Forget becoming an MP if you have ever been a twit
The worst invention in history, by a comfortable distance, is the internet. Apart from killing jobs, the high street and, most importantly, newspapers, it has, via social media and the comments under Youtube videos, revealed a cold and sobering truth: namely, that vast numbers of human beings are completely awful. Honestly: we’re a rotten species. Bring on the asteroid.
The second worst invention, of course, is the smartphone – for giving us constant and irresistible access to the worst invention.
I am, therefore, in total agreement with Prince Harry, who has delivered a speech urging us – for the sake of our mental well-being – to put down our phones.
“I read recently that young people check their phones at least 150 times per day,” said the Prince. “I’m sure we could all be more effective and efficient if we took a moment to process our thoughts rather than rushing from one thing to the next.”
He’s right. Like countless millions, I’ve become pitifully addicted to my phone. At times my wife has felt so ignored that she took to calling herself a Twidow: Twitter widow. I’m trying to cut down because, as the Prince suggests, my phone’s perpetual frenzied nagging for attention was burning me out. My brain was frazzled. It felt like a patch of scorched grass.
Still, I’m lucky. Thank God I’m not a teenager. When I was at school in the 1990s we didn’t have phones. Which meant that, whenever we had an offensive or shaming thought, which was more or less every waking moment of our lives, we mercifully had no means of broadcasting it to the wider world. Today, though, teenagers can instantly publish views that may be used against them for the rest of their lives.
Think of the poor young woman forced to resign as the UK’S first youth police and crime commissioner after an outcry about tweets she’d written in her early teens.
Or the Left-wing student who introduced Jeremy Corbyn at a recent rally, and then had to resign as head of her university’s Labour society; she too was paying the price for questionable tweets she’d written years earlier. Any young person today who hopes to enter politics will need to decide, around the age of 10, never to open a social media account. If they’ve already got one: forget it. They’re doomed.
What these ruinous geniuses in Silicon Valley really need to invent is a time machine. Then they can go back and prevent themselves from
inventing anything else.
An exhibition of Philip Larkin’s personal effects has opened at the University of Hull, where for 30 years the great poet worked as a librarian. Among the exhibits are his bathroom scales. In middle age, we learn, Larkin grew so neurotic about his ever-expanding waistline that he took to weighing himself twice a day. Also on display is a pair of his trousers, accompanied by a letter he wrote, bemoaning his weight. “My trousers seem to have been made for a much bigger creature,” he sighs, “probably an elephant.”
Admirers of Larkin, of course, will already know how much he loathed himself – or at least, how much he professed to. They will know he thought he looked like “an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles on”, or “a bald salmon”. And they will know that in his letters – published in Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) and Letters to Monica (2011) – he was forever lamenting the supposed defects of his character. He told Monica Jones, the most enduring of his girlfriends, that, among countless other failings, he was “insensitive”, “selfish”, “weak”, “inconsiderate”, “superficial”, “infantile”, “unlikable”, “self-deceiving”, “cowardly” and “morally inferior”. Oh, and she really “mustn’t keep thinking of me as clever by any real standards – I shouldn’t be a librarian if I weren’t incapable of any kind of serious thought – I know nothing, read nothing but novels, think nothing …”
In private correspondence, he even used to disparage his poetry. He called An Arundel Tomb “embarrassingly bad”, Essential Beauty “no good”, Here “dull”, Ignorance “v poor”, Sad Steps “pretty unoriginal”, Toads Revisited “bad” and Days “hardly a poem at all”.
His magnificent collection The Whitsun Weddings, meanwhile, was “a poor harvest for nine years”.
In short: his self-criticism was relentless. The question is, though: did he really mean it?
I’m not sure he did. I have a feeling his behaviour was tactical. In the case of his poetry, for instance, he was nakedly fishing for compliments. In fact, I’d go further: his self-deprecation was a sly form of showing-off. He was implying that what lesser mortals might consider a masterpiece was to him nothing. His standards, in other words, were rather higher than theirs.
As for all the wailing to women about his “cowardly”, “selfish” nature: I think that was a cunning defensive ploy. He always did it when he was in trouble with a girlfriend, typically for cheating on her. In the unsparing severity of his self-hatred, he would be harsher on himself even than his girlfriend would – in the hope, I suspect, that she would think, “Well, I know he’s bad, but he’s not as bad as all that”. So by lacerating himself before her, he was subtly seeking her mercy.
Is my theory right? All his adult life Larkin kept voluminous diaries. Surely they would reveal the truth.
Sadly, however, nothing remains of them – except for their spines, which are on display at the new exhibition. Larkin ordered that, as soon as he died, their contents be destroyed unread.
The glorious innocence of the three-year-old mind.
Last weekend in the park, my son picked something up from the grass, held it to his ear, and frowned.
“Daddy,” he said, “I listening to this shell, but I not hear the sea.”
It was the shell of a pistachio nut.