Words and Phrases and Widespread Aversions

I was pleased to read here that I'm not alone in taking against certain words, even though I suspect, given the date, that the whole article may simply be a joke. Certainly it is not a joke for me that, if someone uses 'moist' - I remember a young man I'd earlier thought quite attractive referred to something we'd just eaten as a 'moist meal', and this, along with the rather effete way in which he picked up his chicken bones and gnawed at them, (yes, it is possible to be effete and gnaw), made me decide he wasn't attractive after all (such is the ephemeral nature of romantic love) - I have generally concluded that they are a bit 'wet' in the non-moist sense.

We're not talking here about annoying, overused words, but words that provoke an emotional reaction, words that make you wince. In the same kind of way, I shudder slightly at most shortenings eg 'veggies'. I, along with many others, judging by this article, can't stand 'panties'. I used to hate 'slacks', which the headmistress of my boarding school used to tell us we could wear on special occasions, thus putting me off trousers for a long, long time.

What do you think? What are the words that elicit an involuntary shudder in you?

With All My Might

I used to work on a charity bookstall that set up once a week in a hospital near where I lived. I enjoyed it but one thing that always surprised me was the kinds of books people wanted.

While there were regulars - a couple of mothers who would bring their children along to try to find new bedtime fodder; a man who wanted nothing but ecclesiastical history; a migrant student needing textbooks on management theory - on the whole ours was a passing trade. Over the course of three or four hours, we'd probably serve 40 or 50 customers - (I wanted to say 40 or 45, of course:

but restrained myself) - and almost all of them were there just once.

In other words, over the space of a year we probably encountered a couple of thousand people across our trestle tables. Out of those 2,000, I would calculate that a minimum of 1,800 had pretty much the same request.

"Excuse me, have you got anything on self-improvement?" "Could you show me your self-improvement section?" "I'm sorry to bother you but I'm looking for self-improvement. Do you have any of those?"

I found this dispiriting. Apart from the fact that such books are almost all texts of such banality and tedium that no-one should feel the need to drag their eyes across their pages, the impulse itself is so full of forlorn humility.

How has the world given so many people the message that they are not good enough? Was it always the same? Did the majority of us always find ourselves wanting - and, if so, against what are we measuring ourselves?

I Get It

I'm not much of a Facebook user, but my friend Polly has just gone to Istanbul for a couple of months, (good timing or what?), and so I went to look at her Facebook page to see if she was all right. She is. Furthermore, she reports on her Facebook page that she overheard this conversation as she wandered the cobbled streets of her new neighbourhood:

Tourist 1: Where you from?
Tourist 2: Germany
Tourist 1: Oh , I know it - Hitler!

At last I get the point of Facebook.

Late to the Party

In my first year at university I didn't meet any feminists. Presumably people were being feminists somewhere - after all, The Female Eunuch had been out for some years by that time. In Canberra though, at least in first year Russian and English Literature, (Piers Plowman and the Medieval English Lyric), Unit 1B, it still hadn't occurred to anyone that it was time to revolt against, (or from? - bloody prepositions, the bane of language learners everywhere), the patriarchal yoke.

By the beginning of my second year the situation had utterly changed. A new breed of female had appeared on campus. They spent a lot of time at the Union bar or in the refectory, feet up on the tables, laughing loudly, happy in their own, male-free company. Many looked, at first glance, more thickset than your average Sheila, but labourer's overalls and lace-up boots is a uniform that makes even sylphs look like bruisers. Some had intensified the peculiar impression their costume created by shaving the hair off their heads; almost all had grown - or were in the process of growing - the hair they'd once shaved on their legs and under their arms.

I thought they were mad. I had no money and a cupboard full of flowery Indian-cotton dresses, (all smelling faintly of patchouli oil). I wasn't going to chuck the whole lot out and reinvest in King Gee's and lace-up boots. I couldn't afford to. At least, that was my story. Those clever overall wearers, of course, saw through it. In tutorials, they cast scornful glances in my direction. They could tell it wasn't money that prevented me from crossing the sartorial rubicon. They understood as well as I did that economic necessity wasn't what stopped me getting rid of all my pretty frocks. No, the truth was I was still in the grip of an appalling, unreconstructed impulse that made me want boys, (ugh, gag, wash your  mouth out, disgusting), to like me and think I was pretty.

