I’d shout something like “Look at that, a cat playing the piano!” and run away as fast as you can while the surviving brother is distracted. Sadly this trick will be harder to pull off when it comes to extricating thousands of troops from Afghanistan.

But then it’s like the choice between accepting nuclear power, shivering in a cave or drowning as a result of the icecaps melting. There is no good solution. In simple terms, we’re all up the proverbial gum tree whatever we do.

But next time it is probably going to be best, on the whole, to remember the law of unintended consequences, put your foot down and keep on going.

Love, Auntie.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Give us a vote on who makes our laws

I couldn’t get very excited about last week’s Barnsley by-election. Nor, judging by the feeble 35% turnout, could the electors of Barnsley themselves, who obediently placed their usual signatures against the name of the Labour candidate, as they have done since time immemorial.

Notwithstanding the apparently inconvenient fact that the Labour candidate they had elected only last May subsequently turned out to be an expenses-fiddling crook.

What did get me very exercised last week were the astonishing statements made by two previously unheard-of judges at Nottingham Crown Court who, in the course of barring a Christian couple from fostering children because of their unfashionable views on homosexuality, proclaimed “We sit as secular judges serving a multi-cultural community of many faiths” and “the laws and usages of the realm do not include Christianity, in whatever form. The aphorism that ‘Christianity is part of the common law of England’ is mere rhetoric.”

And there was I fooled into thinking that I lived in a Christian country because we have a head of state anointed in an ancient religious ceremony, two established churches, bishops sitting in the House of Lords – oh, and because nearly 80% of the population of England and Wales defined themselves as Christian, when asked in the 2001 census.

The judges themselves presumably delivered their shocking words in a court adorned with the royal coat of arms, and in which the proceedings usually kick off with participants being invited to swear an oath on the Bible. So how could they so easily conclude that Christian beliefs count for no more in Britain today than those of the islanders of Vanuatu who worship the Duke of Edinburgh as a god?

Memo to judges: the bit at the bottom means 'God and my right'. Quiz: Why might Peter Cook be turning in his grave?

In fact the Vanuatans would almost certainly be accorded more respect by the English courts, because it seems axiomatic that we must pander to the views of every religious minority for fear of causing offence. Hence the widespread sale of unlabelled halal meat to unsuspecting supermarket customers, and the official efforts to excise Christianity from our traditional public holidays, even though worshippers of other faiths keep asserting that they don’t mind in the least. My Muslim in-laws certainly celebrate Christmas far more enthusiastically than I have ever done.

The really important issue here, however, is not the content of the judgement, but the fact that power seems to be leaching constantly from those we have elected, however reluctantly, to judges who are forever beyond our reach. That applies whether they sit in the British courts or in the ever more powerful European ones, which came up with last week’s infuriating judgement on the illegality of taking account of the fact that men are more dangerous drivers than women, and die sooner (two facts which might just be tangentially connected).

In May we are being granted a referendum on a change to the voting system that absolutely no one wants, because even those campaigning for the Alternative Vote would really prefer proportional representation, which AV certainly isn’t. You only have to look at the estimates of how much it would have increased the number of Labour MPs in 1997, 2001 and 2005, when they were hardly in short supply, to realise that.

It would also have made not a blind bit of difference in Barnsley, where Labour’s Dan Jarvis scooped over 60% of the vote.

We are apparently so strapped for cash that we must sack soldiers returning from the front line of Afghanistan, yet we can afford to invest millions holding a pointless referendum to appease the doomed Nick Clegg. Well, here’s a radical idea. Why not hold a referendum on something that matters, like who actually makes our laws: MPs, British judges, Brussels bureaucrats or the European courts?

Until we are allowed a vote on that, my career advice to my son will be unequivocal: become a lawyer.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Pigs and politicians cannot win

My cousin’s roof was blown off by a tornado last month.

That is surely not a sentence many people get to write, unless they have a very large extended family in Kansas. But my cousin lives in the sleepy village of Great Livermere in Suffolk, which experienced this freak weather event on August 23.

The wind also flattened the outbuildings in which, until that very morning, had lived three contented pigs. They escaped being crushed because my cousin’s husband had roused them at five o’clock and driven them to the abattoir to meet their destiny as sausages.

