DIARY
MATTHEW PARRIS Anew survey confirms what we know already: that, among providers of public services, local government is the most hated. So how has the myth arisen that town halls and parish clerks are somehow closest to the people?
The parish laws, and parish queens and kings, Pride's lowest classes of pretending things wrote John Clare, nearly two centuries ago. Since then, reams of twaddle about the sen- sitivity of the smallest units of authority to local need has failed to establish local gov- ernment in the affections of the English. As we emerge from the decades when 'small is beautiful' was the fashionable cant, it is time to re-think. All over the world, espe- cially the Third World, grasping small busi- nessmen throttle economic development, small farmers wreck the environment and smalltown porkbarrel politicians cheat the people they affect to know. Small is not necessarily beautiful. Small is stupid, philis- tine, intolerant. Small is mean, corrupt and self-serving. Small is hateful — now there's a slogan!
Iwrite this in Spain, where the contro- versy surrounding newspaper photos of naked royal Britannic babies seems strangely removed from the forefront of our minds. The Times letters column, I see, dwells still upon that photograph, and one of the Duke of York. I must be the last per- son in Britain not to have seen the famous shot of Prince Andrew. Naked? Really? Of course the quality papers never tell you what you want to know: was the nude photo from the front or back — of the royal genitalia, that is, or of His Royal Highness's bottom? Presumably dukes, even Dukes of York, do have bottoms? Or do they? All around me, as I sit with my Times on the beach, naked children play and swim. Their parents do not seem at all concerned. Princess Eugenie is in some pretty careless company I'm afraid, here on the Costa Brava, and I can just about stand missing that photo of her. My indifference towards Prince Andrew's bottom is prodigious.
The Italian press prefers pictures of refugees being herded like desperate ani- mals. This degradation of the Albanian people is embarrassing and sad, and their being fellow-Europeans makes me espe- cially ashamed. I visited Albania last autumn. It is far from the bleak, alien, ungenerous place that we picture. Its gov- ernment is vile, but the people themselves are a warm, gay, thoroughly Mediterranean nation; a handsome people, many with flax- en hair and brown eyes. But they are poor, and desperate to know more of a world from which they are so isolated. They make television aerials out of wire coat-hangers and wood, and point them at Italy! I had never quite sensed what I sensed there: a feeling of collective loneliness. I asked our guide what Tirana (which we were to visit) was like. 'How do I know?' he replied. 'I've never been anywhere else.' I said Albanians should not think that the grass was every- where greener: at least, I said, they had enough food and clothing. 'You are com- paring us to primitive people,' he replied hotly, tut I am a European, like you.'
rom the miscellany of the Costa Brava news-stand, England's Today shouts its dis- like of Catholic doctors who are boycotting the manufacturer of an abortion pill. I am not a Catholic, and think Rome's attitude to abortion wrong-headed. But is the status of human life not a most important matter, and are Catholics not entitled to a view, and from views may practical consequences not flow? If you think that a drug manufac- turer is conspiring to murder the unborn, is it obviously wrong to avoid dealing with him, even at some slight cost? Or are boy- cotts only acceptable when directed against South Africa, or Nestle? There is an ugly edge to our reaction when Catholics try to organise what they see as a moral response. These doctors are not concealing their campaign; nobody is forced to be their patient. If I found my doctor had a sense of 'We're the sinking man's crumpet.' good and evil strong enough to risk deri- sion in Today I should be encouraged.
You know it's August when there is a Times leading article about unidentified fly- ing objects. 'In Hungary, an entire army unit testified to the appearance at its bar- racks in Tarnaszentmaria of a Saturn- shaped UFO inhabited by 10-foot-tall beings,' says the Times. 'In Mongolia, nomads are meeting them everywhere.' The implication is that if a large number testify to the same sight, the sighting should be given more weight. But the reverse is true. What makes you think you can see a 10-foot-tall being is the fact that the person next to you says he can see one. When we lived in Jamaica, rumours once swept the island that giant John-Crows (buzzard-like birds) wearing top hats were wheeling a coffin from Montego Bay to Kingston. Apparently the creatures spoke with posh English accents. Hundreds testified to it. Our maid, Cyrilena, went down to Kingston by bus to witness their arrival. She returned convinced that she too had seen them.
ews has reached me that fain Picton has died. I first met bin canvassing in Der- byshire for his friend, Tom Spencer, who was standing for the European Parliament. Later he joined Weekend World where he worked with me before going on to the BBC's On the Record. Weekend World recruited lain, I think, partly because they wanted a Tory to balance the Guardian- reading tendency among researchers. They got, instead, a true liberal in the American sense. An honourable, charitable and inde- pendent man, kind, gentle and completely unassuming — a mark of the intelligence lain had to spare. And to think of all the rats he leaves behind! Why do the nice ones have to go? lain was very young.
Abus links Luton airport with the rail- way station. Here, waiting for a train in the early morning, I saw a prison officer hand- cuffed to the prisoner whom he was trans- porting. They sat down on a bench. They were both trying to keep awake. Slowly, the prisoner's head nodded and slumped side- ways. Then the officer's did the same. As I left, the pair were fast asleep in a shaft of sunlight, the officer's head having fallen inadvertently onto the prisoner's shoulders. `Oh for that sweet, untroubled rest,' wrote Clare, confined in a mental asylum,
That poets oft have sung! - The babe upon its mother's breast, The bird upon its young, The heart asleep without a pain When shall I know that sleep again?
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