A steaming day with record beating temperatures. We walked, fortunately, down scrunching tracks that bisect the New Forest. Moses dived into every pool he saw. I met an aged man who, to my irritation, began the old boast: “I’ll bet you can’t tell how old I am?” Nonsense! I am always tempted to answer “104!” But I hadn’t the heart

I nearly told him he was younger than David Dimbleby and the Queen, and Dame(s) Maggie Smith, Judy Dench, Eileen Atkins and John Humphries and what was his problem? But then we
thought, what is the point?

Road Awareness

The only cars I can tolerate at the moment are car crushers!

Heroes and villains

Eighteen months ago I persuaded past foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind and past chief of the general staff General Lord Richards to lead a committee (Commonwealth Veterans Review Committee) that would campaign for an increase in aid for some 8,500 aged veterans who served The Crown when we had an empire and who today live in countries where their is no NHS or welfare.
Please see the film “The Forgotten Legion” on our site www.zane.uk.com

Some 600 live in Zimbabwe.

To cut a long story short, backed by the committee (Lord Richards, Sir John McColl, Charles Byrne, Robert Robson, Martin Rutledge, David Murray), Chris Warren of RCEL (the charity that looks after these people) and ZANE’s Camilla John did a great deal of work. We made an application to HMG’s DfID and some weeks ago we met with the Secretary of State Penny Mordaunt who agreed to create a special scheme to fund the whole exercise. My heroes are all those who worked tirelessly to get the final result.

My villains are those politicians and civil servants who have beefed up the Data Protection Act to make fund raising a costly misery for small charities. The bigger charities can afford rooms full of file pushers but the smaller ones like ZANE stagger under the burden. The trouble is that rules never succeed in stopping the cowboys. They just add costs for the good guys! I reckon that such are today’s regulations that it is more or less impossible to start a new charity today.

Take a Risk!

The spirit of risk-taking is on life support. As a small example, but representative of a trend, consider this. Two of our friends’ children were to join the army but instead decided to go straight into the city. It seems to me they have had no opportunity to walk on the wild side but have instead opted for a life of moneymaking, the delights of Internet dating and the safety of an office.

Rough Living

Of course, previous generations had greater opportunities for risky adventures than today. In my youth, wars involved boots on the ground and rough living, but most loved it and saw the rest of their lives through the prism of that experience. How many times in the late 1950s and ’60s did one hear a sober citizen throw down his pen to exclaim, “Oh, I wish the war was still on!” It’s a strange echo now, for who could want to be at war, but that citizen wasn’t longing for battle and sudden death. He was remembering the freedom of service life, the smell of faraway places, the unpredictability of the future, and the romance of distant lands and seas.

But these wars have more or less stopped and what’s left to explore? In my grandfather’s day, there were places to discover by hacking through jungles:  these are today’s tourist sites. And only a blink of time away, we had an empire that needed hundreds of thousands of the young to fight or serve in now forgotten wars. They were a hardy lot. After a diet of cold showers, the cane and endless Latin (or Greek as a treat), young men were dispensing tough justice to brigands in areas the size of Wales. That so many died can be seen in the forgotten graves strewn across the world. There was no counselling for bereaved families then; nor did TV reporters soupily ask for parent’s “feelings” at the news that Henry had been boiled in a pot. Families just had to get on with it.

Nation of Shopkeepers

Kipling and Somerset Maugham’s stories explain the extraordinary lives they led. But the spirit of adventure – at its peak in the late 1800s – began to grow thin after the Second World War, and is now reduced to a trickle. Today’s young prefer to take their adventures vicariously by way of the Internet and sensation-drenched films. Overseas travel is no longer red in tooth and claw, but has morphed into a flight to a golf course and a posh hotel with the latest girl. In short, most young men have become “domesticated” – wedded to ‘elf and safety’, nappies and family life. Their women have turned nomadic man into paunchy clerks. This comes at the cost of increasing alcohol and drug consumption to dull the pain of the loss of manhood. We are reduced, as Napoleon gloomily forecast, to “a nation of shopkeepers”.

Our elder son was until recently a teacher at St Paul’s School for boys in London. He told me that all the brightest and best opt to follow Dad into the City.

We are open to the taunt thrown by Juvenal at the Roman people nearly 2,000 years ago, that their main desire was panem et circenses (bread and circuses), today perhaps translated as “booze, dating sites and football”.

Perhaps the creeping march of “civilisation” is as inevitable as old age, but it seems that prosperity has slackened our fibres and we are definitely less tough in mind and body than our grandparents  – or even our parents. This is dangerous.

