Now is the time for me to read ‘Power and Pragmatism” by past Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind who is speaking for ZANE in early November. An excellent and insightful book about an extraordinary career by a man crackling with ability and high achievement. Defence Secretary and foreign Secretary and today an elder statesman whose views are continually being sought.

I am also reading David Coltart’s book “The Struggle Continues” that outlines in terrible detail the plight of Zimbabwe today. David describes the many attempts on his life as if they were an occupational hazard or a commonplace in his role as education secretary in the coalition government.

No Sex Please, We’re Godly…

On a recent holiday, a couple of good friends showed Jane and me a YouTube clip of a comic called Danny Bhoy comparing the Italian and British parliaments, and demonstrating how the Italians wish one another “good luck”.

After we had laughed we were left wondering which of our friends would enjoy Bhoy’s act and who would be shocked? Okay, Bhoy swears, and deploys vulgarity and mild sexual innuendo – but not gratuitously, and so what? Why do sexual references produce such anxiety amongst the religious community? And why don’t money, anger, jealousy, or envy produce an equal reaction, for it’s apparently okay to make jokes about these subjects, but not sex?  Go figure. In fact, when you come to think about it, I suppose the two subjects of God and sex cause the greatest fear and anxiety in people; the same topics that form the basis of most so-called “jokes”.

The Christian “Walk”

Anyway we have friends whose default position where vulgarity is concerned is a permanent sniff of disapproval and so we have to be careful. Don’t forget that Christians are expected not to tell smutty stories; not to gossip or boast; and not to exaggerate events. In fact, it seems to me there is very little we can talk about other than what the vicar said last Sunday, and the weather – which is, I suppose, why the latter is such a popular topic! No wonder the Desert Fathers maintained a vow of silence.

I know some people who are “good” in the worst sense of the word. These are the Christians who wander about with downcast eyes and turned-down mouths. They can be relied on to parade their interpretation of scripture as the “right one”, or to condemn gay rights and disapprove of women vicars. Quick to condemn joy, fun and sex, these deeply dreary types are the ones who put off non-Christians (who take one look and not surprisingly say “no thanks”). They can be heard talking in “holy” voices in church, and have a special vocabulary in which they detail their Christian “walk”; or they can be heard muttering about what God confided to them that very morning, or celebrating the car space that was miraculously made available. They read lessons in church, not as the good news but as a final demand for payment; and when they are around, the temperature drops at least five degrees as the sun vanishes behind the nearest cloud. Who can blame it?

Old-School Humour

What is wrong with a bit of vulgarity provided it doesn’t hurt anyone? I don’t like gratuitous swearing, crudeness or blasphemy. But salty stories and earthy humour (see Danny Bhoy) is different as it lightens the day and does no harm – there is no therapy better than a good laugh. Humour doesn’t change much throughout the ages. I visited Pompeii recently, and saw graffiti drawings of cocks and balls – as have been drawn on loo walls since the Garden of Eden (were there loos there?) So what’s new?

By all accounts, Jesus spent a good deal of his time talking to fallen women, tax collectors, drunkards, down-and-outs, and deeply flawed people like me. He was an attractive man, charismatic and wildly popular. I doubt he told his low-life friends to “shut up” whenever they started to tell an off-colour story. Sex has been a source of vulgar humour since the world began. Jesus must have heard all the old jokes and he probably had a good laugh at them too. I’ll bet he would have laughed at Danny Bhoy because he had a sense of humour. In fact, the late former Lord Chancellor Viscount Hailsham once proclaimed that Jesus told a joke when he called Peter “His Rock”!”

So if you are a Christian, does Danny Bhoy’s act offend you? If so, why?

I managed to slip down a flight of stairs in my stockinged feet in one of our host’s houses and jammed the little toe of my left foot in the banisters. This brilliant move may have broken my fall but it twisted the toe just this side of snapping. Not a good move in the early stages of a long walk. Donors will realise that I have been limping this past week and delighted to have a short break to allow the toe that strongly resembles a prize winning radish to recover its past poise.

We went to a service in one of the many churches we attend to favour and the sermon was about the need to avoid sin, and it was implied, particularly sexual sin. Glancing round the congregation I concluded that, as gross self indulgence has reduced most of them to such proportions, both adultery and fornication would merely be an exercise in the ridiculous.

Another couple of days off and then back to the walk.

The Grim Reaper

Another friend of mine is at death’s door. His wife is convinced he will be saved by a miracle cure – not “may”, mind, but “will”. I worry about this. Not so long ago, one of my employee’s husbands was afflicted with pancreatic cancer, and then it spread to his liver and lungs. It seemed clear that it was “Good night, sweet Prince” for him, but no – Rachel had received a sign that he would be cured. Then she heard about a clinic in Acapulco that offered a diet and drug cure for a mere £20k – would I cough up?

