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Oct 10
2017
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Helen Whitten
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Summer holidays are over but the memories can last a lifetime. We have just had one of the most relaxing holidays we have ever experienced – in Greece on the island of Lefkada. A comfortable hotel, the San Nicolas, in the sleepy fishing village of Mikros Gailos, overlooking an exquisite view of a peaceful bay surrounded by unspoilt hills and mountains. There were two tavernas where we could sit and watch the fisherman load their nets and return with lobster, bream and red mullet. It got me thinking about holidays past and recent and the ingredients that make them memorable. Inevitably each of us look for different things from travel and David and I are lucky in enjoying similar pastimes, sometimes an adventure and sometimes a simple laze in the sun. This holiday was the latter.
We relaxed, walked, swam in incredibly clear waters, and read some excellent books. For those of you who appreciate a holiday reading list I will share with you that between us we read Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, Sam Bourne’s To Kill the President, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (more on that to come in another blog!), Peter Nicholls’ Us, Rose Tremain’s The Gustav Sonata, Kamila Shamsi’s Home Fire, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Patrick Mcgrath’s The Wardrobe Mistress, Irvin D. Yalom’s Staring at the Sun, Robert Harris’ Lustrum, and the start of his new book Munich. What a luxury to be able to lie next to the sea in warm sunlight and have one’s mind stimulated by so many new ideas, scenes, characters and events all happening in one’s head. And nothing, absolutely nothing, in one’s Outlook diary to have to rush to or action. Heaven.
This also gave me the time to reflect on memories of holidays as a child, as a parent or travelling alone. Very recently a friend of mine happened to mention that he only ever went on holiday abroad once with his parents. It made me realize that this was the same for me. My parents took us on boating holidays on the Norfolk Broads when we were young and then we had one holiday in Brittany as a family when I was about 14. After that they sent us alone to families in France, Spain, Italy to learn the language, broaden our minds and discover how to manage travelling independently. Invaluable. As I heard someone quote once, travel is one thing you buy that actually makes you spiritually richer.
Travel was expensive in the 50s and 60s. I think today’s young have accumulated many more air miles by the time they are 20 than I did by the time I was 40. The no-frills airlines have made travel accessible to vast numbers of people so that today people see the world and mix with other cultures as a routine part of life. Previous generations did not have this luxury. I remember that when I worked as a researcher for the late Sir Alistair Horne on The Official Biography of Harold Macmillan, he told me how Harold Macmillan had commented that although the charter flights from Gatwick flew noisily over his house in Sussex, Macmillan was actually delighted whenever he saw one of those yellow Clarkson’s planes as it meant that all kinds of people who could not previously have travelled abroad were now able to do so.
Later, as a parent myself, I realized that my parents hadn’t always had as relaxing a time as they might have wished on our family holidays! A time on the Norfolk Broads when my father got our boat stuck under Potter Heigham Bridge and never forgave us children for hiding downstairs in embarrassment. Another year, taking us on the River Thames, the engine broke down just as we were heading for a weir – luckily we were saved from a nasty drop by someone throwing us a rope!
But I suspect the worst holiday for them was when I was about 13 and my brother 15. My father answered an advertisement in The Times for a holiday on a houseboat in Cornwall. The boat was dilapidated and turned out to be at the bottom of a cliff, with the nearest toilets at the top of the cliff. When the tide went out we were on mud flats and the boat tilted dramatically to one side so that everything fell off the tables and shelves. As we manoeuvred to get on or off the houseboat, we were watched by an ancient Cornish fisherman whose boat was moored next to ours. He observed us with a venomous sneer on his face. And it rained and rained. There are only so many clotted cream teas one can eat and I suspect my parents struggled, trying to amuse us teenagers. We curtailed our stay. Of course as selfish young I suspect we only thought about how bored we were and gave little heed to how difficult the whole experience must have been for our parents.
When I think back on family life, though, it wasn’t the holidays that stand out in my memory as the most enjoyable moments. It was the simple times when our parents joined us in the garden to play French Cricket, or sat by the fire with us playing Cluedo or Monopoly. But for personal development and broadening of insight, travel is life changing. I wonder what your own experience of holidays has been as a child, parent or adult? I wonder what memories my sons have of our own family hols!
