Notices

Until 1966, the Times posted births, marriages and deaths on the front page, the rationale being that this was the information of most interest to its readership. Relegation of the register, as it is known, to the inside pages and its replacement by news was greeted with much harrumphing from loyal readers. These days, life events of celebrities and public figures, as well as one’s own relations and friends, are shared through social media. Formal notices in national newspapers are reserved for the denizens of the echo chamber who view communicating in this way as a mark of social standing and prestige.

Despite having repeatedly attempted to cancel it, I am still the recipient of my school magazine. Each one is larger and glossier than the last, its primary audience being prospective parents who they wish to dazzle with the extravagant stage productions, comprehensive sports facilities and outstanding academic achievements. Alumni are included in the circulation and periodically exhorted to donate additional funds to augment facilities which already outstrip by some margin anything offered by publicly funded schools. Flipping past the self-aggrandising content written in that curiously stilted prose favoured by such publications, I turn to the inside back cover where old boys who have died since the previous edition are listed, along with their age and school dates. 

Two of my form died not long after leaving school. The first, an aspiring racing driver, in a helicopter accident. The second of a heart attack on the rugby field. Since then, I have gleaned little of my contemporaries from the magazine. The class of ‘69 endured traditional education management where corporate punishment was endemic. A more humane environment, which recognised that living in constant fear is unlikely to be conducive to learning, was still over the horizon. But at a time when the vanguards of many aspects of social change were gaining traction, we were a peculiarly rebellious cohort with the consequence that little communication appears to be had with the school magazine unless the group is so remarkably fit and healthy that the absence of death notices simply reflects unusual longevity.

I cannot account for my morbid fascination with these notices of passing. For none of my classmates do I wish for a speedy demise, nor am I deluded enough to think that their predeceasing me is in any way a consolation for the inevitability of my own mortality. Idle curiosity is the only explanation.

The same must apply to my dilettante interest in the later lives of those with whom I spent my secondary schooling. I know of a few. A clergyman living in the United States issues an annual ‘round robin’ whose smugness shares its literary style with the school magazine. Glowing accounts of his children’s successes are outnumbered only by breathless celebration of their increasing progeny, none of whom the recipients of the missive know or are ever likely to meet. 

There were some notable trajectories. Becoming an eminent Cambridge professor could have been predicted by one boy’s academic performance at school, exceptional even by the high standards of the institution. Another, equally predictably given his predilection for driving cars without a license or insurance, ended up in prison. But when I hear of most - so and so became a teacher, so and so became an accountant - the information, so valued in anticipation, is received with merely a nod and a shrug. Those bald fragments tell me nothing. Does it betoken a lifetime of fulfilment and satisfaction or, in the words of Thoreau, quiet desperation? I will never know, and frankly, for the most part I don’t really care. 

So I shall stick to glancing down the list of death notices and wondering whether they will bother to publish mine, and if so when.

Hypocrisy

Everyone with a heart is radical when young; everyone with a brain is conservative when old, goes the adage. Early in his political incarnation, Donald Trump was a democrat but became one of the most right-wing republican presidents. Whether this is proof that he possesses either of the aforementioned bodily organs is moot. 

A more modest ideological shift was performed by a British politician who started out as a Tory and ended as a vocal advocate for Reform UK. But what was most notable about their moral stance was their opposition to abortion coupled with support for capital punishment. No doubt arcane religious arguments could be constructed to reconcile these apparently conflicting views, but to me they illustrate the ability, possibly unique to humans, to blithely occupy two opposing positions simultaneously. 

Examples abound.

A friend is a member of the climate activism group Extinction Rebellion, one of their tenets being opposition to air travel and censuring people who take multiple overseas vacations. Yet visiting children resident outside the UK, they consider adequate reason to flout this edict. An illustration of the principle that one’s own indefensible decisions are characterised as the product of valid reason, but other people’s vilified as evidence of flawed personality. 

I am not immune to similar behaviour. Recently retired to Devon, I claimed the moral high ground by forswearing flights (having spent the previous three decades virtually camped at Heathrow) until I realised there were foreign parts I still wanted to visit. While I acknowledge my inconsistency in that instance, many years earlier, I saw no conflict. Enjoying a picnic with members of the Vegetarian Society (don’t ask, I’ve since repented) I was ostracised as soon as I let slip that I was working at the National Institute for Medical Research, where among other perceived enormities, armadillos were infected with leprosy for medical research purposes.