Call me a cynical old thing if you will, but in my view if the Oxford Nuffield can’t crack it then why would a South American clinic? Of course, there will always be some snake-oil clinic that claims to have a miracle cure (no guarantees mind) – provided, of course, you have the dosh.

I have known three cases of partners so hooked on the idea that their loved one was not going to die that it inhibited the process of saying “farewell”. Further, the failure of healing to take place resulted in great resentment and a broken-hearted loss of faith.

Cheerio, Here I Go…
Death, of course, comes to us all, and it’s a lonely business. We all have to deal with it in our own way. Here’s what I think:

I am a profoundly fortunate man to have survived thus far. When I am diagnosed with my galloping ab-dabs – and it’s not “if” it happens but “when” – I hope I shall dwell upon how incredibly lucky I’ve been to have experienced a life marinated in love for as long as I can remember. And I will give thanks for I have been the beneficiary of undeserved GRACE to such a degree that I wonder just to think about it.

I am now an old man and most of what I was meant to do has been done (or not done). So, if I am due to die soonest then I shall of course have a few regrets, and I will be profoundly sad to leave my family and friends behind. But broadly speaking, the timing will be fine by me for I am in God’s hands. His will be done, all will be well, and thank you for the joy and laughter. I hope I will be able to say all this cheerfully enough for unless one is actually facing the end then how we come to terms with it is bound to be theory.

Many of my dear friends are dying with distressing rapidity and I seem to spend an increasing amount of time at funerals and memorial services. It all appears so arbitrary: some of the finest people seem to be “gathered”, as the Scots quaintly put it, and then there are those whom I think could easily be spared that seem grimly to soldier on. Broadcaster David Frost died in 2013 and then his 31-year-old son Miles died last year. Poor Carina Frost had to face the double whammy of losing her husband and son within a short period of time. Mother Teresa once said she intended to have a strong word with the Recording Angel when she arrived in Heaven, and I propose to do the same!

All Will Be Well
I have to admit I’ve never witnessed a “miracle cure” as such, but that’s not to say these manifestations do not occur – just that they seem to be rare. For me, miracles are not necessarily to do with physical cures, but instead may provide profound spiritual healing: the resolution of deep personal traumas, such as a lack of forgiveness; the occasion for true repentance and the resolution of family disputes (often those that have lain unrecognised for years); and the forgiveness of sins and a spiritual awakening that can transform not only the lives of the dying, but of those who are agonisingly left behind.

My view is that whatever happens, all will be well and all manner of things will be well. Our lives are gifts from God, and He (or She) can take back that gift at any time.

We walk back towards Stratford to pick up the car and leave for a couple of days off.  Marcus, our excellent driver. comments about Jane’s and my relationship  and tell me we are a great team.

I ask him who he thinks is the boss?

He grins: “it’s obvious, ” he says. “Jane of course,”

There is no more to say really is there.

The Real Me

In Zimbabwe, ZANE looks after hundreds of very old and frail people. When you’re running a charity with finite resources, there is always the temptation to talk in numbers and thereby depersonalise people, simply regarding them as a group to be financially supported.

But if  Helen, now a feeble old bag of bones hunched up in a bed, was able to speak fluently, she might tell us of how she was brought up in an orphanage in the Transvaal, and left school at 13; or how before the war she won a beauty contest, and how she wished we could see her as she was then with a trim figure, gorgeous brown eyes and thick hair with autumn tints.

Then she married Jim and things were tough. There are no NHS or social services in Zimbabwe – if you need help, there are only local friends who might be able to sympathise briefly, but then again they have their own problems for everyone is fighting some sort of battle.

Jim bought a farm from the government, about 20 km from Marondera. Feisty Helen helped Jim literally hack a home and productive fields from the raw bush. For 45 years, grass was endlessly cut back, scrub and weeds were hooked out, fencing was put up, cattle were tended and dams were built. It was a hard life but a happy and rewarding one too. Sadly, the grown children left with one-way tickets for Tasmania and Toronto –having children leave home for work reasons is an occupational hazard for most Zimbabwe families these days.

Then in a blaze of lurid publicity the world watched as the farm invasions began. In Helen and Jim’s case, they were violently thrown off the farm that had been their home. They saw their pedigree cattle being starved and then hacked to death; they watched their dams silt up and mature trees cut down. Machinery was sold and crops left to waste, and their workers were assaulted and turfed out of their houses. The couple watched the nightmare unfold in slow motion – and a lifetime of love and hard labour was reduced to a car crash.

Six years ago, Helen was obliged to nurse Jim as he lay dying from a broken heart.

If Helen could speak now, I bet she’d say to her carers, “My body may be worn out but I am still a feisty woman with a vibrant soul. Stop waking me when I want to sleep, stop putting me to bed when I want to stay awake. Stop rationing my brandy and stop treating me like a schoolgirl when you find fags in my handbag. After all, what’s the point of my living for yet another week or so – it’ll only be raining! And stop talking to me as if I was an educationally sub-normal child. Look beyond and beneath what you think you see, and talk to the person I have been – and still am. Above all, respect my wish to stay in control of what remains of my life.