So, as we return and autumn arrives, I have been pondering how I can continue to keep Greece in my mind through the winter, so that I can feel I am on holiday even when I am not. Alain de Botton explores the experience of travel in his thought-provoking book The Art of Travel. He mentions J.-K.Huysman’s novel A rebours, 1884, whose eccentric hero, the Duc des Esseintes, decides to go to England after reading Charles Dickens. He gets as far as the Gare Saint Lazaire and visits an English tavern where he enjoys roast beef and Stilton and some ale but then decides it would be too much trouble to take the train to London. After all, had he not just experienced ‘England’ in this tavern and was that not enough? Apparently the Duc never left home again!
De Botton also describes another eccentric, Xavier de Maistre, born in 1763, who wrote a description of travelling around his own bedroom. De Maistre recommended this pursuit for those who were too poor to travel or had fear of highwaymen. He wrote of how, in his pink and blue pyjamas, he took the time to notice the elegance of the furniture in his bedroom as if for the first time, his argument being that we become blind to things of everyday beauty through habituation.
It’s an interesting phenomenon that the brain files as wallpaper those views we see often. We hardly notice the pictures on the walls of our homes, don’t look often enough with detail at the scenery we pass on our way to work, hardly compute the type of architecture that surrounds us, unless we have a little more time to wander rather than ‘be on the way somewhere’. This is the key difference to me of a holiday – the time to wander, reflect.
One thing I have learnt to do, since reading The Art of Travel, is to recognize that travel is in the mind. Also that our experience of travel relates to what we focus on. We can be in a beautiful place and yet have an argument with our partner, or only notice the negative aspects of the place we are visiting.
Equally, we can be back home and imagine, from time to time, that we are on holiday. I sometimes pretend I have arrived in London for the first time as a tourist. Despite having lived there since 1967, I imagine I am seeing the architecture for the first time, hearing the sounds of a busy ‘foreign’ city anew, noticing the amazing parks and gardens, the museums and galleries. This way I can have a holiday in my mind any time I like. And from now on I shall occasionally travel back to the sunshine on the waters of Mikros Gailos bay to refresh my mind with an imaginary summer even in the depths of an English winter. Where might you go …?
Sep 21
2017
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Helen Whitten
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I have been drawn to thinking about trust this week. How does one build trust to go back on a tube if one was involved in the Parson’s Green incident? Would I be willing to book a ticket on Ryan Air or would I be concerned that they might cancel my flight? Is Putin hacking to influence the German election? What does it take to create and maintain trust, or rebuild it when it has been lost?
The definition of trust I found online is a “firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something”. We know from listening to politicians from around the world that words themselves do not create trust. It’s easy to say something, quite different and more difficult to do it. So, as the old phrase goes, “action speaks louder than words”. I value those members of my family, colleagues or friends who do what they say they will do, who are there for me in a reliable way. It means that they provide some kind of anchor of stability in this wild and uncertain world.
But if that is what I value and expect of others then of necessity this is what I need to provide for them too and sometimes that requires that I put a mirror up to myself and accept where I have achieved a goal of reliability and where I haven’t. I fear I can identify several moments in my life where I have disappointed myself and others. We are all fallible and of course our politicians equally so.
Self-trust also means that I need to look to myself to follow through on goals that I have identified as important to me – a daily walk, eating healthily, forgoing that extra glass of wine of an evening, going to the gym. Oh dear, can I actually trust myself when so many of these good intentions don’t get fulfilled? I suspect that many of us let ourselves down with these everyday goals don’t we? Except perhaps you, dear reader!
