This is a Hancock triumph
By Dionysus, I don't know how I can keep glossing the thing over all day long
Everywhere, in every direction, there is hubris. We are soaked in it. Matt Hancock’s ghastly Whatsapp messages, the revelation that is no revelation that the people running our government are the kind of people you don’t want to have running a government; the equally unsurprising revelation that the kind of people running the Metropolitan Police are the kind of people you don’t want to have running the Metropolitan Police. It’s dispiriting and exhausting and it feels like doom-scrolling is now real life. Doom-living. Matt Hancock’s arrogance and lack of self-awareness are what makes me say he has hubris, but actually that’s in the modern sense of the word, which is defined as arrogance and over-confidence.
The Ancient Greeks saw it differently. In 364-365 BC, the Greek orator Aeschines made a speech denouncing a certain Timarchus, who had accused Aeschines of immoral conduct while in office as an ambassador. Aeschines gave back with all barrels. Timarchus had been a rent boy, had moved in with an older man, Misgolas, as his lover and then continued to sell himself; he had squandered his inheritance because he was too fond of gluttony, dice and lyre-players.
I refresh your memories and show that he is guilty of selling his person not only in Misgolas' house, but in the house of another man also, and again of another, and that from this last he went to still another, surely you will no longer look upon him as one who has merely been a kept man, but—by Dionysus, I don't know how I can keep glossing the thing over all day long—as a common prostitute. For the man who follows these practices recklessly and with many men and for pay seems to me to be chargeable with precisely this.
Such a man was not decent enough to be allowed to address the assembly, and such behavioural violations of the common code — Athenians did not allow schools to be open during the dark in case of what someone might get up with young boys — were hubristic, because hubris then meant “the intentional use of violence to humiliate or degrade.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica definition.) (And yes I realise that actual behaviour and public laws about homosexuality and paedophilia in ancient Greece were not remotely aligned.)
Heavy petting and snogging in a government office in contravention of social distancing.
Going to parties when it was illegal to do so and wondering how they can be justified afterwards.
Downgrading resources devoted to dealing with violence against women and girls while publicly claiming the opposite.
Only the last one — well done, Metropolitan Police — qualifies as the original hubris, because it was and is a derelection that led and leads to violence. But Matt “Triumph” Hancock and Boris “It’s not a party” Johnson definitely meet the modern definition of it.
I’m so tired of it.
My father died 48 years ago tomorrow, in our back yard while he was carrying in the supermarket shopping. He was a vicar, a director of education and an English teacher (he met my mother at teacher training college). I was five when he died in front of me and of course I have put him on an enormous pedestal, and I hope that had he lived longer, and had his nosebleeds, uncharacteristic irritation and sky-high stress been recognised as precusors of a massive heart attack, we would have had many interesting conversations about religion and morality (and probably lots of angry teenage fury about it too). I have a box of his sermons that I keep meaning to read, and I’ve been thinking about him this week not just because of the anniversary of his death, or the fact that he so objected to the Americanization of Mothering Sunday into Mother’s Day that he wrote a sermon about it, but because I have been thinking about codes, and morality, and having an anchor in your life. I don’t believe in God, but I can see that God is a heck of an anchor.
I love this picture of my parents.
But I do not see that any one currently in government has an anchor beyond power and money and in Suella Braverman’s case, perverse cruelty. And I wonder whether the current gender fluid trans nonsense and its accompanying violence and lack of debate is because being trans is something to cling to, and when you hold tight to something, you get violent in its defence. I’m not talking here about the men who have co-opted trans rights into the women-silencing misogyny that has captured so many institutions. They will get their reckoning, one day. I mean instead the young girls and young women, mostly, who cling to the new cult because it is accessible and makes a certain sense, and they are led willingly by adults who should know better into surgery and hormones that can wreck lives. Thanks to Hannah Barnes and her excellent book on the criminal (in my view) activities of the Tavistock GIDS clinic Time To Think (turned down by 22 publishers before Swift Press took it on), I think at least the enablers will be held to account. Maybe.
