Just obeying orders

Since like many others I'm thinking a lot about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I feel I should write something about it. But what can I write that hasn't been said a hundred times already?

One question that often occurs to me is how on earth the Russian pilots who're relentlessly bombing buildings and innocent civilians can justify what they're doing. How do they live with themselves? How do they carry on, knowing they're killing and wounding more and more people, continually adding to the carnage and suffering?

One captured pilot, Maksim Kryshtop, said he was just following orders. He said he could have refused to obey the orders, but this would have shown weakness and cowardice.

No doubt if pilots refused to fly the bombing missions and deserted, they would face heavy penalties. In World War Two, 158,000 Russian troops were executed for desertion.

But the pilots must somehow have become entirely detached from the human beings they're bombing, and totally oblivious to the pain and misery they're causing. They simply see people on the ground as targets to be obliterated.

Presumably also they've swallowed the crazy propaganda that Putin has been spreading for years - that Ukraine is run by neo-nazis, drug barons and terrorists and that the invasion is liberating the Ukrainian people.

They were told the Ukrainians would welcome them with open arms, relieved at the prospect of their evil leaders being toppled. They're astonished when far from being welcomed they're greeted with hostility and told they weren't wanted and should return home before they were killed.

I have a simple request to Russian bomber pilots - just say no.

Pic: Maksim Kryshtop

Mealy mouthed

Apparently the English are renowned abroad for not saying what they really mean and coming up with something that hides their true feelings. I love those charts that explain what foreigners think we mean as opposed to what we actually mean. For example:

• "I was disappointed" (I was absolutely furious)
• "I hear what you say" (I totally disagree)
• "With the greatest respect (You're an idiot)
• "That's an interesting proposal" (It can't possibly work)
• "I'll bear it in mind" (But do nothing about it)
• "You must come to dinner sometime" (It would be a nightmare)
• "It's fine" (It can't possibly get any worse)
• "There's a slight problem" (This is a disaster)
• "It really doesn't matter" (That was incredibly offensive)
• "It's not ideal" (It's totally inappropriate)

Well, you get the idea. I gather Americans are more direct, and more likely to say exactly what they think, whatever the reaction might be. They don't understand all this English subterfuge.

I must admit to falling into this trap myself. I'm not brave enough to say to someone "That was a really boring evening and I'm not going to repeat it." I'm more likely to say "That was fun. We must do that again sometime", meaning the exact opposite.

The English custom is to be elaborately polite even in the most dire circumstances, and never to say anything blatantly rude. One must avoid confrontation at all costs and keep the atmosphere calm and comfortable.

I admit to finding any sort of confrontation quite agonising, and I go to extreme lengths to avoid it. I wouldn't have been much good as a police officer or a politician or a debt collector.

But maybe the English have the right idea. Maybe skirting round a delicate issue is better than picking a fight.

Expensive soup

Modern art still divides people. Some people think it's all rubbish, others think it's endlessly fascinating. Personally I'm firmly with the latter.

Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so is the appeal of modern art. It's really up to the viewer to get something out of it. If you put aside all conventional notions of what art should be and look at it with an open mind, then it can be highly enjoyable - and even a lot of fun.

But despite how long modern art has been with us, and despite all the attempts to explain it, I still hear all the familiar criticisms:

• But what does it mean?
• My six year old could have done that
• She's just pulling our leg
• How can that be worth half a million?
• It looks like something out of a dumpster
• It's a grotesque version of the human body
• Why can't she just do a normal painting?
• He's just trying to shock us

Yes, I think some artists are simply pulling our legs. Like Carl Andre's Bricks, which is just that - a pile of 120 bricks. Or Damien Hirst's Away From The Flock, which is a dead sheep in a tank of formaldehyde.

But they're the infamous exceptions. The majority of modern artists are producing genuine artwork that challenges traditional ideas of what art consists of and is exciting and thought-provoking.

When Andy Warhol said "Art is what you can get away with", I think that quote in itself was tongue in cheek. Warhol produced some highly original artwork that was much more than a practical joke.

Of course all the controversy just pushes up the price of modern art so that Warhol's paintings of Campbell Soup Tins have been sold for anything up to £15 million. That's some very expensive soup.

