A memo to the Caliph

I can’t rid myself of the image of a woman I saw in the supermarket on Sunday. Not because she was particularly good looking (though she certainly beat Kim Kardashian) but simply because I have never seen anyone more radiantly happy.

This is a pretty unusual phenomenon among the self-service tills at Sainsbury’s.

Still, it wasn’t hard to work out why and it had nothing to do with her Nectar points. The presumably expected item in her bagging area was a new-born baby, snoozing contentedly in its car seat.

Can anything beat the joy of having a wanted child? And can anything cap the grief of losing that child, whether to a dreadful disease, accident or war?

My generation, the baby boom that followed the Second World War, has been extraordinarily blessed. True, we spent a fair chunk of our time living under the threat of nuclear annihilation, and may have developed more hedonistic tendencies than our parents as a result.

But we have enjoyed steadily rising material living standards, astonishing technological progress and significant improvements in medical science and life expectancy.

Most important of all, we have never been conscripted to don khaki and provide target practice for the Queen’s enemies.

I sincerely hope my young sons will be equally lucky.

Because I take a keen interest in history, and regretted that my parents never thought to do as much for me, I have put aside some mementoes for my boys to ponder in the years ahead. These include sets of coins from the years of their birth, and newspapers from the days they were born.

I wondered if the joyful lady in the supermarket had done the same, and whether she had paused to wonder about the sort of world into which she was bringing her child.

While it all looks undeniably grim, the good news is you could depress yourself equally thoroughly by looking at any newspaper since the dawn of print, or for that matter at wax tablets, runic inscriptions and cave paintings.

The horrors perpetrated by the so-called Islamic State are utterly repellent, but sadly nothing new. Read an account of that fine old English custom of hanging, drawing and quartering, and thank the Lord video had not yet been invented.

Bird flu and even Ebola must surely pale into insignificance compared with the Black Death.

Warnings of global economic crashes and disastrous climate change recur with equal regularity. Even in my lifetime we have been earnestly warned to brace ourselves for a new Ice Age.

One can also be forgiven a sense of déjà vu as Bob Geldof and his pals again trot out the old mistruth that there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas, and politicians claim that they are about to dual the A1.

OK, not Christmas, but I liked the sign. Google Atlas Mountains and Kilimanjaro for more accurate seasonal images.

The pop stars are at least acting altruistically, though maybe we’d need to buy fewer downloads if some of them put less effort into reducing their personal tax bills.

The politicians are, amazingly, manoeuvring to secure their re-election next year and it will, as ever, pay to study the small print attaching to their pledges.

Yes, the A1 will undoubtedly be upgraded to dual carriageway throughout Northumberland. Eventually. In short bursts. With announcements of the next phase typically emerging every five years in advance of an election, to be followed by the regrettable discovery that there is, owing to the incompetence of the outgoing government, no money left.

A typical day on the single carriageway A1 "trunk road"

There is much wisdom in the Book of Ecclesiastes: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

We are born, then we die. The older one gets, the more conscious one becomes that the time between the two is pathetically short, and that nothing really matters much at all. Except one thing.

Using the short while we have got to be as happy as we possibly can be, like that lady in the supermarket. And grasping that the best way to make yourself happy is by making other people happy, too.

Sadly I don’t suppose Islamic State’s self-styled Caliph is likely to read The Journal and take note.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The miracle of new life that made me grow up - well, almost

The physical ageing process is inexorable, but for most of us intellectual development reaches a full stop quite early in our lives.

In an extreme case, Nancy Mitford nicknamed her sister Deborah, now the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, “Nine” in honour of her mental age. When I visited my mother in her nursing home shortly before she died, wheelchair bound after losing two legs to diabetes and with her sight now failing, she said sadly, “The worst of it is, inside I still feel like I did when I was 17.”

While my wife, like every girlfriend who preceded her, repeatedly points out that I have the mind of a 14-year-old boy trapped in the body of a middle-aged man.

Yet on Valentine’s Day 2012 I thought I had finally overcome my limitations when I strode nervously into the operating theatre where a crack team of obstetricians stood ready to perform their version of that popular old conjuring trick of sawing the lady in half.

When first asked whether I would like to accompany my wife during her Caesarean, my instinctive reaction was to ask how much she would fancy being present if I were having my appendix out. I thought pacing a corridor like a 1950s father was much more my style.

Fortunately a friend with vastly more experience in the wives and children department advised me that, from the male point of view, a Caesarean is an altogether less stressful experience than a natural birth. How right he was. I did not feel a thing (and, more importantly, nor did Mrs Hann) as the surgeon went to work. We could not see anything, either, though our prayers for the baby definitely alternated with ones that the gaffer tape holding our screen in place would not come loose.

Then came that first cry which, as every new parent will tell you, is simply the most moving and wonderful sound you can possibly hear. Shortly followed by the first sight of a tiny but perfectly formed human being, seriously hacked off at having his rest so cruelly disturbed.

In that amazing moment, I knew at once that nothing else in life mattered in the slightest. I was still marvelling at my new sense of perspective as I drove into my office the following morning. I was also trying to pin down that other unusual sensation I was experiencing. I finally worked it out: I was happy. Perhaps, at long last, I had finally and belatedly graduated into adulthood.

After visiting the hospital that evening, I spent a very long time slaving away with an Allen key to assemble the cot I had left in its packaging until baby Jamie was born, for fear of tempting fate. As a result I was still awake when my phone rang shortly before midnight, and a client reported that he had just signed a £1.5 billion deal. We hoped to announce it at a civilised hour the next morning, but it proved to have already leaked.

In consequence, I found myself welcoming a newborn baby into the house after a night on my own in which I had managed just three hours’ sleep, wondering whether this set some sort of record.

James George Frederick Hann is a delightful little chap, even if he does bear a disturbing resemblance to the octogenarian Queen Victoria, and has touched off a slightly wearisome upsurge in attention-seeking behaviour by his elder brother.

After a long first day with both our boys at home, my wife and I flopped gratefully on the sofa in front of the television, holding hands and revelling in our great good luck. Then the appearance of a female weather presenter prompted me to make a light-hearted but typically politically incorrect comment.

My wife sighed, as she has so often done before. “Are you ever going to grow up?” she enquired.

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.