Now, unlike in Larkin’s time, and contrary to the popular imagination, there is almost no discernible anti-Irish sentiment in Britain. Gone is the time when a respectable figure such as J.B. Priestley could openly fantasise about exiling Ireland’s huddled masses from England’s western ports. “What a grand clearance there will be,” he wrote. “What a fine exit of ignorance and dirt and drunkenness and disease.” Priestley’s respectable heirs today, if anything, see the English in such light and Ireland as a model of solid sober government.

It is difficult to see Ireland in any other light as it goes to the polls to elect a new government. Whatever problems it has, and it has many, the great structural question dividing Irish politics is now, essentially, how much of its enormous fiscal surplus to set aside to cope with the potential shock of a Trump presidency. Of all the problems to have, this, it is fair to say, is not the worst.

No matter how often British observers try to dismiss Ireland’s wealth as some kind of tax dodge, the reality is that most of Ireland really is richer than most of England — as anyone who spends even the briefest amount of time there can attest. This fact alone stands as a painful rebuke to the British state which does not provoke anywhere near as much self-reflection as it should. Ireland fought a war to leave the UK when it was the poorest part of these islands. It is now richer than the country it left behind. It is not only the Scots who should be angry about this.

Nevertheless, there is something fraudulent about Ireland’s success today that, like the country itself, is eerily familiar to the English observer. In 1997, fresh from his landslide election victory, Tony Blair wowed the Labour Party conference in Brighton with a vision of a future Britain would lead. In the great globalised economy that had emerged from the ashes of the Cold War, Blair argued, Britain would become a “beacon” for the rest of the world to follow, combining the best of America’s economic dynamism with Europe’s social conscience. With the City of London as its beating heart, so the story went, Britain had all the ingredients for success in the 21st century: an open and flexible economy supported by a well-educated, liberal and tolerant people happy in their own multicultural skin. While this fantasy has long since crumbled in Britain, it remains modern Ireland’s comforting mythos.

When observing Ireland from afar, then, the temptation is to see it as the last citadel of a lost Fukuyaman world: Byzantine Constantinople just before the fall, naively getting on with its life behind the walls that will soon be breached. Perhaps this is why Ireland’s political class is so admired by Britain’s lonely podcast centrists who spend their time lamenting the loss of the civilised pre-crash world in which they felt comfortable. Ireland, to these characters, remains recognisable: living proof that their world view is not out of date as they wander lonely in an England that is no longer home.

Yet, the fragility of the Irish settlement is there for all to see. As Silicon Valley’s tax-avoiding bridgehead into the European Union, Ireland is particularly exposed to the geopolitical world now coming into being. Indeed, it is noticeable how clearly this has been understood and expressed during the campaign this year.

More from this author

Jeremy Clarkson: populist tribune

By Tom McTague

On immigration, too, there are obvious parallels with Britain. The flip side of Ireland’s position as a great floodplain for global capital, is that it must also be a place for people to arrive too. A country of just 5 million, Ireland’s net migration is now running at around 80,000 — far lower than the 600,000-1 million that have come to Britain in most recent years, but proportionately higher. With a housing crisis that is, if anything, even more acute than in Britain, the conditions for popular revolt are clearly visible, even if you discount the riots that gripped Dublin after a naturalised immigrant attacked primary school children with a knife.

None of this means Ireland will fall or even necessarily falter. There’s every chance the second Trump term will be as insubstantial as the first, tinkering at the edges of global trade without changing its fundamentals. Perhaps Ireland will not reveal the emptiness of Blair’s prophecy but become its ultimate realisation, Britain’s inheritance transferred to Ireland in some cosmic display of imperial karma.

Beyond mere economics, Ireland’s politics offers plenty of other notes of caution for those in the Starmer government who will be keeping a close eye on developments today. The first is that no matter how impressive Ireland’s economic performance has been in recent years, there remains a deep malaise in the country that is entirely recognisable. On questions of housing, immigration and public services, the anger of the Irish public is as tangible and acute as it is in the UK, while also being gripped by the same intuitive sense that its political class have become so distant they no longer appear to like the opinions of its own citizens.

Perhaps this, too, is the price of wealth. I have been struck in the past by how approachable its political class seemed. Attending the Irish Derby in the late 2000s, I was able to walk up to the then Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, to ask him a question — largely unthinkable in Britain. Cowen was, of course, deeply unpopular for his role in the financial crash, the unlucky figure left standing when the music stopped. Still, looking back, he was a recognisable Fianna Fáiler. Simon Harris, today’s Fine Gael Taoiseach, represents Ireland’s new generation of leaders, tetchy and unpopular, seemingly unable to cope with direct contact with the people.

The defining moment of the election campaign was a toe-curling encounter in a Cork supermarket when a tearful care worker accused Harris of ignoring those, like her, who worked for low wages looking after the disabled. “No you weren’t,” Harris replied, only for the lady to persist. “You’ve done nothing for us, our people are suffering,” she continued, voice quavering. “That’s not true to say that,” Harris replied, now getting frustrated. At that point, as the lady continued to complain, Harris simply offered his hand and turned away from her, only to then double back as if he realised he’d made a terrible mistake. “You’re not a good man,” the lady said, now beginning to sob. “Okay, well if you think I’m not a good man”, Harris then muttered before walking away for good leaving onlookers to shake their heads, shame. This remarkable exchange, captured on video, has torpedoed Harris’s campaign, with his party slumping in the polls as a result.

To English eyes, this is all so remarkably familiar. In 2010, Gordon Brown’s election campaign exploded after he was recorded dismissing a voter as a “bigoted woman”, while earlier this year, Rishi Sunak sunk his attempt to remain Prime Minister by abandoning the D-Day celebrations. On each occasion — Brown, Sunak and now Harris — offered grovelling apologies to stem the loss of support. And on each occasion in Britain at least, they failed.

The power of each of these moments was not just that they were personally embarrassing, but that they seemed to capture something essential about the country itself: the disdain for the common assumptions and prejudices of the ordinary voter, whether over immigration, healthcare or patriotism itself. Dipping into Irish social media these past few months certainly gives the impression that the view of an out-of-touch elite holding ordinary voters in contempt is now as common in Ireland as it is in England. Even Sinn Féin is now being accused of treachery among some of the more fringe nationalists for their attitude to immigration. This is not a good road to go down.

To me, Ireland always seemed to offer yet more proof of George Orwell’s caustic observation that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality”. Over there, it seemed, there was a deeper and entirely unironic reverence for the myths and symbols of its nationhood in a way that has long since been lost in England. The energy that existed among revisionist Irish historians during the Troubles seems to have petered out. Such is the strength of the reverence towards the official Irish narrative, in fact, that to the Unionist northerners the land of the Republic remains as foreign as ever — its customs are not theirs.

Suggested reading

Ireland's migration election

By David Swift

As such, I have always thought it ironic that while Ireland is held up by those who know little about its history as a beacon of civilised internationalism, it is just as easily definable as a place of successful conservative nationalism of the sort dismissed in Britain. Indeed, for the former to be sustainable you could argue that a country must first have the latter. An Irish diplomatic friend once joked with me that the most jarring Englishman of all was not the bumptious ruling class toff of lore, but the self-hating liberal who adores everyone else’s quaint nationalism but his own. Perhaps the reverse is also true: the most jarring modern Irishman is the one who believes his own nationalism is merely an expression of some kind of modern, enlightened internationalism.

Ireland, then, remains a foreign land that is homely in its familiarity, even as it changes to adapt to the modern world. Going to the polls today, there is a three-way tie between Harris’s Fine Gael, the former Taiseach Micheál Martin’s Fianna Fáil and Mary Lou McDonald’s Sinn Féin, each on around 20% of the vote and destined, it seems, for another grand coalition of its traditional centre.

For the average Englishman used to first-past-the-post, such a scenario might appear foreign — and yet remarkably familiar at the same time. There is now a growing realisation within Westminster’s political class that Reform UK may yet do to British politics what Sinn Féin has done in Ireland, not simply dying off but establishing themselves as a new, viable third (or fourth) party, stabilising at around 20-25% in the polls. If this were to happen, there would be a plausible scenario in which Labour, the Conservatives and Reform each go into the next election neck-and-neck in the polls, with the position of Prime Minister available to the leader of the party able to eke out the slenderest of leads. There are now senior political analysts speculating about a realignment in British politics in which Farage’s Reform leads a merger-acquisition of the Conservative Party after the next election to secure the premiership.

Ireland was once destined to follow Britain, its big brother across the water. Perhaps now it is showing us our future in more ways than one. We remain in touch, London, Belfast and Dublin.

A conservative in everything else (literature, politics, jazz), in this Larkin was a trendsetter. An aggressive reappraisal of the work based upon revelations about the life — this is the pattern that has established itself for every successive male literary titan, and which is in the post for the rest. But today, 100 years from his birth, Larkin’s lines remain widely loved and quoted at a time when poetry in general seems to be in terminal decline. That he survived this cancellation makes its story a parable for our age of intolerance, forcing us to reckon directly with the relationship of the dignified public to the sordid private, of art and beauty to ugly, human truth.

