Reflections upon a November day
My post today springs from of a combination of some personal reflections upon modern life as it is and a report by Josh Gabbatiss that I read today upon the UN’s latest warning on the existential threat that climate change represents to the human race, as appears upon the website of The Independent – see here – CLIMATE CHANGE
Something that has remained with me since 1983, when my late wife – who had not long before received the diagnosis of the cancer that would later kill her – and I went off upon a memorable three-week guided tour of the wonders of Ancient Egypt conducted primarily via means of an old-fashioned (non air-conditioned) paddle-steamer travelling down the River Nile.
One of the laid-on features of said expedition was the presence on board of a Cambridge Egyptologist academic whose job it was to give our group a daily 20-minute pre-dinner talk previewing the archeaological site or sites that we would be visiting the following day.
For protocol reasons – the Egyptians were relatively precious about such things – for the bulk of our daily existence he had to remain in the background whilst our official local guide conducted these visits.
For the younger and more inquisitive of our group (amongst which my wife and I regarded ourselves), if we hung about after the official guide had moved on – like a scout mistress or mother duck shepherding her flock – into the next area or room, we could gain the benefit of our academic’s far superior knowledge of all things ancient and Egyptian, including the hieroglyphics, as (in low tones and hopefully out of earshot) he expanded generally upon what we were looking at and/or responded to questions.
But I digress.
The item that has stayed me ever since was his statement, made during one of his nightly lectures, whilst attempting to convey an impression of the greatness of the Ancient Egyptian civilisation.
He said that generally-speaking modern historians now agreed that human civilisation – in terms of organised living arrangements, animal husbandry etc. – had existed on Earth for some 5,000 years (or 50 centuries).
We could best gain an impression of the importance of Ancient Egypt if we were to register, as he now invited us to do, that that pharaohs had reigned in Egypt for 37 of them.
It occurred to me today that, with one thing and another – e.g. climate change, Russia, an ever-expanding world population, the finite nature of fossil fuels and potentially also food and water, Kim Jong-Un, Brexit, the rise of India and China and … er … well, President Donald Trump – it might well be possible that the end the domination of our planet by the human race could come at some future point, whether that be in 50, 100 or even a thousand years, be coming to its natural end.
Presumably to be succeeded by some form of different animal species – or perhaps artificially-intelligent robots.
Reading the warnings contained in the aforementioned (and linked) new UN report upon climate change, I then began to ponder upon some recent personal experiences I have had of life as it is lived in 21st Century Britain.
For example, on Monday, as is my occasional wont, I waddled down to the local high street branch of my bank in order to deposit a cheque and then check my bank account balance, a combined task that should have – and eventually did – take less than four minutes.
But not before I had spent a quarter of an hour waiting to gain access to one of the two bank staffers ‘taking’ the morning influx of visiting customers. This via means of a queue which – by the time I was eventually dealt with – had grown to a crocodile of no fewer than seven people.
How had this happened? Well, firstly (and one might venture to add ‘inevitably’) two of the first three in front of me in said queue had been shopkeepers or businessmen/women ‘depositing’ their overnight cash and other takings … an act which routinely can take up to ten minutes each time as the necessary note-counting, sorting and paperwork takes place.
Next up was an easy-on-the-eye, sassy, lady whom I should estimate (probably wrongly) was in her early thirties, who was there in order to make a bank transfer of either a deposit or a final completion payment in the cause of her new house purchase. That took at least a quarter of an hour on its own – or at least it had done by the time I was at last summoned to the staffer at other end of the counter – and, for all I know, may still be going on as I type!
Finally in front of me was a lady of about sixty – yes, properly ancient(!) – of the intelligent but nevertheless ‘completely away with the fairies’ sort. Her hair was all over the place, her face hadn’t seen make-up in fifteen years, and she was dressed like a bag lady, albeit that – as likely as not – she was probably the spouse of a world-famous author or academic.
Her quest – I know this because she had a voice loud enough that the entire queue was privy to her conversation – was as follows.
Her sister’s boyfriend was intent upon travelling from Rotherham to the metropolis by train but temporarily had no money. It so happened that this situation had coincided with her sister losing her debit card, thus she had no means of paying for his ticket.
And so our heroine had offered to come to the bank in order to send a direct transfer to her sister, who could then forward that money on to her boyfriend … and then he could buy his ticket from Rotherham to London.
As you can imagine, this news was the main excitement of the day for the by then six of us standing dutifully in the queue.
Separately, yesterday on the BBC TV News I watched a couple being interviewed about the iniquities of the Government’s new gradually rolling-out Universal Credit system as it applied to their personal situation.
(I am not that well up on subjects such as Universal Credit but, by all accounts, the Tories have made a complete Horlicks of it, apparently leaving some unfortunates up to five or six weeks without any money at all because they (the Tories) haven’t planned or funded it properly, as they should.
What stupefies me about the Tory high command and strategists is their unerring ability to make policy cock-ups that adversely affect ‘ordinary people’ and then – when these are publicised in the media – contrive to do nothing about it. In the current situation, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if the Tories haven’t been – and will continue to – lose a minimum 50,000 votes per day to Labour in the next General Election, whenever it occurs, by their failure to ‘lance’ this particular boil!).
The couple’s story was heart-wrenching. Between them they worked 22 hours per week part-time as cleaners but also had been relying upon top-ups from the benefit system. Over the past six weeks they had received zippo in benefits. They had therefore been obliged to resort to food banks for food, could not even afford biscuits for their grandchildren’s visits – and so on.
However, the report then showed the wife walking around their flat. It seemed pretty-well appointed: there was a 42” screen colour television on the sitting-room wall, she owned a smartphone and there were loads of birthday card on the mantelpiece To all intents and purposes, on the face of it, they looked to be doing okay.
In a week in which the UK has been criticised, rightly or wrongly, for its Third World poverty (allegedly an affront to people’s Human Rights), I suppose it’s all relative.
If you live in the UK in 2018, ever man jack of us is entitled to all the accessories of modern living and if we cannot afford them ourselves, we automatically get given them, funded by the taxpayer.
Still, it’s human civilisation in action, I suppose. I guess those unfortunates who lived in medieval times (with a life expectancy of 33 to 35) with death and disease around every corner, or who eked out a subsistence existence in Ancient Egypt, or even lived in a Manchester slum in the 1880s, just ‘got on with it’.
They’d be absolutely wide-eyed in disbelief at the luxuries which come as a matter of entitlement in these days.
Some might argue that’s progress.
But then, of course, so is climate change.