I mused for some time as to whether this constituted good or bad luck. I also considered whether the tornado might be seen as retribution by a vegetarian deity, but dismissed the possibility since my cousin’s husband is a priest. I finally concluded that it was simply one of the very few classic lose-lose situations not currently involving a politician.

Last week, despite myself, I bought a copy of Tony Blair’s autobiography. It came with two dust jackets, and I exposed the second one with some trepidation, half expecting it to reveal the image of the shape-shifting giant lizard which, former sports commentator David Icke assures us, is the reality behind our royal family and political leaders.

The more I read of Blair, Mandelson and Brown, the more credible that theory becomes. However, the only difference between the two covers was that the inner one lacked the “Half Marked Price” sticker slapped on the first. This presumably slashes the take of the Royal British Legion, to which Mr Blair has announced that he is donating his profits.

Another classic lose-lose situation because it produced gales of abuse for his hypocrisy that were surely just as great as the howls that would have gone up if he had simply pocketed the money.

On the other hand, it is possible to have only limited sympathy for someone who, when asked if he has any regrets, skirts around those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that he is sorry he tried to abolish foxhunting. Oh, and maybe we should have a crack at Iran next.

Incidentally, I have not read a word of the book yet but the cover picture is haunting me as I type this and making me think that the Tories’ much derided “demon eyes” poster campaign of 1997 actually hit the nail squarely on the head.

I felt rather more sympathy for William Hague in his lose-lose dilemma with his young adviser. Share an expensive hotel room and face accusations of impropriety, or book two and be rubbished for wasting money? After the expenses scandal, what would you do?

The resulting personal statement was the second time Mr Hague has made me cringe, the first being his understandably jejune performance on Radio 4’s Any Questions immediately after his debut as a 16-year-old at the Conservative Party conference. The fact that this is not constantly replayed to embarrass him can only suggest that the BBC has wiped the tape.

My principal client regularly holds managers’ conferences at which all participants are expected to share hotel rooms with colleagues of the same sex. The implications for their reputations are apparently now mind-boggling. Except, of course, that totally different rules apply to politicians.

Back in the 1980s Spitting Image portrayed the press as pigs – trilby-wearing porkers spreading porkies. Today politicians have become the lowest form of human life. How we all hate them – and that’s before they have even started on the real spending cuts.

Dave Cameron will no doubt look back on his paternity leave with young Dandelion, or whatever she is called, as a brief lull before the tornado struck. I hope it does not take his roof off, but if I were him I would not bank upon it.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Who really deserves to be famous?

Last week, as every week, the front pages of our national newspapers were dominated by pictures of attractive women. Two in particular caught my eye.

The first was the “supermodel” Naomi Campbell, tragically inconvenienced by being summoned to the International Criminal Court to reveal her mind-numbing ignorance of Liberia, its president and the appearance of uncut diamonds.

The second was the British doctor Karen Woo, cruelly murdered as she went about her selfless work of helping the sick in one of the most godforsaken corners of Afghanistan.

Now, which of those two was more deserving of public recognition and reward? The question is surely a “no brainer” – or a “Naomi”, as I have just decided to rebrand it. But that is not how our system works.

We are told that most of the young these days aspire above all to be famous. Not famous for anything in particular, just a celebrity of some sort. And to think that, in my day, most schoolboys had no higher ambition than to be an engine driver. I certainly didn’t.

If fame is your desire, it is entirely logical to seek it by, say, taking your clothes off, caterwauling or kicking a ball about. Because, let’s face it, the people who try to do some good in the world are only going to make major headlines if they get killed or screw up in some important respect that can be presented as a “scandal”.

This is not the fault of the media, incidentally. They are merely in the business of selling newspapers or TV advertising by giving us, the public, what we want. Which is, apparently, a steady supply of people whose minimal talents we can relate to. We enjoy sharing their early triumphs, then usually turn ever so slightly jealous when they rub our noses in their wealth and reveal how wearisome they actually find us through their attitude to photographers and autograph hunters.

Next comes the best bit: revelling in their inevitable downfalls as they succumb to drink, drugs, financial overstretch, marital disagreements or what the tabloids like to call “The Big C” (which they always pledge to beat, but so rarely do).

