Porter’s Pensées

What do you think? Bloomsbury obviously didn’t take to my recommendation of Boris in a hard hat and holding Union Jacks suspended helplessly over the Olympic stadium (you must have seen it); and have have come out with these suggestions.

I don’t like the teapots at all. The Bloomsbury people prefer no. 2 – the torn flag.  I’d prefer no. 3 – the Palace of Westminster under a glowering sky; but with the sky looking a bit more glowering, and perhaps the torn flag superimposed over the left of the image.  Any opinions?

Tomorrow I have to get my Identitetskort renewed at the Central Police Station in Stockholm. You need an Identity card, and a ‘Personnummer’, to do almost anything in Sweden. Years ago I used to object strongly to the very idea of people being obliged by governments to carry these, when they were mooted in Britain by – usually – the political Right. I associated them with Orwellian regimes (and Apartheid-era ‘passbooks’ in particular), and feared the use that authoritarian governments could make of them. I felt uneasy about public surveillance for the same reasons – security cameras, hacking, and the like.

All this stemmed, I suppose, from my immersion in the typically ‘freeborn English’ values of my youth: devotion to privacy, especially, and resistance to the authorities’ knowing more about us than we want to tell them. I always thought that the occupation of ‘espionage’ was a rather dirty one, against whomever and for whatever reason; and that was despite my having written books about the history of it, which – I have to say – did little to dispel my mistrust. I like openness and honesty; which is why I also greatly disapprove of ‘bloggers’ who post pseudonymously, unless they have really good reasons for it. I regard anonymous blog-posts rather like unsigned poison-pen letters: cowardly, basically, if someone won’t put a name to his or her hostile Amazon review of one of my books. I hope that none of my readers indulges in that.

Twenty-six years in Orwellian Sweden, however, has cured me of that. It may be because I trust Swedish governments not to abuse their control over me as much as I fear British governments might. This may be naïve of me; but there it is. It also has something to do with the fact that we can’t escape from surveillance and control any more, almost anywhere. Even in Britain you have to have a National Insurance Number, and a driving licence (which looks awfully like an Identitetskort), and a passport to travel abroad; and can’t order anything on line without your personal details and tastes immediately being spread far and wide – by Amazon, for example. So we freeborn Englishmen might as well throw in the towel. And the little bit of plastic I’ll get from the Polis tomorrow will come in terribly useful, after all.

So the only thing I’ll be worried about tomorrow is whether the photo on the card is not too unflattering. I can’t put my thumb over it every time I use it.

In the meantime I have no identitet. I am nothing.

Last night on SVT there was a fantastic performance, from a restored 18^th-century theatre near Stockholm, of Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas. ‘Dido’s Lament’ has always been one of the pieces of music that has moved me the most. I got it up afterwards on Youtube, thinking that the singer here was Anne-Sophie von Otter (she looks a bit like her), only to find it isn’t, but is – Kajsa tells me – the mother of Greta Thunberg.

We always mourn the fact that Mozart died so young. But Purcell died younger. What a loss to music his death represented. And also the prodigy Thomas Lindley’s, who was drowned in a freak boating accident in Lincolnshire at the age of 22. Together, if they’d lived, they might have repaired England’s reputation as ‘Das Land ohne Musik’ over the next couple of centuries.

(Personal)

2022 will probably be the year when I change my domestic arrangements, selling my house in Hull, moving into a small flat there, and living most of the time in Sweden, away from what England has become. That is, as soon as Kajsa has fixed up a ‘Room of My Own’ in her house, as a study for me to work in and keep some of my books. Not all, because I have far too many of them, which I’m unlikely to need again, and which I’d therefore like to find a good home for.

Any ideas? A bulk exodus would be best. I’ll give my children and local friends first option. After that I’ll try Hull University Library, if they still have books as well as computer terminals. Otherwise it will be charity shops. The problem with them, however, is that mine are mostly History books, which aren’t usually the charity shops’ kinds of thing. And I can’t be bothered with E-bay, if it would require me to itemise the books.

I also have hundreds (literally) of CDs to get rid of; mostly classical, but also some jazz, plus Brenda Lee. And novels, poetry, some lovely art books, archaeology…

And tons of working notes from my old researches. I had hoped to go back to these, looking for loose ends – of which there are plenty – to turn into articles; but I feel I’ve run out of time and also enthusiasm for that now. Kajsa suggests establishing a ‘Porter Archive’ somewhere; but I can’t imagine anyone wanting that. In which case it will be an awful lot of hard work and brilliant ideas wasted; but – hey – I have got a dozen books out of it all. Those are what I’ll show to Peter at the Pearly Gates, to persuade him to let me through. (Not that I’m anticipating a visit soon.)

Any other ideas? Second-hand bookshops that collect books in bulk and then find good homes for them? I shan’t want any money for them, only for the recipient to take them away, and put them to good use. That’s after I’ve sorted out the few that I’ll want to keep. I’ll probably be back in Hull – putting the house on the market – in the spring. Visits to look through the books then will be welcome. (Obviously from UK-based people.)

There must be many other academic oldies in this situation. What are they doing?

