It took me all the way from Victoria Station to the one and only stop on the London underground not to have any of the letters from the word ‘mackerel’ in it to work out what had happened. And why I wasn’t cross.
I had every right to be. I had spent an hour on the train up from Pulborough listening to a woman of a certain type articulating, loudly, each page of the Daily Mail in turn to her husband. Loudly. And with added opinion of her own.
Now, I don’t buy the Mail, and I would probably disagree with much of it, most of it even, but I stop well short of the mandatory confected outrage of a generation who have been taught that it is the source of all evil. It has many awful things, of which the most awful is probably Michael Gove’s wife, but it is also a paper that has campaigned successfully for justice for Stephen Lawrence, for the victims of the Omagh bombings, for the dignity of the elderly in British hospitals and against our profligate use of plastic. It’s a cheap target for comedians, so I suppose it does its job for people who like to keep their politics simple, both for and against.
That woman. She started at Billingshurst with Johnson and Farage.
‘Madness,’ she said.
‘Madness,’ he faintly echoed.
By Christs’ Hospital we were on to the smog in Delhi.
‘There’s just too many of them, dear.’
‘Indeed, dear’ he replied, staring sadly out at the countryside.
At Horsham, it was obesity, and at Crawley, the firing of the Macdonalds’ boss for having an ‘inappropriate’ relationship, the thanks I guess you get from a politically schizophrenic company when you have doubled its share price in the four years you have run it.
‘But he was divorced, dear,’ said the man. ‘He was just keen on someone.’
‘It’s that sex thing again,’ she said, as if that explained everything. Which, happily, I suppose it quite often does.
By Three Bridges, she was hot under the collar about the children of I.S fighters, and it was only a phone call from her daughter that shut her up midway through a rant on renewing Eddy Jones’ contract for the 2023 World Cup.
‘But he’s rather good, dear,’ said the man, and on it went.
But by the time I got to my final destination, I realised with a soggy, happy feeling, that this conversation had simply been how politics used to be in this country: half of us patiently and politely listening to the other half with whom we probably completely disagreed. It was a happier time, when not being right didn’t mean you were completely wrong, and when disagreeing with someone didn’t entail distrusting all their motives as well. And where idiots couldn’t put the first vicious, half-baked opinion that came into their heads straight into the public arena via their mobile phone. People like Harold Wilson and Ted Heath staring at us out of the Rediffusion television sets that were entrenched in our shag pile carpet, and saying wonderfully boring things that I suddenly wish I could hear all over again.
I live in a house where we will both almost certainly vote different ways on December 12th, but where either of us might change our minds up right up to our standing in the booth and looking at the voting slip. The truth is we don’t know, just like you don’t, and we’re not too proud to admit it, as maybe you aren’t. I am just sad that so many good MPs on each side have been forced into retirement by fear: that is surely a weapons grade national own goal.
Because good news doesn’t sell papers, presumably no one bothered to tell you that the hole in the Ozone Layer, that thing that we all feared so heartily in 1990, is 50% patched, and will probably cease to exist by 2040. That 38% of our power regularly comes from renewables. That there are salmon in the Thames.
And there are still only two tube stations that contain all five vowels.
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