Revelations

The Diary with Jeremy Paxman — it’s LOLs all round

The Diary with Jeremy Paxman — it’s LOLs all round

The tremendous advantage of the internet is that it gives an apparently factual basis for anything. No longer do we have to exclaim, like some ageing Kingsley Amis, “How many of our fellow citizens are either credulous fools or positively insane?”, for the evidence is to hand. A London taxi driver the other day swore to me that South Africa had been governed by imposters for years, because the real Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the 1980s and could therefore never have been president.


This struck me as implausible only because I had been in South Africa at the time and watched Mandela walk out of prison (and later win the country’s first democratic elections). Still it was a delight to hear the cabbie articulate the locus classicus of a collective false memory system (the “Mandela Effect” is so named because a group of people had all come to the conclusion he really died in prison). The internet provides every fruitcake on the planet with the opportunity to find fellow imbeciles. Among the other events for which the Mandela Effect gives alternative formularies are the belief that the “Mona Lisa” has had her smile painted on recently, and that Star Wars’ C-3PO did not have a silver leg. BuzzFeed helpfully collected a few of these and invited readers to comment. I don’t know whether to cheer or cry that 10 times as many people clicked “WTF” than “LOL”.


The cabbie had an explanation, though. “It’s all happened since they built that Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Something’s gone wrong with time.”


At 20 you don’t give a monkey’s about The End of Days. It’s still something of a shock, at gone 60, to realise how your attitude changes. In Lamb’s Conduit Street a company of undertakers has a window display showing a contemporary depiction of the funeral of Lord Nelson in 1806, an event they organised. I walked in to congratulate them on having produced the most interesting window display I have seen for years and a friendly middle-aged man — who had probably been expecting some grieving family — smiled and handed me a pamphlet about the most recent paterfamilias of this funereal dynasty, one Bunny France, adorned with a picture of a lugubrious yet kindly looking man. Just what you want in an undertaker, one of the last remaining trades where outward appearance matters.


On a train journey from Salisbury to London the next day, we passed the enormous graveyard at Brookwood, just outside Woking. The biggest cemetery in Britain, it was created when Victorian entrepreneurs decided to exploit the railway boom to assuage anxieties about the rapidly expanding population of London and the limited number of churchyards. They formed the splendidly named London Necropolis Company, with a logo featuring a skull and crossbones and an hourglass, bought land in Surrey and built a railway line to carry the dead and their mourners out of town.


It was a delight to hear the cabbie articulate the ‘locus classicus’ of a collective false memory system


But “Where there’s bones, there’s brass” turned out to be less than entirely true. The business plan depended on domination of the funeral trade. Despite its Amazonian ambitions, the company found itself stuck with too many pauper burials to turn a decent profit. In the 20th century Brookwood fell into the hands of property spivs. Part became a Russian Orthodox monastery, part of the grounds a clay pigeon range.


Both my parents opted to be cremated, which seemed to their generation a more modern exit. I have no strong feelings — I used to want to be put in a grave on a moorside or riverbank, but what does it matter? All I would like now is for such friends and family as remain to sing loudly and become merrily inebriated. It’s not as if I will notice, anyway. Brookwood may be pretty suburban but, from the train, it looked a pleasant enough place to moulder away. Not bad company, either: residents include John Singer Sargent; Nelson’s granddaughter; and Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, the only half of the coupling identifiable in the infamous “headless man” photo that scandalised 1960s Britain.


In Sutherland, the most sparsely populated county in Scotland, Tuesday’s announcement of yet another election seemed extremely remote. I confess to being away fishing when other big news has happened — notably on the river Blackwater in Ireland at the time of the 9/11 attacks. But the great importance of that event was immediately clear. This one is much harder to read.


I suppose one can understand why Theresa May did it. It must seem like being invited to take a penalty kick when the opposition goalie has just been carted off to casualty and I doubt even Mrs Corbyn has imagined rehanging the Downing Street curtains.


But that doesn’t make the outcome predictable. For one thing, though this is a profoundly democratic country, people don’t like being asked to keep trooping to the polling stations.


This will not be an election in which monoliths collide, but lots of smaller, individual clashes, in separate corners of the kingdom. Mrs May would be mad to underestimate the feeling of betrayal among Conservative voters who thought — as she claimed to believe — that Britain should stay in the Union. I expect many not to bother voting Tory in June. Or not even to vote at all.

Article courtesy of The Financial Times. Original found here.

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