Shared concerns in Britain and America - 27 December 1991

In the old days, when I was filing one or two dispatches a day from the United States to what was then the most influential liberal paper in Europe, my editor, a sharp eyed shrewd little Lancashire man insisted that once every two years I should go over to England, and spend a month learning what's on the mind of the people you're writing for. It was always a good idea, in the main the trip corrected my long-distance view of what things in America Britons were interested in and what not.

Well, I've just come to the end of a brief safari into southern England and this time it produced a startling surprise, due to what reason I don't know, maybe the immediacy of television and so the speed with which ideas, fashions, political theories, social anxieties and disaster are transmitted round the world. What I discovered was that, often for months I'd been talking from America about social topics, movements, new customs and the like on the assumption that they would be news to the listening audience, whether in New Delhi, Newcastle or New Guinea.

The shock of this disillusion hit me no later than the second morning when I collected a bunch, well, four English newspapers and riffled through them at first to see what news from America they were covering, no surprises there, early profiles of the six dwarves, or Democrats running for the presidency. Front page pieces on the governor of New York, the ineffable Mario Cuomo when he begged after aerobic exercises of conscience to have this cup taken from him. An astonishing amount of space given to the trial of William Kennedy Smith, and of course a parade of defaulting tycoons, firms, banks, and their temporary retreat into the haven of chapter eleven, or protected bankruptcy.

When I turned to the home, or British, news the first thing I noticed which was also no surprise was that all the signs and symptoms of recession we notice in America were happening there. Nothing I've talked about in the past, what, seven months or so was new to Britons, from one-time Tom Wolfe yuppies turning from investment banking at a $120,000 a year to short-order cooks in fast food restaurant at a $150 a week. Down to a nationwide slump in house building and a rash affecting very many young householders of foreclosed mortgages. A Christmas fair announced for some English village had to be cancelled just as a similar Christmas joust in I think Connecticut had to be cancelled.

The recession tales are almost eerily similar and the only question we asked of each other was, when will it be over? I don't think anybody, anybody knows.

One reflection, response common to both countries could have been expected: however learnedly and long we go on about election issues in either country, the fact is deducible from years and years of experience that in the end, for most voters the pocketbook is decisive. If your economy and ours are worse at election time the immemorial consequence has been that the incumbent takes a beating. In Britain, Mr Major's persuasive powers are going to be tested sooner than Mr Bush's. I don't know what the trend has been in British elections but in America if the economy is half-way healthy, even when it's just ticking over easily, it is extremely difficult to unseat a sitting president, to deny him a second term.

So although we have 10 months to go and prophecy about any presidential election more than a day or two before the event is madness, at the moment and looking over the calibre of the six opposing dwarves, Mr Bush looks very hard to beat.

Pretty soon I don't doubt the polls will discover that his big recent slump was an overreaction to the panic cry that he spent all his time improving the world and forgot about the old folks at home. I should say the young folks, for one of the scarier discoveries of government studies in the past few years is that the old folks, since the introduction of Medicaid for the poor and Medicare for everybody over 65, have never been better off. It's the great majority of the poor that are children.

Well now, what was the surprise, what I called the shock of my disillusion when I'd followed the news in Britain for a day or two? It was that social trends of fashion I'd talked about as being peculiarly American turned out to be boringly or alarmingly common in Britain.

Three evenings in a row I kept tabs on the local news which follows in London the nation and international news. I swear with a simple change of names and addresses I could have been in New York. A robbery somewhere, a fire possibly due to arsonists, a policeman stabbed, followed by a grave recital of the numbers of policemen wounded in 1991. A gay protest against some company, some army base, a child found abandoned or bruised in a cellar. Some headmaster, mistress acquitted after a charge of sexually abusing young children. A royal or other distinguished public figure presides over a charity concert for Aids, accompanying short editorials about the rising incidence of Aids among young people hitherto thought quote, "innocent", that is heterosexual and non drug-users. I could go on and on but I will not at this supposedly merry time of the year, bombard you with the uncanny coincidence of our afflictions, problems, and fetishes.

Last summer, after three weeks in Britain, I came back here to boast that for so long I'd never heard the word cholesterol or the word Alzheimer's. No longer. Cholesterol has come bounding in as a transatlantic menace, and the knowledge and fear of Alzheimer's disease is now about where it was in America 15, 20 years ago. On that fearsome topic I will simply repeat my never-answered question: why have we heard about it and started talking about it only in the past say, 15 years at most, when it was discovered and named over a hundred years ago?

Here, as sharp as I can make it, is my point: Alois Alzheimer was born I believe in about 1857 – I'm away from the books but believe I'm approximately correct. He named the disease in about 1887 when he was 30, he died in 1915. What was so special about it? It was the discovery that senility could set in, in middle age, as early as the late 40s and early 50s, it was therefore a premature form of senility. And I believe all the early cases he studied died within six, eight years of what he took to be the onset.

Well in the United States in the past decade or more you never hear of an old person, however aged, who dies of senile dementia, it's always Alzheimer's. My suspicion boosted by several doctors I know is that the great majority of cases of people going round the bend in their 70s or 80s are simply senile, but as one tart British neurologist wickedly suggested, Americans have to die of the latest disease.

Anyway, I have personally known one absolutely genuine case of Alzheimer's. I knew the late Rita Hayworth in her late 40s, when she was already showing distressing symptoms, of irrational fear, loss of memory, wayward talk. Well, now the word and the affliction are coming in, in Britain, though I notice most of the victims are very old. "What's it matter," another doctor friend of mind said, "the symptoms are precisely the same as those of senile dementia and you can raise more money for an Alzheimer's drive than you could for a senility relief foundation." So be it.

I should add an observation something I've noticed which is peculiar to London. A comparative study put out I think by the United Nations, showing that pedestrian deaths in London are three times that of any other big city, due any foreigner will rightly guess to motorcars ploughing down the natives. I have to tell you that no matter how long I'm in London I look twice both ways before taking the plunge into the whirlpool of the roadway. The way cars and vans and taxis come whizzing through side streets and around squares and circles is something that a foreigner has to see to believe. This whizzing James Bond pace is a characteristic that Londoners are apt to deny, but that's only because they don't live anywhere else; by the same token, I always forget how very hard London water is until I come to take a bath and feel that I'm soaping my arms and legs with resin. This is not a New York prejudice – a discovery I made 65 years ago when I first came south from the north country, where we took our water from the then crystal springs of the Lake District.

Well it's getting late, the old year ticks away and I have only a minute or more left I'm proud to notice that I have not added a word to the interminable sermons on the life and achievements of the sainted Mikhail Gorbachev. I leave you with one piece of good news, it's a study just finished in Finland, of 1,200 Helsinki businessmen under special watch for 15 years, all 1,200 had in the beginning either high blood pressure or high cholesterol levels, half of them were put on a low fat, low sugar, low alcohol, no smoking, much exercise, chicken and fish and vegetable life, the other half were allowed to continue on their sinful, lethal way of life.

What do you know, at the end of 15 years, the controlled pure non-sinners had 67 deaths, half of them from heart disease, the uncontrolled reckless eat, drink and be merry lunatics had only 32 deaths, only 14 from heart disease. Thoughtful grave and reverent seigniors of medicine will no doubt spend the next year finding treacherous holes in this well-rounded study. But for now, and for the rest of us there is the happy new year's word of a splendid Irish doctor who says, "Constantly measuring cholesterol levels can do more harm than good, anyway sooner or later this cholesterol theory is going to collapse completely". Mama, would you kindly pass the plum pud and the brandy sauce. Happy New Year.

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