The last five years have been among the strangest in my life. Isolated by the illness (defying diagnosis) that has dogged me since the beginning of 2022, I have been startled by the rapidity with which my life dwindled away to nothing. That of itself is another story of its own, potentially worth considering and discussing — but what triggered these thoughts today was the attendant isolation.
As for so many older people, many of my friends — the loyal ones, the understanding ones, the ones to whom I could always turn — have died. Writing (even from an isolated situation) has of course brought me numerous new friends; however not only are those far-flung, overseas for the most part, but some of those have died too, and they were not old. It's the time we're passing through; it's all part of the crumbling away of the familiar world we knew. It has been very lonely.
Amidst it all — and I cannot write about this because I have nothing good to say — I have been so bitterly disappointed by the church. Some of the alienation and isolation has been to do with that; but I've learned a great deal from it. Today's pastors, it seems, are Ezekiel 34 shepherds.
Part of the whole psycho-spiritual odyssey has been a re-evaluation of my political views. My outlook is more or less as it has been all my life, but around me the political tribes and emphases have shifted and changed, so that when I look at the left-leaning movements that once were fellow travellers, I am dismayed by what they have become. I won't go into why, because I don't want to start a political argument, just set a context.
Much alone, then, and often lonely and bored but interested in current affairs and the world of ideas, I have spent hours and hours exploring contemporary political thinking, and to my surprise found myself nowadays better in harmony with the centre right (that our UK government and media unjustly lump together with the far right), that somewhat nostalgic political cast of thinking, yearning for the way things were. Like the poetry of Rupert Brooke, perhaps:
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
Feeling my way to those who expressed what I was searching for, I liked Douglas Murray, and Rory Stuart, and warmed to the much reviled Jacob Rees Mogg (unjustly smeared as holding all kinds of ideas he never professed), and I became interested in the work of Roger Scruton.
Exploring these thinkers — new to me, for I had swum in other seas hitherto), I spent yesterday evening watching a YouTube interview from a few years ago (pre-pandemic) with Douglas Murray and Roger Scruton. Though I like both thinkers, I found the conversation a little shallow and self-congratulatory, not as good as I had hoped and expected. But in the course of it I learned that Douglas Murray is/was (not sure if he still is) an editor for The Spectator. I had heard of that journal (but never read it) and, while browsing among the publications on display at the supermarket recently, thought it looked interesting.
So I looked up The Spectator online, to see what they had to offer.
The first article to catch my eye was this scathing review by David James, of Sally Wainwright's Riot Women recently aired on the BBC.
Sally Wainwright is a superb writer, one of the best in our generation. Her characterisation and power of observation and insight are astonishingly good. Riot Women is a tour de force; it is magnificent. I find not one false note in it. It has a standing ovation from me.
So I want to go through some of what David James has to say about it.
He says:
"Picture the scene: five middle-aged male actors playing rockstars are lolling about on sofas in a recording studio. In front of them is an attractive young female producer; the men start making obscene gestures behind her about her bottom, sniggering and giggling like schoolboys, one sticks out his tongue through his fingers, intimating what he would like to do to her. Such a scene, if it was ever commissioned, would no doubt have been left on the cutting-room floor. It would be seen as puerile, sexist and outdated. Well, it was commissioned, and by the BBC, and is being broadcast this month in the final episode of Riot Women. Everything is accurate in my description except for one detail: those men are actually middle-aged women, and the target of their offensive behaviour is a man."
The thing is, he's got it wrong. I strongly suspect he has not watched all the episodes — only the first and last perhaps? — and he's got the wrong end of the stick.
The scene he portrays has elements he has either missed or misunderstood.
Let me explain.
The sound engineer in question (what he describes as the producer) is already known to one of the central characters because she met him through a dating site; a man much younger than herself. She was shocked and disappointed to discover that he wanted her to engage in sexual practices she found disgusting and demeaning, and she detached from the encounter. She is taken aback to come face to face with him again (unexpectedly) when he is allocated to their band as their sound engineer.
When it is her turn to record, he goes with her into the studio (alone) but their conversation is inadvertently transmitted through to the adjacent room where the other band members are waiting their turn to record, so they overhear and thus discover the nature of the sexual liaison and her disappointment in it.
Their response is not disapproval or indignation but hilarity. When her turn to record is completed, she returns to find her friends hardly able to contain their giggles. Sitting on the sofa with them, the sound engineer having his back to them as he sits at the sound desk, she asks (mimes, gestures) what they are laughing at. Pointing at him, one of them mimes the sexual practice that he asked of her, the one which disgusted and disappointed her. But they don't judge him; indeed one of them later, generously, pronounces him attractive — they heal her embarrassment and sense of shame by letting it be something funny. It is transformed by the solidarity of friendship that rescues her from the tawdriness and indignity of the failed encounter.
In his rush to disdain and sneer, David James has completely (not partially) failed to grasp not only the dynamics but the actually plot-line. And gone to press in The Spectator slating Sally Wainwright for something that was his invention, not hers, saying erroneously, "Everything is accurate in my description except for one detail: those men are actually middle-aged women". Not so.
But I had been looking for the path the light shines on. I was looking for thinkers of integrity, and wondering if The Spectator might be worth a subscription. Truth finds us, doesn't it, if we look?
I won't be buying even one copy of The Spectator. I am not interested in disdain and contempt, nor in writers (and their editors) who make their living denigrating other writers without even doing their homework.
I've read enough: back to the drawing board. I'll look elsewhere.
As Bertrand Russell so memorably said, "A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."
[I am happy to use the term "man" here advisedly, in its original gender-neutral sense with its etymological derivation from the same root as the Germans got mensch. In the origins of our language, "man" meant simply "person" — the male and female of the species were represented by wer and wif; as in "werewolf" and "wife".]
