DOUBLE CROSS TALK

I will be 83 shortly and too near the swinging of the Pearly Gates to ‘scape bruising. Yet I remain convinced the Creator is unknowable and that mankind invented gods to explain climate change. In earliest Peru, in Greece, even in cynical Rome, gods wielded forked lightning, evoked thunder, inspired tsunamis and started wars. The sudden rush of more sophisticated religions in 5 BC used fairy tales as a way of upholding tribal discipline. That said I stand at the barricades shoulder to shoulder with a former Archbishop of Canterbury defending the right of Xtians to wear the cross, the symbol of their belief, and for their right to talk and behave towards Muslims and Homosexuals as freely as they behave towards us. Even though I have little wonder that religion is losing its grip in the Western world when it continues to rely on myth.

In the less sophisticated East discipline is rewarded with gifts of spectral virgins. Or a handful of nuts - for vegetarians presumably. Yet even here the grip is loosening on all but the Wahabi-inspired zealots. In his book “Shadow of the Sword. The Battle for the Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World“ I read that historian Tim Holland disputes the Muslim belief that the Koran is literally the word of God handed down to Muhammad. He points out the Koran existed many years before the Prophet’s birth but the edition which has become the global version, he argues, was published as recently as 1924.
Nor does he believe Mecca was the place where Muhammad was born. Multiple references to cattle and olive trees which would not flourish in such a dry place suggest a site further north.
The most heartening aspect of this inquiry is that Omar Bakri Muhammad, the Muslimist who threatened the West with 9/11 every day, commented on the book:
“People are entitled to write the books they like as long as they do not insult the honour of the prophet... He can say he does not believe or even that the prophet does not exist and Muslims will just laugh. It’s all in the scriptures.”
Not all religions take such a relaxed view. A devout Jew Peter Beinhart has published “The Crisis of Zionism “in which he warns Israel will have to decide whether to be a Jewish state or a democracy.” Its occupation of the West Bank and aggressive settlement building there means that Israel is two countries”, he writes, “a democratic one in the West where Arab and Israeli citizens can vote and move easily as near equals, and a non-democratic one on the West Bank where Palestinians are cut out of any democratic governance “.
This fairly obvious statement has produced a vitriolic response from the Zionist establishment. Beinhart is accused of being one-sided, part of a privileged elite, and haughty. The Head of the Anti- Defamation League Abraham Foxman claims that a boycott of the West Bank will only worsen the anti Israeli campaign round the world which Beinhart opposes.
WATER, WATER NOWHERE.......
The Ferret runs a pretty tight ship. If called on she would water our garden with a teaspoon. She would not accept that my infirmities give me freedom of the hosepipe.
So hotly was my position attacked that it forced itself into my dreams. I dreamt I had rung Anglian Water for confirmation of the Blue Badge exemption. No sooner had I put down the phone that it rang again. A lady with a most beguiling accent announced she was from Wasser-Deutsch. She said she was sending me a four page questionnaire to assess my need. She then went on to list the questions in great detail and warned me of the consequences of not answering fully and truthfully within seven days. I have long accepted that Germany won World War 2 so I was anxious that I should comply. Most of the questions I could answer but I was worried about the ones that required me to stand in the first available water and measure how far it came up my leg. Ours is not to reason why but just to say “Heil“ and comply instantly. But I was in bed in my nightshirt. How could I answer the question truthfully? It would be difficult enough to fill in the form when I had only blankets on which to rest it. And what of the water test? Am I to stand in water in my bedroom? And if I found any within the seven days allowed for the return of the form do I raise my nightshirt higher than modesty permits to measure against bare skin or would the nightshirt perform an adequate platform against which to measure?
So powerful was my dilemma that I woke convinced that the phone call had happened and lay for several tense minutes worrying until it struck me that I was arguing at a time of drought. Why would I need to stand in water?
Bloody Krauts, I said, and went to stand in the shower with a curious elation that I had beat the Germans at their own game and would fill in the form satirically. I just hope that won’t bring the Gestapo knocking on my door. But would they be permitted to use the Water Torture a teaspoon at a time?

ANNIVERSARY BLUES

Were she still living, my mother would have been 111 on March 10. I scoured the papers, listened to all the bulletins - not a single mention of my old lady.
So why have the media showered us with films and stories about the Titanic, an unsinkable ship that went down on its maiden voyage? Why ever would we want to be reminded of poor seamanship and a shipbuilding failure?

