Hawking taught me so much – but none of it was about space

AFEW years back, I used to pen a weekly newspaper column entitled ‘Jones Moans’. Dear God, I loved writing that column. I could vent my spleen about whatever and whomever had annoyed or slighted me.

Trainee hairdressers who dug their nails into my scalp while asking: ‘Would you like some conditioner?’ Yes, I bloody well would!

The idiocy of wheelie bins that were surely designed by men, as only someone with the arms of an orangutan could reach the bottom to clean them.

The man in Pret A Manger who scratched his head before touching my croissant. Moan? I could name, shame and blame for Britain.

That’s my brief history of whines, brought to mind as we learned the sad news last week that Stephen Hawking, the author of A Brief History Of Time, had died aged 76. He not just survived but overachieved half a century longer than the two years his entirely pessimistic and probably patronising doctors had given him to live after his diagnosis.

I have never begun to understand dark matter, relativity, wormholes or the nature of the universe. Indeed I’ve been known to utter ‘But who put black holes there in the first place?’ while watching TV programmes by lesser brainboxes such as Brian Cox, and wondering why we are looking at the stars and exploring space when there are babies dying on pavements here on Earth.

But this much I do know: Professor Hawking’s stoic, heroic overcoming of his own disability is a humbling lesson for us all.

Because it’s not just me: we have all become professional whingers and moaners, quick to post a gripe on TripAdvisor because the poached egg was a bit cold, or put a nit-picking review on AirBnb because a mini-break was tainted by the kitchen not having a boilingwater tap. Just put the kettle on instead!

We’re spoiled brats who may be able to glimpse the stars as never before but have lost sight of the astonishing good fortune we have to live in our part of planet Earth.

Walking the length of the platform at King’s Cross Station on Thursday, having just read about Hawking’s death, I looked up to be struck by how every face at every seat was miserable, focused only on the phone in their lap.

It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of soldiers returning from Dunkirk. Except that in those, the passengers were leaning out of train windows after being evacuated: grinning, laughing, grubby, grateful, bloodied but unbowed after all the horrors they had been through.

JUST imagine how we would moan if we were ever to be told today to ‘turn that light out’, or that we couldn’t buy that dress. These days, we all wear stress like a medal or a badge. We believe life should be a breeze – never a moment’s hunger or cold – and that if something does go wrong, such as floods, snow or ill-health, that someone, somewhere should be held accountable, must make a public apology and resign immediately. There is no longer the acceptance that life can be hard, and that it’s how we cope that counts.

The most touching aspect of The Theory Of Everything, the film about Hawking’s life, was that Eddie Redmayne, playing him, just kept on smiling.

Here was a man who had every right to be a diva, a tyrant, a misery guts, a ‘victim’ of a cruel disease. He was none of those.

As the film showed, Hawking was not just a genius but a very human hero: lovable, desirable, whole. There wasn’t a woman in the cinema who didn’t rail at Felicity Jones, playing his wife, for choosing a handsome, able-bodied but infinitely inferior man instead.

Hawking in real life had a sense of humour, too, a quality as rare as the snow leopard in many of his intellectual calibre: ‘I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on Earth.’

Crucially, Stephen Hawking didn’t moan at the injustice of his lot. He didn’t allow disability to define or confine him. He transcended his wasted body, while the rest of us are busy obsessing about extra inches around our waist or a few wrinkles on our faces.

Without motor neurone disease, would he have had the same unswerving focus on his work? That’s not for me to say. But he saw being disabled not as a curse but as an opportunity. Surely the biggest breakthrough of all.