Gate Expectations

I notice that the closer we get to London the larger (and dare I say it, the more vulgar) the houses and of course the higher the “sod you” gates: you know, the ones with push button entry bells designed to keep scruffy folk like us out. I always imagine that behind these walls a series of “Mr Bigs” live with bottle blond wives with vermillion toe nails. Mr Big is always an even uglier version of Alan Sugar; he will be sitting in his vast office which will be dominated by a model of his huge yacht. He will of course be devising ways to screw the public.

Sit on my Memory

We have now done our final stretch from Kingston to Westminster – and a good job too because for heaven’s sake we have walked quite far enough – as we crawled down the Thames tow path, we passed literally hundreds of benches all carrying memorial plaques. A nice way to be remembered methinks.

Another Lovely Tom

I ring Tom, one of the traders in my financial services providers “Spreadex”. They are always and consistently efficient and pleasant.

Talking of pleasant young men…

The Last Word

One of my godsons – a staunch Christian – is to join the services and he has been accepted by RMA Sandhurst to train as an officer. Apparently his parents were not particularly keen on the idea and some of his friends mocked him for “wanting to kill people”. How daft is that?

A Noble Profession

My godson asked for my advice and this is what I told him:

I was flattered you asked me about my military experience. However, I should add a government health warning about my experiences because “the past is a foreign country and they do things differently there”…!

You are entering a noble profession. I hear that you are being mocked by a good many of your friends who do not understand what military life is really about. They think that because you are to be a soldier you are a “war lover” when in fact, of course, the reverse is the case – you are there to stop war. Any country that fails to properly defend itself loses its identity, it’s as simple as that. It’s the first obligation of government to defend the realm and the job of the services is therefore of crucial importance. I understand that we spend about 35 per cent of our GNP on social services and under seven per cent on our national defences. Only the future will demonstrate whether these prove to be the right expenditure priorities for our nation.

Churchill once wrote that “the history of man is the history of war” and that’s a sad fact that any casual student of ancient – and modern – history will know. The idea, therefore, that laying down arms somehow deters the wicked from hostilities indicates that the person who holds such a view knows no history. The Russian communist and violent psychopath Lenin who led the ghastly Russian revolution said that those who were members of the UK peace movements were “useful fools”; more recently, when the Berlin Wall came down and reporters gained access to East German archives, they discovered that the CND was partly funded by the Russians. Oh yes, we need to defend ourselves as a nation, so please join up. Our country needs fine young people such as you obviously are.

I hope you will read all Max Hastings’s books on war, plus Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser and First Light by Geoffrey Wellum. You will much enjoy them.

There are those who proclaim that followers of Christ have to embrace pacifism, wrenching the comments about peacemakers in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount completely out of context. Jesus drew a careful distinction between defending the realm and our private conduct towards our neighbour. Note that Jesus never told the centurion he should change his profession!

In an attempt to help you understand the emotions of war, here are a few thoughts, which I culled from talking to and reading about the experiences of veterans from the Second World War. But I reckon that anyone who experienced any of the many wars since 1945 would agree with them.

War is the peak of human contradiction. It contains every paradox and hardly any answers: it raises hope in hearts, excites dreams that we can solve problems, and usually leaves its victors as well as its victims disappointed, dismayed and disillusioned. But war offers its survivors in battle one supreme emotion – the feeling of having been through the turmoil of fire and having lived to mourn one’s comrades in arms. It binds friendships tempered in the forge of white-hot experience in a way unmatched in other relationships in our peaceful society. This perhaps explains its attractions and intoxicating lure to the warrior instinct in us all, buried away as it is with our feelings of insecurity and fears that are stored in our subconscious.

This is not an argument to justify war by any means but an attempt to try to place the whole process in context. I am sure that when you have left the army you will see the rest of your life through the prism of your service experiences: you will never again know such fear, friendships and contrasting emotions. It will be your university of life.

In 1974, Erich Fromm offered this observation in his book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness:

“War to some extent reverses all values. War encourages deep-seated human impulses, such as altruism and solidarity to be expressed – impulses that are stunted by the principles of egotism and competition that peacetime life engenders in modern man. Class differences disappear to a marked extent. In war, a man is man again, and he has a chance to distinguish himself, regardless of privilege that social status confers upon him as a citizen. War is an indirect rebellion against the injustice, inequality and boredom governing social life in peacetime… the fact that war has these positive features is a sad comment on our civilization.”

Please let me know your progress.

Aunt Agatha

Economist Maynard Keynes once said, “When someone persuades me that I am wrong, I change my mind.” What do you do?

One of the joys of life is to be able to discuss things with the young; then, when your learn something new, to adjust your viewpoint. Clearly Maynard Keynes understood why some people – particularly the elderly – can be so tiresome to talk to. All too many of us are firmly set in our ways and patterns of thinking, and simply refuse to budge.

Take Aunt Agatha, for example, a teacher in her day, and a good one too. However, as she grew older, she became increasingly irritating because she simply stopped thinking. This had nothing to do with dementia since other factors were clearly at work.

Closing the Door

Towards the end of her life, my aunt upset me so much that I chose to say little else to her apart from passing the time of day and being as kind as I could be without losing my temper. It’s upsetting when you seeing someone you once respected and still love behaving like a loon. So from time to time, I couldn’t help myself from trying to correct her. However, Aunt Agatha had ceased to hold opinions: instead she paraded prejudices. She simply ignored any information that might persuade her to change her mind, and instead would cling to her old views rather like a swimmer terrified of letting go of her water wings in case she sank.

US psychiatrist Scott Peck’s theory is that Agatha had allowed herself to succumb to a lethal combination of fear and laziness: fear that if she allowed herself to absorb new information, she risked having to change her mind. She realised instinctively that if she allowed that to happen, her fixed map of the world, carefully constructed over considerable time to protect her from the cave where dragons might lurk, would have to be redrawn. So she allowed her natural laziness to engulf her like a shroud so that in time she grew incapable of the necessary effort and courage needed to face reassessing her views on life.

One of Agatha’s least attractive features was her default position, which inclined her to look down on various groups of people so she could feel better about herself. So her opinions about Jews, blacks and Johnny Foreigner were culled straight from The National Front. Once, I sought to challenge her view that the Paralympic Games were a disgrace (because it’s cruel to allow cripples to make spectacles of themselves as a public entertainment.) When I showed Agatha pictures of cheering crowds and happy competitors, all she could say was: “You do go on… you can’t bully me!” Then when I told her she was being absurd, she replied: “You’re always so argumentative and silly!”

She simply closed the conversation down. She thought her dogmatism indicated strength. Discussion with her was the dialogue of the deaf.

Sad that. I saw a car sticker once that read: “Get even: grow really old and become a problem to your children.” I know exactly what the author meant.

And Finally…

Apparently, once when Billy Graham’s wife Ruth was driving along a Californian turnpike, there was a mile-long tailback caused by extensive road works. After an hour’s wait, she saw a sign that read: “End of Construction. Thank you for your patience.”

Ruth died in 2007. She asked to have her gravestone inscribed thus:

“End of Construction: Thank you for your patience.”

I rather like that.

Rug, Rats!

We stay in a beautiful house and I baptise it by casting a glass of claret on a cream rug! They were very kind about it (what else could they do?) and produced a marvellous machine which managed to obliterate most of it.

