Now, I am the first to admit that I'm no Brain of Britain. My eyes cloud over with confused fog should someone attempt to explain the finer complexities of the internal combustion engine, there are menus on my digi box that will forever remain a mystery to me, and I have long maintained that I hit my academic peak when I passed the entrance exam to gain my place at private girls' school, aged 11.
I'm not however a complete numpty either. I did manage to stay the course at the private girls' school and left at the end of the 6th form with 8 GSCEs and 3 A-levels under my belt. I've run my own business since I was 19, I know the difference between there, they're and their, and I'm rather good at Sudoku. I've always worked in very customer facing environments and have met all sorts of people from all walks of life. I therefore believe that I am qualified enough to make the following statement, based on a lifetime's worth of observation....
Intelligence is no substitute for common sense.
Don't get me wrong – we need the intelligent people. They have done wonderful things for the world we live in today, giving us cars, computers, medicine, mobile phones, vacuum cleaners, electricity – in fact pretty much everything we have now come to rely upon to run our daily lives has been given to us by the extremely clever people.
But that doesn't mean for one second that I would trust of any of them to join the right end of a queue in Marks and Spencers.
We may have become reliant on all the time and labour saving inventions the boffins have given us, but the world actually functions on common sense. And my 30 odd years of observing the boffins and the non-boffins alike have led me to conclude that the super intelligent beings lack that very thing that allows the rest of us to just get on with stuff. It's evidently Common Sense or Super Intelligence – you don't seem to be able to have both.
My beloved and sadly departed Grandfather is a prime example of this. Gramps was an immensely clever man. He worked for the Met Office all his working life, remained the second in the world in his field of expertise up until he died aged 89, and was apparently the chap behind closed doors who ultimately had the final yay or nay on the Dam Busters Raid, as the potential success of that operation relied utterly on having the right weather conditions.
His study in the house we lived in was a paper avalanche disaster waiting to happen, and there were genuinely three shelves held up by nothing more the than the piles of books wedged underneath them – I can only presume that these books were never needed because, somehow, the mountains of paper on top of these shelves never once fell off or even slipped slightly. His filing system was worthy of miracle status all on its own.
But despite his brilliance in his job, and his architypal mad professor image, my Gramps was absolutely useless at life. He could spend hours trying to work with the wrong glasses on because he couldn't find the right ones which were actually perched on the top of his head, his cardigans were always buttoned up wrong and the concept of reverse parking was a reach too far for him as he absolutely would not steer while going backwards. But the greatest example of his lack of basic life skills comes from a very long and circular conversation I had with him when I was 10.
Both my mum and my grandmother had been out and variously done small bits of shopping for the other, resulting in them each owing the other some money. For arguments sake, let's say my mum owed £10, and my grandma owed £7.50.
For whatever reason, this became a topic of conversation between myself and Gramps, (I've no idea why) and I at some point said that as Mum owed Grandma more than Grandma owed her, all that actually needed to happen was that Mum needed to give Grandma £2.50.
My Gramps looked at me with a furrowed brow. 'Why?' he asked.
Being 10 and thinking that my Gramps was perhaps testing my maths skills, I proceeded to explain that as Mum owed £10, and Grandma owed £7.50, if Mum were to give Grandma the £10, my Grandma would immediately give her back £7.50 of it, thus leaving her with only £2.50. It would therefore be quicker and simpler for my mum just to give her the £2.50 and thus save passing pieces of money needlessly back and forth between them.
I smiled happily, knowing that I was right, and looked at my Gramps expectantly, awaiting praise. And my heart sank as I realised that he hadn't been testing my maths skills at all. He genuinely couldn't see the sense or logic in my mum only handing over £2.50. In his mind, mum owed £10, and Grandma owed £7.50. Therefore they should each hand over £10 and £7.50 respectively. At no point should anyone be handing over £2.50.
If this conversation had happened with the adult me, I would have simply huffed, smiled and given up, knowing that I would never win. But, being 10, it seemed like a good idea to try and convince Gramps of my superior logic. After about 45 minutes the inevitable result was that Gramps's thinking had not been changed and I left the room in a strop.
And I believe later that day my mum gave my grandma £2.50.
Having had the honour of growing up in very close proximity to one of the intelligencia elite, it could be argued that I should be better placed to handle the often baffling and seemingly senseless behaviour of the Super Clevers. But no. Common sense it seems, is actually a curse in its own right. Having lots of it, contrary to it making your life simpler and more logical, actually just provides an endless source of frustration as you are forced to watch those that lack it trying to function without it.
My son is destined to be one of the Super Clevers. Probably in something like 3D mapping. His 3D imagination and model building skills are light years beyond his age. He's also the image of my Gramps in every way, even down to the way he stands. But more than anything else, I know he's going to be a boffin because he has absolutely no common sense at all. Ask him to help take out the recycling, he will gladly assist. But rather than doing the logical thing of putting the smaller things inside the larger things and carrying them all out together, he will pick up one thing with one hand, and one thing with the other, and take just those two things out. Then he will come back and do the same thing again... for the next 20 minutes. He seems to think the best place to stand when everyone is making their breakfast is in front of the fridge door, the best place to put his shoes on is in the middle of the narrowist and busiest corridor in our house, that tall, full glasses of water should be moved to right in front of you when you need to lean over the table to reach something else, and that the optimum place to build the latest amazingly detailed model is in the doorway to the front room.
I'm very proud of my clever boy, and I can't wait to find out what amazing things he will bring to the world, but I look at him sometimes and can't help but wonder how he will ever survive on his own in the world when it's taken us 5 years just to get him to understand that the phrase 'time to go' also means 'You need to put your shoes on. And your coat. And you need to pick up your bag... which needs to have stuff in it.'
But even the best of us Common Sensers have the odd duff day, the most noticeable symptom being when you hear yourself apologising to the shop lady who has just shown you where the extremely obvious thing you were looking for was with the phrase 'Oops! Couldn't see it for looking!'
I recently witnessed just that when a well dressed lady I seemed destined to follow (she was going everywhere I was going – nothing sinister!) was evidently having a bit of bad day. After walking past the same door three or four times, she finally went in and snapped at the staff inside that they'd have been much easier to find if they'd had something outside to tell people where they were. I couldn't help smiling when I heard one of them reply 'Do you mean something like the big sign on the wall by the door, and the two signs actually on the door?'
The lady understandably became a little sheepish at this point as I think most of us would, but carried on about her business. A little while later I caught up with her again as she held up a long queue of shoppers by refusing to move out of the way of the till while putting her change into her purse. But as someone who walks with the aid of a crutch, I can understand that it's not always that easy to juggle your open purse, a hand full of change and an arm full of shopping bags and walk at the same time.
But my empathy for her started to wane when I noticed that she'd stopped in the shop doorway in order to repack her bags, totally blocking the way for other people wanting either to enter or leave the shop.
I crossed paths with her again at my last stop which happened to be a coffee shop. She'd evidently met a friend and they had sat themselves, just the two of them mind, at a table for four when there were plenty of tables for two available. They'd sat on the two outside chairs, so they could have put all their bags on the two empty inside chairs, but instead, they had dumped all their bags on the floor, where they were spilling out and blocking the pathway around the tables. A mum came in with a buggy and couldn't get past them. When they eventually noticed, they picked the offending bags up to let her pass, and then put them back down exactly where they had been.
This last incident had my suspicions raised, but I doubted that they would ever be confirmed. But luck was on my side. While queuing, I was near enough to them to be able to hear snippets of their conversation. It seemed they were talking about where they had met. At University. At Cambridge.
The well dressed lady was a retired Cambridge Don.
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