Arr, it be international talk like a pirate today, apparently, arr, and you may lay to that etc etc

P.S

This sort of thing isn't unique to the Nasty Mail, either. 

Theories about what caused last month's outbreak of extreme naughtiness are many and varied: from the usual suspect like Poverty, Unmarried Mothers, Grand Theft Auto, The Secret Elders of Frankfurt and Rap Music to more outre suggesstions like Jamaican Dialect and (my personal favourite) the Introduction of Decimal Currency in 1972. Liz Jones is, as ever, beyond parody:

But the problem started when the likes of Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein and Gap commandeered hip-hop clothing and sold it back to young people. The style became self-perpetuating and, to be honest, it rotted young people’s brains. Look at the footage of the young people rioting in London and Birmingham and so on, and it’s like looking at a commercial for American Apparel. Sloppy clothes lead to sloppy minds. The biggest disservice fashion superbrands have done is to relax a generation, for huge profit, and not equip them for the real world. Just as drawstring trousers never emit the warning sign that you might be getting fat, so sportswear means you will never be smart, disciplined or employable.

But I was rather more creeped out by a piece in the Guardian, yes, the Guardian which interviewed parents and yoof leaders in the ruffer parts of London after Teh Riotz to try to find out What Went Wrong and What Should Be Done About It.` The people who spoke to the Guardian feature writer were all of one voice. The reason that the younger generation had risen up as one a set fire to things was, yes, "discipline".

Parents are fearful about how they chastise their children.....

Stirling wondered whether weakened parental authority might have something to do with it.....

London's mayor said adults and teachers needed to be given back the right to impose authority.....

Stirling....believes parents have become afraid to discipline their own children....

....Teachers are scared to punish children.

Chris (who did not want to give her surname) said she felt under pressure not to discipline her children

People here will call social services if they hear you disciplining your children.

It's all very well trying to be liberal, but parents need to be given back their right to parent.

Who are these people who call social services if you make your child sit on the naughty step for five minutes? What do we suppose would happen if a child told Childline that dad had said "No Simpsons for a week because you poured the pepper over your kid sister's head?" What sound does being banned from youth club or losing your allowance make?

Most politicians are reluctant to say that the majority of their voters are child abusers and therefore take the line that the occasional very light blow is a tool which some responsible parents use responsibly. But these people weren't talking about tools or techniques or parenting styles or light blows. No-one appeared to be saying "It's inconvenient that I am no longer allowed to slap Johnny lightly on the wrist, and have to use Time Out instead". They appeared to take it for granted that "discipline" was synonymous with "hitting" and now that parents were not allowed to hit their children, it followed that they were not allowed to "discipline", or "punish" or "impose authority" or indeed "parent" at all.

Except that, er, it hasn't. Some people think that parental hitting ought to be banned. Some people think that there is a jolly difficult balance to be struck between on the one hand it being an obviously bad thing for private citizens to hit other private citizens and on the the other hand it being a bad thing for the state to interfere in how private citizens order their private lives and anyway, how would  you enforce such. I understand that the NSPCC thinks that you should make the law but not actually enforce it. It would, as practically all polticians say about practically everything "send a  clear signal".


That's a good model of 21st century politics, actually. Don't do anything. Just send signals. We may return to this point.

What fascinates me is how deeply enmeshed people are in the fictional universe where the Political Correctness Brigade has already won; how firmly they believe that and all forms of discipline – along with conkers and bent bananas and indecent seaside postcards and Christmas  – have been prohibited,  even though they quite clearly haven't been.

I don't understand how any of this impacts on Teh Riotz in any case. It's a little far-fetched to suppose that some violent, sub-human feral hoodie, half-crazed by exposure to Grand Theft Auto and American Apparel, who has always existed in a violent gang culture in which black youths, and white youths with black accents, who think of each other as soldiers, and don't know how many pence there are in three-and-six-pence, routinely engage in lethal territorial knife fights, might sit out an orgy of looting because they're afraid that Mum might give them a slap when they get home.


But it's a good deal more convincing than Call-Me-Dave's theory:

"Are you going to come out looting and spreading anarchy on Monday night, innit?" (I have it on good authority that this is really how young people talk.)

"That sounds swell, but you will have to tell the cats that I can't, innit. If I were caught, the beak might keep me in after school on Tuesday and make me write 'I must not engage in sheer criminality' on the blackboard, one thousand times, innit.

"Haven't you heard, innit? The Cultural Marxists have abolished discipline, innit. They wouldn't be allowed to put you in detention until Wednesday night, innit."

