Sunday Bible Study

A not very nice man from a not very nice political party has reportedly "invaded" a meat production plant and harangued the staff because he does not think that halal meat ought to be available in this country.

"In ths country" seems to be the crux of his argument: if the newspaper reports are to be believed, he basically shouted "this is the United Kingdom, this is the United Kingdom" over and over again as if that settled matters.

One of my co-workers once told me that they wouldn't buy a sandwich from Subway. In fairness, this is a pretty sound moral principal. Only a barbarian would toast a tuna mayo sandwich, and why do you have to go through the ritual of choosing between six different kinds of bread roll when they all taste identical, although I must admit I like the cookies. When I went to America, Subway seemed exciting and exotic, but then so did Starbucks.

My colleague's objection to Subway is that they serve halal food. Certainly the branch near us does: given that there are quire a lot of Muslim people in the area, this seems to make sound commercial sense. (I do not know if Subway is kosher in majority Jewish areas: perhaps there aren't enough majority Jewish areas for that to be a question.) 

I am pretty sure that a Spicy Italian contains salami; and I am pretty sure that salami is made from pork; and I am pretty sure that pork is not halal. Maybe you can make convincing salami out of fish? Maybe the lamb and beef is halal but they take it for granted that observant Muslims wouldn't order pork to start with? They put cheese into all their sandwiches unless you beg them not to, so presumably Islam doesn't have the meat/dairy restriction that Judaism does?

Halal simply means "permitted", as opposed to haram which means "forbidden". And jihad means "struggle", and hijab means modesty and shariah means "law" and Allah means "God". (Arabic speaking Christians call God "Allah".) But I suppose most people take halal to mean "filthy foreign food" and shariah to mean "chopping peoples heads off" and jihad to mean "terrorism". Up to 10^th September 2001 it was common enough to hear boring men in pubs and the leader column of the Daily Telegraph explaining that you can say what you like about Johnny Foreigner but criminals who have had their heads chopped off hardly ever go out and do it again, which is more than you can say for this country. There seems to be a widespread belief that you can catch Islam off a halal foot-long pepperoni with salad but no olives and conversely, that you can cure someone of Islam by throwing bacon butties at them.

This article covers the inconsistencies in the not-very-nice man's approach quite comprehensively. Why was he singling out halal slaughter houses for his animal welfare initiative, when kosher butchers use pretty much the same methods: indeed, the one sometimes supplies the other? If the objection is that Muslim baa-lambs are not stunned before having their throats cut, then actually they usually are. Hard, in any case, to suppose that the religious slaughter of chickens is a bigger welfare concern than your average bootiful factory farm.

But what interests me is the specifically religious question.

The not-very-nice-man is alleged to have asked "Don’t you realise you’re in Great Britain?.....Why are you offering these animal up to Allah, a fake god, Satan. Do any of you have any morals?....You are in Great Britain....This is a Christian country and the Bible says no Christian should eat meat offered to a false god."

Quite a lot of questions are raised here. 

I am not sure if any good Christian has ever believed that other monotheistic faiths are indistinguishable from Satanism. I think that he may be falling into Dawkins Seventh Fallacy, which states:

a: The gods of Christianity, Muslim and Judaism are separate and distinct non-existant entities, in the way that Captain Ahab; David Copperfield and the Tooth Fairy are separate and distinct non-existent entities

b: When a Christian says that he disbelieves in the Jewish and Muslim deities, he means the same thing by "disbelieve" that an atheist does when he says he disbelieves in all deities whatsoever

c: Christians are therefore the same as atheists with respect to two out of the three major monotheistic faiths, and might as well go the whole hog and disbelieve in all of them. 

In the real world, people who believe in God invariably say that other people who believe in God believe in the same God they believe in, although they very frequently say that they've got special inside knowledge that the others haven't got, or that the others have picked up some wrong ideas along the way. 

But even if you do think that Dio is a false God invented by the evil Italians, "this is Great Britain" seems to me to be a bit of a non sequitur. People In Great Britain have been perfectly free to worship Satan since 1735: certainly since 1951. Religious tolerances is one of the things which makes us Great and British. David Cameron says so. 

But the bit which really intrigued me was the bit about the Bible saying that no Christian should eat meat offered to a false God. 

Where does it say that, exactly?

The Christian Bible contains the complete text of the Jewish Bible and therefore contains a lot of passage about which kinds of food are kosher and which kinds are terefah. (I looked it up.) No pork, no shellfish, no lamb cooked in its mother's milk, wash your hands carefully, put the toilet a long way from the kitchen, and so on. But the Christian "New" Testament contains a number of passages in which Jesus permits his followers to apply those rules with leniency, or to set them aside altogether. Sometimes he seems to be saying that his own presence puts the rules on hold temporarily; sometimes he seems to be saying that the rules, as practiced at that time, went way beyond what God had intended or that they were being applied in an unspiritual, rules-lawyering way. But some of his clearest and least equivocal statements say that eating the wrong kind of food doesn't affect your spiritual status one way or the other: 

There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man....Do ye not perceive, that whatsoever thing from without entereth into the man it cannot defile him. Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats?

Naturally, the gentile converts to Christianity found it much easier to accept this idea than the Jewish ones; and it was a point of contention in the early Church. About the only thing we know about Paul's personal relationship with Peter is that they had a public falling out over whether Christians needed to keep kosher. 

The not very nice man seems to have had one of Paul's letters in mind: 

Whatsoever is sold in the shambles, that eat, asking no question for conscience sake: "For the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof." If any of them that believe not bid you to a feast, and ye be disposed to go; whatsoever is set before you, eat, asking no question for conscience sake.But if any man say unto you, "This is offered in sacrifice unto idols", eat not for his sake that shewed it, and for conscience sake: "for the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof" Conscience, I say, not thine own, but of the other: for why is my liberty judged of another man's conscience? For if I by grace be a partaker, why am I evil spoken of for that for which I give thanks?

Whatever is sold in the market, just eat it, and don't ask questions, because everything in the world belongs to God. It is hard to see how you can read that as saying "the Bible forbids us from eating mean offered to false gods". It actually seems to be saying the very opposite. 

Obviously, Paul isn't talking about halal meat, but he is talking about meat which has been offered to the gods of the Greek pantheon. He is quite clear that it doesn't make any difference if an animal was killed in the temple of Jupiter or in front of a statue of Hercules because Jupiter and Hercules don't actually exist.

But there's a problem. Monotheists have always said "There is no other God but God, so whatever you do, don't worship any of the other Gods" and "Idols are totally meaningless, so whatever you do, don't worship them." Paul seems to be saying that idol-worship is, so to speak, a subjective sin: if you think of a statue of a pagan god as just being a lump of dead marble, then it is; but if at some level you think of it as a rival deity, then you'd be cheating on God by worshiping it. People who converted to Christianity from Greek polytheism might well still think of the statues as potentially being gods of some kind; so if they had a sandwich which they thought might have been used in the worship of one of the Greek deities then they might be committing idol worship in their head. 

