Take the high road and avoid self-pity

THIS summer has been good so far. It’s as if we’re living in a different universe to the one which, during this decade, provided us with several summers when it wouldn’t stop raining. But now the crops look good in the fields, our gardens are blooming like never before, the sunlit West Country beaches are filled with happy campers and England’s cricketers have won through to the World Cup final by annihilating the Aussies, of all people.

It’s got to be good, hasn’t it?

At this point, I bet readers are thinking there’s a big “but” coming.

But… There isn’t going to be one. Because I am fed up with writing about the world going to hell in a handcart and want to be upbeat and jolly.

Who wants to be confronted by an old curmudgeon moaning away in print week-after-week about Brexit and clueless politicians? Not you, and not me.

I’m outta there. Instead, I’m bathing in the sunshine of summer 2019 and will not allow a single cloud blemish the golden horizons I can see from my Exmoor vantage point.

It’s not because I’ve got Brexit fatigue and am losing the plot. Not a bit of it. My thinking goes something like this: show me a cheerful person and I will show you a man or woman who has plenty of friends. Show me an opinionated, whinging, old git, and I will show you someone people try to avoid.

And anyway, I was stirred into action by a reader who harangued me good and proper last weekend for complaining, in this column, about the Brexit Party MEP’s who turned their backs in the European Parliament.

“You have in your writings certainly become more pessimistic, self-pitying and intolerant in the last couple of years,” emailed the reader who, among other things, thought it might be something to do with the heart operation I had in 2017.

It made me sit up and think. Pessimistic and intolerant? Probably. But self-pitying?

I can only assume I must have been putting things badly in these newspaper writings because, after I recovered from that operation I came to the rapid and all-embracing conclusion that I was lucky to be alive. Anyone who’s been through such an interlude will know that every new day becomes a kind of bonus. You revisit that teenage sensation of being in love with life and thank your lucky stars the old ticker is still… well, ticking.

I can’t speak for others who’ve undergone medical crises when saying this, but what I’ve found is that, once you’ve faced death full in the face, you are no longer so afraid of it. You can even shrug at the thought of that silly old Grim Reaper and his stupid scythe. You become much calmer about the idea that your period of time on this rock spinning through space is limited and all too rapidly closing in on its end.

You tell yourself: “This is what you are going to do for the rest of your days, Hespie - you are going to enjoy every single bloomin’ minute of every single waking hour.”

At no time in my life have I been less self-pitying. So I really do apologise, dear readers, if I’ve been coming across as a bit maudlin and negative.

If there’s been some pessimism, it is only on behalf of my kids and their - as yet - unborn children. In some respects, I do worry for them. And if there’s been intolerance, it’s maybe because I feel that it is pointless shilly-shallying around when time is so limited. You may as well get straight to the point. And I am old and ugly enough to take the backlash if people don’t like what I say.

But why bother? Let’s be honest, as a writer of opinion columns I won’t ever be able to change anything. People who do this job like to think they help set some kind of agenda, but my experience is that if people like what you write, they keep coming back to you and then do nothing because their lives already run in parallel with your own. And if they loathe what you say, they stop reading your stuff.

What I wouldn’t want to do, though, is to bore anyone with selfpity. I know a couple of people of my age who do that on Facebook and if their constant posts about endless ailments weren’t so witheringly depressing, they’d be hilarious.

The other morning one of these people posted, for the umpteenth time: “My backache has returned. So unfair!!!”

Three exclamations marks! So unnecessary!!!

Look, I feel sympathy for that person. No one deserves a painful back. But telling the world about it on a daily basis and wailing about how unfair it is? No. It’s a bad idea on so many levels. Number one being that nine out of ten of her Facebook friends will dive into shop doorways or wherever if they ever see her coming down the street towards them.

Luckily for this one self-pitying hack, many readers of this column continue to say hello if they see me in a street - or anywhere else for that matter. Please, please, keep doing so. I promise you will be met with a broad, uncomplaining and very jolly smile.

Pointless shilly-shallying around when time is so limited - you may as well get to the point