ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Available for over a year

There's something contradictory about contemporary British society. On the one hand we say we are anxious about growing intrusion into our private lives - from proliferating closed circuit television cameras to expanding data bases. Modern technology, it is said, is allowing the state – and others – to know about us with a detail that the East German Security Service could only have dreamt about. I understand that. I recently went for a friendly chat with a man I had never met before, whom at one time I would have called my bank manager. He now has a grander title with 'wealth' and 'consultant' in it; clearly designed to flatter both him and me. As he scrolled down my current account statements, scrutinising transactions, he constructed an outline of my day-to-day life with terrifying accuracy. I made a mental note to pay for various frivolities and extravagances with cash in future. That’s on the one hand. But on the other we increasingly go out of our way to reveal publicly even our most private thoughts and feelings on more and more occasions. The latest examples are the post trial, post inquest, post divorce statements. These are now the daily stuff of so many news reports. It seems that no one can leave a hearing any more without exposing their emotions, however raw, for all to see. It’s this that concerns me most. Alright, perhaps we are healthier for being less buttoned up; but the emotional society we have now become puts enormous pressure on those of us who are not at all comfortable with public emoting – not because we are emotionally deficient but because we deal with our feelings differently; inwardly, privately. Can’t we just accept that there are these differences between us? It takes my mind to two brief and contrasting accounts in the gospels of two women, both of whom turned to Jesus for help. The one threw herself in front of him, bathing his feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. The disciples tried to restrain her. Jesus said what she did was something beautiful. It would be remembered wherever the gospel was taken. The other, equally needy, approached without fuss, touched his garment and melted back into the crowd. Contrasting personalities; both know their need of help, both are helped. But the more society requires public expression of feeling as a mark of sincerity or an indication of psychological health, the more difficult it becomes for some of us to navigate our way through life’s ups and downs at all – we just don’t do public emotion. Well my fight-back has begun. Naturally there will be no public demonstration of this. I shall make no tearful statement. But you can read my lips – well my upper lip actually – not trembling just stiff.