Lost for Words

When we are asked to sign visitors books ( we usually are) there is often a column to facilitate “comments”. The trouble with this is that I am always lost for superlatives. Previous writers have already combed the dictionary for adulatory adjectives. And I suppose we are being asked to outdo the compliments of previous guests. I refuse to play this game and so copy King Lear’s daughter, Cordelia, simply thank our hosts politely and merely add my name and address.
Small Stones

I saw a sign recently that proclaimed, “The person who wants to move mountains, starts off by carrying small stones.” I rather liked this as it sums up the need to delay gratification. It ties into the aim that I have adopted for ZANE, and that is that we should be trying to save the people of Zimbabwe one paper clip at a time. It takes hard work and an enormous amount of time. And it’s only after much effort that we see – just occasionally – that something substantial has been achieved.

Job Satisfaction
I read recently comments made by Nathalie Harrison, a leading dancer with The Royal Ballet. I cannot think of a more demanding job. It’s not particularly well paid, and the work is mentally and physically painful. And because the demands of the dancing profession are all consuming, she claims it’s “a complete lifestyle” – unless you are wholly dedicated, you won’t make the standard.

“Of course it’s cruel,” she says. “What goes on the stage is what the director wants at that time, and he’s not going to do something out of obligation or sympathy to me because I have an off day or feel sick. No one understands the demands of the life. It’s all about striving to achieve perfection. We’re way over the line of obsession but we’re all the same, so we think it’s okay.”

Nathalie reckons she can be proud of about one in 20 of her performances. She deplores the fact that so few young people today take their jobs sufficiently seriously. “I deplore,” she says, “the present generation who thinks that success should come easily. A lesson that my profession taught me early on is that the most rewarding moments that feel spectacular are those we have worked incredibly hard for. The harder you work, the greater the reward, and that is something I am not sure that younger people grasp. This fuels my loathing of current fashionable TV shows; young people who have done no training or hard work wanting to be famous, and crying and demanding it. There is a sense of people thinking they are owed something, but we have to earn success. Anything simply handed to someone doesn’t produce the satisfaction that hard graft delivers.”

Brand Power
I counted an average of four full pages describing the birth of William and Kate’s princess in each of the readable newspapers. Perhaps the attention given was somewhat overdone? I am delighted for the royal couple, but for goodness sake – surely there are other things in the world to focus upon for page after page besides a royal birth!

Then I heard that a group of people had camped outside the hospital for two solid weeks waiting to learn the news of the royal birth. How oddball is that?!

I have always been a staunch royalist: I am a supporter because I am a hard-headed traditionalist and pragmatist, and I realise that it is always easier to criticise institutions rather than devise a workable alternative. Imagine, if you will, a head of state called Bercow or Prescott or Heseltine, and you can understand what I mean. Prime ministers can be removed and replaced relatively easily while the ship Britannia steams inexorably on. You will recall that Prime Minister Thatcher was, for example, unceremoniously dumped in the middle of the Gulf War and the UK got on with things remarkably well. Those who remember the ghastliness of the impeachment of the late president Richard Nixon in the US will understand why the overarching institution of monarchy has advantages.

On top of constitutional advantages, the “brand” value of the monarchy to UK Ltd is overwhelming. It beats the brand name of Coca Cola and Apple into a cocked hat. I watched the French presidential ceremony of Francoise Holland: there stood a fat, little man in a brown raincoat standing disconsolately in the drizzle. This gloomy inauguration was watched by a small crowd of people including his assorted discarded mistresses, his present one(s), and a scattering of illegitimate children. The French soldiers were the cast from The Student Prince. It’s sad for the France of today that in 1789, the revolutionaries cut off the heads of the French aristocracy and monarchy, and all those with a little glamour. The “terror” thus released comprehensively destroyed “Brand France” in terms of pageantry and viewing potential. Did you watch the Hollande inauguration ceremony dear reader? I rest my case.

What do I mean by the vulgar term “brand value”? When the next UK royal ceremony takes place – perhaps the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh – it will be watched by billions stretched around the globe: viewers from Tasmania to Hawaii, and from Wellington to Nairobi. And our ceremony will be immaculate in every respect because in the UK we do this sort of thing really well, in fact better than anyone else in the world. What better publicity can our tourist industry and exporting businesses reasonably want?

So monarchy wins in respect of stability and tradition, and pays for itself many times over. But along with the NHS, monarchy is the nearest thing we have to God in the UK and I find that embarrassing and a tad distasteful. As I’ve said before, the never-ending media whirligig and the public’s devouring fascination must be a terrible burden for those centred remorselessly in the spotlight. The quasi-religious adulation is over the top – there is something creepy going on here and it worries me. And beware: adulation can morph into an obsession, thence into savage destruction in a media nanosecond. Anyone who disputes this has only to recall the life and times of Princess Diana to see what I mean. So for goodness sake, can we please show some moderation?

I recall some time ago there was a wry letter in the Telegraph’s letter column that rang true:

“Sir

I see that Princess Kate has not appeared in your front page for some two days now.

Is she ill?”

Friends and Relation

This has been an especially great day because our eldest daughter Clare walked with us all morning. Made up for the incessant rain.

We lunched with Colonel Paul Davis who used to be the Secretary General of the services charity Royal Commonwealth Ex-Services League and a great friend of ZANE and ours. Also, Richard Warren who loyally drove for the last two of our walks. Despite getting to know us really well he has become a great friend.

My thoughts turned to Commonwealth, Empire and war…

The History of Man

I read in Rob Still’s Global Private Equity Fund report that the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town was torn down because it represented “racial supremacy” and was a symbol of “colonialism”.

How ridiculous is that? Why do we continually apologise whenever the subject of the British Empire is raised? Why are we so slow to defend our past, especially when people are just parading their prejudices and talking nonsense? All too often, critics judge events that occurred 150 years ago in the context of the hugely changed world of today. They simply don’t understand that the past is a foreign country and “they do things differently there” – and not always badly either.

Facing the Facts

Will southern Africa degenerate to the level of Zimbabwe? On present showing, the answer, sadly, has to be yes. Of course, anyone who declaims the harsh truth loudly enough will inevitably be accused of “raaaaacism,” a routine knee-jerk reaction – but I think we should fearlessly state the facts.

Mankind probably emerged from Africa, likely emigrating from and then returning in multiple waves. Mankind shares the same DNA; we are of one species and created equally in the sight of God. In other words, it is racist to deem people as sub-human in the way that – for example – the Germans condemned the Jews in the middle of the last century. But it is not racist to point out essential historical facts, as stated below.

For all sorts of reasons, the various branches of man developed unevenly and great empires have risen and fallen with metronomic regularity. At some point, the Assyrians, Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, Romans, Huns and Mongols all dominated world society. Attempts have been made to explain the factors that dictated the unevenness of the development of human societies. Ian Morris’s excellent book Why the West Rules… for Now attempts to measure this development over the millennia.

Survival of the Fittest

The simple fact is that, as Churchill argued, “The history of man is the history of war.” Throughout history, life was tough, brutish and short…especially for the losers. Vanquished and weaker societies were conquered, absorbed, enslaved or simply obliterated.

Ian Morris’s latest book, War! What is it Good For?, illustrates how inter-societal war over the millennia facilitated the advance of mankind by liquidating the weak and unsuccessful, and by creating the “rule of might” under whose protection mankind carried out trade and innovation to progress the species. The worst position to be in was to belong to a weaker society or tribe in any such clash or conflict. As history illustrates, such societies were always virtually annihilated.

Relatively speaking, when the southern African people clashed with the arriving European settlers, as a society of Iron Age pastoralists they were vulnerable. History shows that the indigenous southern Africans were in fact generously and – relatively speaking – fairly treated. And they have much to be grateful for to the early Dutch/Afrikaner settlers and later on to the “British Empire.”

