Odd man out in the age of ‘celebs’

The world of mammon has never been more blatant and noisy. A businessman, a caricature plutocratic monster, pays himself a yearly dividend, from just one of his companies, of £1.2 billion: that is more than the total income of 54,000 people on average earnings. He is capitalism’s top celeb, a media hero, alongside the football managers, pop singers, fashionable harlots, TV academics, babbling bishops, political demagogues and the rest of the pushers and shovers who compete for attention in the headlines, and who dominate the world of ‘getting and spending’, as Wordsworth called it. Hard for anyone, however wide-eyed and virtuous, not to be infected by this pandemic of self-aggrandisement, this virus of vanity, this Gadarene lust for fame and attention.

Yet there are such people. One, who died recently, I knew well. His name was Aimable Jonckheere, but everyone called him Jonck. He was Anglo-French, bilingual, his father an astronomer, his own training in statistics and psychology.