Paul Johnson

Who keeps Lent now? Lenctentid was the Anglo-Saxon name for March, meaning spring tide, and as the 40-day fast fell almost entirely in March, it was called Lent, though in other Christian countries it had quite different names. The odd thing about Lent is that though it is a period of gloom and sorrow, commemorating Christ’s sojourn in the wilderness when he prepared himself to sacrifice his life, the days are lengthening all the time as the grip of winter is relaxed, so we ought to feel a lightness of heart. But this Lent the icy east wind has been so persistent that we have not felt the warm breath of spring at all. When I was a child Lent was taken very seriously indeed. On Wednesdays and Fridays there was no meat or even fish, as a rule, and only one frugal meal.

This month I spent a weekend in Bruges, travelling most of the way by Eurostar, which for this kind of trip easily beats air travel for speed and is, of course, incomparably more comfortable. I love trains. All my early childhood in north Staffordshire, from four to 12, I travelled every day to school on a funny little LMS puffer on the so-called Loop Line, which went through the various Potteries towns and deposited me at Stoke, where it rejoined the main line. Historically, rail was the most efficient, cheap, safe and customer-charming form of travel devised for ordinary people. Like the 19th century which gave it birth, it promoted civilisation, manners and prosperity. Our Loop Line ran from six in the morning to midnight, every 20 minutes.

The hair colour gene MCI-R has seven European variants, one of them blond. It is rare and becoming rarer. A WHO survey calculates that the last true blond will be born in Finland in 2202. Do you believe this? Nor do I. A different lot of scientists argue that this gene emerged over a comparatively short period about 10,000 years ago, with food shortages — and shortages of men — speeding up the natural selection process to the advantage of blonds. A touch of old-style Hollywood here? Certainly not the present dump — which Betty Grable would find unrecognisable, Marilyn Monroe chilly and Mae West distinctly hostile — making bad movies to advance its agenda: to them, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a racist insult.

AJ.P. Taylor was born a hundred years ago this month. I owe a lot to him because he was responsible for my getting an open exhibition to Magdalen, my favourite Oxford college, which I had picked out as mine when a boy of ten. Later he tutored me in modern history. You arrived at his house, Holywell Ford, in the grounds of the college, on the dot of the hour, never a second before or after, and the typing within stopped and a growly voice said ‘Enter!’ Then you got a full, crowded hour, and left again on the dot. The typing (of a Sunday Express diatribe, probably) resumed before you had closed the door. You got your money’s worth. I once heard him say, ‘I always give good value’ — whether for books, articles, tutorials, lectures or TV programmes.

A scare article in the Guardian says that handwriting will soon disappear. Not so. In fact, in the last two years I have reverted to doing all my writing by hand as they no longer make the machines I like, and my eyes object to staring at a screen. My assistant, the angelic Mary, puts my scribbles on computer or disk. Being left-handed, I have to hold my pen in a funny way, as writing from left to right is unnatural to sinistrals. I envy the Ancient Egyptians, who carved their hieroglyphs either way and wrote hieratic (the written version) from right to left. When I was writing my history of Ancient Egypt, my favourite book was Egyptian Grammar by Alan Gardiner, from which I learned hieroglyphs, and a little hieratic (the commercial cursive, demotic, was much too difficult).

The recent death of Michael Wharton, aged 92, raises the interesting question: who was the most right-wing person who ever lived? Many thought he was. I am not sure he did himself. The last time I saw him, when he was already very old, I asked him how he saw himself and he replied, ‘Moving to the right.’ He said this as if regretting a life of obstinate radicalism, though as the honorary editor-in-chief of the Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald for more than half a century it was always difficult to get to the right of him (I tried) in any issue on the political agenda. On other matters he resembled Gilbert Pinfold (or his creator, Evelyn Waugh) and ‘abhorred ... everything that had happened in his lifetime’.

The headline on the tabloid said, ‘Britain running out of water’. I don’t believe this. Indeed, I never believe scare stories about the world going to pot. But water is a fascinating subject. Considering how important it is to us, we know extraordinarily little about it. G.K. Chesterton used to say, ‘There is something inherently comic in the fact that our water is brought to us by who knows what from who knows where, often hundreds of miles away.’ There are more than 1,408 million cubic kilometres of water on the earth’s surface, and this total has changed little in the whole of geologic time. But nearly all of it is in the oceans (97.25 per cent). All the rain and clouds contain less than 0.001 per cent, and lakes, no matter how big, only 0.

I shall remember Saturday 20 January 2006. What it was like elsewhere I do not know, but in west Somerset it was the perfect winter’s day. A great surge of happiness ran through me as I set off for my walk in the hills and coombs. It had been sunny the afternoon before but blustery. Now all was still and the sun was majestic in the cerulean sky, summoning his court. And they came! I swear a multitude of things had happened since the day before. In my garden were irises, peeping through the foliage, and japonica had just appeared, and winter jasmine and its coeval, honeysuckle. I found the first snowdrop in the churchyard.

‘You writers never retire, do you?’ said the guest at the party condescendingly. ‘“Scribble, scribble, scribble, right to the end,” as Edward Gibbon said.’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘it was said to Gibbon, either by George III or the Duke of Gloucester, accounts differ.’ ‘Quite a know-all, aren’t you?’ the man said. ‘But my point is this: there’s no retiring age for writers, and perhaps there ought to be.’ I might well second that wish, ill-natured though it was. I recall vividly V.S. Pritchett, then in his late eighties, telling me how he had to drag himself, groaning and cursing, up the high stairs to his study at the top of the house every morning to do his daily stint. And there was J.B.