But that transgression (if such it was) is dwarfed by the one which dominated my professional life. Privately militating against capitalism and all its works, I devoted my career to furthering the profits of the consultancies which employed me, despite eschewing on principle the products and services of many of their clients. But even my bankrupt conscience baulked at working with tobacco clients. It turns out was not alone. Later, as an independent consultant, I was approached (fruitlessly, despite juicy financial inducements) by my former employer to lead a project for Imperial Tobacco because by then no consultants within the organisation would sully themselves with that industry.

Politicians supply the most egregious exemplars of the contrast between principle and practice. In Anthony Trollope’s novel series, The Pallisers, adhering to his principles, the MP Phineas Finn votes against his party on the issue of tenants’ rights and consequently loses his job. But in a later novel, Phineas Redux, he has become more worldly and votes with the party against church disestablishment, despite being personally in favour. He attempts to justify his hypocrisy by pragmatism. Even worse, the whole Liberal party supports disestablishment, but votes against it merely because it has been proposed by the Tories! 

What a pity that comparable behaviour is still in evidence amongst politicians today, legitimised and enforced by whips, and tolerated, while politicians who change their mind for sound reasons when new facts appear are branded as weak rather than thoughtful and considered.

Numbers

My mother’s favourite number was 17 but she detested 21, maintaining that it was dark and ugly. My father, who revered mathematics, would shake his head wearily as if to indulge her delusion. It wasn’t until years later, when one of my sons declared that each number had its own unique and consistent colour, that I encountered the relatively widespread phenomenon of synaesthesia, which was the obvious explanation for my mother’s remarks. The concept would not have been accepted by my parents, who took the view that all psychology was quackery. In their eyes, it belonged in the basement of the science pyramid at the top of which stood mathematics.

From the age of 8 to 11, I caught the number 75 bus to the only school I attended with pleasant memories, despite once being caned by the headmaster for a minor misdemeanour which tells you all you need to know about the others. During that time, the bus fare jumped from 11/2d to 2d, a scandalous 33% hike, the farthing being so little used by then that a more modest increase would have been impractical.

Mathematics was a subject in which I never flourished. My father’s insistence that I nevertheless took A-level, in the implacable conviction that it was essential for prospering in any scientific discipline, was a mistake. The alternative, biology, would have been a better alternative and opened the path to a more appropriate university course choice.

Another family obsession was prime numbers. Reaching a birthday whose number was prime was considered to have extra significance. When I attained 51, it was several months before I realised that it was not prime but the product of 3 and 17.

Thirteen has long been held to be unlucky, with most American buildings omitting the number from rooms and floors. I discovered a more substantial omission in the Millennium Hotel in New York. One bank of elevators runs from the ground floor to level 25 while a second bank serves levels 30 to 42. As I proved by walking the single flight of stairs between levels 25 and 30, the missing floors do not exist! In a city defined by height, the quirky numbering is simply designed to enable the hotel to seem taller than it is.

  

Love

Love each day as if it's your last, one day you'll be right quoth Woody Allen. 

‘Do you love me? ‘The spoon, loaded with cereal and fruit, pauses before the lips. The right answer will evoke a knowing smile. The wrong one, or a hesitation, will return the spoon to the bowl. Breakfast will be over.

No one would be surprised if you confessed to never having hated, but anyone professing to be unfamiliar with love, as giver or recipient, would be regarded as eccentric or perverse. Yet do we understand what it means? English is celebrated for its richness. If a word doesn't deliver the precise nuance, there are half a dozen not-quite synonyms to choose from. More awkward is when the same word carries multiple meanings. When they are quite distinct, confusion is rare. No one would construe ‘I have a beef with you’ as confirmation of joint ownership of a cow. But when the meanings overlap, that is the territory of miscommunication. My son says he loves pizza. That doesn't mean he is attracted to it as a sexual partner nor that wants to spend the rest of his life eating nothing but pizza (although occasionally I wonder).  In this case, ‘love’ is simply an intensifier, meaning ‘like a lot’. 

Parents love their children which is a shorthand for saying that they would sacrifice many other things in life, sometimes life itself, to protect them. Children love their parents, often caveating that this does not necessarily mean they like them. It means they have a sense of gratitude, often manifested through dutiful care.

The state of being ‘in love’ is well-documented. Intense physical attraction combined with infatuation producing obsessional and irrational behavior when decision-making is impaired or impulsive.