21st CENTURY GIVING
“Philanthropists aren’t going to give money if they are not offered incentives”- multi millionaire on R4.
Actually contemporary philanthropists give with agenda. They reduce their tax bill by their gift. A true philanthropist does not look for incentives. He gives part of his income AFTER tax.

JOIN ME IN THE MADHOUSE
A panel set up to expose health and safety farces was facing ridicule last night after it failed to come to a decision on the seagull in the pond case – and said it could be five days before it did.
The Myth Busters Challenge Panel could not decide whether 25 firemen being told they could not wade into shallow water to save the bird constituted a misinterpretation of the rules.
The Daily Mail contacted the panel at 3pm. But despite being given a whole afternoon to mull it over and it being only the fifth inquiry since the panel’s launch a day before, it failed to give an answer.
Instead the body sent a weak assurance at 6pm that their experts would ‘consider’ the case – and later added that it could be a full five days before they came to a ruling on the matter.
Myth Busters said: ‘We are grateful to have this incident referred to us and will now check the facts of the situation, including if and why that number of firefighters were called to rescue one bird.
‘The Challenge Panel will consider it and give a view. Last night, the panel, set up by the Health and Safety Executive watchdog, was labelled a waste of space’ after failing to reach a decision on a case which was condemned widely as a farce.Each case is considered via the HSE website’s complaints page, by the panel members with the most relevant knowledge.But none of the cases presented to the panel since its launch have so far been resolved.
END NOTE:
Churchill used his mother shamelessly to advance his career. This unattractive trait provoked this , from his friend Lloyd George; “Churchill would use his mother’s skin for a drumhead to beat and sound his praises.”

FAINT DAVIDS DAY

David Frost has been telling us at length how to interview, with illustrations of some of the worst examples by so-called star interviewers.

I did my first published interview on VE Day in 1945. For the next half century scarcely a day passed when I didn’t do one for radio, TV or newspapers. My books are extended interviews with people or other books; yet it took me forty years to become an interviewer.

I may have mentioned that I once fell asleep in the middle of an interview for a Radio 4 series. For the first and only time in my life the office was inundated with letters praising my interviewing technique. At last, they all said, an interviewer who isn’t forever interrupting.

To be truthful, I could never take TV interviews seriously after my first experience on an arts programme in Cardiff with Gwen, the poet Vernon Watkins’ widow. Neither of us could believe that we were required to rehearse our interviews. The producer Gwyn Erfyl explained: “If the interviewer doesn’t know what you are going to say, how could he know what to answer?”

I was to go on to make a weekly half hour radio interview for a decade. Although I did hours of research I deliberately never knew what I was going to ask my guests until the programme began. That is why I think of TV interviewers as actors. The only real interviews are on radio. Libby Purves and Eddie Mair are my favourites. Neither hectors their guests and both elicit the best answers.

The Today programme is the nest of the worst so I was sad to read in the RT that Evan Davis thinks his gentle questioning lets his guests “off the hook“. Which is more than can be said of headmistressy Sarah Montague and prolix Naughtie (who not only asks rambling questions but insists on parroting the answers), attack dog Humphrys and his petulant puppy Justin Webb.

Received radio wisdom is that answers should be kept short. Otherwise listeners get bored. Rubbish. Interview questions are spurs in the flank of monologues. The interviewer is the jockey - a sort of horseman of the puckered lip. If you can see him, even in your mind’s eye, he has failed.

On Radio Wales and R4 Vincent Kane was a superlative interviewer. He left space for answers. So did a man called Gerry Monte and, though his strength is aggressive sycophancy, starstruck Michael Parkinson and quirky Ray Gosling were the best of a bad bunch on TV.

Nowadays the interviewer is the star. His questions swirl like a matador’s red cape as he taunts the “bull” in a suit of too bright lights...I do sometimes wish they could fall asleep and give the other chap a chance. We don’t get interviews: we get cross talk acts between John Humphrys and various elephantine politicians; even crosser talk acts between Paxman’s eyebrows and more politicians, though Boris Johnson and both Lord Bell and George Galloway wiped the floor with him this week. But these ineffectual interrogators never seem to elicit any information.

