SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
J. W. M. THOMPSON
Politically these past few days have been startling, and in a way difficult to account for in normal terms. Extraordinary explanations are required. In earlier, and arguably jollier, times it was the custom at this season of the year to appoint a Lord of Misrule, a mock-dignitary who would hold sway in every great household, turning conventions upside down and creating a fine old havoc in the cause of holiday mirth. In recent days, as members of the Cabinet have fought out their battles in the lurid light of the newspapers, as hectic rumours of resignation and plot have chased each other around Lon- don, I have found myself turning increasingly to the hypothesis that the Prime Minister has secretly decided to liven us all up by reviving this ancient Christmas tradition. Enter, pranc- ing briskly along Downing Street, the Lord of Misrule, fantastically attired, and attended by courtiers, tumblers, fools, hobbyhorses, captives and other diversions. (One can spot a few familiar faces among the little band.) On, at once, to an orgy of general mockery and foolery, to the amazement of all at hand; the bills will wait until a more prosaic season. There is, as I see it, only one flaw in this amiable interpretation of events. How did Mr Wilson procure a Lord of Misrule who so closely resembled himself that he's been able to deceive everyone throughout the boisterous carnival?
Without prejudice
After this week in Brussels, we're no doubt in for another bleak spell of analysis of Britain's ultimate chance of shedding her dread Anglo- Saxon taint, and thus proving to the old man in the Elys6e that we're not Angles but angels, or at least on their side. This we must bear. Meanwhile, I've noted the hubbub over Presi- dent de Gaulle's latest exercise in racial dishar- mony, his characterisation of Jews as 'self- assured, domineering'; and arising out of this I'd like to introduce another speculation into this unseemly ethnic squabble: namely, Is de Gaulle a Jew? Perhaps Le Monde would care to initiate some scholarly inquiries.
On the road
When driving out of London towards Cam- bridge, I sometimes used to see a little tribe of gipsies encamped on the strip of grass beside the road. It was a strange sight to come across a dozen miles from the West End. Their horses nibbled the grass, women in dresses of antique length bent over a cooking fire or spread their washing across a hedge, and only a few feet away the modem world in the form of incessant motor traffic thundered by. Human beings reduced to discomfited anachronisms in this way make an uneasy spectacle. A few days ago, I noticed that the strip of grass had vanished: in its place a second carriageway was being built. I hope the gipsies didn't arrive there one evening unaware that yet another insecure resting-place had been commandeered for ever. But if they did, they could hardly have been surprised. The travelling families, being the nearest modem equivalent to hunted outlaws, must carry a sense of doom with them as they plod from one inhospitable place to another. I'm afraid our society's attitude towards these people is discreditable. We find it easy to speak out charitably on behalf of repressed peoples in other countries, we brandish our superior morality at the South Africans and the Rhodesians, yet we acquiesce in the exis- tence in our own country of this persecuted and deprived minority. To me it was shameful that, at Christmas time of all times, an inter- national relief organisation should have found it necessary to petition the Ministry of Housing for more merciful treatment of the gipsies of Britain.
At present, up and down the country, the police drive them away like criminals. In one sense, indeed, they are criminals of a sort, in that they cannot be slotted neatly into our urbanised, industrialised, filing-cabinet-and- computerised national pattern. They are grit in the machine. This, one concedes, is a very grave offence, revealing a' deplorable lack of some- thing or other. They are also, like other de- pressed people, not especially intelligent, frequently illiterate, rather grubby, and not perhaps as impeccably honest as, say, a politi- cian or a tycoon. But they happen, too, to be human beings, and might ask, with Shylock, 'If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you poison us, do we not die?'
Seasonable
My family was delighted by the promise con• tained in the light sprinkling of snow on Mon- day morning. 'Snow for Christmas!' Why this love of harsh weather at this season? Have we all been brainwashed by Christmas card propa- ganda or is it the lingering link with pagan midwinter festivities? Of course, the comforts of an indoor domestic festival are enhanced when the world outside turns severe, and the pleasures of hard weather are widely enjoyed just now, in different ways. I've just had a telephone call from California which cheer- fully reported, inter alia, a rare taste of season- able rigour—the coldest December for many years, 'and the swimming pool is frozen over.' Not quite Dickensian in idiom, perhaps, but in the spirit nevertheless.
Few of us today savour the delights of con- trast as strong-mindedly as people used to do. I came across this the other day while reading Francis Kilvert, the endlessly interesting Victorian parson-diarist: 'Christmas Day, 1870 . . . An intense frost. I sat down in my bath upon a sheet of thick ice which broke in the middle into large pieces whilst sharp points and jagged edges stuck all round the sides of the tub like cheraux de frise, not par- ticularly comforting to the naked thighs and loins, for the keen ice cut like broken glass. The ice water stung and scorched like fire. I had to collect the floating pieces of ice and pile them on a chair before I could use the sponge and then I had to thaw the sponge in my hands for it was a mass of ice. The morning was most brilliant.' I don't expect a great num- ber of people in 1967 to spice their festive comforts in quite this way.
Whatever their tastes, however, I wish a happy Christmas to all those readers who have stuck to this Notebook since it came into my hands almost a year ago; and even, with a seasonable effort, to those who haven't.
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