Terry Prone: Cost of living package fails to warm public hearts

The Government have unveiled a package of measures to help with increases to the cost of living. Picture: Peter Byrne/PA

Monday

Back in the office, I find myself doing something mortifying. 

During the pandemic, I developed a 'closer than this' relationship with my iPad. So, at my desk, I splay first and second fingers away from each other to make Ukraine bigger.

The problem is that I do this on the mouse-pad map of the world. It doesn’t work, which is a letdown but not much of a surprise and I’m glad none of my colleagues is close enough to notice.

Tuesday

Overheard on a training course where someone has just explained the difference between open and closed questions: “I’ve just realised that 14-year-old male offspring are the only people in the world who can give a closed answer to an open question. Usually in the form of a wordless grunt.”

Wednesday

It is announced that Rebecca Donner’s book — All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days — about her great-great aunt has gone into its fourth printing. 

This is an unusual publishing achievement — her great-great aunt being a forgotten American spy in Second World War Germany who was guillotined on the orders of Hitler.

The woman is hardly known, even to students of the period. Not known at all if you compare her with England’s Nazi-loving Unity Mitford and America’s appalling Martha Dodd, the latter a daughter of the American ambassador who never met a prominent German or Russian she wouldn’t have sex with and betray with equal zest.

Mildred Harnack, in sharp contrast, was an introvert who, doing academic work in Germany in the 1930s, started a circle of resistance to the Nazis, operating initially at what might be called the well-meaning amateur level; writing, printing and distributing leaflets telling the truth about the Third Reich, in the hope of rousing opposition to the regime.

When the war broke out, however, leaflet-drops became irrelevant and dangerous, and Mildred became a spy, delivering secret intelligence to the allies. 

Nazi party members salute during an assembly in 1938 in Berlin. Mildred Harnack while doing academic work in Germany in the 1930s, started a circle of resistance to the Nazis. Picture: AP

She was ruthless about her new craft, using a 10-year-old American boy to courier materials despite the risk this posed to the brave youngster.

As betrayals and accidents brought SS focus onto Harnack and her circle, she burned her journals. 

A relative back home in the US, however, carefully saved everything the family had received from her, archiving it in an attic, from which Donner, decades later, retrieved the documents.

Those documents, added to materials emerging from Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, form the basis of Donner’s astonishing book, which has been compared to the work of WG Sebald.

Inevitably, because of the self-erasure exercised by the dead spy, gaps exist and every now and then the author imagines her subject walking, reflecting or coming to conclusions and uses the dread “perhaps” to introduce these suppositions. 

Nor can the claim be made that she has brought Harnack to life, because Harnack seems to have existed only in relation to causes and personal heroes.

It is, nonetheless, a wondrous work of research-mastery. That it is written, for the most part, in the present tense adds to the suspense when Harnack is arrested, imprisoned, and tried. 

She calmly lies to the court and gets a six-year sentence which, when he hears about it, infuriates Hitler who insists on immediate decapitation.

After her death, she disappears from the story of the Third Reich — until her distant relative publishes this phenomenal, stylish, and beautifully designed book to re-frame her in history.

Thursday

Biting the hand that feeds you isn’t the half of it. It’s more like gnawing the arm right up to the elbow, if not the armpit. 

It’s a mixed metaphor, but I can’t remember so pronounced a case of looking a gift horse in the mouth as evidenced in public reaction to the €200 off the fuel bill.

Trying to remember a parallel, the best I can come up with is when an aunt gave me vests for Christmas when I was six. Woollen vests. 

I was dragooned into signing a card of thanks to the repellent old bat, but had the guts to refuse to put kisses on the card.

To hell with her and her vests, I thought. Easy knowing she doesn’t have to wear them. Easy knowing she’s way past identifying with my agonising need for roller skates. 

Easy knowing she lives on a different planet inhabited by people like her that wear animal heads on fur collars around their wattly necks and doesn’t remember if she ever experienced being six.

Pretty much the same reaction as played out this week in response to the cost of living allowances; to hell with them and their vests.

Friday

Encountering Rachel English in Virgin Media, where she is publicising her novel The Letter Home recalls an interview I once recorded with Maeve Binchy about the obligation to do the media circuit to publicise your book and the difficulties that can pose, including interviewers who haven’t read it but pretend they have and interviewers who have neither read it nor know who you are nor care much as long as you keep burbling away for your allocated four minutes.

Irish author Maeve Binch "actually never made any furniture". File picture: Eamonn Farrell/Photocall Ireland!

Maeve said that in a Birmingham studio once, a young male presenter spoke to her before she was due to go on air.

“Have you always been making your own furniture?” he asked.

Maeve thought about this and decided there was a limit to playing along with the furniture-making proposition. “I said no, I’ve actually never made any furniture,” she told him. “Oh, you’re the other one,” he said, unperturbed. “You’re the one who wrote the big book.”

Saturday

Research suggests that the cause of such loss may actually be a version of the title of that Paul McCartney album about the memory being almost full. 

In other words, a brain cluttered with information may be the cause of those moments when you walk into a room and ask it, aloud, why the hell you are there and what you’re looking for.

The journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences carries new analysis done at the universities of Harvard, Toronto, and Columbia of neuroimaging and behavioural studies of people from 65 years of age to 80, which led the scholars involved to suggest that the brains of older adults are stuffed to the earlobes with accumulated knowledge.

The point being that when younger people go looking for a memory in their brain, it’s easier to find because they have less on the shelves in their mental library.

Older people not only have more on their intellectual shelves, but — as frequently demonstrated on Joe Duffy’s Liveline — often can’t separate one bit of memory from other information to which it is linked.

Sunday

Setting the value of the story aside, some sympathy must go to the Department of Health officials in the leaked recording published by the Business Post. 

How do they ever trust each other again, knowing one of their small group taped them on the sly and handed the result to a newspaper?