Michael Henderson

Three decades ago, when his voice still carried some weight, Malcolm Muggeridge reckoned that social historians of the future would be puzzled by the middle-class death wish that took root after the second world war. It isn’t hard to see what he meant. Some time in the Sixties, politicians and other public figures who had been educated at private schools started to feel ashamed at their good fortune, and moved heaven and earth to deny those who followed the advantages they had enjoyed. Today the consequences are evident wherever one looks. Thousands of lives have been blighted by the doctrine of bogus egalitarianism, and we are all weaker for it. But it is not just schools and universities where standards have been eroded.

Books, we are continually told, particularly by people who rarely read them, are going the way of the dodo. The shops that sell them are closing at an alarming rate, as the dreaded Kindle takes over, and public libraries are being encouraged to turn themselves into noisy ‘resource centres’, designed to attract the feckless young. One might think that the places continuing to sell such glorious, old-fashioned things would be eager to put their best foot forward. So a post-Christmas visit to the biggest bookshop in Europe, as Waterstone’s in Piccadilly likes to call itself, was an eye-opener. It’s a shop that evokes happy memories. I have been buying books there for years, including a complete set of Proust, which is not so much a purchase as an investment for life.

‘To tell the truth,’ says Peter Myers, his Cumbrian baritone untouched by four decades of life in Manhattan, ‘I’m glad it’s all over.’ By ‘it’ he means Christmas and new year, when Myers, the sausage-knotter and purveyor of pies to New Yorkers, is at his busiest. ‘It was bedlam. They began to queue up outside the shop ten days before Christmas for their mince pies. We were making thousands a day. Bedlam, I tell you’. Myers of Keswick, the shop on Hudson Street that bears the name of his birthplace, is not your average butcher’s.

Anatole France described his literary criticism as ‘the adventures of my soul among masterpieces’. We cannot all be critics, in the sense that France was, but he surely spoke for everybody, reviewer or not, who takes reading seriously. Books do furnish a room, and the best books decorate a life. Although reading is an interior activity, as a book speaks directly to one person, one of the greatest joys in a well-lived life is reading in agreeable public places. The beach, where so many people do their annual reading, is not an agreeable place. The noise, heat and general irritation do not provide the reflection that one needs for serious reading, which is why most beach-loafers do not read seriously. In which case, why read at all?

Hear the one about the ‘professional Southerner’? Of course not, says Michael Henderson, so why does the media keep trotting out this tired old cliché about Northerners? John Prescott is at it again. Embold-ened by his first assault on television, an ‘examination’ of social class that was unaccountably aired by the BBC last year, the man we must refer to as the former deputy prime minister has been invited back, this time (yawn) to help viewers understand the differences between North and South. Having seen a bit of the first programme, which revealed rather more about Prescott’s notorious chippiness than the defects of his putative targets, I trust readers will not mark me down for missing the follow-up. Life is short.