Animal heroes of the week: tursiops truncatus
When I travelled on Maersk Kendal for 5 weeks in 2010, I wanted to see dolphins. I was so insistent about this that the officers got bored with my asking about them. We saw them last week/last month, they would say, “they were fabulous.” No idea where they are now. By the third week, we were in the Indian Ocean and out of the piracy danger zone. I left a note on the chart table on the bridge: if you see dolphins or whales, call me.
At first it didn’t go well. July 6th, somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
The sea has calmed. I am allowed on deck. I go to the fo'c'sle. The decks are covered in oily salt crust. Forward, there is a nasty smell which might be the skins. I get to my perch and lean out and stay there for so long my feet go numb. I see one small flying fish in front of the bow. The bow is nearly breaking the surface. Then to the bridge, where I tell Marius about the flying fish and ask him if he has seen whales. Hundreds of them. In fact I saw them the other day, and hundreds of dolphins. WHAT? And you didn't tell me? Now there is a note over the Morse code box. Note to watchkeepers: If you see whales or dolphins please call me. Rose. He says the dolphins were jumping up and down. They like waves. What kind of whales? No idea. The blowing-spout kind.
Then, on July 9th, somewhere in the Indian Ocean:
Dolphins! I was on the fo'c'sle reading about lighthouse keepers. I heard a motor and thought it was a small plane. A small boat passed the bow. Then something leaped out of the water. Dolphins! I ran - illegally - up to the bridge and gasped. They said, we've been trying to find you. The captain sent an AB to tell me. They were right next to the ship. They were saying, where's Rose? I watched them for a while, leaping around, and their fins in a big group in the water, and two fishing boats I presume waiting to catch the fish they had herded, then the captain started the engines and we steamed off in the opposite direction. So I have seen dolphins but not close enough. Discontentment. Not really. On the fo'c'sle with the sound of the whirlpools on the bow and not too hot and no annoying fly (he stays on the starboard side and doesn't make it to port), I am content.
In 2015, researchers from the Ocean Conservation Society were at sea observing and photographing a pod of wild bottlenose dolphins — tursiops truncatus — when the dolphins suddenly veered away. This was weird behaviour for them; the researchers were used to seeing them a few hundred metres off-shore. But here they were heading out to sea. The researchers were so puzzled, they decided to follow them. And where the dolphins were, they found a young woman, half-drowned, who “feebly turned her head toward us, half-raising her hand as a weak sign for help.”
The young woman was from Germany, visiting Los Angeles, and had been trying to kill herself. She survived. The researcher, Maddalena Bearzi, reflected on what would have happened if the dolphins hadn’t been followed by humans to the drowning girl.
“What might (the dolphins) have done with her if we hadn’t been there? Might they have tried to save her? There are many anecdotal accounts of dolphins saving humans from death and disaster, either by guiding them to shore, fending off sharks or helping them to remain afloat until help arrives. Many scientists think dolphins do not, in fact, save humans because there is not enough hard scientific evidence to support these stories. But that day I witnessed coastal bottlenose dolphins suddenly leave their feeding activities and head offshore. And in doing so, they led us to save a dying girl, some three miles offshore. Coincidence?”
Dolphins have more of a moral code than Matt Hancock. Discuss.
It’s my mother’s birthday today. She was born 83 years ago on the first day of spring and though she will not like me telling you this, for that reason she was given the middle name Primrose. I think it suits her because as you remember she is a peach, and her disposition is spring-like. Happy birthday, Sheila Prim! I think I’ve just about forgiven you for not passing on to me your long legs. (I take after my vicar father, a short-ish dark Welshman.) Here she is last year (OK not quite) with her best friend Shirley. And I’ve only just noticed the prominent Ladies sign behind them, clearly an indication that her unborn daughter would grow up to write a book about toilets.
Check them out:
