In common with almost everyone you will meet, apart from lawyers, I have very
little interest in the law. It exists, so far as I can fathom, only to
provide a lifetime of homework for Oxbridge overachievers whose sense of
self-worth is so bound up in getting their prep done and passing their exams
that, were these twin elements of student life to be denied them after their
education was over, they would simply shrivel up and die.
Like the shark that must keep swimming or suffocate, lawyers are people who
must stay in subfusc for ever, slinking from one crepuscular book depository
to the next, always reading, always note taking, always worrying about what
questions will come up, always worrying that the other guy will have done
more work, have sharper pencils, will call for more paper first ... and if
the dawn should rise, and he is not safely tucked up in a library then —
pfffst! — he turns into a bat. (Assuming, of course, that “pfffst!” is the
noise a lawyer makes upon turning into a bat; I have never actually been
there to hear it happen, I confess, and thus have to assume it sounds a bit
like someone opening a can of Lilt).
But I did sit up and take notice when I read a
piece from our legal editor headlined, “Brain ‘size of planet’ is not
big enough for top court, say judges”. Alongside was a photo of an
affable-looking grey-hair leaning on his desk (as they always do) in front
of a wall of old books (as they always are) with a file open in front of him
(as one always is) and his reading glasses lying alongside (as a pair will
always be).
“Ooh, old books bound in leather that nobody has ever opened,” I thought.
“This chap must be HUMUNGOUSLY brainy!”
And I read on to learn that Jonathan Sumption, QC, IQ, ££, has applied for a
place on the new Supreme Court but has been strongly opposed by senior
judges despite being described as having “a brain the size of a planet”.
And I say, hurrah for those senior judges. Not because I think Mr Sumption,
QC, IQ, ££, wouldn’t do a good job, or that he is not very clever (he’s a
medieval historian as well as a top barrister — we’re talking Rumpole
meets R. J. Unstead here), but because what on earth use is a brain the size
of a planet to anyone?
It won’t fit in your head properly, for a start. And so there are bound to be
headaches, sleeplessness, unpleasant leakages, all sorts. It’s an
interesting simile, though. As if sheer cell volume were a guarantee of
intellect, rather than anything qualitative. Ted Danson, for example, the
former Cheers barman and timeless star of Three Men and a Baby,
has a massive head. Much bigger than Sumption’s. So he probably has a bigger
brain. Do you want him in your Supreme Court as well?
Usually, when thick people are trying to describe the braininess of some
egghead with dozens of consecutive degrees (although anyone can take several
degree courses one after the other, it’s just a matter of having the time),
they go for quantity rather than volume.
I can’t tell you the number of hacks who have passed through the doors of The
Times, with the informal middle name of “Two Brains”, “Three Brains” or,
most impressively, “Four Brains” due to their having tacked a couple of
pointless years of “research” on to the end of their common-or-garden
Oxbridge degrees.
These multi-brains are evident in most walks of life (apart from football,
where two A-level passes famously earned Trevor Brooking the nickname “the
Professor”), and usually it is just people with big heads, or with the
appearance of a big head due to a receding hairline. One thinks of David
“Five Brains” Willetts or Alain “Seven Brains” de “Maybe Even Eight Brains”
Botton.
Now, I have known Alain a long time. He is no thicko. But is he truly all that
much smarter than, say, Stephen Fry? We’ll never know, because Stephen has
all his hair. But just imagine how clever we’d think Fry was if he went
bald. Mind you, imagine how depressed he would be.
Aaaaanyway, what was my point here? Er, hell, I’ve forgotten. Me and my
blasted midget brain. Oh, I know, it was the pointlessness of being
extremely clever.
For that is what these senior judges have, very bravely, expressed in the
vetoing of Sumption: the fact that it’s worth being clever, but only up to a
point. Mycroft Holmes was cleverer than his brother, Sherlock. But who had
the great flat in Baker Street, the awesome book deal, the film career . . ?
Who remembers what kind of hat Mycroft wore? Indeed, who even knows the name
of the myopic, burbling boffin in The Simpsons?
I was quite clever as a kid. Perfectly clever enough to pass exams and get
into good schools and universities. But there it stopped. The very cleverest
boys (single sex education, sorry, can’t extrapolate to the ladies), the
ones who knew their 37x tables, read books that weren’t on the syllabus,
nailed the top scholarship positions and had all sorts of nervous rashes,
eating disorders and orthopaedic spectacles, are the ones who have killed
themselves, flunked out of top-level physics at 19 and live on the street,
or ended up as barristers.
This is what, according to our Opinion pages, Roger Scruton wants for his
children. “TV will never poison my children’s minds,” said the headline.
“They pursue,” he wrote, “old-fashioned habits such as talking, reading,
riding and playing the piano ... Brains subject to the wrong input in early
years will be wrongly wired; vital capacities, both intellectual and
emotional, will fail to be acquired, and the result will be a stunted human
being.” Yoicks. That’ll be a fun home to grow up in.
I should know, I had something similar going on as a kid. Not a total TV ban
but a ration of five hours a week, to be selected in advance, at the
beginning of the week, by ringing the chosen items in the Radio Times,
with no midweek changes allowed. Not that I’d have wanted to change. The
selection was a no-brainer (luckily): two-and-a-half hours of Multi-Coloured
Swap Shop; Match of the Day; The Six Million Dollar Man
and whichever out of The Lone Ranger and Champion the Wonder Horse
was showing an episode I’d seen fewer than 30 times.
My parents imposed this because they wanted me to be clever. And it worked
very well. I began reading, took an interest in maths, did my piano
practice, started coming top in everything and sailed through exams at the
top of the year from 15 through to 21.
But when I left university I couldn’t get a job. I was too clever. And too
damn weird. So I turned the box on, got hip to Neighbours and Home
and Away and Fifteen to One, stopped reading books altogether,
started eating with my elbows on the table and moving my lips when reading
road signs, and pretty soon I was a reasonably successful journalist, author
and TV presenter.
In the modern world, massive brains are a handicap. Look at the Nobel Peace
Prize: time was they used to give it to people like Albert Schweitzer or
Norman Borlaug; now it just goes to the good-looking guy who everyone likes,
even if he doesn’t really know anything or do anything. And that can only be
good. These days, my brain is down to the size of a hazelnut, but it fits in
my head a whole lot more comfortably than a planet.
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