"That's, like, way cool, and also wicked and safe, and possibly lush and mint, innit. Let's go and set fire to the bloomin neighbourhood  innit. Pass me that blimey molotov, innit."

Getting the ship confused

A man dies and goes to hell. Satan, after filling in the paperwork, leads him to his cell. It resembles a single room at a Holiday Inn. There is a small bookshelf, consisting of nothing but Barbara Cartland romance novels and Observer Guides to British Birds; an infinite quantity of pot-noodle in the fridge; and a TV which is showing nothing but repeats of One Man and His Dog. "Oh please, no, I'll do anything, show me some mercy" screams the sinner. "Think yourself lucky" says the Devil "This could be heaven for some poor bastard."
                                                             Very Old Joke[1] 



In my last dissertation from the riot-zone, I misquoted Call-Me-Dave as having said:

Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control. Sentences without verbs.

The first bit he really said. The bit at the end was, of course,  my little joke.

Sam asked: "Am I alone in thinking that 70% of that would be a blueprint for utopia?" I think that this is a really interesting question." I apologize in advance for failing to provide a really interesting answer.

I take it that Sam does not think that it would be a Good Thing if all schools were full of vandalism, drug abuse and bullying. I take it that he doesn't even think that it would be a good thing if schools were the kind of environment in which it was impossible for the teacher to actually teach anything or the pupils to actually learn anything.

There have, I suppose, been revolutionaries who think that the whole idea of Literature and History and Science were dreamed up by the Patriarchy in order to keep the workers in their places: that Grammar and Maths are intrinsically Hierarchical and Structured and therefore Repressive. Get rid of schools and books, let the kids go and listen to impulses from vernal woods, and everything will be fine. I don't think that Sam is one of them.

Similarly, I assume that he doesn't think that in the New Jerusalem, there will be widespread murder, rape and child abuse, and that the perpetrators will all get away scott free. Again, there have been those who think that it's the whole idea of "punishment" that creates "crime" and that if we stopped telling people that if they talked in the dinner queue they'd get slapped then they'd mysteriously lose all desire to talk in the dinner queue. Oscar Wilde thought this was the case: so did St Paul, sort of. I don't think this is Sam's point.

And while there have been very, very extreme feminists who are so sure that it's all the fault of men that they've wanted to take men out of the reproductive process altogether (I understand that sisters are doing it in test tubes nowadays) and that even if you absolutely need a man to make a baby you still shouldn't let him anywhere near an actual child, I don't think that Sam or Germain Greer or anyone else thinks that way nowadays.

I imagine that what Sam has in mind is that in Utopia, schools will be nice and interesting and child centred, so teacher will happy to teach and children will be happy to learn and there will be no need to impose learning friendly behaviour by means of rules and sanctions; and that in Utopia, criminals will be well-treated, educated, helped -- isolated from the rest of society as a last resort -- but always for their own and society's good, never with a thought of saying "you did it to us so we'll do it back to you". I think that abolishing fathers is probably one of the 30% of Dave's propositions which he doesn't agree with -- but it might be that he thinks that the idea of fatherhood is bound up with a toxic notion of force and power ("just wait till your father gets home") and that in Utopia, that kind of fatherly role will not exist. Children will have two mothers, one of whom will probably be a male mother.

Sam can tell us if this is the sort of thing he had in mind. But it wasn't the sort of thing which David Cameron had in mind.

At least, I assume it wasn't.

Regular readers [insert joke here] will recall that before the coup, I expressed concern about Mr Cameron's ludicrous poster which asked "Why Not Restore Discipline To Schools". It seemed, I said, to take it for granted that there was a thing called "discipline" which used to exist, which doesn't exist any longer, but which it would be possible to bring back into existence.

Now, that word, "discipline" carries a sliding scale of meanings, along the lines of:

1: Learning in general ("fine art is an academic discipline")

2: Some task which you have set yourself because you think it will do you good ("the discipline of fasting")

3: An orderly environment

4: A highly structured regime in which everyone has to be in a particular place at a particular time and in which clothes, modes of address and bladders are strictly regulated.

5: Punishment

6: Corporal punishment

7: A euphemism used by prostitutes who provide sadomasochistic services.

A relatively sane person might, in fact, believe and be prepared to defend the belief that in order for learning (1) to take place, you absolutely need an orderly environment (3) that order can only be achieved through timetables and ritual courtesies (4) and that such structured regimes can only be brought about with the threat of punishment (5) and that painful punishments are the only kind of punishments that anyone is bothered by (6).