The Fruits of Colonialism

For the last 600 years, there has been a vigorous development and expansion of the European peoples. There are all sorts of reasons: the growth of venture capital, competitive structures of society, shared information, printing, the Industrial Revolution and the harnessing of fossil energy. European society blossomed and exploded in an orgy of discovery, technical advancement and progress. The continent of Europe brought project power across the globe. The Spanish Empire in South America, and the rise of the United States, Canada, Australasia, the steppes of Russia and Siberia all bear testament to the rise of the European nations. But please note this: whenever there was a clash between the vibrant new European peoples and less advanced societies, the results have always been ugly for the latter.

Note that the native North Americans, the Aboriginal people in Australia, and the Aztecs and the Incas were all effectively obliterated. There are many reasons why the southern African indigenous people were spared this carnage. First, the early Dutch/Huguenot “settlers” became assimilated into Africa as an “African tribe”. Next, the Afrikaners failed to attract follow-up mass immigration as happened across the new world; and last, southern Africa came latterly under the relatively benign and progressive flag of the British Empire.

The fact is that the indigenous Africans who found themselves at the bottom on the development heap were in deep trouble. They needed to catch up fast – without being swamped and obliterated by clashes with more advanced societies; and the fact is they were deeply fortunate to be colonised by the Afrikaners and the British Empire.

Why were they fortunate? Well, take for example the fact that when Gandhi was openly defying the British Raj in India, Hitler advised Chamberlain thus: “Shoot him… people will soon forget!” But of course the Raj couldn’t do that, for they knew such an action would breach the law of the land. What other dominant power would have been so tolerant and decent, or wedded to the rule of law?

In the brilliant book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, economic historian Neil Fergusson illustrates the many positive contributions of British colonialism. He makes the vital point that under the British flag, more capital was transferred from the developed to the undeveloped world than at any time before or since in history, and that the risk premium for such transfers was artificially and derisorily low. Thus Anglo-American risk transfers and skills helped build southern Africa into the economic powerhouse of Africa with associated institutions, infrastructure and technology.

Southern Africa has much to thank Cecil Rhodes and the British Empire for. Of course, there were gross excesses and no one can be proud of the miseries and injustices of Apartheid. However, when you take into account the building of cities and their vast necessary infrastructure, the rule of law, and democratic and civic institutions, it’s quite an inheritance. In the round, all you have to do is look around and see – with unprejudiced eyes – what has been achieved and passed on to future generations.

Beloved Country

The good news is that, as a whole, today’s world society has become wealthier, healthier, happier, kinder, cleaner and better educated. People live more peaceful, more equal and longer lives that at any time since Adam. The bad news is that weak-strong societal conflicts are now much subtler than in the past: the battleground is about surviving in the global world economy. There is no escaping the iron rule that to survive you must innovate, but not all boats will rise in the rising tide of global progress and prosperity.

On present showing, I suspect that as indigenous southern Africans fall back in the economic race, they – as has been the case in Zimbabwe – will react increasingly aggressively towards the heritage and history of the white minority. As the aggression rises in tempo, decision boundaries by multi-national companies will be wound back to the shorter term, capital will be invested elsewhere, and emigration forms will be filled in by the most talented. The universities will start to lose gifted teachers as well as the hugely beneficial annual influx of US students, and the alumni will file their long-term endowment plans in the bin. All this will be to the great cost of the departments of engineering, science, mathematics, commerce and law: all vital disciplines if southern Africa is to compete in world markets.

The real problems that face southern Africa have nothing to do with old colonial history; rather they are that: (1) Education performance is now amongst the lowest in the world and as a result, the “born free” of the “Beloved Country” generation are being condemned to servitude and unemployment; (2) Pervasive corruption is smeared across all aspects of southern African life; and (3) There is chronic mismanagement by crucial state-owned enterprises.

The House of Tomorrow

Our children are all doing – well to us, anyway! – interesting things. Milly is a training consultant, a role she has created with her own effort, flair and energy. Thomas is starting his curacy outside Bath, Oliver starts his curacy in the centre of Cambridge, and Clare has just been appointed chaplain of Christ Church Oxford. Our children – and our 10 grandchildren – are our pride and joy, as children usually are to parents the world over and have been since time began.

It’s satisfying to watch our children’s careers and families unfold. They are pleased to be involved in jobs that are love affairs, and for our part, we are as proud as punch. But it’s dangerous for us to try and get too close. We should try and perfect the art of selfless love. Good old St Paul claimed selfless love was like a “drink offering”: a good metaphor, because liquid poured from a glass is a one-way trip. In my view, this is as good a description of selfless love as you can get. Of course, parental love can be a volatile force. It can overwhelm us like a tsunami, but we all have to be careful of living vicariously through children because a parent’s love is like a ball: it gets passed onto each generation. But the ball only goes one way, that is from parent to child and onto that child’s children in turn – and you cannot expect the ball to be passed back to you from your own children. Yes, of course, we love our parents, however old we get – we always need them, and when they die, it’s a loss to be mourned. But it’s a different kind of a love from that which you give a child. And, as parents, our job is to pass the ball forwards and not back. We are our children’s custodians: they are not our possessions.

As the poet Khalil Gibran wrote:

“You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls live in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit.”

Nor can we expect any/much thanks from our children for what we may have done for them – any more than we thanked our parents for what they did for us (which in my case, was not a lot.)

What goes round comes round in the perfect symmetry of life.

Welcome to Our Church?

While waiting for Markus I visited St Nikolas’ church in Guildford. Although it was 11.30am on a Sunday and there were people inside, the doors were locked. I wandered round to find that the somewhat elderly congregation was having coffee in a smart hall at the back.

Interesting, this. What sort of welcome would I receive? I am old (ish!) and dressed as an itinerant scruff – old trousers, a half eaten baseball hat (thanks to our dog Moses), a fluorescent yellow jacket and my big toe showing through my boot, so my fashion suggests “Salvation Home for Destitutes” rather than Hackett, if you know what I mean. What sort of welcome would I have? So, in I walked and the crowd parted like the Red Sea … everyone ignored me, including the vicar, and went on talking to their chums.

My barren visit was saved by the finance chairman called Patrick, who was welcoming, and he gave me coffee.

However, I feel that If I had been an ex-prisoner or black or under fifty I would have not felt welcome.

When I went round to the front doors again there were four young people trying to get in. I told them the bad news… that is that the church has lost the plot and is as dead as the dodo. They smiled and went on their way.

I understand that the vicar is “very spiritual”… that’s nice, then. But it would be even nicer if he had the courtesy to greet strangers because I have always understood that this is vital part of a vicar’s job.

There was a large sign saying “Welcome” on the front of this church, but I have learned that this is only symbolic!

I walked away, sadly…

Pretty Politics

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus never declared, “blessed are the nice” – though it seems all too many of our countrymen want to be thought of as just that. These people don’t want actually to have to do anything in particular to prove their niceness, virtue and political correctness, and they reckon talk will do. They have long since learned what George McDonald Fraser’s great creation Harry Flashman knew: people take you at face value… they don’t probe or think much. So if you can talk the talk, you don’t have to walk the walk. What do I mean?

Talking the Talk

I listened to another vicar the other day, a substantial lady, holding forth to a small group with her “Christian” views on politics. It seems today that clergy talk of little else: they know it’s less offensive and rather easier to discuss, for example, the alleged iniquities of the growth in the number of food banks than preach the Gospel. She talked about “her journey” and then her “vision” for a better society. Then she claimed she was “passionate” about and really “believed” in the NHS, and the plight of the poor to whom she had been “called to serve”. She said, in particular, that she advocated a higher minimum wage.

