A Christian country?

Before the Easter holidays of 1965, my headmaster delivered a stern talk on the meaning of Good Friday to his class of ten-year-olds.

From this we learned that there were only two proper ways to spend the hours between 12 and 3 that sacred afternoon: in church or indoors at home engaged in quiet reflection on the sufferings of Christ.

We must on no account play noisily in our gardens or elsewhere, in ways that might impinge on the tranquillity of other believers.

I’d already felt obliged to lie when our teacher demanded an essay on “What I did at the weekend” and say that I went to church on Sunday, because every other child in my class claimed to do so. And it wasn’t even a Church school.

That lost England was unmistakably a Christian country and Good Friday was, appropriately enough, the deadest day of the year. No shops opened, no newspapers were published. No fun was to be had beyond the ritual consumption of hot cross buns, which were eaten that day and no other.

But what of the hornets’ nest stirred up by David Cameron’s insistence that Britain in 2014 is still “a Christian country”?

One might be inclined to take him more seriously if he didn’t issue similar messages about the importance he attaches to Judaism, Hinduism and Islam at Passover, Diwali and Eid, suggestive of a desperate sucking up to every faith community.

But, to be fair to the man, he has said similar things about Christianity before and, however harshly the unholy alliance of scientists, authors and comedians may rebuke him on the letters page of the Daily Telegraph, he is certainly correct in law.

The Christian faith of our head of state is proclaimed on every circulating coin and we have established State churches in both England and Scotland.

I go to church no more frequently than my parents did but, like them, I would unfailingly tick the “Christian” box on any form that was impertinent enough to enquire about my religious affiliation.

I was married in church using the 1662 Prayer Book (though five years on I am still waiting for my wife to obey me) and had my two sons baptised in the same style.

The late Sir John Mortimer encapsulated the position of many people like me very well when he described himself as “an atheist for Christ”.

I asked for a picture of John Mortimer in church and this came up; he must be thanking God

We love ancient churches and ritual. Few things delight us more than traditional Evensong sung by a cathedral choir.

Sadly our enthusiasm is rarely shared these days by the people who actually go to church, who seem more intent on ripping out the pews to installing comfy chairs, AV systems and coffee lounges.

When I enter a church I hope to hear comforting old words and sing familiar hymns, not to wave my arms in the air as some shining-eyed loon twangs a guitar.

So we have a small number of actual believers and a large number who consider themselves vaguely Christian and would like the church to continue to be there, doing what it always did and willing to receive us for life’s great rites of passage.

This view of the church is, in fact, curiously like my relationship with the Conservative party. I have been an inactive member all my adult life, attracted more by what the party stood for in the past than by anything it does today.

In that respect, I suppose, it is also akin to being a lifelong supporter of Newcastle United.

As it happens my membership is due for renewal and I was so disgusted with the whole Maria Miller expenses business that I felt seriously minded to pack it in.

Hence last week’s column, erroneously billed by one of my Journal colleagues as a bilious attack on the Labour party, when it was in fact a bilious attack on politicians in general.

Yet seeing the sort of people who oppose David Cameron’s latest pronouncement makes me waver. If only to ensure that I remain on his mailing list to see how he squares his support for traditional Christian values with his enthusiasm for gay marriage.

I wish you a very happy St George’s Day.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Social mobility - sadly, it cannot be a one-way street

Everyone seems to agree that social mobility is a good thing, but we focus only on increasing the opportunities to move upwards.

Though since we can’t all be dukes or plutocrats, this is clearly only possible if other people are simultaneously moving in the opposite direction.

The post-war political settlement sought to achieve this with punitive death duties on the rich, balancing the grammar school ladder of opportunity for clever children from poorer backgrounds.

Direct grant schools like Newcastle RGS were, in the words of one Cambridge don I knew, “Powerful engines for turning lower-middle-class boys living in the north of England into upper-middle-class men living in the south.”

Which was perfectly true. Remarkably few of my own Oxbridge-educated RGS contemporaries ever returned to live in the North East.

Though this was balanced by the Durham and Newcastle graduates of my acquaintance who were born in the south, but loved this region so much that they could never bring themselves to leave.

I bucked the trend and returned to Northumberland because we Hanns don’t really do mobility. We have been hanging around the Alnwick area since at least the 1600s, and quite possibly longer (but we were not socially elevated enough for me to be sure).