But if you aren't careful, you will find people engaging in the most shameful flip flopping between the different levels of meaning. Some reactionary old soldier who thinks that neat ties, shiny shoes, army cadets and a decent haircut would solve all the worlds problems will defend his belief in discipline (sense 3) on the ground that you can't possibly be against discipline (sense 1). Anyone who has moved in evangelical circles will be familiar with the argument that "hitting children is a good idea because the word discipline comes from the same root as disciple". In fairness, quite a lot of liberals say that people only support discipline (sense 3) because they enjoy discipline (sense 7).

Now, it falls upon Michael Gove, Dave ridiculous education minister, to implement the long-awaited "restoration" of "discipline". This has become very politically topical because Dave thinks that one of the reasons for Teh Riotz was that children and young people nowadays are undisciplined. I wish it was true that there was an ancient Babylonian text which complains that young people do not respect their elders any more. It is certainly true that Chaucer complains about ill-disciplined apprentices. 

As we saw during the election, the measures that are being proposed (by Tony-Lite, I mean, not Chaucer) are laughably trivial. Some schools like to give parents 24 hours notice before keeping their naughty offspring in after school: Her Majesty's Minister For Education thinks that this shouldn't be necessary. (So far as I can tell, this is a policy of particular schools, or possibly a rule laid down by particular education authorities, so it isn't quite clear what the education minister is going to do about it -- is there going to be primary legislation that says that giving 24 hours notice of detentions will henceforward be unconstitutional? Will parliament also make a meta-rule forbidding teachers to permit boys to take their ties off on hot days, or that cutting across on the field on your way back from P.E isn't allowed even if you ask the gym teacher first?) Gove thinks that it ought to be permissible for a teacher to use physical force, say to separate two boys who are having a fight...what, you mean it already is permissible?....er....it ought to be permissible for a teacher to physically separate two boys who are having a fight without having to fill a form in afterwards. In Daily Mail speak, Gove's moderate list of minor rule changes came out as "Tories pledge to end classroom chaos". And of course, the neanderthals who post comment on the Mail's website immediately translated this to and I quote "Bring back the cane. Discipline went out the window when the cane was banned."

It seems to me that use of the term "discipline" is deliberately being used to create a fug in people's minds. It is absolutely true that no teacher has been allowed to strike a child for 30 years. It is possible that a very stupid person might think "Since good behaviour only follows from the threat of punishment; and since physical punishment is the only possible kind of punishment; I know, without needing to look, that there has been only bad behaviour in all schools for the last 30 years." But I don't think the neanderthals have articulated their point of view in so many words. They probably don't actually know so many words. I think that the very fact that we use the same word, "discipline", to refer to "hitting" and "orderly classrooms" means that when someone tells them that  "hitting" (=discipline) has been abolished they hear that "order"(=discipline) and "learning (=discipline) have been abolished as well. Hence Gove's modest suggestions about making the process of expelling a child from school less bureaucratic becomes  "Gove puts an end to classroom chaos". Doubtless there are difficult schools and difficult classes and teachers at their wits end: their always have been. But the generalized, solvable "classroom chaos" is a myth. In fact, it is very nearly a pun.

It is this kind of verbal ambiguity which Cameron seems to be playing on, and which Sam picks up. The suggestion that, as a general rule, we have "crime without punishment" is quite obviously absurd. We currently have about 85,000 people in prison in this country: some of them, at least, must have committed crimes. In the course of his speech, Cameron claimed that young-people-nowadays aren't scared of committing crimes because they think that if if they are caught, they will only get an ASBO, which they don't mind too much. (The whole point of anti-social behaviour orders -- and the reason they were controversial -- was that they were applied to behaviour that was not, in itself, criminal: you could get an ASBO prohibiting you from buying spray paint even though you hadn't actually been caught painting graffiti on walls yet. It might be true that teenagers who'd been looting shops thought that they would only get an ASBO: it's not at all the case that that was really all they'd get.) [2]

When Cameron said "crime without punishment" he could plausibly deny that he meant anything other than "I think that courts are much too lenient with first time offenders". But a lot of his extreme right wing fanboys will hear either: "No-one gets punished nowadays. If you are found guilty of a mass murder or a war crime, you just get a few hours of community service" (people who write to Metro and the Daily Mail really believe that this is true.) Or they will hear "Prison doesn't count as a punishment, because all prisons are like holiday camps. The only real punishment would be execution, torture or hard-labour, and when we secede from Europe and opt out of the Human Rights Act, that's exactly what they will get."