History lessons are sanitised by lefty teachers and few read the Bible, so the myth has spread that today is bound to be better than yesterday; that we are wiser, kinder, cleverer, more civilised and more peaceful than our forebears; that weapons are nasty things; and that money is best spent on welfare (since bloody conflicts are yesterday’s story). But this claptrap was believed by our Victorian grandparents until it died in the trenches of the Somme. Indeed, this lie is one of the reasons why the young feel comfortable in voting for the absurd pacifist Corbyn.

It is an iron law of life that has yet to be broken that a nation can only earn the right to live soft by being prepared to die hard in defence of its living. We are in the process of forgetting that law. So instead of the drivelling mantra, “take care”, perhaps instead we should be urging our young to take a risk!

Lefty?

One of my readers took issue with the fact that I used the words “lefty teachers” in a disparaging manner, and asked me to justify it.

It so happened that I saw an article by the Times centre-right journalist Melanie Phillips recently who writes as follows (and I paraphrase):

A report last year by the Adam Smith Institute claimed that eight out of 10 university lecturers are left wing. In 2015, the Times Higher Education poll of voting behaviour amongst university teachers found that 46 per cent voted Labour and 11 per cent Conservative. On positions such as Israel, Brexit or global warming, right-wing folk keep their views to themselves if they want to hang on to their jobs.

Phillips points out that those holding centre-right views tend not to be invited on to broadcasting media – unless there is an imperative need to display a fig leaf of political balance. For more than 15 years, she was on a blacklist and no major UK publishing house has published any of her books.

She continues: Views that challenge the left are seen as secular heresies to be silenced. Argument is replaced by smears, name-calling and character assassination designed to stifle dissent. As with all heresies, however, the fundamental motivation for silencing them is fear — fear of even hearing contrary arguments.

This is because at some level such “progressives” fear that their arguments are built on sand and they might be persuaded that the contrary view is correct. Since to such people anything contrary to leftism is not just wrong but evil, they are terrified that this would destroy their entire moral and political personality.

So that’s why I cite lefty teachers as being a curse!

Another hot and fairly humid day that didn’t start well; we found we were sited on a dangerous road with vast lorries whirling towards us winding round hair pin bends. What looks like a dainty and harmless little B road on a map can turn into a big bastard of a road in reality. And then there was the clever sod with piggy little eyes who drove his ghastly little white van straight at me, daring me to move. I didn’t and at the last minute he zig zagged out of the way and then we started to swear at each other.

Long stretches of gorse strewn plain with occasional lines of riders to cheer us on our way. We finished at the delightful Brockenhurst church which used to be surrounded by a WW1 hospital for New Zealand trench casualties. Then again with English troops in WW2.

What did they think they were fighting for?

A Land Fit for Heroes

Anyone visiting the war graves of the First and Second World Wars is surely profoundly moved by the courage of the hundreds of thousands who died, and the sheer witless waste of it all.

What did the fallen think they were fighting for? What British “values” did Stan Hollis VC – the hero of my favourite war story – think were worth preserving when on D-Day he charged German positions alone with a Sten gun and grenades, and killed or took the defenders prisoners? After the war, Stan’s company commander remarked, “Hollis was the only man I met between 1939–45 who felt that winning the war was his own personal responsibility”. What was his spur?

I have had the privilege of talking to many Second World War veterans over the last 15 years, both in the UK and in Zimbabwe, and I’ve noted their views. Many of those who emigrated in the late 1940s to the then Rhodesia left the UK because of profound disappointment with that they found at home after the war.

Of course, defeating Hitler was vital. But let’s face it: the country they returned to was not exactly a “land fit for heroes”. That was a land where pre-war values of honesty and respect for the rule of law co-existed alongside decent wages and housing. It was a reasonable and perfectly attainable hope, and perhaps for a time it came to fruit. And then it was eroded in the name of “progress”, “improvement” and “enlightenment”, which meant the destruction of much of what many had fought for and held to be valuable.

Betrayal

Veterans must have wondered if the material and spiritual degradation – the pornography, the drug culture, the violence and the greed that all grew like Topsy in post-war Britain – were worth the life of a single soldier? Many simmered with anger at the way their precious and costly victory was squandered by weak politicians. They saw the loss of familiar things that were held dear and cherished. To the vapid-minded, these things may seem absurd and trivial, but they had symbolic value: things like county names; ancient regiments with noble histories; the King James’ Bible; and yards, inches and feet (not metres). These things matter to a nation and they were soon lost.

