Throughout my life, I have got through difficult times by having an occasional “highlight”—a deliberate effort to treat myself to something nice. I have shared one such highlight with my 18-year-old grandchild for many years. We watch Mr Bean’s Holiday, every word of which we know by heart, while—this is a crucial element—eating chocolate eclairs from the M&S in the garage on the corner.
Not anymore. The garage has been electrified and the shop transformed. It is now full of unattractive snacks and drinks for people to scoff while their cars are charging.
“Where are the eclairs and trifles?” I whinge.
Depressed shop assistant, “We don’t stock them anymore; we don’t do desserts.”
“Why on earth not?”
A sad shrug. “Head Office.”
The roads in Chiswick and Hammersmith are in a constant state of change to accommodate cyclists and improve the environment. Brilliant—but one perfectly nice road, which I used to drive down regularly, has without warning been made impossible to use. At the junction with the main road, you now must navigate over a pedestrian crossing, followed by a cycle lane going in both directions, and then a box on which you can’t stop without being fined. When I asked a traffic warden to tell me who devised this accident-waiting-to-happen, he muttered, “Head Office.”
During lockdown we became accustomed to obeying rules from on high. We did what various Head Officers decreed. “Don’t even sit next to someone on a park bench.” Then suddenly, “Out you all go, and socialise, and spend money in pubs.” It seemed a bit odd, but we did it, because Head Office told us to. Only afterwards, when we discovered that partygoer Boris Johnson and shagger Matt Hancock had been having a lovely time at our nation’s Head Office, did we start to mistrust these people who order us about and take away our trifles and chocolate eclairs.
Since then, many of us have become reluctant to do as we are told by the usually invisible people in authority.
“Go back to work!” they say.
“No, thank you. We like working from home.”
“Have kids! Supplement the ageing population!” they say.
“We prefer having a dog.”
I recently had my third attack of Covid and wondered, as you do when you are ill at my age, whether this was my final exit. But I promised my dad, when he showed me pictures of Bergen-Belsen at the end of the Second World War and instructed me that it must never happen again, that I would make sure it didn’t. And so, I can’t leave yet. There is so much to do. I can’t leave fighting for democracy up to the Head Office.
The right-wing press and Donald Trump, the increasingly senile leader of the western world, are bent on destroying the BBC, our bastion of culture and truth, give or take the odd error. The Head Offices of the United States and China are fighting for world domination, and Russia and Israel are forcing their people to obey destructive, mindless, campaigns. There will be more migration: even people from the Fens of East Anglia, which may soon be underwater, will need to migrate. Unemployment figures, which are already high, will rise.
This could be a good thing: I would love to see technology take over some of the awful jobs that people are trapped in, so that they have more time to enrich their lives. I have seen youngsters transformed by charities that introduce them to making music, writing stories, planting gardens, debating, cooking, sport.
Some of us have got used to expecting Head Offices to attend to our parks, mend our potholes and clear our leaves in autumn. But we could do a lot more ourselves. We should join the volunteers who are already tending canals, rescuing people at sea, comforting asylum seekers, caring for the elderly. A whole army is out there serving their community and loving every minute. We must somehow organise, in our new free time, to cherish our world—and our souls. All our clever economists can surely find a viable way to fix the obscene imbalance of wealth, providing everyone with enough to live on.
Is this unrealistic? I am a Quaker. Recently in these pages was a slightly sniffy essay about the long, drawn-out process the Society of Friends are undertaking to embrace the modern world. Quakers have no Head Office, no nominated leaders and no voting, but with their testaments of equality, simplicity, truth and peace, they have managed to survive since the 17th century, doing quite a lot of good along the way.
We human beings are so brilliant, and our planet is still so full of wonders. If we set our minds to it, we could unite to not only save ourselves, but to enhance our existence. We cannot leave the change to secretive, incompetent Head Offices.