Pic: Spider by Louise Bourgeois

Secret pleasures

Kylie asked an interesting question in her last blog post. What are the guilty pleasures you spend money on and what do you definitely not spend money on?

She mentioned a Tik Toker whose guilty pleasures are manicures, coffees, magazines and uber eats.

Well, I'm not prone to guilt, so for me it's more a question of unhealthy or extravagant or secret pleasures. So what am I (or Jenny) spending less money on? Or no money at all?

• We're eating out less
• We never buy ready meals
• We only buy printed newspapers on Saturday and Sunday
• We don't buy scented candles or pointless knick-knacks
• We have no subscription services except Sky
• We hardly ever go to the theatre
• We hardly ever use taxis
• We don't have any pets
• We don't buy bottled water
• We have no extended warranties
• We don't belong to a gym
• We buy cheap books from the local charity bookshop
• I get a lot of books from the local library (for my book club)
• I don't have a smartphone, only a PAYG phone
• I don't have a camera
• I never buy designer clothes
• I never wear formal clothing
• I never wear a suit
• I never buy magazines
• And I've never had a manicure (or a pedicure)!

But I couldn't give up coffee, or chocolate, or ice cream, or the internet, or books, or music, or trips to the cinema, or holidays. Some things are just essential for my wellbeing.

I certainly wouldn't squander money on a luxury car, a second home, a swish barbecue set-up, cosmetic dentistry, or an exercise machine. Who needs them?

But above all we aren't the sort of people who rush to replace some household item or piece of clothing simply because it's no longer fashionable. We have a lot of things that are decades old and no longer remotely fashionable, but we're quite happy with them, and that's all that matters.

The need to know

I'm surprised how many of you felt there was nothing wrong with keeping the cause of death secret. In particular people suggested there was no need for others to know and families were entitled to keep such information to themselves. Demanding to know the cause was an unwarranted intrusion into people's lives.

I beg to differ. I think in many cases there is very much a need to know, especially if the death points to some sort of institutional mistake or technical mishap or personal tragedy that needs to be investigated. For example:

• A software failure in a plane
• A mechanical fault in a car
• Medical negligence in a hospital
• Suicide after persistent bullying
• An overdose of a fashionable drug
• The unexpected side-effect of a medicine

Twelve year old Drayke Hardman from Utah killed himself on February 10 in response to bullying from a classmate. This led to much discussion about how to reduce bullying in schools. If the cause of death hadn't been disclosed, then that discussion wouldn't have happened.

Nerissa Regnier, 45, from California died of covid in December after being told seven times by her healthcare provider that she shouldn't be vaccinated because the vaccine contained a "live virus" (which is untrue). So because her death was publicised, anyone who's told about the "live virus" now knows it's nonsense.

There must be hundreds of cases like that, where surprising (or even unsurprising) causes of death lead to beneficial changes. Yes, you might want to be evasive out of embarrassment or shame, but if that allows institutional failures or avoidable tragedies to continue, isn't that a big missed opportunity?

I still think frankness is better than secrecy.

Secrecy and coyness

I'm baffled by this constant reluctance to reveal how someone died. Why the obsessive secrecy and coyness in an age of increasing frankness?

A local MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly) has died suddenly at the age of 39, but the family aren't explaining how he died. So naturally there's all sorts of speculation, probably most of it nonsense, about the possible cause. Suicide is the front runner, but no doubt there's a few takers for a drugs overdose, a sex game that went wrong, a fall down the stairs, an undiagnosed heart condition, a scandal about to break, and anything else our fevered imaginations can come up with.

Why not just tell us the cause of death? What's the big deal? Possibly the cause is something the family is embarrassed or ashamed about, so they prefer to stay silent.

But in these lay-it-all-on-the-table days, when people will reveal almost anything about themselves, no matter how lurid or shocking or intimate, why this odd exception?

I guess people are often afraid that if the cause of death is something that could have been prevented, something that might implicate other people, then they'd rather keep quiet to avoid all the judgmental tut-tutting from self-righteous busybodies.