So. Her Majesty's Ministers makes very specific and only mildly controversial statements: "I think that teachers should be able restrain children without having to fill out a form"; "I think that people who commit even moderately bad criminal offences should be sent to jail even if they haven't been in trouble before." But they couch them in very general terms which play into the fantasy world of those who believe in the Broken Britain mythos.They say "I think that it should be easier for teachers to put children in detention" and the Common Sense brigade hears "All schools in England are in a state of primal chaos."

But liberals like Sam hear the very same words and think that what is being described is a socialist Utopia: a world without coercion or violence or arbitrary authority.

Well, doubtless this is coincidence. Clearly, Cameron didn't intend to describe Sam's ideal society. He just described what he saw going on in the country, and happened to couch it in terms which Sam could willfully and amusingly misread as describing a liberal or anarchist Utopia.

Except.

If my reasoning up to this point has been correct, then the lunatic right now operates primarily in a fictitious world in which a fictitious organisation called the Political Correctness Brigade has already taken control (or very nearly) of England. And the fictitious Political Correctness Brigade is simply a front for the Extreme Left. If Cameron believes that the Cultural Marxists are already running the country, is it any wonder that he describes his made-up Broken Britain precisely in terms of an anarchist Utopia?


[1] I also like the one about the man who, as a warning to mend his ways is allowed to see the torments being meted out to history's greatest sinners. Jack the Ripper is being eternally flayed alive by his victims; Henry VIII is having his head cut off over and over again; Hitler is acting as a domestic slave to thousands of Jewish people; and Richard Nixon is making love to Marilyn Monroe. "Nixon seems to have got off pretty lightly" says the man "Idiot" says Satan "That's Marilyn Monroe's punishment." But it wouldn't actually have been relevant to the essay.

[2] This seem to be the kind of thing that @Nick has experienced: because people think -- because Call-Me-David and the Daily Mail has told them so -- that Health and Safety now controls every aspects of their lives, then a petty official has only to say "ooo, it's against Health and Safety" and people are inclined to believe him. In the Olden Days, that same official would have said that the petty inconvenience he wanted to inflict on you as down to union regulation, or merely that it was more than his jobs' worth to do anything else. People's beliefs about health and safety and asbos seem to count for more than any actual law. There is no point in being saying the Birmingham city council never did ban Christmas (they didn't, by the way): the story is what matters.

I wrote this ten years ago

Arthur:  And what happened to the earth?
Ford:  It’s been disintegrated
Arthur:  Has it?
Ford:  Yes. It just boiled away into space.
Arthur: Look, I’m a bit upset about that.
Ford:  Yes, I can understand.

So; Flash and me and Darren and Keith hired a little pleasure boat at Inverness, and spent a week tootling down the Great Glenn, across Loch Ness, Lock Oich and the imaginatively named Loch Lochy.

Flash and I flew from London to Scotland. That meant on one day I traveled on a train, a car, a bus, a plane and a boat.

Scotland is very pretty. There are hills and lakes.

One night, we tied up at mooring point a mile or so from the nearest village. There was no artificial light. We couldn’t take our eyes of the stars (until it got too cold and we went into the boat and drank whiskey and read poems out loud out of a book).  It surprises townies that the night sky has stars in it.

According to the guidebook, you could drown the whole population of the world in Loch Ness, three times over. Somewhere in its murky depths there hides a Monster.

Never mind the scenery, the whisky, or the stars. It’s the Loch Ness Monster that keeps the tourist business going. Souvenir shops offer you soft-toy Nessies (usually sea-serpents) or china ornament Nessies (usually plesiosaurs). Dumnadrochit has got a large fiberglass plesiosaur in front of a mocked up boat, so you can show your friends a photograph of you with the Monster. As you sail through the lock system into Fort Augustus, there’s a topiary of the monster and a little baby monster.

Flash explained that in Scots, you can’t mistake the word “Lock” for the word “Loch” because “Lock” is pronounced “lok” whereas “Loch” is pronounced, er, “clorrk”.

It only takes two people to pull a little boat through a lock, so while Darren and Keith held onto the ropes, me and Flash jumped off, walked into the canal-side pub (the Loch Inn, ho-ho) downed a quick pint, and rejoined them on the other side.

It was September, so the weather wasn’t perfect but we didn’t have any thoroughly washed out days. There’s a snapshot of the three of us looking very drenched by a very disappointing historical monument.  (An ancient well where the dismembered heads of seven people who had been executed in some blood-curdling highland feud were washed before being presented to the clan chief, apparently.)