But trust holds us together as a human community and I have personally found it most helpful to be open to trusting others until they prove me wrong. I try not to do this in a naïve way but I would prefer to be open to believing in other people from the outset rather than being suspicious or doubtful of strangers unless they give me good reason to be so. In this internet age we actually trust an enormous amount of strangers don’t we? We share intimate facts about our lives with an inanimate object asking us to tell it one’s date of birth, relationships, age, bank details, love interests and more, depending on the website. And, as in the rest of life, most of the time it works, though inevitably, as in all other walks of life, there are charlatans and fraudsters. My neighbour in London rents his flat via Airbnb, as do thousands of people around the world. 99% of the time this works brilliantly for him, but just occasionally he gets a tenant from hell. However, as long as the majority of experience is positive then there is still a reason to trust that most of the time trusting others works.
We unthinkingly trust our car mechanic when we get into our car for a journey, seldom questioning whether they have tightened a necessary screw sufficiently. Likewise we trust the airplane engineer, the electrician, the gasman and so many other people who can influence our everyday safety. Indeed if we felt we had to doubt or check everything it would make our lives impossible.
Forgiving and forgetting when someone has betrayed trust is hard but possible. You don’t necessarily forgive totally, you certainly don’t forget, but nonetheless there comes a time when the incident recedes into distant memory and trust builds up again.
I have been thinking of those caught up at Parson’s Green. I was at that station on 7/7 just when they shut down the tube system. The terrible incidents of that day lingered in my mind for many weeks as I boarded a tube train, just as the IRA bombings made me cautious back in the 1970s. But gradually you realize that life is for living and that in fact it is a happier life when you can let go and trust. Even if you can’t expect all things to be well you can retain a sense that there is enough trust in the world to encourage us to value it as a precious quality that needs nurturing.
I hope that there will be enough politicians out there who endeavour to be trustworthy and lead the world with wisdom. But all political parties have done u-turns over manifesto promises. We can generally sniff out those we find flaky and intuit when something a politician says doesn’t add up. Nonetheless it is up to us as voters to keep them to their word when possible, not just to give in to a world of false news.
Ryan Air will have to work hard to regain trust though I wonder whether Michael O’Leary really cares. It might take months or even years for those involved in the Parson’s Green bomb to feel absolutely at ease as they board their tube for work or school.
And so now, because I prefer to be reliable, I shall leave early to go and pick up my granddaughter from school because I feel it is important to us both that I am not late. I like to think that she can trust me to be reliable.
Ultimately trust seems to be tied up strongly with morality – being honest, doing what you say you will do, being there when you say you will, not betraying confidences, keeping promises and not being creative with the truth. In this post-truth world these actions seem to me to be more important than ever.
Sep 14
2017
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Helen Whitten
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We seem to be having some kind of war on gender. This week a family removed their six-year-old son from a school because another boy was allowed to come to school in a dress. The event has led to much debate on the radio this week. Alongside this, leading department stores have announced that they will not brand clothes specifically for boys or girls but just for “kids”. A few weeks ago BBC2 transmitted a programme “No more boys and girls – can our kids go gender free?”
I wonder whether, in all this coverage, we are not losing sight of simple biology and common sense? After all, way before marketing or advertising came on the scene, men and women in tribes throughout the world have dressed differently and taken on different roles . In the animal world – and we are descended from apes after all – males and females look and act differently. They have not been to primary school, nor been bombarded with pink or blue clothes or stereotypical toys but nonetheless behave differently. Can we not celebrate our differences while at the same time supporting those in doubt?
Of course transgender children need compassion and if they are questioning their gender identity they need expert counselling. A child of six can have no understanding of the adult world and how it works, has not reached puberty, and is vulnerable to the ideas of their parents and teachers. It is one thing for a young boy to dress up in girls’ clothes, quite another to assume that this means he wants to go through all the biological restructuring and social upheaval that is implied in the transgender process. Clothes are only an outer wrapping. How can a child this young truly understand the lifelong implications of changing gender?
It seems to me that small children are becoming pawns within current ideological trends and the agendas of lobbying groups. It is very young children that are being discussed here – six or seven years old. In today’s world they are having thoroughly adult facts presented to them not only about transgender but also all the LGBT themes. Children are unlikely to have any real knowledge of heterosexual relationships but are now learning about all the complexities of human gender and sexuality at an extraordinarily young age. Call me old-fashioned but I believe this can be confusing. Is it helpful to expose all children to these questions at such a young age when we are actually talking about a small minority of people affected?
