You Are Not the Main Story

Peter Kinderman I'm more worried about low-level muggers than, than most forms of crime, to be perfectly honest. And

Hilary Jeffs Hello, and welcome to Experience, the weekly podcast where we get to psychoanalyse the news. So if you're like us, you're obsessed by the headlines and are fascinated by why people behave the way they do, this is definitely the podcast for you. Because it is a podcast about humans, for humans, by humans. So if you're a human, don't forget to like and subscribe. And also tell another human that they would like to listen to us too, and get them to subscribe, and hopefully we can all be in this together. But of course, I could not be on this psychological journey without the wonderful Professor Peter Kinderman. Hello, how are you getting on with our book challenge that we're doing? We're reading Black Bag, aren't we, by Luke Kennard. It's on the Booker shortlist prize, but it includes a psychological experiment

Peter Kinderman It's very psychological. There's lots of psychology in it. I do get the impression that he's either studied psychology or a- eaten a psychology textbook 'cause psychology bods pop up every so... I'm really enjoying it. I'm liking it. It is an audiobook rather than reading it because, you know, I'm kind of doing other things at the same time. But yeah, cracking on, nearly there, getting through it, very much enjoying it. Hope it wins 'cause then I'll have w- have read the Booker Prize winner, which would be a good thing

Hilary Jeffs it's a good thing to tick off the list. Unfortunately, I was listening to it on the way up to your neck of the woods actually with one of my teenagers, and, I forgot that it gets a bit raunchy in places. And, I suddenly turned into like a 1950s housewife where I'm like, "Oh my! Oh goodness! Oh really? Okay." he was at the time wearing the latest edition of Apple AirPods which I know for a fact are mum noise-cancelling. Let's just hope that they are also audiobook

Peter Kinderman Un- unfortunately, one of the features of the human psychology is that extremely explicit discussions of sex can cut through any technology. It's just a known fact

Hilary Jeffs It was so embarrassing. Luckily, on the way back, I managed to switch over to Gardener's Question Time, which of course would have made him turn the music up louder. Although I just quite liked it. It was quite relaxing, I think. Right. So we will keep on. I'm nearly done though. I think I'm probably, I don't know, maybe a quarter off the end. Whereabouts are you?

Peter Kinderman My guess is probably about the same. Yeah, yeah. It, I mean, chapters late '50s, so there you go.

Hilary Jeffs Then you know what I'm saying. You know what I was listening to.

Peter Kinderman I have been there with the interesting chapters and detailed descriptions of things

Hilary Jeffs Yeah, definitely do not listen to it in a car with a teenager, and certainly not younger ones as well. That will really give them something to think about. Before we move on to the headlines this week, Peter, 'cause I know that we're gonna be covering the weather. Who doesn't like to talk about the weather? Obviously, we're also gonna have to talk about lab leaks from an authoritarian state where someone unfortunately has died and the authorities don't want to talk about it. No, we're not going back to 2019. This is right here, right now. It just happens to be Russia and not China this time. And we're gonna finish off by talking about old people in Japan and why they might have turned into kleptomaniacs. So that's all coming up, but first I need your concept of the week, please. Your COW

Peter Kinderman so the concept of the week is the spotlight effect, where e-especially if you do something kind of socially embarrassing, you feel like the spotlight is on you and it becomes incredibly salient and meaningful and dreadfully embarrassing. And, it's probably not true, but people are very self-focused in their attention. You know, we don't survive in this world without a little bit of kind of thinking about me first. But it means that when something happens, I don't know, you stand up in Starbucks and your trousers fall to the floor, then you think everybody's looking at you

Hilary Jeffs I j- to be fair, if you were in Starbucks and your trousers fell to the floor, I might be looking.

Peter Kinderman It did once happen to me, although it didn't happen to me. I actually saw the bloke who did it, and, it was mildly amusing

Hilary Jeffs Yeah, my husband once was in a queue at a bank and a bee went up his leg and stung him. And because he was so embarrassed, he didn't make a noise at all. He was just like, "Oh," which

Peter Kinderman That's remarkable self-control, I would've said. They said this is good

Hilary Jeffs and as a beekeeper, you will know just how much self-control that actually took.

Peter Kinderman Yeah, I have none of that self-control. None

Hilary Jeffs it is something I tell my teenagers all the time, which is that no one else is bothered. No one cares. You are not the main story of anyone else's movie that's going on in their life. They just don't notice it, do they?

