The only Burns Night we need in England

I have been totally bemused by the number of my friends providing social media with details of their Burns Night celebrations.

None of them is a Scot, or resident in Scotland, so the only question that springs to mind is: why?

Deep love for the man, with his gift for conveying the blindingly obvious in partially comprehensible dialect doggerel? Definitely not.

Addiction to haggis? Hardly.

A yearning for the skirl of the pipes? Come on.

An excuse to drink lots of whisky? Yes, but you can do that equally well by your own fireside, or in a pub with chums.

So why Burns Night?

Surely only because it is convenient excuse for a booze-up to lift the spirits after the flood of post-Christmas bills and to raise two fingers to the puritan promoters of Dry January.

An opportunity eagerly latched onto by publicans and restaurateurs to drum up business in the lull between New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day.

It is also part of a more general trend to import and enthuse about other people’s festivities, while losing interest in our own.

Yes, I used to wander fruitlessly around Longbenton with a candle in a hollowed-out turnip at Halloween 50 years ago, but the full-blown festival of ghouls, ghosts and trick-or-treating is unmistakably a trans-Atlantic arriviste.

Along with school proms and the lunacy of Black Friday: a retail spending spree that only makes sense in the US because it is the day after their Thanksgiving holiday.

Though only the brave would bet against many British people enthusiastically sitting down to roast turkey and pumpkin pie on the last Thursday of November each year sometime quite soon.

Chinese New Year, St Patrick’s Day, Eid, Diwali – the list of imported celebrations keeps rolling on.

Milad un Nabi, celebrating the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, was a new one on me when The Journal recently announced a parade through Newcastle to celebrate it on February 25. Which is odd, considering that most Islamic calendars suggest that it should be marked this year on January 4 and December 24. Perhaps the urge to keep up the Christmas and Burns Night sequence of doing something celebratory on the 25th of each month simply proved irresistible.

Meanwhile Guy Fawkes’ Night has become a shadow of its former self, not helped by the Elfin Safety killjoys who have also done their best to clamp down on other deranged English pursuits like rolling cheeses down hills.

Personally I shall be marking the feast of King Charles the Martyr on January 30 and Candlemas (“the Christian festival of lights”) on February 2, and looking forward to all the fun of Shrove Tuesday on February 17. Why won’t everyone else?

It would be unfair to claim that we haven’t done our fair share of exporting traditions, when the Queen is head of state in 15 other countries from Antigua to Tuvalu, and there are judges and barristers in Africa sweltering under horsehair wigs.

Nevertheless, I think we could try to do even more to promote the joys of English eccentricity around the world. Who can say what it might do for world peace if only we could persuade more nations to take up morris dancing?

Perhaps UKIP might be persuaded to adopt that as official policy. It would make as much sense as many of their recent pronouncements.

Though the Greens are making excellent progress in collaring the loony vote with a range of far left policy revelations, brilliantly elucidated by their Australian leader. The genius who described them as “the Militant Tendency with better PR” was absolutely spot on, apart from the “better PR” bit.

Who can fail to find it utterly delicious that the polar opposite of UKIP is led by an immigrant? I almost begin to think that the dreaded election campaign won’t be so bad after all.

However, when the dust has settled, I suspect that we will look at the go-ahead foreign import of multi-party democracy and endless coalition, and feel nostalgia for that dull old British tradition of choosing between the Conservatives and Labour.

Just as I hope we will come to recognise that the only Burns Night we need celebrate in England falls on the fifth of November.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Give it 500 years and it will all be fine

Be honest: had you ever heard of Charlie Hebdo before the murder of so many of its staff?

No, me neither. Suggesting that those who plotted the massacre paid scant attention to the Streisand effect.

So named in honour of the singer, after her efforts to suppress photographs of her Californian home led to them being viewed by more than 400,000 people, compared with the six who had bothered to look at them before she took legal action.

And two of those six were Streisand’s own lawyers.

The same thing happens nearly every time someone seeks to divert attention from a story or image they do not like. All PR practitioners knows that demanding a correction from a newspaper is the surest way to increase awareness of the claims made in the original, inaccurate article.

Despite the timidity of the British media, the internet has treated me to a reasonably good look at those French cartoons that were apparently so offensive as to justify mass murder.

My main personal objection to them was that I didn’t find them the slightest bit funny. This strikes me as a pretty critical failing in a humorous journal. Satire should surely make us laugh, not cringe.

The boundaries determining what we find acceptable and amusing are individual and mobile. I can remember turning Spitting Image off in disgust the first time I saw it, like a stereotypical angry old buffer, but I gradually came round to it as one of the highlights of my TV viewing week.