C.S Lewis said that the generalization of this principal was "on non-essential matters the person without scruples should always give way to the person with scruples." It leads to all sorts of uncomfortable conclusions. If my weaker brother honestly believes that playing Dungeons & Dragons is a kind of devil worship then I (knowing very well that it is not) should never play Dungeons & Dragons again for fear of leading him into subjective sin. I suppose we all accept that we shouldn't have a drink in front of a former alcoholic; should we refrain from eating meat around vegans because meat is murder to them even though to sensible people it isn't?

The not-very-nice-man asserts that the Christian Bible teaches that Subway sell demonic sandwiches. It does not. Even on the assumption (that I am very far from accepting) that the God of Islam is, from the point of view of a good Christian, a false god on a level with Baal, then the Christian Bible is perfectly fine with me eating halal because false gods are precisely that: false. The Christian Bible says that when I go into a sandwich bar, I shouldn't ask questions about the religious affiliation of the sandwiches. It doesn't matter either way. However, if someone tells you that the food is halal and if that person honestly believes that eating a big hearty Italian is pretty much the same thing as drawing a pentacle on the ground and sacrificing a goat to it, then I shouldn't eat sandwiches in their presence. Or maybe at all. If they think it's wrong, then it's wrong for them.

Nothing remotely suggests that Paul thought that the Greeks shouldn't be allowed to carry on performing their own ceremonies in their own ways. The idea that there is a continuity between "I will not eat halal meat"; "No Christian should eat halal meant" and "Muslims living in the UK should not be permitted to eat halal meat" is clearly nonsense. It might be that the not-very-nice-man thinks that there should be no mosques, temples or synagogues in England and that all the Jews, Muslims and Hindus should be rehoused in the American mid-west. But in modern times, countries with Christian majorities have always permitted other religions to be practiced in their borders. There have been Mosques and Temples in the the UK since Victorian times and Synagogues since the the time of Oliver Cromwell. 

So. It's quite awkward. It's none of the unpleasant man's business whether I go to Subway or not; and it's certainly none of his business whether Muslims do. But what does his conscience tell him? If he feels that he is eating the devil every time he worships a sandwich then I should not encourage him.

So: tell me, Mr England First. 

Do you consider your own faith to be a bit on the weak side? 

And now a hymn, during which a collection will be taken

Bless you.

Sunday Politics

I wrote this a couple of months ago. (I really wrote it a couple of months ago. I found it on my Scrivener while looking for something else.) I didn't publish it at the time, because I didn't think it was very interesting:

Our own beloved Ken Livingstone has been accused of a faux pas.

Apparently, he felt that a Labour MP accepting a donation from a hedge fun manager was “like Jimmy Savile funding a children's group”.

The press can be awfully innocent about this kind of thing. The Sun prints the words SEX and BOTTOMS in capital letters, as if they can hardly believe such things exist; anything stronger is blocked out with asterisks. It is okay to print photographs of ladies with no bra on page three of a family newspaper, but god forbid a child should see the word T*TS. They go pale and start to tremble, like your maiden aunt, if anyone uses the F-word. No news reporter has even heard it before.

The formulation like putting X in charge of a Y is so common that it barely reaches the dignity of being a cliche. Like putting Herod in charge of an orphanage barely counts as a simile: it's proverbial. As popular as a pork chop at a Passover; as useful as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest. You might have thought that Blackadder’s as cunning as a fox who had been awarded a degree in Cunning from the University of Cunning (or merely as cunning as a cunning thing) would have killed it off.

Jimmy Savile has a special and strange status which is probably not comprehensible to anyone outside of England or under the age of 45. He isn’t the only entertainer to have been retrospectively exposed as a sex offender; but I think most of our reaction to Rolf Harris’s conviction was “that’s really sad — he seemed so nice”. And Harris was famous for something: it is possible to think that he deserved his jail sentence and that Sun Arise is a terrific song. But so far as anyone can tell, Jimmy Savile never did anything apart from sit around being Jimmy Saville. He played records on the radio, but no-one tells us that he was a master of the craft (like Terry Wogan) or that he championed bands that no-one else cared about (like John Peel). He somehow just existed; being vaguely flamboyant; fronting shows he had nothing to do with; universally present.

I have said elsewhere that in the 1970s the BBC was a genre, almost a place, in a way that can hardly be understood today. More than one of us felt that Basil Brush must be a friend and neighbor of Tom Baker because their shows were on straight after each other. Savile wasn't the guy who fronts that make-a-wish show (“Dear Jimmy, Please could you fix it for me to play the drums with Gary Glitter”); he was more like that weird neighbor you keep bumping into. So the discovery that he was not merely a children’s entertainer who was also a child molester (though God knows that would have been bad enough) but a child molester who appears to have become a children’s entertainer in order to gain access to hundreds and possibly thousands of children genuinely feels like a bomb has gone off through our collective memories. You are thinking about that nice show where the young boy got to star in his own episode of Doctor Who, and then you remember whose show it was. There was that day when Boy George visited my school (true story) after some girls had written to complain that morning assembly was too boring. But who had they written to? Oh yes. Better stop telling that story.

The press love a villain. They compete with each other to see who can condemn the villain in the strongest terms: never mind “disgraced entertainer Jimmy Savile”, not even “evil Jimmy Savile” it needs to be “vile pervert Jimmy Savile”. But what they love even more is a stick to beat the BBC with. (The same journalists who shake when they hear the word “fuck” still regard the idea of showing pictures on the radio as a peculiar fad which will pass before the days of fleet street and hot metal come to an end; their masters hate anything state run because they can’t buy it.) Never mind that Savile was courted by Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles; never mind that Norman Tebbit was one of the few people prepared to defend him when the child rape allegations came out; never mind that he was lauded by anti-sex campaigner Mary Whitehouse. He was a BBC man to the core, and therefore the BBC is infected by his evil.

(The BBC did, in fact, behave reprehensibly, failing to respond to complaints and allegations and evidence because Savile was high profile and rich and could afford the best lawyers in the land. But so did everybody else.)

But what has happened as a result of this is that Savile has been invested with a peculiar kind of anti-sanctity. There is a weird process by which a tiny minority of celebrities become untouchable. You aren’t allowed to say anything against Diana; you aren’t allowed to speak against dead soldiers or appear without a poppy between Halloween and New Years Eve. (When I say “you aren’t allowed to” I mean “if you do, the papers will attack you, not for what you said, but for daring to take the name of our beloved royal family or our brave servicemen in vain”. There's no actual law against it.)

Savile seems to have achieved a level of anti-sanctity in a way that hardly anyone else ever has. When the serial killer Myra Hindley died, she was cremated in private, her ashes scattered in secret and the hospital room she had died in was repainted. That kind of fear of contamination, which features in no actual religion, is the true faith of the Englishman and woman. Someone isn’t a criminal at one time of their lives and not at another; people who murder children without motivation aren’t mentally ill. They have a disease called evil which is communicable — through bed sheets; through white emulsion; through saying their name. Jimmy Savile is like a Weeping Angel; his evil somehow transmissible through his image. We’re allowed to see bad 1970s pop music shows, but his face has to be pixellated, like when someone takes their clothes off on Big Brother and the viewers would be struck blind if they saw a willy. The tabloids got cross because they found there was still an interview with him on a no-longer updated BBC website.

