Sentamu Nails It

This prolonged Yorkist sojourn has few perks. Still slaving away in penitential mode on this 'training the clergy' malarkey. Nearly done - and nearly in truth done in too.

There is though one perfect blessing, which is proximity to the mighty spirit and voice of the local Arch.

He one John Sentamu, famously bereft of dog-collar pending the binning of that great monster Mugabe.

A prayer he has written for Madeleine. No better words than these could there be:

"Keep her safe and take away her fear and anxiety. May your holy angels guard and protect her. We pray that she may be reunited with those who love her. Give hope to all her loved ones and hear our cry for her safe return."

Hear our cry indeed, for her and for all children who suffer today.

One Year, Another Day...

...Some months back I watched a documentary on the mass trade in Chinese children - boys kidnapped to be the one male heir, and now girls to mate in time with the boys.

A mother sat weeping, crying out in her pain: "Each day I wonder where he is, what he is doing, if he well. When it rains is there someone to keep him dry? If he weeps does someone wipe his tears? I should be doing this, but if I cannot I can only pray that someone is."

A year's anniversary of the abduction of Madeleine McCann and we too pray that her life is nourished and nurtured, not cruel and scared. The imaginings of that life must always be with Kate and Gerry.

One year of loss, another day of wondering and hoping and praying.

Wherever she is, may - as He most assuredly does - the Lord hold her in the palm of his hand, keep her safe from harm. One day to return her.

Learning Lessons...

Wales, it seems, is to "learn lessons" from the conviction of these two modern day witches - see below - for manslaughter.

Pray tell what would these be? That our society is doomed and we all with it?

That - rather I am sure - a restructuring of the procedures for child protection will be whipped up as a substitute for any real action?

That the Inquisition was not so very far off in prescribing burning at the stake for witchcraft?

Do I sense despair and doom-mongering here in the fragrant Wolds? God, you betcha I do and the sooner we stop being so immune to such horrors the better.

Meltdown...

A judge today has spoken of his deep concerns that British families are in meltdown, a threat he sees as far more serious than global warming. (The Government, naturally, has responded with a flurry of specious statistics that claim to prove, as ever, the MacMillan Myth 'We've Never Had It So Good'.)

Meanwhile, another judge - this time sitting in a Court rather than giving a public speech - is presiding over a case in which a mother and a half-sister are accused of leaving the sixteen year old daughter of the former to die of an overdose of heroin, preferring rather to watch something called 'Emmerdale' on the television than to call for an ambulance.

The girl - born to an addictive 'family' - herself hooked on heroin at fourteen - had - the prosecution alleges - been assisted by the two women to 'score' drugs during that fatal day and who were, therefore, reluctant to call for help lest their their complicit crime be revealed.

So noticing the child was showing signs of an overdose - 'blue lips' a bit of a giveaway - they put her to bed 'in the recovery position' before popping downstairs to watch their soaps. (I imagine they learned that procedure on some 'Hug A Druggie' training course funded by the NHS - i.e. you and me.)

This is what we hear. We also hear of the mother who giggles during police interviews when her son is accused - then later convicted - of kicking a young woman to death simply because she was a Goth in her dress and demeanour.

Meltdown? Total obliteration of the entire human race cannot come too soon. I speak as a loving Christian.

"Save the planet. Put an end to humanity."

There is a logic. A fearful logic.

Life, The Universe And Everything...

....not a Holy Week homily - that yet to be carefully scripted for delivery at the Vigil of course - but a reflection on a dear friend now so early dead. (In Heaven too I am sure, though he would have scorned the very existence of the place whilst on Earth.)

DNA - no not that either as life's meaning, but the man's name.

Douglas Noel Adams. You'll know him, though not perhaps the Noel bit. He of 'THHGTTG' - and if I have to spell that one out you'll not be knowing of him and the point of the tale would be lost, so I shan't.