There is nothing sinful in amassing wealth, provided it is done justly. Andrew Carnegie, in his essay ‘Wealth’, got it right. What is reprehensible is to hang on to it: ‘The man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced.’ By the time he went, in his sleep, in his 84th year, Carnegie had disposed of virtually everything, and he was buried at Sleepy Hollow, Tarrytown, New York, next to Washington Irving. A sizable volume, A Manual of the Public Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie (1919), shows that, by this date, $350,695,693.40 had been spent on a variety of gifts, including 2,811 free libraries and 7,689 church organs. The last item, considering he was an atheist, is interesting. Are you listening, Richard Dawkins?

People have mixed feelings about ivy (Hedera helix). It is believed to do unhurried damage to buildings while artfully concealing its depredations. ‘Creeping ivy ...hides the ruin that it feeds upon,’ as Cowper says. Not long ago, Jerome, who looks after our London garden, had to cut back the ivy covering the high wall abutting the veranda of my library, thus exposing the brick. This grievously disturbed my post-breakfast period of contemplation, when I look out on the garden and work out what I will write during the day. However, with its characteristic tenacity and fecundity, the ivy has grown back again, the bricks have vanished and the incident is closed.

When I first came to London, half a century ago, the head of the journalistic profession was Arthur Christiansen. ‘Chris’ was much admired in the trade. I considered it a signal honour to have a drink with him in what his employer, Lord Beaverbrook, called ‘El Vino’s Public House’. Beaverbrook made him editor of the Daily Express, and over the quarter-century of his rule there he raised its circulation from 1,700,000 to well over four million. It was the finest popular newspaper in the world. One of Chris’s sayings was, ‘You may speak with the tongues of angels and write with the pen of Shakespeare but you cannot beat news in a newspaper.’ (How true; and how forgotten today.

The most striking work in the spine-tingling show at the National Gallery, ‘Rubens: A Master in the Making’, is the enormous painting of St George slaying the Dragon (Prado). What I like about Rubens is that he always goes over the top. Here, the head of the saint’s charger, and especially the mane, is a creative phantasmagoria of hirsute auxesis, and balancing it is the monster’s crazy head, especially the mouth, already skewered by St George’s lance, and exhibiting catastrophic cavities of such horror that it ought to hang in dentists’ waiting-rooms as an example of what happens if you don’t scour your teeth with a yard-brush.

The world of mammon has never been more blatant and noisy. A businessman, a caricature plutocratic monster, pays himself a yearly dividend, from just one of his companies, of £1.2 billion: that is more than the total income of 54,000 people on average earnings. He is capitalism’s top celeb, a media hero, alongside the football managers, pop singers, fashionable harlots, TV academics, babbling bishops, political demagogues and the rest of the pushers and shovers who compete for attention in the headlines, and who dominate the world of ‘getting and spending’, as Wordsworth called it. Hard for anyone, however wide-eyed and virtuous, not to be infected by this pandemic of self-aggrandisement, this virus of vanity, this Gadarene lust for fame and attention.

This is the season of Advent: the time of prayer. Of course we should all pray all the time and not just in this season. I am not a prayerful person but I do pray daily and cannot imagine not doing so. Even King Claudius, whom Charles Lamb said was the least likable character in all Shakespeare, prayed, and had sufficient self-knowledge to know that his prayers were ineffectual: My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go. All must pray to somebody or something. As Homer says (Odyssey 3: 48), ‘Everyone needs the gods.’ Darwinian fundamentalists pray to Holy Charles; Richard Dawkins, I suppose, to the primaeval polyp. The word comes from precari, to beg or entreat.

The bad behaviour of Sir Christopher Meyer, former ambassador in Washington, raises interesting questions of nomenclature. Should he be called a shit, a cad or a rat? I rather rule out rat as being tabloid-speak, and Meyer, though he has a lot to do with tabloids (as chairman of that humbugging body, the Press Complaints Commission), and actually flogged his memoirs to one, is not himself tabloid material, being dull and colourless. The Sun and the Mirror often refer to men who deceive their wives as ‘love-rats’. How do they refer to a red-haired tabloid editor who gets drunk, beats up her tough-guy actor husband and spends the night in a police cell? The answer is that they simply kill the story. Leaving rats aside, for the time being, is Meyer a shit or a cad?

My old tutor, A.J.P. Taylor, used to say, ‘The only lesson of history is that there are no lessons of history.’ Not true. History does not exactly repeat itself, but there are recurrent patterns. And the historian learns to look for certain signs. He asks, What is the prevailing orthodoxy, in any field, at a particular time? And his training teaches him: it is almost certain to be wrong. That is one reason why I am so suspicious of the Darwinian establishment today, and in particular its orthodoxy that natural selection is the sole form of evolution. This establishment still has enormous power. It controls the big university biology faculties, and such leading journals as Nature and Scientific American.

The bipolarity of science and the humanities has always been a false and inhibiting distinction. Now the enmity between what C.P. Snow called ‘the Two Cultures’ is coming to an end. It has lasted 200 years. Before that, knowledge was seen as a whole, a continuum. A seer like Newton probed into all subjects, albeit physics interested him most. His friend Christopher Wren was a mathematician-scientist before he concentrated on architecture. Their colleagues in the Royal Society discussed all topics. When Diderot was compiling his Encyclopédie, he drew no frontiers between arts and sciences.