The worst disaster occurred when we thought it would be a Good Idea to take the boat out into the middle of the lake while Keith was preparing a good healthy English cooked breakfast. The first time a teensy tiny little wave struck us, he poured a – fortunately not very hot pan -- of cooking oil over himself.

The charter company set Fort William as the limit of how far we could take the boat. It was Tuesday. A nice enough medium size town, containing the one good pub we found, name-check the Goose and Gruel. It’s the place you go if you want to climb Ben Nevis. We didn’t. We did visit the Ben Nevis whisky distillery, however. Not a whisky drinker myself, but I forced myself to try the free samples.

We took a taxi back to the marina where we’d left the boat.

“Och, have ye heard the news?” said the driver “Apparently, an aeroplane has crashed into a big hotel in America.”

We only had a radio to communicate with the outside world. But then one would automatically turn to  Radio 4 in a crisis in any case. When we turned on, there were car bombs going off all over America and tens of thousands were dead. Canary Wharf had been evacuated. Things only gradually got back to normal. I am happy to say that I still haven’t seen the footage of the tower collapsing.

I was going to use the word “stunned” to describe our reaction. Perhaps “embarrassedly not sure how to react” would be more honest. Since none of us on had friends or relatives in New York we turned off the radio and carried on with our holiday. There didn’t seem a great deal else to do.

There was an American family we’d passed in a couple of locks, with a star and stripes tied to the back of their boat. We noticed they’d lowered it to half-mast.

Last February, I lost a very close friend in a pointless futile stupid railway accident. That’s left me a bit mixed up over how to mentally process big disasters. I’d been through the experience of seeing a news report of a major accident, saying “tut tut, how terrible” and finding out twelve hours later that there was a real person involved. It would be nice to say “and that made me feel much more Christian sympathy for the horror stories coming out of New York”, but it actually just made me want to switch off. Must then a Christ perish in torment in each age for the sake of those with no imagination?

I think the media actually does very well at bringing minute-by-minute reporting of major events. In the old days, the morning papers were history’s second or third draft: by the time you heard the news, it had been tidied up. Journalists knew the facts before they reported them. Live news creates a weird immediacy, despite its inaccuracy. Fog of war – conflicting reports – “something terrible has happened, we don’t know what the details are yet”—too early to speculate. Real life must be very much like that. 

But after a few hours, it very rapidly reverts to normal; human-interest items about children who have lost parents and arty photos of the fire brigade raising the Stars and Stripes. Would the girl who lost her fiance be any more traumatized if he’d slipped on the steps outside his house and broken his neck? But because he perished publicly, her grief is News.

I know what they were doing and I don’t blame them for it. 6,000 dead is just a number, they want to put a human face on it. But it has the effect of assimilating the shock into an easily digestible narrative:  tragedy as soap opera. At some level, those of us who weren’t directly involved were enjoying it. God help us, we were.

“We are all Americans now,” said one commentator. I was at college in Brighton when the IRA came within a hairsbreadth of assassinating Mrs. Thatcher; one of those rare moments when strangers are allowed to talk to each other, even if it’s only to look down at the paper and say “Tut tut, nasty business.” People stood on the beach and gaped at the wreckage of the Grand Hotel. A man with one of those RAF moustache accents said “You a Tory supporter, then?” and I said “No, but that’s a bit irrelevant, isn’t it?” -- as if my opinion of the Falklands War or the Miners Strike might have any effect on my opinions of the moral wisdom of putting explosive devices in hotel bedrooms.

My opinions on the U.S foreign policy, the middle-east situation, George Bush’s brain-power, globalization and the fact that Starbucks make crap coffee remain precisely where they were on September 10. But that’s a bit irrelevant, isn’t it?

The most moving sound image which Radio 4 piped at us was the Queen’s guards playing the Star Spangled Banner outside Buck House as part of the changing of the guard; and the mainly but not entirely American voices singing the words. The cynic in me knows that “the Queen’s” decision to change the ceremony was really the result of a press adviser who wanted to make sure that she didn’t fumble the ball like she did when Di died. But it was very moving, nonetheless.

