March 23, 2013 by duncommutin

Right Now

Commuting days until retirement: 491

Right now I am at home – another day off – waiting for some gravel to be delivered for our front drive. Right now, you are reading this (well I hope somebody is, or will). You can see I am having trouble with tenses here, because your ‘now’ is not my ‘now’. I know you are not reading this now, because I haven’t published it. But you know you are reading it now.

This all might seem a bit trivial and pointless, but stay with me for a bit. The notion I am circling around is the curious status of this concept of now. Let’s approach it another way: imagine yourself back at school, in a physics lesson. This may seem either an enticing or an entirely appalling prospect to you, but please indulge my little thought experiment. The teacher has chalked a diagram up on the blackboard (well, that was the cutting edge of presentation technology when I was at school). There’s the diagram up on the right. t₁ and t₂ obviously represent two instants of time for the ball, in its progress down the slope.

Somehow you are managing to stay awake, just. But in your semi-stupor you find yourself putting up your hand.

‘Yes?’, says the teacher irritably, wondering how there could be any serious question to be asked so far, and expecting something entirely facetious.

‘Er – which one is now?’ you ask. The teacher could perhaps consider your question carefully, for the sake any deep conceptual problem concealed within it, but instead she wonders why she bothered to get up this morning.

Not in the curriculum

Warwick University

However there is a serious philosophical issue here – admittedly not in the physics curriculum, to be fair to the teacher. And the reason it’s not in the curriculum is that the concept of ‘now’ is alien to physics. ‘Now’ is entirely confined to our subjective perception of the world. Think of the earth in its nascent state, a ball of molten lava and all that. Does it even make sense to imagine there was a ‘now’ then? We can say that this red-hot lava whirlpool formed before that one did – but we can’t say that either of them is forming now. Well of course not, in the obvious sense – it was four and a half billion years ago. But you could say that there was a time when your first day at school was ‘now’; and you can also say that there was a time when the execution of Marie Antoinette was ‘now’ – for somebody, that is, even perhaps for the unfortunate woman herself. But as for the formation of the earth – there was no one around for whom it could be a ‘now’. (Small green men excepted.) You’re thinking of it as a ‘now’, I expect, but that’s because in your imagined scenario you are in fact there, as some sort of implicit presence suspended in space, viewing the proceedings.

It’s odd to try and visualise an exclusively objective world – one without a point of view – “The View from Nowhere” as the philosopher Thomas Nagel has put it; it’s the title of one of his books. In such a world there is no ‘now’, and therefore no past and no future, but only a ‘before’ and ‘after’ relative to any arbitrary point in time. And I was always struck by the way that T. S. Eliot, in Burnt Norton, from his Four Quartets, associates ‘time past and time future’ with the poetic and spiritual, and ‘time before and time after’ with the prosaic and mundane.

Language

Our language – indeed most languages – are built around the ‘now’, in that tenses correspond to past and future. Without the subjective sense of a ‘now’, language would surely work in a very different way. Interestingly, there is an example possibly relevant to this from the Pirahã people of the Amazon, who have been studied by the controversial linguist Daniel Everett. Their relationship to the passage of time seems to be different from ours – Everett claims that they have no real sense of history or of planning for the future, and so live in a kind of perpetual present. Correspondingly, inflections in their utterances are related not to temporal comparisons, like our tenses, but to the surrounding circumstances – e.g. whether something being described is right here, or is known first-hand, or has been reported by some other person. (Everett originally went to them as a Christian missionary, but was dismayed to find that they had no interest at all in Jesus unless Everett could claim to have met him.)

So all this would seem to support a philosopher I remember reading a long time ago. I don’t remember who he was, and can no longer find the passage. But I remember the sentence “Our language has a tiresome bias in favour of time.” I think this man was from the old-school style of linguistic philosophy, which held that most philosophical problems can be resolved into confusions caused by our use of language – and so time concepts were just another example of this. But I don’t think this is at all adequate as an approach, Pirahã or no Pirahã. However my language works, I would still have a sense of the differing character of past events, which cannot be changed, and future events, which mostly cannot be known – and of course a present, a now, which is the defining division between them. I would be surprised if the experience of a Pirahã person did not include that.

