A couple of months ago, I came breathtakingly close to being able to say something polite about our Prime Minister.
Obviously, the moment passed unfulfilled, and I like to think that subsequent events have proved me right. In fairness, you only had to look alongside him in the school photo they took back in the summer of all those leaders at Carbis Bay to see that historians will probably look back at this age as being one where we chose our planet to be run from the reform school. I mean, a world that reveres as almost godlike the qualities of a Chancellor who has mortgaged her entire country’s energy policy to a hostile power, is a world that is easily pleased. Or at least doesn’t have much else in the way of choice. You will all have your own examples, but let us at least agree that most modern leaders are almost comically awful.
I have a solution.
A friend has been living at our house whilst we have been away on holiday, keeping it secure and looking after (our own) Boris, and a new and extremely excitable Springer Spaniel puppy called Kiwi. (No, we don’t know what we were thinking of, either. )
When we arrived back after a long drive up from Cornwall last night, we thanked her profusely for keeping it all in such good order and, in particular, for re-enthusing and revitalizing a sofa in the kitchen that had spent the last few months with that forlorn and hopeless look best manifested by the back end of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I just love plumping cushions.’
Leaving aside the sheer loveliness of the verb ‘to plump’, it slowly dawned on me that the world would be a darn site happier place if that hotel at Carbis Bay had been less full of Merkels and Macrons, and more full of gentle people who simply loved to plump up cushions.
Obviously, the first beneficiary would be the cushions, and possibly all soft furnishings, in the St. Ives area. That goes without saying. But my bet is that a comfortably arranged cushion will lead to local envy which, in turn, would lead to regional, and then even national imitation. What starts as a simple and polite plumping -(there really is no other suitable verb)- in Cornwall, would swiftly burgeon out to Canterbury, Cork and Costa Rica. Thus would we start with being more comfortable, which would make us better rested and rather less irritable.
In leadership terms, this is not as stupid as it sounds. The kind of person that likes to plump up cushions has a number of qualities that should be welcome in a world staring into many abysses simultaneously. They like to make the best of something existing, rather than endlessly replace it; they are less the movers and shakers than the smoothers and bakers, dedicating their lives to comfort and kindness. They are the quiet aesthetes that only the eyes and the backsides notice, rather than, say, a bawling Macron, or a scheming Xi. They know when a room is right, just as I suspect they would know instinctively when a planet was right, as well.
For hours, I could not bring myself to sit on the sofa at all; that’s how beautiful the cushions were. Early this morning, I made myself a mug of tea and then, like someone quietly touching a John Makepeace table whilst no one is looking, I slowly lowered myself onto it and luxuriated in its sheer…..plumpness. There really is no other word.
And you know what I went off to do straight afterwards? Of course you do. For the first time in my life, I re-plumped out those cushions myself. And, like that US Navy Seals admiral whose wonderful advice was to start each day by making your own bed, mine is now to plump up the cushions on my own sofa.
It is by tiny steps like these that I intend to make the world a better place.
コメント