In real life, most of us don’t think that way. Most of us think of the Queen as a somewhat anachronistic feature of the British constitution that we are nevertheless vaguely affectionate towards; that fuck is quite useful as an exclamation mark but shouldn’t be used as a comma; and that Jimmy Savile was a nasty sex criminal who they should have caught earlier. There are other nasty sex criminals; it’s a truism that most kids who are abused are abused by members of their own family. I shall forebear from telling the P.E teacher story again.

It would have been better if Ken Livingstone had said like putting Herod in charge of a children’s home rather than like putting Savile in charge of a children's charity. It would have been better if he'd thought it through a bit and realized that, er, one of the nasty things about Savile was that he actually did support children's charities. Quite likely the tabloids were simply looking for someone from The Left at whom to direct mock outrage but Ken should have thought it through and not offered them an open goal.

But ultimately, he has misused a holy name. The drawing of a line of sanctity around something is never good; it always prevents thinking. The question to ask about a sex offender is how he got that way, how he got away with it for so long, what we should do if this situation arose again, and whether bleating about "elf and safety” necessarily helps. The anti-sanctification of this figure means he is merely a symbol of evil in general and the evil of public service broadcasting in particular.

And it neatly distracts us all from Ken’s point. What is a Labour MP doing taking money from a hedge fun?

Isn’t that like the Resistance being financed by Kylo Renn?

Anyway. That was the essay. Can anyone think of any other profane figures of proverbial evil that Ken should avoid make glib remarks about?

* Ken Livingstone is a politician, former Mayor of London, and sometime Labour MP. In the 1980s, Mrs Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council specifically in order to stop him being leader of it. The press called him “Red Ken” because he held extreme views such as children should be taught about homosexuality in school sex ed lessons and Sinn Fien would have to be brought into the mainstream political process. If not for his policy of cheap travel on the London Tube, putting 1 Dalling Road and Denmark Street within easy reach of suburban schoolboys, it is most unlikely that I would have become a Dungeons & Dragons player or a comic book collector.

Just give me your fucking money.

(Please.)

Sunday Extra

When sorrows come they come not single spies

But in battalions. 

Shakespeare

There are some perfectly good things to be said about “grief athletics” and “grief inflation”. One might indeed compare the outpouring of public grief over the very funny Victoria Wood (2016) and compare it with that over comedy legends such as, say Eric Morecambe (1984), Charlie Chaplin (1977) or even Stan Laurel (1965). One could do a similar compare-and-contrast with Prince and Bowie on one hand and John Lennon and Elvis Presley on the other, and wonder how on earth we are going to top it when Paul McCartney finally shuffles of this mortal coil. (Fortunately, Bob Dylan is going to live forever.)

My working hypothesis is: “Until 1997, the death of a singer or sportsmen was show-business news or sporting news; after 1997 it became simply news. Before 1997, a death from natural courses would be reflected by an obituary and possibly an season of old movies on BBC 2. After 1997, the amount of newsprint given over to the death had to reflect the perceived importance of the deceased person. Not giving enough column inches to the departed would be a faux pas on a level of bowing from the neck instead of from the waist at the cenotaph, or being seen out in October without a poppy. AN INSULT TO THE DEAD." Prior to 1997, a tabloid might make Elvis Is Dead it’s front page story; after 1997 the serious broadsheets did so as well. 

My mother used to say that people always died in groups of 3, although the rule didn’t apply to major family bereavements. Great Uncle Bulgaria said something similar, so I suppose it was a proverb. I suppose that if old Mrs Dodsworthy three doors down passed away; and a few days later you heard that old Rev Bandersnatch kicked the bucket in his home for redundant clergyman, then you would be consciously waiting for Number 3, and be positively relieved when the paper recorded that Uncle Tumble, who you used to watch on the radio when you were a kid had gone to join the choir invisible, and could stop counting. 

. 

It’s an old saying that “Dog bites man” is not news, but “Man bites dog” is. But if a local man dies after being bitten by a labradoodle (which is “news” in practically anyone’s book) then, for the next three weeks, the local paper will (quite understandably) think that every dog bite in the hospital’s incident book is worth a mention giving the punter (quite wrongly) the impression that there has been a terrible epidemic of men being bitten by dogs. It only required two deaths — David Bowie and Terry Wogan — for someone to decide that 2016 was a terrible year for celebrity deaths; and from then on every obituary  has been underlined in magic marker. 

No such thing as a Curse of Superman had even been thought of before Christopher Reeve had his riding accident.

One of the most boring and annoying rhetorical devices is the one where you pretend that because you think that something ought to be true, it actually is true. It might, in fact, be that the United Kingdom would be better off electing it’s next titular head of state rather than handing the title to the eldest child of the present incumbent. (1) I am, as everyone knows, agnostic on the issue. I tend towards saying that the process would be so complicated and divisive that it’s not worth the effort. Would we simply elect a new King when the old King dies, or would we stop having Kings and elect a President every five years? What would he be President of? “The United Republic”? “Greater England”? “New Britain”? “The Margaret Thatcher Memorial Islands”? This is a country where people claim that a preference for simple plurality vs instant run-off elections is a matter of ineffable religious conviction, for goodness sake.

But, as a matter of fact, we do have a Queen, and it is not too unkind to think that the time is not remote when we must, in the course of nature, have a new King. So there is a certain amount of interest in the day to day life of the Queen, and the next King, and the next King but one, and even the terribly cute next King but two. As arguments go, “Why are we interested in a photograph of an old lady and her grandchildren” and “Why does this require any coverage beyond a simple ‘Elizabeth Windsor, 90 today’ in the announcements column” makes republicans look like grumpy old twits. Republican twittery is cut from very much the same cloth as atheist twittery. I suppose it has to do with being against something rather than in favour of something. 

It might be that the public ought to care more about the finer points of the E.U referendum than about the death of a funny person who used to come on the telly when they were kids. But thinking that a thing is so does not make it so. (Patrick Stewart is getting worryingly close to his 80th birthday.)

There was a point, just after I left college for the second time, when all the legendary geek writers and artists seemed to be turning up their toes. The Golden Age of science fiction and comic books was the 30s and 40s, so many of the participants were always going to to die in the 90s. (2) The 1970s were the Golden Age of television: everyone had a TV, but there were only two channels (plus a third one which only showed nature documentaries in Welsh) and there wasn’t much else to in the evenings, so a very fine comedy actor like Ronnie Corbett could easily become a household name. A generation before, he’d have been making a very decent living as a much in demand stage actor; remembered by no-one except a few aficionados; a generation after, his well reviewed comedy shows would have had to compete with eighty five channels showing rolling 24 hours footage of cats falling off sofas. The entertainers who were always going to die in the second decade of the second millennium weren't cleverer or funnier than the entertainers who have died at other times. But they were famous in a way no-one had ever been before, or ever will be again. 

