For God and the Empire

Events in the UK and Vanuatu have both troubled my conscience in the last week.

Here the cause was Mothering Sunday, an event I had gladly filed in the dustbin of personal history after my mother died in 1992.

But then along came children, very late in life, and a sense of expectation in the household that they, unguided, were never likely to fulfil. So I ended up once again buying flowers and cards, and organising jolly lunch parties.

The five-year-old endeared himself to me on Friday evening when I outlined my plans for the weekend, and he sighed: “Why is it never Daddy’s day?”

Bringing him up to par with his three-year-old brother, who had played an absolute blinder that morning by escorting his mother to the checkout in Next yelling: “Put that back, Mummy! You don’t need another handbag!”

So naturally it was chocolate treats all round when I took them to buy their Mother’s Day cards and gifts on Saturday, as a step towards phasing myself out of the whole process.

The woman on the till fell into my clutches like a dozy bluebottle landing in a Venus flytrap. “Ooh, aren’t you lucky to have such an indulgent Grandpa!” she purred.

“I’m not their Grandpa,” I replied, inserting a sinister pause to savour the rising panic in her eyes before adding, “I’m their Dad.”

This always elicits a flood of apologies and explanations that can only make things worse, like trying to extricate yourself from the hole of asking a fat woman “When’s it due?”

I enjoyed it all immensely. But as I struggled to cook our Sunday roast (not too bad, but not as good as Mummy’s, which is surely how it should be) I did reflect on how much I take for granted.

So much so that I went back to my wedding vows and checked how I was doing. We had the 1662 full Monty, avoidance of fornication and all. My results were surprisingly good.

I may be falling a bit short on the “honour her” front, and will try to do better in future, but nothing like as short as Mrs Hann has consistently fallen in the small matter of “obey”.

A vow she was foolishly induced to make, along with “serve”, by the vicar’s assurance that the words had different meanings in 1662 and 2009. I think he probably had his fingers crossed at the time.

Anyway, what has all this got to do with Vanuatu? A place of which you had almost certainly never heard until it was flattened by Cyclone Pam.

Until 1980 Vanuatu was known as the New Hebrides, despite bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the Scottish originals, and was that rarest of colonial hybrids: an Anglo-French condominium (no, not an apartment) with two sets of administrators, speaking two different languages, and a similar choice of laws.

They didn’t go quite as far as driving on opposite sides of the road on alternate days, but everything else about the set-up seems to have been as absurd as you might imagine.

I know this because 39 years ago I started a PhD on British imperial history. Not long afterwards I was awarded a scholarship restricted to students “who intend to go on to devote their lives to the service of the British Empire”.

Reader, I have plainly failed in that duty. Though I can cite the reasonably good excuse that the British Empire had largely disappeared before I could get around to devoting myself to it.

What makes it worse is that one of my contemporaries did fulfil what should have been my mission. He joined the colonial service at its last gasp in the New Hebrides and was killed there when a camping stove exploded.

But for the subsequent Falklands War, I might have been able to cite him as the last person to lay down his life for the Empire on which the sun never set.

I can find no trace on the internet of his sacrifice, but if anyone ever deserved an MBE (Motto: For God and the Empire) it was surely he. Sadly, there is probably an equal chance of me getting one for cooking Sunday lunch.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Once again the big winner is apathy

It is always a delight to see any political idea favoured by Eddie Izzard being decisively punted into oblivion, so last week saw the Hann household rejoicing for the second Friday in succession.

No

And who could resist a little surge of local pride on discovering that the North East had led the field in saying no to AV, with a majority of 71.9%?

A mere handful of places said “yes”: Oxford, Cambridge, a few smug inner London boroughs and their Edinburgh and Glasgow counterparts. Tempting me to the conclusion that we need never go to the trouble and expense of a national referendum ever again. Just obtain the newspaper wholesalers’ data on where The Guardian sells most strongly, hold local polls there, then do precisely the opposite of whatever they vote for. We won’t go too far wrong.

Though perhaps we should have one last national referendum on Scottish independence first. And I do mean a national referendum. How can you dissolve a marriage without consulting both of the contracting parties? Allowing Scotland alone to vote on its future would be like letting the children decide on their party guest list and entertainment without consulting the adults who actually have to pay for it.

But I am ignoring the pachyderm in the living quarters, which is this. Although pundits assure us that turnout in the AV referendum exceeded expectations, apathy was once again the big winner on polling day. A thumping 58% of my compatriots still found something more important to do than pootling down to their local school or village hall, and marking an “X” on a bit of paper.

How could this lot fail to inspire?

All right, it’s not very intellectually challenging and it doesn’t promise the same sort of returns as filling in a lottery slip, but in the Middle East people are currently dying for the right to do just this. How can you possibly conclude that it is more important to be scratching yourself on the sofa in front of Loose Women or The Jeremy Kyle Show?

Politics matter. Which celebrity is shagging which lady of easy virtue who previously enjoyed relations with which Premiership footballer does not.

Another thing that matters is our ability to hold our heads up in the world by adhering to certain standards of decency and fair play. From the invention of concentration camps in the Boer War to the recent revelations about our treatment of Mau Mau prisoners in Kenya, the reputation of the British Empire is certainly not an unsullied one.

But have the Americans, who worked so hard to bring our Empire to a conclusion, led us onto the broad sunlit uplands of probity and transparency?

Their support of assorted murderous tyrannies around the world, and their use of “extraordinary rendition”, extra-territorial detention camps, the extraction of information by torture and – yes, their ham-fisted inability to get their story straight about the cold-blooded killing of their public enemy number one in Abbotabad last week – all lead me to the conclusion that the world was a rather better and safer place when those chaps from Whitehall were in charge of it.

It’s not that I have any sympathy for Osama bin Laden, though his “command and control centre” looked to me rather more like a teenager’s bedroom that had been handed over to an OAP as part of a Channel 4 reality life swap show. But why would anyone conceive and execute the operation against him in a way that seems specifically designed to give conspiracy theorists a field day?

Latest version of events: the White House execution team hold their breath as the UK AV referendum results come in

The only thing that troubles me about my misgivings is that I have already found them shared by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and will no doubt soon find myself allied with the entire readership of The Guardian, including Eddie Izzard. So as you were, Mr President. Most reluctantly, Operation Geronimo gets my vote.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.