Who owns one's conversation? I'd take a dim view if someone listened at my door and then broadcast what I'd said. Not that I am likely to say anything that anyone would want to know about. But I was on a train when the woman directly behind me started a loud conversation with her literary agent about a book proposal. To begin with it was merely a nuisance. Then it became interesting when she announced that it would be a follow-on to her book on Highgrove, that George had redone the house, and the angle would be to match the music to the house, not that she liked the music herself. My suspicions about George were confirmed when she said that Olivia had rung her yesterday.
So I'm sitting on a train in front of someone who is going to write a book about the house that Beatle, George Harrison, bought and renovated. Does this woman not know that I and probably everyone else in the carriage can hear every word?
Tonight, it seems, she was to be presenting a prize to a Jonathan Bates — although she was third choice for it, Rory Bremner and David Attenborough having pulled out — but now Tom Paulden was going to do it, although she doesn't know who he is. She's written her Country Life piece. She was hoping to make a bid for Harry Griffin's ‘Country Diary’ column in the Guardian, now that he's died; she sent editor, Alan Rusbridger, a list of her work, but got an immediate rejection and never has anything been so disappointing. A little detective work at my computer soon revealed the woman's identity, and should serve as a warning to anyone who thinks that mobile phone conversations are private. What's not private is public, and broadcasting it is some compensation for a disturbed journey.
An end-piece. Mark Thatcher wasn't the only one accused in South Africa of a coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea. Nor was he the only Briton. On television news we saw a number of men on their way into custody. Helpfully, we were told that the Briton was the one wearing spectacles. Michael Howard has pinned the Tories' colours to the mask by deploring political correctness, which, whatever you think of its dafter leanings, on the whole is a force for good. But it does make you wonder, when a news channel can't draw attention to the only white man in a crowd by saying that he is the white man.
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2004.