We saw Helen crouching in a foetal position. It’s amazing how tiny a space this human being occupied. The carers nudged her gently and told her that we there to see her. They talked in the way carers do when they spend their lives communicating with people who are losing their brain cells fast.

“Hello Helen… Tom is here, dear. He has come all the way from Oxford to see you. Will you say “hello” to him?”

The little bundle moved slightly and the head lifted ever so warily, just enough for the mouth to be freed and one eye to open.

“Piss off!” she hissed, and that was it.

So I did. It’s a great privilege to be able to help such a courageous women as Helen.

Last night we had dinner with the talented and rightly famous cricket star Andy Flower. In 2003, Andy and Henry Olonga decided to wear black armbands in an international match in Harare to mark the horrors taking place in their beloved country. Because of the violence of the row they generated both men decided that their families would be under threat and they left for the UK. England’s International cricket status has been immeasurably enhanced by Andy’s coaching and be has agreed to attend a ZANE event this Autumn.

Today we marched through Stratford on Avon, past the swans, the theatre and dozens of Anne Hathaway tea shops and notched another 12 miles on our walk scorecard. If ZANE donors have never seen a Shakespeare play in the new Stratford theatre make it a “bucket list” essential. The RSC Actors could make the Albanian telephone directory entertaining.

Boys Don’t Cry

When I was young, most of my contemporaries seemed fearful of intimacy. Of course they looked normal and sounded normal, but they were afraid of meaningful communication. What had happened to them? Frozen relations at home, bullying at prep schools, being beaten at public school (it still happens in Zimbabwe and in South Africa), parents who told them “boys don’t cry”….

As a result, a good number grew up deeply anxious and a few even stammered, just like Bertie in the film The King’s Speech. I thought that there would have been a generational shift by now but one of my grandsons tells me that things are more or less the same. Anyone who expresses emotion at an expensive school today is deemed “moist” or a “big girl’s blouse”. And it seems the locker-room is still open season for dirty jokes, with “little” women treated as playthings and not to be taken seriously: how sad is this?

Chit Chat

If we fail to express emotions for long enough then they start to atrophy. One of my friends told me that he feared communion because it was too personal. He was telling me, I suppose, that he found it hard to be human. He’s a brilliant public speaker and can win over any audience, but he’s fearful of one-to-one conversations. That may sound like a paradox but it’s easily explained: speeches can be controlled, for these formal encounters are on the speaker’s terms: you can say exactly what you want to, and then it’s over. When my friend has finished a speech, he darts from the room to ensure that he doesn’t have to participate in any unscripted personal encounter, the agenda of which he can’t control.

Personal encounters can be frightening. That’s why people want to depersonalise God’s love and play it down, otherwise it can be threatening. The small talk and social contrivances of polite society are designed to protect people from the confrontations inherent in a meaningful personal exchange. I won’t play this game because I find it irritating: small talk can be so exquisitely constructed that in a room full of people the talk may never extend beyond surface chit-chat. One of my friends controls conversation by telling prepared “stories” as his defence mechanism.

I think that quite a number of church services are designed to parallel social etiquette. They help us avoid any meaningful encounter with God – we escape from having a real dialogue with God into a parallel universe where “religion”, “respectability, morality” and “the Church” are just empty concepts.

Why do so many fear personal encounters and loving relationships? I think it because at one time or another – and we may have forgotten it – our intrinsic tenderness has been violated. Therefore all future potential encounters spell violation. What has happened in practice? A poet has read his most sacred secrets to an audience, who jeer and scorn. A lover offers his heart to another only to be cruelly rejected, or a first affair is ended by a brutal email. A baby stretches out his arms to his universe (his mother) only to be repelled because she is busy. Once bitten twice shy: if an attempt towards intimacy is rejected then the pain is great, the cost is too high, and we may permanently withdraw.

However, the cost of withdrawal is also high. C.S. Lewis describes what can happen:

“Love anything and you heart will surely be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with little hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless and airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.”

Under Fire

Have you ever wondered how you would behave under enemy fire?  It’s not a common occurrence today; some readers may have been fired on in Northern Ireland, and some sons of donors may have seen battle in the Falklands debacle or perhaps served in Afghanistan or Iraq. However, as I say, the experience of warfare is a relatively rare one compared to that of earlier generations who served in two world wars.

The veterans left today are now pinched by old age and slowly vanishing from view over the landscape of memory but many of them have told me that the business of killing is a skilled trade and it reaches its apotheosis in all-out war. The paradox is that although there is fear, terrifying fear – and no one who has ever been involved in a conflict can possibly deny that – there is also elation, a discovery that there has never been an experience more supremely thrilling than the achievement of some appalling destruction. It’s shaming to admit that many attest this to be true. My generation was saved from finding this out for themselves by Harold Wilson’s decision to resist the invitation from Lyndon Johnson to join the American war in Vietnam. (Prime ministers should be judged by what folly they prevent just as much as by what they do, and Wilson rarely gets credit for making that difficult judgement call that saved my generation from much carnage.)

