Columns

In January, the director-general of the BBC, Lord Hall of Birkenhead, announced that the corporation intended to shift away from making programmes enjoyed by older members of the public to concentrate on the ‘lives and passions’ of young people, in particular 16- to 30-year-olds. Of course Hall was not the first BBC employee to take an obsessive interest in young people, and nor was his mantra anything other than the norm in a country where older people, who are comparatively well off, pay their taxes, commit little crime, consume like crazy and indeed pay the licence fee, are held in a certain contempt. A month before Hall made his statement, the BBC had devoted considerable airtime to yoof and its wants, needs and aspirations regarding the general election.

In 1846 Vienna, as across much of the world, a relatively new disease called puerperal (or ‘childbed’) fever had reached epidemic proportions in the local maternity hospital. Death rates of mothers and babies after childbirth were averaging 10 per cent, sometimes twice that. Across the western world millions were dying, the rate reaching 40 per cent in some hospitals. A Hungarian doctor in Vienna’s hospital, Dr Ignaz Semmelweis, began to wonder whether the problem might be something on the hands of doctors who’d been conducting post mortem examinations on the fever’s victims. He suggested handwashing with a chlorine solution. It worked. Deaths plummeted.

In the States, the ‘open letter’ is enjoying quite the formal renaissance. Curiously, recent examples of this newly popular epistolary genre exhibit striking similarities to the ransom note. During June’s riots following George Floyd’s murder, a beloved independent bookstore in Denver called The Tattered Cover posted online that the shop would be politically impartial, the better to remain a neutral space for customers. Cue local outrage. Cue the store’s immediate volte-face: fulsome support for Black Lives Matter. The reversal proved unsatisfactory. Signed by miffed patrons and authors, an open letter to the owners listed ten demands.

The only memorable argument I have ever heard in that tedious debate about whether Shakespeare was a Catholic came from the poet Tom Paulin. I remember him claiming in a lecture that the ‘bare ruin’d choirs’ sonnet must have been written by someone who had seen the despoiled monasteries, desecrated churches and ravaged holy places of a faith of which they were a part. Famously, such an argument only gets you so far, for by this logic Shakespeare was also a king, empress, ex-king, sailor, magician and fool, among many hundreds of others. But part of the rationale stayed with me. Which is that the bitterest truth of all is that loving a thing does not mean you can protect it, and that even the things you consider most sacred can be trampled over.

I’ve never dug a grave before. But that was how I spent my Sunday afternoon. Three feet is awfully deep to dig, and three feet is how deep you have to go if you don’t want foxes to turn a little tragedy into a horror-comedy. I laboured till the head of the spade went out of sight. My children were eating burgers from the barbecue a few feet away, and I worried that they might guess what I was up to. Thank God for the heroic incuriosity of children. I told the youngest something about planting a tree and it seemed to satisfy him. The truth would have been ‘planting the family cat after we put her down tomorrow’. I worried the hole wasn’t big enough. But then it struck me that it was just about the diameter of a cat door and I felt my throat catch.

Of all the people who have made cash in the past month, few can have raked it in like Robin DiAngelo. Since the death of George Floyd, the white American academic and author of White Fragility has been absolutely milking it. A term I probably shouldn’t use, since Peta last week declared milk a symbol of white supremacy. I might say she is absolutely creaming it, though by the time you read this ‘cream’ might be racist too. In which case it will join the British countryside, which was designated as racist by the BBC’s Countryfile last week. A fact that I learned after opening Google’s homepage, where I was educated about the late black American drag queen Marsha Johnson.

I sometimes pick up some food at Tesco for an 86-year-old pensioner who lives a few streets over. At the weekend, I brought him milk and cornflakes. He opened his front door; I put the bags down, retreated the required two metres, but when I looked up he was in tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quietly. ‘I’m just so lonely at the moment.’ Should I have moved closer, put my arm around him? At the moment the risk of passing on the virus is low in London. I’ve had the bug (I think) and I used hand gel after leaving the supermarket. It’s been said of the recent protests that distancing is irrelevant because racism is a deadlier epidemic than Covid. If that’s true of racism, isn’t it also true of loneliness in the old?

‘It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is falling by the hour, the glass will fall forever, But if you break the bloody glass, you won’t hold up the weather.’ The first poem I ever heard was ‘Eenie, meenie, minie moe, catch a tiger by the toe. If he hollers, let him go’, etc. I found it mystifying. How would one catch a tiger by its toe? And do tigers ‘holler’? ‘There is something about this poem they’re not telling me,’ I thought, full of worry, my nappy beginning to chafe. This was last week, by the way. (Ha. Only kidding.