"I told you I was ill"

In Iolanthe, W.S. Gilbert’s Westminster sentry ponders the mysterious fact that every child born into the world alive “Is either a little Liberal, or else a little Conservative”.

This was, of course, before the Labour Party, let alone UKIP or the Greens, had been invented.

Conservatives possibly outnumbering Liberals in this scene from Iolanthe

Yet I increasingly think that there is indeed a fundamental two-way division in humanity, between the optimists and the pessimists.

Whether it is determined biologically or by environment I cannot say, but I do know that the pattern is set early. Because my two sons are both under six, and I definitely have one of each.

The elder, like me, approaches every proposal with a mindset of “What could possibly go wrong?” He is likely to spend his life wondering “What’s the catch?” and turning down opportunities that might, through a concatenation of infinitely remote possibilities, lead to disaster.

The younger, like his mother, has an altogether sunnier disposition. For him, the glass will always be half full rather than half empty.

I am not sure that I can do anything to change their respective attitudes. What interests me is which of them is likely to be happier.

It might seem a no-brainer. The pessimist will live his life in a perpetual fog of gloom and shy away from such possible excitements as space travel, cosmetic surgery or voting Labour.

Not one for Charlie Hann, I suspect

Yet I am a pessimist so extreme that I have never yet boarded an aeroplane without a deep conviction that it is much more likely to crash in flames than to reach its destination.

Which, since so far it has always managed the latter, has given me periods of elation that I am sure no normal traveller could hope to match.

Always expect the worse, and life will throw up regular pleasant surprises.

We spend a lot of time wondering about the time and manner of our death, us pessimists, so I naturally pitched up at Wansbeck General Hospital a week ago fully braced for the worst.

My mood had not been lifted by receiving a summons from the Department of Elderly Medicine, even if I could detect the hand of some well-meaning PR looking for a kinder way to express “Geriatric”.

Nor was it helped by seeing a doctor in a room that bore a sign reading “Pre-Surgical Assessment”.

But then, as it turned out, while I have indeed got a long list of things wrong with me, so would most 60-year-olds subjected to the same battery of tests.

In particular, I am no more likely to keel over with a stroke tomorrow than any other comically overweight and inactive non-smoker of my age.

True, this left the doctor with no explanation for the symptoms I have been experiencing, though he did kindly offer to refer me to another specialist for yet more tests.

However, in the week of Groundhog Day, it seemed better simply to draw stumps and add a few more irritating conditions to the long list of things one just has to learn to live with as one gets older.

Receiving this good news should have lifted me onto the sort of high that I normally experience only after stepping off a plane alive and making it through Arrivals without being the subject of a terrorist attack.

However, a new attack of pessimism soon kicked in as I realised that I could no longer put off a long list of important decisions that I had put on hold in the light of my clearly imminent demise.

I resolved to be nicer to everyone if I were to be spared, and I think it lasted about as long as most such resolutions. But I will keep trying.

In the long run, my pessimist son and I will be proved right, and can only hope that we have enough dying breath to utter the magic words “I told you I was ill.”

The humourless Church establishment prevented Spike Milligan’s family from having those words engraved on his tombstone, until they proposed putting them in incomprehensible Irish.

Since I lack Spike’s Irish roots, I wonder whether one of my readers might be able to assist my preparations by supplying a suitable Latin translation?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Facing up to that overwhelming sense of time running out

I once found it ridiculous that nearly every mention of anyone in a newspaper should be followed by a bracketed reference to their age. Why on earth did that matter?

Today, Keith Hann (58) is completely nonplussed in the rare instances when this detail is omitted, because age provides the essential context for my reaction. An accidental death at 19 is almost always going to seem sadder than at 91.

Though if the 91-year-old met their end surfing on top of a train after downing a case of alcopops, it does make for a more unusual and arresting story.

I remember being mildly amused by the fact that my parents’ first port of call in their Journal and Evening Chronicle was always the “deaths” column; but it has now been mine, too, for many years.

I cannot recall exactly when death changed from being a vague, theoretical possibility to the central consideration of my life, but I suspect that it was somewhere around the age of 40. Perhaps it comes later for women, because Mrs Hann just laughs when I try to explain that some element of her forward planning is of limited relevance to me because I won’t be around to see it come to fruition.

