The Daily Novel

David McKie, aged 71, long-standing columnist of The Guardian, is leading a revolt of the Aged. On 11 September G2 is going to be edited by a team of Oldies. Great idea. It is absolutely true that The Guardian, in its determination to attract new young readers, has got carried away. There are just too many bright young things writing the columns these days, even though some of them are ex-students from my stable, City University. But I am not sure that I am going to volunteer to spend the day of 11 September sitting around the table with a bunch of oldies, even though it only takes me 15 minutes on my scooter to get to Farringdon Road.

I’ll tell you why.

When I was supposed to be planning my retirement I knew I did not want to spend the years after 65 chatting to the other oldies in my neighbourhood, even though some of them have many interesting things to say. So I conceived the idea of starting a new undergraduate degree, Journalism and Contemporary History early one morning when I was walking my dog, Larkin, over Hampstead Heath.

There was one reality problem in implementing this undoubtedly grandiose idea. City University did not have a history department. So a few weeks later I scooted down to the Mile End Road one rainy Friday afternoon, to see Peter Hennessy, Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London, but also a former journalist. It was love at first sight. We both agreed that a deep knowledge of contemporary history would be enormously useful for would-be serious journalists. Before we could do anything we had to await the return of Peter’s head of department, John Ramsden. John is a career academic, a bit sceptical about much of the stuff he reads written by journalists, and his political sympathies are somewhat to the right of those of Peter and myself. His gets his kicks and his academic eminence from writing books about Winston Churchill.

(That’s one of the reasons I write so much about Churchill myself because whenever I have lunch with John, Winston joins us at the table.)

But I digress, as old men sometimes do.

We were aware that we were all a bit long in the tooth to be starting something for eighteen olds so John and Peter decided to give the youngest member of their staff, John Ellison, the task of running it in the first year. It was a brilliant idea. Not only did John immediately bring his own particular brand of enthusiasm to the team but he confessed, that as a young man, shortly before he got seduced by academia, he had seriously considered going into the journalism trade. And talking to John helped me to adjust my teaching wavelength to 18 year olds.

Up to the time the JCH started the whole of my teaching career had been spent in classes with post-graduate and mature students (my oldest ever student was an American Professor aged 64 who decided he would learn something new by sitting in a class in London, where he had been as a young man. Then he was helping to fight the Nazis, and no doubt getting up to a bit of hanky panky with the young women, most of whom were in love with anything wearing an American uniform and bearing gifts of fags and chewing gum).

I decided to go the whole hog and commit myself to teaching the first years.

It was the best decision I made about retirement. Of course, I had difficulty with the attention span of some the students. But you cannot be a serious journalist if you have a short attention span. My job was not to pander to the demands of the customers but to seek to get them to learn, what my colleagues and I had decided they needed to learn, in order to be a good journalist.

And, believe it not, I am still doing this with some of these blogs. In my head I am sometimes writing for 18-year-olds and some of my blogs look distinctly like a bastardised blogging version of contemporary history.

So that’s why I still don’t want to spend too much time with old folks. Like The Guardian I want some young readers. And I hope as soon as they hear of its existence some of next year’s 18 year olds will be posting a few comments to the blogs. Who knows, if their attention span is long enough, they might even get the hang of my weird sense of humour.