Space and time

How about another attack on the problem – to make an analogy between the spatial and the temporal? The spatial equivalent of ‘now’ is ‘here’. And there doesn’t seem to be any perplexity about that. ‘Here’ is where I am, er, now. Oh dear. Maybe these aren’t so easy to separate out. Perhaps ‘here’ seems simpler because we each have our own particular ‘here’. It’s where our body is, and that’s easily seen by others. And we can change it at will. But we all share the same ‘now’, and there’s not a lot we can do to change that. There is, of course, the remote possibility of relativistic time travel. I could in some sense change my ‘now’ relative to yours – but when I come back to earth I am back in the same predicament – just one that differs slightly in degree.

But do we all share the same ‘now’? Here’s a slightly more disturbing thought. I have made out that my own sense of ‘now’ is confined to my own private experience, and doesn’t exist in the world ‘out there’. And the same is true of you, of course. I can see and hear you, and I find from your behaviour and the things you say that you are experiencing the the same, contemporaneous events that I am. But it’s not your private experience, or your ‘now’ that I am seeing – only your body. And your body – including of course your brain – is very much a part of the world ‘out there’. It’s only your private experience which isn’t, and I can’t experience that, by definition. So how do I know that your ‘now’ is the same as mine? Do we each float around in our own isolated time bubbles?

I think perhaps there is a solution of some sort to this. If your ‘now’ is different from mine, it must therefore be either before it or after it. Let’s suppose it’s an hour after. Then if my ‘now’ is at 4.30, yours is now at 5.30. But of course there’s a problem with the now that I have put in bold. It doesn’t refer to actual time, but to a sort of meta-time by which we mark out time itself. And how could this make sense? It’s rather like asking “how fast does time flow?” when there is no other secondary, or meta-time by which we could measure the ‘speed’ of normal time.

So perhaps this last idea crumbles into nonsense. But I still believe that, in the notion of ‘now’ there is a deep problem, which is one aspect of the more general mystery of consciousness. Do you agree? Most don’t.

But right now, the gravel is here, and is spread over the drive. So at least I’ve managed to do something more practical and down-to-earth today than write this post. And that’s a little bit of my past – or what is now my past – that I can be proud of.

March 17, 2013 by duncommutin

We are all Newtonians now – or are we?

Commuting days until retirement: 495

Browsing in a bookshop the other day I found a small book about Newton by Peter Ackroyd. His biographies are mostly about literary figures, and I didn’t know about this one – the prospect of Ackroyd on Isaac Newton seemed an enticing novelty. It lasted a few train journeys, and didn’t disappoint. I suppose I was familiar with the outline of Newton’s work, and knew something about his difficult personality, but this filled some of the gaps in my knowledge wonderfully.

Isaac Newton (Wikimedia Commons)

There are perhaps three central achievements of Newton’s – each one groundbreaking in itself: his elucidation of the nature of light and colour; his invention of the calculus (‘Fluxions’ in his day) as a mathematical technique, and, above all, his unification of the movement of all physical bodies, cosmic and terrestrial, in a mathematical framework bound together by his laws of motion and gravitation. It’s true that calculus was, as we know now, independently hit upon by Leibniz, although at the time there was a fierce controversy, with each suspecting the other of plagiarism. Leibniz had published first, using a more elegant notation, but Newton had certainly been working on his Fluxions for some time before. The flames of the dispute were jealously fanned by Newton, who, once crossed or criticised, rarely forgave an opponent.

