This furore over Gordon Brown’s handwritten letter to the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan may come down to the differing mores of separate social classes that rarely interact.
In the middle class, many of whose members spend their lives in front of computers, the handwritten note is seen as superior to the typed. It represents the personal touch. Authentic, rootsy, person-to-person, heartfelt.
But to Jacqui Janes, I think, to judge by her comments in The Sun yesterday, the handwritten note is something that you leave out for the milkman when you want an extra pint.
When you’re writing something important — and it doesn’t get any more important than a condolence letter to a bereaved mother — she thinks the presentation should be more formal. When your handwriting is as bad as Mr Brown’s, it’s hard to disagree.
Misspelling Mrs Janes’s son’s name was, of course, a shocking cock-up, in whatever form, handwritten, typed, carved in marble. It isn’t so much that the Prime Minister got the lad’s name wrong — anyone can make a mistake. The shocking thing is that having initially written what appears to be Jamio, he doesn’t think drat, screw up that piece of notepaper and start again. Instead, unbelievably, he tries to turn the “o” into an “e”, rather in the manner of a lazy eight-year-old resentfully scribbling a Christmas thank-you note to his grandma.
Advertisement
That really is very stupid. As if a grief-stricken mother, poring over every last detail of her letter from Downing Street, might somehow fail to notice that the Prime Minister has failed to spell her son’s name correctly at the first attempt.
Democratic deficit
Watching the Remembrance Sunday ceremony at the Cenotaph, it struck me that we’re not as committed to democracy in this country as we like to think. At the risk of stating the obvious, of the first four people to lay wreaths, three, Elizabeth, William and Harry were there as a result of an accident of birth and the fourth, Philip, by virtue of his marriage. And yet all four royals looked as if they belonged there, welcome guests, the stars of the show.
The elected people, the politicians, the ones we chose, by contrast, bore the shifty expressions of those who know they’ve been invited under sufferance. They stood there, not just the socially awkward Brown but the smooth boys Cameron and Clegg too, trying to look all sombre and dignified, instead coming across as pensive and hunted. A collective thought bubble above their heads might well have read: “I hope everyone isn’t hating us too much.”
Advertisement
Hard men . . .
Very decent of Michael Gove to pay tribute to my “13st of Yorkshire muscle” in this space yesterday. Sadly, Michael and I haven’t got together in a while, and he’s a little out of date. More like 14-and-a-half these days, Govey. And none of the increase is muscle.
He got it spot on about my home town of Hull though, a city so macho that John Prescott is, indeed, seen as a “dangerously metrosexual figure” and I am irredeemably effeminate.
Years ago, about 1979, I was at the Boulevard, home of Hull FC, one of the city’s two rugby league clubs. Perched on top of the notorious Threepenny stand, commentating on the game, sat the voice of rugby league, Eddie Waring. Most will remember Eddie Waring as the very essence of northern masculinity. In Hull, however, partly because he came from West Yorkshire and partly because he had not long embarked on another career as Stuart Hall’s stooge on It’s a Knockout, Waring was seen as suspiciously soft. Which is why two or three lads, roared on by the rest of the crowd, clambered up into the rafters and set fire — yes, set fire — to his commentary box.
Advertisement
. . . and not so hard
My son asked if he could watch Die Hard and although he’s 12 and it’s an 18, I said yes. I don’t make a habit of this. Die Hard is the first 18 he’s seen, in my presence anyway. He says his cousins once let him watch Alien vs Predator at their house.
My decision was partly pure bad parenting. I fancied watching Die Hard again myself, and knew I’d enjoy it more if Sam was watching with me. It is, after all, the ne plus ultra of the action genre, with a great plot, an at times exceptional script and career-making performances from Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman.
But also, when I replayed Die Hard in my head, fleeting glimpse of bare breasts, glancing reference to cocaine, admittedly heroic quantities of swearing and shooting — I thought: what’s the big deal? No horror, no torture, no bullying, plenty of blood but no guts, nothing he’ll have a nightmare about in ten years’ time. We put our vests on, settled down and hit “play”.