Mrs Hann, on the other hand, is definitely from mobile stock, her immediate antecedents being Iranian or, as she prefers, Persian (because it conjures up warm images of cats and carpets, rather than bearded fanatics).

Having said that, there might be a touch of the fanatic here ...

She also continues to believe that holidays are best taken abroad, despite the tremendous break we enjoyed in Northumberland earlier this month.

Nevertheless, I would unhesitatingly place my wife in the “credit” column in the debate about that aspect of social mobility known as immigration. Though that, too, must come with the caveat that the entire human race cannot live in the UK, and those moving inwards and upwards must be balanced by others heading down and out.

These reflections are inspired by the fact that I am facing, with extreme reluctance, some potential moving of my own. I put my much-loved Northumberland house, with its marvellous views of the Cheviots and Simonside, on the market six weeks ago.

I did so because of the remorseless logic that my elder son starts school in Cheshire in a week’s time. And, once he does, our ability to spend time in the North East as a family will be greatly reduced.

It also reflects the lack of forward planning that can frustrate even the most determined would-be social climber.

The American songwriter Eubie Blake famously observed in his 90s: “If I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.” Similarly, if I had foreseen that I would have two young sons at close to what I always fondly imagined as my retirement age, I’d have taken care to save some cash rather than squandering it all on opera tickets and champagne (the rest, as George Best once said, I simply wasted).

On the plus side, this profligacy has equipped me to write the new edition of The Bluffer’s Guide to Opera, available from all good bookshops and tax-evading online dealerships just as soon as the ink dries.

So I have, late in life, finally achieved my ambition of getting a book into print, albeit not the blockbuster comic novel I have squandered a lifetime pretending to be writing.

I also find that I am deriving steadily increasing satisfaction from fatherhood, which may finally be edging me towards that elusive condition known as happiness. Which I already knew, from my wide-ranging acquaintance with both multi-millionaires and the comparatively poor, has nothing whatsoever to do with the size of one’s bank balance. (Though at least the millionaires get to be miserable in comfort.)

To date there has been an encouraging lack of interest in my house, though I await my estate agent’s feedback on today’s scheduled viewing with appropriate trepidation.

If it does sell, so far as I am concerned, it will definitely represent downward mobility of the worst sort, but at least it creates a golden opportunity for someone else to move up in the world. Does anyone fancy placing their foot upon the ladder?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

There is nothing remotely sexy about turning into a sexagenarian

It is the role of the old to dispense wisdom to the young, and the nature of the young not to pay much if any attention.

I cannot recall exactly when I passed the tipping point between having all the time in the world and knowing that I was about to hit a brick wall at high speed, but it must have been some time in the last decade.

The sensation is beautifully summarised in a Gary Larson cartoon of a sprightly fellow stepping of a kerb with a merry tune on his lips, then lying face down on the road with tyre marks across his back. With the caption: “The old age truck: you never see it coming”.

All of which came back to me very forcefully on Saturday at a grand 60th birthday dinner in Cambridge, where our host gave an excellent speech expressing his personal amazement at reaching this milestone, and counselling his children and their contemporaries to make the most of their time “because it will run through your fingers like grains of sand”.

Truer words were never spoken. I have succeeded in wasting most of my own life through a peculiar combination of conscientiousness and sheer bone idleness, meaning that I worked reasonably hard at narrowly defined tasks, whether schoolwork or paid employment, and shamefully neglected my personal relationships and leisure opportunities.

The only saving grace for me was an abortive attempt to retire at 50, which finally gave me the time and energy to find a wife (or, rather, allow a wife to find me) and produce two children. Because “father of” is going to provide much better reading on my gravestone than “half competent PR man, failed novelist and sometime columnist for The Journal”.

I started school a year earlier than most Geordie children in the late 1950s, and had my education accelerated by a further year through a madcap “flyer” scheme at the Royal Grammar School designed to get their brighter pupils to university 12 months earlier, for reasons never successfully explained to me or, I strongly suspect, anyone else.

As a result, many of my school and university contemporaries are a year or two older than I am, and have already embarked upon their seventh decades. It is easy to discourage them by saying: “So, old chum, if your life is a week, do you realise this is now Sunday?”

It is striking, therefore, that this weekend’s was the first and only invitation to a 60th birthday celebration that I have ever received. It is probably no coincidence that it came from a man who was a dear friend at Akhurst school from 1958-62, but then completely disappeared from my life until a couple of years ago. As a result, he lacked the crucial knowledge of how much of an asset I am likely to prove at a dinner, or indeed any other social occasion.

