Last week, there was something of a debate amongst my now quite elderly parents and me. I remarked that I genuinely struggle to understand why so many people are so reluctant to change their minds. What on earth was so frightening about it? My father, a trained scientist, seemed to get where I was coming from. My mother, a trained counsellor, was less impressed. She sees everything through the matrix of people’s emotional responses and finds it easy to comprehend the ways in which people’s fears and hang-ups are their most powerful driving forces. But I genuinely struggle to understand why people are so fixed in their ways of thinking.
While I’ve never considered myself to be much of a scientist (a glance at my GCSE grades will confirm this for anyone in doubt), I do like to think that I am a rationalist and that I base my responses to most things on the evidence in front of me. I am also, I think on balance, quite emotionally robust. Given these two character traits, I will confess that I genuinely struggle to comprehend why changing one’s mind about something is considered to be such a terrifying prospect; but the older I get, the more I am forced to acknowledge that for many it seems to be so.
In the same week, I met a friend who filled me in on some local gossip and remarked, in passing, that living in our village had been good for her, since she had been exposed to a range of people with different political views and discovered (in a manner that she reported with some surprise) that Conservative voters did not all possess the horns of Beelzebub. She reflected on the limitations of being brought up in a home in which one political viewpoint was presented (a household that she summed up as “Guardian-reading”). I reflected on the fact that I felt there had been a variety of political standpoints within my close family and that these had been openly (and sometimes quite heatedly!) debated, perhaps leaving me open to the notion that there can be well thought-out (and indeed extremely badly thought-out) views on all sides. She said that she envied this experience. It was genuinely fascinating and gave me further pause for thought. Might this exposure to conflicting politics within one family be another reason why I am interested in rather than threatened by alternative viewpoints?
Also this week, whilst listening to a podcast, I heard a reference to an analogy used in human psychology that I had not come across before, and it chimed with all the thoughts I had been having about tribal thinking versus the ability to change one’s mind. I looked up the reference and was fascinated to discover someone called Julia Galef, an author and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality. Galef argues that some people act like “soldiers”, while others act like “scouts”. “Soldiers” in her analogy tend to approach a discussion from the sole position of defending their beliefs, attempting to discredit or dismiss conflicting information and seeing the alternative viewpoints as the enemy to be shot down. “Scouts”, by contrast, are motivated more by the desire to find the truth regardless, of their starting point.
But before we “scouts” get too smug about our Stoic capacity for reason, according to Galef, our tendencies towards being either a “soldier” or a “scout” are both rooted in our emotional responses and learned behaviour. The “soldier” mindset tends to be held by someone who is motivated by connection and community (which can lead to tribalism), whereas someone with a “scout” mindset is more likely to enjoy the process of discovering new things (which can lead to innovative or creative thinking, but carries with it the threat of isolation). For a “soldier”, the process of changing your mind feels like a weakness or even a defeat. For a “scout”, it as something positive and exciting. This is exactly how I feel. To me, the process of changing my mind isn’t simply non-threatening: it is genuinely thrilling and wonderful. I love discovering that I have been wrong about something, or that my understanding of a topic has been flawed. I find it genuinely mind-boggling that people can hold the same views that they have always held, and borderline distressing to imagine that they find the process of change a net negative.
In a quest for further knowledge, I will delve into Galef’s book, The Scout Mindset, and find out if her analogy resonates once I’ve read it in full. For now, I feel genuinely happy to be a “scout” and can highly recommend it. It might not make you the most popular person at the party, but it does make you the one who will point out that the emperor is stark, staring naked.
To what extent should it be evidentially apparent that we practise what we preach? I have been pondering this dilemma, since observing a distinctly less than svelte gentleman, who regularly oversees the training regimes of customers in the gym, encouraging his clients to build muscle and burn fat whilst resting his own arms on his notable and substantial belly. I will admit that my mind went somewhere slightly uncharitable, a thought process that can be summed up in the line, “maybe get your own house in order first,” but then I found myself wondering: to what extent does a fitness instructor have to be fit?
The question became more complicated the more I thought about it. Given the well-documented fact that many doctors smoke and drink alcohol and that many of them are also overweight, does that make those same doctors any less qualified to tell the rest of us what to do when it comes to looking after our bodies? Their ability to diagnose and treat doesn’t disappear if they don’t always follow ideal habits. Shift work is notorious for making it difficult to sustain a healthy diet and lifestyle, as is stress: so should we think less of them for falling prey to the same barriers as the rest of us? And why should this not apply also to fitness instructors?
Physical trainers and their clientele at the gym are something of a source of fascination for me. It is (for me, at any rate) simply impossible not to eavesdrop on their sessions, and I’m fascinated by the barely-concealed disinterest with which so many of the PTs conduct their sessions. It is, to be fair, a pretty repetitive job, watching a variety of newbies straining to improve their fitness, but I am startled by how dismally uninterested some of the instructors seem to be in the process of fitness. Why apply yourself to a career without that basic love for what you do? Personally, I still get a kick out of explaining how participles work, after nearly thirty years of doing so, and I still take joy and pride in watching the lights go on when I help a student to understand something that they have not managed to grasp before.
Perhaps the most enthusiastic personal trainer at the gym is a man whom I have nicknamed (in my head, you understand) The Dangling Frog. This man is genuinely interested in pumping iron, although I would question the degree to which he is an advocate of what I would deem true fitness, given the amount of steroids I suspect he has imbibed. So, why Dangling Frog, you ask? Well, he has done so much upper body work that he resembles one. Imagine holding up a frog by its body and letting its bowed, skinny legs dangle beneath? That’s what this guy looks like. I have witnessed him working on his own muscles and the level of strain he applies to his shoulders and biceps is impressive: the poor old legs don’t get a look in, so they remain a mere shadow of his upper-body musculature. To be frank, I’m surprised that his legs can sustain the downward force of his upper body. One day, I fear that the unarguable laws of physics will complete the inevitable demonstration of force and gravity and his legs will give way.
Still, disproportionate physique aside, this guy is certainly more enthusiastic than most. His favourite regular client is older than him, so he gets to show off a bit under the guise of training and encouragement, but I saw him recently with a younger compatriot and I couldn’t quite work out whether this was a trainer-client situation or simply a meeting of mutual appreciation. Whatever the circumstances, it looked like a beautiful bromance was developing, and their conversation went something as follows:
Bro 1: yeah I think I’m trying too hard. Bro 2: yeah you need to reduce to 36K and focus on letting your body do what it needs to do. Bro 1: yeah exactly. Bro 2: yeah. Bro 1: Maybe I’ll try 30K. Bro 2: I tried with like 42K last week. Bro 1: no way wow. Bro 2 (preening slightly): yeah that was like way too much but you know. Bro 1: yeah man. Bro 2: yeah.
