Dawn

Dawn

Sunday, May 16, 2010

In The Sunday Times this morning, columnist Minette Marrin had this to say about how the lemon of austerity could be turned into lemonade – “The terrible anxiety we’re now supposed to feel about our status, appearance and taste, and generally speaking the struggle of having it all, will give way to the calm of nobody having very much anyway, or hiding it if they do. We won’t have to try so hard. Less will be calmer; at least we won’t have to suffer from choice fatigue.

I thought of this assertion this evening when reading this forecast George Orwell made in an article he wrote in 1941, in the context of ‘well-to-do women who try to stay young at forty by means of physical jerks, cosmetics and avoidance of child-bearing’:- “The impulse to cling to youth at all costs, to attempt to preserve your sexual attraction, to see even in middle age a future for yourself as well as your children, is a thing of recent growth and has only precariously established itself. It will probably disappear again when our standard of living drops."

It strikes me that George was pretty accurate on the specific of predicting Madonna but way off the mark on the general issue of women (and men) giving up on the quest for eternal youth. Come good times, come bad times - the genie is out of the bottle. The one containing the elixir.

Another columnist asked plaintively this morning– in respect of the vogue word ‘progressive’ – “Who are the progressives now? Are we going to go on pretending, for the sake of every studio discussion and political debate, that “progressive” (which should imply forward-looking and tending to bring improvement) must mean Left-wing in the most archaic sense?”.

Well, it seems that David Cameron has answered this today by labelling the Liberal Conservative coalition a ‘progressive alliance’. Let battle continue.

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