IPH and Mensa
When I worked at ICL in Windsor, it was my manager there, Peter Bloxsom, who suggested to me that I apply to join Mensa. I took the test in May or June 1976 and was invited to join, but I was about to emigrate so they suggested I join Mensa-France, which I duly did. Mensa didn’t mean much in Stuttgart; I never contacted an Mensan while there, and though I met a few Mensans in Virginia I made other friends there to spend time with. It was when I was back in England that I began going to a few meetings, and making Mensan friends. Then in 2000 (after 17 years in my present house) I volunteered to help out with editing (I meant: putting the final copy together on the computer) the south east England regional newsletter, a monthly thing with eight A5 pages, I was invited to become its Editor, which meant producing the entire contents. I did this for five years (covering issues June 2000 to June 2005 inclusive, with a few single months off now and then when I had a deputy and she produced the issue instead). I kept at this because I quite like a challenge, and as a professional writer I had never found writing or indeed word processing and producing camera copy for printing difficult.
I made it clear when I began that it was up to people (there are well over 4000 members in the region) to supply me with news stories about past or planned events and other contributions, and that my sole policy would be that I wouldn’t go to press with empty pages. I then waited for input, and when I reached deadline without enough from them, I would just write articles or other items (quizzes, poems, puzzles) to fill the empty space. Somebody provided me a crossword every month, for which a prize was given starting when I started; and one or two other pages were filled with Mensa social “business” information. The funny part was that some readers would tell me they liked my articles more, at the same time as others, the Mensa party animals who thought that Mensa was there to hold events for people to attend (although only about 10 per cent of members ever went to any events at all) insisted the newsletter should be full of regional news — which of course it shoud have been in theory. I just pointed to my editorial policy statement: you send me copy, I’ll put it in. If you don’t, I won’t print empty pages. Some of them never really grasped this despite all their supposed intelligence. When I retired from that I offered to continue to “edit” the crossword page and handle the postal entries and prizewinner drawing; I still do that.
Being in Mensa is a funny thing. Most people’s reaction is “surely it is an elitist idea, isn’t it?" And they always say it as though they are the first person to whom that idea can ever have occurred, and that I can’t possibly have ever heard it before. Well, it isn’t; it would be if Mensa had political aims, but it doesn’t. It’s a social network for people at the top extreme of the IQ range, but out of the 60 million people in the UK (so I gather) 2 per cent is 1,200,000 people are eligible to join and less than 50,000 have ever been members at the same time so they aren’t exactly ganging up on everybody else. The main benefit for people like me is that other Mensans are far less likely to say things like “what’s the matter with you? Did you swallow a dictionary this morning?" in that nasty tone that low-brow anti-intellectual people tend to use if one uses more than one long word that they don’t know in conversation. For other Mensans, though not so much for me, and especially for many older women who join, it is confirmation that they are very highly intelligent, and they can prove this to their menfolk. Many suffered decades where their fathers, brothers, then husbands and sons said “you don’t/wouldn’t understand” and other things -- continually putting them down. Now, they can look them in the eye and say “No, I am a person of very high intelligence; I’m a member of Mensa!" I am all for that.
Now that I have retired from the computer industry and don’t regularly meet other pretty clever people through work, Mensa is a good way to know and keep in touch with people who share my more intellectual interests such as languages, puzzles and ideas generally. But having a Mensa IQ doesn’t guarantee that a person will not say and do stupid things; far from it. Plenty of them say or do — and write — stupid things all the time. Look at the letter column in British Mensa magazine. One reason I am putting writing stuff on this website is that I can prepare explanations of my points of view on various things once and for all and then, faced with anyone who’d like to know my explanation of my views on anything, a link will suffice. It is mainly Mensans, of all the people whom I encounter, who think about some of the questions I am interested in. This is because usually I don’t move in other circles where I;d meet non-Mensans who think about them. If I worked in a university or an intellectual publishing house I might; but I don’t.
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