Phew! Normal service has been resumed. No more panto; no more guest editors forcing Evan, Jim, Ed and Sarah into embarrassingly coy interviews with Karl Lagerfeld et al.; no more year-end reviews of the year behind and portentous glimpses of the year ahead. I don’t know why every year we have to go through this rigmarole. Does anyone really want, or dare, to look back even for a moment? As for the future, for once I’m really intrigued and even excited by what lies ahead. No one can say where this economic downturn might lead, or how long it will last. All the experts are just as baffled as us ordinary mortals. I used to worry that I could never understand what the financial experts were saying; now I know I needn’t have bothered. Natural forces have reasserted themselves. The world is full of mystery. One thing, though, is for sure: we’re all in for hard times. Maybe, just maybe, this might not be such a bad thing, as guest editor Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor discussed with the PM on Today last week. In that rare thing, an interview that was truly inquiring despite being non-confrontational, the Cardinal and Gordon Brown between them agreed that our current difficulties might encourage us to return to a more community-based lifestyle, with a renewed interest in local societies and volunteer groups.
There’s no harm in dreaming, as the Revd Canon Dr Jane Shaw illustrated in her series of talks on The Utopian Dream — and its Disappointments for The Essay on Radio Three. She grew up ‘in community’ because her father was the Master of the Great Hospital in Norwich, originally founded in 1249 for the care of the sick and the poor and now a cluster of flats and cottages for those over 65 built around a chapel and cloister. The experience has shaped her life and she now lives and works as a don at New College, Oxford, practising community by living in college while researching the extraordinary variety of ways in which communities have chased the ever-elusive utopian ideal.
This was irresistible listening for the beginning of the year, when it’s still possible to believe that things might change, although at 11 to 11.15 p.m. it was broadcast far too late for those of us who semi-hibernate in the winter months. Thanks to iPlayer, I managed to listen to all five in one go, which took us from Robert Owen’s experiment in New Lanark at the beginning of the 19th century, through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the eugenics of Nazism, to the free sex (and emotional pain) of the Bloomsberries, the aesthetic ideals of the Bauhaus — and the Panacea Society of Bedford. Here the residents aspire to the discipline of ‘overcoming’, which is to turn yourself into a person who is comfortable for others to live with. In this way your neighbours will be prevented from sinning by becoming annoyed with you, as will you also, by not being annoying. What a brilliant rule for life. So simple, and yet so effective. One to try at home.
In State of Mind on Radio Four (Wednesday), presented by Claudia Hammond, we heard from those who had lived not in utopian, but in involuntary community — in the mental health institutions that existed from the Victorian Lunacy Act until the 1970s. If you were not ill already, they seemed designed to make you so, herding people together in vast turreted buildings, with slitty windows, behind which were dormitories with sometimes as many as 40 beds, locked doors, no escape, and no contact with the outside world. Not everyone was ill to begin with, just troubled, or unlucky, or, as one woman was told, ‘too remote’, She was incarcerated in a ward thoughtfully named ‘F6’ — Female 6.
This was the first of five programmes investigating the changes in the way those who are mentally ill have been treated. Not in itself an unusual topic for Radio Four, but the team behind it (led by producer Marya Burgess) have asked listeners who were either patients in an institution or a member of staff to send in their recollections. They were inundated. One very elderly psychiatrist regretted having been ‘taken in’ by the enthusiastic supporters of lobotomy as a valid treatment option. ‘Like the emperor’s new clothes,’ he muttered, having performed 17 such operations. But it was the patients I wanted to hear from. Very few of them had been given any kind of psychotherapy; most had experienced heavy-duty drug regimes (insulin was used in high quantities to induce coma) or even electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as memorably inflicted on Jack Nicholson in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. What’s so surprising is that it is still being used, and not just as a last resort. We need to know why.
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