28 Thursday April 28 2022 | the times
Comment
But there’s no way he’s claiming my
medal for valour.
Him: It is worse than labour,
everyone agrees.
Me: But I had a 9lb baby, then a
10lb baby. Your stone was 5.5mm and
you didn’t even pass it.
Him: The urethra isn’t designed for
heavy traffic.
Me: I had no pain relief
whatsoever. Twice. You had
morphine up your bum.
Of course it shouldn’t be a
competition. But it is.Ward rounds
T
he urology ward was a
sad, silent place. A
row of men, from
middle-aged to elderly,
sitting in pyjamas all
alone in curtained bays.
No visitors were allowed,
despite permitted hours
being listed on the hospital
website and I was only
admitted because I’d been
visiting my husband on a
different ward when he
was transferred.
“You can’t come in!”
barked a nurse, as I
followed behind his
wheeled bed.
“Yes, she can — she’s
with me,” snapped the nurse
pushing him. No one could
explain, beyond the whim ofthe sister, why one ward allowed
visitors but the other did not. I felt
for these comfortless men, miserably
FaceTiming their wives. And
wondered whether Covid remains
cover for stopping relatives from
cluttering up the place.Another cake ambush
I
passed briskly through
security at Copenhagen
airport and had reached
the area where you
rethread your belt and
stuff “liquids” back into
your bag, when I saw
the cake. In a white
cardboard box, tied
with a ribbon, a treat for
someone had been left
behind.
Being early, I walked
around the small
terminal in a loop back
to duty free, from where
I later saw the cake had
still not been claimed. Its
owners must by now
have boarded their
plane. Soon security
would sling it in the bin.
So I took it. Why?
Because Danish baked
goods are excellent
and expensive and I
detest waste.
Then I had a
terrible thought, bornA
heated debate rages in my
household over the old
truism that kidney stones
are “more painful than
childbirth”. Certainly,
watching my poor husband moan
and writhe as he wrestled with an
agony no painkiller could touch was
like witnessing labour.
The female condition involves a
lifetime of medical intrusion down
below which the male organs largely
escape, beyond the odd gloved digit.
But having a stent pushed up your
old chap is, granted, like a nastier
gynaecological procedure, and was
even performed under epidural.
As he recovers in bed, I hear him
on the phone sharing his war stories
of urine colour changing from “a fine
rosé to a rich burgundy” with other
male “stoners”, just like a new
mother recounting her bloody
maternity drama. Stone pain, I
concede, is more frightening:
contractions are at least “normal”.
Why success in life is the art of the possible
An early sense of one’s potential can be transformational, as Obama, Macron and Morrissey prove
you regularly stand on a professional
stage, a career as an actor seems
much closer than it does from a
provincial church hall. For those
without an expensive education, the
best strategy is surely the one that
worked for Hardy: get as close as you
physically (or even virtually) can to
the world you want to join.
Imaginative proximity is one of the
keys to success. Obama’s father was a
politician in Kenya. And although he
was absent from his young son’s life,
he gave him an imaginative
proximity to politics. Obama knew
his father was a politician and so
politics belonged to the realm of the
plausible. Because Keynes belonged
to the Bloomsbury group whose
members were revolutionising
literature and art, the idea of doing
the same to economics perhaps
seemed less outlandish. Before he
became famous, Morrissey was a
fixture on a Manchester music scene
that was churning out stars regularly.
He is an egotist but in that
environment the idea of becoming a
star was not so absurd.
A sense of imaginative proximity
means you are apt to try where
others will not bother. And the
longer you hold an ambition in your
mind the less fantastical it seems.
Turn a problem over for long enough
and it seems less daunting and
abstract. You start to think about it
practically. Biden graduated near the
bottom of his class but was already
planning to become president.
Of course, most success requires
money, contacts, intelligence or the
nepotistic intervention of powerful
relatives. But without those
advantages, imagination is not useless.you don’t actively exert effort to do
something else.” To those from less
privileged backgrounds, “doctor” is
not the default but a distant dream.
Success can depend on closing this
mental distance. In stories of
dramatic social advance you can spot
the junctures at which the
imaginative gap narrowed. The
novelist Thomas Hardy, one of the
most socially mobile men of the 19th
century, was born the son of a
stonemason in Dorset. An early
friendship with the literary, middle-
class Horace Moule was crucial. It
wasn’t that Moule gave him money
or contacts but, as Hardy’s
biographer Claire Tomalin writes,
that he “enrolled him with what
seemed like princely grace into the
fellowship of those who live by the
written word”. Hardy’s friendship
with Moule transformed his sense of
the possible. It helped him
understand that the world of letters,
which had seemed galactically
distant, was in fact close enough for
him to reach. And he reached it.
I decided to become a journalist in
my mid-twenties after encountering
an old university acquaintance who
mentioned having written a book
review for a newspaper. Before that, I
had never considered that writing for
a newspaper was something that
belonged to my sphere of plausible
experience.
The importance of possibility is
why big public schools spend millions
on state-of-the-art theatres and
laboratories (the theatres of some
London private schools are in better
condition than those in the West
End). You don’t need a high-tech
theatre to train teenage actors. But ifW
hile still in college,
Joe Biden started
producing a detailed
plan for his future
presidential
campaign (it only took five decades
to implement). The young
Emmanuel Macron aspired not to
the presidency but to fame as a
novelist. In France, where novelists
are still believed to be glamorous,
this counts as ambition. At school in
Indonesia, the nine-year-old Barack
Obama wrote in an essay that he
intended to become president.