Still, I enjoyed myself and Mrs Hann can be relied upon to be the life and soul of almost any party, so I hope that this column may serve as a hint to anyone else drawing up a similar invitation list to at least think about sticking us on it.

I shall now begin to think seriously about how to mark my own diamond jubilee in June 2014, a date which I long had ringed in my calendar as the one on which I would write my last press release and put my feet up for good. A plan that responsibility for two very small boys clearly now requires me to put on hold for another couple of decades.

I was reminded, dawdling through Cambridge on a rainy afternoon, that the undergraduate society at the oldest college, Peterhouse, calls itself “The Sex Club” in honour of the college’s sexcentenary in 1884.

Cambridge: always providing food for thought

Inspired by this, I shall design suitable invitations to celebrate my becoming a sexagenarian. If nothing else, beautifully embossed cards advertising “The Keith Hann Sex Party” should keep my costs down by ensuring an absolutely minimal number of positive RSVPs, and those from people whose sight is too dim to read the words properly. Though I suppose there might be quite a few of those …

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Is it time for politicians to get more intimate with Hoares?

Barclays not only gave me my first bank account, but my first pay slip, too.

In 1972, between school and university, I spent six happy months working for them at 40 Clayton Street West in Newcastle: a branch, like so many hundreds of others around the country, long since closed.

The Barclays branch in Belford, Northumberland: RIP

I was there because, in yet another disgraceful example of privileged networking, the Royal Grammar School traditionally placed a couple of its less brilliant Oxbridge entrants with Barclays for a spot of work experience.

I spent my initial weeks shuffling cheques in the company of a bevy of mini-skirted young women in the first floor “machine room”, home to a single, gigantic adding contraption. Then I graduated to being allowed to serve customers at the counter.

The manager was a figure so stratospherically important that I think I spoke to him twice during my time in his branch, on both occasions to explain who I was and why I was there.

The experience did give me a nerdish lifelong interest in banking. At weekends, I would drive around Northumberland with my school chums, admiring particularly attractive banking outposts and reflecting that there would be many worse fates than to be a rural bank manager: a respected figure in the community, comfortably if not excessively rewarded, getting to know one’s customers as a good banker should.

The still functioning branch of Barclays (formerly North Eastern Bank) in Rothbury, Northumberland

But when it came to the end of my attachment and I had to write a letter to the local directors of Barclays thanking them for the experience and explaining whether I hoped to return to the bank after university, I felt obliged to say “no”.

Mainly because, in those days, I dreamt of being a writer or a bachelor don, holed up in a book-lined room coining incomprehensible academic quips over a glass of dry sherry.

With the benefit of hindsight, I would have been far better employed stamping cheques and counting banknotes – and who knows where it might have led? The late Sir Derek Wanless, only a few years ahead of me at the RGS, started his career as a humble clerk at the NatWest.

Though admittedly that was a more meritocratic institution than Barclays, where in those days the top job was invariably reserved for a descendant of one of its founding Quaker families, with a name like Barclay, Bevan or Tuke.

How it used to be

Fast forward 40 years, and traditional branch banking is all but dead. It is impossible to speak to a human being at the bank where one’s account is nominally held, unless one pitches up in person. Nearly every paper-shuffling task I learned to perform has been computerised, centralised and then exported to India in the name of efficiency.

Interest rates on savings are practically non-existent and the fact that they remain high on loans is of limited relevance given that virtually no individual or business can get one. Not least because no one with what little remains of local knowledge or customer understanding can apparently be trusted to take sensible decisions.

It is clearly far better to be “risk averse” and concentrate all the power and money in a tower at Canary Wharf, where instead of helping a budding entrepreneur to buy some machine tools, it can all be splurged on stratospheric rewards for the tiny few charged with maximising returns by the equivalent of sticking most of the bank’s capital on an outsider in the 3.30 at Pontefract.

The only traditional bank left in Britain is called C Hoare & Co, and in 340 years in business it has magnificently grown from a single branch in London to a grand total of two. It is still owned by the founding family, in an unlimited liability partnership: always a powerful constraint against reckless adventures.

There are obvious risks in suggesting that politicians should get more intimate with Hoares. But when Ed Miliband talks, sensibly enough, about the desirability of more new “challenger banks”, I suggest that he takes a long, hard look at replicating this business model.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Hann Perspective: Human Resources

The nastiest piece of work I have ever had the misfortune to encounter called himself a director of human resources. Short, stocky and bullet-headed, he exuded the poorly repressed anger of a fanatical rugby forward who has had his career cut short for causing one fatality too many in the scrum.