Larkin’s letters, published in 1991, are first and foremost a triumph of life-writing. A chronicle of the pinched English post-war, they record (in hilarious, confiding detail) a time of rationed cigarettes, economical beer-drinking, class resentment and fear of “abroad”. And they are rich in the era’s comedy of coping, recording money troubles (“I am having an ineffectual economy drive. It consists of not buying other people drinks”), dysfunctional dwellings (“central heating in the sense that it never reached the bedrooms or bathroom”) and self-conscious ageing (“There are some nice pictures of me from when I didn’t look like a pregnant salmon”).

But their publication also immediately opened up Larkin to attack. They lifted the veil from a carefully protected personality, rendering a writer who had aimed at the universal suddenly and frightfully particular. Most obviously they drew him into the realm of politics, littered as they were with reflexive prejudices around race, class and women. And the insularity of Larkin’s world and perspective was soon transferred by his attackers onto his poetry, itself downgraded to “minor” and “provincial”. But more troublingly still, they hinted at the underlying source of these prejudices: his distaste for the world as it stood. Morbid humour aside, the letters’ key theme is decline, and a growing resentment at life’s failures and Larkin’s own inability to correct them.

Initially, failure seemed distant. A First from Oxford, two novels and a book of poems published by the age of 25. But first the fiction dried up, and novel three was abandoned. Ambition and hope fell away from Larkin like clumps of hair, his dreams of an independent writer’s life (which he deeply envied Kingsley Amis for enjoying) replaced by the drudgery of his work as a librarian. He was sustained only by his poetry, until that mostly went too in the late Seventies, leaving only the illness and alcoholism of his final years: “I used to believe that I should perfect the work and the life could fuck itself. Now I’m not doing anything, all I’ve got is a fucked up life.”

This was all unhappy enough. But it took Andrew Motion’s biography two years later to fully entangle the personal and political, to smash the glass and set sirens wailing with outrage. Far from the eccentric chronicler of 20th century Englishness, it seemed the real Larkin — a midden of unexamined neuroses — had been unearthed. Of course, it all starts with mum and dad, in this case especially dad, Sydney Larkin, a domestic totalitarian who decorated his office and home with Nazi regalia and took the young Philip on holiday to the Reich in 1936 and 1937 to witness the “new Germany”. Philip then heads up to Oxford where — besides developing his poetic talent — he developed the odd and introverted sexuality that beset him all his life.

Under the auspices of “Brunette Coleman”, Larkin spent an abnormal amount of time at university writing a series of lesbian schoolgirl fictions (“As Pam finally pulled Marie’s tunic down over her black stockinged legs, Miss Holden, pausing only to snatch a cane from the cupboard…”) These stories were harmless smut, mainly produced for the amusement of friends. But bondage and schoolgirls would become erotic constants for Larkin — he made sorties from Hull to Soho to seek out specialist magazines on the subject, a cache of which was kept in his library office (“to wank to, or with, or at”), and also circulated with like-minded comrades (“do pass on any that have ceased to stimulate”). But presumably not shared was the dream journal Larkin kept at university, in which sex dreams featuring Nazis, black dogs, faeces and oppressive but distant parental figures predominate.

More from this series

The fate of Europe lies in the steppes

By Aris Roussinos

This far from cloudless adolescent psychology is not immediately suggestive of an empathetic poetic spirit, and we are now understandably wary of such a congealed male sexuality. It would be easy to write off the young Larkin as a borderline incel. But after this inauspicious start there were several love affairs, and Larkin’s erotic misalignment remains as Martin Amis recently wrote “mysterious and very hard to infiltrate… a maze, or a marshland with a few slippery handholds”. Sex itself more or less dried up in Larkin’s mid-30s — like trying to get “someone else to blow your own nose for you” was how he described the act itself. And terrified of marriage his whole life, he strung along his companion of more than 30 years, Monica Jones, in a relationship in which he was manipulative and unfaithful — not through any philanderer’s prerogative but through a juvenile fear of commitment.

A recent biographer of Jones even judges Larkin’s behaviour to be coercive control, and clearly shows how he stifled and inhibited her life. And there is one instance of now-immortalised cruelty: he colluded with Amis in fictionalising Monica as the clingy, boring, attention-seeking Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim. He even sent her a nervous copy after publication which she read over an agonising three days, and never forgot. “Oh he was a bugger,” Monica later said. “He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.”

Whether one’s response to this suburban tragedy is pity or disgust, the effect is the same as his letters: to de-universalise Larkin. To make a man, whose secluded personality meant he was only known through his work, seedily peculiar. It is a blow that has struck many a stale male in recent years, the reputations of (most recently) Philip Roth, V.S. Naipaul, and Saul Bellow collapsing from their 20th century pomp as their work, which pitched itself at broad, sweeping themes, was shown to be the product of a flawed masculinity.

Unlike them Larkin has come through the other side. So, what do readers continue to find in his work? It can’t be his personality or his surroundings — indeed, the post-war so wonderfully enlivened in Larkin’s letters no longer exists. But his poetry has endured because it does capture a universal human instinct, one which can now be read as a subconscious retort to the attacks upon his personality: the desire to record what is humdrum and shameful, and to transform it into something sublime. To, in John Updike’s phrase, give “the mundane its beautiful due”.

Suggested article

The deracination of literature

By Mary Gaitskill

Larkin did not live in an age of therapy and self-care — he would barely have known how to recognise his emotional flaws, let alone “work on them”. And he never directly addressed the most squalid parts of his interior world. But, as he famously said, “deprivation for me is what daffodils were for Wordsworth”, a quip often interpreted as cutesy and self-dramatising. But he really meant it; misery stirred his muse. And you can see it happening within the poems as he takes some highly personal, ignoble incident and uses it as a platform to ascend toward some classical profundity.

There is a needy, lustful instinct behind the initial lines of “Sunny Prestatyn” and “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”, and Larkin often uses his openings as confessional hooks, drawing you into the naked reality of his consciousness before leading you away and above it. But this movement is best seen in “High Windows”, opening with the notoriously obscene lines:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

The poem continues relatively plainly from this ugly statement of generational sexual jealousy, weighing up this feeling and pondering if Larkin’s elders had envied him in his own youth. And then, from nowhere, an extraordinary shift takes places, up and away from that scene:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

This is an image of ambiguous oblivion, perhaps implying religious absolution behind what could be stained-glass church windows, or a nihilistic absence of meaning beyond them. But either way, the image is that of a thwarted 20th century Romantic, a poet fully aware of the coarseness of his age and personhood, but able to find in it metaphysical beauty nonetheless. Not all Larkin poems take such an extreme route. But this is the technical accomplishment that recurs across his greatest works, a capacity to transfigure train journeys, music, photographs, and churches into pockets of narrative which illuminate what he saw as the abiding human themes. “Time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love.”

The greatest writers will always be those who have suffered dully all the wrongs of man, and yet remain alive to a greater wisdom and beauty beyond what they could afford themselves. And to read through Larkin’s letters, with all their everyday drollness and tedium, and grapple with his personality while remembering the genius of his poetry is to be confronted with this truth. But what is more, his poetry insists upon it, understanding that to be human is to be familiar with what is low and wrong, and to yearn for what could, possibly, transcend it. This is why Larkin resists what our age of moral purity would prefer: to be able to separate the fuddled bigot and the sedate chronicler of his age. Both men wrote the poems.

Ghislaine was born with every disadvantage: extraordinary privilege, limitless resources, endless leisure, posh friends, inborn entitlement, and a repulsive beast of a father who seems to have bullied and indulged her by turns. Other people were born to do her bidding, while she herself was immune to accountability. She referred to the young women she exploited as trash. You don’t need to be a card-carrying Freudian to see that the man she pimped for, Jeffrey Epstein, was a surrogate father whose affection she could probably never depend on.

It wasn’t women of her age who attracted him. One unreliable father had already died on her, and another might metaphorically speaking do the same. In several of the photos of the pair, Maxwell is looking adoringly at Epstein, or even kissing him, while he is looking away or at the camera, apparently tolerating her devotion rather than reciprocating it. Desperate to continue as his partner in love, so I would argue in court, she was willing to become his partner in crime. People can do appalling things for the sake of love, but doing them for love is better than doing them out of cruelty or malevolence.

Was Maxwell fated to end up behind bars as a kid with a sexually abusive father and an alcoholic mother? Obviously not. Plenty of people with her upper-class handicaps turn out to be decent human beings. Maxwell didn’t have to inveigle young women into her lover’s massage room. That we amount to more than our circumstances is what we know as freedom. You can always act against the grain of your upbringing. It’s just that it can be fearfully hard to do so. Hangers and floggers aren’t wrong to think we have freedom of choice, simply blind to how arduous this can be. We are all free not to smoke, but a nicotine addict is less free in this respect than the Queen. If you want an image of freedom, don’t look at those who regard health and safety laws as fatal to human liberty; look at a man with a revolver who refrains from shooting the rapist of his small daughter.

Suggested reading

Ghislaine Maxwell's guilty soul

By Will Lloyd

It is only in the modern period that we start thinking of the will as a heroic force, one which overcomes our baser inclinations. It is thus that the idea of will power comes into existence. It is a matter of tensed sinews and gritted teeth. By contrast, for traditional thinkers such as St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, the will is more a form of desire than a kind of power. On this view, to will to do something is to feel drawn to it — even, in the end, to love it. Far from struggling against what we want, the will has to plug into your deepest wishes if it is to work. Instead of a deep desire for heroin, you begin to feel an even deeper desire to be well. You embrace well-being because it’s enjoyable, not just because you’re likely to die if you don’t. Most addicts are aware of this possibility, but it rarely stops them from drinking or shooting up, just as nobody stops being a radical Islamist because somebody tells them they should.