I served in two colonial armies: one in Kenya before independence, and then I served in the Sultan of Muscat’s Northern Frontier Regiment where I was shot at by rebels on my twenty-first birthday (and I have to say I was unaware of what had happened until shortly afterwards). But I have never crouched terrified in a trench, or been fired upon, say, by a machine gun. I wonder how I would react? Would I conquer my fear or would I melt into snivelling immobility like the “coward” in the excellent film Saving Private Ryan? Or might I morph into a warrior like “Dam Buster” Guy Gibson VC, or Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War?

Were they supermen? Did they have no fear? Of course not. They battled with fear as we all would. In Gibson’s book, Enemy Coast Ahead, he wrote of what happens to a bomber and its crew after it is hit by enemy fire, falling steeply out of the sky for a terrible minute of two: “…then it is all over and you hit the ground. Petrol flames come soaring up into the sky, almost reaching to meet you as they rocket your soul to Heaven.” So Gibson knew all about fear, he just knew. He was killed in 1944 flying a Mosquito without sufficient practice near the Dutch town of Steenbergen.

Audie Murphy is quoted as saying, “I have a deadly hatred of fear. It has me by the throat, and I have it by the throat. We have been struggling for many years and I still don’t know which will win the battle but that very hatred of fear has driven me to do a lot of things which I have never bothered to explain and which nobody understands. Fear is the blot on my thinking process, crippling an individual’s ability to act. I simply perform first and think later.”

In my experience this has the ring of raw truth. Men who act bravely in war do so because they dread succumbing to fear more than they dread getting killed. Most heroes fight as many battles with themselves and their fear as they do with the enemy.

We walked from Kington to outside Alchester. Warm and muggy. We had lunch in yet another pub that clearly buys bulk food from a wholesaler who guarantees that none of the recipes need cooking, so the food – if you can call it that – just requires slapping on a plate by anyone.  No skill or preparation needed.  Only the non-complaining English tolerate this sort of thing.

I was hugely complimented by International Rotary who awarded me the Paul Harris Medal of honour for ZAN’E`s work in Zimbabwe. What a friendly charity Rotary is. We walked on with a spring in our steps.

Eyewitness

Readers may have read the sad story concerning saintly war hero Bishop George Bell of Chichester. Damages have now been paid by the Church on the assumption he sexually molested a five-year-old girl.

So far, so commonplace: after all, the papers are full of this sort of thing these days. So what’s odd about this case? Well the woman complained recently of Bell’s abuse, which occurred over 60 years ago, and Bell died in 1958.

Fearing criticism if it was seen to do nothing, the Church dealt with the civil action without “due process”. The assumption was made that in all probability Bell had carried out the alleged abuse and a financial settlement was made. The Church then tried to bury the scandal as best it could. But appalled parishioners started to strip Bell’s name from various church buildings, while others have tried to win a modicum of justice for Bell’s memory. This story isn’t over.

Rough Justice?

Let’s take into account that saintly people can do appalling things (look at Abraham, Jacob, David and so on – the list is vast), and remember how many thought that Jimmy Savile was a (albeit very weird) hero until we found out he was a horror story.

Let’s assume that the complainant’s motive is genuinely to right a wrong and that she is not driven by financial reward – not easy for I have been around a bit, but of course I may be wrong.

I worry that Bell’s reputation can be trashed when he’s not around to defend himself. And is it justice to rely on the word of one complainant concerning memories dating back to when she was just five years old – without third party endorsement – to prove guilt, and thereby comprehensively destroy a man’s reputation?  I understand that there are thousands of cases trundling through the courts on the word of one complainant with no witnesses. This worries me.

The great Russian theatre director Meyerhold used to tell a story from his days as a Moscow law student. One of the professors would arrange for a powerful thug to rush into a busy lecture hall and start a fight. The police would be called and the troublemaker removed. The students would be asked to recount what had happened, and each would tell a slightly different tale. Some would even insist there had been two thugs rather than one.

“Hence,” the professor would explain, “the old Russian saying, “He lies like an eyewitness.”

Capitalism: Red in Tooth and Claw

You can tell the difference between businesses that are run by the state ostensibly “for nothing” (by tax payers actually!) and those operating under the lash of making a profit.

For example, I used to be a member of a “Virgin” Health Club – as you’d expect, it’s run ruthlessly on business lines. Newcomers are sternly interviewed and members mercilessly and routinely sifted by a martinet. I was frequently asked if I wanted to ”upgrade” my already expensive season ticket: “No!”