But surely nowadays people are much more likely to be sympathetic and consoling than judgmental? Surely we're all aware for example that something like suicide has all sorts of contributory factors and that blaming their family or friends for not doing enough to prevent it is simply stupid and unhelpful.

Certainly I have no objection to my own cause of death being revealed, however bizarre or unusual it might be.

So why not just tell us how this chap died? Just take a deep breath and stop all the wild speculation.

PS: Wow, today is my 15th blogiversary!!

Null and void?

A Facebook friend has related the awful story of someone she knows who was cheated out of an inheritance because of a secret marriage.

Daphne Franks' mother, who had vascular dementia and terminal cancer, befriended a much younger man who secretly married her. When she died, he inherited everything because an English marriage* immediately cancels any previous wills. The daughter never knew about the marriage so was unable to stop it.

Which got me wondering on what grounds you can annul a marriage, as that is one possible solution.

An English marriage is automatically void if:

• you're closely related to the other person
• one or both of you were under 16
• one of you was already married or in a civil partnership

Your marriage is voidable** if:

• it wasn't sexually consummated (doesn't apply to same-sex couples)
• you didn't properly consent - for example you were forced into it
• you were unable to consent because of a lack of mental capacity
• your spouse had a sexually transmitted disease when you married
• your spouse was pregnant by someone else when you married
• your spouse is transitioning to the opposite sex

Surely there's a case for voiding the marriage, both on the grounds that her mother was forced into it, and because she lacked the mental capacity to understand what was happening. Apparently the registrar noticed she was acting strangely (she couldn't remember her age or house number) but was satisfied with the explanation that she was a bit forgetful.

Daphne Franks is also campaigning for a change in the law to stop a marriage cancelling a previous will.

But what a terrible end to her mother's life.

*but not in Scotland

**you have to apply to a divorce court for a declaration that the marriage is void

Pic: Daphne Franks and her mother Joan Blass

PS: I've been in touch with Daphne through Facebook and she says "Fabian Hamilton MP asked Boris Johnson what he was going to do about it in Prime Minister's Questions on 9 June 2021. Change is now on the way I'm pleased to say but don't know the details yet!"

The bigger picture

I was getting rather depressed and despairing about the state of the world, pondering over all the terrible problems people are struggling with - poverty, violence, sex trafficking, drug addiction, the list is endless.

Then suddenly I realised the reason for my despair was that I was only looking at one half of the picture. I was only looking at the problems while totally ignoring all the efforts to improve things.

Yes, people are dealing with huge problems but there are thousands of organisations around the world devoted to reducing those problems and salvaging people's lives.

I remind myself that poverty for instance is being tackled by dozens of organisations. Oxfam alone has 21 branches across the world, including Oxfam GB which in 2016/17 had a total income of £408.6m, with 5,000 employees and 23,000 volunteers. Among other things, Oxfam is a global leader in providing water sanitation to impoverished and war-torn areas.

I also remind myself of the hundreds of research projects into horrible diseases like Ebola, multiple sclerosis, cancer and dementia.

I know many people are rather cynical about charities, suggesting for example that too much of their money goes into administration and executive salaries rather than the good causes the public's donations are intended for. But nevertheless they make a big difference to the millions of lives blighted by dire circumstances.

So now that I'm seeing the wider picture, seeing solutions as well as problems, seeing all the help going to those who urgently need it, I feel a lot more cheerful and optimistic.

Unfortunately that wider picture tends to be ignored by the media, which much prefers to focus on dreadful disasters rather than the organisations that come to the rescue.

No wonder despair is so common, But it doesn't have to be.

Write and wrong

The writer Sebastian Faulks is involved in a bizarre argument over whether he should describe the physical appearance of women in his books.

After his last book was published, several people complained that as a man he had no right to describe a woman's appearance.

He had a good think about it and decided not to describe the appearance of the female protagonist in his latest book "Snow Country". He's leaving what she looks like to his readers' imagination. There are one or two hints but that's it.

Other authors have leapt to Sebastian Faulks' defence, saying it's absurd not to describe a woman's appearance. "The idea that writers can't invent characters beyond their own communities is ridiculous" says Bernardine Evaristo. And Dawn French says "The minute we start to police people's imaginations, we go down a very nasty old route."

