A Spectator's Notebook
In normal times the diarist must pay some regard to the calendar. But these are not normal times, and if I were to begin this column with the conventional wishes for a Happy New Year I might be accused of irony.
Nonetheless — taking a deep and probtibly frozen breath — I shall have a shot at it. And I shall begin by suggesting that these wishes might not seem so ironical if all oi us make a concerted and urgent effort to re-examine our priorities. Not our political or social or economic priorities, but our personal priorities, as living, sentient human beings.
And I shall continue by suggesting that though we are all enduringba great deal of discomfort and frustration and annoyance which is not made any more tolerable by the ceaseless gnat-like whine of Mr Wedgwood Benn in the background — the vast majority of us are not in physical pain. (Though there are, admittedly, many persons in whom the contemplation of Mr W. Benn's very existence induces sensations not dissimilar from an attack of acute colitis.) Ninety per cent of us — and I hope that the reader is among them — are not in physical pain, and if you do not agree that this takes care of Priority Number One, you cannot have suffered pain very greatly. 1 am not going to "tell you about my operation." But it is relevant to mention that when I returned to this country from India, towards the end of the war, I carried a revolver in my bag, with every intention of using it, rather than risk a repetition of the pain that I had been called upon to endure. It was the sort of pain that makes a mockery of morphia, the sort of pain where you cannot go on screaming because you have nothing left to scream with. If therefore you are among the ninety per cent your first priority for a Happy New Year is assured.
But what about the national priorities? What message can we read on the horizon? Is there no rift Tri the darkness? Some think not.
The most eloquent Jeremiah to raise his voice in the past fortnight — and normally among the most sensible — is known to a vast audience under the pseudonym of Bernard Levin, and I so often rejoice in him it is with some distress that I now find myself
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