None of this is new. It was going on when I was a lad. It was just that the sums to be reaped from attaining celebrity status were massively smaller - but then so were the rewards for being a chief executive or a successful banker.

In the olden days, they had local celebrities to keep them entertained; they sat on a gate in a smock with a straw in their mouth and were known as the village idiot. At the top end of the scale, one fool with a bladder on a stick might rise to the dizzy heights of court jester.

All are dust and ashes now – forgotten as surely as most of the front page celebrities of today will be in 30 years’ time.

I cannot really lecture on this, having done remarkably little good in my own life and clearly hankering after some public recognition by writing a newspaper column. But I would strongly urge the young to consider that their lives are going to be short and uncertain; that they only get one chance at them, so far as we know; and that it might, on the whole, be better to focus on leaving the world a better place than on winning a contract with Simon Cowell.

For as Lord Byron put it, “What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.” And, as one of the most notoriously scandalous mega-celebrities of his day, he surely knew what he was talking about.

Or, if you insist, follow the fine example of Naomi and simply wonder “Who’s Lord Byron?”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Wrong about Gordon and the Garden

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned. To find peace, I must now recant and proclaim to you all that Gordon Brown is an absolutely cracking chap, and the Alnwick Garden is not pants.

To be fair, the Gordon Brown I have in mind is not the famed genius who abolished boom and bust, but a distinguished local solicitor of the same name. He is one of the old school chums I wrote about last week (and not, I hasten to add, the one with a mail order bride).

His fate was apparently sealed by a late change of name from Stephen to Gordon on the grounds that the latter “could not be mucked about with”. This must have been something of an obsession in the North East of 1954, because I was christened Keith for precisely the same reason. Ironically my wife calls me “Keitho”, so it is surely only the fact that we had them cremated that prevents me from being kept awake at night by the sound of my parents turning in their graves.

Local Gordon has amused himself for the last few years by replying to emails intended for his slightly more famous namesake, including ones asking the then Prime Minister why, when his main workplace was in London and his constituency in Kirkcaldy, he also had an office in Newcastle.

Geordie Gordon has also been moved to write occasional letters to Downing Street, packed with helpful advice. Since he has a high regard for paternity, as the end approached he naturally urged the beleaguered PM to lay down his painful burden and focus on the joys of parenthood.

Advice which Scottish Gordon duly followed when he announced that he was stepping down to focus on the most important job in the world, being a father and husband. Thereby guaranteeing one last burst of unfavourable comment from those outraged that he had been sending other people’s sons to die in Afghanistan in a job that was not even his top priority.

As for the Alnwick Garden, I am not entirely sure that I have ever shared with you my long-standing view of it as a bit of a disappointment. Very occasionally, I do hear faint echoes of my mother’s advice: “If you haven’t got something nice to say, don’t say anything.”

But the fact is that I went not too long after it opened and comprehensively failed to see what the fuss was about. There was not much to see apart from a big, bare waterfall, and frankly that was not a patch on the other ducal cascade at Chatsworth. I came away scratching my head at where all the money invested in the project had actually gone.

Now, I know that I was not alone in this feeling because I mentioned in the village shop last week that I would be spending the afternoon in the Garden, over my own dead body, and was greeted with a general shaking of heads. “It is,” one customer observed, “the sort of place that people from out of the area want to go.”

I duly trudged along in a spirit of resignation and came out hugely uplifted. The planting has matured beautifully, the Treehouse is magnificent, and the treetop walkways huge fun if you come equipped with a baby buggy and a nervous wife.

My one-year-old was entranced by the water sculptures, the blossoms and the white doves billing and cooing by their cotes. In short, we had an absolutely terrific afternoon. I realise that this will not be news to many of you, but some of us never appreciate the treasures on our doorsteps and others, like me, simply need to give them another go.

It’s not a bad principle to apply when approaching most things in life.

Though not for you, obviously, Scottish Gordon.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Savage cuts - and even worse in store?

So, electors of Britain, how would you like your spending cuts? Bold, savage or draconian? What, you were hoping for the usual pre-election promises of more cash for schools ‘n’ hospitals, the faint hope of a high speed rail link in your lifetime, and the even dimmer one of a dual carriageway A1?

Forget it. It isn’t going to happen. Not at the coming election anyway.

