Monday
At last! Someone is doing something about the scourge of – *checks notes* – allotments. Wait, what? Oh. Angela Rayner has been criticised for rules allowing councils to sell off allotments to raise money to meet day-to-day expenditures.
This – if you will forgive the lapse into technical jargon for a moment – is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I feel quite strongly about this because there were (and still at the time of writing are) allotments at the end of my parents’ road and they were how my dad first introduced me, in his customarily gentle way, to politics at the age of four or five. Who owned all the little gardens, I asked. The council did, he said, but it let people – often those who didn’t have gardens of their own – rent them pretty cheaply and they could grow whatever they wanted. Then when they got bored or moved away, another person had a turn. This seemed to me exemplary sharing, of exactly the kind preached at this new thing I was trying out called primary school. I approved.
I still approve. Allotments are basically libraries for outdoor people. And, like libraries, if you sell them off, they won’t come back. Do you know how far away we exist now from a time and culture that would re-establish such grace notes to national life? Further than we’ve ever been. So if I were the deputy leader of a party supposedly (I think I read this somewhere) on the side of ordinary people – people without gardens, you might loosely say – do you know what I would do? Almost anything but sell their land from under them.
Tuesday
You know the trolley problem? Not the supermarket one, the philosophical one; a runaway train is heading for five people tied to a railway track, if you pull a lever you divert it to a track on which only one person will be killed – do you pull the lever? You do? OK. What if the single person was a brilliant surgeon and the five were murderers? Or, there are five people’s lives who could be saved by killing another and distributing his organs among them. Do you do that? Why not? And so on.
Now it’s a video game. How? How? Ever since I first heard it, the trolley problem has been one of the things that can keep me up at night. It’s horrible. It’s genius. It’s appalling. It gets under your brain skin and never leaves. How people can want to see it in 3D and play through it in near-infinite varieties I simply cannot imagine. Do they have nerves of steel? Were people right to condemn video games – are they cauterising emotions with every frame? And above all – should I play? Should I find out the answer to the question that has haunted me these 40 years and more – who would I choose to kill? One way or another, it’s decision time.
Wednesday
I really am beginning to warm to the young, you know. They have invented lots of useful words – “ghosting”, “flex”, “simp” are just some of those I particularly enjoy, in the privacy of my own mind – they hardly go clubbing or drinking any more and they operate silent book clubs (you go and read together, don’t discuss the book, then leave. Perfect).
And now, it turns out, they go to bed at, on average, 9pm. The ideal time. Especially, I suppose, if you’re no longer clubbing or drinking because the world is full of simps busy ghosting you or mindlessly flexing. You can get home from book club, have a small, doubtless well-balanced meal and be tucked up for nine hours – depending on how quickly you can dispense with the trolley problem – of the dreamless shortly thereafter. Where were you all when I needed you, 1994 to 2004ish? Not yet born? Ah, OK. OK.
Thursday
Victoria Wood once said of the proliferation of diet fads, and assertions that things like dark chocolate can be good for you, that she hoped that if she stuck around long enough someone would put in a good word for wine gums.
Alas, she is no longer with us and we still wait in vain to hear about newly discovered antioxidants in Maynards’ finest. But I can offer my own small equivalent: I have stuck around long enough to hear potatoes definitively declared healthy. Researchers from Harvard and Cambridge universities studied the development, or not, of diabetes in 205,000 people over four decades and have determined that spud ingestion does not cause it. Unless it’s chips. They’re still bad. You, literally, can’t have everything. They are the wine gums of potatoes, apparently. But stick around long enough (by eating mash! Hurrah!) and who knows what might be around the corner.
Friday
We are halfway through the school summer holidays. Are we? Aren’t we? Tell me we are. I’ve lost all track of time, like a soldier lost in the jungle. This is, after all, parents’ annual ’Nam.
I thought it would get easier once the child no longer needed constant supervision and entertainment. Instead, it’s worse. I know he’s upstairs on his computer and phone any time I am not actively engaging with him, being exposed to all sorts. I’m told the trolley problem game is very much the least of it out there on the internetz. Leaving a child to his own devices is now a literal and very bad thing.
I do my best. When I’m not working I drag him out on walks, I make him bake things, help with chores, all of that. I even offer to play board games with him. Board games! Occasionally he will agree to a round of poker or to give me his thoughts on what phone I should buy next, if I were ever to contemplate buying a phone again (he can sell this one at an antiques market when I die).
But I can’t do it all the time and the guilt is pervasive and stultifying. I can’t bribe him to see friends because he has half my DNA and won’t. I can’t bribe him to read, because he has the wrong half of my DNA and won’t. So on we go, me alternating working and begging, him serene in his fetid demimonde of online horrors. Roll on September, and salvation.