The shame. And given my early experiences with boys, (see pic below - and, yes, that is my wigwam and my tomahawk, and no, I don't know which parent thought it was more important to photograph my distress than to do something about it, but I think I deserve compensation from all concerned), I really ought to have known better. I can only assume I was suffering from the compulsion Freud describes where you keep going back to a bad experience and repeating it, in the hope it will eventually come out as you want it to.

Or possibly it was just that from earliest youth I'd thought my dad was marvellous and therefore assumed that all his kind must be as well:

Actually, there were other, less flippant reasons that made me resist the blandishments of feminism. If I'm honest, my reluctance to join the movement had little to do with my fondness for men. The sticking point for me was mainly concern about the movement's aims and intentions. I feared that, like many of the political developments of the twentieth century, feminism's main driving force was not sober reason but anger. My radical friends were merely caught up in a reaction. Their aim was the destruction of existing structures, rather than the construction of positive change.

I had no doubt that within the existing social edifice women were treated as second class. That was not where my argument lay. What bothered me was that, while I could see that there was definitely an appetite for smashing, I could not identify anywhere amongst the sisterhood a simultaneous desire to analyse why we'd arrived at the way things were. I thought it important to know, first of all, why the system had been constructed in the way it had been. I thought we should find out what the underlying problems were that the current status quo had tried - however unsuccessfully - to provide solutions for. Only when we'd worked that out, I reasoned, would we be able to produce better solutions ourselves.

Things weren't thought through. That's what put me off. The movement arose from the kind of emoting that Susan Brownmiller describes in her 'Memoir of a Revolution':

"If the anger of enough people has reached the boiling point, the exploding passion can ignite a societal transformation"

I suppose I am fundamentally very English - as such, my instinct always tells me that anger and explosive passion are destructive and not creative impulses.

Most importantly for me though, the central conundrum of women's lives - how to combine achieving things using your talents and intelligence with the bearing of children - was not adequately addressed by bringing things to boiling point and breaking everything up. As Sheila Rowbotham states in the BBC documentary, Libbers: 

'We didn't think through quite how else you bring up children.' 

One approach, of course - possibly that of Susan Brownmiller, who, according to the Libbers programme, had three abortions - was not bringing up children at all. In this context, abortion became a liberating tool. This was another hurdle between me and feminism, and remains so.  Of course, I wholeheartedly believe in the importance of abortion being free, safe and available, but I do not - and will never - regard abortion as in any way liberating. On the contrary, I believe that a woman's need for abortion is almost always emblematic of her continued dominance by masculine forces, since it is only in a world shaped by long centuries of male authority that having a baby causes problems.

An abortion is usually sought because a) the other part of the making-a-baby-equation has not taken up his burden of responsibility in the issue and is not routinely expected to and b) bringing a child into the world and looking after it thereafter makes doing anything else immensely difficult, because things are structured in a manner inimical to women. The obstacles that are placed in the way of mothers who want to be other things as well ought to be the things that feminism aims to remove.

Thus, to my mind, believing that abortions are liberating is deluded. If we were truly liberated, abortions would not be something we'd need. Instead of fighting for the right to abortion, I believed that we should have been fighting for an obstacle-free path through the world and the workplace for mothers. Once we achieved that, I reasoned, we would be truly liberated. By fighting to be freed not from man-made obstacles but from our own children, we were accepting a set up made by men.

Now I know better. At last, I've understood how madly idealistic I was. I recognise that I was wrong and all those women who chose the path of least resistance and fought for abortions understood what was actually possible and what was not. 

Watching the outraged reaction to the proposal by Australia's opposition leader to levy Australia's largest companies, in order to ensure paid parental leave is paid at a woman's actual salary for six months after the birth of each of her children, I have learned that I was simply utterly naive.The reaction to the proposal from men of all colours - apart from the instigator of the scheme himself - has proved to me that most men couldn't care less about women, (or children).

Sure, over the years men have been forced to accept us as we've begun infiltrating their workplaces. Grudgingly they've allowed us to work alongside them - but only provided we do it on their terms.

The abuse that has been heaped on the proposed scheme - which seeks to very slightly adjust the terms of work towards the needs of women, (and children - and need I go into the uncosted health benefits arising from the babies concerned being breastfed for longer and the women concerned being able to breastfeed for longer, not to mention the importance of making it easier for people to have children, in a country where house prices et cetera work against childbearing), is evidence that Australia's male leaders are utterly unenlightened about women's biological dilemma. Therefore, I have finally become a feminist, having too late - and very sadly - recognised that few men give a stuff about what happens to me and the rest of my sex.

