Druin Burch

Homer is much praised, but I find him unreliable. The Mediterranean cove in which we were swimming, for example, was not in the least wine-dark. We were turning around and swimming back, the sights on display at the nudist end of the beach having startled the spluttering elegance of my head-above-water breast-stroke. ‘I wouldn't mind if it was only young women,’ I said to my wife, as we swam back. Rather than accepting my dispassionate nod toward prevailing cultural aesthetics, she replied she didn’t mind in the slightest, and couldn’t see the harm. An unspoken charge of puritanism hung in the air. ‘It was just a bit too much like an outpatient clinic,’ I said, and good-humoured sympathy swung back in my favour.

We Jews make up 0.2 per cent of the world’s population but have won 22 per cent of all the Nobel prizes ever awarded. And we have not done this with a tailwind. Mark Twain thought the reason Jews tended to do so well in business was above-average honesty. Jewish success has been so extravagantly out of proportion to their population that their finest gentile supporters have long sought reasons. Clive James, wondering about our influence in the arts, felt exclusion may have had its benefits. ‘Whole generations of Jewish literati were denied the opportunity of wasting their energies on compiling abstruse doctoral theses. They were driven instead to journalism, plain speech, direct observation and the necessity to entertain.

We are told being non-judgemental is a virtue, that discrimination is a vice, and that the avoidance of prejudice is not merely possible but laudable. Perhaps the quickest way to give the lie to these statements is to reveal to you that I am a 53-year-old man who regularly goes to the gym. What are we to make of someone of advanced middle age who nevertheless spends some of his few remaining hours lifting bits of metal up and putting them down again? Prejudice, I fear, suggests the worst. In the gyms I attend, the mirrors show a mix of the youthful and good-looking, the muscled and toned. Then there are the very fat, with their looks of wild hope or sinking doubt, the smattering of the ordinary and eccentric.

Before the arrival of strawberries, and not long after the coming of the swifts, the elder salutes the coming of summer after its own fashion: emerging from roadsides and hedgerows, gardens and wasteland, and scenting them with its blooms. Almost a century ago, Maud Grieve, in her 1931 Modern Herbal, said ‘that our English summer is not here until the elder is fully in flower, and that it ends when the berries are ripe’. At this time, when thorn blossom – which made our hedgerows look set for a wedding – has faded, the elder, like cow parsley, offers its own floral exuberance.

Saying that national generalisations have fallen out of fashion is an understatement. Stereotypes have become less common and less tolerated. But not all is unblemished improvement, and something of value has been lost. National generalisations – often misnamed racial – now veer close to thought crimes. A pity – national generalisations are a basic tool for making sense of the world, and for understanding how people’s backgrounds shape their values, character and culture. Abusus non tollit usum – that something can be misused does not mean it should not be used. As a man with a very limited range of anecdotes and conversational gambits, I frequently repeat myself. Handily, I work as a hospital doctor, supported by an ever-shifting cast of juniors and students.

Having long been a man whose spirits wilted if meat was not the centre of his meal, I have become almost vegetarian. It’s routinely predictable for age to lead us astray from our youthful socialism, but I find my dietary change more difficult to explain. My younger self would view my politics with horror and my diet with incredulity. I remain partial to eating flesh, but the conviction that any plate without it must be a side dish has evaporated. For most of my life, meat and two veg was my credo – and if the two vegetables were ketchup and mustard, then all the better. But these days I often cook without remembering to include anything that once had blood – and am bemused to find myself content. The vegetable delivery company Natoora bears some of the blame.

We British are not famed for culinary daring. An adventurous meal has traditionally been one that lacks potatoes. Nose-to-tail eating is mostly anathema to a nation that prefers the blandest part of the chicken because it’s the easiest to cut up. Poverty and shortage were not enough to spur our creativity during postwar rationing. The food writer Elizabeth David recounted a Scottish schoolmaster’s wife who recoiled in horror at her freshly gathered chanterelles. A fisherman did the same on spotting her with a crab, both reacting with the same appalled cry: ‘You’re never going to eat those dirty things?’ Few in Britain praise dishes of pig’s ears or chicken knees, but over the past 30 years our culinary character has improved.

Experts warn that doctors like me risk a condition known as ‘compassion fatigue’ – an emotional numbness that comes from too much caring for too long. But aren’t we all on the edge? Distant hardships are now visible as they happen, and the sense that victims are everywhere becomes vividly real. Newsreaders, documentary makers, editorialists, politicians and campaigners imply we’re shallow unless consumed by the wretchedness they describe. I meet the unfortunate, struggling and afflicted on my ward rounds. And I deal with those who have been made frail by age, bad luck and bad choices. Obstetricians get flowers and wine for helping bring wonder into people’s lives, orthopaedic surgeons for fixing hips and restoring freedom. I tend not to get gifts.