I feel we also need to take account of those families who may, for their own psychological or cultural reasons, put their children under pressure to change gender. I suspect many of us know those whose parents wanted a girl and treated a boy like a daughter or wanted a son and treated a daughter like a boy. Likewise there are many cultures where a boy is valued more greatly than a girl. Might making the transgender process too easy lead to family pressure?
Chatting to some teenagers recently I learnt from a thirteen year old that several of her friends decided that they were bisexual, only to change their minds a week or so later. She told us that it could be seen as cool and being heterosexual as dull. They spoke articulately of their disapproval of President Trump preventing transgenders from serving in the armed forces yet seemed unsure what being transgender really involved. There was tolerance but even in teenage years there was also confusion.
I think we are in danger of muddling up stereotypical beliefs about roles with biology. Of course we don’t want to treat girls as sissy princesses or tell boys they mustn’t cry but this is different from encouraging them to question their own gender. There are physical and hormonal differences. Males have XY chromosomes and females XX. Hormones such as testosterone and oestrogen impact both brain and body as well as behaviour. All this is discussed in detail by Professor Simon Baron Cohen of Cambridge University in his book The Essential Difference where he describes a spectrum.
The programme “No More Boys and Girls – can Our Kids go Gender Free?” made me question why we might want to have “no more boys or girls”? Humans procreate through males and females – do we really want to finish off the human race?
The programme made some valuable points about the shaping of expectations due to social norms – parents and teachers expecting girls to play with dolls and soft toys and boys to play with cars and guns etc. This was the same old stuff many of my generation attempted back in the 70s and 80s, mainly, I have to say, without success as even if we didn’t give our sons a toy gun they crafted them out of pieces of wood. Having unisex school uniforms with trousers might be practical but I do question the wisdom of having unisex school toilets, which I understand is the current plan.
We are different. We have different bodies that we have to learn to manage. Boys don’t experience periods, girls don’t experience teenage erections. There is biology that affects our lives. I personally would not have wanted teenage boys sharing toilets when I was a teenager managing periods for the first time. Even today as an adult I am quite glad of the respite of a female-only loo where I can take a breath and brush my hair without any interruptions.
Growing up is confusing. We can accept and celebrate all the LGBT differences but I believe we need to be careful not to overstate the likelihood of the experience when teenagers, especially, are notorious for copying their friends just for the sake of it. I recently heard of a 16 year old boy who transitioned to being a girl as he had felt unhappy with life and yet, having gone through major and unpleasant treatment, was just as unhappy afterwards. Another troubled young man became a woman and was equally troubled afterwards. Could their discontent have been with life in general rather than gender? Perhaps they were going through the usual teenage angst and depression that many of us go through? But they now have to live with the consequences of their decisions for the rest of their life.
Aren’t we possibly overemphasizing the media coverage on these topics? It is excellent that there is more knowledge and understanding of gender and sexuality than there was in my childhood but are we in danger of planting seeds of doubt that might not need to be there? There has to be a balance in how we express these issues.
Each gender contributes a different quality of behaviour, emotion and energy to our endlessly complex and wonderful world. I would feel sad if future generations felt unable to celebrate the differences they bring. Wouldn’t it also be rather dull? But, as I say, perhaps my ideas are out-dated. I do sometimes feel I am living in some kind of sci-fi new world where we are turning out robots who look the same and think the same! In the name of liberal ‘tolerance’ we seem in danger of creating automatons intolerant of the majority norms of nature.
Sep 06
2017
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Helen Whitten
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Do you really have to make your films so violent? We went to the cinema last Saturday and every single trailer for new movies was dystopian, explosive, violent, cruel and visually disturbing. There wasn’t a single movie that I would choose to see or that I felt added any value to our lives. But no doubt you will make money from them and your marketing teams will ensure that they are blockbusters. All I ask is do you really want your children to retain these visions as they grow up to become the leaders who will be creating their own, and our, future?
