This is Episode 61 of the weekly Eyecatching Words podcast, published on the 7th February 2024.
Music
Openings
Hello and welcome to the Eyecatching Words podcast. This is your weekly aural (spelt with an “au”) magazine with news, features and music from deep in the heart of the UK, as seen by a white privileged 65 year old Brit who tries not to be typical of his demographic.
In addition to a look back at the world over the last the week I will also be talking about the global threat from pigeons, and how a pineapple can accidentally enhance your sex life.
This week’s main feature is a reflection on maleness in an age when gender and attitudes towards it have never been more fluid and, to some extent, have never been more controversial.
So grab your earbuds, your beats, or your Alexa, make some coffee and sit down with me for an offbeat interlude in your busy week.
Seven Days
This week’s news was dominated by the announcement that King Charles has an unspecified cancer. I say unspecified but the story is that it is not prostate. I can understand why they did that but given that the prognosis is (apparently) very good I am surprised that they are being so coy. The news cycle is predictable in situations like this with the right wing tabloids trying to sell more papers on the back of the shocking news and the Guardian using it to highlight the length of cancer waiting lists and the fact that his majesty is getting treated straight away whilst most people are not given such treatment. In fact cancer waiting lists were a news item earlier in the week even before the news broke from Buck House.
This led me to a very interesting discovery which is the existence of the “Data and Forensics team” at Sky News. They provided an excellent analysis when the King Charles story broke including a description of the pressures the NHS is under and how demand for cancer services has increased in the last fifteen years but also a picture of the deprived populations that fail to seek timely treatment. This is the team’s mission statement (although they don’t call it that):
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling, we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
I thought that was an excellent description of their work and it was a real “HG Wells and a bicycle ” moment for me. Cheered me up immensely.
Less heartening was finding out that our illustrious Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, (he who would not know a real life dilemma if it fell on him from outer space), had placed a £1,000 bet with Piers Morgan live on TV that his Rwanda policy would be a success. His advisors must have been screaming silently at him from the studio sidelines “It’s a trap!” But he fell for it anyway and, of curse, started obfuscating as soon as he came off air. No-one cares about the discredited policy any more, although there are people who are fighting to help those who are victims of it. It’s the sight of two odious men performing rich people’s antics on the tv screen that galled. It was as bad as watching a Bullingdon Club member burn a twenty pound note in front of a beggar.
Ian Lavender died this week, the last of the Dad’s Army corps of actors and the one who played Private Pike. “Don’t tell him Pike” was one of the most iconic lines of twentieth century tv sitcoms and up there with “you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off” as an example of self-deprecating 1960s British humour. I remember being devastated as a nine year old when the weekly episode was cancelled in 1968 because the BBC thought it was more important to report on the breaking news that was the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. Lavender was typecast in the role and found it difficult to get other work although in later years he did feature as a gay man in Eastenders and was credited with being the first actor to address homophobia in a soap opera.
Also in the news: The guys at Cern in Switzerland are putting together a business case for a 30 billion pound replacement for the existing Large Hadron Collider or LHC. The unimaginatively named Future Hadron Collider or LHC would not be ready until 2040 by which time a large chunk of the future will be behind it, at least in human terms. And it will be huge and deep: the thing will run in a ring below Switzerland and France in an area that would encompass a thousand square kilometres.
The scheme has its supporters and its detractors but to show you that bitchy behaviour can occur anywhere (including the rational realms of science) here is a quote from Dr Sabine Hossenfelder at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.
“I fear that funding such an experiment will mean that a lot of smart people will waste their time on research that will not lead to any progress. The LHC had a good motivation. The FCC has not. Particle physicists have to accept that their time is over. This is the age of quantum physics.”
Wow that’s harsh. Particle physicists have to accept that their time is over. Well maybe it is but £3ob is one hell of a way to throw a goodbye party. I vote we let them sort it out Gangs of New York style, particle physicists on one side and quantum physicists on the other. They could slap each other to death with copies of research papers for or against.
On the personal front I made my third trip in a week to Gatwick to take my wife to catch her plane for a two week trip to Australia. I’m never good without my soul mate although we can at least now FaceTime and keep in touch through WhatsApp. As little as twenty years ago it would have been totally unknown for ordinary folk to have these things at their disposal.