Nor did these warriors fight for a Britain that would be dishonestly railroaded into the EU on a false prospectus – they were told it was a free-trade association, only to discover that there were ambitions to erode the nation state and create a European superpower based in central Europe. They didn’t expect the values of churches and schools to be hollowed out by fashionable reformers, where freedom of choice would be classified as “discrimination”; and they did not fight for a country where the stifling culture of political correctness would make freedom of speech a rarity, and where to hold views that had been thought honourable and worthy for a thousand years would be labelled “bigoted” and “fascist”.

What’s more, they did not fight for a Britain where the planning authorities would gut our city centres and communities in the name of modernity – just take a look at Aylesbury – and place meanly conceived, box-shaped, grey concrete structures smack in the centre of our ancient and well-loved towns and cities. I was given many examples of this sort of vandalism. How about the Bristol “town planners” who left St Mary Redcliffe, one of the jewels of English ecclesiastical architecture, simply stranded on a roundabout?

These young men did not fight for welfare provision that would become a pig’s trough for a few well able to fend for themselves and a web of confusion for others, thereby robbing the needy of self-respect. Nor did they fight for a country where a succession of weak politicians would allow millions of people from alien cultures – in terms of religion, language, lifestyle and outlook – to be dumped, with little thought for the wishes of the existing citizens – into our cities. It seems nobody thought to ask whether the NHS, schools or housing stock could cope, or whether the immigrants would integrate easily?

However, I wonder what they would now say – the very few who are still alive – after learning that amongst Muslim wives who entered Britain on marriage visas from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Somalia in 2016, 44 per cent, 36 per cent, and 27 per cent respectively are unable to speak English? And that in light of current immigration rates and the higher birth rate, Britain’s Muslim population may treble to 13 million, almost 17 per cent of the UK’s total, by 2050?

I don’t believe they fought for any of this. But being realists, they probably would have accepted what they cannot alter – and with a sigh, dusted down their medals and yellowing photographs, and stored them under the bed. Then they would have reserved their protests for the rising pollution of litter in the streets and fields.

Bidet Blues

Apparently, when the late film director Billy Wilder was in Paris making a film in the 1950s, he discovered the bidet. Soon, it became an essential accessory in all must-have bathrooms in the US. The then Mrs Wilder instructed Billy to buy one and ship it back to Los Angeles.

Sadly the demand for bidets had become so great that Wilder was unable to lay his hands on one.

He wired his wife with the sad news: “Unable to find bidet. Suggest do handstand in shower!”

Five miles along the front with chatty and fun guests, we pass miles of wooden beach huts selling so I was told for at least £0.25m each. It’s a crazy world.

We pass sad memorials to young men and crashed planes and continue into Christchurch.

The men of greying Britain have been taken by surprise by the change in the weather which today is overcast and humid. The men look as cool as they can in shorts and sandals with tee shirts stretched to cover beer bellies; and it was drizzling too.

Kindness

We are told how civilised we are as a society and we pride ourselves as being kinder and more caring and sensitive than in our grandparents’ day. Really?

Why is it then that so many of our hospitals are full of dumped elderly? If these folk were babies then there would be a riot and court hearings with irresponsible families being labelled as “cruel”.

Why don’t families regard the old with the same duty of care as the young? I’ll tell you why: selfishness and greed.

Give me an African sense of community and responsibility any day!

Death and Lies

A sonnet by Edna St Vincent Millay scorns the idea that time is a great healer:

Time does not bring relief: you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide.

I suppose we would rather not think about death: just pass the gin, have a laugh and defer worry about the end game until tomorrow. What can fool us, though, are the Grim Reaper’s sudden pauses in his culling; sometimes he seems to get tired and retires across the Styx. For us, the last great cull was in 2011 when four dear friends suddenly died – and no they didn’t just “pass away”, they are bloody well as dead as a doornail. The Reaper pauses… and then bang! More friends suddenly pass into the great perhaps.

We are told that when a great friend dies, a piece of ourselves dies with them. I agree. And like Edna, I don’t think that time is a great healer. I miss all my dead friends, and come to think about it, I miss them more than I did when I was first shocked by news of their passing.

I miss my parents more today than when they died many years ago. A picture, a scent, a building, perhaps a view… and the memories bestir all over again. It’s sad my parents can’t see our children and grandchildren today. The conversations now would be far more interesting. My relationship with them was never easy, and I wrecked bridges I would have liked to rebuild. It’s the guilt and the misery that goes with the memories that keeps the grief so raw.

Move Along, Please!

Death was a common visitor to Victorian households.  Many children, not to mention their mothers, died during childbirth or soon afterwards. And people usually died at home, surrounded by relatives and friends.