It was like listening to poetry. Dangling Frog at least practises a significant amount of what he preaches, which is (I suspect) lots of upper-body pumping, the constant imbibing of protein-based sludge and (I also suspect) a regular date with some anabolic steroids. Is he a better role-model than the instructor with the standard paunch, I found myself wondering? I’m honestly not sure. So, where are the genuine fitness enthusiastists? Is it really that hard?
For fitness coaches, credibility is surely tied to example. If I were a client, I’ll be honest that I would expect them to look fit, and I would expect them to practise what they teach. If a coach promotes healthy eating and an active lifestyle but doesn’t look as if they follow their own advice, my trust would go out the window. Much of their job involves demonstration and motivation, so one would have thought that leading by example would be their most powerful weapon.
Yet, how about counsellors and therapists? They give advice on emotions, coping strategies and behaviour, but they are not expected to have perfect mental health themselves. Indeed, many counsellors have faced their own struggles and a therapist who has sailed through life with no challenges would be an inadequate one indeed. What matters is that they understand techniques and can guide others effectively. While practising what they preach is helpful, self-awareness and professional skill matter more than personal perfection. Perhaps this should also apply to fitness instructors?
I am still pondering this and am left asking myself why it is the case that I would expect and demand a fitness coach to be an exemplification of what they are employed to teach. Perhaps it is because I would assume that the process of fitness is a source of personal interest for them. Likewise, I also perhaps assume that once one is truly knowledgeable about fitness then one surely would not be able to resist the urge to apply it to one’s own lifestyle. For example, once you truly understand the damage that a sedentary lifestyle can cause, surely you cannot help but be more active? Yet, if this were true, then nobody would smoke, nobody would drink, nobody would be inactive. Is it really the case that ignorance is the problem, given the overwhelming amount of information with which we are all surrounded?
When someone claims authority — whether it be a teacher, a coach or a religious leader — humans instinctively look for alignment between their words and actions as proof that their advice is genuine and achievable. If a teacher follows their own guidance, it signals integrity, builds trust and makes their teachings feel real rather than abstract. On the other hand, hypocrisy can weaken respect and create doubt, because it suggests either a lack of belief or a gap between theory and real life. Ultimately, we value authenticity, and seeing someone embody their own principles makes those principles more convincing.
What should one do if one’s own Member of Parliament were to misrepresent reality and twist the truth in order to raise their profile on social media and blow their own trumpet in the House of Commons? One asks this purely hypothetically, of course, for it would be truly beyond the pale were such a thing to happen for real.
Imagine this entirely theoretical scenario. One’s local Member of Parliament visits a comprehensive school within his (or her) constituency. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that this is a school in which one has worked for many happy years and is therefore a school in which one is emotionally invested and indeed a school of which one has an intimate knowledge. It is possible, for example, that one might well have taught a lesson in pretty much every single classroom in such a school. One might, indeed, have a thorough knowledge of the school and the fabric of its buildings, as a result of working there full time for well over a decade. Since leaving this school (again, entirely hypothetically), one might have maintained contact with it on and off, and one might have visited the school on occasion. All possible, in this entirely imaginary tale, I hope you can agree. What is less plausible in one’s story is the behaviour of the Member of Parliament.
To continue this whimsical flight of fancy, imagine that the Member of Parliament saw fit to poke about in an area of the school that has been condemned for several years and is completely shut off to both students and staff. Imagine that this has been the case for so long that — as someone who has worked there for over a decade — one is not even entirely sure where that part of the school actually is, since in one’s imagined scenario the condemned area has been quite rightly out of bounds. Perhaps nobody goes there and perhaps nobody has access to it except for the site team, in this altogether imaginary school in this altogether made-up story. Despite these facts (I say “facts”, but of course, do remember that this is an entirely fictional tale), the Member of Parliament in one’s story takes some pictures of this disused area (imagine that! Ludicrous!) then shares those pictures on his (or her) social media pages and makes claims about the entire school being in “an appalling state”. I mean … this is simply ridiculous, isn’t it? Any publisher would reject such a story as thoroughly unconvincing. Rip up the story and start again, you foolish author, for our fine upstanding Members of Parliament do not behave in such a way. They are busy, important people; they have no truck with such shenanigans.
Forgive me, but we must stretch this truly bizarre tale even further, to the point where you will of course recognise it for the blatant fiction that it must be. For this entirely imaginary Member of Parliament actually speaks in the House about his (or her) visit to this wholly make-believe comprehensive, in a manner that could, in extremis (and, of course, this is what makes this account so obviously hypothetical), be considered misleading to the House. He (or she) describes classrooms (note the plural! Classrooms!) which are “held together by gaffer tape”, leaving one, in one’s imagined scenario, scratching one’s head and struggling to picture the classrooms that he (or she) is talking about. He (or she) then goes on to describe the disused area of the school of which he (or she) took these photographs, and claims that he (or she) “almost fell through the floor” and was what’s more assailed by the stench of mould, all the while insinuating that this is actually representative of the state of the school. The classrooms, after all, you may recall from the imaginary description, are “held together by gaffer tape.” So, in this crazy hallucination, one is still left trying desperately to picture whether one saw a single piece of gaffer tape in one’s entirely imagined 13 years at this entirely fictional comprehensive school. One’s imagination may seem to have completely run away, for in one’s head the very same school is (in an alternate universe that one might call reality) so well-maintained that it is positively the envy of other schools in the area. So free from decay is the site (a source of pride for its site team) that visitors comment on the fact. This is all in one’s vivid imagination, you understand.
In a final flourish to one’s extraordinarily far-fetched tale (I really must write it up some time), one’s fabricated Member of Parliament doubles down when challenged on social media, deletes all of one’s posts in which one points out that he (or she) has misled the House, and even claims to be doing what he (or she) is doing at the behest of the school. This is despite the fact that he (or she) is not in government and not in a position to secure them any funding and perhaps despite the fact (and here things get really wild) that the Leadership team at the school might, one could possibly fantasise in one’s wildest moments, have asked him (or her) to desist. One can just about conceivably imagine that it has been made clear to this MP gone rogue that his (or her) interference and naming of the school on social media and at Westminster is distinctly unhelpful and unwelcome. Could one not?