The United States, true to its Puritan heritage, is a deep believer in voluntarism, regarding the will as supreme. That you’re responsible for absolutely everything you do is part of American folklore. It is this belief which puts so many of its citizens on death row. To point out that a lot of criminals were deprived and unloved as children is to sell out to determinism. The fact that there are degrees of responsibility goes unacknowledged. Freedom is as absolute in the judicial system as it is in the market place, and appeals to social conditions can be left to fancy-pants sociologists. Yet we wouldn’t have the concept of freedom in the first place, or know how to practise it, if we didn’t live in society. When Margaret Thatcher announced that society didn’t exist, she did so in the English language, which belongs to an individual only because it belongs in the first place to a particular civilisation.

Suggested reading

The enabling of Ghislaine Maxwell

By Julie Bindel

None of this is to deny that Ghislaine Maxwell is a despicable predator who richly deserves her prison sentence. She treated the young woman she hired as a sub-human species fashioned to serve her own interests, much as her father treated his employees. Like the rest of us, however, she was also a victim of original sin, which is a more everyday affair than snakes in gardens or forbidden apples. St. Augustine was right to see that original sin is transmitted down the generations, though he was wrong to think that this was a genetic affair. His view of it is broadly at one with that of the poet Philip Larkin:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

Larkin knew what he was talking about: his father was a fascist who supported Hitler, and Larkin himself was a racist and trade union-basher. The fact is that being born severely restricts your freedom. Nobody chooses to enter the world, or gets to select their parents. When a character in Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame protests to another character “But you’re my father!”, the latter replies “Yes, but I didn’t know it was going to be you”. Nobody chooses their body, their social status at birth or much of their temperament, a discomforting thought for a society obsessed with options.

All of this is set for us by our ancestors, hordes of whom lurk within our most casual gestures. It is impossible to say how many people there are in a relationship, but the parents of both partners are certainly at work there, and probably their grandparents and great-grandparents as well. The dead can kill us or drive us insane. The past is what we are mostly made of, and it lives on to stymie the present and future. So much for the excited chatter of brave new worlds and technological wonders.

Suggested reading

Will Ghislaine Maxwell get a fair trial?

By Kat Rosenfield

Like Sophocles’s Oedipus, we are all guilty innocents, tainted by our origins. It’s notable that Oedipus, confronted with the fact that he has killed his father and married his mother, never once tries to defend himself by pointing out that he did all this unknowingly. For the ancient Greeks, guilt is an objective affair like disease or pollution, not in the first place a question of your intentions. And this is also true of the debt and guilt involved in our tangled inheritance. It infiltrates your bones and your blood whether you are conscious of it or not.

Characters in ancient Greek tragedy must move warily, as though picking their way through a minefield. Half-blind that we are, we can never know what damage our deeds will cause in the lives of others. Acts freely performed spin out of control and come to confront ourselves and others like some implacable destiny. It is this which the Greeks called Fate. Oedipus becomes a stranger to himself, while those who should be sexual strangers (one’s parents, for example) become intimate. In fact, there are no strangers, just friends you haven’t alienated yet. It would take a whole army of researchers to trace the consequences of any one of our actions, and some of them are very likely to inflict pain on someone somewhere. If we can’t move without hurting others, then simply to be alive is a question of guilt. There is a residue of harm built into social existence.

Suggested reading

Robert Maxwell was no mystery

By Tanya Gold

Original sin has to do with injuries of which we are innocent but are still in some sense responsible. Let’s say I sit on a bus and see the image of a desert island on a hoarding. The image begins to obsess me to the point where I abandon my family and spend the rest of my days lounging under a palm tree. Aghast at being deserted, my partner finds it impossible to carry on as a psychotherapist, with the result that one of her patients drowns himself in despair. Meanwhile, my daughter packs in ballet school and goes off to run a protection racket in Huddersfield. The culprit for all this is me; but the Malaysian workers who make spiral cuts on the bark of Para rubber trees to collect their milky latex also had a hand in it. Without them, there would have been no rubber to manufacture the tyres of the bus on which I was sitting. They are guilty innocents, bound up like the rest of us with those of whom they know nothing. All this is because Fate is a myth, and what we have instead is contingency: random collisions, collateral damage, unforeseeable effects.

The Larkin poem continues:

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

“They” refers to one’s parents; and if it is true that the fuckers-up are also the fucked-up, forgiveness becomes possible. The misery your mum and dad handed on to you was a crippling legacy bequeathed to them as well. By recognising this, as the drug-addicted Patrick Melrose does at the end of Edward St Aubyn’s magnificent sequence of novels, you can break this deathly lineage, at least in your head and with any luck in your guts as well. It is a tragic process, however, precisely because the price of achieving sanity and fulfilment in these conditions is so fearfully steep. But if Melrose can do it, so can Ghislaine Maxwell in the quiet of her prison cell. In fact, it is all that is now left to her. We should remember that people who act abominably are usually under the influence of forces they can’t fully understand. But we shouldn’t allow them to get away with it either.

Schools closed and the summer exams were cancelled, but I kept my new job. It was a comprehensive school, and my brief was to tutor kids who were academically struggling through Google Meet, the fat and ugly cousin of Zoom. Because everything was up in the air, I was given free rein to teach the kids whatever I wanted that could reasonably be considered English Literature. So I decided to teach them about the poets I have enjoyed since I was little, such as Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney. Those few months constituted one of the best periods of my life.

The OCR, one of the main exam boards in England, will remove the poetry of Heaney and Larkin (among other poets) from its school syllabus this September. Their justification is simple: the syllabus needs to be more inclusive and exciting. Heaney and Larkin are male and stale. They reflect a bygone era that doesn’t speak to an increasingly diverse classroom. They will be replaced by poets from British-Somali, British-Guyanese and Ukrainian backgrounds, and one of the first black women in 19th century America to publish a novel. 14 out of the 15 new writers added to the syllabus will be non-white. Jill Duffy, the chief executive of the OCR, stated: “This is an inspiring set of poems that demonstrates our ongoing commitment to greater diversity.”

This change is part of a wider movement to decolonise the curriculum. For too long, supporters of this movement argue, schools have deliberately excluded people of colour from the English canon and History textbooks. Just as ethnic minority people are discriminated against across society, they are marginalised in the classroom, and the latter injustice reinforces the former. One way to challenge this state of affairs is to decentre white, male authors, replacing them with writers who fall into other categories.

More from this author

The narcissism of America's race politics

By Tomiwa Owolade

Jeffrey Boakye, the author of the recent book, I Heard What You Said, is a prominent advocate for decolonising the curriculum. Boakye, a black British man of Ghanaian heritage, argues that teachers should engage more vocally with race politics. For him, “being a non-white teacher is an inherently political position”. And the reason why the curriculum is “so unapologetically white is the arrogance of empire”. Our values, he argues, are rooted not in “scientific, political and industrial revolutions” but “in genocide, slavery and colonialism”.

Boakye is an English teacher. And English, according to the movement to decolonise the curriculum, should advance social justice. In his book, Boakye refers to one of his students, a black girl called Gertrude; he writes that after he taught her a poem called “Checking Out Me History”, by the British-Guyanese poet John Agard, she felt seen. “It spoke to her experience of a white education that didn’t speak to her sense of personal history.” The poem mentions figures from history like Toussaint L’Ouverture and Mary Seacole: we are supposed to believe it is great precisely because it celebrates black heroes.

The viewpoint of the curriculum decolonisers is based on the assumption that black students resonate most with poetry written by black poets. That is nonsense. Why should a black African student, for instance, identify at all with a poem written by a West Indian man? Because of their shared race? Race is not the only thing that defines the life and experiences of a person; I used to think only avowed racists believed it does. At a more practical level, why should a poem be taught if it can speak to students only on the basis of their being black: what about the Asian and white and mixed-race students in the classroom? This is not inclusion; it is division.

Suggested reading

Why anti-racism should be resisted

By Asra Q. Nomani

Decolonising the curriculum takes place at a superficial level, whereas I taught Larkin to my students because his poems move me at a visceral level: they convey the sense that, yes, this is what it is like to be haunted by fear and loneliness and impotence. And they do so with artistic virtuosity, using the right words in the right order to express such feelings. Consider these contrasting descriptions of death in his late masterpiece “Aubade”, both of them spot on but stylistically different from each other: the straightforward description is the “anaesthetic from which none come round”, and the more elegant version is:

The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is not a male or stale sentiment; this is a poem full of versatility and exactness, range and compactness. In other words, it is characterised by stylistic diversity, which should be a more relevant form of diversity in an English Literature classroom than the vagaries of skin pigmentation.

The poetry critic Jeremy Noel-Tod argues in a piece for the New Statesman that someone like Larkin should be replaced by the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. He writes that, “as a white teenager growing up in rural Norfolk in the Nineties, I wish my teachers had taken the chance to talk about the Soyinka poem in class”, because the Nigerian poet “might have helped us to understand structural racism as the scaffolding of the home country we took for granted”. If Noel-Tod wants to argue Soyinka is as good a poet as Larkin, fair enough, but his argument doesn’t reference art or merit. He is treating poetry as a sub-set of sociology — arguing that we should read non-white poets because they offer us insights into social and political issues.