Why should this lady care that if the minimum wage rises too high, low-skilled workers, whose abilities simply cannot command a high minimum wage, become unemployed? That would of course not be her problem. She was effortlessly indicating to her audience that she was holy, generous and warm-hearted. She was showing that she cared deeply about her fellow man – or woman. All she had to do was talk and send verbal signals. I told her that it was my view that the “Christian” communities held no monopoly of such views, and stances she claimed were “Christian” were surely shared by Muslims, Hindus, Jews and secular humanists. She looked hurt, for all she wanted to be was “nice” and I was complicating things.

PC World

This faux niceness is everywhere. One of our young friends claimed at a recent supper party she had voted “Green”. Everyone said what an interesting choice that was; oh yes, what a sensible move. No one asked how the nation could afford, for example, the £45bn bill they were proposing for insulating everyone’s lofts? Or even commented that the scale of their proposed financial profligacy was breathtaking. No one asked why was it considered wise to run down our defences and drop our nuclear defences in a dangerous world? It would seem, rather, that voting Green is considered to be a “nice” and acceptable option.

At another function, one of our other friends announced he had voted UKIP. There were sharp intakes of breath from the other guests for he had unwittingly stated that he was fundamentally rather nasty, that he did not hold liberal media-approved opinions – one of which of course is to loathe UKIP and all its works. The other guests wanted to demonstrate by their disapproval of UKIP they were not racist. Now, I hasten to add that I am not a UKIP supporter, but the fact that the UKIP manifesto was a paragon of common sense when compared to the Greens’ was not even mentioned. Then one of the other guests said, presumably in order to indicate what a nice person she was and how much she cared about the poor, how much she loathed the Daily Mail. Then, in case that message had been missed, she announced how much she despised Murdoch. I asked her why? Silence fell. I presume she was convinced that her views – prejudices really – were for parading, not debating. In other words they could not be challenged in polite company. I asked if she read other papers, and of course she answered that yes she did. Then I told her that if it hadn’t been for Murdoch courageously taking on the print unions in the 1970s, then there would not today be any other newspapers to read. She stared at me silently because parading an acute dislike of Murdoch is a totemic statement indicating “political correctness”.

Signalling how “nice” you are crosses party boundaries. For example, the Conservatives always have to prove that they are not the “nasty party”. This is one of the reasons they have to hammer off-shore havens and tax avoiders. They were about to name and shame a few avoiders when it was pointed out they were in the process of destroying some of their most generous supporters.

Then why do you think that the Tories ring-fenced the expenditure of 0.7 per cent of our GDP on foreign aid? The efficacy of such expenditure on foreign aid is irrelevant: it was to prove the party is nice and caring. When Cameron claims he is a “passionate defender” of the NHS – note the “passion” – he is declaring he also believes, along with everyone else, in what passes for God in the UK. This triggers the other parties to declare they passionately believe in the NHS even more than Cameron, and that they are therefore even more “compassionate” than him. The virtue lies in the wish. The use of the word “believes” shifts the argument away from evidence about which health care system results in the greatest benefit for the greatest number of voters, to a visceral demonstration of compassion. Then the other parties angrily shriek that the terrible Tories want to “privatise” the NHS and – despite the NHS’s manifest inefficiencies, that will bankrupt us all in the end – that anyone who seeks to change it in any way has to be another Stalin. “Gosh”, we are meant to think, they must be virtuous and ever so “nice” to be so angry and to shriek so loudly.

Then I know of two people who are core capitalists through and through, and with all the trappings of wealth, who claim always to be “Old Labour” because it signals they are concerned with the plight of the poor. But the reality is somewhat different. There is a poem by the great late Bernard Levin that sums their attitude up:

“The working class can kiss my arse,

I’ve joined the bosses class at last”

Virtue is as Virtue Does

There was a time when Christians believed that to be virtuous you had to do something: help in a food bank, visit the sick, or look after your aging parents and not dump them in a care home. These things of course involve effort and sacrifice. How much easier is it just to talk about virtue and do nothing that is actually virtuous.

Christians hold that pride and parading empty virtue are core sins. This is surely why so many of us find empty verbal compassion and virtue signalling nauseating. Perhaps some people are fooled into believing that those who do little – apart from publicly asserting their moral superiority by boasting they loathe UKIP, Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mail – are somehow more virtuous than those who actually take action.

Today’s widespread sham boasting indicates that there is little shame and no real reflection: it’s all words and wind. I have just received an email from George, someone I hardly know. He ends it, “Have a really wonderful weekend, Tom, Warmest possible wishes, George.” (Note the possible!)

Gosh, what a far warmer and generous person George must be than the individual – whom I like a lot – who signed off his email, “Ever Henry”.

Last night we stayed with a dear friend Nigel Pollock outside Godalming. A lovely and relaxed time, much needed after one of our perennial encounters with dis-courteous drivers.

Something Fishy Going on Here…
I recall that a policeman friend of mine arrested a woman driver whom he saw swearing viciously at an inoffensive elderly man who had stopped briefly to allow a woman with a pram to cross the road: she had then given the driver the finger.

Back at the station the policeman deposited the woman in the cells and checked out her papers and the ownership of the car. Soon he released the very angry woman who asked him what the blankety blank he thought he was doing arresting her like that?

“Well madam,” said the cop, “I saw a fish sign in the rear window of your car and a banner saying “Jesus saves” and so when these signs contrasted with your behaviour I was convinced the car had been stolen. My apologies!”

A Day as a Lion

I have occasionally been asked what persuades Jane and I to continue walking for ZANE, and concerned friends wonder whether such an activity isn’t rather risky at our age? I suppose they think that at our stage of life, watching telly in carpet slippers would be a more appropriate way of spending time than staggering up and down the UK. 1,700 miles is a long way!

However, perhaps a single day as a lion is better than a thousand years as a sheep? So, on we plod.

Marshmallow World

Many people think our relatively risk-free and peaceful society is a normal state of affairs. However, we live in extraordinary and unprecedented times. Our strife-free life is a contributing factor to the fact that over 30 per cent of the population is so used to these marshmallow times that they couldn’t even be bothered to vote in the last election. With little sense of history, they are unaware that the essential freedoms we enjoy today – to vote and speak freely, the fact we are more or less an independent people (pity about the EU), religious tolerance, freely elected parliaments and fundamental democratic rights –have all been won in blood by our forefathers. It’s all too easy to just read the sports news and forget that 55 million people died in the Second World War – we take the benefits of peace for granted, and forget the terrible cost.

And while I am thinking dark thoughts, I couldn’t help pondering after we last arrived back from Zimbabwe – a country where people have no state benefits of any kind – what a risk-averse, cosseted and spoiled country the UK has become. In Zimbabwe they have nothing but God’s protection: in the UK we rely on the NHS.

Decline and Fall

The reality is that the seeds of decline lurk everywhere. Gibbon noted five characteristics that led to the fall of the Roman Empire: an obsession with sex and perversion; a celebration of affluence instead of wealth creation; meretricious rubbish posing as art; a desire for more and more people to live off the state; and last, a wide and growing divide between the rich and the poor. Recognise these symptoms anyone?

The banality of the last election frightened me – endless talk of spending money with no attention given to wealth creation. Then the left seeks to cut the armed services with the savings shovelled into either increased welfare in Scotland or our bloated NHS. Lenin would have called Sturgeon and her chums, and their wish to scrap Trident, “useful fools”.

And another thing. What irritates me witless is the lefties’ assumption that they are somehow “nicer” than those with differing views, and automatic occupants of the moral high ground. But the left has no monopoly on compassion. We all want to take money from the “haves” and help the poor. The question is how is the balance to be struck? The idea that the left is “kind” while the right unkind is drivel. Some of the most grotesque mass murderers and dictators had their roots on the left – think Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler.

