It’s good to admit your own ignorance sometimes

Having failed to complete my secondary education – I walked out the gates of Eltham High at the age of 15 – I’ll confess I know very little about anything. Or everything.

I confess to blissful ignorance on everything from A to Z. From accountancy, if you like, to zoology and all the alphabet in between. Picture: istock

Medical specialists focus on a single illness, area or procedure. Not for them the broad brush of the jack-of-all-trades GP. But they will, with surgical precision, give you an artificial hip, a pacemaker or an organ transplant. Practice making perfect.

Academics are similar: they know a lot about a little. I know their type well, having interviewed tens of thousands of professors over the decades. No subject is too arcane or esoteric to attract the attention of some ardent scholar. The mysteries of fungi, for example, or the potential of pyrolysis. This latter topic was the subject of my wife’s PhD.

Ditto for clever contestants on Mastermind or Hard Quiz who present themselves as authorities on the oddest things. The history of the zipper, for example, or the oeuvre of a deservedly forgotten rock group like the Fungus Four or the Pyrolysis Five. Having flaunted their forensic skills, these people tend to flounder when the quizzing turns to general knowledge – once again demonstrating my thesis about those who know a lot about a little versus knowing a little about a lot.

Having failed to complete my secondary education – I walked out the gates of Eltham High at the age of 15 – I belong to another group. Those who know very little about anything. Or everything. Not claiming to be one of those poshly named autodidacts, I confess to blissful ignorance on everything from A to Z. From accountancy, if you like, to zoology and all the alphabet in between. While mighty brains teeter on the brink of discovering the Theory of Everything, I can claim to have formulated the Theory of Nothing. (And when it comes to The Getting of Wisdom, that’s the title of a fillum I produced in 1977, not some boast of achievement.)

Sport. That’s a topic of which I know nothing and care naught. Football, horse racing and boxing (if such brutalities can be considered sports) leave me colder than Torvill and Dean. Even the Olympics fails to ignite my cauldron – beyond mild amusement in controversial opening ceremonies.

Pop music, post-Crosby and Sinatra, falls on deaf ears. I’ll confess to liking the Beatles, but pass on the Stones. And when it comes to art, things get blurry after that Dutchman Rembrandt and Streeton of our Heidelberg School. Born, as it happens, not far from my alma mater Eltham High School.

I confess to not having watched Game of Thrones, the sequels and prequels of Star Wars and the endless superheroes in the Marvel Universe. And I proudly attest to not keeping up with the Kardashians.

Moreover, my main reason for being a Republican is that I refuse to keep up with the royal family – the Windsors being an endless version of Antiques Roadshow.

I wish I knew a little about a lot or a lot about a little – or better still, both. While the phony Marvel Universe can eff off, I’d like to be astronomically literate about the actual universe. You know, the one out there with billions of galaxies that Star Trek explores. But I’ve left that a bit late.

(Wistful post scriptum. A wise person once said that wisdom was knowing what you don’t know. In that case, I may have a little).