Paul Johnson

A simple explanation for the origins of the universe — and us too Some people maintain that, in the age of the internet and Google, public lectures are an outmoded way of acquiring knowledge. I don’t agree. They demand effort to get to, fighting London’s horrid traffic, crowded tubes, parking problems etc., and that is a prolegomenon to concentration. They also force one to follow an argument with no skipping. An uncomfortable setting is a further stimulus to thought. The Royal Institute of Philosophy’s annual lecture series this winter on religion, organised by Professor Anthony O’Hear, is in a room at University College, a new one since it seems to be made of plywood and cardboard.

I am old enough to remember the last slump — I was three in 1932 and lived in the Potteries in North Staffordshire, always a precarious area economically, and badly hit by slack trade. Most of the workers in the pot bank were women and girls, traditionally paid low wages, and now subjected to pay cuts. The men worked in the pits, if they were lucky. My mother, who came from Lancashire, and had a song for everything, used to sing: Colliery lads make gold and silver. Factory lads make brass. Who would marry a hand-loom weaver, When there’s plenty of colliery lads? In the wasteland not far from our house, there were curious piles of stones and boulders, making a lunar landscape.

Plus ça change in the bustling hurly-burly of Westbourne Grove The chill winds are already blowing down Westbourne Grove as the recession takes hold. They would, wouldn’t they? The Grove is a peculiarly fragile and sensitive street, and has been ever since it was set up in the 1850s. At one time it was known as Bankruptcy Alley. The turnover in the shops and restaurants is allegro con brio. When we first came to live in our delightful little street, Newton Road, a quarter-century ago, the Grove was a pretty bedraggled place, only slowly emerging from the near-slummy grime which lasted from the Great Slump, through the war and into the Rachman era, the Monster operating not far from here. In those days there were three greasy- spoon caffs in the Grove or nearby streets.

There are all kinds of reasons for objecting to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Selfish and often indifferent to the feelings of others (especially young women), while hypersensitive to his own, he was one of those intellectual monsters who think ideas matter more than people. But he was a great poet nonetheless. His ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is one of my favourite poems and I often think of it at this time of year when the trees are being stripped of their last leaves. ‘O wild West Wind,’ he writes, Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes.

Not long before he died, Simon Gray and I discussed the extraordinary paradox: why was it that New Labour does everything in its power to discourage smoking and everything in its power (notably longer licensing hours) to encourage drinking? After all, we agreed, drink caused infinitely more human misery, both to drinkers themselves and to their families, than cigarettes. Smoking does not produce suicides, whereas drinking does, every day. Any doctor or hospital consultant will tell you that booze kills many more people than lung cancer, and that’s not even counting road deaths caused by drunken drivers. Above all, smoking does not lead to crime, whereas over 50 per cent of violent crimes are caused by alcohol.

There’s plenty of goodies yet in the English word-factory The most overused word this autumn has been ‘crunch’ in the sense of ‘crisis’, as in the phrase ‘credit crunch’. Not many know that it was first used thus by Winston Churchill, so adding to his many other claims to fame that of being a neologist. The OED credits him with inventing the usage but says it was in the Daily Telegraph on 23 February 1939, whereas I think it was a decade earlier in his book on the first world war. I think I can fairly be called a neologist by virtue of using triumphalist in its current sense, in my History of Christianity (1976), having picked it up from the late mediaeval usage.

My attitude to money is simple. I want to think about it as little as possible. So I have arranged my life with this end in view. I work hard and spend less than I earn. I put aside sums for tax and VAT and do the returns promptly. I pay bills by return of post. I have never borrowed or had an overdraft, and paid off the only mortgage I ever had at the earliest possible date. I always say to the people who look after my savings: I am not greedy and don’t want a high return, just security and peace of mind. None of this did me the slightest good during the present crisis.

People who are infuriated by the huge sums paid for stuffed animals in tanks and the adulation heaped on Francis Bacon’s squiggly horrors should grasp that there is no reason or logic in aesthetics. Andy Warhol, no mean exponent of effrontery, if not of skill, summed up the game for all time: ‘Art is what you can get away with.’ This is certainly true of modern fashion art. Was it always true? In studying the history of the subject, I am often struck by the bizarre careers of artists. For instance, that obscure figure Grünewald was better known in his day as a hydraulic engineer than as the painter of the Isenheim Altarpiece.