Are the broadcast media anyway right to concentrate almost exclusively on politics? I know it is cheap to do but I don’t know anyone who listens enthralled. Perhaps I am also wrong in believing that interviewing should not be part of the entertainment industry, which it has plainly become. I would have thought that if satellite news bulletins and the barely live ‘Five’ proved anything they prove there isn’t enough news about - or news they can afford to get -to nourish a rolling news coverage. The reason the first popular newspapers included features is that there wasn’t enough news to fill a paper big enough for people to buy. In the old days BBC announcers would sometimes come on, announce the nine o’ clock news and say: “There is no news today. Goodnight.”

Isn’t news just another fix anyway? We are used to getting it at stated times like the six o’ clock gin of happy memory; and we think we can’t do without it. Even more depressing, we are now copying things like the Oompah Whimpering show where you manufacture news by bringing together stage villains or antagonists and invite them to fight whilst the audience boos and cheers.
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DAVIDS WHERE ART THOU?

It would be difficult to have faith in our major parties when one considers the appalling mess they made in choosing their leaders. Labour chose the wrong brother whilst the Tories based their choice on one speech at the Conference. David Davies has all the assets Cameron so conspicuously lacks. Impeccable working class background, considerable experience of life in the real world, leadership skills honed in the SAS and a liberal dose of common sense. Cameron went from Eton to Oxford and from Oxford to politics. He is said to have experience of PR. Only in the conservative party back rooms which is not the most shining nursery for skill in the Dark Arts.

hang my galloway high

In his fine poem “The
Maimed Debauchee”, Lord Rochester wrote. "So, when my days of impotence approach,
And I’m by pox and wine’s unlucky chance
Forced from the pleasing billows of debauch
On the dull shore of lazy temperance,
Past joys have more than paid what I endure "

Thank goodness he didn’t have to endure this maladjusted Establishment that plunges us into one unnecessary war after another, an Establishment which, no doubt, has poor Polonius –“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” – spinning in his grave; yet presumes to tell us how much we should drink and smoke.
Fifteen years ago my income plunged to a couple of hundred a week but
it didn’t stop my craving for drink. I brewed a very decent beer for tuppence a
pint and found a source for bootleg gin at a fiver a bottle.
The feral young of today won’t be put off by an increase of two quid on half a bottle of vodka. They only drink on Fridays and Saturdays and that won’t change when the only place you can buy cheap booze is in the bars of the Palace of Westminster. Homemade beer kits will produce a drinkable,strong beer; and there are enough illicit stills springing up in our immigrantcolonies which provide vodka at a shilling a tot. In Wisbech, near here, there are lorries making weekly deliveries.
The Establishment says the success of the smoking ban proves that their regulations work. The smoking ban in pubs has dramatically improved health, it boasts. As
Christopher Booker has pointed out, one study after another has shown that
health risks from passive smoking are non-existent. One 1998 study concluded
that regular exposure to "environmental smoke" is equivalent to
smoking six cigarettes a year.
A seven-year study for the World Health Organisation the same year found the risk
of cancer from passive smoking was "statistically insignificant". Yet
if you look on the WHO website they now warn that passive smoking is a health
risk.
The largest study, based on 118,000 Californians between 1960 and 1998 and
published in the British Medical Journal in 2003, confirmed that smokers had a
"higher than average risk of mortality", but found their partners
were unaffected.
The anti-smoking lobby squealed at such unwelcome findings. But the most
conspicuous effort to refute them, by Professor Nicholas Wald, was found to
have been largely based on studies carried out in Japan and China, where the
epidemiology of lung cancer is quite different from that in the West.
Some years ago the Establishment warned us not to drink more than four units of
alcohol. Since then, one of the members of the Royal College of Physicians' original working party has admitted the figures were "plucked out of the air" in the
absence of any clear evidence about how much alcohol constitutes a risk to
health.
Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal and a member of the College's working party on alcohol, recalled that the committee could find "no decent
data" on the subject, but felt obliged to make a recommendation nonetheless.
He said: "They weren't really based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee."
Yet last week all this hard evidence was happily swept aside by the Gadarene rush
of the self-righteous. It didn’t prevent the Government telling how few units
will wreck our health. It also warned us that if we drink three glasses of wine
a day we have a fifty per cent chance of developing breast cancer. Its advice is, presumably,based on those discredited recommendations of yesteryear.
Columnist Dominic Lawson perceptively points out that the disgraceful brawling in the House of Commons bars has not been linked to the cut price booze offered there. Gooses, Ganders and sauce spring to mind.
The R4 programme “More or Less” discovered the number of units of alcohol consumed by the average British adult has dropped by 20 per cent over the past five years.

