It is well-known in Lancashire that a Yorkshireman speaks bluntly. Whether he speaks sense is always debatable west of Todmorden, but here we have, in a Yorkshireman applauded across the world for his talents, a man who speaks sense bluntly.

I shall name and fame him immediately.

Mr David Hockney is that man. He swapped Santa Monica, California, for Bridlington, Yorkshire, and that, for a start, is swimming pools dappled in blue gone for a bourbon. Gradely.

He declares that Britain is being strangled by thousands of petty laws; that politicians intrude into his life.

“I don't want to live my life being dictated to by doctors. We're being treated like children. It's mean-spirited.”

That's good. That's very good as far as it goes, but, you know, we begin to differ just a weeny bit at that point.

I say we are being treated like idiots, not children. Children are treated in a most complicated way because of governments, endless committees, and academic nonsense of the most abysmal kind.

What is a child? A child (according to Authorities) is so precious that it can not be properly chastised. It can not be slapped, as its parents were slapped, for rebellious actions or talk. It can not be smiled at in the street by strangers in case they are paedophiles. It can not be photographed for similar reasons. It can not be adequately punished by teachers who, instead of being authorities in control, become disillusioned human beings controlled by pupils. It can not be exposed to risk, such as climbing things, sliding on things, crossing roads. It moves about the streets in bundles of 30 in yellow jackets, herded like sheep. It is sacrosanct. It is being kept pure for a purpose. That purpose, for far too many, is to grow up, carry a knife and a grudge, and cause havoc. They are not so much in revolt as revolting.

The teenager of today is arrogant, recognises no authority, moves around in hooded clothes to put the fear of God into others, becomes uncontrollable in mobs, pays little attention in school and even less attention in work, thinks academic advancement uncool, and is generally loathed. It can't spell, add up, and it doesn't know what goes on beyond its own town.

This in spite of the fact that there are more colleges, universities, diplomas, schools and teachers than ever in history, and more advice to those institutions than could be read by any human being in a lifetime lasting 200 years.

Of course, I am enjoying lumping children into one bundle, which is unfair on the good ones, but I am enjoying myself so give over. Life IS unfair. Onwards!

Then there are the children of the rich who live by different standards: they are forced, bullied, made miserable by parents who demand from them absolute success (success always being determined by Sunday Times standards: that is, those with the most money must be the best because it's obvious, innit? They have the best houses.)

In between are children who actually work hard, think, don't scowl all the time, progress of their own volition, and are perfect in every way. Like I was, you see. They are not, I insist again, part of the argument. There are a lot of them, too, and because they are decent they are of little interest to pressure groups.

The country, then, is to some extent, but by no means exclusively, divided between those who shuffle and those who walk; those who want to be in the Sunday Times rich list and those at the street corner waiting for something, anything, to pass so that they can either kick it or nick it.

Once upon a time, children were guided by stringent Victorian standards. They were expected to keep quiet in life until they had something interesting to say. Some, I imagine, went through their lives without saying a word. They learned their school lessons by rote, repeating things in the mass, as I did - “two twos are four, four twos are eight.” They did this in song-song voice and the only places where you can hear it now is from loudspeakers in supermarkets. “Mr Jones to check-out, pliss ... customer waitiiiiiiing.”

But here we are and Mr Hockney is waiting, which is rather rude of us. So let him, then, speak:

“Surely people who want to drink and smoke in one place should be allowed to.”

The government was obsessed by death. “Well, I'm not.

“There are 3,000 new laws, 3,000 new criminal offences, 3,000 new punishments, 3,000 new criminals. I don't know any politicians and I don't want to.”

Here, indeed, is a man of discernment; a gentleman and a scholar as they say in Oswaldtwistle. And you know why? Because he says what I agree with, that's why. The people we think most clever in life are always the ones who say what we agree with. It is an immutable law. And not one newspaper has discovered it throughout printing history. Newspapers think that their leader columns sway opinion. They don't sway anybody. The reader – if he gets around to a leader column at all - says: “To hell with that. I don't agree with it.” And buys another newspaper.

But, we are off track again. Sorry, Mr Hockney.

I could say that California, where he was speaking, is responsible not only for genius but for much of the rubbish that flows out over the world. The Los Angeles thought-police tidal wave hit us years ago and we didn't even notice until everybody became touchy-feely and you couldn't move for writs. That's California thinking as I understand it: human rights, writs, gender things. And drugs. Let us not forget those.