We can’t do patriotism; we aren’t allowed. At about this time of year, there is a minor classical music concert in the Albert Hall. Tradition dictates that the second half includes Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance and a silly medley of English Sea Songs, culminating in Rule Britannia. And every year, I mean, every year, without fail, there is a minor controversy about whether these songs are a bit bellicose and jingoistic and it wouldn’t be better to sing “I’d Like To Teach the World To Sing In Perfect Harmony” instead. This year there was even more mumbling. As it happened, the little American conductor with the line in weak jokes replaced Land of Hope and Glory with Ode to Joy but still let the multitudes belt out Jerusalem and everyone went home relatively happy. But one couldn’t help comparing our embarrassed confusion about patriotic traditions with the purity and wholeheartedness of that of the Americans.

The Vicar preached an entirely adequate sermon about Recent Events in the World. He said that it reminded us of the frailty and contingency of human existence; he said it reminded us of the weakness of human endeavor compared to the will of God; he said that if we put our trust in God rather than towers made by men, that, in the long run, even in the face of terrible events, we would be OK: that death needn’t be the final and total evil. He pointed out that in the Psalm, where it says “God is our refuge” the word “refuge” means literally “unassailably strong tower.”

All doubtless very true.

But it struck me that all he had really done was use an “item in the news” as a sermon illustration: rather as if he had drawn an moral point out of England losing the football (don’t set your hearts on human heroes, they may let you down) or, less likely, England winning the football (press on towards the goal however hard it seems.)

And that, one feels, is what a lot of people have been doing: like any big event, it can’t just be a Terrible Thing which happened: it has to be a metaphor of Titanic proportions; onto which we gradually project meanings. Sensible meanings, if we are C of E vicars; mad ones if we are Richard Dawkins or Pat Robertson. There are crazed fundamentalists on all sides. (Tony’s “reorder the world” speech reminded us that it was possible to be a well meaning liberal and a crazed fundamentalist at the same time.)

It’s unlikely that “Why does God allow bad things to happen” was at the forefront of the congregations mind. If we regarded “the problem of evil” as an impediment to Christian belief, it’s unlikely we would have been in church in the first place. The issue that we could have done with guidance on was, I thought, more practical. “What’s the Christian response to evil?  Should we try to forgive the people who did this terrible thing, and encourage our leaders to turn the other cheek? Or should we rather take up arms against Evil, and prepare for a Holy War?  Great Christians have  taken both positions. And if a Just War it is to be should we regard it as a Crusade against Islam, or merely a crusade against a minority of bad people? Or perhaps a police action against one Evil person? But if it is a war against bad people, why these bad people in particular; why not a never-ending theocratic war until a holy world government ushers in the Millennium?”

Answer came there none.

Someone said that reacting to a terrorist is rather like smacking a naughty child. You know that he’s trying deliberately to provoke you, and in reacting, you are in one sense, giving him precisely what he wants. But if you don’t, then he smashes up your house. There’s no doubt that the point of a terrorist attack is to provoke a retaliation, to make the target behave like the wicked oppressor that the terrorist believes him to be. (Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Look at me I’m being oppressed!)  But in one sense, what else do you do?

As a dyed in the wool liberal with dangerously pacifist tendencies; I would like to hear a good deal less about good wars, about how we are going to defeat the forces of evil and make the world a good and happy place and a great deal more about straightforward retaliation. Swift retaliatory justice, annihilating the perpetrator of the atrocity, in so far as we know who he is, and indeed where, taking out as many civilians and tacit supporters as happen to be in the way – nuke the whole country if you like, I don’t mind. It may not be an ideal solution, but it seems to be morally straightforward, in a brutal, Old Testament way. I can understand the morality of “If you kill our citizens, we will kill you”. It has limits. A blood-letting , some mourning, and we get back to normal. But a general war against terrorism – or, in some views, against evil in general – seems too open ended. It could go on forever. Millions could die. And it’s a blank check to give power to our rulers. Of course we aren’t going to be too critical of them during a crisis; but don’t let it go to their heads, otherwise the crisis could mysteriously drag on for ever and ever, with more and more of our liberties being eroded along the way.

And so everything gets back to normal; my holiday is over; there are reports of bombings on the news and some vague mutterings about anthrax in the stock exchange. It’s not even very interesting any more. Just some dead people in a foreign country; a subject to write about; slag off the clergy, maybe a parenthesis or two about Tony.

It’s been a standing joke in this column for years that half the readers are a mysterious alien race called “Americans”. I drop in friendly little asides about how “my readers” won’t pick up on the irony or understand my references to English literature. Assuming that they exist it would have been nice if I’d been able to think of something better to say to my Americans readers beyond “sorry”. Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

You could drown the whole population of the world in Loch Ness, three times over. Somewhere in its murky depths there hides a Monster.