Music Master

I'm a bit on the cloth-eared end of the spectrum, but there are many people who, unlike me, respond better to music than to words. For them, I imagine, a musical guru would be more suitable than Shakespeare. One such told his rather wonderful story during a segment of Cultural Exchanges, the terrific new feature included regularly on BBC Radio Four's Front Row:

In Case You Missed It

Thanks to Sheridan Jobbins, (Twitter name @5oh19) for alerting me to the most hilarious comment stream I've ever seen on a job advertisement. What's even better, the stream is still growing - and it's getting funnier all the time. Even Bartleby has had his two bob's worth.

Words and Phrases - a Continuing Series

There are people in my household who seem to think that a Monday evening that doesn't include watching at least a part of Q&A, (it tends to be only a part as the programme acts as a soporific on its most enthusiastic viewer - or possibly it's the wine downed to render the content of the programme semi-tolerable), is a Monday evening wasted. I don't agree, but I am usually over-ruled. As a result, I find myself each week being enraged by many things - it's that kind of a programme - but above all by the host inviting me to 'join the Twitter conversation'.

The so-called 'Twitter conversation' is actually a band running along the bottom of the screen, displaying banal tweets by viewers. The tweets shown there are not all the tweets tweeted about the programme; the tweets shown there are only a select few. Some mysterious and mystifying process of editing or censorship is passed through before the successful ones are alllowed to show themselves before the wider viewing public. They are mostly stupid and dull, some are aggressive, one or two are mad. But what is worst about them is they ARE NOT A CONVERSATION. They are just a random collection of remarks. There is no quickfire bantering, there is no referring back, there is no expanding on a theme introduced by one tweeter and enlarged on by another.

What we are being tricked into believing is an exchange of thoughts is no such thing. It is just a burble. "Join the Twitter burble." That's what that man on Q&A should say each week. And if he did, I would answer, 'No, I won't - and even if I did you probably wouldn't let me join properly. You'd probably say, "That's not burbley enough, we can't show something that doesn't burble properly." So instead of joining the Twitter burble, as you are apparently inviting me to do, I'd be left pressing my nose eagerly against the window - or screen - of the Twitter burble. I'd be on the outside, wishing I could be inside. So it's actually a false invitation that you're giving me. In fact, it's a misuse of language. We've cleared up the conversation misunderstanding; you've agreed that it's actually a burble, but now we have the problem that the invitation that you're giving me isn't actually an invitation at all."

At that point, the Q&A fan in my house would wake up and ask me why I was shouting at the telly, and I'd say, 'Never mind, it doesn't really matter. I'm just going to take a look on Twitter', and then he'd go back to sleep.

The Little Book of Calm

Some time ago I mentioned some of the horse books that I grew up with. One that I did not include then but which was once very important to me was The Manual of Horsemanship, a text I prized as a child:

The Manual of Horsemanship is probably the first piece of surrealist literature I ever read; that is, it is a work of total fantasy, written from a point of view of profound seriousness. It is a piece of fiction from beginning to end, a collaboration between the author and the reader in which they both pretend that it might be possible to turn the essentially chaotic business of dealing with a large living animal into an orderly affair, provided precise rules are followed.

It begins by taking the living, spirited being it is dealing with and turning it into a diagram:

(Once everything is labelled, one feels much more in control, even if a combination of fetlock joint, pastern, coronet and wall of foot does combine with an impulse from whatever it is that lies beneath the poll to kick you in the ribs.)

Having drawn and quartered, if not hung, the enemy, so to speak, the book proceeds without any further mucking around to describe the operation of getting on and getting off a pony, ("Because it is the recognised official Manual of the Pony Club it is not considered necessary to substitute the word 'horse' for 'pony' in all sections where either word is equally applicable", by the way), and all the interim procedures.

It continues, alternating between statements that might seem almost as appropriate in a book of Zen Buddhist technique ("Every aid requires the complete harmony of body, legs and hands", "If this system is carefully adhered to, the rider will find these exercises falling into his lap, as a ripe plum does from a tree", "If the rider takes a great deal of trouble in the initial stages of training, he will reap great benefits as time goes on. It is wishful thinking to imagine this high standard of training can be achieved in a short time. It is not possible") and instructions that a) beg the question of the point of the whole exercise - "The greatest difficulty in equitation is to keep the horse absolutely straight" - and b) presuppose a world very unlike the one in which most of us live, a world where you are part of a discerning elite ("knowledgeable horsemen and women will not use bad or coloured saddlery, neither will they neglect the care of their own saddlery") and have access to "your own veterinary surgeon" and your own "well-conducted hunting stable".