My tactic for dealing with her absence is to stay as busy as possible so I have jammed my diary with stuff for the next fortnight so that I won’t have time to mope. Loneliness is probably my least favourite emotion and definitely a gateway to panic attacks and depression. But don’t take my word for it. The Campaign to end loneliness has a mass of research based evidence on their website which shows that loneliness can make you physically ill, mentally ill, and drive you to drink and drugs. Just ask my mates that I got very pissed with the day after she flew out.
Let’s move on.
Pigeon Menace
For those of you who remember cartoons of the sixties and seventies, there was a spin off from Whacky Races that featured the evil Dick Dastardly and his rarely faithful and generally less than helpful sidekick Mutley. Their mission was to catch a homing pigeon that was carrying messages during World War One, which put it in a similar category to the Coyote and the Road Runner in the sense that only one of the characters was ever going to come out of it well and it was never the bad guy.
EXTRACT FROM EPISODE 1 OF DASTARDLY AND MUTLEY
Pigeons of course are very common birds the world over and were considered such a threat to Trafalgar Square that the pigeon food sellers were evicted by the Mayor of London many moons ago to rescue the tourists and locals alike from the perils of pigeon pooh. It also meant that Lord Nelson was spared the indignity of being shat on every five minutes and ending up with more white streaks than a tv screen full of static. The musical comic genius Tom Lehrer had no qualms about recording a song back in the sixties called Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, knowing that he would gain as many sympathisers as detractors. It contained the following brilliant lines:
When they see us coming
The birdies all try and hide
But they still go for peanuts
When coated with cyanide
However the Indian Government has a remarkable history of taking pigeon phobia far too seriously. Recently it released a pigeon that had been in detention for ten months whilst they investigated the claim that it was a Chinese spy pigeon. Actually it was, in true Dastardly and Mullet tradition, more of a cock-up than a conspiracy. The bird was captured at a sea port where it was believed to be acting suspiciously and taken to a veterinary hospital to be investigated, presumably for hidden cameras and swallowed message capsules. The authorities promptly forgot about it until word got back to PETA. Now PETA is a great organisation – the initials stand for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – but it can be a little earnest and over-zealous. It campaigns amongst other things for all cats to be indoor cats, which I heartily disagree with (how can you imprison cats and argue for free range chickens?). But their heart is in the right place and they took up the cause and got him released.
India has previous in this area although not usually in its paranoia about China. In 2015 a Pakistani villager pleaded with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to return his pigeon, which was being held on charges of spying.
The man, who lives just 4km from the border, said he flew his pigeons to celebrate Eid festival. Police said the pigeon had a ring on one of its legs, inscribed with a code that they were trying to decipher, although the owner pointed out that this number sequence was his mobile phone number.
He had a dozen pigeons who were all similarly inscribed. The same thing happened again in 2020 and 2021 and one suspects that for every known detained bird there may be dozens held in the Indian pigeon version of Guantanamo Bay. Now I do understand the psychology of this. There may be
BAD JOKE ALERT
Concerns that the pigeons are trying to organise a coo / coup. But that is no reason to suspend normal pigeon rights process. In Britain of course doing bird is Cockney rhyming slang for going to prison but I don’t think we have a tradition of forcing birds to do bird here.
I am however of the view that pigeons cannot be trusted. My bird cam at the bottom of the garden records dozens of visits from birds big and small every day but the pigeons tend to be greedy and clumsy. They will wait patiently if a squirrel is on the table – I have actually seen them queuing waiting for a squirrel to finish – but the little birds just get shoved out of the way. I also find them far too pushy. It’s difficult to eat a vegan sausage roll in Woking town centre as they will crowd around you and come after your puff pastry. But the fact is that they are just too numerous, too common. They are the plebs of the bird world who tend to go around in gangs and get in the way. Once useful as a source of food, or for carrying messages in wartime, they are now derided.
Pineapple poking
I recently came across an article about monogamy in Vogue, which was bad on a number of levels, the first being that it took a narrow perspective on an issue and tried to make all sorts of arguments that were laughable because of the biases of the author. Its central thesis was that monogamy was dead simply because a few more people in America were, partly because of covid, experimenting with getting their rocks off with persons other than their main life partner.
The article centres on a case study of Megan and Marty Bathia who sound like characters in a Douglas Adams novel but are in fact typical examples of aspiring professionals approaching middle age and crushed by the reality of corporate America and looking for a way to get their mojo back. Listen to this quote.
