Theodore Dalrymple An Englishman's Home Is His Car Park: Slovenliness as a Way of Life

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In this talk, Theodore Dalrymple gives an account of his short visit to the cathedral city of Worcester. In a few days, he saw how a once charming small city had degenerated by neglect within the space of a few years, thanks to a series of foolish, incompetent, short-sighted and Philistine planning decisions by the city council, and a number of social and cultural changes.
He went to the city because his wife had been called to jury service, and he and his wife decided to stay for a few days because it was too far for her to commute daily. He attended court and witnessed there both the good and the bad of the English legal system. He analysed the appalling intellectual corruption of the myriad, supposedly charitable, but in reality, publicly funded, organisations claiming to assist criminals in leading a non-criminal life a corruption all too emblematic, alas, of our national life.
Charmed by the local museum, he was less charmed by the debased commercialism and the scenes he witnessed on the streets and the complete absence of signs of attempts at improvement. Exploited deliverers of food, drunks on the street, an abandoned sleeping bag and cardboard habitation at the entrance to the railway station that no one bothered to clear away, giving the impression of complete municipal apathy all the pathologies that we have come to expect in our big cities have now percolated downwards to cathedral cities.
At the end of his stay, falling suddenly ill, he had an absurd and hilarious encounter with our beloved National Health Service, when it took four identical algorithms employed by four different branches of the service to send one ambulance. Eventually he was rushed through the streets of the city to the hospital, lights flashing and sirens blaring, only to wait for three and a half hours in a traffic jam of ambulances outside the hospital. Himself a doctor, he was both appalled and amused by the absurdity of the episode.

If there is one word that, in Dr Dalrymples opinion, can sum up modern English life, it is slovenliness.
Dr Theodore Dalrymple is a retired doctor and psychiatrist who spent much of his career working in inner-city hospitals and prisons. Drawing on these experiences, he has become one of Britains most incisive social commentators, renowned for his sharp critiques of crime, poverty, and cultural decline. A prolific essayist and columnist for The Spectator, City Journal, and other publications, his books include Life at the Bottom, Our Culture, Whats Left of It, and Spoilt Rotten.
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