Return Of The Grumpy Old Man

For various reasons I have been well disposed towards my fellow men of late. Even, to a degree, Saint Vince of Twickenham, who got jeered by Luddite muppets at a public sector trade union conference the other day. Wake up and smell the coffee lads. You used to bark on about 'comparability' with the private sector. Two way street me old fruit. If you would like to know what pension poverty is, take a look at what Standard Life have done with my pissy little pot. This is my problem, not someone else's and that is the moral of the story.

But now a few things have pissed me off. Most tellingly I have injured my calf muscle again. This is part of some kind of divine conspiracy against my triathlon efforts. It is neither fair on me nor on the larger sporting public. As I have said before - will this setback prevent me from competing (this term is used broadly) in Yorkshire on 19 June? Will it bollocks.

Intolerance. Stupidity. Asininity. These have been bugging me as well. Perhaps because I don't pay enough attention, it has only recently come to my notice that the city authorities in New York have legislated to outlaw smoking outdoors - Central Park for example is a smoke free zone. Now there cannot be any earthly pretence that this is a health measure aimed at the effects of passive smoking. This is an example of a shrill and unpleasant minority imposing its prejudices on everybody else. May this law fester and poison the Big Apple as assuredly as did Prohibition. I can do no better than quote my old hero Simon Raven who wrote this in an Introduction to the re-issue of Alms for Oblivion:

Raven - brilliant and bitter

The cry, 'If I can't, you mustn't', had some trace of justification, however sullen and unlovely the sound of it. Nowadays we hear instead an even less lovely cry, 'If I don't want to, you mustn't' ie. 'It is just possible that I am, after all, missing out on something of value which you have been shrewd enough to detect and I haven't, and that wouldn't be fair and equal, now would it?' Once upon a time, however strong and righteous you considered your message, you scorned to become a pest: in 1998, however trivial your grievance, you find yourself encouraged and even 'morally obliged' to to become not just a pest but a pestilence.

In that same Introduction one finds the following example of Raven's brilliant acerbity - about the sad death of a woman and the shameful hysteria it triggered - the public egged on remember by a shamelessly lachrymose Prime Minister,

Who would have imagined that a flighty, pea-brained princess with an addiction to publicity should become a cult almost in the degree of sanctity?

Louis de Bernieres accurately describes depression as a state of estrangement from oneself. As it happened it was in the year of Diana's death that I had my first brush with the black dog. The events after her death meant that not only was I estranged from myself but also from the country I had loved. And I would be so presumptuous as to suggest that this is not just my problem but a problem for rather more of us. Because goodwill greases wheels and there's precious little of it left. No man is an island? Look around you.