I was interested this morning to come across these few lines, attributed of all people to Calvin Coolidge:

Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.

Talent will not; there is nothing more uncommon than unsuccessful men with talent.

Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.

Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.

Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

They seem to sum up to me what we as a society basically do respect more than anything: hard work. If someone is talented but lazy then we certainly criticise them for it, but it also seems to me that if someone is of limited competence but do really work hard, then at the very least we respect them morally, even if we don’t always give them the job. So, for reasons unconnected with the rhetorical abilities of President Coolidge (he was famously taciturn), and indeed of these precise words, we do seem to have taken fully on board this message.

Our actual valuing of hard work is, incidentally, different from what we think we aspire to be as a society, which is a meritocracy. If you ask people what they think we are or ought to be, that’s what they say. But in reality I don’t think we do respect that - just think of the public view of the very highly paid in finance or in business: people are fairly happy to accept that they are clever people, but they still don’t respect them or think they are entitled to all that money.

Personally, I take the now unfashionable view that we shouldn’t even be trying to be a meritocracy. The term was indeed originally coined by Michael Young as a criticism. And indeed why should we think that power should be held by those who were born talented, any more than we should think it should be held by those born rich, or to aristocrats? Although I don’t quite agree with him that pure Stakhanovism is the only real test of value, it is, as President Coolidge says, what we do with it that matters.

Don’t you know? OK, well how much is (the maximum) Housing Benefit, then? Council Tax benefit? Income Support? Come on, surely you must know one of these! OK, then, pick any benefit you like that you are not personally in receipt of, and tell me how much it is.

No doubt a visitor or two to this site will be able to take up this challenge, and give an answer to one of these questions (and I’m aware that anyone with a rudimentary grasp of the internet should be able to find them all in seconds). But if more than a handful are able to do so genuinely off the top of their head, then I’ll eat, well, I don’t know, the mouldy chocolate I was presented with from an exhibitor’s stall in Bournemouth earlier this week.

If you’re one of those who couldn’t answer them, then you are completely out of touch with everything that is happening in modern Britain, you have no right to contribute to public life, and should withdraw forthwith to the embattled ivory tower you are surely already living in. So say political opponents and the press (a not entirely co-extensive two categories of people, but shall we say not as distinct as they might be).

Clearly Nick made a boo-boo, not merely not knowing the current level of the state pension but being out by a factor of three. When you get something like that as wrong as that, you do indeed make yourself look pretty silly. If I were a political opponent invited to comment then the press quote clearly pretty much writes itself on an occasion like this.

As always, the 20-20 vision of hindsight is a wonderful thing, but clearly he should have just owned up to not knowing, rather than tried to guess. He should not have got the answer to this question quite so badly wrong.

But going up a level from this error, the way in which the media do now expect, especially at election time, leaders of all parties to know what’s number one at the moment, who plays in goal for England, who’s illicitly seeing whom in EastEnders, and who won Big Brother last year , down to whether Cheryl Cole is back with Ashley at the moment, does seem to me rather silly.

It’s not difficult for the press to portray the inability to answer any of these as “out of touch”, but really, this game has everything to do with sport (in the hunting, rather than Premier League, sense) and not very much to do with quite a lot of things that one might reasonably expect politicians ought to be devoting most of their attention to. Keeping in touch with other people’s lives is one thing, but sometimes it feels as if some parts of the media want politicians to be fulltime watchers of television soap operas.

The level of the state pension is not, I accept, in quite that category. But there still does seem to me an issue about the level of detailed knowledge of every area of national life, that most of us wouldn’t pretend to have, that we can reasonably expect from our leading politicians, of all parties.

However given what I once heard referred to as the “well-developed herd mentality” of our national media, I think Gordon and Dave should watch out over the next couple of weeks. Now they’ve scented blood, humiliating leading politicians for not being able to identify which colour bag cheese and onion crisps currently come in, will surely become briefly a very popular pastime on the airwaves.

Parts of the media will no doubt believe that as well as keeping track of exactly how many of his own MPs are now opposing him, and ensuring a bankrupt bank doesn’t torpedo the entire British financial system, our Prime Minister should spend the weekend before conference week’s media appearances mugging up on the precise cost of a pint of milk in Middlesbrough at the moment.

People who know me will have often heard my complaints about some of the annoyances of living in London. There’s a lot that seems tempting, for example, about what Jon has written about his recent move to Brussels.