A Modern Monster

In A.N. Wilson’s excellent book on Hitler, it’s chilling to read that despite the fact he was a monster, he was also a “modernist” (and much liked by his staff). What is fascinating is that most of our lefty friends today would have wholeheartedly agreed with many of his beliefs. Of course, he took his racist views to wild extremes, but he is not alone in this; today we have growing anti-Semitism, and racism is so prevalent in our society that our leaders rightly deem it necessary to implement sterns laws to prevent racial abuse (laws, of course, do not do away with racism, they just mask its pernicious effects).

Of course, Hitler’s racism led him to the ultimate obscenity of mass murder. But he was in fact a boring, commonplace little man with a very “modern” outlook in other areas. He believed in crude Darwinism, along with nearly all the scientists and “sensible” sociologists, politicians and political commentators of our time. Hitler – rather like Blair, who abolished the office of Lord Chancellor – swept away what he regarded as outmoded political structures. He embraced science, not religion, as the answer to life’s mysteries, and he condoned euthanasia and abortion; Hitler regarded himself as forward-looking. Oh yes, and he hated hunting and was a non-smoking vegetarian. In fact, as far as I can see, Hitler’s views were the embodiment of those of the average modern lefty person.

Hitler and his gang started a world war that by its end had killed 52 million people. Without proper defences and with our naive belief that the wars of the wicked past can never return because we are now more “civilised” and “nicer” than before, how can we ensure that the new lefty versions of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Saddam can be spotted before they end the world as we know it? Next time it will be nuclear.

A Stellar Cast

We crawled through thick traffic to the ZANE conference on the second hottest day of the year and, considering Wimbledon is on, it was surprisingly well attended. My friend Paul Boateng – past High Commissioner to South Africa made an excellent chairman. The ambassador Catriona Laing was a star- it’s clear that the Zimbabwe job is highly sensitive and they choose their stars to serve there. We were lucky to have Richard Dowden- director of the Royal Africa Society- and my old friend and clubfoot champion Chris Lavy. All in all a very worthwhile day.
Back to the kind hospitality of ZANE donors.

Turning Heads

Whilst in the car on the way to the conference with Jane, I asked our driver Markus if he looks at women in the street.

“Oh yes,” he admitted, “I always have done!”

“So do I”

“Oh yes Tom,” Jane said sweetly, “do you think they are looking at you?”

Nice having a wife.

—

Shadowlands

Over the last couple of years, we have watched a sad procession of desperate men facing jail sentences and complete ruin for abusing minors. And we read of others destroyed by drink and drugs.

Before we set off this morning, my eye was drawn to yet another sad tale in the paper of a celebrity’s fall from grace – and it set me thinking. These “criminals” have been destroyed by their shadowlands overwhelming them; and there by the grace of God go I.

Something to Die For

We are all created to make a difference. Martin Luther King wrote that, “If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, then he isn’t fit to live.” A rather extreme sentiment, but he makes his position very clear. Rather more gently, Sir Walter Scott said that to be productive we need, “a maiden to woo, a battle to fight and a cause greater than ourselves to live for.”

The ominous fact is that if we are unable to make a difference then we will find a substitute because none of us can live without some sort of purpose. It follows that unless we can find our God-given role, we are likely to find an alternative one that the Almighty did not mean us to play. What do I mean?

Occasionally I have had experiences that were so profound I can recall each moment as it happened with clarity: I remember exactly what was said and who said it.

Some years ago on a business trip I was persuaded to visit a “camp” in California for a week. The course’s purpose, I soon discovered, was to put its participants in touch with their inner feelings.

I am a fully paid up member of the church reticent with deep conservative instincts embedded in my DNA: I am English, RMA Sandhurst trained, and my default position is the stiff upper lip. So when it became clear that this place was completely outside my radar, I wanted out fast. But my hosts were insistent I participated and so I rather weakly stayed; in retrospect I’m rather glad, because the experience taught me a great deal.

At the outset we were sworn to secrecy (though, don’t forget that when I’m sworn to total secrecy, it only takes me a week before I forget quite how secret the secret was; in two weeks, I can’t remember that it was a secret at all; and when three weeks have passed, I can’t even recall who told me the secret in the first place.) Anyway, as all this happened many years ago now, I can relate the experience with a more-or-less clear conscience. (Note: be careful before telling me your secret!)

To get back to the camp, numbers were used rather than names, and to create a degree of anonymity, we were all obliged to wear green tracksuits. We were softened up by having to participate in various vigorous games, racing up and down hills and passing rocks backwards and forwards (performing many sits ups if we were too slow). Meanwhile, ramrod instructors screamed the sort of crude insults that I last heard way back in my Sandhurst days. The frenzy and shouting increased as the week progressed.

In the evenings, we were made to form a circle while our leader persuaded us to open our “inner selves” and talk about our feelings; this gradually progressed to exploring our deepest hopes and fears.

Then, on the last couple of nights, psychodrama was used to persuade us to consider our relationship with our parents…. And then we were encouraged to discuss our sex lives.

Quiet Desperation

I managed – just – to retain a sort of lofty detachment and I (thankfully) rediscovered an acute speech impediment from my childhood, so I sat there rather pink and more or less mute. However, several men began to talk brokenly of hidden sexual secrets and miseries. Perhaps this is something only Americans can do with relaxed fluency, although even they found mentally undressing in public difficult.

Then the mood changed… one man admitted that in the past month he had had sex with three women whose names he didn’t even know. Now the floodgates of revelation began to break all around me. Many of the men admitted that they were addicted to using pornography, despite the fact that doing so left them feeling disgusted and emptied. Others admitted – weeping as they did so – to secret drinking; another man was hooked on cocaine, and he saw no means of escaping.

I understood then what Thoreau meant when he wrote that, “men live lives of quiet desperation”.

The course leader told us we all have a shadow mission. Carl Jung wrote that each of us has a “shadow side” whose patterns of thought and actions betray our deepest values, and lead to misery, bad consciences and destroyed families.

I find the description of the “shadow” helps, as it explains my sense of secrecy, chaos and profound feelings of loneliness that my sin creates in me.

So just as we all have a mission in life – a way of using our talents to carry out the work God intends us to fulfil – we all have a shadow mission, our default position if we cruise along with our minds stuck in neutral. We were told that our souls are stained indelibly with the colour of our leisure thoughts.

The shadowland is where we can end up if we allow our natural temptations to lust and greed to dominate. To illustrate this point, one man stared fixedly at the ground as he told us: “My shadow mission is to spend afternoons with a prostitute and let the rest of the world go to hell. My life is so structured, I need some chaos to help me through.”

A few men giggled nervously and then fell silent: the man had no aspiration to be Saddam Hussein or Stalin, such a prospect would of course have appalled him, and so we contemplated instead this sad and all too mundane story of humiliation and degradation. We realised how easy it is to slide into negative and sinful pursuits that can easily become a way of life. It was the sheer hopelessness and utter banality of his shadow mission that gave it the tang of truth.

We reflected how shadow missions can take over our lives. Celebrities are imprisoned for sexual criminality with minors as their shadow missions first overwhelm and then destroy their careers and families.

Being clear about my own shadow mission has been hugely helpful to me, for I now see it for what it is. I realise I do not want to devote any part of my life to it. Shadow missions consume time, money and emotional energy: at the same time, they are wholly negative and replace creativity. They risk family happiness.