Peter Kinderman No, they won't notice it and it's, it really isn't worth worrying about. But people do have this tendency to think, "Oh my God, this is dreadful," and the world open, you know, the earth opens up in front of your feet, but it's

Hilary Jeffs I have to say, I really admire those celebrities where they have been plastered everywhere with something that's gone wrong, and they just pick themselves back up and they keep on going. You know, whether they're a model on a catwalk that's fallen over or whatever else. Hugh Grant comes to mind. You know, the fact is that you do move on. You can

Peter Kinderman point is that they move on. I once w- with clippy pedals on a, on a racing bike came to a rather abrupt crossroads in a small French town. Couldn't get my feet out of the pedals in time and fell over. There were two cafes, one on, you know, diagonally across, presumably in competition with each other, and I got a ripple of applause from, from the assembled French people and English holidaymakers as I fell over. But you know, yeah. But you cycle off and, you know, make their day. It's, it's not gonna ruin your day

Hilary Jeffs give someone something to enjoy, doesn't it? Actually, maybe this should be a new feature where we just swap embarrassing things that have happened to us in the week and make other people feel better. That is... I reckon that's a good social good we'd have been doing then.

Peter Kinderman I have quite a lot of embarrassing things. I tend to do embarrassing things quite a lot.

Hilary Jeffs Me too. Okay. Well, that Coming Near You is gonna be just a collection of our embarrassment and believe me, nothing will be as embarrassing as what we can tell you, I'm sure. First headline then. Tragically, we've got a bit of a plague outbreak, haven't we? Come out of Russia, out of a lab. Unfortunately, a young female researcher has died. But they say that they're containing it because they've quarantined, I think it's 200 people. Tell me a bit about the pneumonic plague, 'cause it's not something that sort of trips off the tongue, and

Peter Kinderman Yeah,

Hilary Jeffs does rather make you feel slightly nervous.

Peter Kinderman Like I know. And I was thinking about this. I was thinking, "He's gonna ask me about pneumonic plague." I don't know pneumonic plague. I'm not a plague researcher. In fact, I'm not a, I'm not a microbiologist. In

Hilary Jeffs Come on, you know everything

Peter Kinderman Well, so here's, here's what I know. W- th- what I know is that if I was in Andy Burnham's chair right now, I'd be saying to somebody, I'd be saying to the government's chief scientist, I'd be going, "I'd quite like a briefing, please, and I'd quite like a briefing this evening, and I'd quite like a briefing tomorrow morning, and then I'll have another briefing tomorrow evening, and you'll carry on giving me twice-daily briefings until we're sure what's going on," because it is a little bit worrying. The message that, I've received, mainly from the BBC website, I have to say, is... Well, look, here we go. So we've got a Russian not sure that I'm that keen on the Russian state, state-sponsored, slightly dubious facility, probably spo- possibly investigating pathogens, at least from the perspective of biological warfare. Maybe defensive, maybe offensive. Difficult to be defensive without being offensive. It's a biological warfare lab. Yes, somebody has died. Yes, it's pneumonic plague. And yes, that's the kind of scenario that lends itself to horror movies. So it's a bit bothering, and the word plague is a bit bothering. The, like the BBC website, I think it was BBC anyway, what the newsmakers are telling us is plague is bacterial, it's not viral, so that's a difference. And I think, well, that is a difference, and especially because

Hilary Jeffs not different that anyone else understands why that's important. Mm

Peter Kinderman it, what it means is that you should be able to treat it with antibiotics. From it's just conceivable that part of the investigations of plague bacillus from a biological warfare perspective is, I wonder if some of the strains are resistant to antibiotics. And I've read on another website, may be true, might not be true, that the KGB or the follow-up, the FSB or whatever they're called, are coordinating the quarantine, which has now spread, spread to five hospitals. So I think I might drink the good champagne tonight.