I just wonder how we have become so adapted to Hollywood producing endless brutal films? I was born in 1950 and raised on comedies and romances starring Peter Sellers or Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Other than cowboy or war films there was little, if any, violence and Bambi was about as dark as it got. Hitchcock’s thrillers were the first I saw and then we moved into more domestic drama such as The Pumpkin Eater and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. But films like Seven took violence into a totally new genre of sadism, as do digital games such as Grand Theft Auto and others I don’t even want to think about. Killings, torture and sexual cruelty seem to have become the norm.
I remember my dear late Polish brother-in-law Leo commenting that you only get such unpleasant movies when the life around you is reasonably comfortable. Raised in Poland in the war he knew more about life’s real cruelties and barbarity than I did and I can see that if you are actually experiencing violence in your life you are less likely to want to watch more of it. Perhaps it is because we have Kim Jong Un, Putin and Trump arming themselves up for a potential world catastrophe that I felt all the more disgusted by the onslaught of violence I saw in the trailers at the Vue Eastleigh last weekend.
Even children’s stories are no longer the sweet innocent narratives they used to be. If you watched Mary Poppins or the early versions of The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe they are far tamer than recent blockbuster versions of the classics, such as The Jungle Book. Even Paddington Bear became a rather horrifying version about the threatened taxidermy of a small bear. I think my 6-year-old granddaughter has seen more movies in her short life than I had seen by the time I reached adulthood and I am aware that the 3-D aspect of cinematography makes things far more realistic and immediate – which can be wondrous but also terrifying. Recently a writing colleague had her children’s novel, about evacuee children in World War II, rejected by a publisher as “the children in the story were not in enough danger to be of interest to today’s young audience”. Should children be exposed to a continuous ramping-up of adrenalin arousal through increasingly frightening scripts?
The thunderous Dolby surround sound that blasts our ears as the film or ads start is another assault, surely unnecessary and makes us all jump out of our seats. Do you think we are all deaf? Or perhaps you want to make us deaf? The small child in the cinema next to me in The Jungle Book was terrified.
The problem is that the sounds and images linger in the imagination. They acclimatize our minds to violence so that it no longer seems as shocking as it once was. And yet violence is shocking. I look at the state of the world today with its religious and ideological wars and the number of young men excited about taking up arms and I question how we are still, in 2017, determined to kill one another. Now that we realize what a small and vulnerable planet we reside on I would have hoped that we would not still be polluting the environment with bombs, explosions, chemical weapons or acid attacks. And I guess I just don’t appreciate being reminded of all this horror with yet more apocalyptic views of the future dressed up as entertainment.
I have written before of Ekhart Tolle (author of bestsellers A New Earth and The Power of Now) and his concept of a ‘pain body’. This is a part of our emotional make-up that we can unconsciously hook into – the part of us that stops to gawp at a motorway accident, or wants to read about some horrendous murder in the paper. He talks of how newspapers and media-makers play on the pain-body aspect of we fallible humans to draw us towards the negative. But the important message is that once we become aware of what hooks us we have the power to choose not to read, not to watch, not to stop on the motorway. And of course this links to the points I made in my last blog, Let’s Shake Ourselves out of this gloom, https://www.helenwhitten.com/thinking-aloud/lets-shake-ourselves-out-of-this-gloom/ because it is hard to be creative in a way that could be beneficial to human life on earth if we are too steeped in the negativity of the pain-body.
So surely, dear screenwriters, you have the talent and capacity to use your creativity in constructive ways? I am not talking of dumbing down but I am talking about being broader and perhaps deeper in your depiction of life – the film The Intouchables comes to mind as I write. There are endless intricacies and complexities in everyday life that make excellent topics for drama – perhaps you could open your eyes and minds to different descriptions and studies of human behaviour?
The future does not have to be dystopian but if these are the images that are sewn into the neurons of the young people who are watching your movies then perhaps that will be the only image they will be able to conjure up? The power of imagination is immense and the power of unconscious drives equally so. The future of life on earth isn’t looking that rosy right now and personally I don’t feel that your violent movies are contributing towards making life on earth a better place.
