Diary
As readers of this diary may remember, Wivenhoe is having trouble with its port, which has been greatly expanded in recent months with grim consequences, such as fleets of lorries careering down the the High Street, clouds of coal dust and other blights. The whole village, naturally enough, wants something done about it. But to whom should we turn? In theory, to Colchester Council. But little joy was to be found there, since it was Colchester Coun- cil which approved the port expansion in the first place. In the old days, faced with an emergency of this kind, we would have looked to the squire to take the matter up with his powerful friends in London. But Wivenhoe no longer has a squire; nor much of a parson for that matter. What we do have, of course, like every other com- munity, is a local doctor, and it has been interesting to notice how nowadays he has taken the place of squire and parson as the village father figure to whom people look for leadership and help in time of trouble. In this case, luckily, our doctor is one of the old school who accepts that doctoring carries with it social responsibilities which transcend its strictly medical or scientific aspects. But the younger doctors in the area, trained in the modern medical school manner, take a very different view. According to them, the scientific aspects of doctoring are now so complex that the general practitioner cannot afford the time even to be counsellor and friend to his patients, let alone leader of the commun- ity. No doubt this is true, and something similar may also be true of local solicitors and all the other professional people whose activities have now become so specialised as to disqualify them from a broader human involvement. But if doctors in Particular, and professional people in general, are increasingly going to be trained in such a way as to preclude them from filling the social gap left by the squire and parson, who else is there to take up the burden? Nobody. Yet all local communi- ties sometimes feel the need, as Wivenhoe does at present, to look to some person or Persons for protection, over and above the increasingly empty protection afforded by the democratic process. This role used to °e performed by the upper class before it was killed off by egalitarianism; then by the professional class. But even the profes- sional class is now being rendered unsuit- able by the demands of specialisation which have transformed the younger gen- eration into narrow experts quite unsuited to solve any problem outside their own Particular field.
Imagine my chagrin on arriving in Wivenhoe last Saturday to find that the fudents had set up a jumble sale stall bang
in front of my quayside house to raise money for the miners' wives. My good . temper, however, was swiftly restored by the sight of a brand-new sailing boat, moored nearby, belonging to Heave-Ho Sid, the admirable local policeman, who has been much in evidence recently con- trolling the flying pickets. Sid has christ- ened his new boat 'King Arthur' in great gold lettering because, as he gleefully explained to me from the deck, its purch- ase would never have been possible except for all the overtime he has been earning during the last few months, thanks to Mr Scargill.
Around here, as everywhere else, the fields are now littered with great circular bales of wheat and barley, looking through the heat-haze like giant golden wheels which might have fallen off the juggernauts of some advancing Martian army. I much preferred it when the com- bine harvester spewed forth those large rectangular blocks which transformed the fields into a kind of Sahara Desert dotted with Beau Geste forts. These circular bales exude . an unearthly ' menace! as if ' they were waiting in readiness for a command from outer space to start rolling inexorably forward on some mission which has no- thing to do with anything so innocent as feeding human beings.
What would the Western reaction be if President Chernenko was reported to have made a joke about bombing the Americans? Surprise, first of all, that such a cheerless old curmudgeon had made a joke about anything and then, I suspect, immense relief. For would we not be inclined to conclude that a Russian leader prepared to joke in this way was not the kind of obsessive fanatic who might be seriously thinking of pressing the button? If Hitler had joked about gassing Jews, surely this could reasonably have been taken as a good sign that he was not as
seriously determined on this end as we now know him to have been. It seems to me that those who fear that Ronald Reagan is a fanatic hell-bent on annihilating the Russians should be comforted by his gaffe, which could never have been made by a president who actually expected ever to have to carry out his threat. Incidentally, at the bar of .xxxx, Club, on the day this gaffe story broke, I found myself standing be- tween deeply concerned 'great and good' Mark Bonham-Carter, who thought the President's conduct scandalous, and much amused reprobate George Jellicoe, who could not understand what all the fuss was about. Although I was pretty certain where, my feeling lay on the question before this encounter, after it there was no longer even a scintilla of doubt.
How I hate having my hair cut. For 201 minutes or so there is no choice but to look at my own reflection in the mirror. No, this not just boastful false modesty. Under some circumstances it can, I admit, be quite agreeable looking at myself in the mirror — after due care has been taken to make sure that everything is as shipshape as humanly possible. But once in the barber's chair, all control over your appearance vanishes, and you are compel- led to watch the soaking hair being combed into the most hideous shapes, the worst of which is when the barber combs it straight over your forehead. UGH! Nor is it possi- ble to shut your eyes, even for a moment, for fear that the barber will take this to imply agreement to all sorts of horrific experiments from which he can be deterred only by constant vigilance. There is also now a new torture: the blow-drier, which my barber seems all the more eager to inflict since I complained that its use on my head made me look like Quentin Crisp. All I ever want in fact is the simplest trim. But how to explain to this modern artist, with all his latest equipment, that the less he does to improve my appearance, the hap- pier I will be, without sounding like a proper coxcomb? Truth to tell, I prefer nowadays going to the dentist where the wonders of modern technology have taken away from, rather than added to, the attendant unpleasantnesses.
What laws of retailing demand that 'Centres' should proliferate ever out- wards towards the circumference? Walking from St James's Street through the back streets of Soho towards the Spectator office I counted no fewer than 43 centres. The purpose presumably is to make the shop seem grander than it is. But in most cases the contrast between the grandiose name and mean appearance suggests an owner who lacks all conviction. But not all is lost while the West End centre proper holds. If Lobbs were to become the hat centre and Berrys the wine centre, then the end would surely have come.
Peregrine Worsthorne
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