Christmas is a time of goodwill and I must, as usual, suspend my dislikes for the season. What are they? The list lengthens every year. It now includes Scotch announcers on the BBC and radio reporters who use what I call Elementary School Sing-song when reading their (often ungrammatical) dispatches. All footballers and their managers (and mistresses) and football fans.
In the narrow courts between Cornhill and Lombard Street, where the old City lives on, I find the senior partner in his seasonal bad temper. He likes to get on with his work but, he says, nobody else does — and, what is worse, nobody thinks that they should. ‘Take that clerk of mine, Cratchit,’ he grumbles. ‘I never see him at all. First of all it was stress and now it’s paternity leave. He’s taken the year off. Still expects to be paid. Claims he’s looking after Tiny Tim. When I told him that’s a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket, he threatened me with a tribunal.’ His mood does not improve when a sharp-suited figure bounces in: ‘Merry Christmas, uncle! Can I cut you in on my new hedge fund?
Empathy these days is the greatest of the virtues, and he is best who empathises most. That is why pop singers and British politicians are the best people in the world: they can’t see the slightest suffering without empathising with it. Whether they behave better than anyone else is beside the point; it is what they feel, especially in public, that counts. In my own small way, I also sometimes empathise. Last week, for example, a patient came to see me who seemed very nervous. He looked around him as though he expected at any moment to be taken by a giant raptor. ‘Are you like this all the time?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Since when?’ ‘Since I was young.’ ‘Why?
Gordon Brown does not usually receive support from this column but he deserves some congratulation on one initiative. He has written to the European Commission to request that it lifts the threshold above which duty becomes payable on goods brought into the EU for personal use. For the past 10 years it has been frozen at 170 euros (about £145). While the EU has been keen to encourage cross-border shopping within the EU, it does everything it can to discourage us from shopping outside the EU. Should you buy a £200 fur coat in New York, you are liable to pay, on your arrival at Heathrow, VAT of 17.5 per cent plus additional duty of 12 per cent — in addition to any sales taxes you have paid in America.
I have had my portrait painted. It was not my idea. One fault I do not possess is vanity. Indeed I am extremely vain about not being vain. The artist is a young lady called Katrina Bovill. She has been properly trained in Florence where they still have the highest possible standards of fine-art teaching, and she knows exactly what she wants to do and how to do it. She is the best young painter I have come across for many years, and it does my old heart good to relish such a rare combination of talent, skill, professionalism and disciplined enthusiasm. I met her at that magical caravanserai of writers, artists and bibliophiles, ‘Sheila’s Shop’ (Notting Hill Books is its official title), and it was Katrina’s idea to paint me.
Archie Rice urged his audience not to applaud too loudly: ‘It’s an old house. A very old house.’ This may explain why The Entertainer (Archie in the lead) has not been revived in the West End. Too warm a reception might make the theatre fall down. Now all these fragile old houses have found an unlikely friend in Tessa Jowell, who wants to pull £125 million out of the proceeds of the National Lottery to keep them going. In its earlier days the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which is her fiefdom, was known as the Ministry of Free Tickets. Since then it has had a modish makeover and is now the Department of Access and Outreach.
Last week I suggested that in August David Blunkett leaked news of his affair with Kimberly Quinn to the News of the World. My reason for doing so was not that I wished to champion Kimberly Quinn, who happens to be publisher of this magazine. I simply could see no other explanation. Mrs Quinn’s supporters passionately believed that Mr Blunkett did ‘kiss and tell’, and the strength of their belief was such that it was impossible to think (and remains so) that Mrs Quinn herself was the secret conduit. If she was not, who could it be other than Mr Blunkett, who had been dumped by Mrs Quinn, and had the motive of vengeance? On Friday 13 August Andy Coulson, editor of the News of the World, interviewed Mr Blunkett in Sheffield at 10 o’clock in the morning.
For my birthday, I have been given a gold rouble. It’s the thought that matters, of course — but which would you say was worth more: the rouble, or the gold? The promise to pay, or the precious metal? In the rouble’s homeland this question has always been a no-brainer. Ninety years ago Russia went to war, backed by gold reserves that were the biggest in the world. Five years later, when civil war had supervened, Admiral Kolchak was retreating down the Trans-Siberian Railway with a fleet of special trains, one of which held the reserves. By what may have been a coincidence, this train left the rails and was wrecked, and horsemen swooped out of the night and took the gold away.
Who is more in the wrong, David Blunkett or Kimberly Quinn? Everyone has a view. Let me tell the story. I have deliberately chosen not to talk to Kimberly Quinn, who is publisher of The Spectator. Nor have I spoken to David Blunkett, or anyone who works for him. Last July Kimberly Quinn (she then called herself Kimberly Fortier) told Mr Blunkett that their three-year affair was over. Mr Blunkett was very unhappy about this. He was in love with Mrs Quinn, and seems not to have acted particularly rationally. He wanted at the very least to establish his paternity of Mrs Quinn’s two-year-old son, as well as the child she is expecting in January.
Occasionally I walk home from the prison. Usually I take a taxi. Very rarely indeed do I drive; I don’t much care for parking within a mile radius of an establishment from which car thieves are released daily. I turned on the wireless and an unctuously sermonising Church of England voice emerged. ‘We pray for our world,’ it said, ‘especially those parts of it afflicted with violence.’ I thought for a moment that he was referring to the bed-sits and housing estates near my home, as well as the casualty department of my hospital. But he wasn’t, of course. ‘We pray for the Middle East. We pray for the hostages, and for the hostage-takers.’ I turned off the wireless with a gesture of disgust; you speak for yourself, I thought.