Robert Hooke

What I hadn’t realised was that the notion of gravitation, and even the inverse square law governing the strength of attraction, had been discussed by others prior to Newton’s synthesis in Principia Mathematica. It was Robert Hooke – a polymath and versatile scientific investigator himself – who had published these ideas in his Micrographia, without claiming to have originated them himself, and who wrote to Newton to draw his attention to them. They had previous quarrelled over Newton’s work on light and colour, Hooke having claimed some precedence in his own work, but Hooke had conceded to Newton, accepting that he had “abilities much inferior to yours.” This was the sort of thing that was music to Newton’s ears, who wrote back in a conciliatory vein, saying, in the famous phrase, that “if I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” There is some uncertainty as to whether this was a deliberate reference to Hooke’s own short and stunted stature.

But relations with Hooke broke down entirely when he pressed his claim to an acknowledgement in the Principia for his own previous work. Newton was furious, and never forgave him. Hooke was for many years secretary of the Royal Society, a body which, to start with, Newton had an awkward relationship, particularly given the presence of Hooke. But after Hooke’s death, Newton became president of the Society, and the relatively modest reputation which Hooke has today is thought to be due to Newton’s attempts to bury it, once he was in a position to do so. No authentic portrait of Hooke remains, and this is probably Newton’s doing.

By contrast, Newton sat for quite a number of portraits – an indication of his vanity. But he was of course held in high regard by most of his contemporaries for his prodigious talents. Those who got on well with him mostly had the skill to negotiate their way carefully around his prickly personality. An example was Edmond Halley (he of Halley’s comet) who had the task of passing Hooke’s claim to Newton, but managed to do so without himself falling into Newton’s disfavour.

Passions

Newton was long-lived, dying aged 84 – perhaps due to his ascetic style of life and his unquenchable enthusiasm for whatever was his current preoccupation. The early part of his life was mostly spent in Cambridge where he became a fellow, and then the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. He lived a mostly solitary existence, and when working on some problem would often work through the night, neglect bodily needs and be deaf to distractions. His absent-mindedness was legendary. Hardly surprising, given these tendencies and his awkward personality, that he was not known ever to have had a close relationship with any individual, sexual or otherwise. Acts of kindness were not unknown, however, and he made many charitable donations in his later, prosperous years. He did strike up one or two friendships, and was fondly protective towards his niece, who kept house for him when he lived in London in later years.

When his mathematical powers waned with age, he found a new talent for administration in his fifties, when offered the post of Warden of the Royal Mint (and later Master). His predecessors had been lazy placemen for whom the post was a sinecure, and it’s thought that, on his appointment, perhaps 95% of the currency was counterfeit. Over succeeding years Newton turned the full force of his concentration to the task, and put the nation’s currency on a sound footing. Forgers were single-mindedly pursued to the gallows, which was where you ended up in those days if convicted of counterfeiting the currency.

So the last part of Newton’s life was spent prosperously, and in the enjoyment of a vast reputation, presiding over his twin fiefdoms of the Royal Mint and the Royal Society, and doing so right up until his death. But I have not mentioned his two other major intellectual enthusiasms, beside the scientific work I have described. One was alchemy – not then distinct from what we now call chemistry. Alchemists of course are remembered mainly for their efforts to create gold, and hence fabulous wealth – but this was not Newton’s aim. The subject was full of occult knowledge and arcane secrets, and for Newton this was one route to a revelation of the universe’s true, unknown nature, and he pursued it assiduously, having a vast library and spending at least as much time on it as his work in what is for us mainstream science. It also had a practical outcome, since he developed from it a thorough knowledge of metallurgy which he put to use in his work in administering the coinage.

His third passion was his research into the history of Christianity and the church. Newton was a deeply pious man, more in a private than a public way. This was partly because Newton’s particular faith was a heretical one, and would have been dangerously so in the earlier part of his life, when England was ruled by the Catholic James II. Newton was obsessed with the now largely forgotten controversy concerning the opposed church fathers Arius and Athanasius. Arian doctrine (not to be confused with the ‘Aryan’ 19th and 20th century racial dogma) held that Christ was a subordinate entity to God, and denied the Holy Trinity taught by Athanasius, and adopted by the mainstream church. For Newton, Arianism was the true faith, whose origins, he believed, could be traced back beyond the Christian era, and was the only way to approach the reality of God.

