busker

Only the Lonely

Politics is a rough-tuff business, not for the faint of heart. Only the rhino-hided need apply. Am I right?

Apparently not if the press coverage is anything to go by surrounding Britain's Home Secretary and the pickle he's in following allegations by a former lover that he abused his powers to fast-track a visa for her Filipina nanny.

How about this for a headline?

"Is loneliness making the Home Secretary risk his political life?",

and check out the following from the article itself:

"Those who know him say he is a very lonely figure ... totally committed to politics ... Not much else in his life and he is very lonely".

Mr Blunkett even admits to loneliness in his autobiog, On a Clear Day.

It gets worse: he also describes the pain of being taken away from his parents to go to a special school at the age of four: "I desperately missed the hugging and affection of home ... this deprivation had a lasting effect on me well into adult life."

"Although my own sons are now growing up fast, I often give them a hug chiefly because I believe it is important for them to feel that somebody cares about them."

As a naive 16-year-old schoolboy he was taught to kiss by a childhood sweetheart: "Pamela made me feel special, that I deserved to respect myself and that I could lead a normal life."

At boarding school, there was nowhere he could be alone, he said in his book. "Privacy is something I came to value greatly."

Words fail me: How could *any* one allow themselves to attract such pitying - not to mention pitiFUL - waffle?

As for this coverage in the Daily "Torygraph", being snapped looking like a frightened Eric Clapton is *not* what Blunkett needs right now, either career-wise or keeping open options for future extra-marital shenanigans he'll be wanting to get up to.

Stop Press: I see from recent Times coverage, they've traced conception of the Blunkett child to my mother's isle of Corfu. Yassas! No surprise - the air is most conducive for dalliance.

Post-script on Loneliness: Still on the subject of la solitude, I have just given myself a bit of a shock. It seems that Julie Leung and I, unbeknownst to each other, were simultaneously addressing the topic, albeit with different approaches.

As I was honing my boorish attack on 'Lonely Boy' Blunkett, Mrs Leung was taking a more serious tack, with the courage and honesty we've come to know her for. Julie asks the unaskable:

• Who will admit they're lonely?
• Who will confess to this "shameful social disorder"?
• Who is willing to own up to needing new friends?

What a sincerely honest and trustworthy lady she sounds - a "bit embarrassed" by her own letter, yet believing "we live in a society of isolation and that nearly everyone is lonely."

Where Leung puts her finger on it is how she ends that careful paragraph: "And I hope I am always looking for new friends." Bingo! Mrs Leung senses what so many will not grapple with, that one *has* to keep moving. Samuel Johnson nailed it:

"If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair."

Yes, indeed, Julie is right, but who among us bluff and burly Islanders is up to admitting it? Not me, that's for sure. I am classic Exhibit A. I out-blunket Blunkett and I absolutely lack the vocabulary to give voice where it matters.

I blog boldly and email debonair replies, but I learnt long ago from drubbings on the school gamesfield that the only survival kit to work is one's own smallest possible world.

Curtains left too long at a window
rot. Something in the air it seems
causes holes with too much looking.

A bed that is slept in too long
stinks. Something in the atmosphere
objects to this confinement.

A room with a closed door collects
dust. The pages of the books there
curl through lack of use.

Nobody has suitably explained
why the curtains and the doors in my house
suffer these indignities.

Nor why, when I throw them open
and unmake my bed, the rain walks in
to settle down beside me.