If English is simply another variant of sociology or politics, why should the study of it be distinguished from these subjects? Sheffield Hallam University has recently been criticised for suspending its English Literature degree and incorporating it into a degree that consists of Literature, Creative Writing and Language. The justification for this proposal is that the study of English should serve a purpose, that it should have tangible benefits, such as enabling students to get a professional job. Many of the people who advocate for decolonising the curriculum might object to this, not recognising that they are also arguing that English should have a purpose — not getting students a job, but making them less racist. Even if they don’t officially want English to be assimilated into other fields of the humanities, like politics, in practice that is what they promote.

This is profoundly patronising to a writer such as Soyinka. He is the first African to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But a white poetry critic like Noel-Tod doesn’t value him for his artistry, but for his activism.

Suggested reading

Black kids should study Larkin

By Kate Clanchy

Another problem with filtering literature through this rigidly ideological lens is that it disables the fundamental quality of any devoted lover of literature: curiosity. It stops us from reflecting on the particular cultural context of a poet or his poetry, and instead takes a reductive view of writers. Consider the case of Seamus Heaney: why should a poet who grew up in rural Northern Ireland, in a Catholic family, be seen as embodying the white, male British establishment? Ultimately, though, what matters to those who love Heaney and Larkin is not their identities; it is their expert manipulation of language.

I love the firmness of Heaney’s lyricism and his scrupulous eye. In “Blackberry-Picking”, for instance, he writes of both the joy (“You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet / Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it / Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for / Picking”) and the darker side to this endeavour (“But when the bath was filled we found a fur, / A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. / The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush / The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour”). This is what ultimately distinguishes poetry, not communicating a direct message, but evoking a powerful sensibility.

Of course, a poet’s ability to do this does not depend on their race. The fact that great poets from non-white backgrounds are excluded from study is bad. But it is bad not because the identities of such poets are not being “centred”; it is bad because students are missing out on great poetry. Blindness to the artistic work of ethnic minority people is worthy of criticism, but assessing such writers on a tokenistic or ideological basis is another form of blindness: in both cases, the poetic merits of their work are ignored.

Those who support decolonising the curriculum see the relationship between non-white and white authors only in terms of conflict. They see it as a zero-sum game: we need to decentre white and male writers to empower writers from marginalised communities. But this underestimates the debt that many non-white authors owe to the traditions of Western literature. Writers are always in conversation with each other. Toni Morrison is renewing William Faulkner; Zadie Smith is renewing Dickens; Derek Walcott is renewing Homer. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was written in part as a rejection of Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but the title of Achebe’s novel is taken from a poem by William Butler Yeats and the plot resembles the structure of a Greek tragedy. There is some conflict between white and non-white authors in the canon, but there is also great continuity between these two groups. By ignoring this fact, Boakye is reinforcing an assumption anti-racists ought to dismantle: that to be Western is to be white.

More from this author

Black radicals don't need white saviours

By Tomiwa Owolade

W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most influential radical black thinkers of the 20th century. But he also loved Richard Wagner. Du Bois proudly affixed himself to Western culture. As he put it, “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the colour line, I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. From out of the caves of evening that swing between strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”

C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian Trotskyist, similarly affirmed an attachment to Western civilisation: “I didn’t learn literature from the mango tree,” he once wrote, “or bathing on the shore and getting the sun of colonial countries; I set out to master the literature, philosophy and ideas of Western civilisation. That is where I have come from and I would not pretend to be anything else.” In his dying days, when he was visited by Edward Said, James wanted to talk to Said about classical music rather than colonialism. When he died, James was called the Black Plato by the Times.

The traditions of Western literature and culture belong just as much to black people as white people. It is part of my inheritance. And that is why I loved teaching those kids: I was sharing what belonged just as much to them as to the kids with hundreds of books in their family homes or a private education.

My favourite student was a boy called Peter. I could tell from his surname that his family came from Ghana. He came to every single lesson, while all my other students found an excuse to skip at least a few classes. I never met Peter. I still don’t even know what he looks like; his camera was always turned off. But we cultivated a connection, not through the fact that both of our families come from west Africa, but by familiarising ourselves with the great works of English Literature. We read Larkin and Heaney, but we also read Derek Walcott. We read snippets of prose too — George Orwell and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. The priority in studying James and Morrison was the elegance of their sentences, the effect of their imagery, and the sophistication of their tone. When we did approach the topic of racism, we had a foundation to build on. And all the time, I never felt the need to “decentre” white, male authors or slap on diverse voices for the sake of it. I was simply guided by what has moved me since I was a boy and continues to move me now: the transcendent beauty of great art.

Sometimes, I can’t help but chuckle at their irreverence. And so it was last week with their “Taking the Michael” headline. St Michael’s Church in Bournemouth had renamed itself St Mike’s “in a trendy rebrand to entice young people”. Grumpy conservatives online — like me — pointed out that the “el” bit at the end of the word “Michael” is of one of the words for God in the Hebrew Bible. Michael — roughly translated — means something like, “One who is like God.” Given this, taking the “el” bit off the end seems rather unfortunate, especially for a church.

But like most headlines in The Sun, there is a streak of cruelty about it. St Mike’s is a huge barn of a Victorian church designed to seat 1,000 people, but now with a congregation of 20. Bournemouth has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the South West. The Vicar there, Sarah Yetman, has a tough gig and all power to her elbow for trying to turn things around. “We aren’t trying to alienate anyone by changing the name” she explains, “But I do feel that if we don’t take steps now to draw people in from those younger generations we will be lamenting what we have missed in the years to come.” “A bid to become more trendy” was the Daily Mail’s take.

So why did this tiny story attract such attention from the national press? Well, I suspect because it does say something rather important about the changing nature of the Church of England. “Taking the Michael” is just the latest in a broad transformation whereby formality of worship is being dropped because it is seen as a barrier to new younger worshippers. The big idea is that we should all get more chummy with the divine. The austere, intimidating God of fire and thunder, the God of the mountain top, the God whom we approach in awe and wonder, is being replaced with the friendly face of Jesus, more mate than majesty. St Michael was the angel of battle who defeated Satan in the ultimate celestial firefight of good vs evil. I don’t think he’s a Mike.

For the Daily Mail and The Sun, what is going on here is of a piece with the cheapening of our national life — which may seem a bit rich coming from them, but there you are. Trendy vicars are the new trendy teachers trying to relate to the kids with permanent (draining to watch) smiles, over the top, unrelenting enthusiasm, and awkward references to popular culture. Yes, I get it. I too want my children’s teachers to look more like Hector from the History Boys (without the fondling) than the Nineties era Tony Blair leaning casually against the photocopier in his stonewashed jeans. And the comparison is not just with trendy vicars. Our new Bishops want to be known as Ric or Pete or Rod. Names are all about relatability. And Christianity is about our relatability to God.

But here, of course, we stumble very quickly into some deep theological waters of the sort Christians have been arguing about since the first few centuries of its existence. It is a cliché — and indeed an antisemitic trope (See Richard Dawkins) — to compare the violent austere God of the Old Testament to the loving warm and cuddly God of the New Testament as captured in the person of Jesus. Old Testament bad, New Testament good — that’s not Christianity btw.

Suggested article

The Church is abandoning its flock

By Giles Fraser

But nonetheless, the central dynamic of Christianity is to be found in the interplay between immanence and transcendence, between the God who draws near and the God who is far off. And far off isn’t a bad thing. This is the God who hovered over creation at the beginning of time. The is the God of the unknown, the one who rather put Job in his place by saying that there are some things that will always be beyond his understanding. This is the God of the God’s eye view, looking at things from the widest possible perspective. This also is the mystical God of silence, there in the still small voice of calm. For Jews, this God is not even to be named. He is known as “Hashem”, the name. This is the God who hides his face from Moses.

Christianity doesn’t resile from any of this. But adds something shockingly different. God is manifest in a particular person, with a name and a face. Jesus is the image of the invisible God. He is down-to-earth (quite literally) and makes God relatable in a whole new way. Jesus is God, and Jesus is my friend.

For the first 400 years of the church’s history, it struggled to express how both of these perspectives could be true at once, how God could be both near and far, immanent and transcendent. And what it came up with was the doctrine of the Trinity, not so much an answer to how these different perspectives co-exist, but rather a firm commitment to the idea that neither could be given up without giving up the heart of what it was to be a Christian. The Trinity is not any sort of philosophical answer but a kind of regulative guide to what orthodox Christianity looks like. “But play you must a tune beyond us, yet ourselves,” wrote Wallace Stephens. It’s a bit like that.

Suggested article

My shamefully silent Church

By Giles Fraser

I am not convinced that the whole Jesus-is-my-best-friend approach best carries all that young people want from the Almighty. There is nothing like spending an hour or so on your knees, somewhere vast and empty, to put your life into some kind of larger perspective and make you feel suitably humble in the great scheme of things. There is nothing quite like the order and majesty of catholic worship to summon a sense of holiness. This is the place where you can come with all your baggage, failures, stupidities, and hold them up to the altar without the distracting need for chat or explanations. This is the place where the sinner hears the convincing reply of silence. Even the deeply irreligious poet Philip Larkin could see what this kind of church offered: “Since someone will always be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious.”