The club must make a fortune. One day after your subscription is out of date, you are barred until the next dollop of cash has been paid. Quite right too.

I then discovered another gym 400 yards away run by the council: same facilities, newer machines and fees at a quarter of the price set by the private gym.

However, I notice that the entry gates in my council-run gym are forever open, there are no checks to see whether or not my membership is valid, and no one ever asks whether I want to upgrade my membership, pay more or buy any other services?

Who cares? It’s only taxpayer money, so it’s a commercial bombsite. There are happy users of the services of course, but the poor sucker-rate payers pick up the bill caused by unmotivated and lazy staff.

While I am on about it, without serious market discipline, the NHS will bankrupt us all in the end. It’s the nearest thing to God we have in our deeply secular society, and of course it’s run on financially incontinent, communist lines, and no politician dares touch it without ruining their party’s electoral chances.

The NHS is a haven of waste. But if I am wrong and if the principle of a free NHS is such a wonderful idea, why don’t we nationalise the provision of food as well?

Message from the Bank

Lloyds Bank in Oxford’s Summertown sends a clear message to its customers.

As you drive into its small car park, you are faced with the sign, “Bank employees only!”

I often wonder why they don’t add a few words to round off the message: “Customers can get stuffed!”

Sent from Tom Benyon Jnr to the Benyon family this morning:

—

There have been some amazing fund raising feats for Zane this month in the family.

Milly and the boys have conquered  the three peaks (https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Milly-Sinclair)
Granny and Bubba are hiking the pathways of the UK as I write.

But as we know these have been warm up acts, hors d’oeuvres to whet the appetite  for the main meal to come. Which is of course Zac (5) and Eli’s (8) three legged hike from Wellow to Bath!! This is no ordinary walk family. That would be a bit predictable. This is walking whilst lashed to another human being. Think about that. Imagine How hard it would be for you, lashed to your sibling for hours on end whilst they prattle incessantly.

This is x-treme walking,  the like Zane has never seen before. It will no doubt  change all Zane  fundraising in the future.

Donors are already calling for Tom and Jane to raise their game now that Zac and Eli have raised the bar to dizzying heights. So. Tom and Jane,  it’s time to unleash Moses and use the lead to  bind your legs together for the remainder of the walk. It’s the least you can do.  Anyone can walk… But three legged? Now that’s a true test of human endurance.

Okay okay….. ,  here’s the link below!

You can help Eli and Zac raise money for this great cause by donating directly to their fundraising page – https://www.justgiving.com/eliandzac?utm_source=Sharethis&utm_medium=fundraisingpage&utm_content=eliandzac&utm_campaign=pfp-email.

JustGiving sends your donation straight to ZANE and automatically reclaims Gift Aid if you are a UK taxpayer, so your donation is worth even more.

Thank you for your support!

We walk from Worcester where we have been right royally hosted for two days in a lovely house bang in the middle of the town. Off we trot on a muggy, overheated day towards Kington accompanied by Clendon and Camilla Daukes, loyal walkers over the years and fun to be with for we never stop laughing. I have to stop at a chemist to see to a sore mouth to discover I have an infection in my jaw. An infernal nuisance and I worry about the side effects of antibiotics.

So David Cameron has resigned as an MP. It now seems to be open season for the weevils to hurl abuse at him. Blog  readers will recall that one of the things that triggers my anger is unthinking and toxic criticism of our national  leaders by people who have never met them and can have no idea how hard it is to lead a nation; and if they were to be catapulted into the top job would last thirty seconds, if that!  All these armchair critics are doing is to recycle stale abuse culled from the tabloids and when I hear it I reach for the sick bag. It’s so naff. Of course it’s  much more interesting to say rude things about people rather than offer praise. But throwing abuse by saying that “David Cameron is a good guy” is far less interesting than muttering “he is a corrupt bastard!” But offering armchair abuse about strangers  is a cheap and nasty way of spending time.

Parroting unthinking abuse when you have never even met the person and don’t know the facts says far more about the gossip who says it than his or her victim.

However tedious this may be I think David Cameron is a first class, highly moral and a decent family man who led this country safely through extraordinarily difficult times with consummate  skill and integrity. Of course he has made mistakes, everyone does that, but he should be given great credit for his substantial achievements; for just one  example:  in the reform of our public services and schools. Okay,  the referendum could be regarded as a mistake by the “remainers”  but at least  he delivered a referendum on a key constitutional and democratic issue which is more than any of his predecessors did.

He has been a good friend to ZANE. I for one am sorry to see him go and wish him well.

Confession

I was asked to take the collection at our local church service recently. I thought things needed livening up so I cheerfully growled at startled congregants, “Come on: stump up!” Jane was ashamed of my sales-pitch and says the CoE should put me on commission.

Why is it that everyone at church puts on a funny voice? For heaven’s sake, it’s supposed to be Good News surely – so why do people mope around with faces that indicate they have just received a final tax demand?

