Amen to that, Brother Uh-Oh

Within a week of my elder son starting school, 127 so-called education experts had clubbed together to warn me that I was ruining his life.

Because where we are going wrong in the UK, apparently, is sending children to school at the age of four. We should be waiting until they are six or seven before starting their formal education, as they do in Scandinavian countries that “consistently achieve better educational results as well as higher levels of wellbeing”.

To take this debate forward, I thought it might be helpful to obtain the views of a consumer. Charlie, aged 4¼, reports that he loves school so much that he would like to sleep there and not bother coming home.

(An opinion which raised my hopes of packing him off to boarding school in a year or two, if only I could overcome his mother’s veto and land a major lottery win to pay the fees).

When I was away last weekend, he said “I miss …” and Mrs Hann was surprised when the person in question proved not to be the traditional “Daddy” but “Mrs Tudor”, his form teacher.

Charlie is happy to get changed as soon as he comes home so as “not to spoil my beautiful school uniform”. He also cheerfully completes his reading homework each evening and appears to be making excellent progress on all fronts.

However, he has always been eager to learn. Indeed, the only problem we had in getting him to school in the first place was his confident but misplaced assertion that there was no need for him to go as “I already know everything”.

I also started school aged 4¼ and am sure it did me no harm, because I was similarly ready to learn. Indeed, my parents paid for me to go to a private school precisely because the local state primary would not admit me for another year, and they could not face me hanging around the house badgering them with questions.

What did do me harm was later being fast-tracked into taking my A-levels a year earlier than usual so that I could reach university well before I was socially equipped to make the most of it (though, to be fair, on that basis I should probably have deferred my degree course until I was nearer 30).

But then we all develop at different paces. When Charlie was 19 months old he was already addressing us in well-formed sentences. His younger brother Jamie, on the other hand, who is at that age now, says little more than “Mamma”, “Dadda” and “Uh-oh”, which is both his comment when anything goes wrong and his slightly disturbing name for his elder brother.

He also recently started saying “Amen”, which I took to be an early sign of religious awakening, but turns out to be his interpretation of the name of his best friend at nursery, a little girl called Carmen.

The day before Charlie started school my wife gave him his choice of special treat and he asked to be taken to one of those farms where kiddies are invited to stroke bunnies, feed lambs, milk cows and the like. On Saturday he asked us to pay it a repeat visit on the kind pretext of sharing this experience with his younger brother.

In reality, what we mainly witnessed were clear signs of growing confidence and independence as Charlie happily went off alone on the sort of tractor ride that he would previously have insisted on taking only with his mother.

All of which is, I can see, very bittersweet for Mummy, who sees her baby growing up at a pace rarely witnessed since Jack scattered those magic bean seeds in the pantomime.

Childhood and innocence are surprisingly short, and we are doing our best to savour what is left of it. Buoyed up by the knowledge that, at his current rate of progress, young Jamie will indeed be an ideal candidate for the 127 educationalists’ preferred “free play” until he is six or seven.

Which may work out particularly well if I can secure a free transfer of my PR skills to a company somewhere in Scandinavia, where my reputation is as yet untarnished by experience.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

However much we may dislike politicians, they still beat management consultants

Last Thursday night I stepped briefly through the looking glass into the world of the super-rich. They really are different from you and me.

Over dinner, my host explained how he needed an income of at least £20 million a year (before tax, which he sportingly pays, unlike so many of his peers) to maintain his houses, yacht, staff and overall standard of living. Since he is a billionaire this should not present too much of a challenge, even at current interest rates.

Then a multi-millionaire fellow guest mused that he could happily give up almost every aspect of his lifestyle tomorrow, without regrets. Only one thing would be a real wrench to lose: private flights.

Having hitched one or two lifts on private jets over the years I can confirm that avoiding the hell of public airports is indeed a deep joy, though personally I find the economical alternative of never flying anywhere equally acceptable.

Did I feel resentful of the wealth of these two men? Far from it. The richer is an entrepreneur who started life with no advantages at all. He turned a simple idea and a capacity for hard graft into a huge fortune, creating many jobs along the way. Even the most ardent campaigners against excessive pay seem willing to make an exception for those who build great businesses from scratch.

