Have you ever played the handshake game?
This is a bit like the “six degrees of separation” notion –
that everyone is connected to everyone else in the world because each person is
acquainted or connected with a certain number of other people, who in turn have
their set of acquaintances, etc, etc, and that by the time you get to the sixth
set down the line you have reached just about every human being on the planet.
Well, that’s as maybe, and it must be extremely difficult to
prove the point. However, the handshake game is a lot simpler and easier to
verify.
The idea is to think of one person with whom you have shaken
hands and then make an educated guess as to other people with whom that person
will have shaken hands at some time prior to your encounter. You can then say
“I shook the hand that shook the hand of …” and the more famous or exalted that
person was, the better!
It’s a blatant exercise in one-upmanship and name dropping,
but harmless enough!
I offer as my “hand” that of David Owen, who was the UK’s
Foreign Secretary from 1977 to 1979, and had been a health minster before then.
He was first elected to the House of Commons in 1966, having qualified as a
doctor in 1962. As Lord Owen, he is now an active member of the House of Lords.
I met David Owen in September 1977, when he had been Foreign
Secretary for about seven months. I was on a short assignment in Moscow at the
time, working in the Cultural Section of the British Embassy, and he passed
through, shaking lots of hands including mine, when he visited the Embassy during a visit to Moscow to discuss matters with the government of what was then the
Soviet Union. As I recall, his handshake was of the limp variety!
The question then arises of whose hands David Owen might
have shaken prior to shaking mine? – handshakes that happened afterwards cannot
count in this game! He would certainly have shaken the hands of the prime
ministers that he served during his time in office, namely Harold Wilson and
James Callaghan, and royalty including HM The Queen.
The fascination comes in speculating over which world
leaders he might have met, and shaken hands with, during that seven months. Did
he meet Leonid Brezhnev while he was in the Soviet Union, or were his contacts
limited to officials in the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Moscow? The latter is
more likely.
If he did shake hands with world leaders, they could have
included US President Jimmy Carter, Israeli Prime Minister Yitshak Rabin or
India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. However, there is no way of being sure,
and this is – after all – only a game that is not to be taken too seriously!
One might also speculate, given David Owen’s former medical
profession and training, that the hand in question might have been in places
that it is better not to think about too closely!
I read about the handshake game in the London Times, where
an incident was recalled in which three youngish Members of Parliament had wondered
about whose hands had shaken those of well-known people that they had met. One
put forward a link to Mao Zedong and another was sure that he had shaken a hand
that had shaken that of Joseph Stalin. However, the former athlete Sebastian
Coe (who was at one time an MP) said that he had once met Jesse Owens, the
black athlete who had embarrassed the Nazis at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by
winning four gold medals and who was snubbed by Adolf Hitler. A non-handshake
with Hitler was reckoned by the other two MPs to win hands down over their own
contributions to the game!
(Although, for the sake of accuracy, it should be pointed
out that Owens once said that Hitler did shake his hand in a more private
environment and that it was his own President – F D Roosevelt – who refused to
acknowledge his achievement personally)
© John Welford
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