Why is the Establishment so gloomy? From Beijing to Bratislava, more of us are living longer, healthier and more comfortable lives than at any time in history; fewer of us are suffering from poverty, hunger or illiteracy. Pestilence, famine, death and even war, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, are in retreat. My advice? Eat, drink eat and be merry.
Rochester put it so much better:
“I will such heat inspire,
As to important mischief shall incline.
I'll make them long some ancient church to fire,
And fear no lewdness they're called to by wine.
Thus statesman-like, I'll saucily impose,
And safe from danger valiantly advise,
Sheltered in impotence, urge you to blows,
And being good for nothing else, be wise..
My pains at least some respite shall afford
While I behold the battles you maintain
\Vhen fleets of glasses sail about the board,
From whose broadsides volleys of wit shall rain.

Nor let the sight of honourable scars,
Which my too forward valour did procure,
Frighten new-listed soldiers from the wars:

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MINISTRY OF Doohhh

The navy’s newest ship, the offshore support vessel Skandi Bergen, cannot be sent
to war. The civilian crew is not insured for battle.

UNFIT FOR PURPOSE
We are contemplating war with the Falklands, nuclear war between Israel and the
Arabs; the UK has an underclass which has little chance of escape from poverty
and an underground army of feral looters; massive changes are underway to a Welfare
State we have never been able to afford. And what is concerning Her Majesty’s
Opposition? How many members of the cabinet are millionaires; whether the Prime Minister hacked out on a policehorse; whether Cornish pasties should attract VAT; dinners for donors and whereand when the PM last ate a pasty. And the Government? They are advising us to store highly inflammable petrol in our garages and provoking panic over a strike by tanker drivers which may never happen. Now it looks as though it’s all down to George Galloway, a teetotaler, alas, but someone who can talk
brilliantly and walk about at the same time.

Of one thing we can be sure. None of the three major parties is fit to govern us.
They should pay us to get as drunk as they often are.

LIFTING THE VEIL

A Muslim juror refuses to remove her veil and a judge allows her to stand down. This is a clear case of contempt of court. Why isn't she in prison?
My objection to immigrants has nothing to do with race. My family were Norman for a thousand years. In the last fifty years they have added, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Jewish, Catholic, Saxon,Cambodian, Italian and German. I am a Buddhist. I was born in Lancashire of Scottish stock. I lived briefly in Liverpool, in Wales for thirty years,Yorkshire for ten. Now I live in the Fens which has become Mittel Europa.
What I object to is the refusal of many immigrants to integrate. If they come to Britain presumably they are attracted to our way of life. So why do they try so hard to change it?
That is not true of all immigrants. The Royal Regiment of Scotland is kept up to strength by blacks. In my own regiment they prove themselves again and again. In Afghanistan they were called out to rescue the SAS.
Twenty SAS men and 30 Afghan troops on a special mission had become pinned down after their Chinook was crippled by a fault. Alpha Company of the 3rd Battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland (Black Watch) drove back the Taliban, who swarmed from surrounding mountains to attack the out-numbered SAS.
Former head of the Army General Sir Mike Jackson stressed last night that five of the soldiers from Alpha Company's No 1 Platoon were black - showing BNP racists who have tried to hijack Britain's military heritage are out of touch. - M.O.D despatch.
A Welsh extremist website once honoured me with the title of Traitor of the Week. I shared it rather puzzlingly with Ryan Griggs, S4C, Radio Cymru, the Welsh Language Society, the Welsh Language Board and a very nice man called Jonesy who was a Radio Cymru presenter.
I am not a nationalist. Nationalism is a road which ends at the gates
of Auschwitz and we have had a lot of trouble with it in our family.You may recall my Auntie Jeannie was the widow of Uncle Tommy, a Scottish
Nationalist so incandescent that ten years after his death she was still afraid to visit England.
Her son-in-law Jackie, who looked after the boats of the Emir of Kuwait, invited Auntie Jeannie to visit.
"It's no in England, is it?" she inquired fearfully.
In the event, she had a great time, including supper with the Emir in his palace. She was not impressed.
"Does he aye get his dinner on tin plates?" she asked Jackie.
"They're no tin," whispered Jackie, "they're real gold."
"Maks nae difference," said my Auntie Jeannie. "Puir man,
ye cannae keep food hot on tin plates."
The day she got home she went to an Edinburgh market and bought the Emir a six-piece china dinner service.
Alas, we have lost the charming letter of thanks the Emir sent.
My Auntie Jeannie was the Great Imperturbable.
The nearest thing we had in our family to a tradition was the
Hogmanay Fight. My father emigrated to Manchester but
always returned home to Edinburgh on 30 December. He went a day
early to get in training for the whisky drinking marathon which was the family New Year.
By tea time on Old Year's Night whisky had washed away any
seasonal goodwill. By 9 pm naked hostility had replaced it, my
father invariably igniting it by taking out a provocative cigar.
"Bloody Englishman," growled Uncle Tommy, socialist
principles enflamed at the sight of such a capitalist
accessory.
"That makes bliddy two of us," my father would reply every
year.
Uncle Tommy's darkest secret was that he, the
most passionately Scottish of the family, had been born
during a brief visit by his mother to Lancashire.
Blows were exchanged. Three step-brothers, Jimmy and Matty
and Alec who tried to join the row, were rebuffed by Uncle
Tommy on the grounds they weren't family. This made Jimmy and Matty and Alec madder than anyone.
Whilst five brothers fought in the middle of the room, the
wives moved their chairs to the wall and continued their
conversation.Auntie Jeannie served tea.
At 11.45 pm she would say, "Tommy, have you seen the time?"
The fight ended at once and quarter of an hour later the
brothers had their arms round each other and were singing
Auld Lang Syne.
They don't make Hogmanays like that anymore. Or Auntie
Jeannies.