A loftily named environmental pressure group called the Food Commission has been upset by the sale of bottled water from Fiji in Waitrose supermarkets. The water, it complains, has clocked up 10,000 ‘food miles’ before it reaches Western consumers. ‘Transporting water halfway across the world is surely the most ludicrous use of fossil fuels when water is plentiful in the UK,’ it complains. It is also concerned that we are wasting fossil fuels by importing prawns from Indonesia (7,000 food miles) and carrots from South Africa (5,900 food miles). Counting the number of miles travelled by a product is a bizarre and crude way of trying to assess the environmental damage done by an industry.
Just what we need: a well-meant effort to gum up the market in houses. This market now seems to be gumming itself up, but never mind. A new Housing Act has been passed into law, and with it the concept of sellers’ packs. Anyone who wants to sell a house will have to put one of these packs together or, more precisely, to order one. They are supposed to contain all the information that a buyer of the house might want to have, and members of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors will be happy to provide them for anything up to £1,000. Who are these surveyors? Well, if you wanted to annoy them, you could describe them as estate agents with their Sunday suits on.
In the art of writing, one of the central problems is what to put in and what to leave out. In the past, I have always been one for putting in. I felt myself full of good things I did not want the reader to miss. So my books got longer and longer. This gigantism spent itself, and from the gross satisfaction of putting everything in I turned to the more delicate pleasure of deciding what to leave out. I discovered I could write down everything a reasonable person needed to know about the Renaissance in 40,000 words, and I have since done Napoleon and Washington at the same length. It has proved to be great fun. It is one thing, however, to leave out material for reasons of space, bulk, balance and other physical causes, quite another to leave out for reasons of art.
Whatever else the re-election of Bush signifies, it was a smack in the face for the intelligentsia. Like a crazed Kappelmeister sitting at a nightmare organ, they pulled out all the stops, from the bourdon in lead to the fiffaro, not excluding the trompeta magna, and what emerged, far from being a thanksgiving gloria in excelsis, was a lugubrious marche funèbre. In America they were all at it, from old Chomsky to that movie-maker who looks like a mushy jumbo cheeseburger. In Germany the Heidegger Left were goose-stepping in force. In France the followers of ‘Jumping Jack’ Derrida were at the barricades. Here in England all the usual suspects were on parade, from the Oxford stinks-don to the public-sector playwrights, with the Eumenides-novelists spitting fury.
The postman who calls at 30 Able Road may be a new urban myth but, as myths do, he tells a story. The people at number 30 found that they were getting post for 30 Baker Street, 30 Charlie Avenue, 30 Dog Mews, 30 Easy Street and so on. When they compared notes, they worked out that this postman could read Arabic numerals but was still at sea with English street-names. Disbanding the old guard and taking on helpers like this under contract must have given a boost, however temporary, to the Post Office’s finances. This week its omnipresent chairman, Allan Leighton, will take some time off from stalking Sainsbury’s to announce a modest profit, and to claim that it is meeting its targets for the delivery of letters.
One of the hazards of writing a column about the press is that sooner or later you are bound to be cornered by an editor or journalist whom you have teased. I shall never forget the time I was harangued in the street by the charming wife of my old friend Peter Stothard. Sometimes one is cut in the lavatories of clubs by people whom one has quite forgotten having written about. A worse experience is waking up to find that an editor whom you have ragged has been appointed to the editorship of the paper for which you write. Such was my fate when Sir Max Hastings was made editor of the London Evening Standard, for which I then worked. Max was not inclined to take a humorous view of the things I had written about him.
Many of my non-medical friends complain of the pointlessness of their jobs. What they do has no meaning, they say, no intrinsic worth, apart from paying the bills. My friends feel like caged mice which run incessantly inside wheels: an expense of spirit in a waste of effort. ‘At least,’ they say, ‘your job is worthwhile.’ ‘In what sense?’ I ask. ‘You help people.’ If only they knew. Compared with the doctors in a hospital like mine, Sisyphus had it easy. Light recreation such as his would come as a relief to us. There is, for example, a lady well-known to our hospital who attends every two weeks or so with an overdose.
Jonathan Dimbleby has been frightening late-night audiences on ITV with a documentary called the New World War. Using interviews with Ethiopean coffee-producers and reels of library footage of hurricanes, Dimbleby explains his thesis: ‘Global terrorism, global poverty and global warming form a toxic trio that promise a catastrophe that will make the horrors of 9/11 look like the Boston Tea Party.’ ‘Do I exaggerate?’ he asks in an accompanying article in the Observer. In a word, yes. Terrorism, poverty and global warming may be linked in the minds of the Observer-reading classes, but is al-Qa’eda really motivated by the refusal of Western consumers to buy fair-trade bananas?
It had to happen. A few years ago I announced the demise of the City of London. The old place in its old form had enjoyed a great run but was on its way out, and would now be relaunched as Hong Kong West. As the flag comes down from Cazenove’s masthead, we can witness power being handed over. By nature independent to the point of idiosyncrasy, Caz now believes that this model no longer works, and is putting the core of its business into a joint venture with the vast American bank currently known as J.P. Morgan. The aspiration must be that JPM Caz will go straight to the top of the deal-makers’ league. With Caz’s connections and Morgan’s muscle, it could be unstoppable.
What is the purpose of life? Is push-penny really as good as poetry, as Bentham contends? Surely there can have been few of us who have not sometimes wondered whether all our frantic activity — mainly getting and spending — is quite as necessary or important as we like to pretend it is. It is when I am faced by sullen youths, who tell me that life is pointless and not in the least worth living, that all my adolescent angst reawakens. Oh, I know perfectly well that the sullen youth with existential problems is really complaining that his declarations of undying lust for another equally sullen and unattractive youth of the opposite sex have been rejected in favour of those of his best friend.