What an extraordinary tale, I am sure you’ll agree! So, what would one do, in this entirely imagined situation? (I realise that it is so ludicrous that you might not even consider it worth fleshing out a plan for such an unlikely situation, but do humour me for a few more lines). One would, I suspect, have to write to this Member of Parliament directly, as one of his (or her) constiuents, in order to express in no uncertain terms one’s disquiet with his (or her) behaviour. One might even have to explore what avenues there are for making a formal complaint about such a state of affairs, given one’s sincere belief that a distinctly less than truthful statement has been made within the hallowed walls of Parliament. Furthermore, if one were to find oneself in this highly unlikely position, one would certainly (one imagines) feel thoroughly disillusioned with the honesty and integrity of one’s democratically elected representative and one would (one suspects) feel glad, not for the first time, that one did not personally vote for such a person.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the one thing we love more than a hero is to see a hero fall. I’m not sure whether this is an entirely modern phenomenon, but it is perhaps a tendency that has burgeoned in recent decades. More than this, something which I do think is peculiar to our age, is the expectation that historic figures should be judged according to 21st century western values. This, especially when it is pitched against some of the figures who had a significant hand in the process of carving those same values, leaves me distinctly uneasy.
Last week, the BBC reported that Hinchingbrooke School in Huntingdon was swapping the name of one of their pastoral houses from Pepys to Lady Olivia. The process was enacted via a democratic ballot, which turned out to be a classic example of western democracy in action, given that the much-celebrated result was voted for by less than 50% of the electorate. Nevertheless, Lady Olivia, wealthy landowner, school sponsor and evangelical Christian, now finds herself named as the chosen figurehead for modern students in the school that Pepys attended, along with Oliver Cromwell. One can only hope for her that there are no skeletons in her cupboard, to be discovered down the line. There’s always a tweet.
Samuel Pepys seems to have gotten away with being a prolific sex offender without much modern public disapproval until 2025, when historian and translator De la Bédoyère went back to Pepys’s original manuscripts and translated all of his coded entries, which he wrote in a kind of Franglish, Pidgin Latin and a smattering of Spanglish. De la Bédoyère re-published Pepys’s diaries in all their glory, and the result is the extraordinarily detailed snapshot of 17th century life that one might expect; unfortunately, that life is one of a man for whom praying upon vulnerable women was a something of a daily occurrence. It was certainly an education for me, reading what this serial predator got up to on an average day, and it very much does not chime with 21st century western values. Historians are keen to point out that Pepys’s behaviour didn’t even chime particularly well with 17th century western values, as he seems to have had something of a reputation in his day. I only wish I could believe the world has changed, but let’s not pretend that it has. Men with such reputations are still running several countries.
I have been pondering the school’s decision to demote Pepys from his position as a House name and I have no wish to criticise it. The school has already made it clear that there are parts of the school named after Samuel Pepys and that those tributes to him will not change. I have no doubt whatsoever that the school was placed under enormous pressure by a vociferous minority and I don’t even have a particular issue with that in some ways: perhaps those individuals are right. If I had a daughter in the school, perhaps I might have agreed with them that there are better figureheads for her to look up to. Whatever my individual thoughts on the matter, it is inescapable that these days it only takes one parent with a bee in their bonnet and an active WhatsApp group to dictate school policy and this — for better or for worse — is the reality of where schools find themselves today. Headteachers have to pick their battles, and going out to bat for Samuel Pepys was perhaps not something the Headteacher felt was a hill worth dying on.
What I think is more interesting is to ponder whether we have lost something when society cannot tolerate undeniably serious flaws in their heroes. Is this a quirk of the kind of modern puritanism that we find ourselves facing today? If we turn to the ancient texts for our model, the authors of those understood only too well the value of a rounded hero, indeed the very definition of hero required the inclusion of multiple flaws. The notion of a “fatal flaw”, popularised by Rennaissance readings of Aristotle’s Poetics, influenced Shakespeare and other writers. There is unanimous agreement from ancient times to modern that the most interesting heroes are the ones with inherent weaknesses: a perfect hero would be a thoroughly tedious creation.
When Virgil introduces Aeneas as the hero at the beginning of his epic work, he does something quite remarkable. When we first meet Aeneas, he is at his lowest ebb. Battle-fatigued and a travel-worn refugee, Aeneas is at breaking point. He screams and cries and implores the gods to take him: why did I not die in Troy? he asks. What was the point of it all? The visceral shock of introducing us to a hero who appears to have abandoned all hope and is wishing he was dead is one of the most exciting decisions that the author could have made, and it thrills me every time I revisit the text (which has been hundreds of times over the last two years, for that section of the text is on the specification for OCR GCSE). The point, I think, is for us to reflect upon how much more impressive it is when Virgil later describes Aeneas suppressing his emotions, resuming command and leadership over his men: someone we have witnessed at cracking point does the right thing for the good of the majority and for the men in his care. Now, that’s a hero.
Not only does Virgil start his epic work with a radical take on heroism, he ends it controversially, by demonstrating that Aeneas is very much less than perfect. At the end of the epic battle that ensures the supremacy of the Trojans in their new homeland, thus securing the future of what will become the Roman empire, Aeneas is faced with his arch enemy, who begs for mercy. The tradition in ancient texts was that good heroes are extraordinary warriors but they do not give in to blood-lust; whenever a warrior is taken over by this kind of crazed, emotionally-charged violence, disaster tends to ensue and the warrior is punished for his misdemeanours. Good warriors show mercy when the time is right. Yet Virgil does not finish his work in this way. As Aeneas looks down upon his enemy, he is overwhelmed by rage, bitterness and grief: he slays him, quickly and ingloriously, and the epic finishes with our hero’s enemy groaning his last, his tortured soul shrinking away to the underworld. It is a radically depressing way to close an epic work of propaganda and reflects a true genius at his peak. The reader (or more likely the listener) is left with an uneasy sense of disappointment in our hero, left to carry the burdensome knowledge that founding an empire is not without its price and that war makes even good men do terrible things.
Perhaps indeed we have lost something along with the present-day puritanism that judges historic figures according to our modern western values and — inevitably — finds them wanting. Personally, I don’t have a problem with recognising the contribution that Pepys made through his unflinching account of 17th century life alongside the fact that the life he describes is one to which I would viscerally object. It’s what history is all about. What I hope for the future is that we can have these discussions in a more mature and nuanced way. There is nothing more irksome that the modern tendency towards cancellation and extremism, the “no debate” lobby, who consistently fail to understand that the very pluralistic society that they believe in so fervently and lobby so hard for requires endless compromise and true tolerance, the kind of forbearance that makes you feel uncomfortable and sometimes forces you to question your own values. I occasionally wonder whether the louder the cancellation crew shout, the more they’re trying to drown out the voices of doubt in their own head.
