Everything in Moderation

The suburbs are what make Britain great

Bourgeois life is too easy a target for satire. There’s nothing better than the dual carriageway and a job in extra-wet tissues

12 August 2015

Some years ago my father came home from an academic conference with a picture book he’d been given by his visitors, Oulu, the Fifth Biggest Town in Finland.

It was crammed with photographs of the highlights of this jewel of Northern Ostrobothnia. The town hall, the sawmill museum, a bicycle stand, a deserted shopping street covered in snow. There was also plenty of useful information. Since 1996 Oulu has hosted the Air Guitar World Championship. And at the end of the book was a picture of a dual carriageway accompanied by the suggestion that we might like to visit Oulu. ‘Or better still, go round it.’

At first I thought this meant that the whole book had been a joke. Slowly, however, I realised that they were simply proud of the Oulu ring road and were advising us not to miss the chance of travelling on it once we’d had our fill of sawmills.

You might think of this column as: In Defence of Oulu.

It is prompted by the death of that great genius David Nobbs, the author of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, the man who appreciated the comedy in describing a train arriving eleven minutes late at Waterloo station owing to staff difficulties at Hampton Wick.

Nobbs chronicles the monotony of daily suburban life brilliantly. Walking down Coleridge Close and turning right into Tennyson Avenue, filling in the crossword on the journey into work at Sunshine Desserts, the three pictures on his boss’s wall: ‘A Francis Bacon, a John Bratby and a photograph of CJ holding the lemon mousse which had won second prize in the convenience foods category at the 1963 Paris Concours Des Desserts.’

Nobbs said that one of his inspirations was the thought that people have such strange jobs: ‘You can’t grow up wanting to become an executive for extra-wet strength tissues.’ A life trying to think of ways to market products like Kumquat Surprise (‘What about something like, off the top of my head, I like to stroke my nipple with a strawberry and lychee ripple’) drives Reggie to a breakdown.

Though Nobbs was an uncommon talent, his was not an uncommon target. The futility of suburban or small-town life, the banality of commerce and management, the hypocrisy of respectable lives behind net curtains, the despair as youth trickles away into middle age.

And every time I watch Richard Briers quit for a life of self-sufficiency in Surbiton, or Kevin Spacey’s character Lester Burnham melt down in American Beauty, or Reggie Perrin fake his suicide, I am struck by the same thought inspired by the guide to Oulu.

Sunshine Desserts is the height of civilisation. Lester Burnham was better off when he went to work in an office and looked after his family. Oulu is right to boast of its ring road, which is quite an achievement.

When we look at history we regard as heroes those who fought and those who conquered, those who were martyrs for their point of view, those who set out on great adventures, those who built great cathedrals and pyramids.

Yet I think it is a fine ambition to have been an executive for extra-wet strength tissues. In the history of mankind how many better jobs have there been? How many have been better paid? More comfortable? Less dangerous? More inoffensively useful to their fellow man?

The HR department of a children’s shoe brand has never launched a war. Nobody dies in the creation of advertisements for Kumquat Surprise. Surely the reason our ancestors struggled so hard and even fought wars is so that we, their children, could live happily on the commuter line to King’s Cross, heading into work on the 8.17.

I always sigh when I hear people attack consumerism. All that hunger, and war and pestilence, all that dictatorship and torture and tragedy and they want to attack shopping?

I was brought up in Hendon Central and when I was thirteen years old they opened Brent Cross Shopping Centre. I could walk there without crossing the road. My father was a cultured man, a highly sophisticated intellectual, but he regarded the shopping centre as among the great beneficial developments of mankind.

He had almost starved as a young boy in a Soviet-imposed exile. When my father was thirteen years old he couldn’t walk to the shopping centre because there wasn’t one in Siberia. He couldn’t drive there either, because Stalin had the car.

For him, the ability to buy a prepared sandwich in Marks & Spencer or meet my mother for a crusty roll and butter in the Tesco coffee shop represented a great advance in the condition of man. And isn’t it wonderful to live in a country in which we worry seriously about becoming too fat?

People talk about the death of big ideas. The great thing about Britain is our small ideas and our pragmatism, our suburbs and our bourgeois stability. This thing – this apparent banality – that we so easily satirise is what people at the Channel Tunnel are desperate to have. They are fighting their way to be able to work in the Alpine Dry Cleaners in Hatch End. The right to purchase Good Housekeeping in the WHSmith on Bridge Street is as attractive a right as all those contained in the Declaration of Independence.

The Metropolitan Line from Pinner, change across the platform to the Jubilee Line at Finchley Road, is not quiet despair, it is salvation. Oh for delays caused by leaves on the line! Come bring me your apologies for inconvenience!

The heroes of history are those who do not fight wars; those who instead create a world fit for people to market non-stick frying pans and sell to each other oven-ready chips. Yvette Cooper. Jeremy Hunt. Not Julius Caesar. Or Fidel Castro.

