On a London street, late, need a phone, forgot my mobile. Aha — there used to be these things called phone boxes. Spot a cluster. All broken/coins stuck/“999 calls only”. And like mini lavatories inside, festooned with prostitutes’ calling cards. Gave up. Britain is covered in phone boxes, barely used, routinely out of order, mostly filthy. Yes, occasionally someone needs to make a call, doesn’t have a mobile and can’t borrow one. But how often today?
Occasionally someone’s thirsty, has no bottled water and can’t find a shop; but nobody seriously suggests that Britain’s 19th-century network of drinking fountains be maintained. Phone boxes are ugly, unhygienic and pointless. Bite the bullet. Scrap them.
With God on their side
Walking home from The Times yesterday I spotted this poster for the Alpha course: a Christian induction, run by the churches. Above the caption “Find out about the meaning of life” was a mock questionnaire with boxes to tick: “Does God exist?”
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How to skew a poll, step one...
Feather dust-up
Walking on, I passed the lovely but deserted King Edward VII Memorial Park by the Thames in East London. In an empty children’s play area was a scattering of white pigeon feathers. A council employee was trying but failing to displace them with a huge, noisy, fuel-guzzling leaf blower machine. As she roared around the asphalt the feathers just kept gusting back. And that, my Alpha friends, is the meaning of life.
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Watch the river flow
Back at my flat awaited a letter from the Environment Agency. Apparently its “asset systems management team” has identified brickwork fronting the river as being in need of repair by its “riparian owners”. We are asked to get in touch with an asset systems management officer to discuss remedial work. Then we must apply for permission to carry it out. By way almost of a postscript we’re advised: “Please allow three calendar months before the planned commencement of any works for your consent application to be considered.” I’m suggesting to fellow flat-owners that we reply with a simply acknowledgement, promising to communicate our response later. “PS: please allow three calendar months for our consideration of your request.”
We ought to be told
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On Monday’s Today programme was an interview with the wife of Tony Nicklinson, the poor man with “locked-in syndrome”, who can barely move a muscle but remains totally aware. Finding his life impossibly degraded he wants the court’s permission for a doctor to kill him if he requests it. Jane Nicklinson’s interview in support of her husband was the more moving for being spare, honest, loving but unsentimental. Next was a discussion with Lady Finlay of Llandaff, introduced as professor of palliative medicine at Cardiff University.
“Good,” I thought, “a detached, professional view: just what we need.”
But there was something weird about the interview, with Lady Finlay (having agreed that hard cases make bad law) repeatedly ducking the question of whether in this particular case death by another’s hand might be the best outcome for Mr Nicklinson.
Only afterwards did the penny drop. Ilora Finlay (an occasional contributor to these pages) chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Dying Well, which campaigns against the legalisation of euthanasia.
Listeners would have wanted to be told this, but were not. Modern attitudes have pulled the “declaration of interests” in two opposite directions. We have a near-allergic reaction to financial interests, however tangential, and insist on their declaration; but with an equal and opposite sensitivity we shy away from the mention of non-financial affiliations — such as that an interviewee is gay, or a Catholic or humanist campaigner, or a pro-Palestinian polemicist or a Parliamentary Friend of Israel — as if these were personal matters that it would be insulting to suppose might have any connection with someone’s opinion. I want to hear people such as Lady Finlay but, as with Jane Nicklinson, I need to know where they’re coming from.
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That takes the cake
A friend joins a birthday dinner at St John, a fashionable restaurant in Spitalfields, London. They take a special cake and ask the staff if they would bring it to the table after the meal. “There’ll be a charge,” they’re warned. Gulping, they agree. On the bill afterwards they see: “Open pastry: £27.60.” My friend, who is considering whether to emigrate, says this helps to make up his mind.