No doubt you will say that I am an old fogey and not, in any case, your target audience. You might comment that I am being too soft and sensitive about future generations. But please just give a moment’s thought to the kind of images and stories you wish your own children or grandchildren to be exposed to … and see whether that shifts your thinking when you craft future scripts? I hope so.
Aug 30
2017
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Helen Whitten
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Are you as fed up as I am with the amount of negativity and pessimism that exists in this country? Watching the 10 o’clock news does not make for a happy bedtime. Almost every media report is slanted towards the negative – for example, what the NHS is failing to do rather than the daily miracles they perform. The press have the power to shape our perspectives and beliefs and drama sells newspapers so inevitably stories can be ramped up to catch the public’s attention. Our political leaders reinforce these messages by talking of division and a “broken Britain”. The worst thing is that we end up believing it! We need more balanced perspectives.
This morning we happened to re-read some paragraphs of Napoleon Hill’s Success through Positive Mental Attitude. The passages reminded me how important his message of a positive mental attitude is to happiness, health and success.
Hill’s message also reminded me of an initiative I had wanted to set up way back in 1995 to “Think Positively for Britain” . I don’t know if you remember but the recession of the early 90s had put us in the doldrums and I became aware that we are very good at the doldrums in the UK, that we have a habit of denigrating ourselves and being apologetic for more-or-less everything we do or stand for. And I felt then, as I do now, that such negative messages only lead us into a state of paralysing disempowerment. As I wrote in my report in 1995 “every time we talk negatively about the UK we bolster the image of a failing and disintegrating nation”. Do we really want the rest of the world to see us and respond to us in this way, particularly when Messrs Barnier and Juncker are happy to do this for us?
It seems to me all the more urgent now that we shift ourselves out of this gloom. How can we bring up a confident new generation when the messages that young people receive are that they are in a country that is about to fall off a “cliff-edge”? We need to inspire the young to rise above the negativity and create success despite the very real challenges we face in the world. Positive expectations, when based in realistic possibilities, motivate others to step up. We need our leaders to talk of unity and vision and what each of us can do to help achieve this.
We have a tradition in this country of helping entrepreneurs and supporting small businesses. Start-ups are given tax relief and concessions on VAT until their business is established. In July this year the employment rate (the proportion of people aged from 16 to 64 who are in work) was 74.9%, the highest since comparable records began in 1971. Our youth unemployment figures are 12.3% compared to up to 46% in Greece and many young people in the UK want to, and do, start their own businesses – our tech companies are thriving as are our design, music, fashion, film, life sciences and service industries. That’s pretty good news as far as I am concerned.
We beat ourselves up about everything – Brexit, racism, inequality, poverty, housing, health, education. You name it, we complain about it and of course there are very real improvements to be made in many areas but right now we need people to feel energetic and willing to work hard in order to tackle the challenges of a changing relationship with the world. As Napoleon Hill says, we need to attract success by being the sort of people others want to work with. We have shown ourselves capable of this in the past so there’s no reason why we can’t do it again.
I suggest that we need to review the reality of our tendency to apologise for our existence – they say the Brits say “sorry” even when others have bumped into them (read Watching the English by Kate Fox).
Are we really that much worse a country than others? Yes, there are anti-immigrant groups here but look at the rest of the world – the numbers who voted for Le Pen in France, the far right movements in the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Austria. All over the world there are many families who do not condone their offspring marrying outside their ethnic or religious community. I am not condoning this but I just question whether we are truly worse than others are? There is an assumption that by the small majority that voted for Brexit it makes us all racists, though certainly not everyone who voted for Brexit was racist nor a Little Englander.
Yes, we have some class issues but the Americans have their Ivy League, the Italians have any number of Counts and Contessas, the French politicians have almost all attended the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) and the Indians have their caste system. Yes, we had an Empire but so did the Dutch, French, Chinese, Romans, Spanish, Portuguese and many more. Yes, we have inequality issues of social mobility but believe me it is a very different world to that of my 1950s childhood in terms of opportunity for all. We have a long way to go still but we need to acknowledge the changes that have been made and use them as a springboard. We need to remember, also, that not everyone wants to move upwards – that people have communities of friends, cultural and family networks that feel comfortable to them. I also question whether, while the term “posh” is used as an insult, it encourages people to move up or become wealth creators? People tend to use the term “rich” as a criticism, forgetting that wealth creators can become philanthropists.
