‘Life is short. Have an affair.” The emailed advert from Ashley Madison has appeared repeatedly in my inbox over the past year or so. I have often thought that the advertisers should add a rider, in the interests of truth in advertising: “Yes, and risk your marriage, hurt your children, and invite many later regrets.” It now seems that they should perhaps have also added that such confidential sites can be hacked into, and millions who gave their credit card details to the adultery site have had such details made public, to their subsequent mortification. It could almost be a biblical morality lesson: “Be sure your sins will find you out!”
Yet, while we must recognise the difference between right and wrong, there is something less than edifying about taunting individuals who have fallen from grace and shown, once again, that folly, vanity and the weakness of the flesh are forever part of the human experience. People do stupid things and make monumental mistakes, but that’s the way we’ve been since the fall of Adam, and there’s always a demon in the works trying to exploit our fallen nature.
The disclosure that a peer of the realm and deputy speaker in the Upper House, Lord Sewel, has been filmed cavorting with prostitutes, pleading to be “led astray” and sniffing cocaine, surely falls into the category of human error and folly. And while the conduct revealed is lowering, I’m not sure I warm to the cacophony of voices denouncing his sins and calling for his head either. Sometimes, to know you have let yourself down, and publicly, is a mortifying punishment in itself.
The apparent popularity of Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing socialist, as a candidate to lead the Labour Party has drawn some comparisons with the failed leadership of Michael Foot in the 1980s. Footy’s leadership was described as “the longest suicide note in history”, and his memory is sometimes disparaged because the Labour Party failed to thrive under his stewardship.
Michael Foot may not have been cut out to be a political leader, but he was a gentle and cultivated man. He was against nuclear warfare – isn’t any sane person? He was also against terrorism: he refused to meet, or endorse, the IRA. I was once present at a private film screening in Hampstead when the radical Welsh documentary film-maker Kenneth Griffith aired his support for the Provisional IRA’s bombing campaigns, and Michael Foot walked out of the cinema.
Subsequently, I sat next to Footy at a breakfast party given by David Frost, and I asked him if he was ever influenced by Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist thinker. No, Foot said: but he had been passionately engaged by the anti-fascist novelist Ignazio Silone, and he spoke with great fervour about Silone, who had journeyed from communism to socialism to Christianity.
Michael Foot was a true man of letters – perhaps literature rather than politics should have been his calling – and as one of my aunts used to say, “you’d know he was a gentleman”. I daresay Mr Corbyn has his virtues (he lives frugally, which is admirable), but intellectually, I would say, no match for Michael Foot.
The greetings card shops are now stocking a slew of cards saying “Congratulations! You’ve passed your exams!” for successful pupils and students obtaining their results over the course of this month.
This strikes me as discriminatory. Why shouldn’t there be greetings cards for those who have failed their exams, or done rather poorly in their school or college marks? I thought we were supposed to be living in an age of equality.
Why shouldn’t failures and dunces have their own greetings cards? How about a card proclaiming: “Failed your exams? Never mind, remember Samuel Beckett: ‘Try again, fail again, fail better!’”
Or how about a quote from one of Oscar Wilde’s characters in An Ideal Husband, the beautifully dressed Mrs Laura Cheveley, who, reminded that she won no awards at school, drawls: “My prizes came a little later in life!” Well, it can happen – Winston Churchill seldom passed a school exam either.
Those who fail exams and win no prizes should surely have their own greetings cards.
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