St Mike’s has spent some of the considerable money it received from the central church funds on a smart new website. It has the look of a Benetton advert with ridiculously good-looking 20-somethings in fashionable clothes set in interesting locations. Some of the clergy I know call this sort of thing “imaginary church”. On the website, there are no images of the church itself or the real congregation. So I looked for some. I found one of ladies in their 70s with tight platinum rinses and big coats keeping out the chill.

Being a vicar is extremely hard. And it looks like the Vicar of St Mike’s has a job that is harder than most. I wish her well. But even so, the new St Mike’s scares me for the future of the church. As numbers collapse, it is the small pools of musty holy silence that are being cut out first, ordinary churchgoers being sidelined, as central church finance is being pumped into smiley relatable imaginary church. People can find relatable anywhere these days, in every walk of life. Our culture is sick with the sugary taste of emoting professionals. Because, like diabetes, it eats us away from within.

Written as the author was turning 50, Experience felt like a book that it would be important for Amis to have written. He described his relationship with his father, Kingsley Amis, in hilarious and often moving detail. He also described his “missing”, including his cousin Lucy Partington who disappeared in the 1970s and whose body turned up two decades later beneath the house of Fred and Rosemary West.

It had been expected that Experience would unblock something in Amis. His style in fiction and criticism had always been notoriously tinder-dry, as though the novelist could not trust himself to break a smile or laugh in public. In his memoir he trusted himself — and trusted the reader enough — to do this among other things he had not previously done. He was willing to recount details with slapstick humour, such as escorting his father from the pub, so that the reader could burst into generous, unadulterated laughter.

And he opened his heart in a way that was not just surprising but perhaps needed. In Experience he described the emotion that he felt surge through the attendees at the funeral of his cousin. It felt as though for the first time on the page Amis had trusted his readers, and so had given them a glimpse into places that he had spent decades guarding.

But a protective-layer still remained. At this time I shared an American publisher with Amis, and we did the same publicity rounds after each other. I remember a photographer who had done a session with Amis just before me recounting a detail I always found telling. However hard the photographer tried and however much he insisted, he said he could not get Amis to stare straight into the camera. Repeatedly the novelist would make sure that even when he was staring head-on, his pupils would catch just to the side of the lens. It was telling because it spoke to an element that existed in his fiction: Amis had spent years making sure that his readers could never stare — never see — straight into him. Even when they imagined they were doing so he would in fact be slightly evading them.

Twenty years later he has done it again. Inside Story self-describes as a novel, though it is no such thing and after the briefest early protestations never again really tries to be. The result of an earlier false start, it is in fact a follow-up volume to Experience, with all the earlier book’s virtues and occasional flaws.

More from this author

The unspeakable life of John Bercow

By Douglas Murray

Perhaps the flaws can be got out of the way first of all. They are of one piece, which is that Inside Story is too long, digressive and takes on too much. Several books lie within. At first it seems to be a memoir of the novelist’s intellectual and emotional engagements over the last two decades. Then a set of accounts of his friendships with Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens take over. Slightly strangely, as Amis writes the late lives and final years of both these men his father’s great friend Philip Larkin gets caught up in the narrative and ends up coming along with the accounts of these other two writers’ final years.

This is slightly strange because Amis has written about Larkin in the past (not least his 1992 essay “Don Juan in Hull”) in a way that could not be improved upon. But there appear two reasons why Larkin intrudes here. The first is an ex-girlfriend of Amis’s who interrupts his fifties — piling turmoil on turmoil — by claiming that Amis is actually the product of a fling between Larkin and Amis’s mother. That claim turns out to be bunk. But the real reason why Larkin intrudes appears to be that he is the poet of decline and death who Amis most carries with him. So as the years creep up on him and various ailments, including the loss of loved ones, come along, so Larkin is the lens through which Amis sees life as well, inevitably, as death.

There is one other component of Inside Story, which is that Amis intermittently takes time out to provide short lessons, of a few pages each, on how to write. As with the best of Amis’s criticism, this is witty, truthful, even practical stuff. And although it may be presumptuous for a critic to return the favour to Amis, there is one tick he has which should not be copied. This is his decision (first rolled-out in Experience) to append footnotes to his text so that each page has one, sometimes more, notes on things that Amis has written in his main text.

These footnotes are salient, often enlightening, digressions on themes (including the Holocaust and Stalinism) that preoccupy Amis. But they interrupt the flow of the narrative even more than the main narrative already interrupts itself. To relay a lesson in turn, I was always taught that you should never even use parentheses unless you absolutely have to, for if there is a detail not worthy of being carried in the main body of the sentence then you should think again over whether it is needed at all. In the far more serious case of Amis’s footnotes the reader might wish that Amis had decided that those things not worth including in the main flow of the page should not be smuggled in on the page’s bottom.

More from this author

The sly dishonesty of Owen Jones

By Owen Jones

But this is a quibble. The main purpose, and worth, of Inside Story is not just that it appears to be a signing off by one of the most significant figures in modern English fiction. It is that it constitutes his last reflections on three (or arguably four) of the men who formed his literary and other character. The description of Bellow’s decline into forgetfulness is memorable and moving. But as the picture on the dust jacket suggests, it is the description of Hitchens and his more untimely death that will attract many readers.

Detractors of Amis and his circle often remarked on the insular nature of the coterie, and there is something in that. Whenever a new novel by Salman, Martin or any of the others came out it would always be generously noticed by Hitchens, who in turn would have his non-fiction referred to by the others. Outsiders tend to hate this sort of chumocracy, but as Amis shows here the fact could not be helped. Along with James Fenton and others, the Hitchens-Amis circle educated and informed each other. And as the dominant non-fiction writer in the group, it was the force of Hitchens’ political polemic that forced the others into positions and stances they might not otherwise have taken. So much so that when they disagreed (as Hitchens and Amis did very publicly over the latter’s Koba the Dread [2002]) it was noteworthy, even newsworthy.

In death as in life, Hitchens figures large in Amis’s imagination, the formation of his views and the ideas towards which he gravitates. His descriptions of moments in their decades of friendship are almost alarmingly intimate, and those of Hitchens’ last days are hard to read. It seems churlish to claim of a book so personal and self-intrusive that the author holds anything back. And yet he does, in a manner similar to the way in Hitchens himself drew back at moments of his own memoir Hitch-22 [2010]. In this Hitchens interrupts an account of perhaps the most devastating moment in his life to write “A coda on self-slaughter”. Elsewhere, as in his accounts of the Iraq War he evades the obvious question and slips off onto a different matter.

In Inside Story Amis does something similar, interrupting accounts of the demise and loss of the people most close to him, he will suddenly step away and either survey a different scene, reflect on a literary text he feels is related to it or go into a colloquy related to the writer’s art. Perhaps Amis is acting on one of the first lessons for any writer — “show, don’t tell”. Perhaps the problem is that he remains a novelist and is never willing to fully take on the exposure that comes from being a wholly trusted, first-person narrator.

Although there are fairly lengthy recreations of the conversations the two friends had, somehow Amis misses ever saying what it was that made Hitchens the extraordinary person, even force, that he was. What, in the end, was Amis’s understanding of what made his friend, how he changed (if he changed) and what his meteoric impact was all about? Just during the time I knew Hitchens — which was only for a decade — he rocketed from being a famous figure in the literary world to someone you couldn’t walk down a street with, or dine with, without pedestrians and waiters coming over to express some serious admiration. What made him become this, what was he searching for and did he find what he wanted? As before with Amis, you hold out the hope that he is going to look right at the thing.

After Hitchens’ death Amis wrote a piece about him that consisted of a set of anecdotes. Then, as here, Amis (who is better placed than anyone) strangely fails to explain or demonstrate what it was about Hitchens that made an increasing number of people seek him out. Indeed he doesn’t even quite capture what it was about Hitchens that was capable of setting not just the table, but whole arenas, in a roar.

Once again he evades the gaze just slightly, looking off fractionally to the side, hoping not to be caught. But if you are not going to capture yourself and others, and be able to be caught by others, fully and finally in a memoir like this — even while packaged as a novel — then what later opportunity can Amis possibly be waiting for?

It’s quiet today because it’s raining, but all through our serial lockdowns, my local park has remained lively. While Leicester’s professional sporting venues — Grace Road (cricket), King Power (football) and Welford Road (rugby) — stand empty, park life has sustained the sporting life of the city after the old, archaic meaning. From toddlers pushing baby walkers to old guys on the trot, from kids walking the plank (arms-out), to teenagers sullen on the swings (arms-in), from some pretty serious Indian fast bowling at one end to some pretty unserious English tag rugby — both sexes, not very distant — at the other. I could go on, but you’ve all got a park and you know what I mean. There are more ways to sport than playing football for £290,000 per week.

Suggested reading

Is local football heading for the exit?

By Philip Collins

It has been calculated that “green infrastructure” provides Britain with £34.2bn benefits every year. I don’t know how they know that, and even if they do, it all sounds a bit sterile to me. The good that municipal parks do is there for all to see, and never more self-evident than in recent months.

Victoria Park used to be Leicester’s race course. Fashionable punters would disport their way up New Walk to get there. Racing ended in 1882 and the park opened in 1883. Old Aylestonians Rugby Football Club was founded in 1919 and has played Saturday afternoons here ever since. Club headquarters is The Old Horse. Quite sporting for a one-year-old, my grandson thought it fun to drop his arm straight down a player’s pint.