I only listened to him for about ten minutes, but he managed to pack into them more gratuitous abuse than I would have thought humanly possible – and I write that as something of an expert at dishing it out myself. He even beat the colourful soliloquies on my total inadequacy dispensed each week by my would-be PT instructors at the Royal Grammar School 40-odd years ago.

Naturally I stood up and told him where he could stick his consultancy agreement. So ended what had been, until then, a harmonious relationship of more than two decades with one of my larger and more profitable clients.

It was only as I was sitting on the train home, enjoying my sense of liberation, that I realised how easily I had fallen into his trap. The man had been engaged to undertake a spot of “downsizing”, and reducing the impressionable to jelly with an exaggerated account of their deficiencies was provoking widespread resignations and so saving the company a fortune in redundancy pay. No doubt he pocketed a significant performance-related bonus for his excellent work.

The irony was that he wasn’t actually meant to fire me, as subsequent messages from his superiors made clear. He did it partly because he had summoned the wrong PR adviser to a meeting, but mainly because he could not stop himself. He just adored his work. Come to think of it, he bore a striking resemblance to that deranged American commander in Apocalypse Now who loved “the smell of napalm in the morning”.

The HR Director of a typical British food company

At least I could understand the blunt Anglo-Saxon of this uncharacteristically non-PC HR director. Unlike the first time I ever met anyone who professed to work in “human resources”. This was back in the 1980s over lunch with a departmental head and his deputy, with a view to conveying their viewpoint in a forthcoming annual report.

I was accompanied by a member of their company’s finance team, which was lucky because his presence enabled me to escape the conviction that I had wandered into a parallel universe. Comparing notes afterwards, it swiftly became clear that neither of us had understood a word that the HR supremos had said.

I wrote a page of gibberish, peppered with authentically modish buzzwords, which I intended principally as a joke. To my surprise, the HR department told me that I had captured their ethos to perfection.

This was in a company, I feel compelled to add, that also boasted a famously incomprehensible finance director. Recognising that only a fine line separates genius from lunacy, his board colleagues concluded that his oracular pronouncements denoted utter brilliance. Sadly his later career demonstrated that this was a serious misinterpretation of the facts.

To this day I baulk at writing about employees as “human resources”. They are people. Colleagues, if you wish. Partners, if you can back up that claim with real participation in the style of John Lewis. Staff, if you must. But never “resources”, which is a noun that surely sits naturally only with the verb “exploit”.

And just because it is a terrible, numbing cliché to say that people are the most important assets of any company (with the possible exception of Acme Elephant Hire), it does not alter the fact that it is profoundly true.

Yes, your people need training if they are to do their jobs properly, but surely the answer is to keep it relevant and succinct. Ideally dispensed by someone who has made a huge success of actually doing the job in question, rather than devoting themselves to “blue sky thinking” and dispensing advice.

This might seem rich coming from a PR man, though nothing has ever worried me more than being shown around a business and thinking that even I could run it better than the incumbent management (a judgement that subsequent developments have usually tended to prove correct).

The happiest and most successful companies I know have all been run by people with a touch of madness in their make-up. It takes one to know one, which is no doubt why we got on so well. Their insanity tended to manifest itself in a willingness to take risks and to defy conventional wisdom.

Such organisations are likely to take a more than averagely relaxed approach to corporate governance and the best of them don’t have anything to do with “human resources”. They have people, and they treat them with care and consideration, reward them fairly, recognise their successes and have among their corporate objectives one very important intangible: having fun.

Keith Hann is a PR consultant who is barely human, let alone a resource – www.keithhann.com

Originally published in nebusiness magazine, The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Geordies lead the world in judging

Say what you like about the North East, we certainly know our stuff when it comes to the business of judging.

From the late Lord Chief Justice Taylor in the High Court to the nation’s sweetheart Cheryl Cole on The X Factor, Geordies have repeatedly proved their ability to weigh the evidence and come to the right conclusion. Or a conclusion, at any rate, in the case of the TV talent show.

Nor is this by any means a new phenomenon. The two Royal Grammar School educated Scott brothers, sons of a Newcastle coal merchant, both became distinguished judges, and were raised to the peerage in the nineteenth century as Lords Stowell and Eldon – the latter becoming famous as one of England’s longest-serving and most reactionary Lord Chancellors.