It isn’t big or clever to look at a photo of the next-but-one King and the next-but-one Queen outside the Taj Mahal and say “Why is a couple sitting on a bench news, especially?” It isn’t big or clever to pretend that you don’t know who Prince is. I suppose that it is possible to cut yourself off from popular culture to that extent (”and what exactly is a ‘beatle’?”(3)) but that rather prohibits you from talking bout it. I don’t think I could name a single professional football player. (There used to be someone called David Beckham, but he retired to sell perfume and knickers.) 

For some people, it may simply be a logical error. If A is better than B then it follows that B is positively bad. If B is not quite as good as some people say, then it follows that B is awful. So the correct way of expressing the insight that "I am quite surprised, actually, by the importance the media attached to David Bowie" is "David Bowie was a talentless hack who couldn't sing."

But some people are, sadly, positively addicted to saying horrible things. If a lot of people are sad because a singer they liked as died their drug forces them to say "Who the hell was he?" A mad, sad man who writes for the Telegraph managed to describe Prince as “an obscure, sparsely talented performer”. A below the line commentator spoke about his “welcome death”. (4) The humans suffer from a disease called hatred: one day it may be possible to cure it. 

I was a bit surprised, actually, that a left wing paper like the Guardian ran a full page solid black front page to mark the death of a singer. I used to think it was silly to feel sad when a performer you liked died: since I have been going to live gigs, and since several of the performers I most revere are the wrong side of 70, I don’t feel that any more. If Prince merits a front page and a pull out supplement, then nothing short of suspending all other reporting and printing 60 pages of black ink will suffice for Dylan. But as I say: he is immortal. 

I blame Diana. 

(1) Another thing I find boring and irritating is when people say "titular" when the actually mean "eponymous". 

(2) Gene Roddenbury, 1991; Isaac Asimov, 1992; Joe Shuster, 1992; Jack Kirby, 1993; Jerry Siegel, 1996; Bob Kane, 1998

(3)It is very doubtful is any judge ever actually said this. And if even if he did, every word spoken in an English court is recorded verbatim so it is fairly important that slang terms and terms from popular culture are defined for the benefit of future generations. I know this from having watched Crown Court when I was off school with ‘flu. An American Judge would have said “And for the record, Mr Starr, could you tell the court what a Beatle is…” and no-one would have found it especially funny.

(4) Imagine being a Daily Mail journalist and having to sit up all night working out how to get some hatred and bile into reporting the death of an elderly middle-of-the-road comedian who just about everybody like. Imagine reading the Daily Mail and learning of the death of Mr Ronnie Corbett under the headline “WHY WASN’T HE GIVEN A KNIGHTHOOD”. (Due to an establishment conspiracy, apparently.) 

If I had $1 for every person who read this essay I'd have £108.65

Rambling Think-Piece in Precisely Sixteen Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty Six Characters

I have just ordered a t-shirt designed by friend-of-this-blog Mike Taylor.

It depicts a lightsaber and the slogan “Kylo stabbed first”.

Although it contains only three words, someone unfamiliar with the past 40 years of Star Wars culture — let’s call her “Mum” — would not have the faintest idea why the slogan is funny.

To get the joke, you have to know:

1: The original 1977 movie “Star Wars” featured an amoral gunfighter who shot an enemy’s henchmen in cold blood.

2: In 1997, the scene was re-edited so that the gunfighter shot the henchmen in self-defense

3: Fans, who on the whole preferred the original version, expressed their displeasure by making badges and t-shirts with the slogan “Han shot first.”

4: In the new movie, a Very Bad Thing happens to the same character, at the hands of the villain Kylo Ren.

I find this kind of thing funny; but I must admit that I overuse it, to the extent that some people find my writing impenetrable.

I blame the post-modern condition. In the Olden Days everybody shared more or less the same cultural reference points: I could allude to Baby Roo, Moses, James T Kirk, Iago, John Nokes, Fagin, and Tommy Cooper and everyone would know exactly who I was talking about. What with public schools having turned everyone into zombies and everyone having decided that two TV channels just weren't enough, we all have less stuff in common. Oblique signifiers are a nice way of establishing community but they can also be a nasty of excluding people.

Suppose I describe Prof Richard Dawkins as a “whey-faced coxcomb”. Everyone gets that I mean “fool”; nearly everyone gets that I’m using an old-fashioned term for “fool”; and quite a lot of people spot that it’s a quasi-Shakespearian reference. (The bard was good at insults: “Thou base player of football!”) But only a minority — only one of our particular in-group — would spot that I am quoting five times Hugo award loser J.C Wright quoting Shakespeare.

Richard Dawkins is a whey faced coxcomb translates as “Richard Dawkins is a fool, and by the way J.C Wright is a pompous, in the British sense, ass.”

I sometimes wear a “WWTDD” badge because I want people who don’t get it to feel rotten and inferior.

*

Earlier this year I posted the follow squib/aphorism in response to something I had read on the popular social networking site known as Twitter:

Is there some particular reason why believing in Adam and Eve is incompatible with hosting a TV breakfast show which I may be missing?

This has (to slightly misquote Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide) “made a lot of people very angry, and been widely regarded as a bad move”.

The problem with Twitter is that each tweet is necessarily short. You have to sacrifice all nuances in the name of brevity and condensation.

This is also what makes it fun. There is a haiku-like joy in telling a joke or expressing a political viewpoint in precisely 140 characters

One often finds oneself sacrificing grammar, punctuation and elegance to make what you wanted to say fit exactly into the character limit…

OTOH, the very brevity sometimes creates a kind of poetry of its own, and some people actually think and speak in twitter ideolect hashtag gimmick

I feel sometimes I’m in a double-bind. People treat silly little twitter squibs as if they were my final word on great matters of state… (1)

…But when I direct them to my more substantive essays they throw up their hands and say “Oh I couldn’t possibly read anything that long” (2)

To be fair, the same thing is probably true of the twitter output of Prof Richard Dawkins though probably not the Rev’d Giles Fraser LOL (3)

*

The very select group of human beings who have traveled in space all tell us how awesome it is to look down on the Earth. I don’t suppose I shall ever travel in space — I am scared of heights — but am happy to take their word for it. I imagine that looking at the earth from space must be very awesome indeed. (We probably take this too much for granted. Before 1959, every illustration of The World or The Planet Earth was an artist’s impression of what it would look like. In retrospect they usually looked too much like geography teachers’ globes.) Indeed, when English astronaut Helen Sharman appeared on The Museum of Curiosity — a rather odd Radio 4 talk show in which people with nothing in common are invited to talk about whatever they feel like — “seeing the world from space” seemed to be one of the main reasons why Space Travel was a good thing.

Once you’ve seen the Earth from orbit, you realize how insignificant you are, and in particular that the borders and differences between countries and nations that we make so much of aren’t really real.

Woo-oh-oh-oh-oh, you may say I’m a dreamer.

Travel broadens the mind. Traveling into space presumably broadens the mind exponentially. Seeing the earth from space changes your outlook. But then, being wrongly accused of a serious crime probably changes your outlook, as does having heart bypass surgery and taking too much Lysergic acid. The question is whether the new outlook is better or worse than the old one. How could we tell? Yes, I fully accept that you “spoke in tongues” at a revival meeting. So what? Did the experience make you a more pious Christian or a nicer human being, or did you just feel excited during some gospel music? Not that there is anything wrong with feeling excited during some gospel music. There is absolutely nothing wrong with looking out of porthole and saying “Wow!” either. I am just not quite sure what it proves.