No, it looks like your only choice is going to be deciding which party would do the best job of wielding the axe. Which, as Paul Linford was suggesting on Saturday, should hand an advantage to the Tories because they have a reputation for that sort of thing.

An unjustified reputation, as it happens, since Mrs Thatcher actually presided over an increase in the proportion of GDP absorbed by the British State, and record increases in health and welfare spending. But at least we all knew that, in her heart, she wanted to rein things back. That surely needs to be the default setting of anyone aspiring to govern the country. We have tried the alternative of the surprisingly open-handed Scotsman who wanted to spray our cash around like a drunk with a fire extinguisher at a crazy foam party, and we have seen precisely where that got us. In the proverbial, in case you had not noticed.

I can think of no better illustration of the madness of the current regime than the fact that yesterday I sent off the £250 voucher graciously sent to me to open a Child Trust Fund account. Apparently if the little fellow makes it to his seventh birthday they will send me the same again. Only they won’t, with any luck, because it will be one of the egregious wastes of public money that whoever wins the next election will abolish. Along with my £20 per week child benefit and the tax credits paid to couples living on what sound like perfectly comfortable incomes to me.

The Government needs to recognise that most of us can look after ourselves, thanks, and want nothing more than to be left alone. In particular, we have no desire to fork out yet more in tax to pay for bright sparks to dream up ever more complicated schemes to “help” us, which require thick, glossy brochures and well-staffed call centres to explain what on earth they are about.

We can also do without all their efforts to protect us from miniscule risks of harm through their ever-expanding web of databases, surveillance and checks.

I would pledge my vote today to anyone who guaranteed that they would scrap ID cards, the NHS IT scheme and the 2012 Olympics, withdraw from Afghanistan, allow a free and unbiased vote on our continued membership of the European Union, and focus welfare spending on those in genuine need. So, sadly, there is not going to be any candidate in 2010 that I really want to vote for, and many more of us are going to be in the same boat. Thus turnout continues to diminish and politicians keep wringing their hands wondering where they are going wrong.

And why 2010, incidentally? Why not now? According to the conspiracy theorists, because Lord Mandelson is on a mission to prop up Gordon Brown until the Irish have been brow-beaten into rethinking their opposition to the Lisbon Treaty, the new European Constitution is enacted and Tony Blair installed as President, calculating that “Dave” Cameron will lack the bottle to give the British people a referendum on the subject when he is faced with this fait accompli.

I am not normally a believer in conspiracy theories, but this one seems more plausible than most. Could all the talk of vicious spending cuts and tax increases simply be a ploy by the political class to take our minds off something even worse?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

How many lives is Afghanistan worth?

In my pessimistic way, I have often dreamt of returning to my house to find it a smoking ruin, as a result of some momentary inattention to detail by the fighter pilots who regularly train overhead.

Luckily, in my nightmare, a policeman always places a consoling hand on my shoulder and assures me that Biggles ejected safely before the plane came down. So that’s all right, then. And at least I feel reasonably sure that the RAF is on my side.

But what if foreign airmen – say Afghans, to pluck an example at random – came along and flattened my house with a bomb? It would also be an accident, “collateral damage” while they were trying to pick off some bloke with a beard and a funny hat who was holed up in a cave in the Cheviots while he masterminded terrorist atrocities overseas.

Would I laugh off their little mistake, accepting that it could happen to anyone, and feel eager to help them tracking down that nasty man? Or would it make me wish more power to his terrorist elbow to get my own back?

Perhaps it is perverse of me, but I suspect the latter. Which rather undermines the main plank of last week’s argument from both Gordon and Dave for our presence in Afghanistan, namely keeping terrorism off our own streets.

There is also the objective of making Afghanistan a functioning, Western-style democracy. After the triumph of the recent, not at all rigged or corrupt, Presidential elections, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office website assures us that “Parliamentary and district council elections are scheduled to take place in 2010.”

How strange that we should be spilling blood to create district councils in another country, when the Government has just casually abolished our own. I have tried manfully to picture Afghan councillors politely debating whether to move to fortnightly wheelie bin collections, and working on their expenses claims, but have enjoyed only limited success.

