THE SAD DECLINE OF MORALS IN MODERN BRITAIN

     So my nephew and his family are at the pub with a few friends, including one I’ll call Tim, it being his name, and he being, by accounts, the sort of upright and clubbable fellow you’d expect to be called that sort of name.

      At one point, my nephew says to Tim, à propos of I hesitate to conjecture what, “I bet you can’t balance a pine cone on your head.”

Photo by Tony Litvyak on Unsplash

       “I bet I can,” says Tim, and they are off.

       My nephew produces from his pocket a pine cone he has been carrying around because, I suppose, one feels so undressed without a pine cone about one’s person, stands behind Tim’s chair at the table, and rubs the cone hard into the top of Tim’s skull.

       “Ouch,” says Tim.

       “It’s to give it traction,” explains my nephew.

       And what do you know, thinks Tim, it seems to work. The cone remains, balanced on the top of his head as he sits upright in his chair. Slowly, he begins to turn his head to the left: the cone is still digging into his scalp. He turns it to the right: it’s still there. For a moment, he begins to feel it slipping: deftly, he rights himself, and it stays put. Everyone at the table is beaming proudly. The children are delighted, although the little one, who has not yet outgrown her childish habit of babbling, begins to stutter “But, but, but …” but she is particularly little after all, and is soon hushed by her mother.

       Tim begins to feel good about this.

       “Couldn’t do it, right?” he snorts triumphantly to my nephew.

       My nephew only shakes his head, words failing him in his embarrassment.

       “I should think you’re feeling pretty silly right now,” says Tim.

       Still speechless, my nephew can only nod.

       After a few more minutes, Tim decides to challenge himself.

       “I’m going to stand up,” he says.

       “Go for it,” gasps my nephew, who appears by coincidence to be choking a little over his beer.

       Very, very carefully, Tim stands. Slowly, and holding his head very still, he walks to the bar. The cone is still in place!

       “It’s all in the balance,” he tells the barmaid, pointing triumphantly at the top of his head.

       The barmaid is impressed: she calls the landlord across to come and admire. Tim winks at him and raises a victorious thumb.

       “Watch and learn,” he tells him.

       The landlord narrows his eyes and notes something onto a piece of paper: clearly, until this auspicious day, he has never seen in his humble establishment a man of the quality of Tim.

       Now a dab hand at this pine cone balancing business, Tim begins to walk through the pub.

       “I’ve never even done this before,” he tells one table.

       “I can’t believe I’m lasting so long,” he tells another.

       “And my friends said I couldn’t do it at all!” he shouts to a third.

       He walks the length of the pub, and turns to return to his table. His turn brings him face to face with the pub mirror. In which he learns that what he has been so carefully balancing on the top of his head for some minutes now has been, not so much a pine cone, as what can only be described as absolutely nothing at all. Nada. Zilch. Empty air.

       After rubbing the cone into Tim’s head, my nephew – a forty-something-year-old doctor, happily married father of three, generous donor to worthy causes and general all around pillar of the community – had quietly removed it and slipped it back into his pocket. Leaving Tim, another upstanding individual and a Senior Executive at the BBC no less, to spend some considerable time looking, speaking and acting like the most unspeakable twit in front of an entire pubful of people.

       Mysteriously, as of the latest report, Tim is still speaking to my nephew.

       I am saddened to report this woeful falling off of moral standards in Britain’s once proud and respected nation, for which I blame the pernicious influence of Postman Pat.