The logical conclusion of a man not writing about a woman's appearance is that he shouldn't write about women at all, which would be ludicrous.

Surely the real issue is not whether a man writes about a woman's appearance but how he writes about it. If it's merely a matter-of-fact description of her physical features, what's wrong with that? But if he describes her in a sexualised way (big boobs, tempting lips, shapely bottom etc), that's entirely different and obviously annoying to many female readers.

If a man couldn't write about women, or white people couldn't write about black people, or heterosexuals couldn't write about gay people, and so on, where would it end? Books would be stripped to the bone. You could just about mention Jasper the dog and that would be that. Until someone objected that you couldn't write about dogs because you weren't a dog.

Sebastian Faulks should have stood firm and ignored the idiotic criticisms.

Down the hatch

Attitudes to alcohol have certainly changed over the years. Stricter in some ways, more relaxed in others. Alcohol consump-tion in Britain is actually falling steadily, especially among the young, though you wouldn't think it from the way some people casually pour it down their throats.

When I was on my first ever job as a local newspaper journalist, the rest of the staff would routinely go off for extremely boozy lunches and return so pissed they could barely string a few words together, let alone turn in a serious article.

This behaviour didn't last long though, and in my second job, also on a local paper, we would all go for massive lunches (usually heart-rotting fry ups) rather than massive drinking sprees.

Nowadays in many workplaces it's strictly taboo to drink any alcohol at all at lunchtime, to ensure people can do their job and not doze off in a state of happy inebriation. This was definitely the unwritten rule at most of my workplaces and I abided by it, which was easy enough as I've never been a heavy drinker.

As a twenty something I got absurdly drunk a few times with my fellow students on a sociology course, but the hangovers were so dreadful I vowed never to get that drunk again.

But I'm still surprised when I go to other people's homes and they're obviously expecting me to drink copious amounts of alcohol. Bottles of wine are in plentiful supply and my glass is topped up the moment it looks less than full.

Neither of my parents were more than occasional drinkers, so that's probably where my own restraint comes from. They might sheepishly dust off a bottle of sherry for the Christmas dinner but that was about it.

Go on, have another. Cheers!

John's tooth

The price people will pay for a seemingly utterly trivial item, simply because it's associated with some global celebrity, is staggering. Often of course the motive is money and the assumption that said item will turn a handsome profit when resold.

In 2011 one of John Lennon's teeth was auctioned with a guide price of between £10,000 and £20,000. With it was a sworn affidavit from John's former housekeeper that it was genuine and given her by John.

A Canadian dentist bought it for £19,000 and he did in fact see it as a potential money-spinner.

I can only hope he didn't mislay such a tiny item, that it didn't somehow slip down the back of the sofa or get swept into the hoover.

Mind you, you can never be truly sure an item is genuine. Even if it comes with a sworn affidavit, is that totally reliable? But what the hell, if you can afford to splash out £19,000 you're probably pretty wealthy and won't miss the odd wasted £19,000.

Signatures are notoriously dodgy. Busy celebrities often leave their staff to forge signatures on their behalf, so something supposedly signed by the Fab Four may not be the real deal. The Beatles were known to be adept at forging each other's signatures.

Hand-written copies of famous Beatles lyrics sell for huge sums (the hastily-scribbled lyrics for Hey Jude went for $910,000 a few years back), but again there must be a money motive, since who cares what the original lyrics looked like?

But John Lennon's tooth got me wondering. What happened to all the other personal items belonging to the Beatles? John's toothbrush and toothpaste for example. Are they stashed in some millionaire's safe? Or were they just thrown out with the rubbish? Who knows?

Odourless

It's weird having virtually no sense of smell. It means I'm blissfully unaware of nasty smells, but also frustratingly unaware of beautiful ones.

Jenny is always asking me if I smell something or other, to which I invariably reply that I can't smell a thing. Everyone around me is swooning over some delicious scent, and I'm wondering what all the fuss is about.

I used to work with a local councillor who several people told me wasn't too hygienic and had an unpleasant body odour. He drove me to a meeting once and even in such close proximity I couldn't smell anything unusual.

