Afternoon delight

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I read about a very interesting book this week.

Delight by JB Priestley was published in 1949, a grim time by today's standards, although I don't expect people moaned as much then as they do now because that was before moaning became a vocation.

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Delight (which I haven't actually read, being far too busy to spend time on trivialities) is apparently Priestley's attempt to cheer people up in a still bombed-out, rationed, economically-ruined Britain by reminding them of the simple pleasures in life.

Of course, many of Priestley's delights would today be frowned upon and some considered suicidal, such as frying sausages in the open air, smoking in a hot bath or drinking gin and tonics alone – and I'm ashamed to say that two of my biggest small pleasures (although I don't smoke any more) have been breaking open a tightly-packed cube of Golden Virginia tobacco and releasing that exciting scent of tar and carcinogens, and arriving as first customer at a well-kept, gleaming pub and taking in the smell of wood polish and Brasso.

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Which doesn't mean I can't appreciate Priestley pleasures not involving booze or fags – an orchestra tuning up, walking in pine forests, being silly with children or (and I particularly like this one) bragging.
Delight has been out of print for years but was reissued, according to one review, to reflect the new harsh times. I'm not sure about that...unemployment and failing businesses are terrible things but you don't have to know much history or to have lived very long to realise that things have unimaginably worse.

I mean, no more cholera, no more cardboard cities, crime – although nobody believes it – generally going down, more teachers and doctors, and no less than 1.3 million babies taken out of poverty.

Oops...I think I've drifted into Gordon Brown's Labour party conference speech.
This is no surprise because Tuesday, the day of Gordon Brown's speech, turned out to be such a dreadful day that I had to turn to Brown's hour-long address, which by no means flitted by, for light relief.

I had a very bad cold, or actually a doubly very bad cold because it was on my day off, when I should have been taking a day off sick anyway, and because I had to spend most of the day listening to astonishingly bad call centre music (Romantic Trombone Hits of 1987, by the sound of it) because all that stuff I wrote last week about my bank trying to ruin my life has yet to be resolved.

I could go on about the bank's astonishingly slapdash incompetence but I've rather snookered myself by moaning about other people moaning, so on to Gordon Brown's speech.

It's not true that it didn't contain some light moments, such as when the camera panned over the conference hall to show one of the women delegates intently knitting a red cardigan.

Which I don't think was out of disrespect to Mr Brown (well, except that red is not exactly a New Labour colour); there was a time when most women and, incidentally, the leading male historian AJP Tayor, knitted all the time; they could make your tea, tell you to pull your socks up, clip you round the ear and explain the origins of the Second World War without dropping a stitch, so listening to Mr Brown would not have been great challenge.

(Oh, and I've just remembered Simple Pleasure No 23 – being a non-knitter watching people knit; the way clicks and downward glances, quite unaccountably, and before your very eyes, translate themselves into garments you can't buy at Primark).

But I did find that the Brown speech, although articulate and sincere went on rather too long and was too detailed, and packed with scores
too many new laws and targets.

This entirely missed the Barack Obama effect, which all British politicians are temporarily chasing and is achieved by talking, preferably briefly, about new beginnings and inspiring initiatives in a soaring way – and one of the opposites to the word 'soaring' has to be the word 'Gordon'.

I think a lot of people, particularly those in health and education but actually in all public services and many areas of private life and enterprise, wish they could have a bit a break from all that soaring and changing; they just want things to settle down a bit.

Gordon Brown characterised the Tory vision as one limited to how things are, rather than 'reaching out' (a pure Obama phrase) to how things could be.

Yet there is a perfectly respectable conservative case (never followed by the modern Conservative Party) for not doing more than you have to and to arrange yourself around the real rather than the visionary, which, after all, is an important distinction when it comes to separating the sane from the sectionable.

Really (as I said ages ago) Britain is in nowhere near as bad a state as people say it is and Gordon Brown didn't need to spend a whole hour putting it right.