Rugby, football and cricket dominate according to the seasons, as the park changes too, from bright verdant mornings in the Spring, to inky pinky sunsets in the Winter. Keep fit apparatus runs around the perimeter, which is clever of it, as do families on the Saturday morning fun run. Over by the playground, the park thickens with bushes and a wildlife pond, perfect for a bit of (never to be under-estimated) nature-watching and finding what parks have always offered, relief from the town.

Every May the Caribbean Carnival swivels its way through the wrought iron gates, and it was here that local band Kasabian played to fans in 2016 — the year in which Leicester supporters (and a very big Italian contingent) covered the park in blue. When the team arrived with the Premier League trophy, 50,000 people sang Volare to Ranieri the manager while he conducted as if they were a great opera chorus, which of course, in a way, they were.

Suggested reading

Is capitalism killing cricket?

By James Bloodworth

There used to be a croquet and bowls club but I can’t find it. It seems to have been swallowed by a builder’s yard now morphing into a meadow. And dominating the entire skyline is the University of Leicester. Founded in 1919 as a war memorial, its motto is Ut Vitam Habeant. Which they do.

All this popular amusement used to be a big part of what sport meant. Blur’s 1994 hit Parklife captures it perfectly. “All the people”. “So many people”. “And they all go hand in hand through their parklife”. “Know what I mean?” Certainly do, Phil.

Apart from the grass cutting, none of this costs much. It’s a state of mind: cheap, amusing and near to hand — which is, as my book explains, exactly how the English used to sport in their old parish wakes, or at their Shrove Tuesday football, or in all those mad games and festivals which at least once a year denoted liberty and belonging to all who took part. Stamford used to run bulls and it took the NSPCA, Lincoln Assizes, the Home Office, the 14th Dragoon Guards, the patronage of Queen Victoria and a big dollop of the Metropolitan Police to stop them.

Suggested reading

Why Stamford said no to modernity

By Mary Harrington

Sport in the time of the virus, though, is not just outdoors. While elite sport founders in its billions looking as deracinated as it really is, our lockdown world has taken up those fine old British indoor sports of kitchen curling (aka cleaning the floor), skittles (tins of baked beans), balloon tennis over the sofa (an old favourite), and keepie-uppy with a toilet roll.

C. B. Fry (1872-1956) was a world class athlete who did it all. He scored a century against the Australians. He won a Cup Final medal with Southampton. He played right back for England. He held the World Long Jump record, wrote thrilling sports stories and declined the throne of Albania. But his favourite sport cost nothing and was performed entirely indoors — an amusing party piece where he’d jump up onto the mantelpiece from a standing position. Backwards.

I started writing This Sporting Life thinking the history of sport was important, but not that important. I finished it seeing the sporting life as one of our great civil cultures expressing our deepest national instincts.

I’ve stressed the custom and belonging aspects because they are most apposite to life in the time of the virus. But the book deals with other elements as well, including an equestrian world that says everything you need to know about the gentry, a prize-fighting underworld that stood for what we might call the plebeian side of national honour, local festivals that reflected how people saw their freedoms, and all those sports and games that flowered in schools and colleges as distinctive ways of being young. Then, of course, there was Association Football: England’s gift to the world. Football slipped its village moorings and became not only modern but modernist.

William James once said that the first demonstration of free will is to believe in free will. Football works against all determinisms. Every match involves absolute freedom of movement within set limits, which, come to think about it, is about as near to an everyday expression of liberal freedom as we can get. You could privatise the land to deny the people their sport, but you could never privatise the social solidarities that sport embedded. Where parish wakes ended, football took off. Sometimes a football crowd on the move can look like the parish on a war footing.

Suggested reading

Jack Charlton's vanished world

By Dan Jackson

Historically, people had little choice in where they lived or who with. They had to get on with it and like it, and being for the most part excluded from educated opinion, they found their own forms of expression. They didn’t call sport patriotism and they never called it nationalism. They were simply tapping-in to what was available.

Eric Hobsbawm famously remarked that the nation, comprising millions, “seems more real as a team of eleven named players”. This is fair enough as far as it goes but it misses the larger and far more untidy point that it works the other way as well. Patriotism in Britain has never really been about the great and the good as about faith in each other. Nobody ever cheered a national team for being better than them. They cheer it for being part of them, a piece of the main.

This is something intellectuals such as Fintan O’Toole and Pankaj Mishra, who portray the English as the upper-class gullible led by the lower-class stupid, do not understand. They like to claim Orwell, but not the Orwell who suddenly realised that if the working class was patriotic, it was patriotic in its own way, after its own heroes. ‘The great and the good’, lest we forget, is strictly ironic. Royals and politicians always look like fish out of water at Cup Finals because, deep down, they know it’s not about them. It’s about us.

I started in Victoria Park Leicester. In a piece for Literary Review, Sean O’ Brien cites Pearson Park in Hull as “the centre of imaginative operations” for England’s greatest poet Philip Larkin. On that park, no different from thousands of others like it, Larkin looked from his high windows on the kids and the football, on the fog and the litter bins, and turned what was ordinary into moments which, taken together, have entered the nation’s soul.

Here’s to This Sporting Life.

Robert Colls’ This Sporting Life. Sport and Liberty in England 1760-1960 (Oxford University Press) is published on Thursday.

It’s not true anymore. Since the beginning of this century, three million visitors have submerged themselves at The Deep, Terry Farrell’s dockside aquarium. 19,000 immigrants have settled in the city, 4,800 from Poland. In 2017, Hull’s status as UK Capital of Culture attracted 5.3 million people to gallery exhibitions, music events and multimedia shows.

Larkin has become one of the attractions. The poet’s sculpted likeness stands in the city, a solid materialisation of Hull’s cultural capital. He welcomes tourists by the barriers at Paragon Station, through which he once passed to take the London train to attend librarians’ conferences and forage on Old Compton Street for Danish porn. Perhaps your mum and dad have seen him. (At the station, I mean, not in Soho.)

This is not an article about how great Hull is. People from Hull don’t write those. Hull, like Liverpool, has its back to England, and thinks of itself as a separate city-state. But we don’t possess that implacable Liverpudlian self-confidence. We do self-doubt and self-pity and shame as well as pride — and we don’t do pride in an uncomplicated way because we’re awkward and bloody-minded when it comes to ourselves as well as others.

More from this series

Don't call Abingdon ordinary

By Eleanor Parker

Hull doesn’t like being told what to do. In the English Civil War, it refused entry to the king. In the EU referendum, 67.6% voted in favour of Brexit, despite the imminent arrival of a German-owned wind turbine factory — its best economic hope for years. (It remains so.) Hull celebrates its association with abolitionism: a massive statue of William Wilberforce soars above the grey-and-turquoise FE College. Generations of Hull schoolchildren have been sent to the Wilberforce Museum and gazed upon the shackles and manacles of slavery.

When Oswald Mosley visited the city in July 1936, crowds turned up to boo him and some local children cut the wires of his PA system. And yet, in 2009, Hull sent a British National Party candidate to the European Parliament. (Unfortunately, the tweedy neo-Fascist Andrew Brons did not stand for a second term, robbing his constituents of the opportunity to atone for having elected him in the first place.)

Do you want the tour? We could continue the far-Right theme and visit the Ferens Art Gallery to meet Percy Wyndham Lewis – Vorticism’s chief explosives officer, Hitler fanboy and amateur airman. He’s easy to spot — in Mr Wyndham Lewis as ‘Tyro’ (1920) he depicted himself as a reptile-green bandit baring his incisors from an ochreous void. To stand before him is to feel the burning contempt of a Modernist Ubermensch — except Hull has caught him and fixed him, like a prehistoric insect caught in amber.

More from this author

Did Colston deserve his watery grave?

By Matthew Sweet

Less care, unfortunately, has been taken with the friendly face of Modernist Hull — Alan Boyson’s Three Ships, which adorns the side of the British Home Stores building on Jameson Street. It is a landmark of the city and the largest mosaic in the country. Earlier this year, the Council was narrowly prevented from demolishing it — but only for the moment. If they decide it is “unsafe” they might yet pull it down. Hull’s perverse streak showing again.

Hull’s separateness brought Larkin to the Humber and nourished his work. He wasn’t the only one. Hull welcomes artistic migrants. The poet Douglas Dunn was nurtured by the city — it gave him the subject of Terry Street (1969). Basil Kirchin, an audio experimentalist who made soundscapes with birdsong, insect chirrups, the cries of zoo animals and the screams of children, took refuge on the Hessle Road. If you’ve heard his album Worlds Within Worlds (1971), you can indulge your dreams about what he was trying to escape.

Hull is still playing this role. Poets and artists thrive here. It might be because the Humber Estuary is the English landscape’s best shot at true abstraction — three miles of water and an immensity of sky: Larkin’s “unfenced existence”. On the other hand, rents are low, studio space is plentiful, and there’s good coffee on Humber Street.

Suggested reading

Why the North East of England is different

By Dan Jackson

Some indicators of Hull’s separateness have vanished. The fishing industry, and the lonely, dangerous lives of its seagoing workers. The Ladas that rolled off Russian boats, then rolled over Hull’s wide, uninclined roads. The chunky dial behind the living room curtain that changed channels on the Rediffusion TV — a stormproof radio and television service that arrived through cables under the pavement. (The famous cream-coloured phone boxes are the last memorials of Hull’s status as the Galapagos of British telecommunications.)