A LOAD OF BULL

I have reviewed books, theatres and restaurants, and a very glamorous life it has been. Baskets of free books, no bills for a mountain of meals that Red Rum couldn’t jump over and no charge for the best seats at ballets, operas, musicals and plays.

My new task, reviewing colostomy bags, is something of a come down. As a subject shit does not call for lyrical prose. Even writing the word is an effort. I owe my pension to the royalties of Winnie the Pooh but I still think that generous bear is ill named.

Why does that inoffensive word summon up feelings of such distaste? Google it and it must be the only subject which does not return a single response. As a pictogram it is a pleasing arrangement of curves, vertical and horizontal brush strokes. By any other name - manure night soil, meadow muffins, compost - it is pleasantly rural.

It is nothing more than the detritus of good food and drink which as fertiliser will provide our future feasts. Indeed it is the stuff of life. Yet in the dictionary this unhappy word is given a terrible name.

The best poetry anthology is a dictionary. Dr Johnson illuminated entries in his delightful work by providing a verse or piece of prose, usually from his own well stocked mind, to illustrate his definition.

“Shittlecock”, he insists, is a real noun. It describes the game we know under a slightly different name. He provides this explanation: “It is called cock because of its feathers. Perhaps it is properly shuttle cork, a cork driven to and fro, as the instrument in weaving, and softened by frequent and rapid utterance from cork to cock.”

He offers this quotation from Collier:

“You need not discharge a cannon to break the chain of his thought, the pat of a shittlecock or the creaking of a jack, will do his business.”

Lesser dictionaries are less inventive, if more scathing

“Something disgusting, of poor quality or otherwise totally unacceptable. It’s a narcotic, foolish deceitful language, insolent talk; small or worthless; to treat with anger or disrespect. It’s an expression of anger, surprise or an expression of displeasure...”

Yet the same innocent letters are part of history. They are all of them ‘this’ and part of ‘that’, the larger part of ‘thirst’, and we could not wear a ‘shirt’ without them.

Worries about words launched Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott’s first best seller.

His friend William Clerk drew Scott's attention to racial tensions in post-Norman Conquest England. Clerk noted how our names for livestock generally have Anglo-Saxon origins (e.g. sheep, pig, cow) which are exchanged for Anglo-French terms once they are prepared for the table (e.g. mutton, pork, beef). This illustration of the subservience of labouring Saxon to land-owning Norman was subsequently inserted in Ivanhoe and became the novel’s theme.

“...........swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sow

when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels,

like a traitor?"

"Pork," answered the swine-herd.

"I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I

think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in

the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a

Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to

feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurtha?"

"It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy

fool's pate."

"Nay, I can tell you more," said Wamba, in the same tone; "there is old

Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the

charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery

French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are

destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau

in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a

Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."