Suddenly, everyone is talking about Lord of the Flies. It is one of my favourite novels, one which I taught for GCSE English literature for around a decade. I’m afraid that I have no urge to see what the BBC have done with it. I have also been somewhat irritated to see multiple hot takes on social media, critisising the story’s doom-laden attitude towards childhood and children’s psychology.
First of all, Golding was emphatically not being doom-laden about the nature of children, he was being doom-laden about the nature of humanity as a whole: let us not underestimate the extent of his doom-mongering, please. Secondly, Lord of the Flies is no more a novel about children and childhood than Animal Farm is a novel about livestock and animal husbandry. Like Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies is an extended allegory, and its message is a profoundly depressing one. So, buckle up.
Golding’s work of genius (one which he, incidentally, dismissed in later life as “boring and crude”) is a thoroughly disturbing exploration of what happens when the structures of civilisation fall away. It is emphatically not a novel about children. While the novel appears to contain the trappings of childhood: children’s games, their fears, their rivalries and their capacity for cruelty, it becomes clear as the narrative unfolds that Golding’s central concern extends way beyond childhood psychology. The island on which the children find themselves stranded is a microcosm of the world that the boys have left behind, a specimen society in which rival authorities, social hierarchies, violence and superstitious ideology rapidly emerge. Golding uses children in order to examine society stripped to its essentials, suggesting that what we call “civilisation” is a fundamentally fragile construct laid over a persistent human capacity for savagery. The novel is less an anthropological study of childhood than a parable about the nature of society itself.
From the outset of the novel, in which the boys find themselves stranded in the wilderness, the protagonists attempt to recreate the structures of the adult world from which they have come. They call assemblies, establish rules and elect a leader. Ralph’s authority rests on apparent legitimacy: he is chosen through a vote, and a conch shell is used as a tangible sign of democratic order. The conch regulates speech, embodies fairness and stands as a shared agreement among the boys to abide by rules. These early chapters might seem to suggest that humans, left to their own devices, instinctively lean towards mature governance; yet Golding makes it clear that the boys’ desire for adherence to a set of rules depends not on moral conviction but on a fear of consequences and a individual lust for dominance, for the boys speak immediately of the punishments that will face anyone who transgresses the rules they plan to lay down for themselves. Furthermore, as the hope of rescue fades, the rules lose all of their potency. As Ralph puts it, “things are breaking up. I don’t understand why.” The deterioration is not portrayed as uniquely childish; rather, it reflects how flimsy and insubstantial social contracts are when the institutions that sustain them collapse.
Jack’s transformation from choir leader to autocratic demagogue underscores this shift. His authority on the island grows not through reasoned persuasion but through his manipulation of fear and the promise of hunting and meat. He paints his face, embraces ritual and forms a tribe built on spectacle and intimidation. In doing so, he does not regress into childhood so much as adopt the tactics of a charismatic despot.
It is hinted from the outset that the boys have arrived from a society already engaged in a global conflict. The island society quickly begins to resemble the violent regimes and wartime mentalities of the adult world and the children’s play-acting of war quickly becomes indistinguishable from the very worst forms of human brutality. The murder of Simon is not an impulsive scuffle between children; it is a collective frenzy, a ritualised killing fuelled by hysteria and conformity. In that pivotal moment, Golding depicts the terrifying ease with which ordinary individuals can participate in atrocities when swept up by mass hysteria and mindless ideology. This is emphatically not a comment on the nature of children: it is a study in group dynamics and the power of suggestion.
Prior to his death, Simon’s role in the novel further supports the interpretation that Golding is examining society and group dynamics. His encounter with the pig’s head, the eponymous “Lord of the Flies,” reveals the central moral insight of the book: “the beast” that the boys fear is not an external creature but something within themselves. The pig’s head, swarming with flies, seems to speak to Simon, telling him that it (the beast) is part of them, is inside them: it is not an external force, rather it is innate to humanity. Golding aims to convince his readers that the impulse toward violence and domination is an inherent aspect of human nature, one that civilised society attempts, imperfectly, to restrain. Simon’s death, at the hands of boys who mistake him for “the beast” crawling out of the forest, symbolises the destruction of moral truth by collective fear and aggression. The tragedy lies not in the fact that the children are capable of evil, but in the implication that all humans are in the wrong circumstances.
Piggy represents rationality, scientific thought and the values of ordered civilisation. His glasses, which enable the boys to make fire, symbolise the power of technology and reason. Yet reason alone cannot withstand the tide of savagery once the social consensus collapses. Piggy is marginalised, mocked and finally killed when Roger deliberately dislodges the boulder that crushes him. This final act by Roger is particularly significant: earlier in the novel, he is depicted as throwing stones at the younger boys but he deliberately misses; the implication is that he is an inherently violent boy who is restrained in his urges by what Golding calls “the taboo of the old life.” As those restrictions erode with the breakdown of society, so too does his individual restraint. By the time he kills Piggy, Roger acts with deliberate intent. Golding’s emphasis on the gradual disappearance of internalised moderation points to his theme of the importance of societal structures in shaping and curbing antisocial behaviour. When those structures weaken, he believes, our latent cruelty surfaces.
Golding’s novel is emphatically not about childhood. The boys bring with them the hierarchies, prejudices and fears of their culture. The choirboys, accustomed to discipline and exclusion, quickly form an elite group under Jack. The “littluns” (as the youngest members of the group are collectively referred to) are marginalised and terrorised by the older boys and even Ralph, ostensibly the champion of order, participates in the violence against Simon. No character is exempt from moral compromise and this universality suggests that Golding is less interested in developmental psychology than in the broader human condition: his view of us is emphatically not a happy one.
The sudden arrival of the naval officer at the end of the novel crystallises the evidence that the island society is a mirror that Golding is holding up to the adult world. The officer is initially amused by the boys’ appearance, viewing their behaviour as a childish game. Yet he represents a world engaged in destructive warfare: his warship waits offshore, a reminder that organised violence is not confined to the island but is institutionalised in the adult society that lies beyond it. The boys’ painted faces and sharpened sticks are grotesque reflections of his uniform and the weapons he brings. The officer’s presence does not negate the horror that has occurred; rather, it frames it within a wider context. The island is not an aberration but a microcosm: Golding implies that the same forces driving the boys to chaos are operating on a global scale.