The American decision theorist
Eliezer Yudkowsky coined the useful
term “hero licence”. “Roughly,” this
describes “my intention to try to do
something that’s in excess of what
you think matches my current social
standing.” When discussing success
we rightly invoke drive, work ethic
and wealth. But too rarely
mentioned is imagination. Perhaps it
sounds wishy-washy. But a crucial
determinant of success is your sense
of the possible.
Among those we consider geniuses,
this faculty of imagination can be so
precocious and specific it amounts to
a feeling of destiny. Yudkowsky cites
John Maynard Keynes: “I believe
myself to be writing a book on
economic theory which will largely
revolutionise the way the world
thinks about its economic problems.”
He might equally have quoted
Morrissey before the release of the
first Smiths album: “I really do
expect the highest critical praise... I
think it’s a signal post in music.”
All too common are talented
people who are stymied because they
lack Yudkowsky’s hero licence. There
are many brilliant adult men and
women who have more reasonable
grounds than the young Obama to
suppose they might one day become
president but who will never try
because the idea seems preposterous.
Our lives are determined by our
circumstances but also by our
understanding of what is possible.
Humans are creatures of limitedimagination and we take our cues
from our environment. The
professions of our parents and
siblings are hugely influential. Partly
this is a matter of contacts, work
experience and family wealth (and
perhaps genetics). But our families
also provide our sense of what an
obvious thing to do with life might
be. The children of nurses are almost
four times as likely to become nurses
than the average person. The
children of lawyers are seven times
more likely to become lawyers.
In an essay on Yudkowsky’s theory
the rationalist blogger Scott
Alexander wrote: “Because my father
is a doctor, ‘doctor’ has always
seemed like the default career path ifThe longer you hold
an ambition, the less
fantastical it seems
of too much Scandi noir: what if this
was a box of cocaine. How could I
answer the question: “Did you pack
this cake yourself ?” So I retired to a
bathroom, untied the bow and found
an orangey almond tart. And back
home my family ate it. But I am not,
as you may guess, without guilt.
Should I have taken the cake? Would
you? And if the cake was yours
please email me at The Times and I
will send a replacement wherever in
the world you flew.Amis’s better half
A
friend wondered why she’d
never read Elizabeth Jane
Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles,
but then devoured all five books in
one go. I realised I’d dismissed them
as stuffy drawing-room books,
literary chintz, and Howard as a
minor writer, more famous as
Kingsley Amis’s wife.
How wrong I was. Only halfway
through the first book, The Light
Years, I’m dazzled by her spare prose,
the clear-eyed female view of events
between the wars. Incest begins with
a fatherly kiss, mothers confide how
they hate getting pregnant, menfolk
cope silently with the horrors
endured in France, the bereaved
stagger on. The Cazalets are not
cosy at all.Janice Turner Notebook
I’ll see your
kidney stone
and raise you
a 10lb baby
@victoriapeckhamThe Met’s lack of
contrition shows it
is a law unto itself
Jawad Iqbal
T
he Metropolitan Police,
mired in a series of racism
and misogyny scandals, are
nothing if not consistent in
their failure to meet
professional standards. The latest
public humiliation for Britain’s
biggest force comes in a damning
independent report into its treatment
of the black athlete Bianca Williams
in a stop and search. The failings
paint a picture of a police service
that is poorly led, blind to its faults
and lacking in accountability to
the public.
Williams and her partner Ricardo
dos Santos were stopped by police in
July 2020. Both were put in
handcuffs, searched for weapons and
drugs, and separated from their
three-month-old son. Nothing was
found. Details of the couple’s baby
were stored on a police database.
The investigation by the
Independent Office of Police
Conduct (IOPC), the official
watchdog, found that the actions of
the five officers involved met the
threshold for gross misconduct. They
could face the sack.
Yet the Met’s senior leaders
repeatedly defended the officers. The
recently departed commissioner,
Dame Cressida Dick, declared: “I
would say that any officer worth
their salt would have stopped that
car that was being driven in that
manner.” Not the first time she has
demonstrated poor judgment. The
Met’s acting boss, Sir Stephen House,
maintained that two internal
standards teams had reviewed the
footage of the stop and “neither team
saw anything wrong with it”. Even
now the Met is offering more pig-
headed defiance, issuing a statement
that House’s words were “factually
correct at the time”. The lack of
contrition speaks volumes about a
broken police culture.
The wider failings of stop and
search must be addressed. Home
Office figures show that black people
are almost seven times more likely to
be stopped in England and Wales. A
recent report from the IOPC
watchdog cited the case of a teenager
reportedly stopped 60 times by the
Met. He was sometimes searched
many times in the same day. In
another case, two black men were
searched after a fist bump was
mistaken for a drug deal.
Stop and search remains a
legitimate tool, especially at a time
when violent crime is rising, but
there must be safeguards. It is being
used too bluntly; handcuffing during
stops is used too routinely and area
commanders must engage more with
communities to ensure people aren’t
being stopped because of lazy
stereotypes.
But the bigger question remains:
where is the police leader who can
rescue the Met in the eyes of the
public it exists to serve?Jawad Iqbal is a freelance writerJames
Marriott@j_amesmarriott