There's a coastal walk at the end of Belfast Lough where apparently the accumulated seaweed "absolutely reeks", but I can't detect anything out of the ordinary (which is handy because it greatly improves the walk). 

Jenny sometimes asks me if a newly-washed towel smells a bit off, but I regularly tell her it smells fine to me. I can only assume it really does smell off and she's not just imagining it.

Unfortunately beautiful smells usually pass me by, so I'm missing out on quite a lot. Roses and other flowers, coffee, freshly-cooked food, perfumes, shampoos, melting chocolate, newly mown grass, paint, scented candles, to name but a few (though I can generally smell perfume if someone is soaked in it).

I can't rely on my sense of smell to tell me if I need a shower or clean clothes, but luckily my sweat is quite pleasant (so I'm told) so I'm unlikely to embarrass myself with an undetected stink.

Luckily I have Jenny to alert me if the house is on fire and I haven't noticed anything untoward. If I was on my own, I might have been incinerated by now.

I wonder what it's like to have a normal sense of smell?

Wandering mind

I'm not good at concentrating. At the best of times my concentration is probably about 75 per cent of what it should be. My attention wanders constantly as I'm easily distracted.

Whether it's TV, the media, books, or when I'm talking to other people, I'm just not focusing 100 per cent. Which means there are all sorts of details I don't take in, and consequently a lot of details I don't remember.

I daresay a psychologist might diagnose me with ADHD, but most of the relevant symptoms are ones I don't experience. Like excessive talking, acting without thinking, and interrupting conversations.

I don't think it's an age thing. My concentration wasn't any better when I was young. I would easily get the wrong end of the stick because some important detail had escaped me.

I must say my poor concentration has seldom been a hindrance. It hasn't stopped me having a great life. It hasn't stopped me doing demanding jobs. I just have to make allowances for it (and envy those whose concentration is a lot better).

It can be a problem with TV dramas, where Jenny keeps reminding me of crucial details I've somehow missed. "Don't you remember, she's the one who discovered the body in the first episode?"

Somehow I doubt I could radically improve my concentration, even with special mental exercises. It would take a miraculous overhaul of my brain to achieve gimlet-like concentration.

Of course I'm not alone. Plenty of people have poor concentration, as I repeatedly discover when some politician blatantly misconstrues a document they've just read because they haven't read it properly.

I wonder how many crime dramas I've unwittingly misconstrued?

Food for thought

I'm reading a fascinating book by the American nutritionist Michael Pollan, who says all nutritional and dietary advice should be viewed with great scepticism as we actually know very little about what happens to food inside the human body.

The typical food item contains so many substances, many of them not yet even identified, that it's pretty hazardous trying to predict what that food will do to us after we eat it.

Also, every person has a unique metabolism that processes food in a unique way. So how a food will affect my body is quite different from how it affects someone else's body.

One person will get fat and develop heart disease, while another person eating the same food will stay thin and have a healthy heart.

Food is far more complex than nutritionists make out, but if they admitted how little they know about food and what it does to our bodies, their reputations would plummet.

One splendid example of ill-informed pronouncements was the advice to cut down on saturated fats to avoid heart disease. When people did so, the incidence of heart disease in fact rose. The advice turned out to be based on guesswork and supposition rather than solid evidence.

I must say I generally ignore nutritionists' advice, as I know that advice can change radically from year to year, often totally reversing the previous accepted wisdom. I just try to eat a healthy range of foods, including as many raw foods as possible.

One thing many nutritionists agree on is that what's known as the Western diet - lots of processed food, foods full of sugar and fat, food lacking vital vitamins and minerals - is wreaking a huge toll of chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease. So I also try to avoid such foods.

Common sense is probably more reliable than the latest dietary dictum.

Pic: Michael Pollan

Unwelcome words

I keep up as best I can with all those linguistic changes to avoid offending one group or another in society, but sometimes I'm taken by surprise to learn that a particular word I'd never even thought about is highly offensive and needs to be replaced.

There's currently a big furore over the word "midget". Dr Erin Pritchard, a lecturer in disability studies, who herself has achondroplasia, a growth-stunting condition, says the word is offensive to short people and has a very derogatory origin in Victorian freak shows.

