SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

J. W. M. THOMPSON

The orgy of year-end and decade-end stock- taking doesn't seem to have produced any very clear consensus about the recent past, except possibly a modest echoing of the Abbe Sieyes' unheroic boast: 'We survived'.

We are all in the habit of looking back without affection upon an old year. There used to be a cartoon which regularly ap- peared at this season, in which the dying year was depicted as a ravaged and mourn- ful ancient and the new one as a smiling and hopeful babe. Although cartoon clichés have changed, the general sentiment is much the same, at least so far as the old year is concerned. Even when one thinks of years which saw triumphs-1945, for instance— once remembers that by the end of Decem- ber disillusionment had already begun.

The history books of the future will no doubt place 1969 alongside other per- manently-labelled dates, like 1066 or 1914, as the year of the moon landings; but as so often the matter the historians will seize upon hasn't meant much to people alive at the time. Our preoccupations are smaller, and more pressing. And, rather to my sur- prise, I find 1969 in some ways brighter in retrospect than many of its immediate pre- decessors. I think—or like to think—that it saw a hint of a new realism in this country, after a long engagement with the consola- tions of self-delusion.

In this optimistic mood, I would choose as the hopeful symbol of 1969 the fact that the nation then discovered, after years of genuflecting before the oafish gods of the balance-sheet, that many of the statistics flourished by the priest-economists had been ludicrously wrong. The oracles of the age had to confess that they had made a hash of their sums. We should not be ungrateful to a year which brought us that small release.

Out of season

But I have been impress'ed in the past few days by the odd absurdity of the arrange- ment which has us all pretending that a new year has in fact begun on 1 January. Where I live, on the fringe of East Anglia, the countryside gave the lie direct to this fiction when I walked over the fields in some of the last hours of 1969. Everything was still, silent, lifeless; the world had fallen asleep and was clearly far from the hour of awakening; nothing moved, on the grey earth or in the grey sky. What we have now entered, I reflected, is by any reasonable view the last quarter of the old year. the season when life dies away and winter buries and freezes everything.

I've never found out quite how this obvious truth came to be submerged in the present perverse convention about 1 Janu- ary. Certainly for long periods our fore- fathers sensibly celebrated New Year's Day in March, as did the Romans until Julius Caesar reshaped their calendar. William the Conqueror made 1 January the first day of the year; but the innovation didn't stick, and the realistic English were beginning their new year on 25 March (that is, Lady Day) until the middle of the eighteenth century.

It was pushed back to January again when we adopted the Gregorian calendar: an early example of our sacrificing national customs for the sake of a continental tie-up. This reform was, of course, all very en- lightened and a great advance on the old Julian calendar, which was gradually slip- ping further and further out of alignment with the solar system. But for some reason the fixing of New Year's Day on 1 January went with it, although so far as I can see this had nothing at all to do with the astronomical corrections it incorporated. We have been stuck with this arrangement ever since.

Thus, this week we wish each other a happy new year—and then brace ourselves for the full rigours of winter. I fail to see how this makes the prospect any more comfortable.

Reluctant heroes

President Johnson's television interview was vintage Liu: the BBC was shrewd to snap it

up and show it at length. Nevertheless, if Mr Johnson's main object was to put an end to his 'credibility gap' the effort was a re- sounding failure. Indeed, his new version of history seems chiefly to have demonstrated that former Presidents can have a credi- bility gap as well as those still in the White House.

But, leaving aside the massive scepticism which his narrative of events has aroused in America, what made me boggle was one of his general statements, which seemed to carry the politician's necessary talent for self-deception unusually far. 'The men who really get power and have power are gener- ally people who don't want power': by what conceivable reasoning, in a democracy, can such a proposition be supported? The list of American Presidents and British Prime Ministers in recent times doesn't yield a single name of a man who hadn't conscious- ly and for a long period of time set out to win power—not necessarily expecting the power of the top job, of course, but certainly trying to secure all the power that was avail- able. The idea of a Churchill or a Nixon (to take obviously disparate examples) unwill- ingly accepting the power thrust upon him is just a joke.

No one who knows anything of the tedium and drudgery involved in the pursuit of elected office can suppose that men put up with it without the strong incentive of the prize of power, at some level or other, ahead of them. I don't see anything in- herently shameful in this appetite, even though politicians do tend to be bashful about it.

They used to call their itch to run things 'the desire to serve'. Mr Johnson has gone further by plaintively denying that the itch even exists. I prefer the motto with which another former President, Harry Tru- man, used to admonish self-pitying col- leagues: `If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen'.

Memo to Mintech

This may be a significant matter at the start of a new decade. A Kensington resident in- forms me that the parking meters outside his house invariably reject the new, decimal 10p coins but swallow the old two-shilling pieces without demur. If machines are them- selves turning reactionary and Luddite now, what can the future hold?