Given that the readership of this blog is growing, although very, very slowly, and given that readers now happen upon these ramblings from all over the world, I fell to wondering whether there are several phrases I use, common here in Britain and Australia and possibly the US, strike some readers as baffling. By the way, I know a little about how many read this and where they live because of the stats supplied by Google. And - forgive me, please, but we are all human - I look at them pretty regularly, usually to see who has been reading the most recent entry.
That’s why I know that this blog’s readership is not necessarily restricted to family, friends and neighbours keeping a close eye on whether or not I am being indiscreet (‘What the fuck’s he been saying now? For Christ’s sakes! You’d think he could keep his trap shut just once in a while!’)
So apart from folk in the United Kingdom, the US and the usual suspects in Europe - Germany and France - who tune in (assumedly because they have little else better to do), there have also been readers - or possibly just one very enthusiastic reader - who have visited from Hungary 43 times and the Ukraine 30 times (though I should strictly call the country simply Ukraine as I understand the description ‘the Ukraine’ began life as an overly dismissive name given it by Russians).
That, to be honest, is odd enough, although given that over these past few years I have mentioned affairs in those two countries, perhaps they googled some term or other and washed up here. But even odder is that in the past week, i.e. in the past seven days, readers, or again one very enthusiastic reader, in South Korea and Turkey has come along. And not just once or twice but apparently, respectively 129 and 128 times. There were also visitors from Australia and Canada
That visitors arrive from Turkey I can somehow understand in that once or twice I have commented on the democratic principles, or, better, the increasing lack of them, of Recep Tayyip Ergdogan. But why to goodness would this blog or any of its entries be of any interest to folk in South Korea? The stats also list what particular entries have proved most popular, and they tell me that visitors have been reading entries about the former French president Francois Hollande and his complicated love life, and in the past an entry about the film and novel The Leopard and the stories and life of Somerset Maugham.
About ten months ago and for several weeks, there was extraordinary interest in this blog from Russia. Well, I am vain - aren’t we all if we are honest - but it did occur to me that it wasn’t so much Anglophiles in the depths of Siberia who were happening along but rather some bot or other had somehow latched onto my URL. I know that because the stats also give ‘traffic sources’ and ‘referring sites’, and when I clicked on them, they were, invariably, porn sites and sites promising to introduce the visitor to wholesome lasses keen to make my - or yours or anyone’s - acquaintance with a view to marriage (and, I assume, a shot at getting a Western European passport).
The pertinent thing is that Google then changed its something or other which meant bots could no longer latch on, and the visits from Russia stopped sharpish. That might indicate that the visits from South Korea, Hungary and Ukraine are bona fide arrivals. Odd. But none of that has much to do with ‘old farts’ and why it is best to avoid them, except that I was wondering what a visitor from South Korea, Hungary or Ukraine would make of the many Anglo-Saxons phrases I use.
. . .
Even if a visitor is not quite as au fait (as we Brits say, we Brits who regularly refer to a cul de sac, coup de foudre, coup d’etat and all the other French and pseudo-French phrases we have made our own) with English as she is spoken rather than as she is taught in language schools, I’m reasonably sure they can guess what I mean by an ‘old fart’. And I mention it because, strictly, I could be easily numbered in their ranks, given that I am no spring chicken and am even less likely to see 25 again than 35, 45 and, sadly even 65. But there is more to being an ‘old fart’ than age, thank goodness, which means with luck and effort those who might qualify can still do their best to delay the onset of ‘old fartdom’. I have met ‘old farts’ are barely over 40 and who would be horrified to be regarded as one. But sadly pretty much everything about them shouts out the fact.
They are the kind of people who are increasingly liable to start a sentence with ‘what really irritates me these days’, ‘what I really hate these days’ and, in extremis, ‘I despair, I really do!’ They are the kind of people who will declare when an esteemed actor, comedian, football player, politician or all-round wit or whoever dies ‘well, we’ll never see his/her like again!’ But the thing is we will most certainly see their like again, and what they say is complete
But there is far more to old farts than that. Old farts are forever decrying the present and extolling the past. Music, writers, films, sportsmen and woman, cars, food and, I should imagine, even cat food ‘just isn’t what it used to be’. The world for them is a far nastier place far more dangerous place today, and the number of people who can be trusted is diminishing by the hour. To be frank, and even though I say so, to my credit I have long been aware of old farts and the crap they almost always talk. But of late it has become even more disconcerting. When I was young, folk would declare about contemporary music ‘why can’t they write a decent tune any more!’
Well, I took no notice. But what really disconcerted me, and still does, is that in the Eighties those who said that would hark back to Sixties’s music. In the Nineties, they would hark back to Seventies and Eighties music, thoroughly convinced that the music ‘the younger generation’ was listening to - in the Nineties - was just so much crap. But now, dear folk, now - in 2017 - our new crop of old farts are moaning that ‘music these days is just awful. Why can’t they produce songs as they did in the Nineties!’ Give me a break, or rather, give me a fucking break! I have no doubt whatsoever that in 2027 and 2037 and 2047 music, films, fiction and the rest will be produced which will be just as interesting and just as satisfying as what has been produced and appreciated by then contemporary generations for the past 400 years.