It almost goes without saying that these three obsessions were not independent of one another in Newton’s mind. For him they all served the same purpose – to uncover the mysteries of the universe and the nature of God. Gravitation was a controversial topic at the time, in virtue of its assertion that one body could act upon another without physical contact. (Perhaps a sort of parallel with the issues we have today with the phenomenon of quantum entanglement.) For Newton, the concept was all of a piece with the mysterious action of God – a window into the nature of reality.

Of course Newton’s scientific conception of the universe has now been radically modified by the twentieth century developments of relativity and quantum theory. But there’s a more fundamental sense in which we are still Newtonians: his towering achievement was the scheme of the universe as an integrated whole, governed by mathematically described laws (with some honours also going to his predecessor Galileo). This is the framework within which all our modern scientific endeavours take place.

Estrangement

The brothers as they appear in the book (faces obscured)

So why the note of uncertainty in my title? To explain this I want to digress by describing an image which came into my mind while thinking about it. A few years back, the local people where I live produced a book about our village’s history. An appeal went out for any period photographs that might be borrowed to illustrate the book, and there was a big response. The organiser gave me the task of scanning in all these photos for the book’s publishers, and one them sticks in my mind. It showed two brothers who were local characters during the 1930s standing in a garden, and a closer examination showed that it had been taken at a wedding. They are wearing their best suits, and are sporting buttonholes. Why is the setting not so immediately obvious? Because the photo had been crudely ripped in two down the middle, with both the brothers in the left half. We can see that one of them is the groom, and that the missing right half contained his bride – only her hand is visible, nestling in the crook of his arm.

I found this mute evidence of some anguished estrangement from the past rather moving. What had seemed like a happy union at the time now had the feminine half of it expunged by someone who was determined that she no longer deserved any place in their thoughts. Yes – you get my drift. The enterprise of science now prefers to go it alone along its own, masculine, analytical path, with any attendant mystery ripped out of the picture, leaving only the barest hint. (See my thoughts on atheism in the previous post.)

It’s worth returning to Newton’s own imagery and repeating the often-quoted passage he wrote towards the end of his life:

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Although he was an arrogant man in his personal dealings (and the opening phrase here hints at how conscious he is of his reputation), I don’t believe this to be mock-modesty. He also was genuinely pious, and all too aware of the mystery surrounding what he had learned of the universe. Today, we look forward to finishing the task of enumerating the pebbles and shells, and are happy to ignore the ocean. In this sense we are more arrogant than he was, and that’s the source of my doubt as to whether we are really Newtonians now.

Ackroyd, Peter: Newton. Vintage Books, 2007

March 11, 2013 by duncommutin

Gardening Leave

Commuting days until retirement: 499

A cold, windy garden seen from a warm study

A day off, supposedly to do some gardening, but the sub-zero wind is keeping me indoors. Delicate plants, we office workers.

A chance, at any rate, to reflect on that back and forth journey that the rest of my fellow commuters have resumed for the week. When you look at all those other blank faces on the train, you do wonder about what’s behind them. When they look around at their fellow passengers (carefully, so as not to catch anyone’s eye), what are they thinking about this repetitive enterprise that we are all involved in? Why does it take place – beyond, that is, our individual needs to make a living? Backwards and forwards – reciprocal motion, like the pistons in a car engine. The pistons keep the car moving, irrespective of where it’s going, and of course we commuters, busy driving the engine of society, have no more idea than do the pistons where our vehicle is headed.

No doubt that is unfair to some, who have occupations with a very explicit social purpose. But I’d guess that the majority of us work for private companies, and are driven by the profit motive – a force as amoral as the torque of the car engine, which may be propelling the car towards sunlit uplands of some sort – or over a cliff edge. The difference in our case, of course, is that there’s no driver, no consciously directed intention, no steering wheel.