Hilary Jeffs Okay. We come to you for peace and reassurance, and what you have given me is a slight mild panic rising up from my stomach into my throat. But I'm not going to be that worried about it, and I'll tell you why I'm not gonna be worried about it. Apparently, with it being... This is, this is just my little analysis. With it being a person-to-person transmission, it's actually not that efficient at doing it. Apparently, it takes quite a lot to make someone infected. This is, this is me trying to put the positive spin on it. And that's why we had other plagues really that took more lives, 'cause it's really deadly at the moment, we know that, within, within 24 hours of getting it. And indeed, once you've got it, then you show symptoms in 24 hours, and then you can be dead in 24 hours. I know that. But it doesn't, it doesn't like to hop from one host to another

Peter Kinderman That's absolutely true and absolutely fine, and I wouldn't worry about it at all. It's just that if I were, and I'm not, the research director of a Russian biological weapons factory, I would be interested in whether I could make pneumonic plague jump from human to human by airborne transmission, and at the same time make it resistant to antibiotics. All I'm saying is those would be targets were I to be in a research lab investigating pneumonic plague, and somebody was in a research lab, and they were investigating pneumonic plague, and now they're dead.

Hilary Jeffs Not for the first time, myself and everyone else is just so grateful that you're on the light side and not on the dark side, Peter, because

Peter Kinderman is, this is where, you know, I deviate from

Hilary Jeffs [unclear]

Peter Kinderman idiots like Trump and Boris Johnson, and I veer towards sensible people in charge, which is this is why we have organizations like the World Health Organization, whose job is to investigate pandemic plague outbreaks and to recommend steps that we take in order to keep ourselves safe. And, you know, should it come to being something that I will worry about, then I will follow the advice given to me by people who know what they're talking about, and I won't drink bleach

Hilary Jeffs and actually, yes, no, don't drink, drink, ever drink bleach. That's a ridiculous thing to do, Trump. I do think that if we did have to lock down again, collectively we all are better able to be able to do that now having gone through it. We haven't got that same psychological shift. However, I'm not sure they would very easily go back towards a lockdown after what they feel it might have done to our children and stuff. What do you think will be- they'll be trying to weigh up if that was on the cards?

Peter Kinderman I think they'll be weighing up the minor inconveniences of lockdown versus pandemic death, and I think that they would go for whatever steps are necessary to keep people alive, and I'll do whatever they advise me to do

Hilary Jeffs Well, that is very good advice. Although the minor inconvenience, I'm not sure it was that minor

Peter Kinderman No, it was significant and it's had a major effect, but I think that, you know, the when we have surgery, like, I don't know, you fall off your bike and you break a bone, and they go, "I'm really sorry about this, but we're gonna have to do surgery," you don't go, "Yeah, no, I don't think I'll bother." You go, "I realise that it's a bad thing, but it's a far, far better thing than..." Dot, dot, dot. And I think the lockdown was utterly horrible, but worse than many, many more people dying, and it w- the economic and social consequences of the lockdown were much less than the social and economic and mental health and health consequences of, you know, an unrestricted, in this case, flu influenza. So I don't think that this outbreak in Russia will turn out to be serious, but if it is, then we'll do what's necessary and take it from there. Human beings have faced other existential crises in the past. We'll face this one

Hilary Jeffs Absolutely, and my point would be that maybe this time they would actually take more timely decisions. I couldn't help but feel that things went on a much worse trajectory because we waited so long before we actually did take action, and then we didn't do it in the right order. Opening up pubs to eat out to help out I just felt was an utter disaster because it meant that our kids were yet again out of school as a result in trying to put a brake on the virus spread

Peter Kinderman but Boris Johnson was the worst possible Prime Minister at the worst possible time and delayed making decisions 'cause A, he was inept and B, his political compass was towards, I don't know, preserving his, his

Hilary Jeffs Come on, he did do the vaccine

Peter Kinderman Mm. He didn't do the vaccine, did he? He clever scientists, who i- immediately di- diverted all of their research activity towards the vaccine did the vaccine. Boris Johnson probably impeded the action of the vaccine. And eat out to kill your granny was a really bad idea, but we don't have those clowns in charge anymore, thank goodness. Also, just as a, as a side note, you need to take these drastic actions in order to prevent you getting something from COVID, something called COVID-19 was a bit of an ask an ask. You need to do these things in order to prevent you getting the plague. It's, it's just got a catchier title and, it's more likely to work

Hilary Jeffs Yeah. Do you know what? You're not wrong. And actually, they've already- vaccines are already sort of half developed, aren't they, for different strains of the plague. So I'm sure that that sort of thing would get a lot easier. And we have to remember that even though it's scary, we do have countries around the world that still have small pockets of outbreaks of plague. Admittedly, not from a Russian lab, but, we'll just try and keep it on a positive note there. Thanks, Peter, for your wellbeing tips today. Yeah, we'll be definitely needing those at the end of the show.