We handle words so carelessly and yet they are more dangerous than nuclear fission. I think a British market town is the ultimate civilised community yet when the Queen wishes to confer great honour she allows a town to call itself a city. No big deal, according to Cobbett to whom London was the Great Wen (a skin eruption). Historically a city is any town which contains a cathedral. There are 21 cathedral cities in Britain but only one cathedral town - St Asaph. I have never met anyone in that town who doesn’t insist it too is a city. So why the jubilation, when, to mark Her Diamond Jubilee, Our Gracious waves her wand and a city it becomes? As the French say, more musically, Merde!

.

IT’S BEING SO CHEERFUL...........

Doomsday theorists are alarmed that the Mayan ‘Long Count’ Calendar, as it is known, appears to end abruptly on a date they recorded as 13.0.0.0. On the Gregorian calendar, which we use today, this corresponds to December 21, 2012.

The only clue as to what the Mayans thought might happen on that day comes from an ancient stone tablet, discovered during road works in Mexico back in the Sixties. Carved upon it are hieroglyphics that refer to the year 2012 and an event that will involve Bolon Yokte, the Mayan god of war and creation.

Weathering and a crack in the stone have made the last part of the inscription illegible, but Mexican archaeologists have interpreted it as saying: ‘He will descend from the sky.’

There is no mention of reindeer but I still don’t like the notion of a sky crowded with a Mayan God, the Norse God Thor driving his wild herd and drunken old Santa, afire with seven million glasses of sherry, in charge of six rebellious reindeer with red noses that also hint at sherry servings.

PS: TRY MY COMIC NOVEL ISLAND FLING

.http://www.bewritebooks.com/mb/IslandFling/IslandFling.html#/1/

NO NUDES IS GOOD NEWS

There are days when unclothed women seem to dominate the curious world that is Emailia. Alas, I have reached an age when my interest in so many acres of naked flesh is philosophical. Increasingly it is the comic aspect which dominates and the sad truth is that women look much better with their clothes on. I expect it was a dawning aesthetic sense which prompted the cave dwellers to rush from the hearth to do unequal battle with the bear and the wolf, so desperate were they to hide the more comic aspects of Creation.

I used to make fun of the Creator as designer. Now I am more indulgent. I believe after creating creatures as beautiful as the tiger, the humming bird or the antelope It felt entitled to a little light relief. The general outline of Homo Sapiens on which It decided is pleasing enough. It is the appendages that are so risible.

I have suggested that arms one could unscrew at night would be a blessing since I seem to devote a great deal of sleeping time to deciding on where to put my arms. Few will argue that waste disposal arrangements could have been better managed. My colostomy bag might have been copied to advantage,

Surprisingly, I have the support of the early Christian church which inveighed against the act of birth, which it unpleasantly described as occurring between the urine and the fundament. The Church used it as an argument against women; probably why there are no women bishops and in Catholicism no women in authority at all.

I am probably extreme in viewing all religions as fairy tales for grownups but in a limited way that view is shared by religions. Only other people’s religions, of course; always viewed as mythology. Nevertheless they share with Christians a distaste for the birthing process on which the Creator has settled.

In Greek mythology various gods have been born out of the head of Zeus; other religions chose the side. Less dramatically, the Christian view merely dispenses with a father and so ensures the pain without the pleasure, which is par for the course. Gore Vidal pointed out that Christianity is the only religion which has a corpse and an instrument of torture as its most sacred symbol.

I would never consciously offend a believer but I find it impossible to take religion seriously. Nevertheless, one of the most moving books I have read is Aldous Huxley’s anthology “The Perennial Philosophy”, a collection of the writings of the Great Mystics, East and West. The Perennial Philosophy, which is thousands of years old, demonstrates what they called the Divine Reality, the Highest Common Factor which is found in every one of the major religions.

I was delighted by an excerpt from a Hindu Apanished in which a father explains the invisible presence of God by dissolving salt in water. When the salt dissolved it was invisible but when he gave it to his son to drink the water tasted salty.

He says: “In this body of yours you do not perceive the True, but there in fact it is.”

As a Buddhist I don’t believe in death or gods. The Buddha was a man and I am part of him, as I am of all sensate creatures.

I have no difficulty, like the Hindu, in believing in an unknowable Creator. But if all religions are variants of the same belief and everyone is praying to the same God, then why is religion the basis of so many wars?

