Vindicated!

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round: they all laughed when Edison recorded sound. George and Ira Gershwin continued their hymn in praise of obsessives with congratulations to "Wilbur and his brother" - the two Wrights who "said that man could fly" - and Marconi who, despite the doubters, refused to believe that "wireless was a phoney". They were all men with a single idea in their heads whose lives were dominated by one objective. And they changed the world.

Cliff Bradshaw, the 69-yearold retired electrician, will not be able to claim any such grand results for his discovery of a 4,000-year-old Bronze Age gold cup. But his find is also a triumph for invincible determination - the culmination of the years in which he searched for buried treasure with his metal detector. It is easy to imagine how his friends and neighbours laughed each morning as he set off on his search. But no doubt today he remembers the last line of the Gershwins' song about men with more famous manias. "Ho! Ho! Ho! Who's got the last laugh now?" The answer is Cliff Bradshaw with a claim on a quarter of a million pounds of treasure trove.

Mr Bradshaw's discovery is a vindication of the bees which buzz in the bonnets of all those men and women who are accused of wasting their time on hopeless projects. In this cruel world we are likely only to remember those who made an unlikely breakthrough.

Had the Wright brothers not made their aeroplane fly they would have remained no more than owners of a bicycle factory in Dayton, Ohio, who had a crazy notion about men possessing the power of birds. And if Edward Jenner had not developed the vaccine which eliminated smallpox he would be remembered (if at all) as the pathetic doctor who wasted his life - and caused a good deal of human suffering - in pursuit of a formula which all his medical contemporaries knew could not be found.

For every successful Wright and Jenner there have to be thousands of failed engineers and physicians. Without the multitudes of men and women whose metal detectors tick in vain, Cliff Bradshaw would not have found what looks like a replica of the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail is the perfect example of the pointless obsession which, by some quirk of human psychology, attracts nothing but credit to those it dominates. Joseph of Arimathea did not bring to England the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper. Yet King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table spent most of their lives looking for it in and around Camelot. Sir Galahad searched with the manic determination of a stamp collector who has mislaid his "penny black". Nobody called him a nerd. It all goes to prove that times, and values, change. In an age of diminished attention spans - when some of our children can only concentrate for as long as it takes to change a television channel - we crudely undervalue the men and women who devote all their time and enthusiasm to the pursuit of a single infatuation. The train-spotters, the stamp collectors and the football statisticians who cannot only remember who won the Cup in 1935 but can name both teams which played in the Final and the players who scored the goals are dismissed as "anoraks" and described by the 21st century'stwo most damning adjectives - sad and boring. We ought to admire their persistence, their devotion and indomitable determination. They are true "amateurs" - men and women motivated purely by love.

It is of course possible to be obsessed by the wrong things. There are women whose whole lives (and complete bank balances) are devoted to plastic surgery, and there are men whose compulsive ambition is to have their entire bodies covered in lurid tattoos. Nobody can pretend that a day spent without the removal of a double chin or the etching of a loving message on the buttock is a day wasted. But most of the consuming pastimes are at worst harmless. And trivial pursuits have a habit of suddenly becoming important.

In 1940 it was the weekend sailors of England - who had for years infuriated their wives and families by spending all their leisure time messing about in boats - who took their little ships to Dunkirk and brought the British army home. Two hundred years earlier in the United States, Benjamin Franklin had astonished his admirers by spending what they regarded as useless hours flying kites. It was through his kite flying that he made his discoveries about the properties and uses of electricity.

I freely confess to having two ruling passions, neither of which is likely to save the nation in time of war nor lead to a major scientific discovery. One is my dog - who must be walked every morning and have his teeth cleaned every night - and the other is the Sheffield Wednesday Football Club, which has both entranced and disappointed me for more than half a century. My enthusiasm for both Buster and the Owls is wholly immoderate. But then I am an immoderate sort of person. When I was a politician I was manically political. Now that I am a writer, writing is a fixation. My guess is that " twitchers" in the Foreign Office - bird-watching being a particular preoccupation of diplomats - negotiate with foreign governments with the same determination that they crawl through the swamp lands of East Anglia in the hope of seeing the lesser crested grebe. The truth is, you are either keen on everything you do or keen on nothing at all. The anoraks and the nerds deserve the praise of everyone who despises the halfhearted. More power to their metal detectors, binoculars and notebooks.