Published in 1954, in the aftermath of the Second World War and at the dawn of the nuclear age, Lord of the Flies reflects a period of unprecedented recent human destruction. The belief in steady moral and social progress had been shattered by the exposure of the Holocaust and the growing fear of atomic warfare. Golding, who had served in the Royal Navy, stated that he had witnessed firsthand man’s capacity for organised brutality and illustrating this was his purpose in writing the novel. His choice to use schoolboys as protagonists was an artistic decision: by stripping away adult institutions and placing children in isolation, Golding constructs a controlled experiment in which the island mirrors the essential dynamics of society in a concentrated form. The boys’ age if anything underscores the horrifying argument that the seeds of societal violence lie not in complex political systems alone but in the fundamental aspects of human nature. While the “beast” that the children fear can be seen as a childish nightmare, Golding does not treat their fears as trivial. “The beast” evolves into a powerful symbol of how societies create external enemies to embody internal anxieties and explain the darkness within them. The boys’ belief in the beast apparently justifies Jack’s desire for authoritarian rule and explains the abandonment of rational deliberation. In this way, childish superstition becomes analogous to the propaganda and scapegoating we find in adult societies.
It is undeniable that the novel challenged the mid-twentieth-century literary tradition, which portrayed children as naturally innocent and if anything morally superior to adults. In traditional adventure stories, still popular at the time, stranded boys tend to maintain British civility and cooperation. Golding deliberately inverts this literary convention. His boys do not build a utopia; they descend into barbarism. This inversion, however, is not a comment on children but a critique of the complacent belief that civilisation is secure and that moral behaviour is natural and instinctive. By showing that even well-educated English schoolboys can commit atrocities, Golding aimed to dismantle the myth of inherent cultural or moral superiority. Ralph’s uncontrolled grief at the end of the novel is portrayed as a source of embarassment to the naval officer. He weeps “for the end of innocence” and “the darkness of man’s heart,” a final summation of Golding’s bleak vision.
To read Lord of the Flies as a novel about the nature of children is to overlook its broader philosophical ambitions. Golding did not believe or aim to suggest that children are uniquely savage or that society alone corrupts them. Instead, he proposes that society is both a product of and a defence against the darker aspects of human nature. Civilisation provides structures — laws, social norms and institutions — that channel natural instincts such as aggression and desire into appropriate avenues. When those structures disintegrate, as they do on the island, the underlying impulses are revealed. The boys are not aberrations; they are average human beings.
Golding’s frankly brilliant work interrogates the very foundations upon which social order rests, yet it achieves this by focusing on children, whose assumed innocence sharpens the shock of moral collapse. Golding invites readers to question their comforting assumptions about progress, about culture and the nature of morality. The savagery on the island is not confined to childhood; it is an ever-present possibility within human communities. By the time the naval officer arrives, the reader understands that rescue from the island does not equate to rescue from the darkness within. Golding’s enduring message is that society’s stability depends upon our constant vigilance against forces that originate in the human heart. How’s that for a bedtime story?
“Turn a blind eye” is one of those expressions that slips easily into everyday speech, a shorthand way of describing the act of deliberately ignoring something. We might say a teacher turned a blind eye to students whispering in class (never a good idea, by the way), or that a government turned a blind eye to corruption (even worse). Many people use the phrase without a second thought about its origins, but like many idioms, it comes with a story. In recent years, some people have questioned the phrase, arguing that it may be offensive or insensitive. Well, speaking as someone who actually is blind in one eye, I am here to defend it: so, brace yourselves.
The most commonly cited origin story for “turn a blind eye” dates back to the Napoleonic Wars and everyone’s favourite British naval hero, Admiral Horatio Nelson. Nelson had lost the sight in one eye earlier in his naval career, when flying debris from a shot impacted a sandbag and struck his face, causing severe damage to his retina. He is often portrayed as wearing an eye patch, but there appears to be no evidence that he did so: historic accounts seem to indicate that his eye remained intact, he simply couldn’t see out of it any more.
During the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, Vice-Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, the commander-in-chief of the British fleet, ordered the signal for Nelson to cease fighting and withdraw. Signals were transmitted from ship to ship via the medium of flags, so the order was necessarily a visual one. Nelson was alerted to the signal to disengage, but was eager to press ahead with the attack. According to the story, he raised his telescope to his blind eye and claimed to see no signal. Having feigned ignorance of the order, he continued the battle and secured a crucial tactical victory. The rest, as they say, is history, and presumably explains why Nelson still has his statue on the top of a column in central London and Hyde Parker doesn’t.
The anecdote of Nelson’s act of defiance was popularised in later retellings and became associated with the idea of deliberately ignoring unwelcome information or instructions. Nelson’s choice to quite literally turn his blind eye to an order he did not want to follow captured perfectly the notion of wilful ignorance or selective attention. Over time, the phrase entered the broader English language as an idiom, detached from its naval origins. Speakers used it to describe actions or policies where someone in authority chose not to recognise or address a problem.
Historians, always here to spoil the fun, are not 100% certain that the phrase originated with the story of Nelson: some debate the precise accuracy of the apocryphal story and there is evidence that similar expressions already existed before the Battle of Copenhagen and that the phrase may have been popularised through literary or journalistic embellishments of naval history rather than by Nelson’s own words and actions. Whatever the truth, the phrase stuck, and for generations it has been taught in history classes and quoted in newspapers, novels and speeches around the English-speaking world. Hurrah for insurrection.
As with many idioms rooted in physical descriptions of the body, “turn a blind eye” uses a physical metaphor to express the complexities of the human psyche, indeed sight and blindness have long served as powerful symbols of human understanding and perception. To “see” something often stands for awareness or understanding, while to be “blind” to something suggests ignorance, either accidental or wilful. The metaphor is played out to its full in the story of Oedipus Rex, who is metaphorically blind to the truth of his own story, and blinds himself in reality when he discovers it. Teiresias the prophet is physically blind but is the only one that can see the truth as the story unfolds. Shakespeare likewise exploited the theme to equal horror in King Lear, in which the theme of blindness resonates throughout the play, at times to quite toe-curling effect.
Now, to the modern world. Despite the phrase’s deep history, widespread use and highly effective meaning, it has not been free from criticism in recent years. Some people today argue that “turn a blind eye” may be offensive or insensitive because it invokes blindness — a physical disability — in a potentially negative way. The concern, so far as I can gather, is that by equating blindness with wilful ignorance, the phrase serves to reinforce negative stereotypes about people who are visually impaired. This criticism is, of course, part of a broader trend in which people are told to pay closer attention to the ways language can unintentionally marginalise or demean particular groups of people.