Gwenap, which, until it closed in 2009, was thought to be Britain’s oldest sex shop. (At one stage the sign over the door read: “Blow Up Dolls Suit Reformed Terrorists: Make Love Not War.”) The Radburn-style towers of Orchard Park, where travelling people pastured their horses on the traffic islands, and my grandfather surveyed the East Riding from the fourteenth floor of a twenty-storey highrise. (When one tower, Milldane, came down in August 2013, a photograph appeared to show a ghostly figure standing on one of the balconies.)

Walk down Whitefriargate, past the Land of Green Ginger, and you’ll encounter the true spirit of Hull’s oddness. It’s located just inside the Hepworth Arcade, a light-flooded Victorian shopping mall. The window display has barely changed in 50 years. Thick coils of plastic dog turd. Rubber custard creams and bourbon biscuits. Fake bluebottles entombed in Perspex ice cubes. Soap that makes you dirty. Sweets that burn your mouth. Sweets that make you fart. Sun-bleached envelopes bearing line drawings of people from the olden days with nails through their fingers and their eyes rolling in their heads like roulette balls.

Dinsdales joke shop has been in the same family for four generations. Behind the glass-topped counter, there’s always a member of the clan who will supply the history lecture or delve into a musty cardboard box to pull out a tiny tin of 1930s itching powder. (“Worse that a cartload of fleas,” claims the slogan on the lid.)

Suggested reading

Would you rather be someone else?

By Dan Hitchens

The shop is small. You can’t ignore your fellow customers — or what might be going on inside their heads. On a recent visit I got talking to a cheerful woman in her sixties who was there to buy exploding cigarettes. These, she explained, would be handed out to anyone who tried to cadge a fag from her on the street. (“That’ll teach ‘em,” she said.) Her haul also contained a couple of dozen little plastic bags, the sort you use to take cash to the bank. Inside each was a crumpled fake tenner. She slipped one into my pocket, but the rest were destined for scattering on the pavements of Hull, where they would act as little punishments for anyone whose spirit might briefly be lifted by the idea of getting something for nothing. The joke shop manager, showing a fine understanding of the psychology of her clients, pulled out a stack of fake winning Irish lottery scratch cards. She had, she said, placed one of these just out of reach of her mother-in-law, with hilarious consequences.

If Hull was on the couch, what would it say? That we had a great industry and we mourn it. We mourn, particularly, the legions of the drowned, upon whom our prosperity depended. But we also breathe a quiet sigh of relief that we are no longer that city whose male population disappeared for weeks on end, came back, drank their wages, beat up their wives and disappeared again. And we’re thankful that nobody is suggesting a post-Brexit return to the stinking feculence of the whaling business.

We’d talk about Hull’s image, too. Hull was the crappest town in the Book of Crap Towns (2003) — whose authors declared that the place “smelt of death” and would, come Judgement Day, be “leased out indefinitely to Satan to provide housing for the Damned”. Jasper Carrott used to joke that restaurants in Hull closed for lunch. When The Economist wrote about Hull, it saw “Britain’s rust belt” where “teenagers in baseball caps and tracksuits wander aimlessly”. (A sight never witnessed, of course, in the prosperous South.)

Suggested reading

The rebirth of Liverpool

By Sam Jordison

And we’d talk about Larkin, and his poem This Be the Verse, and its image of misery deepening from generation to generation. The first line is the one everyone quotes: “They fuck you up…” Perhaps, in Hull, we’ve always been a little fucked up. In recent years, the rest of the country seems to have joined us. And I have to say: being fucked up is fine. It’s survivable, anyway. Being fucked, not so much. That’s more serious. The distinction is important. And it would be foolish to pretend, with Covid-19 the subject of our present chapter and a no-deal Brexit the possible matter of the next, that it wasn’t being asked.

Is Britain fucked? Go to Hull. Wander its streets, and you might find out. See its wide impossible sky and the great grey stripe of its river. Gaze upon the pale blues and greens of the Boyson mosaic, the shining contours of Dinsdale’s plastic dog turds, and you may discover the answer. Don’t tell us though. We won’t listen.

That line doesn’t feature in Andrew H Miller’s new work of literary criticism, On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives, though “To My Wife” is quoted in full, as is “I Remember, I Remember”, a detailed reminiscence of all the things Larkin didn’t get up to in his childhood. Larkin’s most ruthlessly unsentimental poem on this subject, however, is “Dockery and Son”, which meditates on the difference between one life path and another before concluding that, actually, it doesn’t really matter, because our choices are determined by deep-lying psychological habits and in any case we’ll all be dead before long:

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

Faced with Larkin’s nihilism, Miller politely suggests that it maybe isn’t the whole picture. While Larkin writes as though “we’re defined by loss,” Miller tells us, “I’d like to think that something is sometimes gained.” He also manages to look on the bright side of Virginia Woolf, concentrating on the “happy, even delicious” moments in her prose rather than the intimations of mental illness and despair. Although the book, very sensibly, does not try to live up to its self-help-y jacket blurb — “On Not Being Someone Else offers the balm that when we confront our imaginary selves, we discover who we are” — it is written in a gently soothing tone, and for the most part Miller finds poets and novelists to be consoling, helpful company rather than stunningly original or dazzlingly subversive.

More from this author

Whatever happened to the polymath?

By Dan Hitchens

The preface to this concise and thoughtful book is a study in self-deprecation: Miller warns us that he doesn’t “really argue for many theses”, he just wants to point out a distinctive theme of modern literature: the exploration of the road not taken – to cite the most famous example, and perhaps the best-known American poem of the 20^th century. It is, Miller persuasively argues, a constant preoccupation of the last 200 years, from David Copperfield’s disappointed brooding to the acronyms which have recently entered the language. “Ah – YOLO plus FOMO,” says one of Miller’s colleagues when told about the book.

But Miller has another argument to make, and an ambitious one: that contemplating the lives we didn’t lead can help us “to find meaning”. Or at least, help us feel that way: poems and stories, he writes, “create with special power the experience of verging on meaning: something important is being said, but what isn’t clear.”

A possible rejoinder is that if you don’t know what’s being said, then you can hardly know whether it’s important or a complete waste of time. All the same, there is a kind of communication which is beyond language: as Felix Mendelssohn once remarked, the emotions expressed by music are not too vague for words, but too precise. Words themselves, as Miller’s many well-chosen examples show, can point towards the unsayable. Virginia Woolf, on his reading, balances the beauty of the present moment with the restless yearning for something more.

Suggested reading

Surely lockdown is a millennial's idea of heaven?

By Meghan Murphy

In his search for “meaning” in literary texts, Miller follows in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, who predicted in 1880 that poetry would replace religion. Arnold supported such a change, on the grounds that poetry had some of the practical functions of Christianity — “to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us” — but none of the supposed disadvantages, like dogmas which might have to be defended against criticism from scientists and historians. The drawback to Arnold’s scheme, and perhaps the reason that his prediction has not come to pass, is that dogmas actually respond to a need: they are answers to unavoidable questions. Poetry, by contrast, offers few if any answers – it cannot even deal with Larkin’s question of what the point of it all is.

Miller’s book may be overly idealistic about poetry, but he does not have his head in the clouds. If recent centuries have seen a growing fascination with unled lives, he observes, the main reason is market capitalism, “an economic system that isolates us and urges us to calculate opportunities and maximize their effects.” Although Miller does not explicitly link liberal capitalism with liberal social policy, he does note that many recent changes, from the legalisation of abortion to what he chooses to call “the increased visibility of transgender people”, have also reinforced the sense that life consists in a series of choices.

Suggested reading

The danger of safetyism

By Matthew Crawford

Much has been written since 2016 about Western liberalism and the high price we have paid for it as a society in the breakdown of communities and traditions. Less often discussed are its effects on the individual imagination. Liberalism has freed the self to create its own identity: as a justice of the US Supreme Court once declared, “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” But unless you happen to be G. W. F. Hegel this is an impossibly heavy burden, and we have had to displace it by making up ersatz identities — hence the popularity of video games, social media and vicarious living through celebrities.

Cinema also deals in fantasy, but has sometimes found ways of deflating it. The dominant theme of mid-period Woody Allen films is that the characters who try to break into a world of wealth, celebrity and romantic drama end up as hollow men, while the real heroes turn out to be those who take life as it comes and do their best to help the people around them. An earlier example is It’s A Wonderful Life, to which Miller devotes a short chapter. It is a film of lost possibilities: George Bailey watches his friends escape to lives of excitement and adventure while he remains stuck in his small town. And yet, the film suggests in its unforgettable last half-hour, it is Bailey’s life which was the true adventure, if we could only see it.

Art and literature can help reconcile us to only having one life to live, but they cannot provide the meaning of that life. One sign of this is how easily even the profoundest works of art get turned into brands. Frost’s “Road Not Taken” has become quite a money-spinner, being used in advertisements for cars, insurance, chewing gum and the jobs website Monster.com (“Find The Job You Deserve”). Transcendence, one feels, should be a little harder to sell.

Freud had previously imagined human beings as being driven exclusively by the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. With the death drive he postulated an altogether more complex part of our unconscious psychological make-up: that alongside our desire for pleasure, runs some sort of desire for our own destruction. We are driven by an allegiance to two very different gods: Eros and Thanatos.

