YESTERDAY ALL MY TROUBLES WERE SO FAR AWAY

No, yesterday wasn’t so good if you actually think back.

This week Libby Purves wrote a great piece in the Times counting our current blessings. She’s so good that a friend said to me “I’d make her PM - tomorrow” - he’s right Libby’s a liberal voice of joyful sanity - Libby for leader of the Happy Party. Why not? In the insane post-reason and enlightenment world of Brexit, Corbyn and Trump anything could happen.

   
Her basic thesis - well-worn and endorsed in various blogs of mine and others but not so well written as hers - is that across the board everything, yes everything, is getting better. Health, medical discoveries, food and drink, restaurants, shops, manners, sport, wealth, housing, welfare - yes, everything….Yet despair is fashionable, she says, and only 5% of Britons think the world is getting better. So of the other 95%...
Are you blind? Are you deaf? Are you mad?

In the relatively recent past we hanged, beat and abused people with some relish. When Winston Churchill rebuked some Admirals for talking affectionately about the traditions of the Royal Navy he said:
 “And what are they? They are rum, sodomy and the lash'.

In this better world, global literacy is up from 21% a century ago to 86% now. Johan Norberg,
whose book “Progress” Libby cites at some length, praises globalism, industrialisation, science and the liberal heart. And it’s this liberal heart that interests me and inspires me the most.

Overall we, and especially the young and better-educated, are repelled by any concept like the old-school smack of firm government. And to those lamenting our rapid progress and who advocate the return to the rose tinted past and good honest coal mining, well I despair of them.

Our new world is actually (and potentially even more) bright, shiny and brainy. It’s liberal, cosmopolitan, speaks English and likes the same great movies. It’s young, energetic, fit and funny. We learned to laugh intelligently in the 1960’s and 70’s and now again we are seeing better and sharper satire. This is as good as it’s got.

Over the past two weeks I’ve eaten splendidly at newish restaurants - 64 Degrees in Brighton and at 45 Jermyn Street and Eneko in London. I’ve felt as though I were in the centre of the world walking with a mix of different nationalities and seeing people enjoying the warmth of a long drawn out summer.

I read Saturday’s Times and it was upbeat as I wanted it to be, Caitlin Moran and Robert Crampton as ever cheerful, funny and big hearted. Happy stories like Gertie the dog swimming out to sea to recover a German holiday maker’s false leg that had been washed away in a freak wave.

All too often we get what we expect. As the Victor Meldrews discover things go wrong when
we anticipate them doing so. So cheer up. Expect the best. And start laughing at our extraordinary good fortune.

NEW YOUNG SCOTLAND - WELCOME

I watched a referendum debate on TV the other night at which hordes of young Scottish students were in the audience. They were amazing- very bright, eager and full of passion. If this is Scotland, I thought, they’re going to have a ball whether Thursday’s decision is ‘yes’ or ‘no’. And the debate has gone beyond a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ already. It did that with Gordon Brown’s olive branch, not so much an olive branch as an olive forest. And the bruising nature of the debate from the ‘No Campaign’ has meant one thing.

Union as we know it is over.

There’s been an overall miscalculation by everyone and oddly I think this includes the SNP. They were, I was told a few months ago by a pundit, making the most of an average hand that had been dealt to them. But the campaign, populist, mostly positive on their part and above all young now feels more like a revolution than a referendum.

I wonder if Alex Salmond realises what kind of toothpaste he’s squeezed out of the referendum tube. Times writer, Robert Crampton, who’s been touring Scotland on a temperature-taking tour, may be right in predicting a successful “yes” vote. But what he rather sadly concludes is that this is a great, happy and upbeat nation we’ll miss. One he thinks that deserves to have a go by itself. But the general sense is that Alex will have served his time whatever happens. Old politics - simply not fit enough.

A friend of mine said right at the start of the campaign that he'd been down to England on holiday and felt what a miserable bunch we all were.  This holiday had converted him from staunch “no” to wavering “maybe”. Another friend defined the issue as a “governance” one. Westminster cannot rule anywhere anymore - too remote culturally. The mayor has taken over London and Westminster is sitting in a stagnant, historic pool. If Scotland goes, just watch the action from Cornwall and Wales.

(Something odd’s just happened. I’m a dreadful typist and I just made an error - Westminster as “Westmonster”. History will judge this époque as the one when centuries of history may be seen to have reached their sell-by date. ‘Westmonster’ is in its death throes.)

Undertakers are gathering like Nigel Farage and George Galloway (in that Scottish Referendum debate looking grumpy, wearing a trilby - why? What’s George got to do with anything?). Both are yesterday’s minor men.

Back to Scotland ….. whatever happens on Thursday this is the place to be right now … like Berlin after the wall came down. It’s got energy, verve and ambition. I’d guess it might even manage to hang on to its young talent - previously it squandered its entrepreneurial youth. It’s got momentum and that rebel yell feeling that successful and innovative places seem to have.

I think the referendum is no longer relevant. A new, young nation has been launched.