We are also training and supporting the Afghan armed forces until they are strong enough to take over from us, overlooking the detail that the country would never be able to generate the tax revenues needed to pay for them. We are clamping down on the world’s biggest supplier of opium, which will obviously be why drugs are now unobtainable on our streets. We are protecting the rights of women, by keeping out the evil Taliban, who threatened to kill girls seeking education, and replacing them with a cuddly, liberal regime which has just made it legal for men to starve wives who deny them their conjugal rights.

It was entirely understandable, after 9/11, that the world’s greatest military power should feel the urge to give someone a powerful retaliatory kicking, and attacking Afghanistan with its Al Qaeda bases at least made a little more sense than invading Iraq in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

But terrorists can and will operate anywhere (it is widely argued that the destruction of the World Trade Center was actually planned in Hamburg) and our continuing involvement in Afghanistan strikes me as being more likely to win converts to the anti-Western cause than to deter them.

In short, I question whether whatever we think we are doing in Afghanistan is worth the bones of one British soldier, let alone hundreds. And when we leave, whether in five years or 40, as one general recently predicted, I suspect that we will do so not with Kandahar District Council happily twinned with Sunderland and beating its recycling targets, but with our tails between our legs and no clear sense of achievement. Just like the Russians did in 1989. Not to mention the previous great power that barged in thinking it could sort the place out once and for all. Who was that again?

Oh yes, it was us.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Perhaps finally starting to grow up

Precisely 95 years ago today, Britain blundered into a world war that destroyed much of the youth and wealth of the nation to little obvious purpose.

Now we are engaged in an equally pointless conflict in Afghanistan that has already lasted almost twice as long as the Great War, while the Government seems to be devoting more energy to clawing back the compensation paid to wounded soldiers than to providing them with the helicopters and bomb-proof vehicles they need to avoid death or injury in the first place.

“Lions led by donkeys” once again. Little changes, except that individual flag-draped coffins now come home in numbers that can be counted on one’s fingers, rather than thousands of corpses being dumped in mass graves overseas. This, at least, is progress, as is the greater awareness of what is being done in our name promoted by such developments as television, the internet and, yes, social networking sites.

Which is why I was initially puzzled when I heard reports of the Archbishop of Westminster’s interview on Sunday, apparently suggesting that such sites are practically works of the devil. Closer examination revealed that he was reacting to the suicide of a 15-year-old girl, allegedly in response to hurtful remarks about her posted on Bebo.

This is undoubtedly a tragedy, though I have to confess that it moves me less than the fate of our soldiers, whether in 1914 or now. And I cannot help wondering whether 20,000 British troops would have been sent to their deaths on the first day of the Battle of the Somme if they had been able to keep in touch with home through Twitter and texts, rather than just through censored letters and postcards.

I also cannot help feeling that, sadly, some people have always been pushed over the edge through bullying. Little changes. Where the Archbishop has a point is that it is undoubtedly easier to be cruel by proxy, on a website or by text, than it is to do so face to face.

Like many shy people, I took to email with great enthusiasm and would much rather communicate with friends or clients by that means than by telephone, failing the ideal of sharing a bottle of wine with them over a good lunch. There is none of that textspeak nonsense for me, of course. It is all properly written, capitalised and punctuated, and checked before despatch.

Yet it remains impersonal and close to instantaneous. There is limited scope for second thoughts, and the recipient finds it hard to detect the sender’s mood or tone of voice. I still shudder when I think of the time I reduced a lady journalist to tears with a few pertinent observations on a piece she had written, which could have been delivered without offence over the phone. Luckily she remains a friend.

Here, too, comparatively little changes. My grandfather, an Alnwick garage proprietor, destroyed the family fortunes with an intemperate letter to the press about one of his business rivals, which led to a crippling libel action. Apparently he never forgave my aunt for typing and posting it in accordance with his instructions.

Like most things, social networking sites can be life enhancing if used in moderation and with due care and attention to the feelings of others. The crucial objections, so far as I am concerned, are that many users clearly find them as addictive as Class A drugs, and that they can be the most colossal waste of time. That is why I closed my Facebook account a couple of weeks ago. So far as I can tell, none of my “friends” has even noticed and I feel a strange sense of liberation. I would say that I finally feel as though I have grown up, but it is clearly much too early for that.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.