I just can’t engage with engaging

I GOT engaged in 1981. The condition lasted just over a year – and the rest, as they say, is matrimony.

Back then plighting your troth was about the only kind of engagement anyone ever got engaged in, unless they were on the phone, in a public toilet or in the military. Trafalgar and El Alamein – they were a couple of major naval and land engagements, as I recall.

Incidentally, isn’t it strange how marriage and fighting to the death are considered to have something basic in common? But I digress.

Today there are many more opportunities to be engaged, most of them to be avoided even more strenuously than an Afrika Korps land-mine. Everybody and his granny wants to “engage” with you – it’s one of those creepy touchyfeely ideas that emerged from the vile compost of public relations and human resources.

At our level it’s what we used to call talking to someone, or getting to know them. A young relative was telling me how he had blanked an obnoxious party guest. “I decided not to engage with him,” he said. I decided to try not to moisten my trousers via the medium of hilarity.

At the top level it appears at its

They only want to work out how to get you to do what they want

worst in politics where awfully earnest people with phones for brains are desperate to engage with the people and to have the people engage with them.

Public engagement with politics reached its height during the independence referendum when people apparently (so I’m told – I was watching the box set of Breaking Bad at the time) went to church halls and public squares to listen to arguments about who should have the privilege of extracting taxes from them.

A similar process is going on in the Labour Party where thousands of people have spent three quid so that they can engage with each other about how best to lose the next election. Cynical? Yes. People – especially in organisations – who claim they want to engage with you will also say they want to connect with you, to listen to you, suggesting they care deeply about what you think.

They don’t. They only want to work out how best to get you to do what they want.

Although in the case of my wife and me it turned out we both wanted years of marital bliss, so that was OK.