Bristol is very big. The world is even bigger. I am very small relative to Bristol. I am very small indeed relative to the world. I am very big relative to my friend Richard. But the idea that I am insignificant compared with the world only works if you think that big things are in general more significant than small things. In which case I am presumably twelve inches more significant than my friend Richard.

I am currently cutting out snacks and taking more exercise in the hope that it will make me less significant.

Up in space, you can’t see any borders or any countries. Well, no, of course you can’t. No-one ever supposed you could. People used to say that you could see the Great Wall of China from space, but apparently you can’t. I don’t think I ever believed that there was a cosmological distinction between England and Scotland that was obvious from the Moon and would have been even if no-one had invented highland clearances, whisky or irn-bru. I always understood that the difference was mostly cultural — language and history and politics. And climate. You can’t see climate from space; not very easily, but I am still taking a coat if I ever go back to Dundee.

We are only entitled to say “in space, you can see that countries aren’t really real” if we have first agreed that “real things are thing you can see from a long way away”. According to which criteria, history and language and politics, and whether the shops open on a Sunday and what time the pubs close are not real. But they make a real difference to the real lives or real people most of whom have no real chance of really going up in a space rocket, whatever Richard Branson says.

A grown up may say to a child “Stop quarrelling about that toy. It only cost sixpence and a few years from now you won’t even remember it, and a century from now you will both be dead” Yes. But to that child at that moment, the teddy bear or the ball or the small ray-gun that came with the second Cyborg and Muton accessory pack is simply the most important thing in the world. The people of Palestine don’t want to hear that from a sufficiently elevated perspective their struggle isn’t very important and from space you can’t even see the wall. What they want is justice. Which is another of the things you can’t see from space.

*

It transpires that there is a journalist named Dan Walker. He used to talk about football for the BBC, and now he is going to appear on a breakfast time talk show. (One of the things I find it hardest to get my head around, from a terrestrial or extraterrestrial perspective is that a man may make a living talking about football.) It transpires that Mr Walker is a Christian; and it further transpires that he is a Christian of a fairly conservative flavour. For example, he believes that Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden were really really real.

This is pretty much all I know about him. Whether he believes that the Red Sea was actually the Sea of Reeds; whether he thinks that John Mark is the same Mark who wrote the Gospel and how he deals with the prophecy of Daniel being written in Aramaic I couldn’t say. The first I heard of him was a post on the aforementioned Twitter by the aforementioned Prof Richard Dawkins.

“Why in the world is BBC hiring a young earth creationist to host BBC Breakfast? Why not someone who accepts reality.” said the very great man.

“Is there some particular reason why believing in Adam and Eve is incompatible with hosting a TV show which I’m missing?” said I.

“Or does the New Atheist movement think that only people who believe like they do should have jobs and everyone else should be blacklisted?” continued I.

“It’s not like they’d be the first” I concluded.

I don’t think my first bit contained any hidden meanings or obscure cultural references. By “believing in Adam and Eve” I meant “believing that Adam and Eve were historical individuals in the same way that George Washington arguably was”. By “incompatible with hosting a TV show” I meant “incompatible with hosting a TV show.” My question was “Why does believing that Adam and Eve were real people — even granted that you and me and Richard Dawkins agrees that they were not — prevent you from asking Brie Larson penetrating questions about her dress or asking Jeremy Corbyn equally penetrating questions about his tie?

I admit that the question was rhetorical and I already knew the answer

*

"But” asked my Aunt Sally “You would surely agree that at the very least a journalist who believed in Adam and Eve should not be allowed to work on a science programme?”

“You’ve asked me a question” I replied “So let me ask you a question. Would a journalist who didn’t believe in the Christian God be allowed to work on Songs of Praise”

Songs of Praise is a long running British soft-religious TV show. In the olden days they simply put a camera in a church and recorded half an hour of community hymn singing — Anglican, Wesleyan or Salvation Army as the mood took them. They now go to town and chat to local people and ask them to pick hymns that they like.

“I suppose” said Sally “It would depend on what kind of atheist. If he was the kind who shouted ‘oh no there isn’t’ every time the choir started to sing ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away…’ then probably not. If he was the kind who thought that even though he didn’t go in for all this God stuff himself, it was his job to line up a shot of the stained glass window and the vicar so it looked as pretty as possible, then of course he could.”

“Well, quite” I retorted. “And you couldn’t have someone who was supposed to be interviewing the local Catholic clergymen and was somehow under the impression that he was Free Presbyterian. Particularly not if he thought it didn’t make any difference because it was all equally a pile of rubbish.”

“The question” said Sally, "Wouldn't be 'Is the journalist an atheist.' It’s much more ‘Is the journalist a dick?’”

“But that” said I “Is, in a very real sense, always the question.”

*

I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who literally believes in Adam and Eve. It's a fringe belief, in this country at least. Is the literal belief in Adam and Eve, alone among the vast range of spiritual and fringe beliefs in the world — meditation and speaking in tongues and yogic flying and tea leaf reading and Gaia and the journey of the hero and homeopathy — the one which rules you out of presenting TV breakfast shows? And if so, why?  I can see that if the BBC are going to make a prestige 26 part series on dinosaurs and I want to be chief researcher and it turns out that not only do I not believe that any such creatures as dinosaurs ever existed, I actually think that the whole idea of dinosaurs is a myth put about by the Frankfurt Group to make it easier for the communists to take over… Well I probably wouldn’t get the job. I have, how would you say, preconceptions which would make it impossible for me to do it properly. But what's the connection between Breakfast TV and creationism? 

I try to imagine how my interview for the Breakfast time job would pan out in Richard Dawkins' universe: 

“Well: you are obviously a very good TV presenter with lots of excellent contacts. You would fit onto this show very well indeed. But as a matter of pure formality, I have to ask you some questions about your personal beliefs. Do you believe in Adam and Eve?”

“Well, I suppose it depends what you mean by ‘believe’. If you mean ‘were they historical people’ then no, I most certainly don’t believe that they were. But if you mean ‘do they represent important religious truths’ then yes I suppose I do. I think that the story is presented as something which happened a long time ago, but it is really a picture of what’s happening now, inside every human being, all the time. I think that each of us exiles ourself…”

What happens then? Does my interviewer say “Oh, your personal spiritual beliefs are none of my business or anybody else’s. I myself believe in the I-Ching, but naturally I wouldn’t tell you that. I just have to check that you don’t believe that the Garden of Eden was a real place or that God made the world in six days. Anything else is your own problem.”

Or does he say “Oh. So you DO believe in Adam and Eve, or else in something almost as stupid, or else you are using theology to pull the wool over our eyes. We obviously can’t have you, or anyone who believes in anything with the slightest hint of the supernatural working for us. Goodbye.”

