Mark Nowak, father of the murdered Henry Nowak, spoke powerfully in public after Vickrum Digwa was convicted of the crime. He said there was \u2018no moment when the pain stops\u2019 and he thought there never would be. This prompted a comparison in my mind. Last month, Daphne Hamilton-Fairley died, aged 95. Our families were neighbours and friends in Bayswater in the late 1950s, and kept in touch after we moved to the country. Daphne\u2019s husband, Gordon, was a most distinguished oncologist at Bart\u2019s. One morning in 1975, he was walking in Campden Hill Square. His dogs sniffed under a car. A\u00a0bomb planted there exploded, killing Gordon (and the dogs). The IRA had intended to blow up the MP Sir Hugh Fraser, husband of the famous Lady Antonia, who lived next door. Widowed, Daphne was the picture of strength and calm dignity. Those qualities never left her. At the time, she publicly resisted anger and bitterness, and afterwards she led a fulfilled life. Her vocation was in helping the dyslexic and those with other learning difficulties. She set up and ran Fairley House as a school for them. Seeing her in old age, I felt it would be hard to think of someone who had survived such a horror so admirably. But Mr Nowak\u2019s point about the pain every day stands; it has applied to Daphne and her four children for half a century. Sarah, her second daughter, tells me how surprisingly hard they all found her funeral, because it provoked \u2018a double mourning\u2019 \u2013 for her and, which they had felt unable to express at the time, for their father. Gordon\u2019s plaque in the crypt of St Paul\u2019s says: \u2018It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives.\u2019 Sarah repeated this in tribute to both her parents at Fairley House this week. It is true, but the rest of us should not forget the lifelong cost when innocence is murdered.<\/p>\n
Running before the wind of anti-anti-racism as the Makerfield by-election approaches, the government is trying to edge away from race into class. It says it wants to ensure that people do not have to alter their accents to succeed in the public service. Many will nod in agreement, but in fact not all accents are equally attractive or equally comprehensible. Stronger (and therefore more working-class) accents can have a comprehensibility problem. Can you understand what rappers say? Some accents go with a patois. Suppose Scots felt free to address southern clients using words like \u2018dreich\u2019, \u2018thrawn\u2019 or \u2018sleekit\u2019. Besides, one can be confident that the \u2018keep your accent\u2019 rule will not apply to the persecuted posh. My dear friend Edward Stourton had his career on the Today programme blighted solely because his accent is old-style public school. Posh people are the one group today who must disguise their native accents to get on.<\/p>\n
Pride in place is a good thing, and to that extent, it is good that Sir Keir Starmer, who has damaged pride in place so much by his tax assaults on pubs and high streets, now has a \u2018Pride in Place\u2019 programme. How does the programme operate, though? According to the Times, residents in every council in England were asked how much they agreed that \u2018people in your neighbourhood pull together to improve the neighbourhood\u2019: \u2018Only areas that scored in the bottom 20 per cent were eligible for funding.\u2019 There is an apparent logic in this \u2013 why fund areas that are thoroughly neighbourly already? Yet also a sort of madness, since one has to disrespect one\u2019s neighbourhood in order to get help. Does it lose the money when it becomes more neighbourly? Surely the best places to help are those which are working hard to overcome disadvantage, not those where no one lifts a finger. This is a small but classic example of how discretionary welfare operates. Perverse incentives lie at its heart.<\/p>\n
My recent fogeyish reports in this column about what young people cannot do relate to this pride in place point. People under 30 have almost no idea where they are when they travel. Guided by GPS etc, they do not have a mental map that tells them that Wigan is north of Worcester, south of Wigtown and west of Whitby. At school, they are not taught about how x town came into being, what it produced, what relation its geography bears to sources of water and so on. It is hard to feel pride in a place you know nothing about.<\/p>\n
Unlike most of the media, I find it perfectly believable that Nicola Sturgeon was ignorant of her husband\u2019s finances. Busy and important couples find it easier to keep their finances separate and even unknown to the other partner, on an \u2018each to his\/her own\u2019 principle. When I wrote the life of Margaret Thatcher, I found that the money of her husband Denis and her money were things apart. Her parliamentary, leader\u2019s and later prime-ministerial salaries paid for everything related to her career. His money paid for most of the rest, and his investment and spending choices had nothing to do with her. This was sensible, even ethically preferable. The difference from the Sturgeon case consists in the fact that Denis was a businessman in the private sector, whereas Peter Murrell was being paid by the party led by his wife and therefore ultimately answerable to her. It is all the difference in the world. By the way, I love the fact that Ms Sturgeon\u2019s autobiography is called Frankly. I look forward to Humble by Donald Trump and Starry by Keir Starmer.<\/p>\n
I quite often receive letters from fellow pedants who complain about the house style of publications which express dates in the American manner e.g. \u2018June 13\u2019, rather than in the traditional British usage of \u201813 June\u2019 or even \u2018the 13th of June\u2019. I agree with them, and the whole thing is odd, since the most famous American date is called \u2013 by Americans \u2013 the Fourth of July, which we are all about to celebrate for the 250th time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mark Nowak, father of the murdered Henry Nowak, spoke powerfully in public after Vickrum Digwa was convicted of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":730229,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,6084,353425,353426,44,353427],"class_list":["post-730228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-grief","tag-henry-nowak","tag-makerfield","tag-news","tag-nicola-sturgeon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=730228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730228\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/730229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=730228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=730228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=730228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}