What made Freud reconsider the exclusive dominance of the pleasure principle in human lives was the compulsion in several of his patients to play out to themselves, and to repeat, painful experiences from their past. In what way, for instance, could the repeated nightmares of those who had witnessed so much death and destruction during the Great War be understood in terms of the psyche seeking pleasure? Why do dreams return us again and again to traumatic experiences of destruction?

Suggested reading

The turn of the year is no cause for optimism

By Peter Hitchens

Something other than pleasure maximisation had to be going on here. And the desire to replay destructiveness is not merely some psychological leakage that takes place in the middle of the night. What about the tendency we have to repeat destructive patterns of behaviour in our own lives? How many of us have the same New Year’s resolutions this year that we had last year and the year before? Aren’t we constantly battling with something destructive within — a smoking habit, for instance — that we claim we want to rid ourselves of, and yet which always ‘gets the better of us’. Perhaps on some level, we will our own destruction.

Freud’s was not a completely original proposal. In the early 19th century, Schopenhauer had explored the idea that human unhappiness is generated by desire. Obviously, not getting what you want can make you unhappy. But what Schopenhauer noticed was that even getting what you want is not unproblematic, for satisfied desire is often just the elimination of the desire itself, and often merely a temporary return to the condition of not desiring – post-coital, oblivious, smoking a fag. The French call it “la petite morte”, the little death.

Actually, smoking is an excellent example. Lighting up a fag, and breathing in the nicotine, is a way to quiet the desire for a cigarette. It is a way to deal with the desiring. To make it go away. The aim of smoking is to stop that insistent desire to smoke. And if the aim of desire – Eros — is to make the desiring go away, then death, the absence of desire, is its ultimate goal. Buddhism runs something similar. And so, at some level, does Christianity:

“Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.”

Little wonder, then, that we talk about death as being ‘at peace’.

Desire is what motivates our survival. Yet desire is also what generates our frustration and unhappiness. For Freud, this complex formula is famously the drama of the child and built in to our earliest experiences. The child desires its parent, but the parent is already taken and is “taboo”. In this sense, our earliest desires are also experienced as forbidden, and so the trauma of childhood is one of frustrated desire.

Freud describes adult life as a process of recovery, of learning (and failing) to accommodate unmet needs. Such a history points in the direction of both Eros and Thanatos – to Eros, as the motivating rage against unmet desire, and to Thanatos as the unspoken realisation that the only way to quell the fire of desire is to abolish the desiring.

None of this is more clearly exposed than within our working lives. In his brilliant book on our culture of overworking, Not Working, the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen explores this interplay of Eros and Thanatos in the context of our obsession with professional advancement and ‘getting on’.

“The life drive seeks more of everything. Through sexual reproduction and hard work, it ensures that the species renews itself and that new life can be sustained. Through curiosity, imagination and practical application, it created new territories, ideas, communities, technologies and cultures. The life drive would go on without stopping if it could.”

But, of course, you can’t go on forever, without stopping. We work hard, ever harder, to rage against the dying of the light. But slowing down is an inbuilt part of the mechanics of human biology. And, on some level, we are also grateful for it, we desire it.

 “When Freud suggests that the death drive insinuates itself quietly and invisibly into the life drive, seeking to inhibit its forward movement, he reminds us that even in the most manically expansive and ambitious periods in the life of an individual or a people, there is a moment of sluggishness. [Consider] the voice of lassitude whispering: Really? Can you be bothered? Wouldn’t you rather stay in bed?” 

A propos New Year’s resolutions, Cohen makes the telling point that even here we have turned ‘giving up’ stuff — stopping doing things — into a form of hard work. It’s now another project of the self, another thing for the to-do list, another basis for advancement.

The subtitle to Cohen’s book — “why we have to stop” — references a very different form of stopping. His ‘stopping’ is a release from the endless wheel of getting on. It is something that makes its peace with being at peace — not as the premature acceptance of death, and not the peace of the slacker or the slob, but the sort of peace that comes from not being constantly run by the drum beat of a very professionalised kind of Eros. Of not being constantly driven by a neurotic version of the life force that has been cleverly harnessed by capitalism.

In theological terms, Cohen’s pitch is much more the Jewish sabbath than the Protestant work ethic. Paint a painting, daydream more, play more, go for a walk, read a book. Maybe start with Cohen’s Not Working — there is no better antidote to all those forward planning meetings, setting ambitious goals, filling up all those empty pages in your diary.

“Why should I let the toad work squat on my life?” complains Phillip Larkin. But Cohen’s point is that we do it to ourselves. That our culture of overwork, of constantly checking and sending off e-mails, of setting up yet another meeting, can easily become all about us running away from our eventual descent into nothingness. Cohen is right to suggest that instead of this panic, we should make friends with our finitude.

Too much thinking about the death drive has overly associated it with a kind of malevolence — we might think of Dr Strangelove or Donald Trump starting World War Three in the Middle East. And it is true that the death drive has some dark power, reminding us of our terrible fascination with war and violence.

But there is another side to it. What Cohen proposes is not some malevolent celebration of death, or even the celebration of that stupefied nothingness offered by an enveloping sofa and a glass of wine. Rather, what he points to is a kind of letting go that promises welcome release from the Duracell bunny version of Eros.

That kind of Eros is often a desperate version of the need to pretend that we will never die, that we will never fall silent. And that kind of Eros is trapped in something both scared and foolish. In other words, we can presume too quickly that Thanatos is our enemy. And so, as we cling desperately to Eros, we become its slave.

Freud would know why we're all workaholics

Subscribe:

I exaggerate. But after a joyous August of playing aimlessly with my 20-month old son, creating dens, making up silly games, and singing his favourite nursery songs, I find the change of mood at this time of year more than a little deflating.

And when I read that the American Academy of Pediatrics has just published a report – The Power of Play – in which they argue that children are now so incapable of play that doctors should prescribe it to them as some sort of therapy, I want to chuck my laptop in the skip and return to the simple pleasures of mucking about with my boy. Yes, it’s a fantasy. “Ah, were I courageous enough to shout, Stuff your pension! But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff That dreams are made on.” Larkin continues.

Suggested reading

Jesus was a ‘somewhere’. Paul was an 'anywhere'

By Giles Fraser

My complaint is not so much about the work, but really more about instrumentality – the idea that everything we do has to be for some further purpose, a means to another end. Play, by contrast, is always an end in itself. It’s here the American Academy of Pediatrics report gets things badly wrong. It argues “research demonstrates that developmentally appropriate play … is a singular opportunity to promote social-emotional, cognitive, language, and self-regulation skills and build executive function”. “Play is not frivolous” it says, “it enhances brain structure and function which allow us to pursue goals and ignore distractions.”

This is utter balderdash: not balderdash as in untrue, but balderdash as in missing the point. Of course play is frivolous, entirely frivolous – anything else and it isn’t play. The idea that play is a means to an end, that it is some important developmental stage en route to ‘pursuing goals’ , turns play into a form of work. And nothing could be better designed to undermine play that to give it this sort of point.

I am fortunate enough that there is something entirely pointless about what I do as a priest. OK, I can hear the atheists sniggering at the back, so I had better clarify that. I mean pointless in a very particular sense: that the worship of God is pointless in so far as it is conducted for its own sake, not to elicit some additional advantage.

Those who assume that Christians worship God as means to adduce divine favour, thus to build up points to get into heaven, or – even more foolishly – to get little Jonny into the local church school, miss what worship is supposed to be all about – simply the joy of doing it, in and of itself.

When the Book of Revelation describes heaven as eternal worship, it does not mean that it will be like some sort of endless church service, the Vicar droning on and on to infinity. That’s not heaven, that’s the other place. Rather, the worship of heaven is more like play: something that derives its meaning, purpose and satisfaction in and through the very act of doing it. That is why it is able to go on forever.

The central image of God in the Christian tradition is that of the Trinity, three persons creating one-ness though some sort of continual dance with each other.  Imagine a sort of divine Ring a Ring o’ Roses, all holding hands, dancing in a circle, celebrating life in a whirligig of continuous motion. Not three, but made as one in the disco of loving interchange, the continual giving and receiving of love.

Perichoresis is the technical theological word for it. And worship is the privilege of participating in this divine life, the reciprocal exchange of loving kindness, the playful dance of life celebrating life. So when human beings are said to have been made in the image and likeness of God, that means they are made for play.

I know, I have probably strayed too much into sermon mode here. But worship is the nearest thing I can think of to play. G K Chesterton put it thus:

“It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task-garden, heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that on can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke – that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls. When we are really holy we may regard the Universe at a lark.”

Children are born knowing how to play. Adults tend to lose that ability. I have a pond at the bottom of my garden. It has a dozen or so goldfish in it. My son can sit there for ages, just pointing to the fish as they pop to the surface. “Dag” he says (fish in Hebrew), as one comes into view. And I sit with him, doing nothing but this. There is no other point to sitting out there occasionally spotting fish, yet these are the most joyous and life-affirming of times.

After a while, I think I ought to be doing something useful, like writing a column. But Louie resists my need to get on with stuff. He takes my hand, sits me down and makes me wait for the next fish. My boy is teaching me how to worship again. “Truly, I tell you,” says Jesus, “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”