Opening their relationship sparked a stream of existential questions for the Bhatias, according to Megan: “Whose life are we living? What do we want?” Entrenched systems were equally open to debate. “We are in a time of questioning institutional structures like health care, education, and, yes, monogamy,” she says, referencing the rise of a vocal, progressive political movement demanding sweeping structural change. The swelling impulse to challenge the status quo, from systemic racism and criminal justice to #MeToo’s reckoning on sexist abuse, had crept into her sex life and relationship style: “I think people are disillusioned with life right now and really starting to write their own rules,” Megan says.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not making a case for or against monogamy, it’s a matter of personal choice. But most people just don’t have the time or the personal resources to do anything more than earn a living, spend time with the kids, clean the house, plan the shopping and fall into bed exhausted at the end of each day. Their relationship may or may not be a happy one but chances are both the people in it are probably under a lot of pressure. And by the time they aren’t and the mortgage is paid off and the kids have grown up they will probably be more worried about pelvic floor and prostates than the luxury of a non monogamous relationship.
That sounds unusually harsh for me but this article quotes a lot of statistics and gives a lot of examples that really are plucked from a narrow section of society and I found that annoying. There is a discussion about a woman called Tina from Essex who used to sit down with her husband and maintain an excel spreadsheet of their spice rack before deciding to start bonking around by mutual consent. That was almost literally a case of deciding to spice up your love life. Tina from Essex actually made an interesting point that working from home made it easier to have sex with other people, presumably because you could shop closer to home and saved time on your commute. No wonder there are a lot of news stories about employers getting paranoid about what their staff get up to when working from home. “Sorry I’m just going to have to turn off my camera during this meeting as my good looking neighbour is going to do me over the desk for a few minutes with the consent of myself and my husband”.
What, you might ask, has all this to do with pineapples? Well apparently it is a symbol that you are up for it even if you have a wedding ring and can be approached for sex without damaging the wider relationship. A pineapple t shirt is pretty much an invitation for an approach to shag. The Southampton Cruise Centre website contains a hilarious and very straight faced account of this as follows.
A pineapple has often been seen as a code for swinging and sticking an upside down pineapple on your stateroom door is seen as enticing other couples into joining your ‘adult fun’…Hawaii first created the ‘upside down pineapple cake’ to serve when guests came to visit, so it became a symbol of hospitality in the country. Pineapples were also considered an affluent fruit and they were often used as centrepieces for dinner parties. Swingers then adopted this symbol, accommodating others to join their lifestyle.
There is apparently some debate about whether the pineapple needs to be upside down or not. So be careful next time you go to Sainsbury’s and buy a fresh one. If you put it in the trolley upside down you may get more than just double nectar points at the checkout and have some explaining to do.
The Men’s Room
The culture war generals and their strategists would have you believe that we live in an age of extremes, which is simply not true. Opinions on all things are nuanced and always have been, and that includes the debate about what it is to be an older man in an age of uncertainty. Where extremes exist they are usually manufactured by the likes of the Daily Mail, for whom love sells no papers but anger generates circulation increases. They are of course asking one question when they should be asking many, and seeking a single solution when they should be seeking a whole range. As the phrase goes: it’s complicated. We all need to learn to behave better. We all need to leave the gun in the holster until we’ve had a chance to talk. And people need to stop reading the Daily Mail.
So this is a piece about men getting older and defying stereotypes, which will bring big benefits for society and even bigger benefits for men’s health and wellbeing. I am 65 which according to any age distribution graph of the UK population does not make me a particular outlier against any single other age group – the real drop off point comes when you hit 75 and you find yourself in a dwindling minority. According to the stereotypes there is a good chance I should be a grumpy, mildly racist, anti-woke, Brexit voting mysogynist who thinks things used to be better. Actually I’m none of those things (okay I am occasionally grumpy). But the reality is that I have always tried to be better than that, and most of my male acquaintances of my age, whilst far from perfect, also aspire to do better.
So here’s my thinking. I have recently started a small WhatsApp group consisting of four older men whose avowed aim is to meet up, drink beer and talk. Yes we do talk about football. But we don’t talk about cars or golf. At our inaugural meeting we covered a lot of ground that included a long conversation about the hell that is the menopause and how helpless you feel when watching your female partner suffering. We talked a lot about politics and the state of the world. We swopped stories about life experiences and we share our anxieties about mental health and ageing. We even hugged when we headed home.
In the UK, research by the Movember Foundation in 2018 found 27% of men said they had no close friends at all. They also found that friendships become less strong as men get older, with 22% of men aged 55 and over saying they never see their friends. It would seem there is, for men at least, a friendship recession.