I have only seen a couple of dead bodies in my life, for today death has been relegated to hospitals and hospices, where tubes and monitors bleep away and professionals deal with the mysteries of death on our behalf.

Do we mourn enough? Bereaved Victorians wore black armbands, widows wore weeds and formal mourning took at least a year. Okay, a lot of this was simply a matter of form, not substance, but people took their time to grieve and weep. Today we are encouraged to briskly “move on”, not to dwell on the past, and to take a hard look at the nearest dating site! We are made to feel as if we have somehow failed if we can’t move on quickly enough.

At some funerals, we hear that our loved one has not died but is instead waiting in another room. Whatever our religious belief, this is drivel. For most people who have lost a dear loved one, the loss is like losing a limb: how can they ever just “get over it?” And why should they seek “closure?”

Time to Grieve

In our sentimental yet unreflective society, we are inclined to think that with the right counselling and pills we can “recover” from everything in double-quick time. But talking about the dead at a memorial service over a glass of prosecco and an egg sandwich is very different from the expression of raw grief at the graveside. The pain of naked grief is the antithesis of the belief that everything can be fixed quickly. It’s the grieving and the experience of the pain – and not the chatter or anti-depressants – that brings about healing.

We drive slowly through the ancient paths of the New Forest avoiding herds of tiny ponies towards our first host. Our gentle hosts will have to remain nameless because if we begin to praise one we have to praise them all and any gradations in gratitude or enthusiasm would be immediately noticed and although no one would say anything – we are, after all, English – deeply resented! However, without the prodigious hospitality we enjoy, our walks would be bleak indeed. We so often find ourselves arriving smack in the midst of a Wimbledon tennis joust which we usually miss as we lie cowering in a steaming bath.

The day is terrifyingly hot and a touch humid. Worrying this. We have to be wary of dehydration. I prefer grey skies myself as our English summer views are best seen through a faint haze of mist, the essential essence that paints our Eden with such delicate colours and provides such glorious views. I can’t imagine Heaven can compete, particularly in the months of June and July. Anyone who chooses to leave the UK at this time of year for anywhere else in the world has to be crazed.

We are in “Dad’s Army” country. Only 80 years ago and the sky would have been scored with the vapour trails of the Battle of Britain. Who under fifty remembers that now?

Clocked!

Our eldest daughter, Clare, told me that she would be preaching at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford (where she is the chaplain), and so of course I was careful to arrive on time.

I am always overawed by the cathedral’s majestic interior. Over the centuries, countless men and women have come to kneel with prayers listing everything from black misery to thanks for incredible joy. I sat in a vaulted space of quiet reverence gently lit by waterfalls of silver light cascading down from above. Behind, were the gilded pipes of the organ, which soared upwards towards the ceiling like prayers. There is always a great sense of drama that attends cathedral services. I sat enthralled, listening to the beauty of the choir.

But no Clare. Right place, yes; right day, yes. Then some chap began to preach. What was going on?! Had she been dropped? Poor Clare, what could I say to comfort her?

A Tale of Two Churches

I sidled out of the door and steamed over the road to St Aldates. If you are not a churchgoer, you may be blissfully unaware of the different styles of service that exist between churches such as Christ Church and St Aldates. All I can tell you is that the difference is as profound as can be. Christ Church’s services are so high you can scarcely see your feet, while St Aldates… well St Aldates is everyman’s church. Guitars, drums, noisy praise songs… The church is run by my pal Charlie Cleverely. As ever, he was brimming with joyful enthusiasm, as was the vast congregation made up of people of all ages, classes and types.

I slipped into a pew alongside the associate vicar, my old friend Simon Ponsonby (he was looking more like Ernest Hemingway than ever). Simon chatted with great affection about Oliver, our younger son, who worked at St Aldates for many years. Then Simon asked me why I was there? I told him about Clare’s mysterious absence from the Christ Church service.

Simon looked at me curiously. “The clocks went forward an hour, last night, Tom. You do know that?!”

I charged back to Christ Church, just in time to hear Clare give a peerless sermon! Then there was a second communion service. What is the theology of participating in two communions inside 20 minutes? How many sins were committed in the time I spent running between the two churches?  I sat on my hands and wondered.

And how could I have not known about the clocks?  Am I going potty?

We start by thanking all donors for their generosity. Without your support and encouragement ZANE would not exist.

Jane and I started walking a fews days early. We thought it prudent to whirl our old limbs up a few hills to see if they could, once again, stand the strain of a new long distance walk in support of the poorest of the poor in Zimbabwe.