The great Eldon. Worth it? How dare you, sir?

Let us pause to wonder just how long it will be before Cheryl has a street full of ethnic eateries or a shopping centre named after her.

Peter Cook’s famous sketch in which he lamented that he had to become a coal miner rather than a judge because he “never had the Latin for the judging” has clearly been overtaken by events. Which is handy given both the limited opportunities for mining in today’s North East and Cook’s astute observation that “I would much prefer to be a judge than a coal miner because of the absence of falling coal.”

There were certainly no witty classical allusions in the quotes attributed last week to the latest addition to the pantheon of Northumbrian judicial greatness, Judge Beatrice Bolton of Rothbury, after her conviction at Carlisle Magistrates’ Court for failing to control her dangerous dog.

Judge Beatrice. Worth it? F*** off!

In fact, she used precisely the words that so often spring to mind when her more senior colleagues make pronouncements involving “human rights”, for example when they conclude that it is not possible to deport someone who has, say, knifed a headmaster to death or snuffed out a 12-year-old girl’s life in a hit-and-run incident.

Yes, it is highly amusing to hear a dispenser of justice reacting so badly when she experiences the rough end of it herself. Almost as perfectly ironic, in fact, as reading Julian Assange’s squeals of protest at the leaks about the nature of the sex crimes alleged against him in Sweden.

A saying popular with my parents sprang to mind: “If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out.”

But it would be sad, I feel, for such an admirably plain speaker to be deprived of her position because of one inappropriate outburst. After all, some of our greatest judges have made grave mistakes and been gone on to redeem themselves. Just think of Wor Cheryl’s drunken fracas with that Guildford lavatory attendant, for a start.

Wor Cheryl. Woath it? Coase Ah am, pet.

While Lord Eldon hardly got his career off to the most promising or conventional of starts by eloping from Sandhill with the banker’s daughter Bessie Surtees.

If, God forbid, I ever find myself standing in the dock before one of Her Majesty’s justices or Simon Cowell’s talent scouts, I would be happy to think that I was appearing before a fallible human being like myself, who would see the funny side when I reacted with an outburst of choice language on being sent down or kicked off the show in favour of someone even less talented than myself.

Yes, I really believe that such people do exist, but then I believed in Santa Claus until I was eight.

In fact, I would not mind having a go at training for a crack at this judging lark myself, but for the fact that the Government has just decided to close down all our local magistrates’ courts. Given my minimal knowledge of leeks, dogs, dressed sticks and singing, and with beauty contests ruled out on the grounds of political correctness, I wonder where I should start?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

 Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Singing the praises of the musical

I first realised that Simon Cowell had achieved world domination when I invited two cultured friends to an opera and they replied “We can’t possibly go out that night – it’s the start of The X-Factor!”

Even more amazingly, the opera concerned was one of those summer country house affairs, which means that Mr Cowell’s TV money-making machine must have been churning away every weekend from balmy late August through to polar mid-December.

The strangest thing to me was that I knew for a fact that my friends possessed one of those Sky Plus Box gizmos and could perfectly well have watched the show later, with the added bonus of being able to fast-forward through the ads. Apparently, though, it’s just not the same.

Indeed, for complete satisfaction I understand that you must not only see these things live, but share your views of them with the world every few minutes via Twitter and Facebook. A great service for the likes of me, because an occasional glance at these has enabled me to pretend to be in touch with what is going on not only on The X-Factor, but also The Apprentice, Strictly Come Dancing and I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here without wasting great chunks of my life actually watching them.

Not that I have anything against popular entertainment. I spent almost every evening last week glued to the unfolding drama that was the 50th anniversary of Coronation Street, even though ITV had done their utmost to drain it of any surprises by emailing me months beforehand with previews of their tram crash and details of which actors had decided to leave the series or been sacked by its new producer.

Only on Wednesday did I rely on my old-fashioned video recorder to keep me up to date as I slithered through the snow-covered streets of Jesmond to see the Royal Grammar School’s production of Oklahoma! A show I had always viewed with the utmost suspicion because it was my mother’s favourite, causing her to go slightly weak-kneed whenever Edmund Hockridge appeared on TV variety shows singing the one about the surrey with a fringe on top.