There are enigmatic diagrams that seem to explain everything and nothing, (mostly the latter):

(These two remind me of the kind of thing you sometimes see in American literary criticism - The Narrative Patterns in Jane Austen's Oeuvre: Characters and the Maze):

and diagrams which make the difficult look easy:

There are instructions for doing things that could never be done while holding a book in one hand (this comment actually applies to almost the entire text):

Best of all the reader is presented with a whole programme for living:

Every eventuality is covered and, provided rigid discipline is observed, all will be well. I find this impossible fantasy very soothing. My children had Hogwarts; I had a dream of stable (in all senses of the word) routine.

The Geopolitics of Whitegoods

Our washing machine and our dishwasher both stopped working within days of each other. If I weren't such a trusting person, I might have begun to wonder about conspiracies of built-in obsolescence. Instead, I called a man and fixed a time for him to visit. I thoght he was coming round to fix the machines. Sadly, he was under the impression that he was there to pronounce their last rites. Which he did, with the immortal phrase, 'They're buggered love, that'll be $132, I don't take cards.'

So off we went, as we do every five to ten years (used to be the latter, now getting increasingly more usual that it's the former) to the big store out in the industrial suburb where you find this kind of stuff. As we wandered the aisles, we were soon joined by a cheerful fellow called Rakib Khan, who set about advising us on what we should buy and what we should avoid.

Basically, his advice came down to the simple principle that stuff made in Asia is, as he put it, 'absolutely no good at all.' Even Turkey was really Asia, apparently, and out of the question. Only European workers had the skill and the work ethic and the all-round craftsmanship to produce an appliance we could think about buying. China, Korea, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, the workers of all these great nations and many more in the region were swept aside. Only Germans and Scandinavians were worthy of our consideration. We took his advice, shelling out far more than we'd planned to. When I got home, I remembered the stamp at the back of a cupboard we've got that was built in the 1920s:

Some things never change.

Moderation

Recently a noisy section of the population has been spending a lot of its time nagging the rest of us about not wasting food. The presumption is profoundly annoying, to me at any rate. Speaking as a person who, having brought home a chicken, has never allowed it to feature in fewer than four meals minimum - ditto any other morsel of edible substance brought into the household - I am insulted at the suggestion that I throw money around at the supermarket just so I can throw food in the bin at home. I do not need chiding or advice on this subject, but I get it anyway. and it drives me mad, especially as I thought I'd escaped the phenomenon by leaving Great Britain to return home to Australia as soon as Gordon Brown and his meddling interfering cohort began lecturing the populace on their wicked foodwasting ways.

But now the hectoring has reached our shores. It's enough to drive you to drink. Except that that too is off limits. The notion that the odd alcoholic beverage might help get you through the stresses of life seems to be considered barbaric in some vociferous circles these days, (and yet no-one can explain to me what alcohol is for if it is not for easing strain). Someone has even written a book about how horrid people were to her when she decided to lay off the bottle for a year. I know this because the book was discussed solemnly last night on the First Tuesday Book Club, (a programme that is in itself an argument for alcohol - I only saw it inadvertently and I doubt I'd have survived it if my husband hadn't kindly supplied me with strong drink [well some wine]).

What concerned me about the discussion of the book - which is called High Sobriety, although I've no idea why I'm giving it free publicity - was the fact that not one person on the panel questioned the decision of the book's writer to drink nothing and to let it be known that she was drinking nothing. Clearly, just as it is annoying if vegetarians when invited to dinner don't just pick out the broccoli and avoid the steak on their plate but instead insist on ringing you up before they come to your house to inform you that they are vegetarians and ensure you make proper arrangements for them, so, if you don't drink but do make a song and dance about it, it can feel to others that you are challenging their decisions, throwing down the teetotaller's gauntlet and expecting a response. If on the other hand, you simply order something non-alcoholic without pointing out that it's non-alcoholic, no-one even notices. And anyway why not just drink in moderation?

But I'll leave the last word to Alice Thomas Ellis who, in a piece called Drink Up in her collection called Home Life, wrote much more perceptively about this subject than me:

"...I once took a child to see a doctor about a verucca. The doctor was bored stiff with the verucca. He looked keenly at me, enquired what was wrong and on hearing that I had sustained a bereavement pressed upon me an unsolicited prescription. Being half-witted, I cashed it in and started on a course of pills which had to be approached warily - one a day for two days, two a day for three days - that sort of thing. After a week of this I found I could no longer read newsprint, my mouth was as dry as a dog biscuit and every time I stood up I fell over. Vodka never did that to me.

