Yeah, Yeah, Yeah...

          The weather lately has suited me well: wet and windy days interspersed with dry and often sunny ones. For me, this translates into a healthy balance of indoor and outdoor pursuits. One afternoon, I sat solidly on the sofa and finished reading Polly Toynbee’s memoir*. The next morning, I cycled through the rejuvenating sunlight along the seafront to the old fishing harbour, where I indulged my craving for coffee, a croissant and a mooch around an up-market charity shop. I returned two hours later feeling refreshed and in possession of an elegant, mid-sixties glass carafe and set of tumblers that we definitely don’t need.

          Looking back on the week, the sixties have been much on my mind (an explanation, if one were needed, for the superfluous purchase). Polly Toynbee is the same age as me and much of her story is set in the sixties and studded with characters from the political and social scene of the time. There are also photos of her, fashionably attired á la Carnaby Street, which are guaranteed to make a veteran of those days wax nostalgic. In the evenings, I binged on The Beatles: Get Back, a seven-hour-long fly-on-the-wall documentary filmed while they were assembling their songs for the Let It Be album. I imagine all that footage might be too much for those with only a passing interest in the music, but for anyone intrigued by the creative process, its very duration is a merit. To lighten things up, there are fascinating glimpses of Linda, Yoko and Maureen. And, for those who appreciate the technicalities, the characters responsible for the recording, equipment and general back-up are all highly visible. The prodigious musical output is the most striking aspect of the film, but the unspoken social commentary is interesting too. It’s there in the fashions, manners and habits of the time: for instance, there was very little swearing and an awful lot of ciggie-smoking, the opposite of what you might expect in a studio today.

          I don’t know whether Polly Toynbee was a Beatles fan – or whether the Beatles were even aware of Polly - but whereas she continued in her family’s tradition of political writing and activism, the Beatles (collectively) kept shtum publicly on such matters – with the notable exception of Taxman, their 1966 rail against the tax rates for high earners. At that time, I was far less interested in politics than I was in popular music and, if I had been asked, I probably would have said that the two were unconnected. This, I now believe, was a view born of ignorance. Ask me now and I would say that everything is political.

          At our last University of the Third Age (U3A) discussion group, the topic was ‘trust’ and how it impinges on our social interactions. We concluded that society can only work as long as a degree of trust – or at least the expectation of it – is embedded in our transactions with other individuals, our institutions and the state. This led to a round of votes on which politicians (including from the sixties, Heath and Wilson, both of whom are named and blamed in Taxman) we considered to be trustworthy. Perhaps because our group tends towards left-wing liberalism, there was mostly consensus. But the problem with attributing trustworthiness to individuals is that it does not necessarily carry over into politics. John Steinbeck** put it nicely, thus:

“The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second.”

All you need is love, eh? I wish it were so.

 

*Polly Toynbee An Uneasy Inheritance

**Novelist and Nobel laureate