If it were on air now, I wonder to what extent militant Islam would feature as the butt of its humour? Not much at all, I suspect. We are all, to use Mrs Thatcher’s word, frit.

Somehow I cannot see adherents to Islamic State or Al-Qaeda coming to see the funny side of anything any time soon, either.

Despite those apologists endlessly parroting on the news that “Islam is a religion of peace”, the historical fact is that it has a pretty dismal record of being spread and imposed by force.

But then so, too, does Christianity. Witness the Crusades and the conquistadors. BBC2’s serialisation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, beginning tonight, should provide a timely reminder that in the 1530s religion in England was literally a matter of life and death.

The difference is that we calmed down and moved on from the horror of beheadings and burnings at the stake some centuries ago – though the notion of “progress” in history is equally old-fashioned and discredited. So let us merely observe as a fact that it is 2015 in the Christian calendar adopted by the secular West, but only 1436 in the Islamic one.

What is completely clear is that there is an unbridgeable “them” and “us” divide between those who regard religion as a decorative incidental and those who truly believe that this life is but a brief diversion on the way to eternal bliss.

The extent to which even our full-time religious practitioners actually believe this was well illustrated by the reaction to Basil Hume’s letter to his clergy advising them of his advanced cancer. This apparently elicited hundreds of letters of sympathy and just one congratulating him on his luck and wishing that he could join him.

As a very occasional churchgoer, the only temptations in religion for me are its associated art, architecture and music, along with the faint hope that it might make me slightly nicer to other people and better able to face the inevitability of death.

While satirical magazines only tempt me to buy them if I think they are likely to make me laugh. 

Humour and religion should both be instruments to make our lives more bearable: to uplift, to bring us joy, to comfort us when we have good reasons for sadness. As Barbra Streisand surely realised quite quickly, it is far better to send in the clowns than the lawyers.

However, the world would be a safer place if the clowns focused on being genuinely funny rather than provocatively offensive, at least until all believers come to adopt the same relaxed perspective most of us in Britain have acquired.

I reckon around 500 years should do it nicely.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Accept reality: there is no Santa Claus

Most of us now view politicians much as my younger son began to regard Santa Claus last month.

Two-year-old Jamie had a series of meetings with Santa at a variety of events. At each he was asked what he wanted for Christmas and replied, unfailingly, “a race car”.

At which Santa asked whether he had been a good boy and then handed over a small package that clearly, from its shape and size, contained either a book or a cuddly toy.

Each time Jamie eagerly unwrapped it and his little face fell as he surveyed the contents.

“Oh,” he said with infinite sadness. “I was hoping for a race car.”

Luckily the real Santa turned up on Christmas Eve with just enough racing cars to restore his faith in superhuman nature.

What, you might ask, has any of this got to do with politicians as we brace ourselves for months of General Election campaigning?

Simply that we too have a wish list – lower immigration, better roads, cheaper rail fares, improved health services, tax increases for the rich, tax cuts for ourselves – that the various Santas of the main parties may promise to deliver.

But then they’ll simply hand over the same old package that they had planned all along, and we will be terribly disappointed.

This is because our expectations, like Jamie’s, are fundamentally unrealistic. The national finances are knackered, to use the technical economists’ jargon, and whoever is in charge is going to struggle to do much for us against that background.

Let us take health as an example, because I happen to have had recent experience of attending Wansbeck Hospital for an NHS scan.

The premises were top notch, the equipment clearly state-of-the-art, the staff charming and my appointments on time. This is exactly what people pay for private health insurance in the hope of achieving.

Now, as it happens, the service at Wansbeck is provided in partnership with a private company: InHealth.

Why should anyone care? It works brilliantly and it remains free to the patient. If this is the sort of “privatisation” that is going to make the NHS “unrecognisable” after another five years of Tory government, I’d vote for more of it.

What’s more, I feel no confidence that Labour in office would do anything radically different, given that they persisted with the Private Finance Initiative and the introduction of private partners to the NHS throughout their 13 years in office.

The key, plain fact of the “NHS crisis” was disarmingly explained on the radio the other morning by a scientist introducing his research findings that two thirds of cancers are caused by random mutations on which neither lifestyle nor heredity has any bearing.

The human body, he said, has a design life of approximately 40 years and after that it will start breaking down, no matter how careful you are.

Trying to keep me, at the age of 60, doing all the things I used to enjoy in my 20s is like trying to do 24,000 miles a year in a 1954 Morris Minor. It’s likely to cover rather a lot of them on the top of a recovery truck.