‘Do you love me?’ That breakfast table question, triggered by some imagined slight, momentary inattention or lapse of propriety, probes the partner for a different message. It's easy enough to say yes, but when I say I love her, do I mean the same as when she reciprocates? Am I attracted to her physically? Certainly. Do I want to spend the rest of my life with her? Yes – well, at the moment. Would I stand between her and a grizzly bear? Unlikely. Unpacking the component parts of ‘love’ and holding them up to the light to see if they match our feelings is unlikely to get us on to the scrambled eggs.

Look, we've come this far, we rub along pretty well together, neither of us irritates the other excessively, we often have fun and it's too much effort and too high risk to look for perfection, so yes, I do love you. Or, as David Sidaris confessed, he planned to stay with his partner for the rest of his life as he couldn't bear the idea of going to another gay bar.

Loss

The inflection points at which the number of wedding invitations decreases and the number of funeral invitations increases coincide. At this point, more attention is paid to friends. Like physical fitness, friendship is slow to attain but decays rapidly if neglected. Even the slender thread of an annual Christmas card can pull through the sturdier rope of reignited friendship in propitious circumstances. 

With no digital backup, in the past even the loss of a tattered address book, edge etched with letters of the alphabet for easy reference, could sever a friendship. Work contacts, their status determined by context and poised uncertainly between acquaintanceship and friendship, wither through indifference or relocation. Mass slaughter of entire networks is the byproduct of divorce, when jointly held friends express their allegiance or self-righteousness by taking sides. Long after the wrangling over money and children has been settled, it is the loss of friends which leaves enduring bruises. 

In old age, as the count of friends dwindles from natural causes, the remaining stock becomes more valuable, if only because of scarcity. It also triggers the realisation that the longevity of a friendship has inherent value. As the saying goes, you can’t make new old friends. The grumpy old buffer, tetchy through ill-health, frustration and disappointment, nevertheless shares a hinterland of experiences, joyful or horrific, which form part of both parties’ personal history and identity. 

So the deliberate termination of a four-decade long friendship, must be a decision taken only as a result of the gravest offence. And nevertheless, of this action, three people will suffer. Two at least have their grudge to comfort them, I am left with perplexity.

Hitchhikers

                                                            Hitchhikers

Navigating a roundabout near Bovey Tracey, I spotted an unusual sight. On the bend leading to the slip road, an unkempt figure, backpack at his feet, was waving his thumb. I pulled up around the corner, half-hoping he hadn’t noticed I’d stopped.

When I was offered a place at St Andrews University, I assumed I would travel there from London by train. But in the period between attending the interview (yes, in those days, universities admissions tutors interviewed candidates face to face) and starting the course, Dr Beeching had closed the branch line from Leuchars Junction to St Andrews. Buses were no more reliable in those days than they are today and driving was not an option. I had not passed my test and even if I had, car ownership in the days before Japanese competition forced British manufacturers to improve their quality control sentenced proud owners to weekends spent under the bonnet or scraping rust. On the one occasion I flew, the plane was diverted to Glasgow, landing well after midnight to the annoyance of the friend in Edinburgh with whom I was spending the night and who drove there to collect. It didn’t take long to realise that the cheapest and least inconvenient mode of transport was hitching, in those days an entirely acceptable and widely used option.

Most of my trips between London and Scotland entailed multiple lifts, often no more than twenty or thirty miles apiece, so that accomplishing the journey in one day was ambitious. My most successful hitch was a single lift from Edinburgh to the outskirts of north London. Embarrassingly, I broke the first unwritten rule of the hitchhikers’ code by falling asleep ten minutes after being picked up, thus depriving the driver of the quid pro quo of company during an otherwise tedious journey at the time when fewer cars had radios and CDs had not yet been invented.

A hazard of hitchhiking was exposure to drivers whose primary incentive was to impress with their skill. Having escaped from a maniacal mini driver who gave my girlfriend and I a lift from St Andrews to Edinburgh on a Friday afternoon, we tried to invent a plausible reason to decline his offer when he saw us by the roadside two days later waiting for a return ride.

By the time I qualified for a company car in the 1990s, hitchhiking in the UK had all but vanished. On the rare occasions when I spotted a lonely figure by the roadside, I always offered a ride (probably in contravention of the firm’s insurance policy) and on one occasion bought the traveller dinner, a favour which had several times been extended to me in my hitching days. 