But there is a point to all my ranting.
. . .
The other day I was chatting to my son, who turned 18 on May 25 and I told him that I believe his and his sister’s lives - she turns 21 on August 7 - will in some ways be a lot less easy than mine has been. And that is when it occurred to me that I was perhaps in danger of becoming an old fart. But bear with me.
Years ago, many yeas ago I remember talk of ‘the Baghdad Pact’ and I had - and till have - no idea what it was about or what it entailed. A little later I became aware of ‘Colonel Grivas’ and EOKA and a good deal of bloodshed in Cyprus. I didn’t regularly listen to the news - Christ, I wasn’t even ten - but I would overhear things on the radio and later TV. Then there was the financial crisis Britain found itself in when the pound was devalued, the Vietnam War and the social angst US conservatives went through when their sons and daughters (now in their late sixties and, ironically, themselves old farts), the emergence of the Islamic Republic of Iran and all the rest. And that is just
in the Western world. We didn’t have the internet then, we didn’t have live TV reports from the other side of the world, and so we - here in the Western world - had little idea of the fears and political upheavals in South America and the Far East. Yes, there were newspaper and broadcast reports, but none of it was immediate as it is now. There was then as now plenty to worry about, for everyone.
But the other day I found myself telling my son that I believed his and his sister’s lives would be rather less settled than mine had been.
For us here in Britain things really are looking rather bleak economically, and it won’t be in the short term. And I stress I am not making a political point about the rights or wrongs of Brexit and Britain’s likely departure from the European Union. The point I am making is that a Europe-wide arrangement which for better or worse and whether or not you agreed with it did bring economic stability and prosperity to many here in Europe will end.
Things are really not looking very good at all, not just for Britain but arguably also for the rest of the EU. As far as I can see it is highly unlikely any deal which will benefit Britain will be done by March 2019 and our economy will suffer. But the EU also faces its problems, not least the very odd reversal of democracy in Poland where the ruling Law and Justice party is most definitely no longer towing the liberal line which has been so prevalent so far. But there’s more to it than that, far more.
There is the problem of several hundreds of thousands of migrants from North Africa arriving in Europe, initially in Italy, but who want to get further north to taste the good life they have heard about and, I must say, who on earth in his or her right mind can blame. You and I would most certainly be doing the same thing if we found ourselves in their predicament, and bugger the rights and wrongs of ‘illegal immigration’. But that migration is not going to stop. It will slow down come the autumn and winter, but next year and the year after and the year after that it will carry on as before.
In Turkey it seems pretty obvious to me that Erdogan is shaping up to becoming an old-fashioned dictator. The US has as a president a man who, whatever his other talents (whatever they might be) is quite obviously utterly unsuited to leading his country and, to use that horrible cliche, acting as ‘the leader of the free world’. He seems to have no political talents and absolutely no ideas about what to do and, most damningly, seems uninterested in his position except in what a dash he can play around the world. And Russia and China know that.
China itself is in many ways far, far beyond the comprehension of most of us here in the West, and most certainly far, far beyond my comprehension. But crucially as under Trump the US could possibly lose its influence, China might choose try to take over its role. And unlike the US, which for all its myriad flaws (a tendency to elect the richest man in the country as president being not the least of them) is still observes the rule of law and will do so for many years to come) China has no such scruples. I think that in the 21st century and being fully aware of the benefits to itself of global trade - and mindful that it must keep its new middle class onside - it is unlikely to resort to any kind of widespread warfare, but it is really not above any indulging in any other mischief which might further its fortunes.
Incidentally, I know little about China’s history except in very broad outline, but I am sure nothing but nothing has change very much and that the period under Mao Tse Tung was nothing but an aberration, a tiny blip in history. Its leader might no longer be called the emperor, but he is there by consent and must always play his cards right to ensure his survival, as every other emperor was obliged to do.
. . .
But back to my point about ‘old farts’ and why they must always be discounted: when I write that I feel life will be a tad less comfortable for my children and their generation, or possibly worse, am I simply falling into the old trap which we late sixtysomethings are prone to do, to view the future as bleak merely because we are on the wrong side of history? I don’t know. I hope so. But am I? Certainly, I might be very wrong about many things outlined above, but I don’t think I am wrong about the very uncertain future Britain now faces.
My father was born in 1923 and will have lived through what we call the Depression. It affected many, though I don’t think it much affected him and his parents (both primary school teachers). The way things look at the moment - today, for example, Sunday, July 23 - the outlook for Britain economically is not looking at all great. Maybe the good times have rolled, at least for the next 20 years. Who knows, but don’t ask an old fart.
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