Peter Kinderman It'll be fine. It'll be fine. Just buy a lot of bo- bottled water, but it'll be fine

Hilary Jeffs Bottled water. Bottled water.

Peter Kinderman I'm-- I don't. I wouldn't buy, I wouldn't buy bottled water, but I'm just saying, I'm just saying it'll be fine, but

Hilary Jeffs worried about the water. You're not helping me, Peter. Right, we're moving on quickly. We'll move on to the weather because the Met Office have got sort of a little bit chippy today because everyone has been forecasting, like, you know, a winter from hell with El Niño effect causing us to have an absolutely disgusting winter that's going to be colder than the Antarctic and all the rest of it. And they're sort of saying, you know, "Now calm down, calm down." But we do know that we love talking about the weather in the UK. It is one of our best pastimes. 96% of us have talked about it in the last six hours, and something like 40% of us have talked about it in the last hour, which means if you do maths and you forget about people needing to sleep, at any one time, about a third of us have either just talked about the weather, are talking about the weather, or are about to talk about the weather. So this is the place to be 'cause we're gonna give you lots of weather stuff to be able to pep up those conversations. Why do we like talking about the weather so much?

Peter Kinderman So there are lots of reasons. I mean, one reason which I should say straight up is with climate change, we're gonna be talking about the weather a lot more, and I think that's probably a good thing because our weather will get more chaotic

Hilary Jeffs Not good thing that it's climate change. Good thing

Peter Kinderman that we're talking about it. The-- as we put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we're gonna put more-- we're gonna trap more energy in the atmosphere. The atmosphere's gonna get more energetic. It's gonna get, on average, warmer. That means more water in the atmosphere, and it means more temperature, which means more storms and so forth. So our, our weather is going to become unpredictable and wet and pretty much chaotic and horrible, so we're gonna be talking about it more for that reason. So we-we're, we're, we're animals, right? We live in and we live in relation to the environment. And the environment includes, you know, despite all of our technology and despite the fact that mobile phones and laptops and central heating and houses and jobs and pensions are all things that are important in our modern environment, we still live in the environment which is the weather impacting on our skin. I mean, that's, that's the primary source of perturbation. We shiver, we co- we're cold. We wake up in the night and it's cold going to the loo. It-- So we live in an environment and we,

Hilary Jeffs We're talking about our age again?

Peter Kinderman Yeah. Well, it's, yeah, yeah, yeah, true. So I think the fact that we're perturbed on, by the environment is a fact. It's-- And we open our eyes and we look at the environment so we can see the perturbations and that those perturbations are shared. So if you and I meet in a cafe, I don't know where you're up to with your pension. I don't know what your mortgage situation is like. I don't know what's happened between you and your children this morning, and I, whatever. So, but I do know that we've both experienced the same weather, so we've got a point of conversation. As you know, I'm, I'm not a big fan of football, but I do find that people seem to regard, "Did you watch the match last night?" as a way of entering a conversation with somebody on neutral topic. And

Hilary Jeffs And you're not allowed to say no, just like you're not allowed to disagree with someone about the weather either, are

Peter Kinderman Exactly. That's right.

Hilary Jeffs Code.

Peter Kinderman So say,

Hilary Jeffs out there." " Ooh, yes it is." Not,

Peter Kinderman you co- you come into the cafe and you kind of shake the rain off and you go, "Wow, it's a bit brisk out there." And then you've s- you've uttered something verbally that the other person will respond to without going, "You pompous git," or, "No, I don't want to buy that," or whatever. It's a nice neutral topic for conversation. So yeah, it kind of, it kind of opened things up. And finally, and this is, this is also the point, which is the weather does affect, it affects, what we do and it affects our mood because we're animals that live in an environment. So

Hilary Jeffs Now, I've heard some quite interesting things about what the weather does. For example, apparently as a storm is brewing, kids start behaving worse because apparently there's something about the ions in the air that makes their blood pressure go up and they get more irritable. So, I'm just blaming any of their grumpiness on the weather from now on. I'll just be like, "You need to go and have a cup of tea and forget about it. It's just the weather." Seems like a perfect way of just dismissing any concerns that they may be having. I like it. And the other thing is that we have less crime when the weather is bad. So in New York, there are fewer murders, and in Greater Manchester, there is just less crime generally when it is raining. W- why?