And science. Let us not forget science. For science endlessly contradicts itself. The joyous coincidence is that as Hockney was on the attack, the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition admitted that it might have been confusing us for 18 years.

The recommended daily intake of calories could be increased by up to 16%, a draft report by the committee on nutrition said.

Intake levels are currently 2,000 calories for women and 2,500 for men.

Well, this caused a terrible turmoil among the committee-d classes. It was misleading, they thought. The entire country was about to waddle rather than walk as a result of another hamburger. It wouldn't have the sense to think for itself. It needed even more advice. Or did it? Some committed the unforgivable sin of thinking for themselves. Like Hockney.

So in all the turmoil, I was with Harriet, of Berkshire, who wrote: “This has got to be the best news I have heard all week! Seriously, though, I've lost a stone by going from eating rather a lot to just eating normally and I thought there was something wrong with me as I am still losing weight. And I'm not going hungry.”

I tell you, David Hockney, I applaud you all the way, brush, canvas, dappled blue water and fag-end included.

You can write my leader columns any day. We, and one or two people drinking in the last remaining pub, seem to be the only sane ones left. Apart from Harriet.

Harriet can write a leader column, too.

Next week:

A committee that says too much exercise is bad for you, so cut out the jogging and treddle-mills and walk instead.

Another committee that says the exact opposite.

How dried seaweed and seagull urine transformed my life, by an old crone in Wales.

How I donated my enormous left leg and fed 300 Africans, by a gentlemen in Dorset.

A tractatus too far

I have never envied a genius, because my head seems full enough for my daily routines. After all, I have been packing it for many, many years as one would a well-loved suitcase. Any more would only dislodge what I have accumulated the hard way. Then - another big factor - geniuses live isolated, rather one-track lives.

I read recently of a genius girl aged two who said that sausages tasted "as though there was a party in my mouth." I was 42 before I could think of a line even remotely as good as that, and then I'm not sure I am exaggerating.

Plainly that child is already ahead of 99 per cent of poets and within hitting distance of Virgil.

Georgia Brown could count to ten, recognised colours, was starting with French, and had a genius-rated IQ of 152. It didn't say whether she had won Mastermind, followed by a Nobel Prize, but it will come, it will come, probably next year if progress continues.

In one sense, and one only, I think I might beat her because when I took the MENSA test at the office - it was officially marked elsewhere - I did so in the name of Mr Cooksey, a photographer I knew, in case I fared badly. I reckon that deception alone was worth 50 points for ingenuity. Mr Cooksey, to his surprise, found that he had done reasonably well in the test - having originally assumed that MENSA was a women's complaint - and although puzzled at being confused with me, was grateful in an uncomprehending sort of way.

No, I do not envy the child. Not one bit. Because genius makes people odd. They become enveloped in their own oddities so that they no longer recognise the norm. The world regards them as strange, even freakish. Old Mother Einstein probably said, "I think there's something wrong with our Albert. He's filled his nappy and blackboard again."

I can imagine nothing worse than being Professor Stephen Hawking, who is so wracked by physical disability that his voice is re-constituted and sounds like that of a Dalek. To be so clever and be separated from others both by subject and a tortured body must be ... well, tortuous, to say the least.

I read his book, A Brief History of Time, from beginning to end and it did not seem very brief to me. It was inordinately long. He lost me somewhere around Pluto.

I have always been curious about Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great philosopher. He had an IQ of 190 and I have not the faintest idea what he was on about. He soared into the great stratophere of incomprensibility where only gods, Bertrand Russell and geniuses lurk.

His problem was something to do with words and their limitations, I think. Or I think I think. I desperately wanted to understand Ludwig and so, I suspect, did a million or two more. But there is no way. Russell understood him, or said he did, but it was one tractatus too far for the likes of me.

I went to a wedding at an Oxford college and stood in a queue there, admiring architecture. Wittgenstein was at the front of my mind and I was in the middle of the queue, so I said something jocular about him to my wife, and the man immediately ahead of me turned and began to explain what the great philosopher was all about. Astonishing. I was overwhelmed by learning.

I remember thinking, "How come I was born in Oswaldtwistle when all this was going on in Oxford? What was the Good Lord thinking of?" I felt deprived. I thought Mr Punker at Holy Trinity Free Church of England (bottom of New Lane, you will recall), was learned because he had a big moustache and a stern expression, but he was nothing like this, not even at Sermons time.