Or is there? Here we could head into either politics or religion, those two traditionally taboo topics of polite conversation. But it’s religion I’m thinking of. A few posts ago I referred to a Bible-reading passenger sitting right next to me on the train. I see such people regularly, and no doubt they are quite clear about the purpose question. But the rest of us?

Winning the argument

It seems as if the atheists are currently winning the argument. Once rather less focused, nowadays they have some strident and articulate standard-bearers. This has perhaps lent some conviction to the waverers among us. There was a time when religion, for most, was more of a social badge. My father, for instance, would unhesitatingly write “C of E” (Church of England) on any form that asked for religion, but would never be seen in a church, other than for weddings or funerals. And this wasn’t hypocrisy: he was quite up-front about his beliefs, or lack of them. More recently, most people would mutter something vague to the effect of “Well, I think there must be something…” if asked the religion question.

But now, surveys and censuses show that there are a many more who will happily call themselves atheists, or at least agnostics. The New Atheists, as they now tend to be called, have got across the message that we don’t need a purpose imposed on us from above – we can formulate our own. We don’t, furthermore, require a God or a scriptural set of rules in order to tell right from wrong. And our sense of wonder has its needs catered for by the impressive discoveries of science.

So I think, on the face of it, I have pretty good credentials as an atheist. I more or less agree with the above statements; I don’t believe in an old man in the sky, or some more diffuse entity of which he is a personification; and creationism seems to me a ragbag of prejudice, ignorance and wishful thinking, as opposed to the coherent and justified body of theory which evolutionary biology gives us. Large, received bodies of doctrine from organised religion I am unable to swallow. So why is it, that if I see, for a example, a TV debate between an atheist and an apologist of religion, I feel myself instinctively sympathising with the religious point of view? (That’s assuming the religious side doesn’t represent creationism, or some swivel-eyed variety of fundamentalism.)

Stop worrying

Could it be the unbearable smugness which seems to hang like a cloud around the atheist programme? Individually, the most vocal atheists seem to be perfectly decent people, and some – for example Dawkins and Hitchens – are (or were) brilliant writers in their different ways. But somehow the public face of the movement seems to patronise us, with its inverted holier-than-thou expression.

That ghastly bus advertising campaign didn’t help: for those who don’t know it, there was an atheist-sponsored poster campaign on London buses a few years back, with the slogan ‘THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD. SO STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.’ Of the many reasons why this is objectionable, it’s difficult to pick out the worst. I would go for the fact that many people are worried a lot of the time, and not enjoying their lives, and for whom the existence of god is the last thing on their minds. So to be be dogged by fatuous slogans such as this does not make things any easier for them.

At least the campaign provided us with a bit if fun, when a religious group complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The advertising code of practice lays down that ads must be “Legal, Decent, Honest and Truthful’. Well, we can probably get away with the first three here, so that leaves the issue of truthfulness. Which leaves the hapless ASA with the task of ruling on the probability of the existence of God. I have heard of no outcome to this, so perhaps they are still deliberating. Or maybe they judged the probability of the existence of God to be the same as that of Carlsberg being the best lager in the world.

Stuff and experience

No – for me, what is most importantly wrong with the atheist agenda is what it leaves out, what its vision simply doesn’t encompass. There are many aspects to this, so let’s start with the moral one. Of course, we can agree, our morals don’t come direct from the ten commandments. or any other body of doctrine. They come from the fact that we are sentient, conscious beings, who know what it is to suffer, and understand the importance of not inflicting such suffering on other beings – and of promoting their happiness and wellbeing.

That of course, I know, is a massive oversimplification, culturally, historically and emotionally – but it still has at its heart this question of consciousness, of private experience. No scientific theory yet has come anywhere near providing an account of this which can assimilate it into our account of the physical world. There’s ‘stuff’, and there’s ‘experience’. Science deals with the first; morality has more to do with the second. I’d maintain that the question of how, or whether, we can unify our knowledge of the two lies at present outside science, and will remain so unless science becomes a very different kind of enterprise.

