I was on friendly terms with Rod Liddle for quite a few decades. He applied for the job I got when I was 17 at the New Musical Express, which kicked off my writing career. Though I wouldn’t claim we were bezzie mates, we had a lot of the same friends and we met up in a couple of group lunches and had a laugh.
So I was surprised at my lack of grief when he died. (Apparently he too was remarkably sanguine about his ending.) My overwhelming feeling was: ‘Good for Rod – he escaped!’ It’s the first time I can recall feeling that way about the premature death of someone I knew a bit and liked a lot. Why, I wondered, did I react like this?
Violent criminals released to roam the streets – and violent criminals imported to roam the streets
Lionel Shriver might be partly to blame. This year I’ve been reading her complete oeuvre and my favourite of her underappreciated novels is the jauntily titled So Much For That. ‘So much for that’ – it’s become a recurrent phrase in my head ever since I read it. I’ve come to apply it to everything, from my disablement at the end of 2024, to where exactly the human race is going.
What’s happened, I’ve realised, is that after a lifetime of being proudly optimistic (hope is, after all, a virtue), I’ve become a pessimist. Yet what’s odd is that my new-found pessimism hasn’t made any difference to the cheer with which I greet each day. I suppose you could say I’m a Perky Pessimist.
Most of the world’s pessimists can be divided into two kinds: miserable sods who genuinely enjoy grumbling and get an almost parasexual thrill from it, like Frazer in Dad’s Army; and posers who think a dash of the doomed poet will help them pull girls. Both are very wearing to be around.
The Perky Pessimist, though, is a different breed. We’re cheery coves in our day-to-day lives, not inclined to carp or cavil. We simply believe, as surely as two and two make four, that the world – and specifically western civilisation – is on the road to nowhere and is never coming back. We’re Mustn’t Grumble Nihilists: yes, everything is falling apart, but there’s nothing we can do about it so why fret? We take comfort in the fact that when we were young we got to enjoy an unprecedented level of highly enjoyable sex, drugs and house music before it all went sour. By the way, this attitude, as much as the triple lock, is probably what makes The Youth so cross with us.
If you doubt the case for pessimism, if not perkiness, look at the facts. Barely any developed nation is even bothering to have children. Japan is especially bad; so low is its birthrate that more adult nappies (of which I am an enthusiastic wearer) than baby ones have been bought in the past ten years, to the extent that a major nappy producer announced it would no longer manufacture the traditional kind.
Over here, schools – where once there were worries about over-sized classes – are closing; more than 100 in the past decade. The tens of thousands of children, mostly from disadvantaged homes, who never came back after lockdown have contributed to this. They’re sometimes vividly called ‘ghost children’ and I think of this phrase as going beyond Covid. To me, they’re a legion of little ghosts of the world’s lost hope for itself.
Children who show up are suffering record levels of unhappiness which often prevents them from learning with vigour and rigour; this extends into university level. Mind you, I can see why the poor little sods are sad. When they leave education, many will go on benefits, mostly because of ‘mental health’. A modern-day Yosser from Boys from the Blackstuff wouldn’t be asking ‘Gizza job!’, but boasting proudly: ‘I got ADHD – gizza hand-out!’
Then there’s the breakdown of civil society, from shoplifting to fare-dodging. The sectarianism of voting. Violent criminals released to roam the streets; violent criminals imported to roam the streets. The emergence of snake oil salesmen to pick up the slack from the main parties. Oh, and there’s AI, always waiting in the wings, warming up, like a sinister robot ballerina, soon to take the stage in a vast danse macabre the like of which the world has never seen.
No wonder only 6 per cent of Brits say they would volunteer to fight off an invasion by a foreign power. And who could blame the almost two-thirds of people who believe the country’s ‘social contract’ is broken? All around the western world, young people in particular are losing faith in democracy.
Over in New York City, capital of the international capitalist dream, they’ve elected a communist mayor because they feel the same. It’s a good job Zack Polanski’s not as presentable as Zohran Mamdani. But still… what have we got to protect? A country with a decreasing number of schools, churches and pubs; a shell and a shadow of itself.
Rod, of course, made his stellar reputation by writing about all this; the degradation of every hope and dream our generation had nursed as bright-eyed youngsters. Everyone who was fond of this exceptional man will miss him. But he is better off out of it. Much as he excelled in decrying these dog days, there are far worse times just around the corner, which perhaps even he was not prepared for. So much for that.
Comments