Communion that day bothered me. I knelt there and my mind went blank! I couldn’t recall anything I had done that was especially wrong – was I wasting God’s time? What on earth was I doing on my knees anyway? Jane told me that I should be ashamed of myself (she says this a lot), and if it would help my contrition she is quite prepared to draw up a list of my iniquities – of which she has first–hand knowledge – for future reference.

Dog Tales

I saw the Rev’d Kate Bottley on a TV programme called Gogglebox in which the reaction of participants watching various programmes is recorded to review their variances. In a session when a dog died, the bulk of viewers wept copiously but this dry-eyed vicar sensibly remarked that since the dog was only a small one, “they only would need a small hole to bury it”. Not an unreasonable observation from someone who spends a good deal of her time comforting people who have been bereaved, sometimes in ghastly circumstances. But apparently the poor vicar was the subject of vicious trolling by the kind of bores who barrack anyone who has fallen short in the political correctness stakes, or who has failed to weep at the correct moment.

This reminds me that some time ago I ran a series of advertisements for ZANE showing a woman living in Harare with two dogs she could no longer afford to feed. I thought that the great British public, with its well-known love of animals, would deeply sympathise with her plight and stump up right royally. Not a bit of it: the prevailing reaction seemed to be, “Why doesn’t this daft woman just eat her dogs?!”

A Tangled Web           

Of course, we’re out of the EU now, but I can’t help reflecting on how years ago – when I was an MP – I went round the parliament in Brussels with journalist John Sergeant. It was hugely confusing then, and it must be far worse now; and it’s all made worse by the fact the whole outfit shifts from Brussels to Strasbourg each six months. What a waste of time and money that is for starters. What do they do all day in all those offices other than allow faceless and unaccountable people to spout vast, confusing directives?

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address is a mere 278 words of timeless and immortal prose and the last EU directive on the size of eggs ran to 40 closely worded pages!

The one thing that made me laugh hung in the men’s lavatory in the Parliament building at eye height: “Do you know you are the only person in this building who knows exactly what you are doing!”

In Praise of Monty

It was Kipling who said that as God couldn’t be everywhere at the same time, he created mothers.

I may laugh at Jane for playing General Montgomery from time to time, but she is a remarkable mother and granny. In fact, all mothers surely deserve a medal for the sacrifices they make but of course I only know about Jane’s qualities at first hand. She has focused on our children and grandchildren’s needs for years with laser dedication, allowing them to take reasonable risks yet rescuing them from the various dangers that lurk throughout childhood. She’s told them “don’t shout”, “button it up”, and “don’t sit on wet grass, or you know what will happen”. We’ve heard, “Eat that now and it’ll spoil your appetite,” or “Who cares what Mrs Jenkins children are doing, you’re not going out dressed like that?” Or how about, “Were you born in a barn?”, “This  isn’t an hotel”, or her speciality – said with a glinting eye – “Just because I say so”?

Jane was brilliant at knowing what not to say and allowing our children space to make their own mistakes. She never told off our daughter for smoking behind the stables because she guessed the phase would pass. (In fact, when the children were teenagers I took them to a prison and a home for the mentally ill. They soon worked out what the crooks and mentally unstable often had in common – chain-smoking. End of lesson!)

Jane didn’t say a word when one of our daughters brought home a man with a pigtail and a dog on a rope (I did). She said nothing about the children coming back late at night because she thought that if they were trusted, all would be well in the end. To my astonishment, this worked.

Jane carried the maze of family life in her head and she performed the great, unpaid duties in the home as well. She usually played tough cop, while I got to be the nice one. As Madonna once said, “I’m the disciplinarian with the school runs, making the doctor appointments and ensuring the homework gets done. He does the fun things, the treats, ice creams and rowdy games.” Jane played Cinderella, while I always sought the popularity of Gladiator.

Motherhood is the only job where if you do it really well you get demoted. Jane’s profound works of love won’t make the obituary pages but she has helped form the characters of the wonderful people that are our children and grandchildren. Jane lives in them, not just by her DNA but by the subtle process of osmosis: thousands of baths run, meals prepared and eaten, school runs completed, clothing ironed, homework improved, tears kissed better, stories related, gentle advice given. Jane lives on in their capacity to love greatly. They in turn will pass all this on as the ball rolls steadily forward.

In this way, as the old song goes, “Love never dies”.

We took the day off which us just as well as it has deluged! This was the day we were reliably informed would be the warmest ever, so it sounds as if the forecasters are the same folk who forecast the Brexit result!

We went in search of an iPad charger, having left the last one like spoor in the drawing room of the last host’s house. A highlight of the day was a joyous lunch with Liz Landale, a lovely person we have known for many years. She lives in elegant style in a beautiful house she and her husband Sandy developed over half a century. Sandy was a gentleman, a lay reader and an accomplished poet. He died not long ago. He had one of those faces I can picture still and if I don’t want to believe he is dead I don’t have to.