But we expect the NHS to keep us going in good health until we are 80, 90 and – in ever-increasing numbers – 100.

The potential cost of trying to do this is limitless and ruinous. No political party is ever going to be able to deliver it, so like young Jamie we might as well stop wishing and accept the reality of ongoing disappointment.

Because there isn’t a benevolent Mummy and Daddy to step in and save the day for the NHS, the roads budget, the armed services or anything else.

Accept reality – and bear in mind that the reality of hard times in Britain is infinitely preferable to the condition of most of the rest of the world – and we will undoubtedly face fewer disappointments.

That knowledge may also enhance our lives for the next few months as we reach for the “off” switch at the start of every pointless political debate. After all, we don’t need a doctor to tell us they are very bad indeed for our blood pressure.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

I never said that

Years ago I had a client whose catchphrase was “I never said that.”

Twice a year, as regular as clockwork, his now long vanished company would present results falling well short of the optimistic projections everyone remembered him making six months earlier. 

Everyone, that is, apart from the person who had actually uttered the words.

This was a much easier trick to pull off in the days before nearly everyone wandered around with a phone that doubles as an audio and video recorder.

Though the shifting sands of our memories distort even words that have been captured on camera. Witness “Play it again, Sam” becoming the most famous line from Casablanca even though it is never uttered in the film.

There are people who seem dedicated to sucking the pleasure from life by debunking famous quotations. Look up any great wit’s most hilarious sayings and you will almost certainly find a leaden, spoilsport footnote advising you that there is no proof that Churchill, Wilde or whoever it might be ever uttered any such words.

This is particularly hard on those who have come up with one amusing saying in a lifetime, like the recently deceased Mandy-Rice Davies, whose unoriginal but perfectly timed “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” earned her a place in every dictionary of quotations.

Only for a distinguished barrister who had made extensive notes during the relevant hearing to write to The Times last year claiming that she had never said it, despite its being widely reported in the media at the time.

I prefer to sustain myself with the belief that every wit really did make all those lightning fast ripostes, just as I delude myself that I used the hilarious line that nearly always occurs to me shortly after a conversation has ended.

Currently, like most parents, I derive most pleasure from the utterances of my own children. Mrs Hann, determined to make our offspring understand that there is more to Christmas than Santa and presents, announced that we would attend the crib service in Whittingham on Christmas Eve.

Charlie, aged 5½, was aghast. “I can’t believe you’re making me leave the house on Christmas Eve,” he said.

When Mummy explained why, he continued: “Yeah, I already know that story. With God and everything.”

Then, after a pause for reflection: “Mummy, you do know the baby Jesus is dead, don’t you? He died at Easter. So what’s the point of celebrating the birth of someone who’s already dead?”

He may attend a Church of England school, but I can’t help feeling that there is some way still to go in his religious instruction.

Still, we dragged him to the service anyway, sang some mercifully traditional hymns with appropriate gusto, and returned home in plenty of time to remove the fireguard and leave the appropriate offerings for Santa and Rudolph.

Few things in life have given me more pleasure than seeing that small boy beam as he ripped open the first small parcel in his stocking and declared “Wow, I’ve been hoping for this all year!”

Even if for now the credit all goes to Santa rather than his thoughtful parents.

The major change I detect since the 1950s is that toys, like furniture, have moved into the realm of the flatpack. I used to unwrap my presents and then simply play with them (usually, to my parents’ irritation, deriving more pleasure from the empty boxes than anything else).

Now Christmas morning is but the start of a major construction project which, like those begun at the same time by Network Rail, has horribly overrun.

We have a model stud farm taking up most of the sitting room, a vehicle racing tower loosely based on Gateshead’s Get Carter car park dominating the bedroom, and several full boxes of Playmobil and Lego yet to tackle.

I could be getting on with those now, rather than writing this column or, as I shortly intend, heading out for a large lunch at the pub.

“But Daddy, you promised!” a little voice just claimed from somewhere near the carpet.

“Really?” I say, and a useful phrase rolls in like cloud from across the years. “I’m sure I never said that.”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The power of social media

What use are social media? Are they any more than time-fillers for the chronically underemployed?

Personally I am sceptical about Facebook, which seems to be a platform for sharing hilarious cat videos and photos of your family with people who have little interest in either.

Though my wife seems to organise most of her admittedly limited social life through Facebook quite satisfactorily.

It’s more business-orientated equivalent LinkedIn delivers regular endorsements of skills you haven’t got from people you have barely heard of, plus valuable reminders to congratulate contacts on the anniversaries of taking up jobs from which they have long since been sacked.

