DIARY
DIGBY ANDERSON The house is suddenly looking quite bare. I have finally taken down the notices. Just before Christmas I was at a small con- ference held in a stately home. That is, in the summer it's a stately home open to the public, a museum of sorts. In the winter it takes a few guests for conferences, a hotel of sorts. This means it has to keep the guests discreetly off the very valuable furni- ture and paintings. It does this by a judi- cious use of ropes and notices. I returned determined that we, at No. 17, should have notices in our house too. They have been a great success with the last lot of guests over Christmas. Next time people come to stay, we shall have ropes as well. The use of the notices is slightly different from that in the stately home. There was one each on my and Mrs A's armchair saying, 'Reserved for permanent residents'. You may tut, but a friend's mother-in-law recently scorned 28 to steal his; 'We have 29 chairs, Digby, 29, I counted, and which one did she sit in?' There was a large, stern notice on the kitchen door forbidding access, and one on the bathroom, 'Frequent washing is injuri- ous to health and character'. One of the most effective was slipped into the books we were reading which, when not being read, lay on various tables: 'Someone else has already started reading this book. If You wish to choose a book, find one for Yourself from the bookcase'. But the one with 100 per cent success was on the man- telshelf: `Do not poke, or otherwise rear- range the fire'. It is sad that society has come to this, that these notices are neces- sary. But I was impressed by how respected they were. The old codes are still there. They just need activating. No doubt readers Will be able to improve on my efforts. I intend to do so myself. But a warning. With the notices you also need a general book of instructions announcing times of meals, with warnings to guests not to talk about their ailments or the traffic problems they encountered on their way. This I had. What I forgot was to make a map of where all the notices were. Some were obvious, but many had been left to be uncovered and come as a surprise. You need the map to find them to take down.
Idoubt that Miss Polly Toynbee has notices in her house. And if she has, she has not thought much of the informal social codes they activate. I have just heard her on the wireless. She was 'trailing' a pro- gramme she was to do in one of those irri- tating self-advertisements the BBC is always doing when you are waiting for another quite different programme you have chosen to listen to. I didn't catch the exact words, but it was something along the lines of, 'Is our society really an equal/men- tocratic/democratic' one? Politicians and people like Miss Toynbee obviously think that this matters. I'm not sure anyone else much cares, at least in the important things of life such as who sits on which armchair. When I started to think about the codes governing behaviour in the home, they had more or less nothing to do with such ideas and everything to do with who the various people were, their relationships to the property and to each other.
This is true in the swimming pool too. I've taken up swimming again as part of a general attempt to take up a whole list of things I used to do and enjoy, but dropped, decades ago in teenage years. Adolescence brings a few new hobbies such as girls, but the cost is enormous in habits and hobbies forgone. Also reinstated are dominoes, shooting, Rafael Sabatini, choral evensong and gin rummy. It's a big and serious swim- ming pool where swimmers swim serious numbers of lengths seriously. Above all else, no swimmer wants to share a lane, though there are notices indicating how this can be done. So who gets a lane and how? Obviously the fat swimming-club fee keeps most people out. After that, timing is important, knowing the busy and quiet times. After that, all sorts of informal things. A swimmer in his lane will start swimming more furiously when he sees another enter the pool door, glare through his goggles, and move to the centre of the `Some crackdown, she'll probably get porridge.' lane. Breast-stroke swimmers increase the width of their arm-stroke, crawlers start blowing out air noisily.
Iam currently editing a report on the hereditary principle, which, I suppose, is why I've started noticing such things. What emerges is that if you look at the important parts of life, who leaves money to whom, who gets a good start in life, who helps whom, who is expected by others to help whom, all matter of duties, rewards, advan- tages and privileges, including armchairs and swimming lanes, these turn out to have very little to do with equality, meritocracy or democracy and everything to do with who people are, where they are, when and how: in the jargon with 'particularity'. The principles which put the hereditary peers where they are, far from being anachronis- tic or anomalous, are ones which remain powerful and popular throughout society.
Athe dust starts to settle on the Man- delson affair, one legacy is that the Conser- vatives have a new word in their vocabulary and, they think, a new weapon in their armoury: 'cronyism'. Whenever I hear one of the shadow ministers on the wireless, be it on education or Iraq, he manages to slip in a jibe about cronyism. Labour used to have a similar jibe about old boys' net- works. Both cronies and networks of OBs seem to me potentially good, not bad, things. More to the point, both are used widely, successfully and approvedly in most people's lives. One helps friends because one knows they can be trusted. Of course, there is a downside and all sorts of risks, but better the devil. . . . The modern idea is to choose candidates for a job or position purely on the basis of their competence. The old idea was to choose them on that and their character. And you only knew their character if you had known them some time — khronios; long-lasting — or knew someone who had known them. That is what a 'character', a testimonial was. What was wrong with Barings' appointment of Mr Leeson was not that he was incompe- tent, but that he was the wrong sort of per- son. An old boys' network would have spot- ' ted him a mile off, and most of the Labour fallen of the past weeks.
Day after day Mr Hague and Mr Blair compete to see who can appear the more modern. What any non-politician's diary would show is that the nuts and bolts of everyday home and public life in today's Britain are not modern at all. The gulf between everyday realities and the talk of politicians has never been wider.
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