But of course, I still do not recall what Wittgenstein was about. Or Mr Punker come to think of it. No wonder Witty worried about words and limitations:

A television producer once turned up a whole family of child geniuses. They were in Wales. He had a good go at them on TV and then I went in pursuit of them. He, of course, would not say where they were. But by contacting Fanny Waterman, the noted piano teacher, in Leeds (one of the children was mastering music), I traced the family and the mother went into near hysterics at the thought of any further publicity. Quite pitiful, it was. She asked whether she could speak to the editor of the paper to plead with him.

I did what journalists are never supposed to do: I dropped the subject without consulting anyone. And from that day to this I have never heard another word about her children. Can geniuses revert to normality or do they always desperately try not to be noticed?

I came across a genius in Hans Kronberger - why are they so often Jewish? He was a refugee from Germany, interned by Britain and then taken into atomic energy. Somebody high up had said: "Put him into that because nothing will ever come of it." And lo! they did. And lo! it blossomed.

Kronberger was Deputy Managing Director, UK Atomic Energy Authority (Reactor Group), 1960-1964, and Scientist-in-Chief, 1964-1968. I asked him to explain to me what the subject was all about. We met in a Manchester lecture room with a blackboard covering the length of a longish wall. There, in a state of pent-up nervousness that was awe-inspiring - at one time he had three cigarettes burning at once - he explained his rarified world. And when, by the strength of intellect, he turned me into instant pulp he paused, and said: "Now, we can begin the interview." It seems that all that had gone on before was a rehearsal. I already felt like bed.

But we proceeded. And he stuck a lump of atomic stuff into my hand to explain matters, and I wonder to this day whether it made my hair fall out. Well, something did. And having listened to the same thing twice, I was quite wrung-out and asked - and oh how stupid I was - whether he could solve the problem of fog. We had quite a lot of fog at the time. I lived 25 miles from the office and edged through it by car staring miserably at the centre road line. Purgatory. Hence the question. He danced to his blackboard and covered it end to end in symbols and then he turned to me, noted that I had aged by 40 years or so since he began, and announced: "There, you see - it can't be done."

He died young, tragically, and more's the pity.

So there you are - if you are a genius you have to hide away. Or you have no-one to speak to in particular. Or you are looked upon with suspicion. Or you leave dazed people in your wake.

Albert Einstein, for instance: who could he speak to about e=mc2? There he was with an amazing discovery about something dramatic in the universe and only half a dozen people in the world could appreciate what he told them. There was a press conference at the time, and one brave reporter said: "Does it mean there is no hitching point in space?"

Surely that can't mean a thing. But Albert said it was as near as they were going to get. To me, it still doesn't mean a thing.

I suspect that a real super genius, immediately on being born, might decide, through the amazing power of his or her mind, not to be one. That would be really clever. Sensible, too. Anyway, it's what I did.

Not many in church but a very good sermon. I was most uplifted. Vicar took as his theme -

"And behold, I, even I am bringing the flood of water upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life, from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall perish. (Genesis 6:17)

He kindly shook our hands, wished us a good night as we left, and hoped my Uncle Harry was feeling better.

News headline, web.

Retrospective

Accrington Stanley, Alan Bennett, Eddie Braben, My cruel sea, Derek Jamieson, Roy Farran, Charles Lamb, Sam's chophouse gang, Lake district: Water's little dance, Martyrs of Clay Cross, Edmund Spenser, Nowells of Read hall, Cecil the Mink, Oh, to be a countryman, Technology rampant, Rosie Boot, Cooks and all that, Les at 100, The Paslew Saga, Wellington's England remembered; Pendle witches; Greenhouse weeds: a mortifying tale; Mottled legs; Dentistry; On growing old; Edmund the money man; the new editor; barristers and journalists; Memory and Last of the Summer Wine; the Yates's experience; Rose: the ghost and the ring; The gravy train; Lillian Ross of the New Yorker and John Huston; Brian Duff and a Rook; Meditation; Party conferences; Press: the underclass; A bwoody gweat wow

Main contents list

Lancashire affairs:

www.lankylad.com

Media

www.gentlemenranters.com

http://booksaboutjournalism.com/

skidmoresisland.blogspot.com

Geoffrey Mather (c) 2009