Richard Dawkins has form in this area. Back in 2013 he was insinuating that Muslims couldn’t work on financial papers “because they believed in flying horses”. Earlier this year, he was rattling off little squibs asking how it was that people who believed that Jesus turned water into wine could possibly hold down jobs in the modern world. This makes me at least suspect that behind the proposition “Young earth creationists shouldn’t present breakfast TV shows” lurks the parenthesis “…and neither should anyone else who believes in miracles, angels prophecies or any other supernatural aspect of religion” which is only a hop, skip and jump from “you shouldn’t employ Christians or Muslims: you should only employ atheists, like me.”

It would have been better if I hadn’t used the politically loaded term “blacklist”.

*

I don’t think that you can deduce things about Scottish independence, the Palestinian/Israeli conflict or the Brexit referendum by looking at the Earth from space. I don’t think that the book of Genesis is very helpful as an explanation of why the male Kakapo parrot has a mating cry which positively repels the female. I don’t think Darwinism is much use as a religious myth. A friend of mind wrote on Facebook that the black-holes and gravity waves thing meant “Science has proved that God doesn’t exist.” I think he probably said it mainly to annoy me, but I still think it’s nonsense. I don’t think you can draw spiritual and ethical conclusions from material and scientific observations.

If people continue to say “I have seen the earth from space; and this proves borders and nations don’t exist and Tibet should damn well shut up about it” then a certain number of people are going to be very tempted to say “Well, if that’s what it proves, then I don’t believe you saw it. Probably your trip into space was another trick, like that time O.J went to Mars.” If people continue to say “all living things shared a common ancestor, and therefore culture and morality are not really real” then some people will continue to say “well, if that’s what it proves, then I don’t believe all living things shared a common ancestor.” If people try to bring science round to reductive, misanthropic conclusions, some people are bound to reject science. It’s the only rational thing to do.

*

So anyway: all those thoughts were kind of bound up in the little tweet I posted from the coffee shop; just like the whole history of Star Wars is bound up in Mike’s little t-shirt. Kylo Slashed First. Is it just believing in Adam and Eve that disqualifies you from breakfast TV, or religious faith in general. That’s the joy of Twitter, although, of course, that’s the trouble with it too.

And the punch line is this: the people who were annoyed by the 140 character tweet will probably never know, because they will probably find a 3,000 word article much too long and dull to bother with. 

*

On no possible view is it literally true that a kangeroo is my cousin.

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Dear Jeremy,

Thank you for your e-mail.

I very recently joined the Labour Party because I believed that you would be driven by your conscience and convictions, rather than merely seek sympathetic headlines in far-right newspapers.

I think that war is always a very great evil. I think that civilized countries should only resort to war when there is literally no alternative. There are obviously alternatives to bombing Syria.

No-one has made it clear what such a war would be likely to achieve. And if the country is as bankrupt as we keep being told, we can't afford it anyway.

Ten years ago, those of us who opposed the war in Iraq were called cowards and traitors by the same right-wingers who want to have another war next week. Today absolutely everyone (even Mr Blair, I think) agrees that the Iraq war was a terrible mistake. Ten years from now any bombing of Syria will be regarded as a similarly catastrophic error. Whatever happens next week, you can be sure that people will be saying "Jeremy was right" for years to come.

I don't want to live in a one party state, where only one voice (the voice of the Daily Mail) is permitted, and where anyone who speaks out against a war or an economic policy is branded a traitor or a communist by both parties. The job of the opposition is to oppose -- that is, to constructively critique the government. So it is important that the Labour Party oppose this crazy war even -- especially -- if the crazy war goes ahead. If both sides of the House of Commons support the crazy war, then the millions of us who oppose it are simply denied a voice, a say, a stake in the decision.

I think that Cameron's war, like Blair's war, will turn out to be a reckless waste of money and lives that will only make matters much worse. I think that you and the other moderates who think that war is only ever a last resort should stick to your consciences. Do not let the extremists in your own party and the far-right press who think that bombs are the solution to everything derail you.

Thank you for taking the trouble to write to me; stay in touch.

Andrew

Read: "Je Suis Andrew"

Support this page. 

Why I Would Rather The Labour Party Were In Opposition Forever Than The Tories Were In Government Forever With No Opposition

I am Socialist. 

In fact, I am probably your worst nightmare. I am a Christian Socialist. 

(I can answer the one about men's bottoms better than Tim Farron, but I am not going to.) 

I am not a Marxist or Communist. I think that everyone, including me, should pay slightly more taxes; and that the money be spend on schools, hospitals, libraries and parks which everyone, including me, can use.

I am also, incidentally, a liberal, in the sense that I think that everybody should be allowed to do whatever they like so long as it isn't interfering with anybody else. ("I find it squicky" does not count as interfering.)

My ideal arrangement would be a consensus around the political center-left:

• Health care free at the point of need
• Public service broadcasting
• State schools that are sufficiently good, that no-one needs to pay for private education
• A job for every one who wants one 
• Everyone with a job able to afford a mortgage (or rent on a decent home); to feed and clothe their family; and have a bit left over for beer
• Everyone without a job paid an allowance so they can buy food and pay rent and have a bit left over for beer
• No-one made to feel like an outsider or in danger because of their headwear or the word they use for "god" or who they fall in love with (this includes headwear, deities, and sexual practices I persohnally find squicky) 
• A country where we don't execute school children; spank murderers; or torture people who look a bit like people who think might be terrorists. 
• The rich permitted to continue tearing small woodland animals to pieces in the privacy of their own homes if they really want. 

However, as I understand it, a center-left government is not currently one of the options on the table.

The options on the table appear to be

1: A far right government that wants to abolish the BBC, abolish the welfare state, abolish the NHS and bring back the Workhouse, with an center left opposition that criticizes them, attacks them, campaigns against them, picks holes in their laws at committee stage, supports protesters and strikers and generally makes life as hard as possible for the government. 

2: A far right government that wants to abolish the BBC, abolish the welfare state, abolish the NHS and bring back the Workhouse and an opposition which positively encourages them, in the hope that, in 2025, the opposition can form a government which believes in abolishing the BBC and bringing back the workhouse.

So I choose option 1. Obviously, option 3 (a center left government with a center right opposition) would be the best option. But it isn't on offer.

They won't call them workhouses. But silly teenagers are going to carry on having sex whatever Geroge Osbourne says. Particularly when the newspapers won't ever allow realistic advise about sex, contraception and abortion to be given to school children. Dacre and Murdoch and Desmond are prudes, like all pornographers. So instead of "silly ladies with five kids from three different men being supported by the public purse" we are going to have "silly ladies with five kids from three different men who can't possibly support those kids." So either we go back to Cathy Come Home, kick her onto the streets, and send the kid catcher round to forcibly put her kids in a state orphanages (which is more expensive than Welfare) or we send poor people who simply won't stop breeding to some sort of state-run institution, probably on the model of detention centers for immigrants, where they can be taken care of away from the public gaze. And those detention centers will be made as nasty as possible, so as not to appear to reward people who have "done the wrong thing" and chosen to be poor. And the Daily Mail will say that these places are like holiday camps, and that honest people's tax dollars shouldn't be spent on water and air for women who've had sex too young when they can't afford it, and if they would rather die they had better do so so quickly and reduce the surplus populations. And Labour will say that that's what they're hearing on the doorsteps and it would be self-indulgent to disagree.