It does not seem so long since I found myself similarly frustrated when suggesting improvements to a family property and being met with indifference on the grounds that “it will see me out”. Though in that instance the pessimists proved correct, as pessimists so often do.

Right now, Mrs Hann and I are juggling my desire to live and die in rural Northumberland with our work commitments elsewhere, and the knowledge that where we are living this December will determine where our older son starts his first school next September.

Buying a new home is not the simple option it once appeared, when a 25-year mortgage would run until I am 83 or, on the evidence of 300 years of Hann family mortality statistics, long dead. A fact that is evidently not lost on potential sources of such finance, judging by their marked reluctance to provide it.

The revolutionary iCoffin: surely the perfect last word for a PR man? (With acknowledgements to onceuponageek.com)

I have no life insurance, because what was the point of spending money on that when I had no wife or dependents to benefit from it? (Added to which, I hoped that more distant relatives and godchildren might greet the news of my demise with unadulterated sorrow, rather than as the harbinger of a lucky windfall.)

While my pension provision, thanks to the feeble performance of the stock market as well as my own improvidence, makes my retirement seem a more implausible fantasy than my three-year-old’s current concerns about the ogre that apparently inhabits a tree in our garden, or the tiger that regularly takes up residence beneath his bed.

The bottom line is that I find myself with responsibility for the future of two small boys and a strategy for their housing and education almost entirely based on winning the National Lottery.

Or, after 40 years of mainly scribbling for a living, suddenly coming up with the latest answer to Harry Potter or Fifty Shades of Grey. Realistically, I think we have far more chance of winning the Lottery.

But, as you read this, I will be sitting at my desk with my phone off the hook and my email inbox disabled, staring at a blank screen as I try to start the short book that someone recklessly commissioned two months ago, and which now needs to be delivered in just five short weeks.

I will be breaking off only for my long deferred annual check-up at the doctor’s tomorrow, which can surely only add fuel to my slow-burning fire of fatalistic gloom.

My book? Oh, it is a supposedly humorous short guide to opera, about which I know a little. Though my main hope, if I get it done, is naturally for a follow-up commission on my specialist subject: trying to work out how much time I have got left.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The life-changing alternative to a romantic Valentine's dinner

I am sure that when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully, just as Dr Johnson observed.
Though the regrettable abolition of capital punishment in the UK, even for treason, piracy and arson in Her Majesty’s dockyards, sadly prevents me from putting his theory to a practical test.

However, I know from personal experience that there comes a tipping point when any prediction of lifespan stops offering reassurance and becomes a threat.

When I was a small boy a gypsy lady knocked on our door selling clothes pegs and lucky heather. I cannot imagine that my mother departed from the habit of a lifetime by actually buying anything, but the encounter ended with the gypsy grabbing my mother’s hand and assuring her that she was a lovely lady who would live to be 82.

An image of a gipsy fortune teller has been removed to avoid potential charges (financial, not criminal) from the money-grubbing image copyright police.

Mum was initially cheered by this, because her parents had died aged 60 and 63. But when she reached 80, and particularly 81, it became the source of increasing concern. It concentrated her mind all right, though not on anything positive.

Spookily, or self-fulfillingly, 20 years ago last month the prophecy proved absolutely correct.

Demonstrating that good old-fashioned Romany fortune-tellers are a great deal more reliable than the Internet, which forecast that I would be handing in my dinner pail last Saturday.

A last outing for this dear old favourite, now sadly abandoned as my Twitter avatar

True, I always knew that I could buy myself an extra 30 years of life by simply switching my tick from the “pessimistic” box to “optimistic”. But how could someone who has been “a glass three quarters empty – and with a really nasty-looking foreign object at the bottom” man all his life be expected to tell such a thumping lie?

I kept telling myself that it was all a bit of harmless fun until I developed a mysterious lump on my jaw last month, and was referred for various hospital tests. This convinced me that I was indeed on the way out. However, I prudently confined myself to betting my wife £50 that I was dying, rather than squandering my life savings, giving away all my belongings or commissioning a fine memorial.