Peter Kinderman ' Cause, 'cause burglars don't like going out in the rain, neither do muggers.

Hilary Jeffs It as simple as that?

Peter Kinderman Look, you know, if you're a low-level mugger, I'm, I'm more worried about low-level muggers than, than most forms of crime, to be perfectly honest. And there's a... I'm pointing. There's an alleyway just over there that we call Mugger's Alley 'cause it is. Well, if you walk down there in, you know, 11 o'clock at night on a relatively warm summer's night, then the basically the job description of the muggers is to hang around with a Stanley knife and wait for you. Well, hanging around with a Stanley knife waiting for somebody at 11 o'clock on a evening in summertime is quite a nice pastime. Hanging around when it's down in in November is a very unpleasant job. I'd rather go home and have a cup of tea. It's kind of a balance of things. So yeah, I'm... I feel much safer when it's absolutely teeming it down because I think that the people, like I say, who hang around on corners waiting to attack people like me are less likely to be there. I feel safer. So yeah, great. Bring on the rain. Less likely to be m- what you really want is for it to be lovely and sunny than for it to absolutely teem down just as you're walking home. That would be ideal

Hilary Jeffs It is. Well, and apparently you get crime rates that sort of rise steadily in Greater Manchester, about 18 degrees, and then it plummets again because then people are like, "It's too hot to actually commit any crimes at that point."

Peter Kinderman It's, it's true for all of us. If y- if you say to me, you know, "What are we gonna have for tea? Are we gonna have beans on toast or fish and chips?" And it's raining, I'll go, "I don't fancy the walk. Let's have beans on toast." You know, "What are you gonna do tonight?" "I think I might go out and rob a few people. Oh, no, on the other hand, I might not. It's raining." It seems

Hilary Jeffs No, you know, there is actually now kind of, you know, some kind of business for people who need better rain attire if they are muggers, frankly. I mean, I don't know what that would look like. I have to say, actually, the only time I was nearly mugged, it was in beautiful weather. I was in Washington, and these kids went by on a skateboard, and at the last minute, one of them went flying, fell off, and dropped a knife out his hand. Meanwhile, they all started laughing, and what he was gonna do was cut the straps on my bag. But I was pregnant at the time. It was terrifying. But

Peter Kinderman So are you suggesting that we should go into the business of making waterproof balaclavas in order to appeal to the Mancunian weather, which is only gonna get worse as climate

Hilary Jeffs I would like to say yes, but then you'll just tell me that, you know, it's not true and you'll, you'll crush all my

Peter Kinderman No, I think it is true. I just think it's more negative than my worries about pneumonic plague, that's all

Hilary Jeffs Okay, fair enough. I'll take that one. Perhaps you're right. Yes, so we all love talking about the rain. We have uniquely interesting rain in the UK because we're an island, so we get more unpredictable weather, and our, our atmosphere is full of moisture. It's as simple as that, and that is why our weather is so crazy. Now, before we leave this topic, though, let me give you a nice fun fact. Well, in fact, I'll quiz you. How often do we have a white Christmas in the UK?

Peter Kinderman Oh, it's not very often. The reason why they talk about white Christmas is 'cause Charles Dickens wrote about it. Everybody knows Charles Dickens, and therefore everybody thinks we have white Christmases. But it's really rare. It's something like one in twen- 20, maybe as common as one in 12, but it's not very often

Hilary Jeffs according to the bookies, in the last 60-odd years we've had it more than 50 times because they pay out if one, one snowflake falls on the British Isles. That's what

Peter Kinderman On the British Isles anywhere?

Hilary Jeffs Yeah

Peter Kinderman Oh, well, I'd say okay, fair enough, but a bookie's well, that was quite generous. I didn't realise that bookies were that generous. I regarded white Christmas as a white Christmas that I experience by

Hilary Jeffs Oh yeah, that's really rare. That, and you know, that's gonna be coming even rarer, isn't it? And did you know that in, like, the 1700s they brought Christmas forward by 11 days, thus further bringing down the chance of us, of us ever having a white Christmas.

Peter Kinderman I

Hilary Jeffs Frankly, I wanna campaign for it to go back. What would that make it? The 6th or something, like the Orthodox calendar probably, wouldn't it?