So we have just finished trialing ourselves in South Wales, in fact on the plain where SAS recruits are driven to the point of collapse by their granite jawed trainers. I am an old soldier and like so many of my aged colleagues I fantasise that all I have to do is some tough training walks and runs, a few goes round the gym and the years would fall away like a waterfall and I could join the SAS. Dream on sunshine! I am gone with the wind and aches and pains come and go so with such regularity I know that if I am not hurting, I’m long since dead!

We walked about eight miles and to my astonishment we appear, when taking our antiquity into account, to be reasonably fit. When I checked with the the doctor I asked him: “If I was a horse would you have me shot?” When he said he would keep me a while longer at grass and gentle trotting I asked if it was at least worth my while even starting to read “War and Peace? ” He thought for a while and answered “yes” – I have to say without much conviction – so off we go, no more excuses. Since we started the walks in 2010 we have walked well over 2000 miles and consumed at least six pairs of boots and eight walking sticks. Walking addicts might be interested to know that the best walking poles by far are made by “Traveller Carbon, LEKI” with dinki little hand supporters. They are light and flexible. And avoid all cheap boots, they wear out and are uncomfortable. Remember there is no such thing as a bargain. The best boots by a country mile are (inevitably) German and called MEINDL (with Teutonic quality like that, goodness knows how they lost the war!). They are expensive but as tough as a Tiger tank, and comfortable with it.

Markus , our excellent driver, has now arrived hot foot from Bulawayo. So off we zoom to Bournemouth and here we come!

Bullingdon Blues

Recently, a friend invited me to address the prisoners at Bullingdon nick in Oxfordshire. I was shown around by an enthusiastic and caring woman from Oxford’s St Aldates Church.

When I arrived at the chapel where my address was to take place, I met the service organiser. He took one look at me and simply vetoed my talk. I shrugged and sat down to wait…

When my friend asked him what the problem was, he replied as if I wasn’t there: “Just look at him! There’s nothing the likes of him could say to the prisoners that would even begin to be relevant!”

I was stung into defending myself. “I do know the difference between the Bullingdon Club and Bullingdon Prison, you know!

The organiser looked suitably unimpressed. Then I had an idea.

“Do you happen to know Oliver Benyon? (He worked as youth pastor at St Aldates for eight years.)

“Oh yes,” said my critic, “a great man!”

“He’s my son.”

The atmosphere defrosted immediately. “Oh, in that case…”

I was quietly furious.

I spoke well enough and have been invited back. The circle has fully turned.

It goes without saying that Oliver thought this was the funniest story ever…

Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word…

It’s hard to apologise, and even harder when you aren’t particularly sorry.

But it takes even more grace to say sorry when you know that offence has been given but you haven’t the slightest idea what the dispute is all about…

Georgie Knaggs, aka The Phraser, freelance writer and ZANE Trustee joined Tom and Jane on the last afternoon of the walk and has written this lovely account on her blog:

Liverpool

A long walk to end the trek at Liverpool Cathedral. On the way we tramped through Huyton where, in 1974 I contested the seat of the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. He was a great man, one of the most talented Labour politicians of his generation, and sixties and seventies Labour was blessed by many talented big men and women: for example, Bevan, Bevin, Crosland, Shore, Brown, Barbara Castle and Denis Healy. What would they think of today’s Labour party?

I thought I recognised places we canvassed all those years ago, but I’m sure that after all this time this is wishful thinking. Of course Harold beat me by a vast margin. They hardly bothered to count votes in Huyton in those days: they just weighed Labour’s majority.

Some years ago Jane and I holidayed in the Scilly Isles and we flew from Penzance Airport. By chance there stood Mary Wilson who charmingly claimed to remember me. Then to my surprise she then poured out her heart that Harold – who was by then clasped in Alzheimer’s ghastly grip – was pretty much ignored by today’s Labour party, his achievements long forgotten. I tried to cheer her up by reminding her how Harold had held the party together – a mighty task at any time and one that requires great skill. Then he created The Open University. And under great pressure from US President, Lyndon Johnson, Harold steadfastly kept us from a bloody involvement in the Vietnam War. I suggested to Mary her that politicians should be judged not merely for what they do but what follies they keep us away from. Being Prime Minister is a lonely job.

During lunch in a bar I watched a woman breast feeding her baby. What bothered me was that the mother didn’t look at the child during the process but she was wholly preoccupied on an iPad, fascinated I presume by some game or other she was addicted to. Surely this is profoundly sad. Ever since Adam delved and Eve span mothers have focussed their love and attention on their children, sometimes softly singing to them, then making faces at them, playing silly games like peek-a-boo, or admiring them and smiling devotedly as they feed, just simply loving them as the centre of the world. Now mothers are apparently addicted to iPad and phones; their babies have been replaced by some stupid video game on an electronic machine.