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More gems from Michael Quinion’s must-read blog Worldwide Words:

Michael Hocken submitted a casting call spotted by an actor friend: “We are making a short 3 minute comedy/drama about God coming down to earth to enter into competitions and film festivals throughout the UK.”

Leo Boivin writes: “The lead sentence of an editorial in the Washington Post on 26 February read, “One day this month four murders occurred in the space of 72 hours in Prince George’s County.”

A report on the CBC News site startled James Helbig. “A woman has been found frozen to death at Apex Mountain Resort, confirm RCMP. ... Police believe cold weather was a factor in her death.”

On Oscar night, Grant Cribb tells us, the red-carpet correspondent for BBC TV news was speculating about Meryl Streep’s chances. He concluded: “You might think that she’s won a whole brace of Oscars over the years. In fact, she’s only won two.”

Michael Robertson e-mailed, “In the New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge, the entry for Clark Gable concludes: ‘In The Misfits — his last film, made shortly after his death — he played a tough, aging cowboy.”

*************88**********

My favourite restaurant in the universe is Brown’s opposite the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It is a lofty-ceilinged room, French in a Belle Epoque way, noisy with lively conversation, friendly but respectful waiters and good traditional food. Lunching there with Chinese friends I admitted to the husband, retired from a Chair in Statistics, that I had followed all the debate by economists about the Crash without understanding a single word.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “the economists don’t understand what they are talking about either. It’s not a question of understanding them but translating. Quantative Easing, for example. That means the issue of worthless bank notes.”

“That’s forgery,“ I said.

“Exactly,“ he said. “There are lies, damned lies and economists.” We returned to our beef steak pie cooked in beer with quiet satisfaction.

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Bailey, our gardener Hipkin’s Wonderdog who has reached 17 on a diet of sausages, beef burgers, chicken and a full Sunday luncheon, has caught a nasty cough. Naturally Hipkin doses him with child strength cough mixture. He went to replenish his supplies at Tesco’s.

“It were one o’ they till girls,” he told me. ‘How old’s the baby then?’ she says. Well, says I, it ain’t a baby, not at all. It’s a dog. ‘A dog,’ says she. ‘Well I ain’t a-gooin to sell you none. Not for a dog.’ So I went savage. You knows what you can do with your mixture, I says, and I walks out.”

Poor Hipkin’s troubles have come not as single spies but in battalions. “All the geraniums have died in my neighbour’s conservative,” he told me.

LAND OF HELPLESS TORIES

Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham are becoming 'no-go areas' because of drugs gangs... just like Mexico and Brazil, says the UNITED NATIONS

Primary school where just 26 out of 700 pupils speak English as their first language

Don't bother getting a good degree: Now PC brigade says bosses shouldn't just hire best students as it 'discriminates against average graduates'

Daily Mail Headlines, Tuesday 28 Feb 2012

Was it those news items or disclosures of the recurring venality of our MPS, frauds by the bankers, the corruption of the Metropolitan police that made me realise that I, who was born in 1929, the year of the Great Depression, have lived to witness the end game, the collapse of the United Kingdom?

Actually it was none of those. It watching a documentary on the dispute between the English Defence League and another ragtag bunch, the Militant Muslims, in Luton. Not a big thing in itself. A battle really between a street corner thug and a fundamentalist accountant. In the more sensible past it would not have been worth an airing. But it was enough to make me realise it was all over. The giants I knew in my youth have been supplanted by petulant pigmies.

It was not always so. Next weekend I will be attending a very special 100th birthday party.

Geoffrey Rowley-Conwy, 9th Baron Langford, has been my best friend for 63 years. He is a man from another age. A good landlord, an amateur jockey, a breeder and driver of trotting horses, but, above all, a brave professional soldier. When Singapore Island fell to the Japanese in 1942, many officers became separated from their units. Not so the young Rowley Conwy He commandeered a Chinese junk and evacuated his entire RA battery. A civilian rubber planter Douglas Fraser joined them. In defiance of army convention, the Colonel (then still a major) recruited him into the army and “commissioned“ him. The two men brought the battery through the Thousand Isles, where Rowkley Conwy was ordered to take command of a log-burning steamer ferrying escaping soldiers down the Irrawaddy to Padang on the West coast and did two trips in it to islands east of Sumatra .