These mysteries are, I would maintain, part of what religion is a response to – they are its stock-in-trade, what it is most comfortable with. But for the atheist/materialist agenda it’s necessary to assert that science has either explained them already, or will have them under its belt after some more investigation. I would respectfully disagree – and hope to expand on this in future posts.

March 7, 2013 by duncommutin

Antiversary

Commuting days until retirement: 500

Five hundred days to go – I couldn’t let that go by without comment. It’s a sort of backwards anniversary, or anti-anniversary. Let’s call it an antiversary.

So here’s something to celebrate it:

Antiverse

A quincentennially starred antiversary
Needs observance that’s more than just cursory.
Despite notions you’ve got
From my profile shot
I’ve come a long way from the nursery.

My hope from today’s antiversary
That my pension will build to a bursary
Means I cannot start shirking
But must go on working –
For time is a fearsome adversary.

(If you’re a pronunciation freak, I’m sorry about the last line. I was out of rhyme words.)

March 4, 2013 by duncommutin

More commuter’s tales

Commuting days until retirement: 503

This morning’s train journey had something of a surreal air about it, and the oddities started at the ticket office. This was the day when I surrender my monthly arm and leg in exchange for a season ticket. There was one passenger ahead of me, already at the window, and it was clear from his tone of voice that all was not well.

‘But I need it to claim the expenses!’
‘Well look, I’ve done you a photocopy. ‘
‘But they don’t accept photocopies! I have to have the ticket!’
‘I can’t do that. It’s railway property.’
‘I only need my ticket!’
‘You don’t buy a ticket. You buy the journey.’

This last point proffered with smug satisfaction, as an argument clincher.

And after only a few more exchanges, to my surprise, the passenger gave up. I wouldn’t have. And the clerk in this office had always seemed quite affable – I hadn’t put him down as a jobsworth. I thought of the vast majority of tickets I have ever bought, which have ended up in the bin at home. Will the railway send the bailiffs round one day, to enforce a mass repossession of these cherished items? The sheer Orwellian absurdity is difficult to believe. If the clerk had just given back the ticket, would he have ended up hanging by the wrists in some fearful house of correction for errant railway employees? I can just imagine it, under one of the dingier railway arches near the back end of Waterloo, where screams are heard on dark foggy nights.

‘Now once again. Who do the tickets belong to?’
(Yelp of pain)
‘Yes, that’s right – they belong to us.’

I had to catch the later train – the earlier one would have been before the ticket office opened. So a few minutes later I was on it, standing room only. Once we were under way there was a beep and a throat clearing – the driver had something to say. Drivers on the PA system vary in my commuting experience, from completely taciturn (a blessing if you’re reading) to chronic verbal diarrhoea. This one was well to the latter end of the scale.

‘I have an announcement, particularly for those who have joined the train at the last two stops.’ (Pause for effect.) ‘The state of the train is not at all what it should be today. It’s filthy. I can only apologise for the state of it. Last night we had late night revellers using it as a pigsty. Frankly I’m embarrassed to be driving this train. It’s a mess.’

At this point, passengers are nervously catching each other’s eyes, in the British manner, not sure whether they dare to embark on a shared joke. They don’t quite manage it, not in my carriage, anyway. I look around, and it doesn’t look that much different from usual. I catch sight of one beer can under a seat, but that’s all. Meanwhile the driver is getting into his stride.

‘And this morning we had a cleaner off sick. So that’s why the train is in this state. It’s not good enough. It’s a shambles. You don’t deserve to be subjected to this.’

It seems as if our main function is to be witnesses to this man’s grief.

‘The only crumb of comfort I can offer you is that I will be making representations at the highest levels about this. It’s unforgivable and something must be done.’

Well, I hope for his sake that these higher echelons will have a sympathetic ear for him. But I rather suspect that they’ll be too busy counting their precious bits of cardboard.