To be fair, those of my acquaintance who have not rendered themselves unemployable through age, infirmity or incompetence tell me that it is a useful channel for both finding work and then recruiting younger and cheaper people to do said work for them.

Then there is Twitter, surely the greatest time-waster of them all? Tuned to the gnat-like attention span of the young with its ludicrously tight 140 character limit in which to convey your message, and full of inconsequence and bile.

Well no, actually, not entirely. As a much Tweeted Christmas card points out, in 2014 the angel of the Lord would find that his glad tidings of great joy were old hat to the shepherds, who’d already have read all about it on their smartphones.

Nearly every piece of breaking news in the last year has reached me through Twitter rather than broadcast media. Indeed on more than one occasion I’ve tuned in to the TV news to learn more about some event widely reported on social media only to find no mention of it all, as broadcasters presumably sought corroboration through official channels.

Then there is the great boon of enhanced customer service. Let me give you an example. At the beginning of December I ordered some parts to rebuild my elder son’s electric train set, after it had been comprehensively trashed by his younger brother.

I heard nothing for 10 days, so I sent a polite email and received, in return, an automated reply apologising in advance for the long delay I would experience before they got back to me, because they were frightfully busy. (The electronic mail equivalent of that maddening recorded message that begins “Your call is important to us …”. Only not important enough for us to employ enough people to answer our phones.)

So after a few more days I posted a Tweet containing the firm’s name and the words “shocking customer service”. Within half an hour I’d had a personal email from a director of the company (unknown to me, but acquainted with one of my Twitter followers) and very shortly after that my order was on its way.

All right, I’d jumped the queue and as an Englishman I naturally have my reservations about that, but it seems to be a trick that most of us can pull. Because every business cares far more about its public image than it does about you as an individual customer.

So complaining about your lousy train journey on Twitter is the equivalent of having your private conversation with Customer Services relayed over the tannoy at the Central Station.

Their Twitter feeds suggest that even notorious offenders like the energy companies are far more effective at dealing with complaints presented to them through Twitter than with those that arrive by more conventional channels. Which admittedly isn’t hard, since my experience of writing letters and sending emails to my electricity provider is strangely akin to dropping a brick down a bottomless well.

As I write I am still waiting to see whether Twitter will help me track down the important Christmas present that I supposedly signed for at 17.01 on Sunday, but which in fact never arrived at all.

Even if it ultimately fails, I know that both the sender and the courier are on the case, and I’ve been spared hours listening to hold music on the phone.

So give it a whirl yourself. Don’t say this column never tells you anything useful, and have a Christmas so merry you’ll want to go on Twitter to tell the world about it.

@keithhann

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Foot-in-mouth disease strikes again

Chris Tingle sounds suspiciously like a 1970s Radio 1 DJ, currently on bail as part of Operation Yewtree.

In fact it is the name of a seasonal church service. Albeit one that can never feel like a proper tradition to me, because it wasn’t around when I was growing up.

If Wikipedia is to be believed Christingle was introduced to England in 1968. Making it a full five years later than sexual intercourse, according to the poet Philip Larkin.

I was only dimly aware of Christingle, as of many things, through years of listening to The Archers. There it forms part of the December fabric along with “stir up Sunday” and the traditional switch-on of the illuminations around Ambridge village green.

But I only started attending the service when I had children and, more particularly, one of them began attending a Church of England primary school.

Hence we dutifully trooped along to our parish church on Sunday morning and my two boys, like a plague of locusts who have spent too long on the 5:2 diet, stripped the sultanas and dolly mixtures off their oranges before their candles were even lit.

In keeping with the spirit of 1968, the rector leading the service seemed to me to bear an endearing resemblance to a Gerry Anderson marionette. I suspected he might have some underlying happy clappy tendencies, but if he did they were held in check by the uncomprehending stares of a bunch of irregular worshippers and his organist.

Perhaps those looks were what threw him so thoroughly off his stride in his address to the assembled children about the Advent candles.

“And who do you think we will light this last white one for, next week? I’ll give you a clue. His name begins with a G … I mean J.”

A vicar who does not know how to spell Jesus seemed like the gaffe to end all gaffes until I found my wife, after an alcohol-free lunch, referring to our elder son as “Whatsisname”.

But they both seem pallid amateurs compared to the weekend’s supreme champions of the foot-in-mouth world, UKIP. How did we fill our days with mirth before this shower came along, with their unbelievably rich cast of fantasists, apparent racists and homophobes, and all-round world-class loons?

Whenever I feel depressed about my current job, which is most days, I can at least pause to reflect, “It could be worse, you could be doing PR for UKIP or the Keystone Cops.”