I am not condoning the situations that need improvement but my question is to check whether we are really so much worse than others in the way we currently seem to think of ourselves? Our institutions of government, law and social services are not perfect but they match up pretty well to those in other countries. Let’s acknowledge what we have developed over the centuries. It isn’t about comparing ourselves with others necessarily, as comparison doesn’t always work when each country has its own unique circumstances. It is about perspective. Let’s not judge ourselves more harshly than we judge others. It isn’t good for our future, especially in a time of false truths and radicalisation.
The majority of people here live in better circumstances than ever before. We have a reasonably civilised and tolerant society where we strive for equality of the sexes, classes, gender and race, even if we inevitably don’t succeed as much as we would like to. Far more people today have a roof over their head, central heating, fridges, cookers, washing machines, televisions, a mobile phone and cars, than in my childhood. We benefit from a National health service and free education. We can drink the water from the tap and be assured that our sewage system works pretty well most of the time. Having travelled to over 50 countries, I feel we have much to be grateful for and yet we certainly can’t be complacent and need to keep striving for improvements.
My argument isn’t about nationalism or empire building or any political movement. We don’t have to wait for politicians or social services or anyone else in order to be able to start conversations that remind us of the better aspects of life here. We can do it now, for ourselves. We can build up a sense of confidence and worth, a sense of belonging to something good. This focus can make us happier and also improve our health. The Danes may have invented Hygge but surely we have done cosy for generations? We live in a beautiful country made up of a multitude of good people: let us celebrate what we have achieved. We need to believe in ourselves and our ability to create more success through collaboration, despite the challenges. Let’s start describing ourselves as a country in which there is enterprise, achievement and potential.
In my 1995 initiative I suggested that we allocate a time each day, say 8.15am, where we focus on thinking positively about what is working and could work, rather than what is not. I suggested people identify and share just one thing that pleased them about living here – for example, perhaps public libraries, public footpaths, national parks and forests, our immense generosity as a nation when giving to charity, Bake-Off …? Why don’t you name what comes to your mind and do let me know – and if you manage to persuade a journalist to print a positive story I will give the first ten people who do so a copy of my CD on positive thinking!
Refs: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266228/youth-unemployment-rate-in-eu-countries/
Napoleon Hill: Think and Grow Rich; Napoleon Hill and Clement W Stone: Success through Positive Mental Attitude; Napoleon Hill and Dennis Kimbro: Think and Grow Rich: A Black Choice
Kate Fox: Watching the English
Charlotte Abrahams: Hygge: A Celebration of Simple Pleasures. Living the Danish Way.
Positiveworks Ltd is now owned by Sixth Sense Consulting www.sixthsenseconsulting.co.uk
Aug 16
2017
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Helen Whitten
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Last week we went to the funeral of an elderly aunt. She was a feisty lady, well read and well respected. She reminded me a little of my mother. She had two sons, now in middle years, who arranged the funeral beautifully and, as a mother of two sons, it took my imagination forward to the potential moment of my own funeral, with my sons arranging the readings and music for me. This made me wonder what they would choose. It would, perhaps, be controlling of me to leave them a list …?
It is discomforting to accept that I have reached this stage of life. It means I truly have to start thinking of myself as grown up, as of an age when my own parents were getting ill and more vulnerable. I prefer, of course, to think of myself as a svelte, slightly rebellious rather pop-mad teenager but there is no way I can pretend that this is who I am these days – especially when I look in the mirror!
And moving house – when we finally get an offer on our beautiful Hampshire home – brings this all to the foreground of my attention as we have to begin to consider what life might be like for us over the next 10-20 years. A rather unsettling prospect, really. My younger son told me off the other day for talking too much about ageing and legacies (at least it’s good to think he isn’t waiting for that one!) but the reality is that as we look at houses we do absolutely have to consider our needs in the years to come. We certainly don’t want to be giving the government and estate agents the benefit of our cash in exorbitant taxes and fees by having to move again, unless we absolutely have to.