A number of people diagnosed with terminal cancer have famously gone down the latter route, only to find themselves trying to sue their local health authority for compensation when it later turned out that they were not dying after all.

I'm not making it up: one disgruntled man who was wrongly diagnosed with terminal cancer

I guessed I was in the clear when the lump miraculously vanished shortly before its scheduled biopsy. So now I am embracing life with a new spring in my step, while ever conscious that Fate is probably waiting just around the corner, toying with a sock full of wet sand.

Perhaps in the shape of the 100% increase in my complement of sons, expected a week today.

My last column was sadly misinformed in believing that our Wednesdays-only breech baby turnaround expert was a bloke, and that he achieved success in 60% of cases. In fact we saw a charming lady, who cheerily admitted to a success rate of just 40%, which the determinedly stubborn Jamie Hann swiftly pushed towards 39%.

So Mrs Hann followed medical advice and booked herself a Caesarean section, much against her inclinations. Which at least allowed us to choose the date of the birth. I lobbied strongly for February 29, so that we would only have to buy him a birthday present every fourth year, but apparently he cannot be kept waiting that long.

The hospital recommended February 13, but Mrs Hann superstitiously demurred. And so we ended up with a scheduled delivery on Valentine’s Day. This will save me from buying a romantic dinner not only in 2012 but every year for the rest of my life, since no doubt we will be hosting a kiddies’ birthday party instead.

No more Valentine's Day dinners: such a blow

Already my newly extended life is looking up very nicely.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Hann Perspective: The Coming Apocalypse

I have a friend who has not yet been certified insane, owing to a series of regrettable oversights by the overworked medical profession, yet still purports to believe that the world will be coming to an end on 21 December next year.

The timing could be worse, I suppose. Royalists like me will have enjoyed the uplift of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, while those who care for that sort of thing will have been able to watch their money cascading down the world class gurgler of the London Olympics. And we will all be spared yet another excruciating Christmas lunch with the in-laws as well as those always daunting winter fuel bills.

The important question is whether it is really going to happen. Because, if it is, we might as well all stop worrying about our shrinking pension funds and start ticking off achievements from the list of 50 things to do before we die. Or in my case, five things, four of which will almost certainly be ruled out by my inability to secure the willing participation of a lingerie model suitably qualified by her ownership of a main line steam locomotive.

In her case, I'd have settled for a narrow gauge locomotive

Common sense, of course, decrees that the end of the world is not about to take place. But then I am pretty sure that common sense dismissed the Black Death, the huge death toll of the First World War and the horror unleashed on 9/11 as alarmist fantasies until they actually occurred. And if they had been slightly more intelligent, the dinosaurs would no doubt have enjoyed a good chuckle about the huge odds against their far from cosy world being blown apart by a massive asteroid impact.

Famous last words:"What the f... was that?"

Wikipedia is packed with laughable stories of those who made a wrong call on the timing of the Apocalypse, and I don’t have a lot of faith in my friend’s burbling explanations about the Mayan calendar. But I know from my own years as an investment analyst that once in a blue moon even a total idiot can turn out to be almost right, albeit for completely the wrong reasons.

The basis of my niggling concern is the way that the whole world economic system increasingly resembles one of those gigantic boulders precariously balanced on the top of a crumbling pinnacle of rock: the pinnacle in this case being the Everest of global debt. It will only take the failure of one or two meaningful sovereign states to bring the entire thing crashing down, taking with it the banks, what is left of our savings, and our ability to make payments with cash, credit cards or cheques.

Even if the trumpets have failed to sound and the four horsemen have not made their scheduled appearance the previous day, this financial scenario could make 22 December 2012 the occasion of some smugness among those who have invested in a bit of land suitable for vegetable cultivation, a large stock of tinned food, some chickens, a gun and maybe a few gold bars for conducting transactions with their neighbours.

Being one of the world’s foremost pessimists, I was certainly thinking along these lines when I bought my current home in Northumberland. Though I have never actually grown anything more ambitious than mint and chives, and the modest tinned food stockpile is covered in rust and swelling disturbingly at the seams; while the hens remain a pipe dream and I have yet to feel even remotely tempted to give the constabulary a laugh at my expense by applying for a firearms licence.