I know it’s unfair to judge a whole organisation by the conduct of one of its members; but how on earth does the Catholic Church let Jacob Rees-Mogg get away with it?

I was brought up a Christian: a faith I abandoned many years ago (it was the word ‘faith’ that did it for me, as a professional sceptic), but it was a very different kind of Christianity from – evidently – Rees-Mogg’s sort, and one whose dominant ethic, as I understood it, and which I still greatly admire, went right against his. Camels and needles come to mind. Together with ‘but the greatest of these is charity’. And ‘give everything you have to the poor’. And ‘blessed are the meek’. And all those instructions against bearing ‘false witness’. (You see: my Methodist upbringing wasn’t entirely lost on me.) OK, he may have spurned contraceptives, which goes down well with certain kinds of ‘Christian’. But so far as I remember the Bible doesn’t mention them in any case. So by my understanding of Christianity Jacob isn’t exactly Mother Theresa. (Not that, in my opinion, she was all that Christian herself. But what do I, as an ex-Christian, know?)

Does he go to Confession? What sort of priest is his confessor? Does he (JRM) know how sinful he is, and therefore which of his actions and opinions count as transgressions that he should confess? What is his priest’s reaction? How many Hail Marys does he make him say in penance? Does JRM have the time to recite them all? Do they – in Catholic theology – give him an ‘out of jail’ card to resume his un-Christian ways afterwards? Or does his condom-less begetting of lots of Catholic children make up for it all?

I really would like to know what his Church – i.e. the Pope – makes of him. Does it still ‘excommunicate’ people? After all, the Labour Party does, and for far less. (Which is why I’ve abandoned that, too.)

All the people I am currently dealing with at Bloomsbury are women; as from my experience they almost all seem to be in the publishing world. (It wasn’t like that in my earlier authorial days.) I have no problem with that, of course; but it set me thinking.

All the dogs I see around me just now are bitches. (I’m aware of this, as we have a dog of our own; and we have to make sure that the only bottoms she sniffs are other girls’.) So, what has become of all the male dogs? – Then, on the human side: between us Kajsa and I have nine grandchildren, eight of whom happen to be girls. Sweden of course is a very gender-aware society, and Britain is becoming more so. Are ‘they’ putting something in the water to prevent male babies (and puppies) from being conceived? Or aborting them as soon as their willies show up on the scans? Or are they being shifted out immediately after birth to some very secret male-only orphanage, where they have to live out their lives without women, and with the left-over male dogs, until they all slaughter each other, as men do? Is this part of a great feminist plot to end the oppressive hegemony of the male sex once and for all? – I wouldn’t particularly mind that: my female publishers are wonderful, as is my sambo; and look at most of the women prime ministers there are around currently (i.e. post-Thatcher); but I do have some concerns for us boys: specifically, for what may be happening to us, in or just out of the womb.

Then yesterday I had a message from another of the people who are getting my book produced, called ‘Merv’. That can’t be a girl’s name, can it? Thank goodness, I thought; at least they’re keeping some males on. – Or is this only for breeding purposes?

Of course it could be just that I notice women more, now that they’ve been let out of the kitchen and into the public domain. It wasn’t like that in my youth.

Is it a symptom of a real depression when England are swept away by Australia in the first Test, and West Ham are beaten 2-0 by Arsenal, both within a couple of days – and I really don’t care?

Anyone who thinks I’m a bit hard on Britain’s ‘Public’ schools – and the damage they are still doing to our politics and our country – should read the following, from today’s Guardian. It reveals a lot about Boris Johnson, in particular.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/08/public-schoolboys-boris-johnson-sad-little-boys-richard-beard.

I recognise a lot of it from my own school – an ‘Independent’ fee-paying boarding school but with the fees of ‘day boys’ like me paid by the local County Education Authority – and from my Cambridge college, where nearly all my undergraduate contemporaries were from ‘proper’ Public schools. And mainly stuck together, in ‘Old Boy’ groups. As they did in the prestigious and highly-paid jobs they managed to get into afterwards – Civil Service, diplomacy, the Law, Conservative (and sometimes other) MPs, the BBC, Bishoprics, journalism (not ‘reporting’, simply ‘commentating’ on the basis of their ignorance of the world), high up in the Army, on the Boards of investment companies (not businesses that made anything); all of this due in great part to their Public school backgrounds. Which was, of course, why their parents had sent them to those schools originally. ‘OK, little Boris (or whoever): so you’re going to miss our love, and contact with normal human beings, and have your emotional growth – and especially your humour – stunted for good, and develop appalling attitudes toward ‘oiks’ (the lower classes), ‘blacks’, ‘swots’, ‘queers’ and ‘gals’, and have your loyalties restricted permanently to your own ‘kind’… and all the rest. But it will give you a start in life.’ As of course it did; and for Boris most of all. – And a finish, hopefully. Maybe it’s he who will undermine the totally unmerited prestige of the Public schools, once and for all.