So this involves us thinking about whether we shall have dodgy hips, wobbly ankles, rheumatism or arthritis, will we go a little doollally with dementia, will the staircase be too steep for us, will it (awful thought) fit a Stannah chairlift? Is it close enough (but not too close) to children and grandchildren for us to visit them – and of course for them to reach us in an emergency?
Alongside the possibilities of frailty come the tricky questions of Wills and legacies and Inheritance Tax and how much money one might need, outside the bricks and mortar, to pay for a care home, or care at home, should we need it. And all the more complicated having come together later in life with what they call a ‘blended’ family.
Someone commented to me the other day that we were unusual in wanting to move from the countryside towards London at this stage of life but I responded that my understanding is that this is quite a trend with us Baby Boomer generation. Personally at this and the next stages of life I would much rather have life and cafés and art galleries (not to mention doctors, chemists and hospitals) on my doorstep than cows and sheep. Don’t get me wrong, I love cows and sheep and would make sure to visit them frequently from our urban home. I just don’t find them stimulating enough on a daily basis to keep me feeling young. David and I both enjoy the bustle of an art gallery, the provocation of a lecture, a walk in a park, the escapist enjoyment of a movie or play.
Then there is driving. In the country you have to drive everywhere and living in Alresford, our very pretty Jane Austen-style market town, I notice the elderly drivers, the way they park in the middle of the road, the way they scratch your car as they head for the supermarket or chemist. Although I accept that the young are also a risk, I don’t want to become one of those doddery drivers. They can be dangerous. I prefer to think of getting on a tube, train or bus and letting those ‘take the strain’ as the ad used to say.
Countryside is, in my view, a marvellous place for families with children, where they can run around. It is also a wonderful environment for those in middle years who can, as David and I have, enjoy the beauty and yet feel energetic enough to drive to theatres and museums. We are so fortunate in our little spot of Hampshire to have theatres in Chichester, Guildford and Southampton so easily available, and the Pallant Gallery and Farnham Crafts Museum as well as some of the most beautiful Cathedrals one could ever wish for. It has been great.
But right now I am ready to return to the smoke. I like to think we can get a train for a nice weekend in the countryside or to stay with friends. Also it is surprising how cheap London can be. Wonderful lunchtime concerts in churches, thought-provoking lectures, access to any number of museums all for virtually nothing. Not to mention a Freedom Pass if one is fortunate enough to receive one – and if one has the courage to battle the crowds.
So the flashforwards have forced me to consider the reality of our situation, the aspects of life we may have to plan for in these years to come. We are agreed that in choosing our new home we will take all this into account and ensure that what we buy will support our aspirations. There is much to look forward to but nonetheless a few things to worry about.
And I am afraid, my darling sons, that I have already started to make that list for my funeral – and I do hope you will find it and make sure that you read Wendy Cope’s marvellous poem My Funeral [see http://lastwordcelebrant.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/poem-my-funeral-by-wendy-cope.html ] which is about the importance of keeping a funeral short and not allowing it to be a eulogy. My mother was adamant about this towards the end of her life – “for goodness sake don’t go overboard on the praise, I am fed up with listening to eulogies of my friends that don’t describe them one jot”.
I am ashamed to admit I was reminded of the Wendy Cope poem while listening to The Archers recently (Caroline’s funeral, for those of you similarly hooked). The Archers addiction is, I fear, another sign of age, as I’ve always vowed I would never listen and am now absolutely glued. Oh dear, the slippery slope downhill? I justify it as being 13 minutes of harmless village gossip.
But really it reminds me that I have probably always been a city girl at heart, not truly one interested in the everyday life of heifers and pigs. So am looking forward to our move back towards London when it happens. That particular flashforward makes me excited. And I don’t suppose David will be too sorry to hand the lawn-mowing over to a pair of younger hands either!