Pottering around here tonight with hose, watering can, transplanting fork and secateurs, it is hard to imagine that powerful idiots are gaily subverting elected Prime Ministers, perverting care systems, inverting truth, converting unwilling heathens, and diverting money into their already bursting pockets around the globe.
Among the many things enabling one to forget that false reality are the deliciously acid fragrance of elderflower on the night air, that greenhousy smell of flowering tomato plants, the beginnings of moelleux ceanothus scent wafting across the courtyard, and the deliriously sickly sweetness of honeysuckle flowers as the sun goes down.
It was a delightful end to a day bisected by lunch with two important friends – whose Left-wing views I hardly share at all, but whose grounded decency will always justly earn my complete respect. Together over a marathon meal that put me in mind of Fitzrovia circa 1978, we talked of the rape of Cyprus, the hypocrisy of Obama, the crass naivety of Friedman, the brilliance of student graffiti, the spinelessness of Ed Miliband, and a thousand other things so engaging that five hours passed in what felt like five minutes.
It is a sad truism in our contemporary world that decent folks of practical brain and good heart are such a tiny minority of humanity. Rather than being the silent majority, they are the noisy minority. But their bruit de vivre is drowned out by the media noise of the equally tiny clique setting the agenda for can-kicking today and meltdown tomorrow. Of course, being arrogant in my own uniquely humble way, I use the personal pronoun ‘they’ when what I really mean is the infinitely more personal pronoun ‘we’.
I do not, however, place myself in this exalted category out of any false sense of perfection: on the contrary, I do so because an essential ingredient of decency is the acceptance of one’s ability to be, on occasions, a complete prat, a pompous prick, a boorish didact, and a person with so much sagesse to offer others, in the end there is nowhere near enough left for oneself.
What puts decency firmly apart from zealotry is the ability to be self-deprecating: the ability to apply a grasp of humanity’s incurable silliness to oneself. As somebody once wrote with uncanny insight, “Most humour is generated by the difference between human aspiration and human achievement”.
Only when the human turns to hubris in preference to humour do things start to fall apart bigtime. This is the disease from which all our elites suffer in 2013: but awareness of it – coupled with the burning desire to eradicate it – is what unites all those who would resist.
In my garden this evening, I sat and appreciated the dark red of roses, the unnatural blue of Nigella, the sound of crickets and toads, the smell of nature, the taste of cold water, and the gently fading heat of a late-Spring day. What on earth would be the point of resisting all that harmless sensory reality? Far better surely to accept it -and use its restorative qualities to steel oneself to the task of resisting the obscene unreality created by zealots.
The Slog 