At the age of 55, Gervase Markham set off to walk from London to Berwick without using any bridge or boat, and without swimming, but relying only on a staff to help him leap. That was in 1622. When he returned, with a certificate from the mayor of Berwick, many of his friends — 39 of them — refused to pay up on the wagers they had laid.
I mention Markham because he is the first person known to have used the term ring fence. Last week George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, aged 41, said he was going to electrify the ring fence. He has not yet made the walk to Berwick.
The metaphor seems to me to border on the pathological, as does the announcement by Maria Miller, the culture secretary, that she has created a quadruple lock to protect clergymen against gay marriage. Why do politicians’ minds run upon electric fences and rows of padlocks? Are they frightened we will try to escape?
Lenin had a saying that ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.’ That was what inspired Nigel Osborne’s opera, with a libretto by Craig Raine, The Electrification of the Soviet Union.
I do not think George Osborne shares all Lenin’s ambitions, but such vivid metaphors are common in some kinds of schizophrenia. A friend of mine often receives anonymous emails about ‘a classified racket of network voice-to-skull control signal throughout the UK’. A classic compendium of such metaphors may be found in John Haslam’s Illustrations of Madness (1810), recounting the delusions of James Tilly Matthews, a patient in Bethlem Hospital. Matthews described the effects that unseen enemies, by means of the Air Loom, worked upon him, including Fluid Locking, Stone Making, Kiteing, Lobster-Cracking, Bomb-Bursting, Pushing up the Quicksilver and Tying Down. The Chancellor might consider applying any of these to the banking world. If they are not effective, there is a Plan B, or perhaps by now we’ve reached K: Apoplexy-Working with the Nutmeg-Grater. ‘Where such effort does not suddenly destroy the person,’ Matthews explained, ‘it produces small pimples on the temples.’ A modest price to pay for rebalancing the economy.
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