March 3, 2013 by duncommutin

Bus travel, a politician and a dark brown comestible

Commuting days until retirement: 504

These days the last leg of my journey into work is by bus. This is because, given my advanced age, I qualify for a bus pass, which saves me enough money to make it worthwhile. What hadn’t really struck me was, as my daughter had already told me, how much more civilised a form of transport it is than the tube (underground or metro, for non-UK readers). Instead of a brutal ten minutes of shoulder-to-shoulder, er – (as I try to think of a suitably claustrophobic word here, my spookily intelligent phone keyboard suggests ‘wrongness’. OK – ‘shoulder-to-shoulder wrongness’ will do very well.) So instead of ten minutes of that, a long way underground, I have twenty minutes of mature reflection as I survey busy London streets from wide top deck windows. And the frequent background of Eastern European chatter creates a sense of being delocalised, as if I am viewing the frenetic urban activity below from some privileged, remote vantage point.

And here’s some proof, found in the back of a drawer by my sister. Also proves my age, unfortunately.

As this mobile ivory tower lurches and judders around corners and through traffic lights I sometimes think of a dictum of Margaret Thatcher’s: ‘If a man of over 26 finds himself on a bus he must consider himself a failure.’ I’m 64, so I don’t know what that makes me. And in this connection I also think of a school friend of mine, who, when we were about 12 or so, was quite single-mindedly fascinated by everything to do with buses. I caught the bug too, and for a year or two would join him on ‘Red Rovers’ (bus tickets that gave you travel all over London for a day), visit bus garages, and even take black-and-white photos of buses with our Kodak Brownies (remember them?). I can recall my mother gawping at my photo album, and obviously wondering what sort of psychological backwater her son had ended up in.

Well, (typically for me) the enthusiasm didn’t last long. But my friend proceeded to a career in management with London Transport, while marrying and raising a family. I haven’t seen him for a while, but I’ve heard that now, with that responsibility discharged, he is doing what he always really wanted to do – he drives a bus. And this seems to me to be a resounding success in life, although it wouldn’t register on the Thatcher scale.

Before expanding on the character of the former prime minister I naturally checked by Googling the quotation, to only to find that she never actually said it. It’s a sobering experience, having launched your carefully engineered, watertight Titanic of an argument, only to have it encounter the iceberg of a factual inaccuracy. My lifeboat will have to be the thought that it wouldn’t have been attributed it to her unless it had seemed to fit. And the point I was going to develop – which is now thrashing about in the freezing water but still alive – was how essentially one-dimensional her outlook was. Much more a conviction politician than many others, and one of immense strength of personality – but as we all know, a current gathers greater force when constricted into a narrow channel.

Margaret Thatcher, as depicted in TV’s Spitting Image

Perhaps this accounts for how polarised people’s opinions about her tended to be. Either you admired the ‘iron lady’ strength of character, or if your politics differed, then what you saw as forceful wrong-headedness inspired a forceful dislike. Thus she became the Marmite of politicians: I don’t know if this is known beyond the UK, but Marmite is a yeast extract spread which is famous for being either adored or reviled – indifference is rare. (I’m an exception; I can take it or leave it, and I mostly leave it.)

Which takes me back to a residential poetry course I did a few years ago. One of the tutors was the poet Sean O’Brien. When the Marmite controversy arose at breakfast one morning, he nailed his colours firmly to the Marmite-lovers’ mast. (On Thatcher, his politics would put him in the other camp – see for example his wonderful poem Cousin Coat.) I hope he won’t mind me playing fast and loose with his copyright, but the next day the following little poem appeared, and has since found its way into his collection November.

The Plain Facts of the Matter

There are two tribes this world can boast:
The Marmite-lovers and the damned.
Fact is, though, everybody’s toast
Whatever breakfast they’ve got planned.

It’s not for us to turn away
The sort who shun the dark brown jar,
But sure as sure come Judgement Day
The Lord will know who His folk are.

Duncommutin

Thoughts from beyond the end of the line

Month: March 2013

Right Now