Give me any day a politician who has been special adviser to the agriculture minister over a man on a white charger come to purify the nation and sweep away its corruption. For I well know who will be doing the sweeping and who will be the swept.

Give me special advisers and special offers. When people are trying things on in the changing rooms of Top Shop they are too busy to start transporting the Jews to the East.

We have toiled hard over centuries to create places like Oulu and Pinner, where we can live in peace and work in offices with desk chairs that swivel. Let the sun shine on Sunshine Desserts.

Not every age needs a Churchill or a de Gaulle

My mother’s life taught me the value of political moderation and to be distrustful of radical change and big ideas

8 February 2017

A couple of weeks ago I received in the mail a copy of a book called Survivor. It contained stunning portraits of Holocaust survivors taken by the photographer Harry Borden. And one of them was a wonderful picture of my mother, standing by the open door of the dining room at her house in Hendon.

Accompanying each portrait were a few words from the subject in their own handwriting. Next to hers, Mum had written: ‘I think of myself as a person, a wife and mother first and a survivor last.’

Last week, after a long illness, she died. And I have found myself standing by the same open dining-room door and thinking about what she had said. Here’s my attempt to make sense of it.

Whenever my mother told of her arrest and being taken to a concentration camp by cattle truck, she would always add that my father had spent much longer in such a truck when exiled to the Siberian borders by Stalin.

Partly this reflected her natural modesty. She found competitive stories of suffering utterly ludicrous, and was keen to undercut her own. But partly it was to emphasise the way in which the enemies of liberty, however different they look, produce the same misery and death.

Even as a child it wasn’t hard to absorb the simple political lesson. It was to be resolute in defence of democracy, free speech and the rule of law. When I was a student I was often offered dope, but refused it because Mum and Dad taught me never, ever to break the law. If you don’t respect the rules laid down by a freely elected parliament, where next? My friends remind me that I refused to tape records for them because it breached copyright.

As an adult, however, I began to understand better the subtlety of my parents’ politics. Actually, more than their politics, their way of looking at the world.

My mum’s favourite joke was ‘Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the theatre?’ Indeed, when my father died, I returned in a hurry from watching Chelsea play Norwich City and my mother looked at me and said: ‘What was the score?’ (It was 3-1 by the way.)

The reason she found the Lincoln joke funny was that she thought nothing so absurd as a lack of a sense of proportion. It would have been a perfectly reasonable response to Belsen and exile for my parents to have had a hair trigger, to see the next Holocaust in every event, the next Stalin in every bumptious leadership figure. Instead, they went the other way.

My mother’s view was that if she lived her life as a ‘survivor’, she would be granting Hitler the ultimate triumph. She would live as a person, a wife and a mother. She would note not how similar events were to a fresh disaster, but how dissimilar they were.

My parents never involved themselves in a hedge (or any other) dispute with a neighbour, it was out of the question to disapprove of their children’s partners, they never took sides in rows on the synagogue council. It isn’t quite true that we children were never admonished, but they were remarkably tolerant. Even when I failed to realise that Copydex glue for carpets was intended for the underside.

The only time I remember being properly told off was for claiming, just before dinner, to be starving. Justly, my parents found my failure to appreciate what starving really was, offensive.

Inevitably, this all had an impact on their politics and on mine. It isn’t just that we find unbelievably stupid, people who put the Nazi emblem on the European Union flag or call it the EUSSR. It’s broader than that.

The great figures of history are often seen as those who are unreasonable in circumstances where reason no longer applies. Take Charles de Gaulle, for instance. He was stubbornly, almost insanely, unreasonable about small things as well as big ones. And his pettiness was his greatness. Through it he preserved the rights of France and secured its independence.

No one would argue that Winston Churchill was always reasonable or acted proportionately. Nor that, in different circumstances, Margaret Thatcher was either. There are moments in history for people willing and able to be incredibly bloody-minded and to appreciate that great acts of change or resistance are necessary.

But not every moment is like that and not every circumstance requires it. There is greatness too in the ability to compromise, to moderate, to accept with generosity the eccentricities and obsessions of others. It can be an achievement when nothing much happens.

America’s first president had his wars and his monument. America’s fifth president, James Monroe, cannot boast a great cathartic moment, or a spectacular military victory. Only a period in office known as ‘the era of good feeling’. But I know which president I would rather have lived under. There would be no Monroe without Washington, but what would be the point of a Washington if we were never able to enjoy the era of Monroe?

And not every political event requires courage and resistance. Sometimes acceptance and understanding are the right response. I notice the imprint of my parents’ politics on my view of leaving the European Union. I wanted to remain, but you know what? We’ll live. Even if the worst predictions of the economic consequences are correct, which they probably aren’t, we will live.

