Three rather different anniversaries

Not unnaturally, the press today has been full of the 40th anniversary of the moon landings. I remember them well; the geeky nine-year-old Collard hoovering up every detail and simply taking over the lesson from the elderly primary teacher when she tried to raise the subject. And then so much disappointment, when all that heroic effort didn’t seem to be leading anywhere except to more and spiffier military technology (though I do remember that non-stick pans came into it somewhere, and I don’t mind those).

Hardly a mention (outside Germany) of the concurrent 65th anniversary of the assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944. Under the circumstances that was hardly less heroic, although it failed. (I don’t normally have much time for suicide bombers: but if Stauffenberg had stayed in the bunker and made sure no one moved his briefcase, he’d have slotted Hitler while only shortening his own life by twelve hours.)

I respect the Germans’ desire to celebrate a Resistance hero whom all can agree upon, though I can’t help reflecting that there were others who didn’t need eleven and a half years to discover that the Führer was a nasty piece of work. As one of Tiberius’ victims in I, Claudius said, “You remind me that mankind needs its sense of smell”. One of my favourite German authors, Jochen Klepper, tried as a loyal German to play along, stay in Germany and sit it out, until he realised that he was not going to succeed in saving his Jewish wife and stepdaughter from the gas chambers: and so all three committed suicide. It is a fatal weakness of conservatism, which is not of course to deny that some on the Left have behaved no better.

And lastly: 75 years since we last beat the Aussies at Lord’s. Now that performance by the injury-ravaged Freddie Flintoff is a piece of heroism we can all identify with.