That reminds me: many years ago I said publicly that I didn’t really know how I wrote, and would leave discussion of that (and I quote) “to the clever buggers in universities,” and it has since been quoted back to me by your dean of Research, a decent guy, but in my opinion not fat enough for the position, with the observation that I was now one of those clever buggers! Officially! I was astonished, and indeed my whole life has been one of astonishment, as I shall now recount.…
However, there has to be a regrettable caveat. PCA messes with the memory, and also makes it almost impossible to read from a written speech. Doing so means, if the speaker has a hope of holding the audience, that their gaze should flick effortlessly between the painstakingly written text and the audience themselves. I have been robbed of the power to do that. Therefore I shall endeavour to give my speech from memory and assisted by my estimable PA Rob Wilkins, with whom I have agreed that he will occasionally, given that we are all friends here, interject as he sees fit with comments like “You didn’t tell them about the hippopotamus, you daft old fart,” in which case I will have to say, “Thank you for that but please remember next time that it is in fact ‘Prof. Sir Daft Old Fart, OBE, and Blackboard Monitor,’ thank you so very much.”
And why should I subject you to this charade? It is because it is the truth of the world and the world is growing older, and I am luckier, with my technology, than many others.
Twice, when I have spoken out on subjects like Alzheimer’s and assisted dying, helpful Christians have told me that I should try considering my affliction as a gift from God. Now, personally I would have preferred a box of chocolates. Nevertheless, there may be some truth, a curiously convoluted truth, in that because it has made me look at the world, just like my pants, from a new perspective, which, according to G. K. Chesterton, is the role of fantasy anyway. And now I am living in a kind of fantasy, and I have found that growing within me is a steeliness that I never knew was there, the view of the world that might make Bob Dylan look like a man who was only slightly annoyed about the government. Whereas, not so long ago, I used to drift gently through the world, occasionally rebounding softly from the side. I began to open my eyes which led to a terrible tendency to question authority, because authority that cannot be questioned is tyranny and I will not accept any tyranny, even that of heaven.
Nevertheless, to question authority is not, in principle, to attack it, although authority always assumes that this is the case since authority must repeatedly establish its right to rule; and if this is done by force, then it turns out that it was a tyranny all along. Good heavens, I can’t believe I am preaching this to an audience of Irishmen! Just think about it: a quarter of an hour of rational thinking and an Englishman turns into an Irishman.
Recently, an organization not far from where I live had to make some of its employees redundant. They were called in to the office of some functionary who told them that, I quote, “they were being deleted.” This did make the local news, but the most miraculous thing about it is that nobody, after being dealt with by a Dalek, punched the bastard’s lights out and set fire to his desk. I would have stood their bail.
We live in a venal world run largely by men who count numbers and, because they can count people, they think people are numbers. We accept half-truths, we have learned to think that we must do what the government tells us, when in fact the truth of the matter is that the government should do what we tell it. Governments are scared. In England, unlike Ireland, where I gather you punch one another’s lights out for fun and entertainment at both weddings and funerals, the government does not like to hold a referendum, because that would mean that stupid people, which is to say people who aren’t politicians, would make the decisions which are better left to stupid and, as we learn more and more, dishonest politicians instead. They despise us until an election comes around, when they pretend that they do not.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, three peoples who hold dear to them the same God are at one another’s throats. How stupid can one species be? And we will continue to be so stupid until we realize that the Iron Age is over. I write fantasy and I wouldn’t have been able to come up with something like that.
It may not surprise you to know that I have some Irishness in my ancestry, but I suspect that everybody has, in the same way that we’re all related to Charlemagne.
My mother, sadly no longer with us, had an Irish grandfather who told her stories as a girl and took delight in telling me how she passed them on to me when I was very young. I was too young to remember, but I sometimes suspect that many of those have lurked in the nether regions of my subconscious, waiting to burst out as soon as, to the dismay of the gods of literature, I got my hands on my first word processor. I am pretty certain that one of them surfaced in Lords and Ladies, because it has an indefinable Irish construction.
I owe a great deal to my parents. My mother watched me become a Knight, but do you know, she would have been even prouder to talk about “my son, the professor.” They raised me with kindness and, where appropriate, a side order of brief and effective sternness and—may they be forever blessed for this final consideration—without any religious upbringing whatsoever. To the best of my knowledge, neither of my parents as an adult ever went in to church with religious aforethought. I know that there was distant Catholicism in my mother’s family, but only because once, when I was about six years old, I found a crucifix and, much to her amusement, came up to her holding it and said, “Mum, I have found a stick with an acrobat on it!” And although she did indeed never perform an act of worship that I was aware of, the acrobat followed her every house move and after her death I desperately tore my way through her possessions until I found him. He was actually in front of me as I wrote this lecture. I have always considered him an exemplar of mankind, but possibly regrettably the Origin of Species hit me before the Bible did.
As a child, I did not read for pleasure. Reading was associated with school and besides, I was always one step behind. A trait that has characterized my life, I feel. Starting with the fact that I was born late! It came as a shock, I can tell you, but not to my mother who had been lying there waiting for me for several hours after the apparently predestined time, or three damn hours as she put it to me sometime later.