I am sure that such a fundamental and profound change in behaviour is deeply significant and comes at great cost. It fills me with a sense of profound unease.

Thanks

Another long trek has ended in beautiful Liverpool RC Cathedral. What a peerless and Godly place it is.

We have enjoyed great hospitality from generous hosts. I think it is invidious to start naming you for it becomes rather like a visitor’s book, trying to think of something original to write that is markedly different each time.

So let me limit my thanks to Markus our wonderful driver and support from Bulawayo. A delightful and kind man and a great driver.

Our heartfelt thanks to all our generous donors. Without you all, we have no mission.

To ZANE Trustee Georgie, and Charlie Knaggs who lifted our morale at the end of the walk.

My love and grateful thanks to Jane who puts up with my grumpiness with great grace.

To Moses, a dog who gladdens the heart of all who meet him.

You may recall in an earlier correspondence that I dedicated this walk to a lady I met recently in Harare, one so poor that the mere offer of milk in her tea brought her (and by way of her reaction, me) to tears. So my final thanks is to her and all of ZANE’s grateful beneficiaries whose quiet bravery and stoicism in the face of such hardship inspired me every step of the way.

Wickedness and Virtue

As soon as the extent of the terror attack at Westminster was known, several friends of the murderer, Khalid Masood, announced that he was a “lovely man, always smiling and joking.”

However, after this “lovely” man checked out of his hotel on that March morning, off he went on the rampage in London, mowing down numerous people before stabbing a House of Commons policeman to death.

So he wasn’t such a nice man after all. When his crime record was searched, it was discovered that he had “form”, and had been jailed in 2003 for possession of a knife. At that time, another friend claimed: “This is a great shock to me…It’s hard to take in that this is the same bloke.”

In a local paper, there was a school picture of smiling Masood with a statement underneath: “His arms folded, he gives no clue as to the murderous path he will take.

Did they expect him to scowl and hold up a sign reading, “Here is a future serial murderer”?

Shades of Grey

The assumption that external appearances and everyday behaviour are any sort of guide to the full extent of a person’s intentions is clearly dotty. Of course, unless he was bonkers, Masood would have done his utmost to hide the plans that were likely to bring horror to all he encountered on his murderous enterprise. The illusion held by many today is that we are either wholly good or wholly bad. This notion has a long genesis.  Apparently Socrates, Plato and Aristotle believed in the “unity of the virtues”, insisting that any bad person was bound to possess the totality of wickedness, and a “good” person was bound to possess not just some, but all the virtues.

This attitude is represented in the 1950s film High Noon. There stands the epitome of virtue and courage, Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper), pitted against Frank Miller, cast as the essence of wickedness. The Kane character is, of course, perched on the moral high ground. Off set, this “pure” image is somewhat tarnished as actor Gary Cooper was having a raunchy affair with his leading lady, Grace Kelly. So when reality kicks in, morals often squeak in second – what’s new?

Recently we learnt of the death of the one-time head of the IRA, Martin McGuinness. In his early life, he was a widow maker on an industrial scale, responsible for many hundreds of deaths and atrocities. Then terrorist McGuinness suddenly decided to go into peace-making politics, and having arranged an amnesty for himself and his cronies, was promoted to hero and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland.

His funeral was attended by Alastair Campbell – who wrote a flowery tribute outlining his latter-day virtues in the Guardian – and Bill Clinton, who told the weeping congregation what delightful company Martin had been. Some other people – like Norman Tebbit, whose wife Margaret has been crippled since 1984 as a direct result of the bomb planted (at McGuinness’s supposed command) in the Brighton Grand Hotel – had less complimentary things to say. McGuinness never said he was sorry. Apparently when faced with awkward questions, he let it be known that the “peace process” was merely the continuation of terrorist activity by other means, and so as far as he was concerned there was nothing to be sorry about: “We all have blood on our hands, don’t we?” was the sentiment he offered to deflect hard questions.

So McGuinness was not only a cold-eyed killer but he was also capable of great acts of kindness, and devotedly looked after his wife and four children.

Jekyll and Hyde

Of course, a mix of wickedness and virtue is at the heart of most of Shakespeare’s plays. None of his characters are wholly virtuous or villainous either. In recent times, Hitler’s secretaries disclosed what a delightful, kind and considerate boss he was. And Hitler’s sidekick, Heinrich Himmler – the SS killer who devised the “Final Solution” that killed 6 million Jews – was the subject of a film called The Decent One, which showed the charming and tender correspondence between him, his wife and children. Himmler also expressed great concern about the effect mass murder was having on his gassing and shooting troops.

