Charles Moore
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Donald Rumsfeld was much mocked for talking about the difference between ‘known unknowns’, ‘unknown unknowns’ and so on, but his distinctions actually meant something. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke on similar lines when he came to the parish church of Burwash, just down the road from us, to give the address for the annual commemoration of Rudyard Kipling earlier this year. Dr Williams’s theme was that ‘All great artists know more than they know that they know’, and they cannot necessarily explain themselves: they can only create. Kipling, he said, drew much of his inspiration from what was, in the poet’s own words, ‘half devil and half child’, from ‘dark and difficult places in the psyche, and from the extraordinary, varied, tragic experience of children’, including his own. ‘Kipling,’ said the Archbishop, whose words are reprinted in the June edition of the Kipling Journal, ‘knew more than he knew that he knew, and …he knew that he knew more than he knew that he knew.’ And now that I know that Kipling knew all that, I think the better of him.
The organisation Fathers4Justice tried to disrupt the Sovereign’s Parade on Saturday but failed to get over the barriers. Of course it is a good thing for society to remember the feelings of fathers, but once fathering becomes fashionable it starts to be subject to the competitive instincts that lurk within the male sex. Both Gordon Brown and David Cameron believe that, in order to be prime minister, they must display fatherly credentials in public, and so each now tries to outdo the other in the political equivalent of the parents’ race at school speech day (Cameron is winning, I’d say). Perhaps there should be an organisation called Fathers4No.10.
There is a growing habit of accepting invitations to parties and not turning up. This doesn’t matter, perhaps, if it is just a drinks party, but the custom has spread to dinners. Last week I went to the Samuel Johnson Prize dinner at the Savoy. There was a seating plan, and we were all put on tables of ten. At our table, four of the places were empty. This was rude. It made it awkward for people with no one on one side of them (poor Helena Kennedy had only me) and it cost the hosts a good deal of wasted money. I think a policy of name and shame is in order. The absent four on our table were Sir John Maddox, Jacqui Hughes, Jamie Byng and his wife, whose name, I’m afraid, I never got and therefore cannot fully shame. Apologies if any of these was ill, bereaved or stuck in traffic at the last minute. I see from the Court and Social page of the Daily Telegraph that Sir John managed to turn up to chair a dinner debate at the Athenaeum a few days later, on the subject ‘Liberalism has gone too far’. In the matter of manners, it has.
Earlier this week I had a perfect midsummer experience. Walking home at midnight, I found our front doorstep obligingly lit by a solitary glow-worm.
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