Philosophy from Mick the plumber

Nov 22 2007 By John Avison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

MICK the Plumber called last week to get our radiators restarted.

Just as well you turned up, I said. Notwithstanding the fingerless gloves my extremities are blue from hypothermia.

They all seize up this time of year, says Mick. You don’t use ’em for a few months and when they warm up the water finds all the weak points.

Help, I thought. I can do without all that happening to my extremities.

And then it dawned on me he wasn’t talking about my extremities. Mick the Plumber was talking about the plumbing.

One of Mick’s favourite topics outside of stopcocks, millibars and self-tapping valves (I think he said self-tapping valves) is that people see and hear what they want to see and hear.

“A plane crashes exactly on the border of Spain and France,” he says, twiddling a grommet somewhere at the back of the boiler. “Where do you bury the survivors?”

I was wise to this one and told him that the survivors would be very cross if you buried them anywhere.

But his point was taken. We see what we want to see and hear what it suits us to hear.

As I was going to St Ives I met a man with seven wives. Each wife had seven cats and each cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, man and wives, how many were going to St Ives?

Just one. Me. You see you weren’t listening.

All right, you were being deliberately misled. But Mick says we get misled from the top; politicians, religious leaders, the media. We’re so used to hearing lies and spin that we’ve virtually lost the ability to hear the faint and distant clarion call of truth.

I’d add that those with an interest in controlling what we think would never tell us all the facts. They are happy that we have an opinion – and that it is in their favour. But they would never tell us everything and let us make up our minds.

If you think this is paranoid test it against any statement made by anybody in the public eye.

Tory leader David Cameron, to give just one example, said this week that he wanted every child in Britain to read by the time it was six and that a Conservative Government would aim for that.

Somebody then pointed out that if a child could not read before it was six it would be identified as having failed and that a sense of failure can damage a young mind far more deeply than not being able to read.

These statements are both valuable, but neither is the whole truth. That distant clarion cry of truth is drowned out by each party’s loud grinding of axes.

I thought about that and came up with a personal example.

Last week’s Thursday column on faith schools was homed in on. Mostly it was by people who have a vested interest in faith schools, one way or another.

I bet you never visited a faith school before you wrote the article, one said. No, I didn’t.

I have never been to Ulan Bator either, but I can put my hands on a host of facts about it through books, TV programmes, websites, geographic surveys and so on.

Do faith schools do a good job? Yes, largely, they do. They produce good results and usually have high standards of discipline, which always helps.

But I simply cannot be doing with education that attempts to pass off beautiful, elegant, ancient myths as scientific truth. It’s just the way I am.

Incidentally, a myth is a profound form of truth in itself. ‘Myth’ does not mean ‘lie’.

The facts I used about faith schools were not selected to prove my point. They are just there, on various Government websites, for anyone to study and draw their own conclusions.

And draw them we do, with enthusiasm, and every one’s different.

Mick the Plumber went on to observe that if you got 10 people to look out of the same window and describe the first five things they saw it would be highly unlikely each person’s list would be the same.

“The people who have a negative outlook on life will notice litter, a broken branch, a cracked window, a leaking drainpipe.

“The people who are positive will spot the colour of the sky, sunlight on a flower, somebody’s smile,” he says.

“The truth is that it’s all out there. We just select what reinforces our world view.”

And I thought Mick was a plumber.

party politics Tory leader David Cameron – “That distant clarion cry of truth is drowned out by each party’s loud grinding of axes”