As someone who actually is blind in one eye, I am going out to bat for the phrase (although, being blind in one eye, it is true that my batting can be somewhat haphazard). My blindness on one side (the right, as it happens) has cost me a lot, and I’m not about to let it cost me my language as well. It was a significant factor in my deciding not to drive and has affected my life in numerous ways. I now struggle significantly with eye strain and have to be careful with articifical light and screen time in order to avoid migraines, as my one good eye (not actually that good, as it happens!) is doing all the work. I am terrible at judging depth and distance, so professional tennis playing was out as a potential career; you also don’t want me to pour you a glass of red wine at an angle, trust me on that one.
I chose to tell my classes in school about it, as it was important to make clear to students that if they were waving their hand in the air on my right side I simply wouldn’t see them: I would much rather own up to a physical disablity than have children believe that I was ignoring them. Despite this, I know that my reputation as somewhat standoffish also stems from my disablity: colleagues, acquaintances and even close friends have often believed that I am deliberately ignoring them because they do not appreciate the limits of my vision. It is the problem with having what the right-on brigade call an “invisible disablity” — it is not obvious that I am blind on one side, nor is it apparent that my sight in general is pretty terrible, so as a result nobody makes any allowances for me when it comes to that. The received narrative is that Emma is rude and standoffish. Oh well. Sometimes it’s a useful reputation to have, to be honest.
Anyway, back to the phrase. The controversy around it reflects how social attitudes and awareness changes over time. Idioms such as “turn a blind eye” become ingrained in everyday speech, then one day somebody decides to unpick the meaning of the phrase and take offence. But the metaphorical connection between blindness and ignorance has been used for millenia, and is not a comment on those of us who are visually impaired. (Remember Teiresias? He was a blind man credited with insight beyond that of all others, perhaps reflecting the fact that even in the ancient world, people understood that those who are completely blind develop excellent perception beyond physical sight).
I have been lectured by keyboard warriors on the internet for using the phrase “turn a blind eye” and I shall confess that I have taken great pleasure in telling them that I am — as it happens — blind in one eye. To date, every single one of them has climbed down off their high horse and started self-flagillating, telling me that they are “still learning” and begging for my forgiveness. Dear Lord, how did we get here? I am honestly not sure when the tipping point was, when we reached the point that people feel they have to police every word they say. If I had to guess, I’d say that the turning point was about 1999.
I suspect that those who claim to find the phrase problematic have absolutely zero experience of what it is like to be blind in any sense. Were they in touch with the experience, they would understand why the metaphor works so well. Believe me, if you’re trying to get my attention beyond a certain angle to the right, you can forget it: it’s not going to happen. Even more crucially, were these people properly aware of the purported origins of the phrae, then surely they would also have to acknowledge that the phrase is clearly associated with wilful ignorance and avoidance, not merely physical disablity. According to the story, apocryphal or otherwise, Nelson didn’t accidentally hold up the telescope to his blind eye in a state of haplnessness or vulnerability: he deliberately used the telescope in this way, in order to disobey an order. That is the point! It is a story about disobedience and coolness under pressure, not about impairment. Somewhat less gloriously, I sometimes lie on my left to take advantage of my blindness and blot out the world: disabilities have their advantages, you know!
As society ties itself up in knots over what it believes is diversity and inclusion, people have begun to question whether expressions such as “turn a blind eye” carry unexamined assumptions that might be exclusionary or hurtful. I am here to tell you, people: for heaven’s sake, stop panicking and get on with your life. I don’t feel in the least bit excluded by the phrase, it is by a country mile the best, most expressive and most useful manner in which to describe what you’re trying to say. (Are we allowed to say country mile any more? Does that imply that people in the country don’t understand measures and distances? I’ll have to check).
This debate around “turn a blind eye” is just one part of a broader conversation about how language intersects with identity, power and social values. Similar discussions have arisen around other idioms and expressions that draw on physical traits or historical stereotypes. For example, phrases like “lame” to describe something unimpressive or “crazy” to describe something irrational have been questioned for their potential to offend or marginalise groups of people. In each case, speakers and writers are encouraged to consider whether there are better, more inclusive ways to express themselves. Personally, I am beginning to find it all more than a little bit exhausting. Sanitising language to the point where communication becomes awkward or laden with fear of making mistakes is crippling us all (there I go again — sorry). Learning about the historical origins of a phrase can enrich our appreciation of language rather than diminish it, and personally I’d rather enjoy the full richness of English expression than have my language policed by the terminally well-meaning.
Last week, toy giant Mattel launched its first “autistic Barbie”. Coming hot on the heels of its first-ever doll with type 1 diabetes, sporting her own insulin pump and glucose monitor, this latest addition to Barbie’s range marks another milestone in Mattel’s purported goal to ensure that more children “see themselves in Barbie.”
While many have celebrated a neurodivergent Barbie as an important step toward inclusion and visibility for children with autism, others have raised concerns about representation and stereotypes. Supporters argue that the doll’s design — including features like noise-cancelling headphones, a tablet with communication apps and sensory-friendly clothing — will ensure that autistic children see themselves reflected in a mainstream toy. They argue that such representations could normalise the support tools that many children use in daily life, which can be empowering and affirming for them. As one poster on LinkedIn put it last week, “We have all had an opinion on the new autism Barbie. Today, I chose to leave that to the person who actually matters. I bought the Barbie for my daughter. Her reaction was immediate and joyful. “Awesome.” She picked it up and said, “Look Mum, it has the talking board you got at the parks and what my brother used.” Then, “The ear defenders are like mine. We can wear them together.” … Representation does not need to be flawless to be powerful. It just needs to be seen, felt and recognised by the people it is for.”
I have also read that autistic Barbie has been blessed with articulated joints “to allow for stimming gestures”. Now, if we’re going to talk about representing humans, autistic or otherwise, I would have thought that all versions of Barbie would benefit from articulated joints. As I recall, Barbie’s extraordinary lack of flexibility was my main issue with her back in the 1980s, when I was playing with dolls. Barbie’s fixed limbs meant that she effectively couldn’t ride her horse, only balance above it like a plastic A-frame, giving the impression that she was wing-walking rather than riding her steed. In my 10-year-old world, in which I lived and breathed all things horse-related, this was a massive let-down.
