Michael Deacon:
Chin up, everyone. It’s all going to be fine. Enough of this dreary handwringing about a “no deal” Brexit and grounded planes and economic chaos. What we need is some good old-fashioned British positivity. Just ask John Redwood. This week the veteran Tory MP offered some excellent advice to Philip Hammond, our perpetually glum Chancellor. The latest economic forecasts were less than encouraging – but, revealed Mr Redwood, there was a straightforward solution. The Chancellor, he declared, should tell the Treasury to make its forecasts more “optimistic”.
See. That’s the spirit. Don’t like the numbers? Just order some nicer ones. Officials telling you that growth will only be 1.6 per cent? Tell them to tell you it’ll be 6.1 per cent. Simple as that.
Personally, I think this country would be in much better shape if we all took a leaf out of Mr Redwood’s book. We must start being more optimistic – and demand more optimism from others. Doctors, for example.
“Bad news, I’m afraid, Mr Redwood. Your leg is broken in 23 places, your hips are shattered, we can’t find your collarbone, and your left pinky is jammed in your right armpit. At your age, I’m really not sure it was wise to take up cliff-diving. You won’t be able to walk for at least six months.”
“Six months? Come on, doctor. Stop talking my legs down. Give me a more optimistic forecast.”
“More optimistic?”
“Yes. Come on. Enough Project Fear. Show some belief.”
“Right. Er … At a push, maybe five months? With a bit of luck, four and a half?”
“Oh, for pity’s sake. I’ve had just about enough of this constant negativity from the medical elite.”
“Mr Redwood, I can’t just – ”
“Little wonder the public have lost faith in the so-called experts, when all you come out with is this endless doom and gloom.”
“Very well, Mr Redwood. Have it your way. You’ve got nothing worse than a cold, you’ll live to 160, and I’ve just bet £2,000 that you’ll win Wimbledon without dropping a set.”
“There! That’s more like it. And what are my odds for 100-metre gold at the next Olympics?” “You’re 40/1 on, Mr Redwood.” “Just as I thought. See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”
According to a new essay by his biographer Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin thought that, as a rule, children wrote better poetry than adults. I think Larkin was probably right. For one thing, children tend to be less self-conscious than adults, so their attempts at poetry are liable to be more honest. Children just say what they think, unhampered by an adult’s terror of embarrassment.
More than that, though: children, especially small children, often display a bizarre flair for imagery. It may be completely accidental, but that doesn’t make it less arresting. “Dada,” said my three-year-old son recently, “my skeleton is dancing inside.” On another occasion he squealed, “Mummy, there’s clouds in the river!” The other day, meanwhile, he mysteriously informed me that “parachutes only come out at night”.
I have no idea what any of those phrases mean. Then again, I generally have no idea what TS Eliot means, either, but that doesn’t stop The Waste Land being poetry. My son is simply giving a foretaste of the lyrical experimentalism that will, one day, see him acclaimed as the radical poetic voice of his age.
When I was about six or seven I tried to write poems myself. To my tremendous pride, one of them got published in the village magazine. It was my personal reworking of Tam O’shanter (we’d been doing Burns at school). In my masterpiece I somehow contrived to misspell “witches” three different ways in consecutive lines.
Demonstrating proper respect for the poet’s vision, the sub editors left the spelling exactly as submitted.
It would be easy to kid ourselves. To pretend that the Harvey Weinstein scandal is simply about Hollywood. That Hollywood is some remote, alien citadel of godless depravity, utterly unlike the world the rest of us inhabit.
But it isn’t. For ordinary women with ordinary jobs in ordinary towns, harassment is part of everyday life.
A female friend wrote a list of times she’s been harassed in public by men she’d never met. Not all the times it’s happened – just a few that have happened recently, that she could recall off the top of her head. It happens so often – has become so numbingly routine – that she couldn’t remember them all.
There are other, worse things that men have done to her, but she didn’t want to include them in the list. The following is merely what you might call the run-of-the-mill stuff: the normal stuff.
A man told her she looked “like a slag” when she was sitting on a train one morning, alone, and wearing no make-up.
A man on a busy tube carriage grabbed hold of her thigh – and other commuters ignored it.
More than once, on her walk home from the swimming pool, men in the street have shouted out what they would “do” to her.
When she told a man in the street to leave her alone, he followed her home, warned her that he now knew where she lived, and called her a bitch.
While at university, she learnt to avoid queuing at crowded bars because of the frequency with which she would be “accidentally” groped.
And, when a little girl stopped to pat my friend’s dog, the girl’s father leered at my friend and whispered that he wanted her to wrap her legs around his neck.
Again: just a few examples, from a single, ordinary young woman.
This isn’t about Hollywood. There are predators everywhere. They may not have wealth or status or influence, but they’re there.