Nothing does anything much for grief, but just a little alcohol helps just a little, especially at funerals. A wake would not be the same with everyone standing round, carefully timing his anti-depressants."

Mind you, she goes on to mention that her husband believes women "don't need to drink because they're drunk already." That is a very sobering thought.

Another Slice of Heaven

Having just discovered an email in my inbox from a fellow by the name of Robert Barton, (who I think perhaps works in the same office as George Sanderson who emailed me yesterday and Peter Johnson who emailed me the week before last), informing me that I have a large inheritance waiting for me from a longlost relative, I can't help thinking that it might be rather nice, in heaven, if all these gentlemen were the genuine article and not, as I fear they are here on earth, the noms de plume of a bunch of crooks.

After Heaven

Having speculated about heaven, I suppose one must also mention the other place, (although only while touching wood, of course).

I think my favourite vision of that unattractive region is the one Lord Redesdale, the father of the Duchess of Devonshire, came up with. He had a horror of anything sticky so, when his youngest daughter asked him what his definition of hell was, he answered, "Honey on my bowler hat."

I learnt this from an exceptionally funny article reposted from the Telegraph on the excellent Patrick Leigh Fermor blog here.

Embarassing Moments in Radio I

Whenever a husband is unfaithful, his wife must, naturally, be insulted. However, I think there are degrees of insult and, frankly, John Major's decision to have an affair with Edwina Currie ranks as possibly the biggest marital insult the world has ever known.

Apart from the fact that she is the human equivalent of chalk being dragged down a blackboard, Currie is also so 'in your face' - (to use a phrase that I don't like, but I suspect she's very 'keen' on ['keen' is very Currie, almost essence of]) - about the whole sordid imbroglio. Perhaps it was her finest hour. Certainly she grabs every tiny opportunity to remind us of it. With no thought for poor old Norma, she refuses to leave it alone.

Even on Radio 3, (I know, I thought they never allowed anything unsavoury on that station), she cannot let matters rest. On Nightwaves during a discussion about Thatcher's legacy last week, someone suggested that not many people now remember Major. There was no need to reply, but a simpering Edwina decided to shove herself forward anyway. "Oh I do", she purred into the microphone, topping the horror off with a flirtatious giggle which would make even the strongest among us blench:

Skylar and Richard

This week I read an article in The New Yorker about young people in the United States who are having irreversible surgery and hormone treatment to change their sex. The article dwelt mainly on those who are crossing from female to male, although the process is - or has been - more common in the other direction, partly because it can be done more completely (I will leave the details to your imagination).

The article claims,

'Transgenderism has replaced homosexuality as the newest civil-rights frontier'

and rather tentatively suggests that just possibly there may be influences other than pure muddled biology at work on some of the children who pursue the goal of changing sex. It focussed on one child, now called Skylar, who has been supported in changing from a girl to a boy by their parents, who allowed surgery and hormone treatment when they were, as far as I can tell, fourteen or fifteen. Skylar's mother explains that

'Skylar never wanted to wear a dress.'

Skylar claims to have found puberty 'weird' and, after browsing in Barnes and Noble and finding some young-adult novels about trans kids and then researching on the Internet, came to the conclusion that becoming a boy was the next step to take. As a result of the decision, Skylar has become very in demand and a focus of interest for classmates and the wider world. Attention is something adolescents do love very much.

An alternative case study is also described in the article. She is a girl who was a Tomboy as a child. In the final year of 'an alternative high school' she decided she wanted to become a boy. Her mother tells the writer of the article,

'"I'm still not convinced that it's a good idea to give hormones and assume that, in most cases, it will solve all their problems. I know the clinics giving them out think they're doing something wonderful and saving lives. But a lot of these kids are sad for a variety of reasons. Maybe the gender feelings are the underlying cause, maybe not."'

This conversation took place in a pie shop and, rather chillingly, the author tells us, it was interrupted by

'the college student who'd been studying across from us'

who told them,

'that she, too, was about to transition to male'.

The mother of the Tomboy continued, saying,

'that she had met many teenagers who seemed to regard their bodies as endlessly modifiable, through piercings, or tattoos, or even workout regimens. She wondered if sexual orientation was beginning to seem boring as a form of identity; gay people were getting married, and perhaps seemed too settled. 

