In Judgment

I was a little uncharitable yesterday towards Mr Terry methinks. After all, I don't really know what has been going on his life (& I don't want to know) and he's not the first gentleman, and certainly won't be the last, who seems to have a problem keeping it in his trousers. It's not so much the individual case that irritated, and my tone clearly was one of irritation, as the general point concerning the misapplication of the notion of 'character' - and, I suppose, further down the road, the baffling application of the positive idea of reputation to those who are highly likely to mislay theirs over the course of time.

In fact, when you really consider it, it's difficult to imagine how we might sincerely talk of anyone possessing 'character' who happens to be particularly talented in a certain area, gains from that and has the good fortune to be born in the developed world. I don't begrudge those who can sell their talents at a high price the money they get. But I can't understand why I'm expected to admire them for some excellence of personality at one and the same time. Similarly, I can see why those who work hard and make a contribution to society deserve to prosper, and I hope they do, but it seems to me there's nothing terribly special about hard work - it is clearly the lot of a fair proportion of humanity who fail to prosper and they get on with it without claiming to be anything too special.

I think I'll reserve my sense of those who possess this mysterious thing called 'character' for those who persevere against impossible odds just to keep going in impossible circumstances and somehow get through. And you know what? There are plenty of those folk around, usually in those places we don't too much care to look.