Monday
Rishi the recidivist. To add to his fixed-penalty notice for joining Boris Johnson at his birthday party during lockdown, the prime minister has now clocked up a second for not wearing a seatbelt. Not the worst crime, but one of the dumbest. Sunak only got caught because he filmed himself breaking the law. Not sure Rishi is cut out for life as a career criminal. Even so, he appears to be rather more trustworthy than some of his colleagues. A low bar, admittedly. First there is Johnson, who didn’t appear to think there was anything questionable about an old mucker, Richard Sharp, allegedly helping him to secure a loan facility just weeks before he recommended Sharp to be chair of the BBC. And what is it with Boris that he needs £800,000 to maintain his lifestyle when he already has friends paying for his accommodation? You can tell Johnson knows he’s done something wrong because he sloped off to Ukraine to see Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the weekend. Then there’s Nadhim Zahawi, the Tory party chair, who appears to have accidentally failed to fill in his tax return correctly, threatened journalists who wanted to reveal the story and negotiated his own settlement with HMRC when he was … chancellor. He now can’t even remember how much of the £4m or so he forked out was a penalty and says any irregularity was “carelessness”. Weird that the very rich never carelessly pay too much tax. Zahawi wants to stay on but my bet is he is on borrowed time. Gone by the end of the month. So much for Sunak’s promise of a Tory party guided by “professionalism, integrity and accountability”.
Tuesday
The Doomsday Clock has just moved another 10 seconds closer to midnight. The metaphorical clock was dreamed up by atomic scientists in 1947 as a symbol of just how close the world was to being wiped out by human-made disasters. The main threats are now primarily nuclear war and climate change. At the time of its creation the clock was set at seven minutes to midnight, and since then it has moved 25 times, backwards and forwards. The furthest the clock has been away from midnight was in 1991 after the fall of the communist bloc in eastern Europe. Then it was 17 minutes. Since then it has been getting progressively closer. In 2020 it was one minute 40 seconds to midnight and remained that way for three years, despite a global pandemic. Now it is as close to midnight as it has ever been. Largely as a result of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, the clock is at 90 seconds. Which sounds alarming. Only, maybe there are a few shards of hope to be taken. Unusual for me, I know. Usually I tend to the gloomy. But, look at it this way. Here’s what’s happened in the past three years. There is the biggest conflict in Europe taking place since the second world war. We can’t be sure Putin isn’t mad enough to fire off some nukes if he feels like he’s losing. There was Covid, which we still can’t be sure wasn’t human-made. There has been plenty of hand-wringing but not much action on climate change at various COP summits. And in the UK, we have a country that was so unhinged even Liz Truss got to be prime minister. And yet, despite all this, we’re only 10 seconds closer to midnight. Or to put it another way. Things could get eight times worse – imagine – and we still wouldn’t hit Armageddon. Sleep a little easier.
Wednesday
When I was young, my parents would often talk about their fears that their generation had left the country worse off for my generation. This seemed harsh, not least because my dad and my mum had spent six years of their youth fighting in the second world war: both never recovered from the psychological scars. They had fought so their children, my sisters and me, could live in freedom. I try not to forget that. Yet with Britain on the ropes in the 1970s, they feared for our future. Now I’m older than they were when we had those conversations and I find myself worrying about the same thing. That my generation has screwed things up for my children. We have hogged the best pensions. I could take my state pension now if I wanted to. I’d guess my children won’t be able to take theirs until they are well into the 70s. Many of us have got asset-rich because of house price inflation: God knows where I’d be living if I had to buy a house from scratch now. We never really took care of the world during decades of peace post-1945. Maybe it’s just the curse of every generation to think it has fucked things up for the next one. The humility of old age. If not humility, then the humbling. Getting old is not easy. Though it can look that way on those adverts for cruises. Rather, it’s a series of losses. One’s body slowly giving up on you, refusing to do what it once did. Saying goodbyes. Not least to your children. I have already spent more than 95% of the time I will be with them while I’m alive. I mind that. But also the goodbyes to friends who are less lucky with their health. And always the knowledge this is only ever going to end one way.
Thursday
A Cambridge philosopher, Dr Farbod Akhlaghi, has written a paper – Transformative Experience and the Right to Revelatory Autonomy – for the journal Analysis in which he argues we have a moral duty not to give friends and relatives advice on their life choices. He suggests, if I’ve understood him properly, that the only true life is one of self-expression, and any interference, however well-meaning, detracts from the true-lived experience. We can never know if our choices will turn out to be right in advance, and it is only by making them that we reveal our true values and preferences and realise our true selves. Hmm. I see where he’s coming from – sort of – but I’m still very glad that my friends and relatives have stepped in at various points to offer me their advice. And I’m glad there have been moments when I’ve had the common sense and the humility to listen to them. When you’re naturally self-destructive, you often need people around with a healthier perspective. Left to myself, I would probably more often than not have come up with a poorer choice. Now, this might make me a less well-realised version of me – one that is less quintessentially John – but if that is the price of taking advice from others then it’s one I’m very comfortable with. It also seems misguided. Surely it is our interactions with others that bend and shape our lives. We exist not as atavistic isolates but as social beings. We are our connections. There is no one true version of me that has become monstrously distorted. At least, I hope not.
Friday
This Sunday afternoon I will be heading to central London to go to the opera. On my own. Normally I go with my wife, but Jill can’t take four and a half hours of Wagner. I’d much rather be going with her, but over the years I’ve learned how to adapt to the solitary experience. There’s actually something quite nice about not having a conversation in the intervals and allowing my mind to wander. I dare say I might also nod off for a few minutes or so guilt-free while watching the opera and let the music filter into my unconscious. I often do with Wagner. Because in between the moments of transcendence there are others I find a wee bit dull. Wagner would vehemently disagree with me and denounce me as a philistine, but great art is rarely uniformly brilliant. Take Hamlet. It’s rarely performed at its full five hours because most directors don’t think modern audiences can take it. But Wagner is never cut. I wrote about this 10 years ago and was thrilled to discover that great musicians and writers such as John Eliot Gardiner, Julian Barnes, Barbara Hannigan, David Hare and Philip Hensher agreed. Allowing the mind to wander is part of the creative process. Opera and theatre aren’t art forms that need to be treated with reverence. Also, what bores us now is not necessarily what bored us years previously. Boredom is a moving target. And the best art is like life. You need the dull bits to better appreciate the climaxes.
• This article was amended on 27 January 2023 to better reflect the argument made in Akhlaghi’s paper.
