October 2019

I’m wondering where this year has got to: it seems to have galloped past, and already commercially minded people are telling us that there are only 13 weeks to Christmas. Rather too soon to be thinking about it, in my view. For here we are in the Greek autumn and in golden October. The leaves are turning colour, the figs are bursting on the trees, and the pomegranates are getting redder and plumper by the minute.

But the temperatures are more like summer than autumn, being in the high 20s and low 30s. Summer itself seems reluctant to end, and people are still swimming. So far this part of the world has not exhibited too much in the way of climate change, but I suppose it is only a matter of time…

The topic itself seems to be very divisive, and I, for one, am very tired of hearing middle-aged men criticising Greta Thunberg, often in the cruellest way. The Australian Prime Minister has contented himself, at least as far as I know, by merely saying that he does not want Australian children to be anxious about climate change. (He does not seem to worry about the anxiety levels of refugee children.)

I’ve just written a piece about anxiety.

OUR POOR NERVES

The problem of anxiety is back in the news, but it’s never been away, really. Our remote ancestors must have had butterflies in their tummies when they peeped out of their caves and saw hungry sabre-toothed tigers or bears sniffing around, so that anxiety, the need to be cautious and to avoid risk, was a necessary evolutionary development. Early humans had to choose between fight or flight, and we later ones are still making that choice, albeit in different circumstances. In modern life, I have often thought, an edge of anxiety is desirable; otherwise, we’d be tempted to flop around like the average amoeba.

Babies are born anxious: where is my mother/food supply? Separation anxiety can be a real problem, as any mother of toddlers ruefully learns. And there are a great many forms of anxiety, often labelled ‘nerves’ in bygone eras. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, Mrs Bennet accuses her husband of having no compassion for her ‘poor nerves.’ These days, Google Anxiety, and brace yourself for 193,000,000 entries.

It is probably true that anxious parents tend to produce anxious children, and if those children have vivid imaginations the jittery tendency is exacerbated. I was a nervy child, and definitely prey to all sorts of imagined fears and dreads, especially at bedtime. My mother, driven quietly mad, eventually turned to the Good Book for help, and so I made the acquaintance of Psalm 91: I would drop off, at least occasionally, to the sound of her reading; verse 4 is clearly marked in my 60-year-old Bible. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler. I was encouraged not to fear the terror by night, or the arrow that flew by day, but there will still many times when I did.

Every generation has its specific anxiety, it seems to me. My parents were children in the era of the Great Depression: they themselves were always fed and clothed, but they saw other children go barefoot to school, and in their different parts of Victoria they always took two cut lunches to school: their own, and one that was left in the school office for children who had been unable to bring a lunch. They knew of women who searched garbage cans for vegetable peelings that they could take home and boil. My maternal grandmother, untrained for any occupation, ran a boarding-house, the only option for a widow and mother of three: she was fortunate in that her father owned a dwelling big enough for the purpose. My paternal grandfather also had three children, and had his salary cut at least once during those troubled years. These people certainly experienced anxiety, and inevitably transmitted it to their offspring.

My generation was anxious, too, growing up as we did during the Cold War and in the shadow of The Bomb. I lay awake, picturing a powerful finger on the crucial button, and I know I had many companions in insomnia. My widowed grandmother was of an evangelical turn, and so did not ease my worries at all, forecasting, as she regularly did, the end of the world. ‘The olive groves are flourishing in Jerusalem,’ she would say. ‘A sure sign.’ It seemed to me even then that anxiety cannot be avoided; what is needed is the ability to cope with it.

The current generation of growing children is mightily concerned with the pressing matter of climate change; it is significant that Greta Thunberg has motivated millions to take strike action, despite being little more than a child herself. She has, however, to endure blame and denigration from powerful climate change deniers: she does so stoically, and with the confidence that she has touched a chord in people of all ages who are concerned about the fate of the planet. But now the Australian Prime Minister has expressed his concern that Australian children are being exposed to ‘needless anxiety.’ He should think carefully about the use of that word needless, and to ask himself what action he is taking to lessen that anxiety. 

Australian children, like children around the world, are justifiably anxious, but they are also becoming very aware of the world’s environmental problems. And are trying to tackle them.

As are Greek children, I should add.