The other is the chief executive of a public company, but a notably successful one that has rewarded its shareholders well over the years. He also charmed me by revealing that one of his small pleasures is allowing his PA to put through calls from the heads of management consultancies, who invariably introduce themselves with a well-worn spiel about the matchless expertise their organisation can offer.

“Really,” he replies disarmingly. “Are you experts in all those things? What a remarkable coincidence. So are we!”

And then he quietly replaces the receiver.

I warm to this approach because, to me, the single most annoying thing about the massive inflation in executive salaries in recent years has not been the way it has been organised through cabals of “independent non-executive directors” who are actually all members of the same self-interested club. No, it is the way so many business leaders seem unwilling to make their own decisions, even though that is surely precisely what they are being paid so generously to do.

Instead they call in management consultants to outline the options and advise on the optimum course of action. In my experience this will either be a blinding statement of the obvious or a recommendation that the application of only a few moments’ clear thought will show to be laughably and dangerously wrong.

And all for a mere seven figure fee. No wonder that management consultants are so widely derided as people who borrow your watch to tell you the time, then walk off with it in their pocket.

This may seem rich coming from one who scratches a living as a consultant himself, and in a field (public relations) which most honest practitioners will admit is principally about the liberal application of common sense.

All I can say in my defence is that at least I have never been greedy, or seriously damaged the prospects of my clients. So far.

As for my super-rich pals, there is clearly no need to worry about them as a private jet will always be on hand to whisk them off to some more tolerant part of the world if Britain turns seriously resentful, as it may well do as the screw on general living standards tightens in the years ahead.

Our politicians are only brave enough to hint that there might be a temporary blip in the upward march of prosperity, not that the good times are gone for ever. But if they told us the truth and we rose up against them, what would be the alternative? Technocrats. Or, to put it another way, experts. Management consultants.

If it ever comes to that, the top National Lottery prize should surely not be cash, but a place on the last private jet to leave the country.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

You know things are really bad when politicians start saying "sorry"

One of the few things I remember about school physics lessons is being invited to laugh at the discredited belief in an invisible substance called phlogiston, supposedly released during burning.

It stuck in my mind chiefly because it actually sounded more plausible than many of the things I was told to believe as undisputed facts.

The man behind the phlogiston theory: was it really balls?

So I was delighted last week when some apparently reputable scientists came up with data that appear to challenge Einstein’s theory of relativity, even though I haven’t got the slightest clue what any of it means.

Does this man look relatively trustworthy?

It’s just that my spirits instinctively soar at even the faint possibility of experts, who nearly always have a greatly inflated sense of their own importance, being proved wrong.

So I suppose I should be positively ecstatic at seeing the financial geniuses who held such sway in the Thatcher, Major and Blair/Brown eras being so comprehensively discredited. And I would, but for the fact that their uncontrolled mishandling of the financial system looks certain to plunge all of us into a decade or two of relative poverty – which is particularly disappointing for those of us who only have a couple of decades left.

There is also the niggling sense that this setback will seem altogether more bearable from the comfort of a private island, luxury yacht, Swiss Alpine lodge or Cotswold mansion bought with the bonuses dished out for brilliance in conjuring up entirely illusory profits.

These people were not mere bankers, they were alchemists. The priestly caste of our age who could perform magic so powerful that no one dared to say “Hang on, this is total cobblers” when they invented supposedly AAA super-safe investments out of the mortgages insanely and aggressively marketed to crazed optimists and congenital liars living on the margins of society.

You know that things are really, really bad when a senior politician pops up on the media and says “Sorry,” as Ed Balls did yesterday morning, doubtless hoping that the electorate will react with a friendly slap on the back and a “Don’t worry about it, mate, it could have happened to anyone.”

Spot the Balls

I devoutly hope not, though my confidence in the alternative is not increased by hearing Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander attack his Eurosceptic Conservative colleagues in the coalition as “enemies of growth”.