The outcry started after Marks and Spencer announced they were rebranding their sweet Midget Gems as Mini Gems to avoid offence. Several other companies have said they're considering doing the same.

Predictably enough, dozens of trolls have pitched in, saying it's wokery gone mad, or politically correct nonsense, or language policing, or just someone looking for something contentious to complain about.

Well, no, it's not just wokery gone mad. If a lot of people are so offended by a specific word that they avoid using it, then we should take note and avoid using it ourselves. How hard is it to make a simple change that would make other people more comfortable?

Dr Pritchard explains that the word's origin automatically dehumanises people like herself. "It was a word popularised during the Victorian freak show, where many disabled people, including people with dwarfism, were oppressed and exploited. When people scream the name at you in the street, it is only right that it is removed."

Yes, there are plenty of examples of "wokery gone mad" but this isn't one of them. This is a sensible request to phase out a disparaging word with a shameful history. Is that so hard to understand?

Pic: Doctor Erin Pritchard

Not a patriot

I'm not a patriot. By that I mean I'm not going to defend my country to the last and make out that everything it is or does is wonderful. That's just idiotic. Britain does some things well and does other things very badly.

To gloss over the failures and pretend they don't exist, and to magnify the successes even if they're simply the basics of a properly-run country, seems to me a cock-eyed way of looking at things.

But don't misunderstand me. When I say I'm not a patriot, that doesn't mean I slag off Britain and how it's run at every opportunity. It just means I take a realistic view of my country, with all its faults, and I don't mindlessly defend it like some blinkered fanatic.

When I say I'm not patriotic, what that means is:

• I couldn't care less about the union jack
• I couldn't care less about the national anthem
• I'm not distraught if Britain doesn't win some big sports event
• I don't wildly exaggerate Britain's achievements
• I'm not at all proud of my country
• I don't dismiss all other countries as inferior
• I don't think the British are all fine, upstanding, law-abiding citizens
• I don't believe the British have some unique cultural or spiritual quality
• I don't believe Britain is the "cradle of democracy"
• I don't see what's so special about the "village pub"

There's nothing wonderful about this very average country.  Alongside those with dazzling talents and abilities, there are many more with modest skills who're simply going through the motions till retirement - that is, if they can even afford to retire, when the state pension is so scandalously low*.

Not so much a wonderful country as a country staggering on chaotically from day to day.

* The basic state pension is £179.60 ($243.91) a week.

Cake célèbre

A decision today by the European Court of Human Rights means that the notorious "gay cake" case still hasn't been resolved.

In 2014 Gareth Lee asked Ashers, a Belfast bakery, to make him a cake with a slogan supporting gay marriage (which at that time was still illegal). The bakery refused, saying the slogan conflicted with their religious beliefs. So Mr Lee started a legal action for discrimination.

The case has made it way slowly through various courts, finally reaching the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled today that Mr Lee's case was inadmissible because he hadn't exhausted all options in UK courts.

It's not clear if Mr Lee will now abandon his legal action or soldier on in some way.

A lot of people have wondered why he bothered to take legal action in the first place. If Ashers refused to bake his cake, why didn't he just find another bakery that had no such objection? Why make such a big issue out of someone else's beliefs not aligning with his own?

He's spent huge amounts of time and money pursuing his legal action, when there was a very simple solution to Ashers' objection - just take his custom elsewhere.

Mr Lee seems to have a very large bee in his bonnet about a bakery that wouldn't supply exactly what he wanted. Perhaps he should kill the bee and put an end to his ridiculous obsession with trouncing Ashers.

It's not even a case about homophobia. Ashers have explained that they have nothing against homosexuals, only the particular slogan Mr Lee wanted on his cake.

After all, if someone wanted to buy a cake with a slogan supporting Adolf Hitler and Nazism, shouldn't the bakery have a right to refuse? I think so.

Pic: Gareth Lee

The honest truth

A woman from North Carolina has caused huge controversy with her new book on marriage, in which she lists all her husband's faults and says marriage requires you to blot out certain aspects of your spouse to stay happy.

