I listened to actor, presenter, and ‘activist’ Tony Robinson choose his Desert Island Discs on Sunday. He’s a doctrinaire leftist, and all my prejudices are on the opposite side, so I didn’t expect I would be cheering the man on. Nor did I. I’m an ardent listener to Desert Island Discs and I don’t think I have ever heard such flagrant moral vanity in a castaway.
However, he said two things that I agreed with profoundly. One was that we owe a debt of gratitude to the generation who fought the war and that we ought to treat them better in their old age. The other was how thrilling it is to take your grandchild to the zoo, as he had recently done.
Of course, the first goes without saying — though I was surprised to hear this vast repository of conservatism applauded. The second I would have dismissed as sentimental twaddle up to about 19 months ago, when my first grandchild, Oscar, was born. But I’m so ludicrously besotted by my grandson now that my boy looks at me askance. Not the least odd thing about the strange business is that Oscar returns his grandfather’s love no less passionately. It was almost disappointing to find Tony Robinson and I have so much in common.
When I go round to see Oscar, we have a little routine going. I hoist him up into my arms and we check the lampshades for resting flies. If we find one — it’s usually the same fruit fly — he pokes it into life with his forefinger. We’ve been persecuting this one individual like this for weeks. Oscar and I can be as excited about hunting fruit flies as people used to be about hunting tigers.
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