The tourist route, as the river-lift across Sumatra became known, was the inspiration of another chum, Lt Col Alan “Cocky” Ferguson Warren, Royal Marines, Commander, Special Operations Executive Orient. Appalled that no evacuation plan had been made, Warren borrowed, bought or stole a fleet of river boats and set up a mini Dunkirk which saved thousands of lives. When Singapore fell only 800 were left behind.

He gave the young Rowley Conwy command of a diesel-engined, 66 ton launch and a map torn from a school exercise book, his only chart, which had Rangoon and Sydney on the same page. Dodging Japanese bombers, running his craft ashore so often the pumps were in constant use, he later took over a second launch, the Plover, in which he made one trip before the route was closed down.

Reporting to Warren, he was told the plan had been to give him charge of all Allied troops in Padang but at 29 he was too young and too junior and so he was told to await orders.

Warren bought a Malay pirhau to make his own escape and that of his small staff from Padang but, ashamed at the behaviour of senior British and Australian officers, he gave his place instead to Rowley Conwy.. He remained, appointing himself Commander British Troops and bringing the abandoned soldiery back into units, so that a senior and experienced officer would be present to surrender when inevitably the Japanese reached Padang. This led to three years of captivity in the River Kwai death camps. Had his role in the SOE been discovered it would have meant instant death at the hands of the Japanese Secret Police. Warren's action was one of the most cold-blooded and bravest decisions of the war.

Rowley Conwy joined an elite group of Warren’s SOE staff who sailed the leaky Sederhana Djohanis, with paper-thin and patched sails, across the Bay of Bengal from Padang to Bombay. The 1,500-mile voyage, during which they were strafed by an enemy fighter and almost inadvertently sailed through a Japanese fleet, took 37 days. They were finally picked up a mile off the Ceylon coast by the merchant ship Anglo Canadian.

The son of an officer killed at Gallipol, he too joined the army. As a young officer he was forced to live on his pay but typically found ways to run a horse and a Bentley motor car. In India he rode as a jockey for local millionaires.

He is a bon viveur with a boundless gift for friendship. His mottoes are “The Best is Barely Good Enough” and “It only costs a Little More to travel First Class.”

He has always been ready for battle. When he had his shirt collars replaced with material from the tail of his shirts he was incandescent when Customs attempted to charge him duty. The resulting correspondence was worthy of Wodehouse. When the Customs ended a letter, “We have the honour to be your Lordship’s Most Obedient Servant”, he wrote back, “Then act like one.”

As a youth he was confronted in Fortnum & Mason’s by a formidable floor walker in a frock coat.

“And who might you be?” he demanded.

“I am in charge of this floor,” was the reply.

“Then get it swept. It’s filthy.”

He owns the Junction Pool of the Rivers Clwyd and Elwy, a fine holding pool for sea trout. He fought a running battle with Flintshire’s Lord Lieutenant Hugh Mainwaring who refused to allow him costs when he took a poacher to court. In reprisal, he took to fining poachers on the spot and sending the money to service charities. When one refused to pay, he followed him home and sat in his front garden until he got his money. He was only once beaten. A disgruntled poacher introduced a seal to the river.

I was his PR sergeant on the Berlin Airlift. We met when I took up residence in an empty aircraft engine packing case next to his office and we have been firm friends from that day to this. His wife Susan was “best man” at my wedding.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Michael Gove yesterday denied being guilty of 'Cymru-phobia' after using the term 'welshed' in Parliament.

The Education Secretary used the verb, meaning to fail to honour a deal or pay a gambling debt, as he faced MPs at Commons' questions.

Some Welsh people find the term offensive, claiming it implies they cannot be trusted.

Mr Gove, a Scotsman, was rebuked by Speaker John Bercow, who urged him to choose another word.

I suppose it would be asking too much to expect The Speaker to know anything about history.

When Edward I built his castles in Wales the writ of English Law ran only in the towns in which they were built. All the country beyond was governed by Welsh law (the term survives in towns like Welsh Frankton). Any trader who escaped his debts by going into the ‘Welshery’ was said to have ‘welshed’.

MPs do it all the time.

And finally

A Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge? This was an entry

for the 32nd annual Bookseller Diagram prize for the oddest book

title of the year. Other titles are: Estonian Sock Patterns All

Around The World, A Century Of Sand Dredging In The Bristol Channel

(Volume Two), A Taxonomy of Office Chairs (which is described as "an

exhaustive overview"), and The Mushroom In Christian Art.