Alan Bennett: Old Man Talking

I am now eighty, an age that entitles one to be listened to though not necessarily heeded. I had never been much concerned with politics until the 1980s when they became difficult to avoid. Without ever having been particularly left-wing I am happy never to have trod that dreary safari from left to right which generally comes with age, a trip writers in particular seem drawn to, Amis, Osborne, Larkin, Iris Murdoch all ending up at the spectrum’s crusty and clichéd end.

If I haven’t, it’s partly due to circumstances: there has been so little that has happened to England since the 1980s that I have been happy about or felt able to endorse. One has only had to stand still to become a radical. Though that, too, sounds like an old man talking. Still, I don’t regret it and one thing it’s always a pleasure to see on television is the occasional programme about ancient and persistent activists, old ladies recounting their early struggles for women’s rights or battles for birth control, veteran campers from Greenham Common, cheerful, good-humoured and radical as they ever were, still – though it’s not a word I care for – feisty after all these years. That to me is wisdom as disillusion is not.

London Review of Books.

from a Sermon before the University, King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, 1st June.

Which Alan takes as an opportunity to argue for the abolition of public schools.

Agreed, they have a funny habit of turning perfectly nice little children into egregious, entitled little shits.

A cynic might think that is their main function.