Columns

I was only a boy when I first began protesting against the idiocy of so much of the folk wisdom handed down to us. Proverbs, adages and aphorisms (‘a pithy observation that contains a general truth,’ says my dictionary) are recited to children by grown-ups, often in a singsong, holier-than-thou voice; and I couldn’t help noticing that many were quite evidently untrue, contained thoroughly bad advice, and some nuggets of supposedly sage proverbial wisdom are flatly contradicted by other nuggets of sage proverbial wisdom. I started taking a note whenever my attention was caught by yet another glaringly obvious example of a proverb, sanctimonious or trite, that was just plain wrong.

I’m torn between headlining this column ‘Why I’m moving to Portugal’ and ‘Why I’m leaving the UK’. Exhausted, shadowed by tippling towers of cardboard, once more unable to put my hands on a black marker when I bought a whole box or to locate a tape gun when we have bloody four of them, in all having perversely disassembled a working household into a shambled heap, I am hard-pressed to answer either question. Why have I done this to myself? Remind me. If the UK is falling on hard times, isn’t it when you’re down on your luck that your mates should rally round? On the positive side, I have knocked together a thumbnail for friends.

What follows may suggest that I require an ‘intervention’. Readers might even interpret this column as a cry for help. Please let me assure you that it is not. But I have just learned of a new addiction, and it is possible that I suffer from it. It is not an addiction to crack cocaine. Nor is it an addiction to alcohol, though I like to think I do my bit. No – it is an addiction I have just learned about thanks to Idris Elba: ‘Work addiction.’ The actor, who you doubtless know from The Wire, Luther and other dramas, gave an interview this week in which he said he has been in therapy for the past year because he is a ‘workaholic’. After seeing a therapist he has realised his addiction to work is ‘unhealthy’.

Adulthood was once determined by age, but now we’ve extended childhood far beyond the teenage years. If the government gets its way, the next generation will never grow up: there are reportedly plans to ban cigarette sales to anyone born after 2009. This would mean that, come 2060, 50-year-olds could be begging their elders to pop into the local corner shop to buy them a pack of 20. We need a new metric of adulthood, and I have a proposal. The real mark is not an age or any particular milestone, it’s really when you receive your first piece of unsolicited feedback. It’s a grim but unavoidable rite of passage: having personal and outlandish comments directed your way, often in such a breezy or casual manner you’d think they were talking about the weather.

Long-time readers may recall that I take a special interest in the art of corruption. And this week America has thrown up a delicious example. Democrat Senator Robert Menendez was indicted last week on bribery charges. This follows a raid on the New Jersey Senator’s home in which federal agents found more than $480,000 hidden in clothing and piled up in his closets. The agents also found 13 gold bars. You have to go back to the 1990s for the last time that parliament was seriously accused of being ‘up for sale’ Menendez denies the charges and said on Monday that it has simply been his habit, for some years, to take thousands of dollars in cash from his personal savings account and store it around the house.

As we all shroud ourselves in grief at being unable to watch Russell Brand any more on terrestrial television stations, a few thoughts occur. The first and most obvious is (once again) the presumption of guilt on the part of the entertainment industry, a business entirely devoid of morals and managed largely by coked-up hypocrites. Obviously, for most human beings our repulsion at the immediacy with which Brand has been cancelled by these dreadful people is challenged by our collective detestation of the man himself – yet another of those ‘comedians’ who never ever said anything funny and whose shtick was simply to reflect the zeitgeist of the age by showing off. But still.

This is my brother’s story and, like many telling stories, it’s small. Tim lives in Iowa, as our mother’s family did, a lightly populated state smack in the centre of the US, and breadbasket to the world. Its rolling hills, panoramic skies and cornfields stippling to the horizon exude what I can only call wholesomeness. This is a place that produces not simply words, ideas or transient technologies, but tangible commodities that keep the human race alive at scale. Historically, Iowans have been friendly, open and guileless; farmers have tended to look out for one another. However much coastal urbanites may disdain the rubes who raise the cattle feed for their sirloins, this classic flyover country should harbour the true moral heart of America, were such a thing to remain anywhere.

How terrified should we be of the new Covid variant nicknamed (on Twitter) ‘Pirola’? Out of our wits? Or should we be more worried that BA.2.86, to give it its official name, is acting as a stalking horse for those who want our country locked down once again and a clamp placed securely over our jaws? The government has brought forward its booster-jab rollout for the over-65s in response to this new variant, which has so far afflicted slightly more than 100 people worldwide and caused no deaths. This action was not enough for many, though.

Like all hacks, I sometimes wonder whether I should just screw my self-esteem, do a Jonathan Freedland and start writing trashy novels for cash. As I fill the pages with every cliché, I can at least console myself by thinking of the wonderful piles of lucre about to come my way. It is very sensible of China to gather information on those who might be critical of it Were I to make this career change, my first ‘shocker’ would involve a Chinese spy called Fang Fang. She would be a sexy, enormously seductive femme fatale. As she works her way through the American political scene, she would entrap male members of Congress with startling ease, finding out juicy secrets along the way which she then reports back to Beijing.