In addition to my recently founded group – which is based around former NHS colleagues – I also have many other male friends from different walks of life who I see regularly, sometimes in small groups and sometimes on a one to one basis. To me this is an essential facet of growing older. But what I find is that as we age and become more vulnerable we are also more likely to share our experiences and our vulnerabilities, which is the opposite of what researchers would suggest. Here are some unattributed phrases I have heard in conversation with male friends in recent months.
“I don’t have any interests so sometimes I don’t know what to do with myself”.
“I tried to kill myself once and I don’t mind talking about it”.
“I’m sickened by the loss of standards in public life. Things were never perfect but nowadays politicians just take the piss. I think it’s really sad. And this isn’t the kind of world I expected to grow old in”.
“I’m going to keep working as long as I can. At least that way I can pretend I’m not getting old”.
“You keep seeing obituaries of people that are dying in their seventies and you think Christ, that could be me a few years from now.. It’s scary.”
“I’m sorry for just talking about my ailments but they’ve been getting me down lately”.
Now what is even more interesting is that these phrases don’t come out after a few beers but are just part of normal conversation. In fact after a few drinks there is a more relaxed and warm and genuinely humorous tone to the conversation. The fears get left behind, the catharsis done. It is I imagine easier for people to party once they’ve shown the demons the door but you do have to learn the rituals of exorcising your fears, your vulnerabilities and insecurities. But I have had what I would call deep conversations with other men over coffee and even on street corners so alcohol is far from essential, and in fact there is a rising tide of drinking less and drinking differently as people realise how bad it is for you to be reliant on it.
There is another side to the issue of friendships. Professor Rose Anne Kenny who I saw at the Hay Festival last year has written an excellent book called Age Proof where she notes the truth of that old adage “you can’t choose your family but you can choose your friends”. In it she reports:
Friendships play a big part in health and well-being in late life because our interactions with friends stem from choice, and we are most likely to maintain the friendships that we enjoy most. On days when we positively interact with friends, we report greater happiness and more positive mood. Friendships are more closely tied to well-being because friends often engaging leisure activities together, in limited doses that involved degree of spontaneity. In contrast, selectively removing family relationships which are stressful or unpleasant is considerably harder than removing strange friendships, which explains why friendships have a stronger impact on happiness than some family relationships.
Part of the stoking of the culture wars by the right wing press is to generate tension between the generations. Even when accurate it can be unhelpful. For instance there is this from Brendan O’Neil in The Spectator back in 2020.
An extraordinary myth has taken hold about Boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964. Namely that they all had a free university education, a job for life, and a home of their own that they bought when they were about 25. This is complete nonsense. The vast majority of Boomers never darkened the door of a university. Many left school at the age of 14 to work and keep their families in food and lodgings. Some even lived in slums, which mercifully no longer exist in the UK.
Prejudice is so often based on false assumptions, and that is no different for the prejudice that says old people are all wealthy, greedy sociopaths who are now sticking two fingers up at the struggling young. Yes, many millennials are having a tough time, but believe me, you have experienced nothing like the depths of poverty or hardship many Boomers were brought up in.
O’Neill is both right and wrong. Yes we shouldn’t demonise Baby Boomers (of which I am one) but to compare the generations is actually the wrong starting point. The question should be to ask whether key indicators of inequality have changed and whether our communities and our personal relationships are more or less healthy.
So where am I going with this? I suppose what I am saying is that it is perfectly possible for older men to be “woke” and we should embrace that side of ourselves. We don’t have to give up beer and football but we do need to have the courage to let the other topics of conversation in, and they do need to influence our behaviour. We are well placed to reach out to other generations an d use our time to build bridges. And we need to laugh. That is perhaps one of the greatest benefits of coming together, particularly when you can make jokes at your own expense. In my experience one of the great benefits of age is that you can look back on your life with real humour and not care anymore about what judgements people may form.
Outtros
That’s all from me this week. Next time I will be focusing on my forthcoming trip to Yorkshire and trying to understand why there is such a tension between Yorkshire Folk and Softie Southerners. The playout this week is a very personal one from Elton John, “I’m Still Standing”. Two and a half months on from leaving the NHS for good I’m in the angry phase of looking back over my career and in particular remembering the nasty top execs and politicians who make the life of most NHS staff hell. The salient lyrics are in the second verse and I quote
Don’t you know I’m still standin’ better than I ever did Lookin’ like a true survivor, feelin’ like a little kid I’m still standin’ after all this time Picking up the pieces of my life without you on my mind
Eyecatching 