That depravity and decency can coexist in individuals is demonstrated by Robert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which I wrote about in my last commentary.

How tidy it would be if we could collect all the good guys in one camp and all the evil ones in another. However, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, there is a thread of evil that runs through the hearts of all men (and women too).

The Choice

Where does all this leave us? How self-aware are we? I have often thanked God that I wasn’t born German a generation or two earlier, for in my prime I was blond, thin-lipped and blue eyed, all straight from central casting. I could have played a credible Nazi officer in any of the 1950s Second World War black and white films.

But what about real life?  On our last French holiday, I visited Oradour Sur Glane, where, on 10 June 1944, the Das Reich battalion under Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann massacred over 600 people as reprisal for some trivial offence or other. Later, of course, it was discovered that Oradour was the wrong village, but what did that matter to the Nazis in wartime when lives were so cheap and soldiers brutalised? One of the defences offered at the 1946 trial of the surviving murderers was that this massacre was nothing compared to the ghastly crimes conducted in Eastern Russia only a few months before.

On the command of President de Gaulle, Oradour remains untouched these past decades, a silent memorial to the fallen French civilians of the Second World War.

I occasionally imagine myself aged 19 or so, and under Diekmann’s command. Ordered to shoot hundreds of women and children, what would I have done? Rather than be shot myself, I suspect I would have obeyed the order.

Then I would have been a war criminal, a monster rightly to be hunted down like a dog.

I think that the sentence in the Lord’s Prayer, “Lead me not unto temptation” is a prayer to Almighty God that we might be spared facing such soul-shattering choices.

So virtuous reader, what would you have done? How depraved might you have become if cruel circumstances had obliged you to face an unspeakable choice? And if you had machine-gunned innocent women and children, would your childhood and university friends all say how jolly and kind you usually were, and then announce how surprised they were that you – of all people – had turned out to be a soulless mass murderer?

Carnal Canal 

Shock, horror, a vast gay dog shot out of a thicket next to the canal just before Lymm and then poor innocent Moses found himself horribly hidden under a labbymongrel, all set to have his wicked way with him. Reader, when did you last try and prize a rampant dog off another when they are locked in a homosexual embrace ? After heaving and cursing we just about managed , then the  bounder escaped down the towpath.  Poor Moses. Having just about escaped a date worse than death, he spent the rest of the day either coyly sitting down or peeping round corners to avoid the second coming.

Judged Suitable

I see that the judge in the Grenfell disaster is deemed to be unsatisfactory by the suffering victims. No one can do anything other than evince heartfelt sympathy for all those involved. However I hope they will be able to show some restraint and accept the High  Court judge who has been asked to do the job instead of campaigning he be replaced. Once sufferers find they have the power to accept or reject judges there will be no end of it.

This started eighteen months back; ‘victims’ of sex abuse campaigned to get HMG to reject Dame Elisabeth Butler schloss, said to be too “establishment” and therefore unfit to preside over the enquiry.  At last the. “Ideal” judge was found: Dame Justice Lowell Goddard from New Zealand.

Goddard was established with four first class return tickets to New Zealand in a flat a heartbeat from Harrods  and a half million pound package. Then it was found not only was she more or less impossible to work with but she knew little about UK law. A few months later the dear lady apparently got homesick and that was the end of her.

We have very little corruption in the UK. Our judges are world class. If our judges find themselves conflicted they will “recuse” themselves and they should be trusted to do this without a campaign to oust them. If these campaigns are seen to succeed then the integrity of our court processes is weakened to the loss of us all. I experienced some attempts to undermine judges in the Lloyds’ of London debacle in the early nineties and it was as disgraceful then as it is now.

The Great British Baby

As Dickens’ Wilkins Micawber says in David Copperfield:

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure, nineteen pounds nineteen and six: result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result: misery.”

Pigs Might Fly

During the election, politicians talked about increasing expenditure as if the government had its own money – not taxpayers – and had to be badgered into spending it on the needs of an impoverished and deserving electorate.

The party that borrowed the most was “generous and kind”: the one with modest plans was “mean and nasty”.

For heaven’s sake! Are we infants? If so, it’s our own fault for being credulous fools. As DH Lawrence writes:

We can’t be too careful
about the British Public
It gets bigger and bigger
and its perambulator has to get
bigger and bigger
and its dummy-teat has to be made
bigger and bigger and bigger
and the job of changing its nappies
gets bigger and bigger and bigger
and bigger
And the sound of its howling gets
bigger and bigger and bigger and
bigger and bigger…   

So our party leaders are howled at by reporters:

“Don’t doctors and nurses deserve a pay rise?”