My parents thought political moderation was a virtue in itself. They regarded grand conspiracy theories as bizarre, and sweeping big ideas as unconvincing. My dad liked Harold Wilson precisely for the reason some of Wilson’s colleagues despised him, because he was a pragmatist who adapted to circumstances. I think politically Mum was happiest when she supported the SDP, though she admired John Major.

My mum didn’t want to live all her life as a survivor. She wanted a country that was free but also safe and stable. She didn’t want a turbulent politics that sucked in every citizen. She wanted reason and moderation and a sense of proportion so that she could do more than survive.

So that she could live, and love, and nurture and prosper. And, in the end, so that she could die in peace and tranquillity in her adopted home.

Once in a while just go for it, hell for leather

Moderation is fine for every day, but for one-off moments adopt an uncompromising, Steve Jobs approach

Oscar Wilde once said: ‘Everything in moderation. Including moderation.’ Although probably someone else said it first. This column appeared during the London Olympics, of which I’d always been a supporter.

8 August 2012

Enthusiasm for the Olympics has its critics. Someone wrote to me last week describing the whole thing as a disappointment, while complaining that there were so many empty seats. This reminded me of Woody Allen’s joke about the two Jewish women and the restaurant. ‘The food here is terrible,’ says one. ‘Yes,’ says the other, ‘and such small portions.’

One argument, however, I feel I have to take seriously. It goes, roughly, like this. It’s fun and all that, but we’ve spent billions of pounds and as many hours so that some people can run around in circles for a fortnight.

I’ve thought a little about how to respond to this and I feel the best way is by telling you about my one sporting triumph. I beat Sebastian Coe in an egg-and-spoon race. Not at school. As adults. He already had his gold medals. And there was none of this stuff he did against Steve Ovett, none of this coming back in his less good race later and being vindicated. He was just beaten and I won, end of.

The thing is, you see, that Seb turned out to run quite fast, faster than me (on the day). But he dropped the egg and I didn’t.

The egg-and-spoon race rewards moderation. If you run too slowly you lose anyway. Run too quickly and there’s a good chance that you will lose the egg. Egg-and-spoon suits both my athletic ability (although in the ten years since my famous victory, I’ve lost a yard or two of pace) and my attitude to life.

I am, in general, conservative with a small c. I am suspicious of big schemes, of people with a glint in their eye and a simple solution, of those with dogmatic obsessions who can’t resist hammering it home. I am all for the spirit of compromise, taking one thing with another, seeing if we can’t fold everyone into the solution. Naturally I suffer from the inevitable human failing of believing myself more reasonable than others think me, but you get the idea.

And the Olympics, the history of it, the conduct of the competitors and, indeed, the very fact of London 2012, is a contradiction of that idea.

At the end of last year, Walter Isaacson published his excellent biography of Steve Jobs. And it turns out that in many ways Jobs was dreadful. He was manipulative, egotistical, ready to trample over people to an extraordinary extent and his head was full of highly eccentric notions, particularly about his health and diet.

He was also simply brilliant. And there was a connection between his impossible personality and the impossible results he achieved. He insisted that his singular vision, his concept, however extreme and impractical it might seem, was delivered exactly as he had conceived it.

He was quite unwilling to compromise with anybody or even with reality. He ignored cost, or even whether the parts he wished to include in his new product existed. He thought anyone who couldn’t see things as he saw them was a fool and should be treated as such. He lied and cheated to get his way. And he succeeded.

This can’t be a rule for everyone’s behaviour. It can’t be countenanced. And even for one person, it can end in disaster, as with Jobs it often did. But the extremism, the insistence on seeing through his idea without challenge, that’s what made it so good. You can’t always be like that, but sometimes you have to be.

To follow the history of the Olympics is to be struck by the unbelievable dogmatism of Avery Brundage, for decades the leading light in the International Olympic Committee. He held to his ideas – that the Olympics should be for amateurs, and that politics should be kept out of it – to the point of madness. In the late 1950s he was still complaining publicly about the ‘well financed’ campaign in the 1930s against the Nazi Olympics of 1936.

Yet at the same time it is hard to avoid the conclusion that without this singular, blinkered, intense commitment – one that it would often have been hard for a reasonable, moderate person to justify – the Olympics would have collapsed long before London 2012.

Brundage’s behaviour was hard to tolerate, but perhaps sportsmen tolerated it because, at some level, they understood his extremism. Bill Furniss, the swimming coach, describes intense sessions with the great champion Rebecca Adlington as ‘sick-bucket sessions’ because they push her to the absolute limit. One of Adlington’s great advantages as a swimmer, her admirers explain, is her willingness to endure pain.

Who does that? And why? It is to achieve a moment, even if only a fleeting one, of uncompromised brilliance. She endures pain because she has a singular vision that brooks no opposition or interference. Not everyone can do it, and she can’t go on doing it for ever, but what it produces is something worth having. And something that can’t be obtained in any other way.