I think, on the whole, that it would be easier to big up the latter as a credible law enforcement agency than the former as an alternative government, or even as a desirable holder of the balance of power.

I don’t write this without regret, being a traditional Englishman who favours tweed three-piece suits, the monarchy, the Book of Common Prayer and the old ways of doing things in general.

But I can more believe in Nigel Farage as a potential Prime Minister than I can really have faith that today’s CofE is going to offer me the secret of eternal life.

And even if it were, a heaven that consists of clapping, swaying and waving my arms around to the accompaniment of twanging guitars is one I would rather do without.

My idea of Hell

I wish UKIP could be displaced by a truly Conservative party that bothered to check what its name actually meant in a dictionary before setting out its policy agenda.

And that the Church of England could revert to being a provider of hard pews, rousing hymns, ancient rituals and thoughtful sermons, rather than a branch of the social work industry always embarrassingly keen to “get down with the kids”.

I’d like to believe that the son of God was born of a virgin in Bethlehem a couple of millennia ago, and I’m happy to go through the traditional motions of worship. But then I also put out sherry, mince pies and carrots for Santa and Rudolph.

Even so, I do value the church for helping to provide some excellent schools, preserving our architectural heritage and generally meaning well, in addition to providing some incidental entertainment.

Whereas with UKIP, I really cannot see beyond the laughs.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The present is also a foreign country

In 1953, the year before I was born, a novel with one of the most famous opening lines of the twentieth century was published.

It was L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, and I’m sure you know the words: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

That usually prompts a nod of recognition. But if one ponders the logical consequences, aren’t we all creatures of the past? And does that not make each and every one of us immigrants in the foreign country that is Britain today?

Because they certainly do things very differently here and now, compared with the black and white, steam-powered, pounds, shillings and pence, “never had it so good” world in which my generation grew up.

Since then it has been pretty much a perpetual revolution, disguised only by the fact that the young woman who was crowned in 1953 still has her image on the currency today.

Many of the things I read and hear each day seem as alien to me as they must to a non-English speaker who has just arrived in Dover clinging to the underside of a lorry.

I miss half crowns and remain equally baffled by metric measurements and the way that English names for foreign places keep changing, but those of the foods associated with them (Peking duck, Ceylon tea) do not.

I cannot keep up with the ever-changing rules on acceptable language. A few weeks ago I listened in astonishment to an edition of BBC Radio 4’s Any Answers that was dominated by fury with Lord Heseltine for having used the word “handicapped”. This is apparently about as offensive as anyone can be to a disabled person in 2014.

It came as news to me and, reassuringly, to my younger and much more switched-on wife. Though the caravan will surely move on again, rendering the currently approved word completely unacceptable within another few years.

Meanwhile the most offensive words of my childhood are now the mainstays of popular comedy shows.

You’re probably wondering where I’m going with this, and expecting the name of Nigel Farage to crop up, so I won’t disappoint you. He doesn’t like being late for events because the motorways are so crowded, and cites “open door” immigration as one factor driving population growth.

My dad was saying much the same thing in 1960, outraged by the growing number of cars on the road and particularly by people on the neighbouring council estate having the temerity to take up driving.

His views were formed by around 1915, as mine were by the end of the 1950s, and thereafter we were both lost somewhere abroad without a guide book.

But it’s not just me, my dad and the entire membership of UKIP. Most of us appear overwhelmed with nostalgia for a golden age that never existed. Witness the recent YouGov survey that found a huge majority of the public in favour of renationalising the energy companies and railways.

Clearly forgetting the epic, soviet-style inefficiency of the old electricity boards and British Rail.

The simple, sad reality is that you can’t combine a generous welfare state with open borders; you will inevitably be overwhelmed by demand.

But equally you can’t maintain a functioning welfare state when your own population is ageing, and you rely on those in work to pay the pensions of the elderly. Those moaning immigrants from the past who irritatingly insist on living longer and longer as each year goes by.

The only remote hope of squaring that particular circle seems to be allowing the working population to be topped up with younger people from overseas. Maybe our leaders could try spelling this out a bit more clearly.

Ultimately this conundrum is all the selfish fault of us baby boomers, famously obsessed with sex yet bizarrely failing to breed in adequate numbers. I belatedly tried to make amends by adding two potential workers to the national pool. And my reward? A lecture the other day that began: “You silly old man, you don’t know anything. I’m two. I know things.

Actually my younger son Jamie is all of 2¾. I’m seriously thinking of entering him into a debating contest with Mr Farage.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.