As a very wise man once said: the poor drink and dance and screw because there's nothing else to do.

Politics isn't a destination, it's a trajectory. 

At one time, we had the Tories saying "Move slowly to the right" and Labour saying "Move slowly to the left". 

Then it became the Tories saying "Move quickly to the right" and Labour saying "Move slowly to the right." 

The new policy is Tories saying "Move quickly to the right" and Labour saying "We certainly aren't going to stop you."

Perhaps one day, David Cameron will say "We have now moved as far to the right as we need to, and can stop?" On that day, will his party say "Hooray! We have moved as far to the right as we need to, and can stop." Or will they denounce him as a communist? 

This page is supported by Patreon. That means that people who like my writing agree to pay me a few pence per essay. 

If the 437 people who read my last political essay had each pledged 50c to Patreon, I would be able to give up work and write full time. Not that I would, because I quite like my job, but it's a nice thought. 

I also done a book. 

How Democracy Works

"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake."
Nineteen Eighty-Four

How I think democracy works

Everyone votes for the candidate whose politics most closely match their own.

The candidate with the most votes in a particular region goes to Parliament.

Parliament as a whole -- consisting of many members from many different parties with many different points of view -- represents "the people" who also belong to many different parties and have many different points of view.

The many different MPs debate taxes and wars and duck houses from their various points of view, and then take a vote. Whatever the majority of MPs vote for become the Law. 

How Harriet Harman thinks democracy works.

Everyone votes for the candidate whose politics most closely match their own.

The candidate with the most votes in a particular region goes to parliament.

The party with the most seats in parliament is deemed to represent the will of of "the British people."

The opinions of those members of the British People who voted against the party with the most seats in parliament are disregarded.

It becomes the moral duty of candidates who were voted in by members of the minority party to pretend that they support the majority party because the majority party, by virtue of being the majority party, represents the will of the whole of the British people, and to vote against them would be "undemocratic". 

It is clear that the whole idea of representative democracy is a terrible mistake. It would be better to dispense with constituencies altogether, and to give which ever party secures the plurality of votes 100% of parliamentary seats, presumably picked off a party list.

Indeed, the whole idea of "parliament" is a terrible mistake: it would be better to dispense with MPs altogether and simply elect a President, with absolute dictatorial powers, for a term of 5 years.

Possibly, in fact, the whole idea of "representatives" is a terrible mistake and we should simply vote for a programme which Civil Servants would then carry out unquestioningly until the next election.

(This is extremely close to how Mr Tony Blair did, in fact govern: I don't need to listen too much to Parliament, because people voted for ME to Prime Minister; I don't need to to listen to criticism of my programme, because The People voted for The Pledges which were in The Manifesto and therefore whatever was in the Manifesto is the People's Will and it would be undemocratic of me to do anything else. The idea may be that Labour wants to treat the Tories as elected dictators in a one party state because they intend to behave like elected dictators in a one party state when they get back into power in 2025 or 2030.)

What Harriet Harman thinks happened at the 2015 election.

Harriet Harman thinks that the 2015 was a disaster for the Labour Party. She thinks that The People rejected the Labour Party on such a scale that the only sensible thing to do is to stop being the Labour Party and become something else instead.

What I think happened in the 2015 election

I think that the 2015 election was a Damn Close Thing.

I think that 37% of those of us who voted voted Tory; 30% of those of us who voted voted Labour and 33% of those of us who voted voted Something Else.

I think that 25% of us voted Tory, 20% of us voted Labour, another 20% voted for Something Else and 35% of us didn't bother to vote at all.

According to our crazy election system, that means that 51% of MPs are Tories; 36% of MPs are Labour and  13% are Something Else. But that still means that the Tories have only got a slender majority. Members of Parliament do occasionally vote against their party, or call in sick, or get stuck in traffic, so every single debate and vote ought to be regarded as a Damn Close Thing. 

What I think the point of the Opposition is.

I think the point of the Opposition is to oppose.

What Harriet Harman thinks the point of the Opposition is.

I don't know.

This page is supported by Patreon. If you like what you see, please pledge to donate £1 or fifty pence every time I write something. Supporters get little extras from time to time.


A little while ago I wrote down everything I know about politics, and put it in a book. It would be lovely if some of you read it. 

Coffee and Clangers

Suppose I go to a cafe and have a horrible cup of coffee.

There are a number of things I might do. I might send it back and ask for a nicer one. I might decide not to go to that cafe any more. I might say that in the grand scheme of things drinking a horrible cup of coffee isn’t that big a deal.

On the other hand, I might draw the conclusion that it is impossible to get a nice cup of coffee anywhere in England nowadays. I might go further. Until recently, every village and high street in England was full of shops selling really great coffee. Suddenly, all the coffee shops started serving filthy American coffee — the kind where you grind up beans and force steam through the powder, not the traditional English kind that comes in bottles with a picture of a Gurkha on it. And no-one, absolutely no-one, likes this new Star Bucks drink. The BBC decided to give undue prominence to a tiny number of celebrity chefs who told everyone that the foul American drink was better. They probably did so for bad motives. Possibly they had financial interests in the new coffee shops; or possibly they just wanted to reinforce their sense of superiority by affecting to like a drink which no-one could possibly like. 

Before long, I’ll be talking about a powerful coffee lobby with a name ending in brigade or -ista who has made it impossible for anyone to say, or even think, that Nescafe is nicer than single estate Americano – except for you and me, who are the only people on earth who understand these things.

Every couple of Februarys, England loses a day or two’s work to the weather. Everybody who stops to think about it understands why this happens: we get so little snow that it would be pretty pointless to spend millions of pounds on thousands of snow plows that would sit in garages gathering dust on nine hundred and ninety nine days out of a thousand. Nevertheless, it is an important national tradition that we spend the bi-annual cold day in February saying (all together now) 

What’s the matter 

with this country

(of ours)

two inches of snow 

and it 

grinds to a halt!

That’s all perfectly good fun. Almost as much fun as laughing at the railwayman who blamed train delays on "the wrong kind of snow." (He never existed, and he never said it, but it's still good fun.) I recall a year or two back A Pundit, (possibly Christopher Hitchens' brother) going on Question Time to explain that England was now THIRD WORLD COUNTRY and we were slow at unblocking frozen roads BECAUSE COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOLS. No-one has ever actually written my coffee essay, but I do recall A Nother Pundit eating a meal that was more highly spiced then he happened to like and writing a column to the effect that there was no longer a single restaurant in England where they cooked without chili because political correctness. 

The iconic example of the genre is Paul Johnson's 1964 essay which claimed that young people didn't really like the Beatles: they were pretending to like them because politicians told them to; that music critics pretended to be able to tell the difference between different kinds of jazz to cover up the fact that it was all equally a savage cacophony; and that the youth of 1964 liked the same things that young people have always liked, namely Dante, Matisse and Proust.

