A.N Wilson on the English lack of interest in politics

“Would be revolutionaries have often been shocked (as Lenin was when he spent a year in London) by the English capacity to “switch off” politically. This capacity is less marked in the Irish, the Welsh or Scots.”

A.N Wilson, “London – a short history”, (1900-1939 chapter, pp 95)

How true this is. Sometimes I feel like I am in a society full of mutes, as no-one is interested, no-one will talk, about the issues of the day. Yet politics is so important; like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, something else that eludes the understanding of most (English) people, it permeates every single aspect of our daily lives. And yet people are uninterested in it.

I wrote this in 2005; the referendum debate changed things slightly for a while, only slightly, and only for a while. We're back to being political mutes. 

The “spareness of the desert” – Count Almasy, Peter Fleming, T.E Lawrence

“Here [in the desert] nuance took you a hundred miles”

Count Almasy, the villain and hero in Michael Ondjaate’s “The English Patient”, writes of the “spareness of the desert”, where repetition (of words) was equal to flinging away precious water.

Peter Fleming wrote the same thing in his book “News from Tartary”, of the softness of the “oasis peoples” who dwelt in the oases on the fringes of the Takla Makan desert in the 1930’s. T.E Lawrence (admittedly in the film – I do not recall him writing this in “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”) said that England was a “fat country”.

And he was right, and even more so today. We are a fat people, a soft people. And I am a soft man at heart.