Heather Havrilesky says that "after 15 years of marriage, you start to see your mate clearly, free of your own projections and misperceptions." Her husband Bill "is exactly the same as a heap of laundry: smelly, inert, almost sentient but not quite" until he has had his coffee each morning.

If Jenny was that frank about my shortcomings, I'd die of embarrassment. And I wouldn't dream of broadcasting all her shortcomings. But she claims Bill has read her book three times, and loves it. He approves of her brutal honesty, has a great sense of humour about himself, and "doesn't lose sleep over what other people think". I must say I find it hard to believe he can be that un-bothered.

Not many people would be that candid publicly about their spouse's failings. There's a sort of unwritten rule that you stress all the benefits of your marriage while skipping over the less desirable aspects. Moaning about your spouse is reserved strictly for the ears of close friends only.

Is that good or bad? If everyone hides the downside of their marriage, these must be a lot of people hearing all these glossy accounts and thinking their own marriage must be a dismal failure. Wouldn't it be better if we were all more honest and admitted that marriage isn't necessarily the joyous idyll we imagined on our wedding day? That making a marriage last over the long term is hard work?

Anyway, I won't be putting pen to paper any time soon. My marital secrets will stay exactly that - secret.

Pic: Heather Havrilesky

Begone, Mr Grumpy

I don't want to become one of those miserable old geezers who're convinced the world is going to pot, nobody does their job properly any more, there are fraudsters everywhere you look, young people have no respect for their elders, motorists drive like maniacs, and good taste is a thing of the past. I want to see the world through a positive lens rather than finding fault with everyone and everything.

If you don't watch yourself, it's easy to slip into habitual pessimism, especially when the media love to focus on disasters and cock-ups rather than most people's uneventful daily lives. Or if you have such a rose-tinted view of the past that today's world seems like a steady decline from once-impeccable standards.

So hopefully I'm still abiding by my pledges against grumpiness (originally drawn up in 2012):

• I won't moan and groan
• I won't become a grumpy old man
• I won't let the world's problems get me down
• I won't make mountains out of molehills
• I won't let petty irritations annoy me
• I won't complain about my bodily deficiencies
• I won't denigrate other people's lives
• I won't tell other people what to do*
• I won't rant and rave
• I won't demonise young people
• I won't be cynical
• I won't be paranoid
• I won't see the worst in people
• I won't be nostalgic
• I won't believe everything was better in the old days
• I won't think that I know best
• I won't think life's conspiring against me
• I won't be offended by bad manners
• I won't be offended
• I won't over-react

Of course Jenny might say I'm not as sanguine as I make out, that there's a grumpy old man lurking just under the breezy exterior. Well, if Mr Grumpy does make an appearance, I'm sure she'll silence him pretty promptly.

*except politicians and bankers, obviously

Reluctant adult

A lot of children want desperately to be adults. They find childhood totally frustrating - always being told what to do, prevented from doing things, treated like idiots, not understanding what the grown-ups are talking about.

They passionately want to be adults so they can do what they want, make their own decisions, understand life a bit better, not be constantly watched.

Not me. I can't remember ever yearning to be an adult or chafing under all the parental restrictions. I think I wanted to be a child forever, always looked after and never having any adult worries.

Even though my childhood was far from ideal, with a bad-tempered father and a dreadful boarding school,  I must have concluded that all things considered perpetual childhood would be the ideal state.

Maybe it was because so many of the adults I came across seemed to have numerous worries and burdens and didn't seem very contented with their lot in life. My parents themselves had been on the verge of divorce at one point and other adults had to cope with huge mortgages, nasty bosses, serious illnesses and endless bills. I could stay a child and avoid all those frightening problems.

I didn't see adulthood as a land of opportunity, more as a land of increasing encumbrances and obstacles. The drawbacks seemed to greatly outweigh the benefits. How often did I hear an adult saying how much they enjoyed being an adult? Not often enough for my liking.

Of course now I've been an adult for so long I can better appreciate the benefits and make light of the encumbrances. But I guess there's still a small part of me that thinks childhood was really rather idyllic and why couldn't I have been a self-indulgent, irresponsible teenager a little longer?