My most recent experience of hitchhiking was three years ago in Norfolk. My companion and I had planned a walk which relied on the local bus service to return us to our starting point. Having miscalculated the timing, she suggested we try hitching. The idea would not have occurred to me and I doubted we would have any luck, but within a few minutes a car pulled up in the adjacent layby. We ran towards it just as a second vehicle stopped. We stated our destination and dumped our bags on the back seat. It quickly became apparent that the driver had not stopped with the intention of offering a lift but merely to consult with the following driver about the route! But by this time we were comfortably ensconced so they had no choice but to accept us.

The decline in hitchhiking can be explained by several factors. Wider car ownership; restrictions on parking near motorways; a general fear of strangers. In an increasingly atomised world, David Cameron’s Big Society initiative of 2010, allegedly designed to ‘help people to come together in their neighbourhoods to do good things’ made no reference to hitchhiking.

My Bovey Tracey hitchhiker placed a rucksack attached to a two wheeled trolley on the back seat and got in the front. I leaned across to offer my hand. 

‘Hi, I’m David.’

‘David’s my birth name,’ he said, ‘but I’m known as Bryn now.’

He explained he was going to Leicester to buy a van. He was well into his sixties and I was surprised to hear he had just passed his driving test. He explained that he enjoyed the life of a tramp and that the van he was buying would be suitable for sleeping in and also accommodate a wheelchair in case he needed to transport either of his parents, both in their nineties. I thought of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London in which he describes the ‘spikes’ used by itinerants. Rather a different concept of tramping from travelling about in a van. I dropped him at Exeter St David’s from where he would get a train. I wished him well and he seemed pleased that I remembered to call him by his assumed name.

Afterwards I reflected that Bryn’s acquisition of his own vehicle, late in life, marked the demise of one of the few remaining hitchhikers and the decline of a mode of transport which had been a familiar feature of British life until the late twentieth century.

Desire

One of the bitterest ironies of old age is having the time and, if one is fortunate, the resources to indulge one’s childhood dreams, yet lacking the desire to do so. In some cases, it is even worse. Owning a car matured from a teenage aspiration to a family necessity to a convenient but resented liability. 

I developed an early interest in photography. My parents bought me a Kodak 127 for my 10th birthday which was hardly any more sophisticated than a pinhole camera. I recall taking the first role of film, 12 exposures, and then inadvertently fogging it before it could be developed. I went through a phase of commandeering the bathroom which had been part of a rental unit on our top floor as a dark room to develop and print photographs. My impatience and incompetence (foreshadowing the same qualities which ended my brief career as a research biochemist) produced indifferent results. 

There was a shop in Blackheath called Butcher, Curnow which was half a pharmacy, or chemist as we call them in those days, and half a camera shop. On the left, behind a long mahogany counter, were stacked rows of bottles with coloured liquids. On the right, up two steps, was the photography counter. Each day, on the way home from school. I would gaze at the shop window drooling over the unaffordable Pentaxes. At lunchtime, with a similarly obsessed friend, I would visit the local library which subscribed to Amateur Photographer and marvel at the images produced by professionals. 

For my 13th birthday, which occurred while we were spending the summer in Chicago, where my father was working, I received a Voigtlander Vitoret, a rangefinder camera which by father, an optics professional, had selected on the basis of its lens, which he assured me was the best in its class. But without an exposure meter, and in the blinding Illinois sun, almost all of my attempts, turned out to be woefully overexposed. I envied my father’s Konica, considerably superior and sporting an exposure meter. (When I inherited his belongings, I took it to a secondhand camera shop reluctant to part with such a treasure. The owner shook his head sadly when he saw it. Lovely camera, he said, but I can’t sell them. He pointed over my shoulder to a shelf where there were three identical models with a label underneath, saying simply ‘offers?’) 

Five years later, I splurged most of my first term’s allowance at university on a Practika SLR. With minimal funds to buy film, my attempts of photography were minimal. 

Two decades further on and with access to real money, I bought an expensive Canon. This was transferred to my second wife, who subsequently lost it. 

I went through a decade of acquiring a succession of digital cameras, the last of which was stolen, along with my passport and other valuables, in Spain. Since then, like most people, I have managed with a mobile phone. 

I still look in the windows of camera shops. Now that I can afford to buy any model I choose the allure has faded. I read the descriptions, note the prices then shake my head and walk on.