Critics of the all-new neurodivergent Barbie have pointed out that autism is an invisible, highly diverse spectrum that cannot be captured by one set of external traits or accessories. While this is arguably an issue for all representation, some people worry that relying on visible markers to represent women with ASD will reinforce simplistic or stereotypical ideas about what autism “looks like.” The debate about the new Barbie doll is, of course, part of a wider conversation about corporate “diversity” initiatives and the commercialisation of identity, with some seeing the doll as meaningful representation and others questioning whether it reduces a complex human experience to design features.
This is not a new debate, merely the current iteration of a discussion that has been evolving since Barbie’s inception over 60 years ago. When I was a child, more than forty years ago, feminists were raging about Barbie. My mother, a reasonably committed feminist herself, was nevertheless comfortable with me having a Barbie. Indeed, I had the Barbie horse (which actually did have articulated limbs, unlike its owner, but was a ridiculously stylised fantasy creature) and I also had the Barbie car, which was frankly hideous. Personally, I found the Sindy products more appealing: the horses were more realistic (of paramount importance) and her car was a sensible beach buggy, which seemed infinitely more usable when compared to Barbie’s insane mega-pink sportsmobile.
So, when and where did the Barbie doll originate, you may wonder? Well, Barbie burst onto the scene in New York in 1959, and at the time she was pretty unique. She was created by Ruth Handler, co-founder of Mattel, who had noticed her daughter playing with paper dolls, imagining them as grown women with jobs, romances and social lives. At the time, the dolls that were marketed to girls were baby dolls, designed to encourage domestic play that mimicked nurturing and motherhood. Handler realised there was space for something radically different: a doll that allowed girls to imagine themselves not as mothers but as independent adults, with working lives and hobbies. In terms of an aspirational start-point for a girl’s toy, it was actually quite progressive.
What the world ended up with was arguably anything but that. Mattel designed the look of Barbie supposedly as a teenaged fashion model, and there is no escaping the fact that she was overtly sexualised and designed around an unobtainable body ideal. Despite (or perhaps because of?) this, Barbie sold spectacularly well, becoming a cultural phenomenon almost overnight, but she also drew criticism from parents and feminist commentators, who pointed out that her figure was unrealistic and inappropriate. Her tiny waist, elongated legs and prominent bust sparked debates that would dog her image for decades. To be honest, when I was 10 I’m not sure that I saw her as a representative human, since nobody I knew looked like that. I think I saw her as an imaginary creature that was a bit like humans but not actually human: an entity designed purely for fantasy. My mother’s only comment on Barbie’s physique was on her rigid arms, fixed permanently in the position of elbows at a 90-degree angles: “probably years of carrying a tray,” she said.
As Barbie expanded through the 1960s and 1970s, Mattel worked hard to position her as a girlboss. Barbie acquired careers, first as a fashion model (sigh), then as a nurse, then a flight attendant, then eventually as an astronaut. These additions expanded her image for sure. Arguably, Barbie could be seen as wholly progressive, presenting girls with visions of independence and professional ambition, summarised in the slogan still linked to the doll: “you can be anything”. On the other hand, Barbie remained bound during this period to narrow beauty standards, with the same unobtainable body type, youthful face and a consumerist lifestyle to boot. Feminist responses to Barbie during the second wave in the 1970s were largely critical. Many women argued that Barbie taught girls to value appearance above all else and promoted a passive, male-oriented ideal of femininity: the introduction of Ken as Barbie’s boyfriend further fuelled this narrative. But a counter-narrative argued that Barbie represented autonomy and independence: she remained unmarried, child-free, financially solvent and capable of holding almost any job. What a woman! Except she still couldn’t ride a horse.
Inevitably, Barbie’s commercial success prompted other manufacturers to get in on the act. In the UK, the Sindy doll was introduced in 1963 and quickly became known as “the girl next door” in contrast to Barbie’s glamorous American swagger. Personally, as a sensible shoe-wearer from childhood to the present day, Sindy was the girl for me. She had a softer face, a smaller bust and broadly speaking more realistic proportions. She was deliberately marketed as more relatable and was certainly less overtly sexualised. Sindy’s lifestyle emphasised hobbies and everyday fashion rather than aspiration and luxury. Many parents understandably viewed Sindy as a more wholesome option, and some feminist commentators later pointed to her as an example of how dolls could and should reflect a broader, less idealised version of womanhood. Much more importantly for 10-year-old me, she had articulated limbs and could ride a horse properly.
There were other dolls of course. The Pippa doll, launched in the UK in 1966, occupied a different cultural space again. I had one Pippa doll and from memory I wasn’t keen. Smaller and thus cheaper than Barbie, Pippa was marketed primarily as another teenaged fashion doll, closely tied to the aesthetics of London in the swinging ’60s. No wonder I wasn’t interested: she was far too trendy for me. Pippa reflected contemporary youth culture rather than adulthood or career ambition, but like Barbie and Sindy, she drew attention to how dolls function as cultural reflection, the encoding of our ideas about age, class and identity.
Representation became an increasingly central issue as Barbie’s reach grew globally. The first black-skinned Barbie appeared all the way back in 1980, followed by dolls representing various ethnicities and cultures. While these moves were broadly welcomed, they were rightly criticised for being superficial, as the early supposedly “diverse” Barbies shared the same facial features and body moulds as the original, differing solely in skin tone and costume and thus rendering them a frankly grotesque parody of the women they were purported to represent. Ken, too, was “diversified” over time, although he rarely attracted the same level of scrutiny, this very fact reflecting the inescapable truth that society’s response to representations of the female body is always more highly-charged.
Disability representation, body diversity and realistic aging were largely absent for much of Barbie’s history at this time and by the 1990s and 2000s, long after my own toys had been banished to the loft, Barbie’s cultural dominance had begun to wane and criticism of her image grew louder. Discussions linked the dolls to unrealistic beauty ideals and society became more and more concerned with the unnatural and hugely limiting image she presented. In response to falling sales, Mattel undertook a series of reinventions. In 2016, the company introduced a new line of Barbies with explicitly named body types — tall, petite and curvy (I kid you not) — alongside the original stretched form that represented nobody who has actually walked this planet. These new dolls had different proportions, altered clothing fits and a range of silhouettes that disrupted the long-standing elongated form of Barbie. Mattel also expanded its facial representation, introducing varied nose shapes, jawlines and eye placements; they also significantly broadened hair textures to include natural curls, afros and braids. Later additions included dolls with prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs, hearing aids, vitiligo and the visible medical devices we find today. These changes were accompanied by marketing that explicitly framed Barbie as a reflection of “real women” and “diverse lived experiences”. Critics remain sceptical, and many people question whether such brand rehabilitation can ever meaningfully counter decades of cultural messaging to the contrary.