Wrestling our Demons

Shadow missions lead to the same destination: Satan’s broken wasteland of lies, disgrace and shuddering despair. Jesus was tempted by a shadow mission: we read in Hebrews that he was tempted like us “in every way”, but he rejected it. In the desert, Satan tempted Jesus to achieve his mission without hunger and without pain. “All the kingdoms of the world I will give you.” But Jesus walked away.

We are all subjected to temptation. In Conan Doyle’s The Final Problem, Sherlock Holmes wrestles with his archenemy Moriarty on a cliff edge wreathed in mist high above the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.

Just one tiny push, that’s all it takes, and Holmes will fall to destruction in his shadowland.

Temptation

Perhaps dear reader you might like to be a fly on the wall and listen in as I spend a little time bartering with the devil.

The man who gave us advice on how to negotiate the road to Alton was oh so kind and well meaning:

“Do watch the lorries as they sweep round bends…do be careful as drivers are known to drive really fast as they approach the town….” and on he went!

I was sorely tempted to put Him right with, “Listen sunshine, Jane and I have walked 1800 miles round Britain recently and there is nothing we haven’t already seen  on UK roads with cars tearing along so fast they make Silverstone look like a roller skating rink.  We’ve faced lorries and white vans that we’re convinced were trying to kill us…we reckon by now we know more about roads than Old Man Macadam ever did so keep your impertinent advice to yourself, and don’t tell Andy Murray how to hold his racket, do you understand?”

But he was trying to help us and was so kind and a supporter and donor so I thanked him for his great solicitude and kindness and we went on our way.

Devil 0, virtue 1

This time!

Hume Truths

Staying with Gordon and Sally Scutt I was reminded of the story about the charismatic cardinal of Westminster Basil Hume when he was headmaster of Ampleforth college. I was told this tale by a former pupil who said that after forty years he could still recall an electrifying encounter with Hume when a class of fifty boys, aged I suppose 17 or so, decided that the gospel was a tedious irrelevance to their lives:

” Look sir,” said one representative of his friends, ” Henry here is going into the city. George has a family business to look after him; Marcus will inherit an estate and I’m going into the army. What possible use is “religion” or the “gospel” to us?”

Hume answered quietly thus;

” Gentlemen there are fifty of you in this class. Statistically at least twenty five of you will have marriage difficulties that involve betrayal and endless misery. Sixteen of you will know the pain of divorce. Eighteen of you will suffer serious financial difficulties, six will go bankrupt. Twenty five of you will face serious issues with your children; two will go to prison (and you doubtless will be one of them Bloggins. Six will face the challenge of handicapped children; you will all know about sickness, pain and you will face death. At all these times I submit gentlemen you will be thankful for the gospel of Christ”.

Phew! No wonder he remembered it!

Hurry!

I am reading a biography about President Abraham Lincoln who was a great leader and achiever. He was responsible for the abolition of slavery and winning the American civil war. It is interesting that he never hurried. In fact when he was young, he read mainly Aesop’s Fables – which he more or less memorised – and the Bible.

Lincoln had to understand everything minutely and exactly, and it took him a long time. He would slowly chew over each new fact until it was memorised. And when it was lodged in his mind, he never lost his understanding of it. He often spoke of how slowly his mind worked. His law partner said that Lincoln read less and thought more than any man in his sphere in America. I read somewhere that today we have largely traded wisdom for information, and depth for breadth. We want microwave maturity. We should study Lincoln.

Oh Dear! I Shall be Too Late!

I oversleep and have to dress in a hurry. I can’t help wondering when the voice of God will announce to me: “From henceforth thou shalt be unable to put on thine own socks?”

But we are late. We have to catch up with our schedule so we rush to the start of the walk. Hurry, hurry and hurry!

We pass two cars with drivers furiously fingering their mobiles. Another sign flashes by advertising a credit card that will take “the waiting out of wanting.” The traffic slows to a queue and I can see road rage mounting in the driver nearest us, who by the agitated workings of his face and the honking of his horn appears to be growing somewhat impatient. We walk past a garage advertising “help to move you faster”.

What sort of a state are we in? We all have to move faster and faster. What instinct encourages me to speed in my car so often? We now have systems that churn out news 24/7. It’s not as if we can do anything much about the information we are constantly absorbing. However, people are continually staring at their phones and emails at meetings, during social occasions and even in church, in case they are missing something vital. Fast food and pizza houses tell us they don’t sell just food, they sell “fast delivery”. Even shampoos and conditioners are combined to save time.

Some time ago, a survey told us that because advanced technology is taking over mundane jobs, many people will be forced to cut their working hours. So, the weeks we work each year are bound to reduce so we can retire sooner. The question is: how are people going to spend the time they are saving? Watching video games and the telly? I hear that the two phrases most used in homes in the UK today are “move over” and “what’s on?”

This is ridiculous. Why are we all in such a hurry? As the red queen in Alice and Wonderland puts it: “… it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast…!”

Time-Poor

Hurry can destroy us and it keeps us from happiness. As Carl Jung once wrote, “Hurry is not just like the devil: hurry is the devil.”

The irony is that although our society is sated with goods, we are time-poor. Our friends in Zimbabwe are very poor indeed but rich in time. They are not driven or hurried. Hurry sickness is a continual struggle to achieve more things in less and less time, in the face of opposition real or imagined. And hurry can destroy family life. Busy people appear to have less and less time to talk to – and love – their families and their children. Charlie, a friend of mine, told me that when his bishop father died he received over 200 letters saying what a wonderful, kind, caring and gentle man his father was. Charlie told me with tears in his eyes: “He was always in a such hurry when he was with me. I did not know that man.”

It is because hurry lies behind so much of the anger and frustrations of modern living and is the great enemy of loving relationships and family life that perhaps we should take a look at how Lincoln operated – and just slow down.

Walks and Talks with Daukes

We walked from Avington to Medstead and we were joined by Clendon and Camilla Daukes. It’s always a joy to have them with us if only because we make each other laugh until we cry. Clendon is a force of nature, a man of boundless energy and goodwill who can’t see a good cause without wanting to take it up. He doesn’t just talk about things, he really gets them done.

We spend the night enjoying the kind hospitality of Patrick Mitford Slade, who I know well from his work with the services charities whom we are privileged to partner in Zimbabwe. We meet Julia from Cornwall, who is a loyal ZANE supporter and she plans to walk with us today.

The Bride Bomb

As I walk with my friend we fondly reminisce about a memorable wedding we both attended many years ago – one where everything went disastrously awry.

It takes a certain amount of courage to continue with an event after the wheels have completely fallen off, and we both agree that our friends deserved a medal. The bride’s mum was a formidable woman with the manor and bearing of a regimental sergeant major. She had arranged for two bands and three sets of singers to perform, and there were enough flowers in the church to make an annexe to the Chelsea Flower Show. There were eight bridesmaids and groups of appointed flower petal throwers, and they had all been drilled mercilessly. The grandeur was on a scale usually reserved for Trooping the Colour.

Just a Cheeseball or Two…

The wedding was unfolding according to plan until the moment of the processional. The bride had been dressed for hours (if not days). No adrenaline was left in the poor lady’s body. She had been left alone in the church’s reception hall, and while the organ went on playing bits of Mozart she walked nervously along the tables laden with delicious goodies. She absent-mindedly started to sample the delicacies on display, from a vast bowl of pressed nuts to a selection of little pink and green mints. Then she nibbled some pecans and a cheese-ball or two, before gulping down a few black olives. Now she swallowed a handful of glazed almonds, a few sausages with frilly toothpicks stuck in them, a couple of shrimps shrouded in bacon, and some cheese biscuits smothered in liver pate. She washed down the lot with the help of a glass of pink champagne given to her by her father. Just to calm her nerves, you understand.