Why do men want to rule the world? The question is prompted by the British Museum’s exhibition of objects from Hadrian’s day. They have gone to a lot of trouble. Worth it? Hadrian was one of those supremely busy, and colossally boring, people who crop up on history’s pages to puzzle us. He had been brought up by his distant relative Trajan (a much more interesting fellow) to assume wide responsibil-ities — the two tramped the empire together. No doubt old Trajan wanted him to succeed. Even so, Hadrian only did so by murdering four important people. That proved he wanted the job badly, of course. But, having got it, he spent most of his 20-year reign going all over his enormous property inspecting it.

Stop throwing bricks! You might hit a bishop’s niece ‘Damn! Another bishop dead!’ said Lord Melbourne in 1834, adding, ‘I think they do it to vex me.’ The departure of one bishop meant he had to make a new one, and that involved writing (in his own hand, for security reasons) disagreeable letters on matters in which he took little interest. In his time, however, there were only 26 bishops, and no more than two died, on average, in any one year. Today there are 114 bishops, and when one dies, or half a dozen for that matter, it is, to use Talleyrand’s distinction, a news-item, not an event. The Anglican Church is a shrinking phenomenon.

Today’s Friday so we must be in Spain Recently a Syrian lorry driver, making his cumbrous way across Turkey and Europe to Gibraltar, and following his satellite navigation system and online mapping service, found himself in Lincolnshire, on the Gibraltar Point Nature Reserve. These devices cannot make allowance for monoglot ignorance and soggy IQs of that magnitude. Nor do they merit the attack on what she called ‘corporate cartography’ recently launched at the RGS by Mary Spence. She is president of the Cartographic Society and ought to know better. Route maps on a ‘need-to-know’ basis, that is, omitting everything you don’t need, are not new: far from it.

When is too old? When too young? Almost every day I hear a story of someone, at the height of his power and energy, being compulsorily retired at 60. Or there is a fuss because a girl wants to get married at 15. I recall that Lydia, youngest of the Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice, was 15 when she ran off with the miscreant Wickham. She prided herself on the fact that she was taller than her siblings and was obviously precocious. When it came to the point the problem was not her age but getting Wickham to marry her. An underage girl is a moveable feast. I have been reading about the fascinating case of Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509), who might fairly be described as the founder of the Tudor dynasty. She was both the beneficiary and the victim of outrageous fortune.

The spectacular increase in scientific knowledge during the last hundred years tempts me to ask: cui bono? We now live on average twice as long as in the early 19th century. But what does our ability to repair our bodies and fend off fatal diseases do except prepare us for a long twilight of Alzheimer’s and debility, a burden on our families and a reproach on ourselves. I recall a woman in her mid-nineties, who had led a life of duty, saying over and over again: ‘I have lived too long.’ I spend much of my time studying history, especially letters, diaries and biographies, and I see no evidence that all the technical knowledge we now possess has increased the sum of human happiness by one smile or a single heartbeat of delight.

It is an indictment of our society that, despite huge scientific advances in the last century, particularly in the production of food, millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions, do not get enough to eat. The principal culprit is the Green movement, in its many species or fanaticisms. The Prince of Wales, who might be described as the most prominent Green man, has recently drawn attention to the destructive power of his ideology by attacking the growing of genetically modified crops, perhaps the largest step forward ever taken by mankind to reduce the cost of basic foodstuffs, and to increase their production and worldwide availability.

One of the great paradoxes, for most of us, is the hatred of work, and the need for it to fill what Dr Johnson called ‘the great vacancies of life’. We sigh for leisure, then don’t know how to handle it when it comes in abundance. Occupation is wearisome, but essential, and retirement is longed-for but disappointing. A typical example was Charles Lamb. During the 33 years he worked at the East India House he perpetually grumbled about the way his work gobbled up the best hours of each day and left him tired and listless, with virtually nothing for himself and his pleasures.

Splendours and miseries of the Queen’s English in the 21st century The wonderful thing about language, and especially English, with its enormous vocabulary, is the existence of groups of words with broadly similar meanings but each of which conveys something slightly different. Such subtle distinctions add to the richness of meaning, in speech and writing, and to the pleasure of using words. And the sense changes over time, as historic events add moral overtones or undertones to particular words. Take, for instance, the group of words meaning ‘friend’, of which there are about 30 or 40. None is exactly interchangeable. Many have undergone osmosis even in our own lifetime. Some are mysterious in origin and malleability. Crony, for instance.