The sorts of things that happen when viewing adds for erectile disfunction cures

Part one of a new Substack

I’m a recovering foreign correspondent, who arrived back in Britain after an absence of over three decades and discovered that what seemed to be familiar was anything but and it made me realise that looking at what’s going on with a familiar yet unfamiliar eye opens up all sorts of possibilities to understanding this strangely pleasant land .

But first, a warning, if you have wandered into this space looking for profound and scholarly musings on the state of Britain, now might be the time to wander elsewhere because my intentions are more modest and, frankly, not that weighty.

Unlikely as it seems what triggered the idea for these musings was seeing television adverts for erectile disfunction. These adverts seemed to crop up with alarming regularity as I resumed some avid viewing of British television. I had to fight the paranoid assumption that I was somehow being targeted. Yes, I do know it doesn’t work like that, but paranoia is not logical.

My insecurities notwithstanding, I am pretty sure that there was a taboo on advertising remedies for this sort of problem when I left Britain. Yet here it was nestled between family viewing on mainstream television. It ignited a chain of thought: if this taboo had disappeared, what else had changed, arguably, more substantively?

Arriving at the tail end of 2021 and disgorged at Heathrow airport, not quite buzzing but markedly busier than my point of departure, the forlorn Hong Kong airport which looked more like a hospital ward than a transportation hub, it felt good to be getting back to what passed for normal in those weird Covid-panic days.

Yet, what was this normal? When you have been away from a country that you used to know it is easier to spot the changes and, of course, the absurdities. With this in mind I presume to ask whether Britain has really changed profoundly or has it largely remained the same. The more I thought about it, the more difficult it became to disentangle what were little more than superficial changes as opposed to more substantial transformations

I wanted to look into this because I was no longer going to be a mere visitor to a country that I thought I had left for good. And then, because journalists are incorrigible in this respect, it seemed like a good idea to immodestly share my findings with hordes of readers. Well, at least some.

I better start by explaining my absence from the UK. I left in 1987, shortly after the crushing of the miner’s strike which also meant that my job as Labour Editor of The Observer had been rendered to irrelevance as trade unions faded from the news. I was then offered the job of social services editor.  I still don’t know what that entailed but I sensed a great opportunity to transform this dubious proposition for the rather better opportunity of becoming a foreign correspondent based in Hong Kong.

It was a place where enterprise pulsates through the air to the extent that I quickly embraced in this heady atmosphere.  Journalists are not supposed to do this sort of thing but I reckoned I could carry on writing and, like a great many other people around me, I could presume to set up some set up businesses. It sort of worked.

However, my first love was journalism and whatever else I did I could not shake of the habit of seeing the world through the eyes of reporter. As a foreign correspondent a big part of my job was to make sense of what was happening out there in abroad to people who were not necessarily familiar with the places I was plodding around. It took a while to become familiar with my patch which was Hong Kong and the surrounding world of South East Asia and it required a sharp and uneven learning curve.

Surely, coming back to Britain, meant that I could skip the learning curve and move swiftly onto the diagnostic stage. Afterall I was born in London, fluent in the language, and had a good grasp of the strange customs of the British. Could I not therefore be qualified to be the kind of well-informed fellow hack that I fondly imagined myself to be as I pocked my nose into other people’s business in the great abroad? Could I not even be so grandiose as to take on the task of explaining how things are in Britain as it lumbers into the new century?

This brings me to the first of many cliches you may observe in this space, namely that a little knowledge is generally a bad thing. I assumed that I would rapidly get up to speed with current reality. This turned out to be sheer folly leading to frequent bafflement, bouts of really annoying frustration and, yes, I would go as far as to say, some considerable surprise. The copious advertising of erectile disfunction remedies turned out to be no more than a tiny sample of other surprises.

So, I drew up a sophisticated plan of action (on an A4 size pad not the back of an envelope, thank you very much). I was posed to examine what was happening in this green and strangely pleasant land, albeit borrowing, at an early stage, from the words of William Blake because I tend to work on the principle that if you are to borrow, it’s best to borrow from the best.

I will explain more next week and then start ploughing through the vast terrain of British life in all its many forms. I will unashamedly draw on a great wodge experience as a journalist, entrepreneur and then there’s my ancient but surprisingly relevant experience as a lowly political researcher in Westminster, an experience that gave me considerable insight into the world of government and killed off all thoughts of political ambition before they became dangerous.