When the bride arrived at the church door, what everyone noticed was not her dress but her face. It was white, tinged with a light-green sheen. For what was coming down the aisle was not a bride but a walking time bomb, ready to explode.

Just before she reached the church altar, the bride threw up. And when I say she threw up, I don’t mean a ladylike “urp” into her little lace hanky. There’s no nice way of putting it, for not only did the bride spray her mother but she hosed most of the chancel – hitting three bridesmaids, the groom, the best man and the vicar too.

Only two people were seen to be smiling: one was the mother of the groom and the other was the father of the bride.

The bride pulled herself together though, and afterwards there was a much quieter, less ostentatious ceremony in the reception hall. And everyone cried, as people are supposed to do at weddings, mostly because the groom held the bride tenderly and kissed her lovingly throughout the whole ceremony.

There was an action replay 10 years later to celebrate the disaster and the event was displayed on three TV monitors – everyone laughed until they cried. Even the bride’s mum had long been able to see the funny side. But how could they enjoy the event when it had all gone so disastrously wrong? Simple. Because despite the unfortunate chain of events, this was still a loving wedding full of laughter and great fun. The whole episode is now safely archived away in the family’s folklore.

Of course, that sort of wedding is well over the top, and we don’t have to spend loads of money to have fun and celebrate. But as I’ve said before, there are never enough good parties to mark the important changes in life. Today we apparently have a new way of doing things: more relaxed and less formal – but with fewer opportunities for chaos, laughter and tears. I wonder if the new ways are as much fun as those of the old days?

No More Shame

One of my friends told me that his daughter Muriel has morphed into a “relationship” with Freddie, where she seems to have been stuck for some nine years. No one decided when her single state ended and her new “couple” role started, it just seemed to happen – and, of course, there was no party.

The problem is that Muriel’s “partner”, Freddie, cannot make up his mind whether or not to commit to Muriel. Muriel is now 35 and lives in limbo land with her biological clock loudly ticking. She is desperate to have a family but no one knows what to say to Freddie to get him to face up to his responsibilities as the old lines of family authority have been eroded to dust. Is Muriel still “in” her old family, or out of it? If she is “out”, when did she leave? My friend (Muriel’s dad) has been bracing himself for some time to question Freddie about his long-term intentions, but he is told to shut up by his wife (who will do whatever she has to avoid confrontation). Muriel has come to realise that she is not as marriageable as she was nine years ago, and she is fearful that if she presses too hard she faces the risk of being traded in for a new model. The question she asks at four in the morning is whether her present insecurity is better than the risk she faces of potential loneliness?

If this is the new way of living, then who are the winners? Both sets of parents are increasingly flustered, and Muriel is frightened and miserable.

Today, we seem to have done away with shame. Once it was a very potent emotion and it governed people’s lives long after the ducking pool and the stocks were abolished. Shakespeare mentions “shame” 344 times in his plays and guilt, which is a far more personal emotion, only 33 times. A mere 100 years ago, society expected people to behave in a certain way and if they failed to conform then they were humiliated. Carl Jung calls shame a “soul-eating” emotion. It destroyed Oscar Wilde with hideous relish and finality; single mothers were ostracised and illegitimate children were stigmatised: unpleasant hypocrites and gossips had a great time. My grandmother was deserted by her feckless husband in 1905 and the family – lower middle class, southern Manchester – was traduced by the community for bringing shame on itself – an even worse social crime than ruining one’s own reputation. There was little allowance for redemption then. It’s easy to see why the British rejected shame in the second half of the twentieth century, for it was seen to be a singularly destructive and corrosive emotion.

But isn’t there a need for some shame? Perhaps we need to differentiate between good and bad shame; for example should the likes of Freddie be allowed to get off without critical comment from any quarter? All Muriel’s family want is to ensure that the interests of their vulnerable daughter are protected, for we are all more vulnerable than we pretend to be.

Poor Muriel thought it was so much fun when she started out on the relationship when there were no social rules to bother herself with. But it’s a cold, hard world out there and loneliness is peeping round the corner.

Moral Drift

Over the years, the default position of our UK authorities – both local and national – has been to create an atheist society, and they appear to be well on the way to succeeding.

Today it seems that social workers no longer work within a clear framework of right and wrong, or with reference to a higher power. Well we can see how this is working out in Oxford where underage girls were recently raped by a group of men. Although our local authorities as well as the police were informed of what was happening, they chose to do nothing to stop the abuse because they did not want to be seen as “judgemental”. So the rapes continued unabated for some time. It would seem that the police and the local authorities operate today in a state of moral drift.

It’s not as if we couldn’t see this coming. George Orwell, the author of 1984 was a noted atheist. Before he died, he pondered the loss of religious faith in Europe that he had once applauded, and he was honest enough to express dismay at the results. “For two hundred years,” he wrote, “we have sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than we had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded and down we came. But unfortunately there has been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all but a cesspool of barbed wire… It appears that amputation of the soul is not a simple surgical job like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic.”

Oxford’s raped girls are a testimony to that. And don’t forget that Orwell wrote that 50 years ago. I wonder what he would be writing if he were alive today?

The Grand Old Duke

We walked like the troops of the Grand Old Duke of York, up and down the hills from Hursley to Avington through the middle of Winchester. We met a kind lady called Ruth in the cathedral refrectory who kinldy made a donation to Zane,

The sadness for Jane and me is that Moses is not with us. The poor dog managed to get a splinter jammed in his heel and when it was extracted it went septic. We hope he can join us again on Monday as we miss him bounding along. He is so trusting and full of innocent joy. I often recall the prayer: “Oh God, please make me the person my dog thinks I am.”

Nasty Game

We were joined by Simon who walks with us. Apparently he knew Zimbabwe well. He is engaging company as we spend part of the day taking rainwear off and putting  it back on. We discuss “Big Game” shooting,  not a sport I have ever wished to take part in. I was put off for life  after I visited a baronial home in Aberdeen when I was young.  We were shown around by the aged Laird who had apparently fought in WW1.  In the hall he showed us  a selection of heads of animals mounted on the far wall – you must have seen the sort of thing. MacDuff pointed out the head of a gnu, a wildebeest, a buffalo and so on. And then he announced with particular relish:

“And there is the head of a German soldier I shot in the war!”

And there ….hanging on the wall was a skull mounted on a board. Under it was the description:

“Fritz: Vimy Ridge 1918”

This disgusting little man had gone back with a shovel after the war and dug up “his prize”and hung it on his wall as a trophy! Can you imagine anything more horrible than that?

As I trudge, my mind turns to thoughts of politics, religion and society, as it often does.

Shifting Sands

We have just endured yet another election where the level of debate was deplorable. Our leaders apparently assume that the average voter is a moron – perhaps it’s true? For some months, we were obliged to listen to a Punch and Judy show where senior politicians were seeking to bash into the electorate that their party loved the NHS more than any other party, and take that!

But reality is usually a casualty in elections. I have actively participated in four elections and during each one the electorate was told: “This is the most important election since the war!” Does anyone still believe such exaggeration?

Politics in Action

Of course politics is vitally important for there are obviously certain functions that only a government can reasonably undertake. Only government can ensure that the currency is not debased (we have an appalling record); that the country is properly defended, policed and represented overseas; and that taxation is collected and that the poor are well provided for. Only government can ensure that vital services, such as education, the NHS and local government, are efficiently run and reasonably financed.

I reckon that politicians should not only be judged by what they do, but also by the things they don’t do. Prime Minister Harold Wilson was never accorded sufficient recognition for keeping us out of the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 70s. How sad that Tony Blair didn’t read Labour’s recent history.