Mr Alexander, you may care to recall, wasted five years of his life as head of communications for Britain in Europe, the expert-rich movement campaigning for the abolition of the pound, which was all too inclined to dismiss its opposition as barmy xenophobes and simpletons who did not understand the complex issues involved.

It would be rather satisfying to sit back and watch our euro-adopting neighbours trapped, as William Hague vividly and accurately warned, in a burning building with no exits, but for the certainty that the collapsing structure will almost certainly land on our own heads. Such are the perils of schadenfreude.

So instead let us focus on the sane way forward, based on a massive increase in scepticism about anyone pretending to expertise or presenting painless solutions to the gigantic hole in which we find ourselves.

As our living standards decline, remember also that material things in themselves never bring happiness. They merely fuel the appetite for that next material thing which, if only we could get it, would make us truly happy. Only it never does.

But why listen to me? I’m not an expert. In fact, I have been repeatedly told that I am fool. Notably when I turned down a series of fantastic opportunities to make me richer, from taking out an endowment mortgage to investing my meagre pension fund in dot.com bubble stocks or complex derivatives I did not understand. Luckily for me no one ever offered me shares in a phlogiston factory. I would probably have snapped them up.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Awed by the sheer randomness of existence

It seems that the most dangerous age for rock stars is 27. While for baby boomers like me, born in 1954, 57 is starting to look less like an English summer pasture, filled with gorgeous wildflowers, and more like a tropical swamp infested with mosquitoes and crocodiles, and surrounded by heavily armed fanatics.

In the last few weeks I have learned of the deaths of three of my school contemporaries, all from natural causes rather than as the result of some freak accident. They were not friends of mine, but with my elephantine memory I naturally remember them well. And in my mind they are still smiling miniatures in blazers and short trousers, full of life and promise.

I really must learn how to scan those black and white form photographs from the 1960s ...

None of them, curiously, was the sort of overweight and physically inferior specimen that one might have marked down for an early exit. In my class, that was undoubtedly me. The fat kid squatting glumly on the floor of the gymnasium as his schoolfellows swarmed nimbly to the top of the ropes. The one who always landed on the near end of the vaulting horse with a groin-shattering crunch, and who somehow endured eight years of swimming classes without ever learning to swim a stroke.

No, these were normally proportioned, fit and healthy lads who should have been actuarially good for whatever average life expectancy is these days (and remember that it will have increased by three hours in the day that has passed between my writing these words and your reading them).

Yet they are gone and I am somehow still here. Which is handy given that, after an apparently rather precocious start, I somehow lapsed into a state of lazily suspended animation for about four decades, and have only recently emerged from my chrysalis as one of the world’s ultimate late developers.

Here I am slowly and rather reluctantly learning the rudiments of parenting at an age when most people are indulging their grandchildren (or, in less privileged postcodes, great grandchildren). And being told by my headshaking financial adviser what a great pity it is that I did not have the foresight to take out a whacking great life insurance policy before I was known to have a heart condition, albeit at a time of my life when I had no dependants and could see no earthly use for such provision.

The dreadful news of this last weekend powerfully underlines the complete randomness of existence and the utter folly of attempting to discern patterns or draw conclusions from it. Alerted by Twitter to the unfolding catastrophe in Norway, I turned on the BBC news channel where an American “expert” banged on at inordinate length about how the attacks bore all the classic hallmarks of being planned and perpetrated by jihadists.

Even when it was pointed out to him that all the reports spoke of a blond-haired, blue-eyed gunman, his confidence did not skip a beat. Surely his interviewer was aware of the increasing sophistication of these organisations in recruiting individuals who were less likely to arouse suspicion?

The idea that this might be the dastardly work of some home-grown loon simply never occurred to him, any more than I anticipated my late fatherhood or the premature departure of the boys I grew up with.

It is very hard to draw any useful conclusions from all this, other than that the one thing in this life on which we can bet with confidence is its complete unpredictability. But I shall make these admittedly unoriginal resolutions: to enjoy life while I can, and try living every day on the assumption that it will be my last. With any luck it won’t be, but it might make me behave more kindly to the people I meet along the way, and that can never be a bad thing for any of us.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.