But of course the flip side of this place is the amazing range of things happening here - and the trick is (unlike too many Londoners) to take advantage of them!

And at the end of last week I had the opportunity to enjoy two of its highlights.

One of them has been widely written about and recognised - and is the new production of Aida that is on at the ENO, designed by Zandra Rhodes. I must say when I first saw this advertised I wanted to go because I don’t know Aida very well and I wanted to hear the music and see the opera. I wasn’t that interested in who had designed it (and if I’m being honest although I had just about heard of Zandra Rhodes, I had only a vague idea that she designed clothes, a bit wacky I think, probably because her name begins with a Z!).

But from the moment the curtain rises the star of the show is very clearly the design on stage - both the set and the extraordinary costumes. Read the rest of this entry »

So I was just flicking idly through a routine briefing from the party, when I found myself reading the following sentence:

”¢ A report by the government’s Chief Scientist, Sir David King, is calling for a cull of badgers in some areas affected by Bovine Tony Blair.

I didn’t immediately clock at it first, but something didn’t sound quite right in the sentence so I looked at it again more carefully.

“Bovine Tony Blair”? That sounded pretty abusive for an internal party document so what did it mean? Our former Prime Minister wandering the nation behaving in a cow-like fashion?

A minute’s reflection gave the answer. Presumably the story is in fact about tuberculosis in cattle, or “Bovine TB” - and someone still has a shortcut programmed into their computer to expand automatically from the abbreviation of the former Prime Minister’s initials…

He may be gone but it’s good to know he is still…being blamed for attacking badgers!

Fall is well and truly upon us, and yesterday afternoon we took a beautiful autumnal walk around Highgate Cemetery.

It is very much a creation of the nineteenth century - one of several cemeteries built following the need for more burial space during the rapid expansion of London, and before the twentieth century vogue of cremation. And it feels very Victorian gothic, containing graves or other tombs which are at the least very grand and proper, normally topped by at least an angel or some other statue, and in many cases magnificently more: several large family mausoleums, as well as areas of catacombs. Most famously there is the ‘Lebanon Circle’ - a circular area of catacombs around a large central Cedar (of Lebanon); and an Eqyptian avenue reflecting the fashion of interest in Egypt at one point in the Victorian era.

The very leafy surroundings make it particularly evocative to be there in the autumn, and we had a beautiful fresh afternoon to be up there.

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I suffered a sentimental pang this week when I read that Lonely Planet has been sold and is being bought by BBC Worldwide.

When I went off round the world a few years ago, Lonely Planet guides were my constant companion - without them I would have been completely lost (indeed until I did find them, I was lost!). Their books, at least the ones I was using, had a very distinctive backpacker style and ethos - they were definitely much more than just a guidebook. No doubt some of this was just good marketing to their audience, but I certainly felt a lot of affinity with them.

I can remember well at one point somewhere in India someone having a different brand of guide (Rough Guide, I think), and among the group of people I was with at the time, this causing some slight bemusement - why would you use any guide other than Lonely Planet? Was it perhaps better? No, he said, he had just chosen Rough Guide to make a change from LP, he said, which, like everyone else, he had used all the rest of the time.

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Over recent years there have been some quite heated local battles about the various elements of the redevelopment of the Kings Cross area and a wide swathe of land around it. I haven’t been involved in those and would be very wary of commenting on them, so I’ll keep well clear of that!

But as someone who goes through Kings Cross and the large area around it affected by what is going on quite often, it’s impossible not to be struck by the impressive scale of the improvements that are taking place.

Most striking of all at the moment perhaps is the refurbishment of St Pancras station in preparation for Eurostar starting their services there in November. The station building itself, which I remember from ten years ago as a rather dingy four platforms or so for getting a train to Leicester or Nottingham (and where I was once short-changed in WH Smith; this may not have been a permanent feature affecting all passengers), has been magnificently transformed. The outside of the building looks amazing and the glimpses of the inside look just as good, though I think the full force may only be visible to people hurriedly getting on or off Eurostar trains.

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I have just discovered the ‘Wish List’ feature on Amazon and I think it’s great! All those books you think you’d like to read but will certainly forget or write on a piece of paper that you’ll then lose - and now someone else offers to remember them for you!

Now I just need them to offer to remember all the ones that I’ve already bought but haven’t managed to read yet!