Of course, not all that government does is in fact wise: some is destructive folly. What possessed Labour to allow gaming houses to flourish smack in the centre of our poorest cities, thereby allowing the greedy to suck welfare benefits from the poorest families in the land with cormorant efficiency? And why did the Coalition allow this wickedness to continue? This is an issue of the deepest shame and no party emerges well.

I suggest that we can help the democratic process to flourish in two main ways: first by resisting the impulse to offer lazy, ignorant and vicious criticism of senior politicians, which has the effect of weakening our democracy. It was John Kennedy who said that no one should judge any politician until he or she had seen the advice they were given and actually faced the issues. Such criticism is usually made by those who know very little about the relevant issues, and it carries the implication that if the critic were doing the job, he or she would do it better: unlikely!

The second thing we can do is to actually vote.

Work to be Done

But there are a number of vital things that politicians cannot do – and I wonder sometimes if they are aware of their limitations?

Politicians cannot affect the passions of the masses and they cannot change people. They don’t have the power to build families, mend broken hearts or transform shattered lives. Politicians cannot limit the acute spiral in drug and alcohol abuse or the level of suicide, and nor can they moderate the ghastly level of sexual exploitation that is everywhere a commonplace. They cannot stem the rising number of abortions, and they cannot stop many of those who have no real need of care homes from being shunted into institutional care (by families who often can’t be bothered to look after them). There is little politicians can do about domestic cruelty or the chronic loneliness that disfigures our society, and they cannot repair the collateral damage caused by abusive families. They cannot reduce the misery suffered by neglected children – and this is not necessarily due to lack of resources or money. Politicians can do nothing to correct the blight of materialism or pornography, nor can they offer grace or forgiveness. And lastly, they cannot build bridges of reconciliation between those who are hurting and those who are demanding vengeance.

In summary, politicians on their own cannot make people happy.

Some might ask if I am forgetting the MP William Wilberforce and his abolition of slavery, or the Clapham Sect and the eighteenth/early nineteenth-century reformation of manners? Of course Wilberforce and many like him wrought miracles to bring about the correction of monstrous evils. But Wilberforce needed the vicar and ex-slaver John Newton to convert him to the foot of the cross, before the veil was lifted and he began to undertake his life’s great work.

So there is work for our Christian community to do, which, with respect, politicians and secular humanists can’t even begin to undertake. And it does not need committees or councils to achieve great things. Let me tell you that Jane and I have walked up and down this great land of ours, and I have never seen a monument or a statue celebrating the achievements of a committee or a council!

The Seeds of Change

Often the most amazing changes come from tiny beginnings, and from the grassroots up and not from government down. For example, in 1935, two drunks sat at a table in Ohio: one told the other that he had just been converted to Christ and he was going to stop drinking. His friend told him he was a drunk and could do nothing to help himself, let alone others. “Leave it to the doctors,” he said, “and just drink and be happy.”

Three months later, Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by a drunk with an idea in a dingy cellar. Today AA (and its 12 steps) operates round the world, and it has never needed a penny of government subsidy. There was no great government initiative operating here. Just an alcoholic with an idea. Great things often start from a kitchen table, a cellar… and a dream.

So there is great work to be done by the saints in fighting the evils of our time. With respect to Archbishop Sentamu, I would submit that the greatest evil is not inequality (although that of course is a terrible injustice), but the fact that for the first time in recorded history man is trying to create an atheist society here in the UK and across Europe. It will end in catastrophe.

To sum up, I quote the great and late Malcolm Muggeridge, who claimed that his chat-show career had come to a sad end because each time an issue was raised and he was asked for an answer, he would keep on replying: “The only answer is Jesus Christ.” The invitations dried up.

The issue is a difficult one for politicians, for as Alastair Campbell told us: “We don’t do God.” However, the reality must be Jesus: anything else is shifting sand.

Feeling Hot Hot Hot

Yesterday was said to be the hottest day this year and today was apparently forecast to be thundery, in fact it was even hotter than yesterday so the forecasters clearly double as election pollsters!  But how kind of the health authorities to warn us about high temperatures and the effect they can have if you don’t drink enough. What a nanny state we have become!  We have just sweated to Hursley where we devoured ice creams and where I told a pretty South African lady called Caryn all about ZANE.

And while I am feeling hot under the collar:

Je Suis Confused

In a free society we should be allowed to say what we like, and the right to offend is crucial. However just because we have that right does not mean that we should exercise it lightly; with rights come responsibilities, and one of these is not to offend people gratuitously.

Let’s make no bones about it: the freedom to speak our minds is precious. Once a government starts to erode freedom of speech, history tells us, there can be no stopping it: this is why our national press campaigned strongly against the extension of government censorship, however light and innocent it purported to be. You will recall the fuss surrounding Hugh Grant’s “Hacked Off” campaign a year or so back, and his attempt to get parliament to apply press controls.

I am *Not* Charlie

If you doubt the merits of a free press, just take a look at the wickedness that the likes of Napoleon, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Stalin and Saddam got up to under their draconian censorship laws – and Mugabe still does today – and you’ll see what I mean. They imposed tough censorship laws in the name of protecting the state; under its dark veil, they murdered people, and they did it with impunity.

The not inconsiderable pain that freedom of speech is bound to bring to those offended by it is, I submit, the price we pay for living in a free society. Yet we already have censorship. It’s already against the law to make inflammatory statements about minorities and it is illegal, for example, to display placards on the windows of bed and breakfast houses stating, “No Jews, blacks or Irish”. Such notices are discriminatory: they can give rise to grave offence and may lead to violence.

Yet various prominent Bitish politicians showed solidarity with the Charlie Hebdo magazine that grossly insulted Muslims. I should add that when the magazine’s journalists weren’t insulting the prophet Muhammad, they were insulting Christians –particularly the pope – in disgusting terms, or anyone else they thought cared deeply enough about something precious to allow them a cheap headline. We were all encouraged to go around proclaiming, “Je suis Charlie”. I didn’t join in.

Yet recently, Christian Harry Hammond was prosecuted under Section 5 of the Public Order Act for wandering about with a placard proclaiming, “Homosexuals will go to hell”. Whether I agree or disagree with Harry Hammond, or what the Charlie Hebdo journalists were saying about the Prophet Muhammad or those placards that insult minorities is beside the point. My argument is this: if insulting minorities is forbidden by law and Hammond was prosecuted for exercising his freedom of speech, then why is the Charlie Hebdo magazine lauded for insulting Muslims?

None of this makes any sense to me. Does it to you?

No Solutions

I have just heard a true story. Swarms of birds were pooing all over the Lincoln Memorial – not only was the fabric of the stonework being degraded, but tourists were complaining.

So the powers that be tried to stop the birds by using nets, but that failed and it looked ghastly anyway. So they asked themselves why the birds were collecting in that precise spot in the first place, and after a great deal of investigation they discovered that the birds had an overwhelming appetite for the spiders that were also gathering in vast numbers.

Then they smothered the memorial with anti-spider juice and that failed too. So for some months they continued their intense investigations and discovered that spiders were crawling all over the memorial because thousands of mosquitoes were present. So they tried a special mosquito insecticide but that didn’t resolve the problem either.

Next, they asked themselves why mosquitoes were attracted to the memorial. After weeks of research they determined that it was because of the floodlights. So they turned off the lights and the problem seemed to be solved….

Then people started complaining because the lights had been turned off and they couldn’t see the memorial properly.

As Enoch Powell once said, “There are some problems to which there are no solutions.”