“The more money you earn, the more you lose a sense of its value. You get used to eating caviar, and at some point, it begins to taste as ordinary as anything else.”
Tennis champion Boris Becker has enjoyed a dream life, as he readily admits. The only child of an architect, he was well educated and, in typical German fashion, was brought up to take hard work and discipline as simply the way life ought to be lived. At 16 he was introduced to tennis and, despite his mother’s wish for him to take up medicine, he took a two-year sabbatical from school to play his game, promising that if he didn’t succeed he would go back to his studies. At 17 he won Wimbledon, the youngest tennis player ever to win that most coveted of prizes.
That of course led him to become a very rich man, with enough money to retire from tennis in 1999 – while still a young person − and concentrate on his property business and car dealership chain. But the principles inculcated in him during his upbringing have not left him. He does not spend money uselessly and neither does he buy things he does not like simply to keep up with the Joneses. In fact, he lives quite simply and, because his business forces him to be away from home for long stretches, his idea of pleasure is spending time with his family.
Why am I recounting all this? Because while I have never been able to resist a challenge, and while my brain keeps constantly dreaming up new ventures that have taken me from being an ordinary GP to the person I am now (and that via a lot of adventures that have not always proved successful), I cannot but feel that far too many people, whose every breath impacts on the welfare of our society, have lost their connection with life and have come to believe – as Becker said − that caviar is an ordinary meal.
Becker may have kept his cool but we have only to look at football stars to realise what too much caviar can do to you. Arsene Wenger, the coach of a club I do not support, but who nevertheless is a coach to admire, has warned players that by being faithful to one club, they would go further as players and as people than by letting their agents keep on enticing them with endless transfers and the money they bring. In fact he quoted the success of Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Frank Lampard with their respective clubs as an example to follow.
What was Arsene saying? “Our people are our most important asset.” You’ve heard these words many times, if you work in an organisation. Yet how many organisations – the government included − act as if they really believe these words? Not many. These words are the clear expression of a value, and values are visible through the actions people take, not their talk. What value drives people to cling to the physical trappings of power, status, and inequality such as executive parking places and offices that grow larger by a foot with every promotion? What value do mission statements have when they are barely worth the paper they are written on, the frame they are enclosed in and the nail from which they hang?
We are too deeply rooted in southern Mediterranean culture to resist doing things for their image rather than for their substance; and this despite the fact that time after time this proves to be a short-lived advantage and more so in an age of increasing education and electronic communication. Additionally, we live in the age of spin and have seen what constant use of spin did to Tony Blair! But reading the writing on the wall has never proved to be easy. In fact, history has shown us that it is one of the most difficult signs to decipher.
At present the papers are full of the voices of dissenting MPs and ex-MPs. It is not my business to justify or condemn. Politics is not a simple game to play and the size of our island home makes it even more difficult, as family networks and other relationships make it far from easy to take unbiased and truly independent decisions. But while everything changes, and indeed has to change to deal with new environments, principles ought to remain the same. As a doctor, I have had to take on board not only advances in medicine and the changes to a doctor’s working life but also the values that our society is in the process of adopting. But my commitment to care for my patients, to do the best I can for their welfare, to serve life not to destroy it, has not changed; it cannot change, because if it does then I will no longer be able to call myself a doctor and I may as well board up my surgery door.
When caviar begins to taste as ordinary as everything else, then the loss is more of one’s palate. It is humanity that is being sacrificed.