Charles Moore
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Following this column’s mention of civil servants who cannot write English (see last week’s Notes), I happened to be with some Tory peers as they received Blackberry messages from their whips about voting in the long-running parliamentary battle over the Alternative Vote referendum Bill. A ‘diversion’, they were told, was ‘immanent’.
Pity poor Mehdi Alavi, the small trader from Acton who is being persecuted by the Today programme. His offence, in the eyes of Today, is to have supplied lethal drugs to prisons in the United States which execute criminals. It is never explained what Mr Alavi has done which should put him on the wrong side of the law. The executions are legal in the American states in which they are performed. The United States is an ally, with the rule of law. Is Mr Alavi doing anything worse than huge British companies who sell our bombs, fighter jets etc abroad? What if the syringe used in a lethal injection were made in Britain? Would that, too, incur the wrath of Today and its ally (where is the BBC ‘balance’ here?), Clive Stafford-Smith of the anti-capital punishment organisation Reprieve? I am not a fan of the death penalty, but at least it (usually) kills the guilty. There is an enormous British export industry producing abortifacients which kill the innocent. I have not heard it arraigned by Today.
Each year, we take our turn in a small group which has local old people to tea. On Sunday, the star of our party was Connie Gellender, who had reached her century the previous week. (A hundred candles on a cake, by the way, generates a terrifying amount of heat. Don’t try it at home.) When you are that old, the mere passage of time makes small details interesting, so I could not hear enough from Mrs Gellender about her early life in Clapham. She and her husband, who worked in a W.H. Smith station bookstall, had so little money that they waited for five years to get married, which they did in 1934. His offer of a better job had fallen through just before the wedding day, so they had to live in one room until their first child was born. Their wedding breakfast consisted of beans on toast at a Lyons Corner House, 4d each. When they did at last get a house, its roof was blown off by flying bombs. Since being widowed in the 1970s, Mrs Gellender lived alone until three weeks ago, when she moved into a home. She has 25 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren. Her only son died of cancer when he was 58, an illness which may have been caused by the British hydrogen bomb tests on Christmas Island, where he was stationed, in the 1950s. The only precautions he was advised to take, she told me, were to wear dark glasses and turn his back to the explosion. I was struck by her lack of bitterness about this, in fact by her refusal to complain about anything. Life had brought her a good family, she believed, and that was enough. The only thing which irks her is an old woman of her acquaintance who tells her she hates children. Why is it that people like Mrs Gellender, who experienced what would nowadays be defined as deprivation, managed it so well? If we baby-boomers become centenarians — and it looks as though there will be alarmingly large numbers of us — will we be equally cheerful?
Hunting recently on the borders of Cheshire and Wales, I came upon Paradise. Hedges provide, on the whole, the most satisfying form of jump, but the problem is that they are often full of wire or unsuitable at take-off or landing, so the field has to queue at the one bit that is safe. In the Wynnstay country, though, Lord Daresbury, the Joint-Master, has bought up five farms, the whole amounting to 1,500 acres, and made it his job to ensure that there is no wire in any hedge and that all may be jumped at any point. So off one goes, taking one’s own line, as in some prelapsarian print. Peter Daresbury complained to me that all these hedge-fund billionaires often pour their new money into shooting, where there is often plenty of what people in Surtees call ‘tin’, but not into hunting, where it is always short. This is true, and I wonder why. Perhaps they don’t have the time (you cannot spend half the day on your mobile phone out hunting, as many seem to do when shooting). Perhaps they fear being on equal (or even unfavourable) terms with people who are much poorer than they. Perhaps they simply aren’t fit enough. It is sad. Hedges are England’s unique contribution to landscape .The best thing to do with all that money from hedge funds would be to channel it into a Hedge Fund.
Strange how a usage can die for no obvious reason. A headmaster I met told me he recently wrote a public letter to an education authority using the words ‘handsome is as handsome does’. He found that no one knew what the phrase meant.
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