Tides

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
Julius Caesar, Act IV, scene 3

Over the centuries, the words of Shakespeare's Brutus, quoted above, will have struck a plangent chord in the hearts of many who somehow missed an important boat for which they had a ticket in their pocket, or at least thought they did. If you don't pick yourself up pretty smartly, you really can spend a lifetime hanging around on the dock of the bay, gazing at the horizon, watching the tide rolling in, wondering whether that ship will ever return – it won't – and what life might have been like had you only stepped aboard when the opportunity presented itself all those years ago.

I have no real complaints about my own life; shallows and miseries have not been my lot, and I am only rarely haunted by what might have been, had I but known the scope of ambition that once lay open before me. To be perfectly honest, I had very little idea what serious ambition was, or how you were supposed to go about pursuing it, at the time in my life when it might have made a difference. I can't speak for the privately educated, but aspiration as an extreme sport has never been taught or encouraged in state schools, even in the old grammar schools; your horizon was set at low-risk, achievable goals, defined by hard work, exam passes, and well-trodden career paths. Anything else was terra incognita, a mapless waste, a place to be avoided where dragons roamed, and the bones of reckless adventurers lay scattered on the ground.

 

There was a wisdom in this. By ignoring the existence of the Chancer's Boat, the one that goes on risky voyages to parts unknown, legions of us made it instead onto the ferry that crosses on a regular timetable from the world of precarious wage-work to salaried, well-pensioned comfort. Result! In fact, I'm pretty sure places on that Chancer's Boat cannot be guaranteed or reserved; there are no tickets, travel agents, or tour guides that will get you on board. Apart from the occasional innocent, fatefully or accidentally embarked on an astonishing adventure, getting aboard takes a special kind of motivation, the sharp-elbowed sort that takes no prisoners, brooks no opposition, and whatever other clichés of ruthless self-interest you care to mention. Even a Shakespeare or an Einstein must have had 3 a.m. twinges of regret at the betrayals, backstabbings, and outright thievery that would, I'm sure, have seemed entirely necessary along the way.

The thing about "exceptionalism" – the conviction that the normal rules don't apply to you – is that it quickly becomes a murky business, however pure its genesis. Despite what the "follow your dream" gurus would have us believe, to be gifted with game-changing abilities is not a career choice, an option open to anyone; not even to some clever narcissist endowed with over-abundant self-belief like our current Prime Minister. I'm sure a Shakespeare or an Einstein must have known who and what they were; that they were truly exceptional, the Real Thing, generation-defining geniuses. But, even so, raw talent is never enough in itself. Realising outstanding potential, like crime, depends on opportunity, motive, and means. 

Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Graveyard" (1751) is rightly regarded as one of the ornaments of English literature. At its core, the poem can be boiled down into a simple message: an awful lot of people with great potential have had to live simple, constrained lives, but this may have been no bad thing, given the harm done by ruthless power-seekers, and besides we're all gonna die, innit? (Trust me, I'm an Oxford-trained literary critic [1]). As a piece of ideology Gray's poem is open to all sorts of retrospective sniping – its melancholy quietism is pretty conservative – but its heart is sound and its sheer quality as a piece of verse keeps it buoyant in the literary charts. But it does raise the question: how many "mute inglorious Miltons" or "village-Hampdens" (nothing to do with football, apparently) still live unacknowledged and unfulfilled among us? And, provided they promise not to "wade through slaughter to a throne" – always a risk – what could or should be done about it?

To my mind, there have only ever been two answers: better schools and better social housing. "Better schools", that is, in the sense of safe, creative, and stimulating environments, staffed by excellent, well-paid, child-oriented professionals, who are capable of recognising and nurturing the many varieties of talent, but are also dedicated to bringing the best out of perfectly ordinary children. It doesn't seem a lot to ask. Such schools exist (apart from the "well-paid" bit) but that should be the description of all state schools everywhere. Sadly, it isn't. And "better social housing" means good, safe, well-maintained homes at an affordable rent for everyone who needs one, provided and managed by the local authority. The greatest and most consequential 20th-century crime in Britain was the selling off of our council housing, and the prevention of local authorities from remedying the situation by building more. I do not think this is an exaggeration. Without the good schools and council housing that came as standard with life in a British "New Town" in the 1950s and 60s, my life and those of everyone I grew up with would have been very different.

But, beyond those essential basics, we also need to shift the focus of aspiration within our neglected and under-resourced communities. Far too much attention is paid to the exceptional: the Premier League footballer, the champion boxer, the TV show host, the popular musical act, and all the other celebrity poster-people for improbable, lottery-scale "success". It's understandable, but nothing constrains social mobility as effectively as the idea that life is an all-or-nothing gamble. The true nature of the systematic, embedded privilege of the well-established, well-placed, and well-to-do is well-hidden behind the attention-grabbing blind of these wild-card outliers. By focussing ambition on flashy careers in broadcasting, music, and sport, too many young lives are doomed to disappointment – "shallows and miseries", indeed – their eyes having been diverted from the true prize: regular places on the ferry that leads from the world of precarious wage-work to solid middle-class professional jobs, secured by pursuing those low-risk, achievable goals, defined by hard work, exam passes, and well-trodden career paths. Boring, but true.

So, come on: the tide is in twice a day, and the boat leaves according to the published timetable. All aboard!

1. I think I've complained before about the "[university name]-trained" formula, encountered so frequently in journalism and popular literature. Other universities may differ in their approach, and things may have changed in more recent decades, but at the three universities at which I happened to study, "training" in any meaningful sense was not on the curriculum. In fact, I would suggest that the more prestigious the institution, the less likely anything resembling the "training" I would expect a plumber or an athlete to undergo will be taking place.