It still amazes me that Eton and its like managed to make this amazing comeback into high British politics in the 2010s, when most of us assumed that their day had passed: faded into history along with jousting and the jus prima noctis.  Wilson and Thatcher, Grammar School products both, were meant to have presaged a new meritocratic age. Eton, of course, has little to do with ‘merit’, of any kind.

Not, by the way, that the schools conditioned all their boys in this way. I knew a number at Cambridge who were almost normal, and even friendly. I must have been their token oik. And then there’s ‘George Orwell’, of course (an Old Etonian himself). But the general point stands; as well as the puzzle. – To which I could suggest a number of possible solutions. But not just now.

When Boris goes – which surely must be soon – will he take the gold wallpaper with him? Among all the other scandals which have accompanied the refurbishing of his Downing Street flat – who paid for it? Did he declare it as a gift? Is it true that the paper wouldn’t stay up because it was too heavy? Whose awful taste was responsible for it? – it has always puzzled me that he should feel the need to redecorate, and so expensively, an apartment which would only be his while he was prime minister. Did he imagine that he would be there for ever? As ‘King of the World’ – his early ambition – perhaps? Once – that is – his minions have so destroyed the (unwritten) British constitution as to allow him to override any legal and parliamentary checks and balances to his absolute authority. (They’ve started on that already.)

Question number 2. What part has Mother-of-the-Nation Carrie taken in all this? I recognise that she is – or was before she married him – a serious political operator. But in the good old days home furnishings were always seen as part of ‘the woman’s sphere’: making the nest comfortable for hubby when he came home from his hard day’s work. So is he ‘under her thumb’? Does she ‘hen-peck’ him? (That might not go down too well with his ‘Red Wall’ voters.) Or can we see the serious political operator poking out here from beneath her skirts? – That is, with a more cunning plot than he could ever realise: to undermine his premiership by adding to the scorn and scandal that at present seems to be engulfing it, either in her interest – to force him to take more time with the babies (unlikely, that) – or in secret league with old dissident Tory friends of hers?

In any event it can hardly be worth her having to sleep with him.

If the ‘great man’ theory of history doesn’t quite work, not for serious historians anyway, the ‘absolutely f*cking useless man’ theory might still be worth considering. Boris Johnson seems to be showing the way in which idiots and amoralists can affect history, personally; and especially if they think they can become ‘great men’. (Or of course ‘great women’.) We know that Boris had Churchillian ambitions, and always believed he was ‘special’, partly perhaps because of his Eton schooling, although famously questioned on it in one of his school reports to his wife-beating father in 1982:

‘Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the School for next half). I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.’

There you have it. But of course the Eton connection was one of the things that propelled him into the leadership of the Conservative Party, on the grounds that if he knew Greek and Latin he must be bright; which of course it doesn’t indicate in the least. The ‘Classics’ mainly test memory, for language and facts about the ancient past. In my school the ‘top’ students did Latin and Greek A-levels, and got into Oxford on the basis of this. None of them, so far as I’m aware, did very much with their lives afterwards. That’s because they weren’t taught about modern times; or even to think. Still the classicists had the greatest academic kudus at my university, and were awarded the highest proportion of ‘Firsts’ there. But that told you little about their ‘intelligence’. Boris – who incidentally only got a 2:1 (like me, as it happens, but I didn’t do Classics, and had an excuse) – may have a good memory, and obviously has a way with words and schoolboy jokes (although these are beginning to pall with me, and with most others, I guess). But a knowledge of the world, deep thought, ordinary morality, decency and critical thinking seem to be entirely lost on him. He may be a typical Etonian in these ways; if not a typical Classicist.

Now it looks as if he might come a cropper on account of the dishonesty, narcissism, laziness and utter disregard of what his ancient Romans used to call ‘vertù’, for which he’s been well known since his Eton days. Partly due to a couple of amusing appearances on Have I Got News for You, his Tory admirers decided that a ‘fun’ personality like his might cut though the serious (and boring) politics offered by his rivals, and by the Opposition; together with his (misleading) promise to bring a finish to the ‘boring’ Brexit shenanigans; and of course his many other lies. His rich capitalist and newspaper owner backers clearly – and cleverly – saw his clownish personality as something that would wow the plebs – ‘isn’t he a card!’ – at least until he ‘got Brexit done’, and Britain was set on the authoritarian path they had always hankered for for over eighty years: ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. (That was the Daily Mail in 1934.) Then they could dump him for – who knows? I don’t trust many of them on that side, but they could be intelligent, which may be more dangerous. Maybe Boris’s stupidity is the only thing keeping Britain from a sort of fascism.

It’s interesting that if Boris does fall it will be only because of a Christmas party, held last year in the face of government – his own government’s – rules, rather than his other egregious crimes and misdemeanours. This may seem trivial; and might well be so if it weren’t for ordinary people’s complaining that they had to obey the rules, even if they they were thereby prevented from comforting their dying relatives, and while the police were breaking up wedding parties on the same day. Suddenly the ‘one rule for us, another for them’ accusation began to hit home, and even Corbyn’s ‘for the many, not the few’ slogan in the previous general election.  In the meantime – to return to my initial theme – we can see how ‘personalities’ can indeed affect history, if the deeper forces behind them choose their agents skilfully.