"The kids who are edgy and funky and drawn to artsy things - these are conversations that are taking place in dorm rooms ... There are tides of history that wash in, and when they wash out they leave some people stranded. The drug culture of the sixties was like that and the sexual culture of the eighties, with AIDS. I think this could be the next wave like that, and I don't want my daughter to be a casualty"'

After reading that article, I read another, this time in Vanity Fair, about Rachel Johnson's troubled editorship of The Lady. Among the many criticisms of Johnson made by the magazine's part owner is that ,

"'You can't get her away from a penis. I think it comes from growing up with all those boys [Johnson has several brothers, including the current Mayor of London]. She is basically a boy. But we didn't pick up on this,'"

Johnson's surprising response to these commments was that they were

'"worryingly accurate": when she was at primary school she refused to wear a dress and made classmates call her Richard.'

And Richard she might have become forever had she been in a different place at a different time.

The Missing

Yesterday I saw an article about mistletoe and its medical potential and I remembered how my dearest friend, not long a mother and desperate for any cure, tried mistletoe as an 'alternative therapy'. It didn't work, but this isn't about the disappointments of alternative therapies. There are acres to be written about that, but I'm not the person to do it.

Instead, what I do know about is the sadness of finding the ones you love most are absent, the strange way that it turns out that they were, in fact, the ones you would always love the best. Some people might argue that our relationships are random, that we choose those that suit us from the choice made available and that we can replace one bright, fun friend with another similar and equally vibrant creature.

My experience, miserably, is otherwise. In my life, I've occasionally found an individual I really get on with. Sometimes it's a relative, sometimes it's a friend. Whatever the link, the thing I've noticed is that, if the bond is truly there, it isn't something that's replaceable. That leaves you feeling very lonely, if someone whom you've discovered is one of those few people you can really call a soul mate suddenly dies on you. Even years later, there is no solution. The voids in your life don't vanish or diminish. If anything, they grow darker and deeper. You can go round them, averting your eyes most of the time, but every now and then it's impossible to ignore them. The spaces where the missing once were remain, unfilled.

Oh Dear

Look what we've gone and done. I knew we shouldn't have kept washing her:

Now she's gone.

Blame It On the Cleaner

Our local shops is a constant source of wonder. The latest offering is this ad for an all-round factotum, willing not only to iron and babysit but also very happy to take responsibility for any misdemeanours:

Or is there a 'p' missing and she's just good at getting under furniture and round corners? How disappointing. I was hoping for all my sins to be absolved.

The Wisdom of Ringo

Generally speaking, Ringo is rather discounted within the pantheon of Beatle braininess. However, there is a moment in Living in the Material World, Martin Scorsese's documentary about George Harrison, when he articulates an often overlooked truth:

Fame is much sought, but those who achieve it don't always realise they've made a Faustian pact until it's already too late. "That's the deal," as Ringo says. There is no going back.

Glamour and Anti-Glamour

I noticed this on a shampoo bottle in the shower this morning:

It made me laugh, although of course it shouldn't have. After all, if I'm setting culinary trends in my vegetable garden, who knows what they're up to out in the industrial suburb of Hume.

All the same, it seemed a ridiculous juxtaposition and made me think of my much loved, sadly missed friend Katherine, who used to point out newspaper advertisements for PAs in London which were headed 'London, Paris, New York' but on closer reading turned out to be mainly involved with booking tickets for various bosses to jet off to those and other glamorous locations (but never, for some reason, to Hume, ACT)

Goodness, Gracious

I've learnt something wonderful in the last few days. It is that some rare human beings are so kind to each other that it is almost impossible to believe.

On Friday, my brother, who has been in dialysis for almost three years, was given a kidney by a friend. The story of how the two of them became friends has a miraculous quality to it, but I won't go into that for the moment. The point is that my brother's friend made the decision some time ago that handing over a kidney was something that needed doing, and after that they would not be dissuaded. Ignoring the danger they were putting themselves in, undeterred by the knowledge of the considerable pain they would have to endure in the recovery period, they took no notice of my brother's protestations and went ahead and did it.

Forget celebrities. Forget all the shiny, sharp-elbowed people we are encouraged to be interested in. It is the rare individuals like my brother's friend that we need as models to aspire to. But of course they don't want adulation or attention. They don't think what they do is hard. They think it is simply a matter of doing the right thing.