Piggy Wig

When I was a little boy, I was often persuaded to recite the Lear nonsense poem “The Owl and the Pussy Cat” to an assortment of doting aunts. It has a couple of lines that have always intrigued me:

“And there in a wood, a Piggy-Wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.”

Then we come to the complicated bit (when you are aged five lots of things are complicated).

“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling,
Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.” (See what I mean!)

I knew about the pigs on the local farm close to where we lived, but none of them had any rings. So why on earth did this pig have a ring in its nose? When I asked the question, my aunts were undoubtedly impressed with my precocity but none of them had a clue.

I have now learned that a nose ring makes leading a pig rather easier than it would be otherwise: the pig can’t escape – its will is dominated and it follows obediently.

I never thought until recently that Lear’s innocent little poem had any serious meaning until I saw a crack den (and don’t ask me why I was in one, for it’s a long – and innocent! – story and nothing to do with this tale). As soon as I saw it, I was reminded of Lear’s pig and its ring.

Drug addiction means being led by the nose with one’s will suspended, in this case towards chemical substances. In their ghastly way, drugs command the purest form of “worship” ever invented by Old Nick. The hellish room I saw, with its smeared windows, discoloured wallpaper, dirty bed, and floor littered with discarded needles, was a shrine. A strange, sweet smell hung everywhere, the sort of odour that marinates your clothes and makes you feel tainted.

Addicts will sacrifice anything to get their next “fix” – their money, their bodies, literally anything. Their ring has led them to an altar that is destroying all who worship there with cruel efficiency.

So my dear readers, we may not be crack addicts but like the piggy wig we all have a nose ring. Where is it leading us? A quote that bothers me more than any other is from US bestselling author David Foster Wallace. He wasn’t a Christian but he wrote:

“Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reasons for choosing some sort of God… to worship… is pretty much everything else will eat you alive. If you worship money and things… then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before your loved ones bury you. …Worship power, and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your owns fear. Worship your intellect… and you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful, it is that they are unconscious. They are our default settings.”

Wallace committed suicide in 2008.

The Roaring Lion
Wallace’s words tie in with the Bible (1 Peter 5:8) where we are told, “Your enemy the Devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to snare.” I heard somewhere that you rarely get bitten when you pick up a snake: you only get bitten when you try to put it down.

I read that former Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy drifted into alcoholism. There was no great white blinding moment when he crossed a line from moderation into addiction. Indeed, addictions are all around us. And as Wallace says, it ain’t just about booze and heroin. At the last Olympics, a friend’s daughter was living with an athlete who had previously won an Olympic bronze. What a great achievement, but his passion was to win gold to the degree that it became an obsession – which is I suppose another word for addiction. When he finally won another bronze – missing out on silver or gold by a milo-second – he was consumed by a profound anger that finally destroyed the relationship. Poor man and poor couple. It would seem there is a high chance that unless you become obsessed by your sport, you are unlikely to succeed.

Addictions come in all shapes and sizes. Addicts worship but they are bowing down before the wrong thing. G.K. Chesterton wrote somewhere that when a man visited a brothel he was in fact calling out to God. That idea takes a bit of thinking about, but when you understand the pull of raw addiction then you can more readily understand why the likes of Sir John Gielgud have felt driven to solicit sex in public places in order to satisfy their needs. Twenty years ago, the then Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Allan Green, ruined his career after he was caught soliciting sex in King’s Cross. His wife, the poor woman, later killed herself. Forty years ago, Lord Lambton wrecked his ministerial career for consorting with prostitutes, and broadcaster Frank Bough suffered a similar fate when he was caught out in the same way. So it has always been. The exposers used to be the Church; today it is the tabloids. I wonder if those who were caught were in fact relieved. Perhaps they found the mask of respectability too heavy to carry?

Best stick to God. On we trudge tomorrow…

Worcester Sores

A miserable morning when everything seemed to go wrong: the fields were wired up, the gateways blocked with nettles, the paths in the Suckley wood eight miles from Worcester appeared to be circular and we were both convinced we were going in ever decreasing circles and would end up our backsides. Then after we had staggered out and lunched in the “Bank Hotel” we found it as boring as a dentist’s waiting room with nasty food: a hamburger with at least three inches of substitute meat packets of tomato sauce and a rather elderly pickle is not enough for a growing boy.

After lunch tore the three miles into Worcester and calmed down in the eleventh century cathedral for that, in part, is what cathedrals are for.

All’s Well That Ends Well

Jane and I recently enjoyed a dramatic production of Hamlet at Stratford played by an all-black cast. I studied the play at school and so I know it well enough, but great slabs of the prose still wafted over my head. However, I nodded wisely and pretended that I understood exactly what was going on.

I’ll bet I am not alone in this incomprehension. Years ago, a friend went to see a provincial production where the spoken words were indistinct.