Peter Kinderman That would probably be quite good. Yeah. Yeah. That is quite a good idea. I know there was all sorts of shenanigans with calendars 'cause there were, there were riots at one point where people thought they'd lost s- 16 or 11 days of their lives because of the calendar change, which yeah. So

Hilary Jeffs Oh. Well, it, and apparently we're having to mess around with atomic clocks about seconds as well at the moment, which I think might cause another Y2K. But that's another topic for another day. We'll come onto that next week perhaps. That's quite interesting. Just to, you know, bring on more of the doom and gloom, and that the world is going to end, because that is our way of spreading some joy and happiness around-

Peter Kinderman Is the Earth slowing down? Is this tidal braking or so- anyway, we'll talk about it another time,

Hilary Jeffs We're gonna talk about it 'cause it's actually changed direction. So whereas before we either had to add or take away, we've now got to do the opposite, and apparently that's more difficult. So, yes, it is a bit of a tricky one. Moving on, our last headline of the week is about Japanese OAPs. Now, there is an older population that is exploding in Japan. They have now tipped 100,000 people over the age of 100. Something like a third of their population is over 60. Their birth rate is 1.4 per people, per babies per woman, and it has to be 2.1 to maintain the population. And unfortunately, there's quite a lot of older people who are plagued by poverty, and they've got themselves into a poverty-crime incarceration trap, where they're literally going up and saying to a policeman, "I've just stolen this bike," so that they get sent to prison because it's cheaper than a care home. It's astounding to me. I mean, A, you wouldn't get that in this country, would you? 'Cause it's so blooming horrible. But,

Peter Kinderman I don't know. Care homes are pretty horrible as well.

Hilary Jeffs I went to

Peter Kinderman I've been

Hilary Jeffs when I was looking for one for my dad, and it was disgusting.

Peter Kinderman I, went round care homes doing, doing research with another clinical psychologist, and w- we kept on vowing to ourselves that we'd find ways of avoiding going into care homes in the future.

Hilary Jeffs I think what we should all do is just become parts of big communes and then just pay people to come in and look after us, 'cause I think that's gotta be cheaper, hasn't it, ultimately?

Peter Kinderman How care homes should be. But then we had the Thatcher government and it all got privatized, and instead of being communes where we all look after ourselves in a village, and the elders of the village and everybody looked after themselves, and it was all nice and actually made life good, then they thought they'd make some profit and then cream the profits out of the state, and that's,

Hilary Jeffs Do you know, it

Peter Kinderman that's the problem with people voting for Margaret Thatcher

Hilary Jeffs Well, unfortunately we can't go back and change that, but the minute I get a real Doctor Who TARDIS, I am gonna do that very thing and just tell everyone what difficulties are ahead. But Burnham's gonna sort out our

Peter Kinderman The government's gonna sort it out and we won't have to go down the... I thought it was-- It's just very poignant really, isn't it? That what you've got is a bunch of people in Japan and potentially in other countries who are, are feeling so miserable and desperate about the state of affairs that they're facing as they reach their older years that they're thinking about crime as the way to secure a less bad future. And I think it's just extremely sad. It genuinely does make me think... I mean, I've been to Japan, it's a nice country and, you know, it's quite a, you know, it's a very civilized country with what I would have thought would have been a very positive set of policies towards older people. And if that's happening in Japan, then I'm very worried about the rest of us, frankly. And it does make me think that, you know, again, the march towards industrialized capitalism hasn't necessarily served us terribly well

Hilary Jeffs Well, it's a very interesting thing because I watch anime sometimes when I have to with one of my children who's particularly into it. And there was one film that we watched, and it was, like, really horrific, but part of the story was a learning curve about the fact that someone's dad had gone to prison for killing someone accidentally in a car accident, and the shame that followed that family around, which was, you know, I'd led to believe was really part of the culture that it was really shameful to do that. So the very fact that they think that it's worth going through that shame and the societal, you know, kind of abreg- ugh, I can't speak. Going through all of that disapproval from society is difficult, isn't it? I mean, they really must be falling on some hard times.