“How can benefits continue to be cut?”

“What about increased funding for the schools?”

It seems implicit that good politicians have to do the decent thing and spend more: only the mean and nasty embrace “austerity”.

The late US President Reagan once joked, “The US national debt is big enough to look after itself.” It was (I hope!) meant to be Ronnie’s little joke.

But seriously, don’t voters even notice that the UK remains submerged in debt? Dear old Gordon Brown borrowed vast sums and we haven’t yet recovered from that binge yet. And an ageing population and creaking NHS promises further acute pressure on the public purse down the track.

So how can we save? It’s hard politically. Take the so-called “triple lock” on pensions, a Cameron gimmick he never believed he would have to deliver as he was sure he wouldn’t win the 2015 election. But today the “triple lock” is inevitably regarded as a “right”, and any reduction is described as an “assault on the elderly.”

Every day, HMG is spending money that it hasn’t got and no one seems to mind. But there has to be a day of reckoning. Every attempt to try and live within our means is described not as praiseworthy, but “barbaric”.

Change can only come after the questioners start asking politicians, not how much money are you going to spend, but how much are you going to save?

Gosh! Are those pink pigs flying past my window?

My trip to the important ZANE meeting in London was a success and I will report the implications in another blog at another time. Poor Jane and Moses were obliged to continue to walk through lovely country in slanting rain and mist. We spend the night with a friend I have not see since my time in the army half a lifetime ago. Most generous hosts so a joyous evening full of gossip and laughter.

The Wisdom of Moses

One of the many joys of this walk is Moses, our two year old “cockerpoo”, our third dog to accompany Jane and I as we totter around the UK. The previous couple of dogs were Staffies; although Jane and I loved them dearly they were not everyone’s favourite. Particularly Dinah, who although she looked as if Almighty had bestowed special favour in her in terms of her shape and her colour, she was as sharp as she was beautiful. She was run over near our house and it was all my fault. Soft old thing that I am I water up still when I think of her death.

What massively irritates me about Moses is that he regards me as a wholly dispensable
add-on in his doggy life, perhaps good for a walk or two , and an occasional pat… but he loves Jane to an obsessive degree. When I arrive home and Jane is not with me he rushes over, then stands forlornly searching for Jane. Then when her absence is obvious her slinks away giving me reproachful looks over his shoulder for not being his pride and joy!

Shedding the Pounds

Read any of the papers or glossies and you will be overwhelmed by the vast number of weird diet choices offered to a confused and desperately overweight public. They are all based on the proposition that if you follow this or that diet, or use this or that device, you will end up slim, happy and looking like the slender, sun-kissed model on show in the ad.

The latest enticement that caught my eye came from a very attractive and clearly up-market girl holding a 10-inch Perspex pipe and with a large carrot stuck in her mouth. No reader, it was not a sex invitation or one of Trump’s playmates on the pull, but she was selling a device that incredibly purported to remove fat from food. I am convinced that this is yet another confidence trick cruelly pulled by a dewy eyed, slim, privately educated posh girl seeking to make a fortune by persuading sad shop girls who gorge on sugary food, factory pies, McDonalds and fizzy drinks that – at not inconsiderable cost – if they follow the diet and buy the plastic device, they will end up looking just like Keira Knightley.

When – after losing half their body weight – these girls remain skinny versions of who they were before (and very definitely do not morph into Ms Knightley), reality dawns: they are still plain and poor. The misery backlash more or less guarantees they will end up gorging on junk food from sheer desperation and ending up the same size they were before they started – or possibly a few sizes larger. Then the cycle starts all over again.

The Benyon Regime
For free, I offer donors the Benyon diet plan, guaranteed to keep anyone slim and reasonably fit!

Don’t eat anything out of packet, and don’t eat in front of a screen – unless you are watching your favourite soap (and then only indulge yourself once a week). Don’t drink more than one pint of beer in the pub in an evening, and don’t drink port or any brightly coloured, sweet, fizzy fluid. Never eat while standing up and please don’t scoff hamburgers on public transport or in the street. Always use cutlery and don’t munch anything out of a box. Avoid eating anything delivered to your door by a man on a motorbike – and the same goes for food passed through your car window.

Don’t eat anything your dog would ignore. Don’t eat anything you “can’t resist” because you must; and don’t eat “because a little bit of what you fancy does you good” – because it doesn’t. There’s no point in eating food just because you saw it advertised on TV, particularly if it says it’s low in calories (it’s surely a lie). Never eat because you are bored or depressed.

And, last but not least, don’t eat anything your granny wouldn’t have recognised as food.