My little patch of land (though sadly not my sheep)

As for those gold bars, the only thing glistering in my house, now that I have had the crown on my back tooth replaced in porcelain, is the fake guinea dangling modestly at the end of my great-grandfather’s watch chain.

It is rather a shame that I haven’t had the courage of my negative convictions, or made any like-minded friends to reinforce them. We could have held a splendid Christmas lunch of tinned all-day breakfast in 2012, and smirked over the irony that one of the few growth sectors on the high street in the years before the crash was those shops devoted to parting the gullible from their precious metals and converting them into now worthless folding money.

However, I imagine that the smiles would probably be wiped off our faces quite quickly when rampaging mobs of the hungry urban underclass arrived on our blessed plots and started helping themselves to anything that took their fancy, in the popular Tottenham style.

I suppose if I really believed in the imminent economic Apocalypse, I would currently be looking for a small offshore island with fertile soil and scope for fortification. Though for a lazy man like me, it seems easier simply to take the advice so often shouted at me in the streets: “Cheer up, it may never happen!”

Keith Hann is a PR consultant who likes to prepare for the worst 

www.keithhann.com

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

Time to pose the Wooler question

Five years ago Wooler basked briefly in the national media spotlight after its Barclays cash machine began paying out double the amount requested. A midnight queue snaked down the high street, with one lady allegedly arriving by taxi, still in her nightdress and curlers.

This was reported as an amusing “and finally” story, replacing the usual skateboarding duck, and the participants were compared with the loveable rogues in Whisky Galore. I heard no suggestion that it actually represented fraud or terminal degeneracy. Even more remarkably, those involved apparently got away with it, since a Barclays spokesman announced that they could not be absolutely sure who had benefited, and their security company was to blame for putting the wrong notes in the machine.

I asked myself at the time whether I would have taken advantage of this glitch, if anyone had let me into the secret, and concluded that I would not. Primarily because I would have been too lazy and / or drunk to make the 28-mile round trip, but also because of a strong sense that it was bad and wrong. In addition, my chronically pessimistic outlook on life would have engendered a near certainty of being caught, having to pay the money back and perhaps garnering some unwelcome personal publicity along the way.

Unfortunately no such moral or practical considerations appear to have given most of our Members of Parliament pause before they formed an orderly queue in front of the defective machinery dishing out free money in their Fees Office. They forgot Hann’s First Rule of Life, which is to ask yourself the question “What could possibly go wrong?” before embarking on any course of action.

In this case, that would have involved thinking about how it would look to your constituents and the wider world if they ever found out that you had claimed for a load of ludicrous domestic and personal expenditure that clearly had nothing at all to do with the perfectly legitimate provision of a place to kip if you live too far from Westminster to commute there on a daily basis. And, more seriously, that you kept changing your mind about what constituted your second home with the clear objective of maximising your takings. Plus, infuriatingly, evading or reclaiming the taxes you impose on the rest of us, from capital gains to council tax and stamp duty.

Like many of you, I suspect, I am now bored with the whole saga, though sneakily looking forward to hearing about the Liberal Democrats and nationalists; and hoping that some mole is burrowing into the accounts department of The Daily Telegraph with a view to publishing all the expenses receipts of its journalists, which I dare say would demonstrate creativity on a par with the MPs’.

It would be nice to be able to say that this whole mess is the result of the professionalization of politics, and that it would not have happened in the days when men of substance sat in the House. Yet we find people who have made or married a great deal of money (such as Francis Maude for the Tories and Shaun Woodward for Labour) on the list of claimants along with the lifelong political geeks.

Greed and stupidity when faced with the lure of free money may be all but universal, but they are not exactly helpful to those of us who want the House of Commons to be stronger, not weaker: to reclaim much of the power it has ceded to Brussels, and to hold the executive to account. Perhaps the answer is an early General Election in which all candidates would be subject to the following lie detector test: “What would you have done if you had been passing through Wooler in April 2004, and heard the news about the dodgy cash machine?”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.