“Not that it really mattered,” he later proclaimed, “because I know the play so well.”

What a pseud! He lieth.

Forsooth!

In his biography, Lawrence Oliver said that he was once in a production of Richard III where an actor called Dan Cunningham was playing a messenger. One matinee, Cunningham was having a fag in the wings and Olivier was on stage.

Cunningham suddenly realised that things had gone very quiet. Believing he’d missed his cue, he stubbed out his fag, rushed on stage and flung himself at Larry’s feet: “My liege, the Duke of Buckingham is slain this hour.”

Now this presented problems because the Duke of Buckingham hadn’t even been on stage yet. So Larry gripped him very firmly by the arm and hissed, “Thou liest Sirrah!”

“Oh sod, Larry’s dried!” Cunningham thought to himself. He quickly came up with some Shakespearean doggerel: “Nay, my liege, I swear, by yonder thicket he lies all covered in gore!”

So Larry applied a real tourniquet to his arm and snarled, “Is’t positive Sirrah?”

Quick as a flash, back came Cunningham: “Yea my liege, I swear by all that is holy, the Duke of Buckingham is slain this hour.”

Larry gripped him by the throat, turned him upstage and cried:

“Then by my troth, thou hast fucketh the entire play!”

Suffice to say that nobody in the audience even seemed to notice…

Drem Station

Jane wasn’t always the confident Christian lady she is today. When she was a little girl she used to live in East Lothian near North Berwick, and the local train to Edinburgh started in the local “Drem” Station.

One day her parents overheard her saying her prayers as follows: “And lead me not into Drem Station…”

Summer Nights

The British appear to be immune to cold. I suppose this is just as well, as most of the time living in the UK is a bit like inhabiting the bottom of a well…

Sixty years ago, Noel Coward memorably sang to his fellow colonials, “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” But he failed to comment on the fact that Englishmen at home are also mad about throwing outdoor parties when the weather is wet, freezing and foul.

Cold Comfort Farm
On a number of occasions, I have been invited to parties by kindly yet insanely optimistic hosts who seem to forget that the British weather is rarely conducive to outdoor merrymaking.

A few months ago, we celebrated a friend’s wedding in Scotland. The party was held in a farmyard with icy rain trickling down our necks. To get a drink, we were forced to wade through mud while the meal was eaten in an open barn, which doubled as a wind tunnel. There weren’t enough chairs, either, come to think about it.

Out of politeness and affection, around seventy of Scotland’s finest chose not to say to our hosts, “It’s good to see you out on day release, when are you being taken back in?” Instead we shivered in our huskies and greatcoats, eating rubbery chicken off plastic plates while pretending we were in the Bahamas – or anywhere else. By the end of the celebration, I was close to hypothermia and it was at least two hours before I could feel my feet again.

Last week, we were guests at an evening birthday party in Reading. We knew were in for it when the host announced: “What a glorious day it’s been, and what a lovely evening too!”. Although the day had been fairly warm, any fool knows that in the UK, the temperature automatically drops at least six degrees and goes on diving. By eight, guests were shivering trying to keep warm, and I saw one poor soul who had stopped moving altogether.

Of course, the last word must go to Winston Churchill. When he was prime minister, his chief whip brought him the ghastly news that one of his ministers had been caught on a bench in St James’ Park in flagrante delicto with a guardsman.

Noting that this particular February night had been the coldest of the winter, Churchill jovially announced: “And below freezing too! Makes you proud to be British.”

Master of My Destiny?
Nelson Mandela claimed that the short poem “Invictus” by the Victorian poet William Ernest Henley encouraged him to go on fighting for his life. The poem ends:

“I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.”

Churchill quoted the poem in the Commons in September 1941, as did “Captain Renault” in the totemic film Casablanca, and Barack Obama at Mandela’s memorial service in 2013. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has spoken of the poem’s influence on her late father, Aung Sang, and then there is the film Invictus too.

The worry I have is that the sentiments don’t quite ring true. Okay, it’s good never to surrender or give up, but we have all been around a bit and we know that what makes God laugh is “people making plans”.

Try quoting this poem to someone who’s just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and hear what they have to say about being master of their destiny. Or what about someone caught up in a messy divorce – not of their own making – or someone involved in a company bankruptcy, when their involvement is limited to being an employee? Or someone who’s lost a child in, say, a hit-and-run accident?

We are all too often leaves blowing in the wind. Of course, as our secular society has removed God from the equation, vanity – or desperation – tries to persuade us that we are in charge.

Death in Teheran
Perhaps this story best makes my point:

A rich and mighty Persian prince once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death who had threatened him. The servant begged his master to give him his fastest horse to enable him to flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The Prince graciously consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the Prince himself met Death in the garden and questioned him.

“Why did you threaten and terrify my servant?” the Prince asked.

“I did not threaten him,” answered Death. “I only showed surprise in still finding him there when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran.”