I had to dig my way into my house before I went out to the show

Hoping the performance would take my mind off the weight of snow on my conservatory roof

 In the early 1980s a production of Oklahoma! at the Palace Theatre tempted mum to visit London for the first time since she had accompanied her father there on a business trip some 60 years earlier. I took her to the show over my own dead body and absolutely loved it, and have been a keen fan of musicals ever since.

I have seen other professional stage productions of Oklahoma!, along with the classic film, but the energy and enthusiasm of the 16 to 18-year-olds of the RGS carried all before them. I sat with a big, silly grin on my face from the opening bars of the overture to the closing reprise of the title song, and drove home humming happily.

The brilliant cast ... and a probable breach of the Data Protection Act, now I come to think of it

A fortnight's snow layered like something out of a geology lesson

 Four days earlier I had spent rather a lot of money to see the glamorous diva Angela Gheorghiu perform the title role in the operatic rarity Adriana Lecouvreur to a packed house at Covent Garden. I enjoyed it, but Oklahoma! was infinitely greater fun – and yet there were empty seats in the RGS auditorium.

It is good to be reminded that there is a wealth of talent all around us, both amateur and professional, and that a live show on stage provides a true reality and immediacy that television can never match. So if your life is a desert now that The X Factor is over, why not try taking in a different sort of pantomime at your local theatre or village hall? You could even extend the slapstick beyond the stage by trying to use your iPhone to post irritatingly frequent updates on the performance for your followers on Twitter.

All together now: “Oh no, you couldn’t!”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Risk and elitism in the firing line

All-out war continues, not just in Afghanistan, but against domestic enemies as diverse as risk, elitism, racism, sexism, obesity and drunkenness. Almost the complete range of my interests and enthusiasms, in fact.

I was powerfully reminded of the campaign to eliminate risk by a report on Saturday that no fewer than nine fire engines had raced to Newcastle’s Mansion House so that firefighters (not, God forbid, firemen) in gas-tight suits could deal with a deadly seepage of mercury from an antique clock.

Forty years ago, just across Osborne Road at the Royal Grammar School, my schoolmates and I regularly amused ourselves by shunting globules of mercury around the railway lines carved in the ancient desks of the science department by previous generations of bored youths. Clearly we are lucky to be alive.

I returned to the school on Friday, in response to a kind invitation to lunch from its governors, and found that the passage of time had not erased a feeling of mild foreboding on entering the premises.

I arrived on the dot of 12.30 to avoid the risk of being slammed in late detention, carefully checked that my tie and trousers were properly fastened, and felt vaguely guilty that I was not wearing a crested blue cap.

Perhaps it is because the place has undergone such a comprehensive physical transformation since I left in 1971 that I feel strongly tempted to send my own son there, when he reaches the appropriate age in around 2017. All I will need is a full-time job in the North East paying enough to cover the fees, with a minimum retirement age of 75. All offers gratefully received.

My own parents faced no comparable concerns, because I enjoyed a Northumberland County Council scholarship; one of those devices designed to promote social mobility (still very good, apparently) but abolished because they were also redolent of elitism (now thoroughly bad).

On Sunday, my wife and I found another front opened in the war against risk at the church where we were married, which had been transformed into a building site. Contractors were busily levelling the floor, which had served perfectly well for two or three hundred years, because Elfin Safety now deemed it to pose an unacceptable “trip hazard”.

Later that day, I found myself in a restaurant opposite a man who shockingly observed of the passers-by “There are a lot of foreigners around here.” Ordinarily this would have been the cue for a visit from the diversity awareness police, but it merely raised a slightly puzzled laugh because the speaker was my Iranian father-in-law. A man so comprehensively assimilated that he answers the question of whether he prefers to be known as Iranian or Persian with “Actually, I prefer to be called British.”

I did not dare to ask how he felt about the news that the BNP was now prepared to admit (“welcome” might be pushing it, I guess) ethnic minority members. But I was interested to find that my wife’s uncle thoroughly approved of some distinctly non-PC remarks I had posted on my blog about that Iranian “criminal in uniform” Ali Dizaei, who rose almost to the top of the Metropolitan Police by relentlessly playing the “racism” card against anyone who stood in his way, and somehow became president of the Black Police Association despite what many might have seen as the fatal handicap of not being the least bit black.

This Persian feast was not quite the romantic meal à deux I had envisaged for my first Valentine’s Day as a married man, but it certainly beat the previous 40 years of moodily chewing a TV dinner for one, and regretting the lack of mawkish greetings cards on my mantelpiece.

Yes, even I am prepared to concede that, once in while, some things do change for the better.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.