Throughout her history, Barbie has functioned both as a mirror and as a mould for cultural ideas about gender and adulthood. Feminist responses to Barbie and her contemporaries continue to be mixed, reflecting broader tensions within modern intersectional feminism about choice, agency, beauty and capitalism. Whether she is seen as a symbol of oprression or progressivism, Barbie reveals how deeply children’s toys can be entangled with social values. More than six decades after her launch, the debate surrounding Barbie and her rivals endures because it is ultimately a debate about how society sees women and the futures that young girls are encouraged to imagine for themselves.
It seemed simple enough. It even seemed like a good idea. Something I had done before and not struggled with, an easy way to earn my Good Citizen badge for the day.
On my regular route to a local megastore, I pass a garage with a carwash. For some inexplicable reason, the footpath next to the carwash has become a dumping ground for supermarket trollies. Without fail, every time I make my way through this pass, there is an abandoned trolley, standing askew. I have puzzled as to why this particular place is where someone consistently no longer has need of the trolley that they apparently did need to take out of the supermarket carpark, but the logic escapes me. Still, given that I am able-bodied and on my way to the very megastore to which the abandoned trollies belong, I always take hold of the forsaken four-wheeler and push it back to its home.
On this particular occasion, in the hiatus between Christmas and New Year, I happened upon no less than four of them, nosing each other like abandoned dogs in the underpass. Can I manage four? I mused to myself. Of course I can, beamed my gym-going, over-confident self. Four trollies will be a breeze. Of course, I hadn’t factored in the treacherous nature of supermarket trolley-wheels combined with a sharp corner, heavy traffic and a steep slope: nevertheless, I eventually made it to the trolley park, breathless but triumphant. The park was completely empty of trollies. I kid you not, not one single person appeared to have returned their trolley to its rightful home on that day. In smiling possession of four, I was thus immediately set upon by multiple shoppers, all of them making a grab for one of the trollies I had brought. You’re welcome!
I grant you that it is all too easy to bemoan the state of modern Britain, but sometimes it’s the little things that get you down. I’m not sure if I can put a date upon when the shift occurred, but I’m sure that there were indeed halcyon days when people dutifully returned their trollies to the trolley park for the benefit of others. At the risk of sounding a little deranged, I’ve been pondering this for a week or more: when and why did people stop thinking that they had to return their trolley? After much musing, I think I’ve hit upon the source of the problem. It isn’t a symptom of poor parenting, it isn’t the state of our schools and it isn’t that people have somehow become inherently worse than they used to be. The issue, I believe, is that very few of us do our shopping in anything that even remotely resembles a community any more.
When my parents speak of their youth (a timespan ranging from the mid 1930s to the post-war period), both of them talk about local shops and local tradespeople. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, for better or for worse, and local businesses were at the very heart of the community. Shops and services were run by people you knew and that meant that those shops and services were places that expected and demanded respect and acknowledgement. Shop-owners were not a faceless corporation, they were members of the inner circle. If some local scallywag caused trouble for a local shopkeeper, there would be consequences and those consequences would have an impact on family and friends.
In such a community, it was shameful to be caught doing something thoughtless, because reports of such behaviour would be shared with other members of the neighbourhood. Both my parents recall being known to all the adults in their area and they can acknowledge both the privileges and the responsibilities that came with that fact. The privileges included feeling safe and looked after in their community, the sense that they could knock on anyone’s door at any time and ask for help; the responsibilities included knowing that any misdemeanours would get straight back to their parents! It suddenly occurred to me that very few of us feel either looked after or indeed feel judged and monitored in this way any more.
Very few of us feel vulnerable to any sense of shame about our routine behaviours, because we move through the world so anonymously, or at least we feel as if we do. Small acts of selfishness such as dumping our trolley at the side of the street will rarely if ever receive any kind of direct challenge or lasting consequence. As a result, people have gradually and unconsciously learned that they can get away with such thoughtless behaviour without an impact on their own lives. I honestly don’t believe that we are any less innately thoughtful than we used to be — it doesn’t make sense for such a seismic change in human nature to have happened so quickly; rather, it is the case that we operate in a world that does not expect us to be thoughtful and in which there are no consequences for our thoughtless behaviour.
There is so much to regret with the loss of local shopping: when I think of all the hand-wringing that is done about the state of the environment, so much of that could be solved or at least mitigated against if we simply went back to local stores. Out-of-town supermarkets started to become the norm somewhere between the 1960s and the 1980s and I would argue that this caused a shift in people’s attitude towards buying produce. At one stroke, we started to feel like we were giving our money to big corporations, nameless and faceless profiteers that we all began to resent whilst at the same time demanding more and more of their wares. Within the next two generations came the internet and online delivery, meaning we didn’t even have to leave our homes to give our money to invisible people. As a result of all of this, retail as a concept has taken on an identity of its own and is completely detached from humanity.
When we do leave our houses to circulate around the premises that such corporations set up for their customers, the distate on all sides is palpable. Despite what the advertisements would have us believe, it is obvious that customers feel no liking nor obligation towards such corporations and likewise the companies themselves display barely-concealed disdain towards their customers. Buying and selling now operates in an open atmosphere of mutual contempt. If you think I’m exaggerating, then perhaps you’ve never shopped in a large megastore in one of the poorest parts of the country. To quote the words of Jarvis Cocker in his 1995 classic, Common People, “I can’t see anyone else smiling in here.” Nobody smiles and nobody talks to each other. Everyone beats a path to the automated check-outs so they don’t have to interact with a human being before they leave the store. Virtually everything is tagged because theft is so rife, another consequence of people feeling so detached from their store-merchants: research indicates that most people now believe shoplifting to be a victimless crime.
But before we get too depressed, let’s all resolve to do better. While we might indeed be forking out our money to a giant company we don’t care for, in itself owned by one of the handful of global corporations that appear to own and control the entire universe, let us not forget that within those conglomerates there are hundreds and thousands of individual people like us, people who work and shop on their premises. Let us not lose sight of our individual humanity, which I believe we still possess in bucketloads: it is simply that we are operating in a world that makes us feel isolated and unmoored, disconnected from the sometimes bewildering number of other humans that move around us. As the population increases, there is a painful irony in the fact that we all seem to feel more and more alone inside it. But as just a tiny drop in what could be a potential antidote, how about this for a New Year’s resolution? Next time you see an abandoned trolley and you’re heading towards its homeland, why not pick it up and take it with you? You might be surprised how good it makes you feel.