Peter Kinderman Well, again, and, you know, we're, we're supposed to be talking more about human psychology than about politics, but it really does make me worry about, like I say, about selfishness and about capitalism and about pursuit of money and profit and about our failure to develop a collective society. Because we've got the Japan situation, which, I mean, okay, journalists, journalists like to tell a story, so, you know, you find a story, you tell a story. It might not reflect the truth in Japan. The Japanese ambassador might be a little bit annoyed about the way that their country is being portrayed, but it's a poignant story. We've also talked about... You and I have talked about assisted dying and some of the pressures on people who feel that they're a burden on their family. Well, that should, that should just simply not happen in a civilized society, and yet we talk about it as if, yeah, well, we know that many hundreds of thousands of old people do feel as if they're a burden on their family and do feel as if they would be better off dead, and we need to bring in legislation to protect them choosing to kill themselves to avoid that set of circumstances. That's pretty shameful on us as a, as a society. And old people in Japan committing crimes in order to go to jail because the alternative is that they don't have appropriate social care, that's pretty shameful too. I think we're, w- we haven't done br-... We're very, very good at making gadgets with screens that light up, and we're very good at packing people into aluminium tubes and flying them to other parts of the world. That we're good at. Looking after old people, bit rubbish

Hilary Jeffs Yeah, and we do need to sort this out actually, not just because we are careering towards that age faster than you can say Jack Robinson. However, it is just incumbent on a civilized society, and this is what shocked me, that apparently lots of children now are starting to shun their parents and to kick them out because they do a transference of wealth, I think, at quite an, a younger age rather than on death. And then these kids just k- kick their parents out, which, I mean, I find it quite horrible, and I can't imagine ever having not tried to be there for my mum or my dad and it was very different because they didn't have to live with me, and they didn't have illnesses that went on for a very long time. And I appreciate it's not easy, and when people are already struggling, I know it's hard. And sometimes people don't actually get on with their parents at all, and nor do they even feel that their parents deserve anything. So we have to give a shout-out for people who perhaps have not had very good parents, because there are occasions when there are legitimate reasons why people don't look up to their parents

Peter Kinderman I think we also have to give a shout-out to academic sociologists who are the people who tell us whether this is somebody down the road that I know whose mate had a, had a mother who did X versus there's a trend in society towards. And it might be that some bloke in Japan did tell a police officer that he'd nicked a car because he wanted to go to jail because he'd heard a rumor that they were giving out free soup or whatever. Or it might be a trend in Japan. And again, if I were sitting in Andy Burnham's chair, what I'd do is I'd say, "Right, where's the chief sociologist? Is this a trend or is it not? Give us the stats," rather than relying on anecdote

Hilary Jeffs Yeah, well, the stats are that the prison population has gone up 500% of people over the age of 60 in the last 20 years. So it is, you know, far outstripping the uplift in the population of that, of that age group. So it is actually quite a, an astounding, astounding trend. But there you go. That's what's happening. There are

Peter Kinderman to manage

Hilary Jeffs It is, but their prisons cost them something like the equivalent of 11 pounds a day compared to ours, nearly 150. So, you know, maybe they are thinking this is the way to do this. But Human Rights Watch do call out Japan because they are a country that do like to lock people up. They are jail happy. You know, your second offense, you might get locked up for just stealing a pepper pot for four years. You know, it, that is the way that they rock and roll there. And it's not really, I don't think... Well, obviously it's not working as a deterrent amongst older people, let's put it that way. 'cause they're enjoying their stay and the care that they're getting. But it's a sad indictment on their society, I would say. So Peter, that brings us to the end of our romp through the headlines for today. Can you give us a nugget to make us feel slightly better after some of the more difficult pandemic style op- pa-

Peter Kinderman well, I mean the two things. I mean, first of all, I mean, the tip to try is the counterpoint to the spotlight effect, which is if it wasn't you in the spotlight, what would you do? And the answer is you'd glance over, maybe you'd even have a chuckle, and then you'd get on with your day. So that's probably what's gonna happen. Bloke falls off his bike, there's a ripple of applause. It's amusing. W- was he particularly embarrassed by it? No, not really. It was just an incident in the day. On you go. So just take the perspective of what would you do if you're watching and you... It wouldn't be the most important thing in the world. You wouldn't particularly judge the person. It's just a thing and move on. I'm thinking about the pandemic and, of course, the advice is the same as always, wh- which is, well, what you gotta do is appraise the situation as you find it and make the best possible judgment, and that's what you do. So it would be follow sound medical advice, keep your eye on the news, don't drink bleach

Hilary Jeffs And with that, I say thank you very much again, and we'll see you next week