Not everyone is “ambitious”. Even those that are fall into two distinct categories. The first group we’ll call the “positively” ambitious. If you ask them what they would like to do they will tell you (in astonishing detail)Â and outline their plan to get there. They say things like “I want to be Lord Chancellor” or “I want my own advertising agency”; or “One day I’ll be a McDonalds Team Leader”; or “Since you are going to die anyway Mr Bond, let me explain to you exactly how I will force the governments of the West to tremble BWAHAHAHAHAHA”.
I am in the second group: the negatively ambitious. This is an even more loathsome group than the first (though we are less likely to be found stroking a long-haired cat with a black vinyl glove). We NA’s have no idea what we want to do but are haunted by a vague sense that we should be achieving something more and when our PA friends outline their plans to steal atomic warheads and blackmail the British Secret Service into giving them the power they crave, we go quiet and think “Damn, I wish I’d thought of that. Now I’m going to get to be his dorky sidekick at best”.
To sum it up in a phrase: “We’ve no idea where we want to go but we are terrified we are getting left behind”.
I have a number of astonishingly PA friends. Some of them have even begun to get where they have always planned to go. This should make them very very happy  and dammit some of them really are very very happy. Why isn’t God smiting these people? Others, however, are suffering.
Earlier this week P and I found ourselves sat in a dining room in the House of Commons trying to comfort a Member of Parliament who was nursing a broken heart. Now there was nothing unusual about the act itself – we deployed the standard technique we have honed to perfection: tell the truth emphatically while holding eye contact: “He’s an idiot for leaving you”; “I know he has had second, third and fourth thoughts”. Admittedly Penny is better at it and can veer from the truth when humanity demands it: “He’s not seeing anyone so far as I know”. I can be less fleet of foot: “Yes he is love, some veternarian he met while fencing … ARGH, excuse me, someone seems to be crushing my foot with a dress heel”.
What was flat-out surreal was the environment in which all this was happening. Our well-meant platitudes were delivered whilst a discreet and respectful waiter brought me a “heart-healthy” thai beef salad and the Thames ebbed past beneath the leaded windows. On the walls hallucinogenic heraldic wallpaper that only the Victorians could have conceived tugged my retinas back and forth giving me motion sickness. At the next table the Chief Secretary to the Treasury was entertaining a group of sycophants with witticisms about the Finance Bill and MPs all about us were quietly enjoying the thought that this was the last day of the Parliamentary term and they could get back to stuffing drug-soaked oranges in their mouths whilst auto-asphyxiating ; fancying pigeons or whatever else it is they like to do with their time off.
No-one is quite sure what caused the break up. It could have been the loneliness he endured when she was an MEP in Brussels. It could have been that she ran for Parliament when he had, in rather 17th century style, instructed her not to. It could have been the fear that he would end up as Denis Thatcher rather than Lord Chief Justice. Who knows? I love them both and it is heart-breaking to see either one unhappy. Between them they had greater and more specific ambitions than anyone (indeed any 100 people) I know and that ultimately seems to have been the death of the relationship.
We walked out past the stonework and tiles of the Central Lobby and, waving to the armed police with a “put the safety back on” friendliness, we put Westminster Abbey behind us and went searching for the car. Penny patted my arm and said “you’re not so bad” which I took to mean “sometimes it is good to be married to a man whose principal ambition is to find a really good dairy-free cake”.
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