I don’t think that I would go as far as Philip Sandifier who characterises this kind of mindset as fascist – the golden age, the act of backstabbing betrayal, the belief that the back-stabbers are secretly running things; the need for a mighty hero to come and slay the celebrity chefs.  I’d be more likely to call it the Old Man’s Fallacy. 

Stuff changes. Most of us are more comfortable with the stuff that was around when we were young and less comfortable with the stuff that has come along since. I remember visiting the town I grew up in after a few years absence and being confused and mildly annoyed that the 261 bus that I used to take to school was now called the 84 and stopped in a different place. It would have been terribly tempting to draw the conclusion: "It is the natural order of things for the 261 to stop outside the newsagent; Ken Livingstone must have changed it for some ulterior motive. He is a commie, after all."

In fact, I recall thinking "I suppose when you are old, everything feels like this: the whole world is confusing and mildly annoying."

It would be crazy to believe think that a bus route is part of the natural order of things. As crazy as thinking that the right number of pennies for there to be in a pound is 240, or being prepared to go to jail rather than weigh your bananas in grams. Or starting a political party to ensure that our unit of currency is never called the Euro. A millennium survey found that the second most hated man in history was Dr Beeching (after Adolf Hitler.)

And there's nothing wicked about liking old things and thinking that change for changes sake it is a bit silly. I like the fact that each generation leaves stuff for the next to look at; and I like the fact that the next generation thinks "Why on earth did the last generation leaves us that?" It reminds us that what everyone agrees is obviously true this year is not what everyone agreed was obviously true last year. Next year something different will be obviously true. Two hundred years ago the people of Bristol all thought that Edward Colston was just the kind of person you ought to commemorate with a statue. Nowadays the people of Bristol all think that a guy who made his living selling tobacco and black people is more a monster than a hero. That strikes me as a very good reason to leave the statue exactly where it is.

The Old Man's fallacy is particularly prevalent among Old Men who write for a living. It is possible to turn "I ordered a cup of coffee but it wasn't very nice" into a sparkling anecdote that makes readers want to come back next week and hear the scintillating tale about how you ordered you ordered you steak medium and got it well-done. Bill Bryson has made something of a career out of that kind of thing. But most of us, if required to transmute life's minor irritations into column inches are tempted to read the general into the particular, the universal into the specific. A proper essay on "Why Joe's Cafe served me a rotten drink" would you require you to talk to Joe, interview Joe's customers and Joe's baristas, to take a tour of Joe's kitchen and learn a little about the fine art of coffee making. Actual work; actual research; actual journalism. Any fool can rattle off  "Why this cup of coffee proves the world is in an awful mess" in an hour and a half.   

*

A recent piece in the Telegraph claimed that the Clangers isn't as good as it used to be. 

The Clangers was a children's animated TV show from 1970. There were 24 episodes of the original series, meticulously hand made with stop-motion animation. More or less everyone agrees that it was the best children's TV programme ever made. Forty years on, the BBC has produced a new series, twice as long as the original. 

NuClangers is about as steeped in nostalgia as a TV show could possibly be. Not a sequel or remake, it's more like a painfully devoted love-letter to the original. It uses old fashioned stop motion animation when the temptation must have been to CGI the thing. The characters are still very obviously knitted puppets, although I am told the internal skeleton is more complicated than in the olden days, so the creatures can strike poses they wouldn't have managed in the original. 

It is most unlikely that anyone at Smallfilms in 1969 said "I know, let's use knitted puppets, because that will look quaint and endearing." I think that knitting was probably just the easiest way of making little pink aliens. TV screens were smaller in those days, so probably hardly anyone saw the stitching. Valerie Singleton didn't tell us to knit a Clanger: she told us to make them out of socks. Mine was made out of an old school uniform sock: grey with silver foil armour. But that’s fine because, in the 1970s, the Clangers were grey. We realized they were knitted at the same time they turned pink: when we got to play remastered DVDs on colour tellies. 

A TV show that was obviously meant for children, but was obviously set on an alien planet seemed fresh and strange in 1970s. It can't possibly feel like that now. The original show was made by basically two people, frame by frame, in a shed, doing whatever seemed to amusing at the time. Modern TV reels of lists of set designers and animators in dozens. Old Clangers existed in a very specific time-slot, namely 5.30 on weekday evenings. We kids were still watching our after-school children’s programmes, but Daddy had just come in from work and was waiting for the early evening news. Then it would be tea time, and then, as Zebedee might have put it, time for bed. The children’s programmes that lived in that space were allowed a knowing, adult irony, because kids and grown-ups were likely to be watching them. That slot simply doesn't exist any more. The natural home of NuClangers is CBBC, which means that it has to appeal directly to kids, which makes it slightly more patronising than it was before, and slightly more moralistic. Or at any rate slightly differently moralistic. The Soup Dragon, explains the narrator carefully, is only sulking because she wanted Small Clanger to say "thank you" for the Soup; Major Clanger means well in building Granny Clanger a knitting machine, but doesn't understand that she positively likes knitting. 

If anything, its slightly too faithful to the original show. A classic Old Clangers story involved some new thing arriving on the Moon, and the Clangers, after some initial misunderstanding, making friends with it. Unusually for a kids show, it had a sort of continuity to it. If Small Clanger plants a music tree in episode 3, then there is still a music tree on the Moon in episode 5. Each episode creates a new status quo. NuClangers is reluctant to disrupt the status quo that was established in the final part of old Clangers. It has to place the Iron Chicken and the Froglets and Cloud and even the Sky Moos in fresh configurations to produce new stories. It does a good job in making up new stories about the friends that the Clangers had already made in the original series, but so far it hasn't introduced any new ones. 

The Daily Telegraph's main complaint was the blinkin' obvious one. NuClangers is narrated by Michael Palin, and Michael Palin is no Oliver Postgate. Oliver Postgate had a voice which could comment on the Universe at one moment (“this is the planet earth; our home; it is a small world, wrapped in clouds”) and on Tiny Clanger's hi-jinks the next (“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea...”) with hardly a modulation in his tone. Stephen Fry said that if he believed in God, then the voice of God would sound like Oliver Postgate. Oliver Postgate is not narrating the new series for one very good reason: he has, er, been dead for seven years. 

Well, I suppose one might possibly say "Clangers without Postgate is like Trek without Nimoy: it's an obviously silly idea, and there is no more to be said." The Telegraph proceeds to say that, because of the lack of his voice, the new series is not as sad as the original, which may, perhaps be true. (The main thing that struck me was that in the old series, space was black, but in the new series, space is blue.)

And so the Old Man's Fallacy kicks in. Fings ain’t what they used to be. The reason for this is that bad people have gone around changing fings for bad motives.

It is (concludes the essay) another example of how children’s TV has become sanitised, just like so much else in children’s lives.

To which the only possible answer is "No it isn't and no it hasn't".

No-one has sanitized anything. But it is possible that in the last 40 years, the world has changed in various small ways.

Accepting and adapting to small changes in your world is very much what Oliver Postage's original Clangers episodes were all about.

Old Men who keep abreast of new TV shows, new comic-books and (especially) new music are universally referred to as "hipsters".

One cannot win, can one?

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