Inspired by an irascible 90-year-old

It is my birthday on Friday and I am most definitely feeling my age, even though it will be another three years before I qualify for a bus pass.

No, make that seven years. Because I have just checked the Government’s online ready reckoner of my entitlements, which increasingly resemble one of those carrots suspended in front of a donkey on a long stick.

This seems odd, given that railway booking clerks have been raising their voices and enunciating “Have you got a railcard?” with painful clarity for at least a decade now. The last such encounter was on the Welsh Highland Railway a couple of weeks ago, when the conductor offered us “two seniors and an adult” after apparently mistaking me for the husband of my 86-year-old aunt.

You might think it foolish to make a fuss, but the railway proved to have the unusual policy of charging more for its concessionary fares than for the ordinary ones. So I was moderately cheered until we reached the terminus and I took my small son into the gift shop, where the bloke behind the counter immediately addressed me as “Granddad”.

Morale was not improved when I got home and opened a cheery letter from my doctor containing a nine point questionnaire on just how depressed I feel about being on her coronary heart disease register. As a matter of fact, until I opened my mail I was feeling less miserable than I have been for most of the last 40 years. Now, on the other hand …

At least there is the chance that I may be gloriously Raptured on Harold Camping’s revised date of October 21 this year, or when the Mayan calendar runs out on December 21, 2012. Or there is the long-standing prediction by deathclock.com that I will be handing in my dinner pail on February 4, 2012, though the credibility of this received a severe knock when my brother took the self-same test and it told him that he had been dead for a decade already.

But what of the alternative of getting seriously old, as opposed to just looking it as I evidently do? Could there be a finer role model for any of us than HRH The Duke of Edinburgh, 90 on June 10, who just keeps beggaring on, as Churchill almost put it? One week it’s the State Visit to Ireland, the next it’s the Obamas in London. Both fraught with a huge range of risks, not least the potential for some mind-bogglingly inappropriate asides, yet both adjudged diplomatic triumphs.

My hero

One of the very few bits of television I watched last week was Alan Titchmarsh’s epic interview with the Duke, which had clearly been edited to eliminate HRH’s initial reply to each of the timid gardener’s queries: “What a blanking stupid question!” It was like watching a crocodile toy with a chihuahua.

How much more fun it would be to let His Royal Highness loose on a Paxman or a Humphrys, and see these legendarily tough interviewers being tossed, gored and trampled by a man who truly has nothing to gain by winning them over. And who apparently cares so little for his own reputation that even when presented with an open goal – the chance to take credit for a genuinely great innovation, The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award – modestly snapped that he had merely lent it his name.

I have a friend who repeatedly asserts that there is no such thing as a happy 90-year-old (readers please feel free to correct him). And on the evidence of Alan Titchmarsh’s cringeworthy efforts, there is probably no right thing to say to Prince Philip. Nevertheless I wish him a very happy birthday, and many more. Like the Royal Yacht, he is a unique asset who will be sorely missed when he is gone.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Speaking up for my son and heir

On my birthday tomorrow I shall be just five years short of receiving a bus pass, and only 30 days away from the scheduled birth of my first child. His inheritance is therefore much on my mind.

To say that I never expected to breed would be an understatement worthy to rank alongside “Michael Martin wasn’t the best-ever Speaker of the House of Commons”. My traditional attitude mirrored that of Philip Larkin’s famous poem with the unprintable first line, that went on to the doleful pronouncement that “Man hands on misery to man.”

Defenders of Mr Martin always asserted that his detractors were motivated by snobbery, but my own objections had much more to do with his catastrophic inadequacy. That word “Speaker” in the job title should surely have been a bit of a clue that the ideal candidate is not completely inarticulate. I doubt that Mr Martin was even qualified to be a “The.”

To me, the most objectionable thing about the man was the frequently repeated story of how his “dream” was to hang on to the next election so that his son could inherit his safe Labour seat in Glasgow. How eighteenth century is that?

I also keep reading that it is Lord Mandelson’s ambition to become Foreign Secretary so that he can follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, Herbert Morrison. The Business Secretary, incidentally, made a little bit of history for me last week when he was introduced by a radio interviewer as “Peter Mandelson” and immediately insisted that he should be addressed as “Lord”. Every other peer I have met nudges people in the opposite direction. His attitude seems appropriately redolent of the last days of the Ancien Régime.

It should perhaps be no surprise that Conservative MP Nick Hurd is the fourth generation of his family to sit in the House of Commons; Tories were traditionally supposed to believe in that sort of thing. But Hilary Armstrong and Hilary Benn on the Labour benches have far more in common than their first name; they are both also the children of MPs. Labour turned to Gwyneth Dunwoody’s daughter Tamsin to defend her late mother’s seat in a by-election last year, while with splendid irony Mr Blair’s ejection of most of the hereditary members of the House of Lords was masterminded by Baroness Jay, the daughter of Jim Callaghan.

Consider the traditionally left-leaning callings such as acting and the media, and the same dynastic principles apply. Just look up Polly Toynbee on Wikipedia.

There is nothing wrong with this, in my view. I would like my son to have the same sort of cushy, desk-bound life that I have enjoyed, rather than doing something arduous, dangerous and badly paid.

What upsets me is hypocrisy: people who preach equality of opportunity while ensuring that their own offspring are fast-tracked up the ladder. These are the same individuals who fought so hard to ensure that genuine avenues of advancement for the talented children of the poor, like state grammar schools, were done away with; and who, when they are found with their hands in the till of the House of Commons, say that what we need is radical constitutional reform, starting with an elected House of Lords.

I say that at least you know where you are with a duke, and can reasonably hope that someone who owns half a county isn’t going to bother fiddling his travelling expenses. Now that the Hann genes surprisingly look set to last another generation, I am seriously thinking of devoting my declining years to a crusade for honest recognition that the hereditary principle has always been with us, and always will be. I shall seek no reward but a modest bauble to pass on to my son; Viscount Callaly has a pleasant ring to it.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.