Anyway, cutting to the chase as ever one does, there was - now some thirty years ago God spare us from remembering how long ago - the matter of the meaning of 'LTU&E', that being the Ultimate Question put to Deep Thought, a computer of gargantuan scope that took some several millions of years to come up with the question's answer: '42'

Good answer, if a bit tricky to fathom - as many of the best answers are. So still comes the secondary question - what on Earth was DNA up to? Forty-frigging-two! Some crazed, teasing, madcap genius playing with our sensitivities these thirty years? In many ways yes.

The source of many a learned paper on the matter, with explanations quite as weird and wonderful as the answer itself. Many based on warped misuse of the near-science of numerology: codes within codes revealing a certain truth all dependent on symbolism and affinity. (Quite fun in its way - dear Saint Augustine loved it - but generally that way obsessive compulsive madness lies.)

All wrong in any case of course. Lend or bend - according to taste - an ear, I shall expound all.

DNA and I roomed together at School. When I say 'roomed' I mean rather that we were but two among four hundred or more boyish souls condemned by cruel fate - and harsher parenting - to dwell in the deep discomfort of a boarding school.

Among the many aches and pains of such a life was the very industrial scale of the thing. Nothing was ever really personal, all was en masse from bathing facilities to dormitories to dining halls.

Eating would indeed be at a long double-sided table seating twenty or so pupils, each grabbing what they could from the vast troughs of food 'ere a greedy neighbour had scoffed the last remaining pie.

In such circs. a boy's fantasy would be dining on a totally more domestic scale. As indeed boy turned to youth, hormone infested and deeply charged with - largely - unrequited sexual longings, the perfect ideal would be the a dinner date with a lascivious female as prelude to whatever the virginal youth - as such he was - could most fervently imagine.

From thus came forth the great - and greatly misunderstood - answer to life the universe and everything. Deep Thought - taking on the mantle of its author - did not give a numerical answer, as generally taken, but a verbal. Being, however, a computer not entirely versed in the full idiom of English the words were not uttered entirely as they ought.

Deep Thought thus, in answer to the great mystery of life, spoke of "For tea two" - that wonderful intimate moment of a pair of persons alone with their scones and their Darjeeling - instead of the intended or more correct "Tea for two".

That was the earthly paradise the boarding school boy had yearned for, and the one he wished pronounced. An intimate meal - nothing more, but most certain nothing less.

There is in fact, within the text, a 'second phase' (as these rugger types would say) meaning not to be overlooked.

For the people who heard Deep Thought utter the Great Answer assumed that a computer must give a numerical answer, because computers were but vast 'number crunchers' after all. '42' might be odd and a bit off, but at least it was a logical starting point, they reckoned (applying further the numerical idiom).

And thus from this dual misunderstanding, based on mutual attempt to see the world from the point of view of the other, came complete confusion.

Or chaos.

Which is where DNA really did intend to leave his Universe.

But I do hope - indeed I know - that the man has finally found his proper ordering of the finite world within his now infinite sphere.

Might not be the making of an Easter homily. But then again it might.

Capering Curates....

Charlie the Curate is a fine fellow, much welcomed around these parts. The parishioners adore him, as well they might being all chubby-cheeked and cheerful and earnest and all. (They like their curates fresh. Somewhat in the manner of Count Dracula sometimes I fear - young blood on which to feast and be forever young.)

I too rather approve of the cove. Keeps me on my toes with a veritable - if occasionally mildly irritating - encyclopaedic knowledge of all things scriptural and eccesial. He never means it of course, but oft-times it's a bit like one of those entertaining yet irksome chappies in public houses who can perform the most astonishing of card tricks, also never failing to chip in with the right answer when there's a pub quiz question the team simply cannot fathom. Smart or what, in a kind of too-good-to-be-true sort of way.

Quote him any line - half-line, word even it sometimes seems - from the Good Book and he'll be back at you with the next Chapter and a Half before you can say "Fine Charlie. Take your point. Now where's that bottle of malt gone?"

Not that there is anything of the showman about the fellow, nor even - far worse - the dour text-book puritan ever on the lookout - and all too swift to shout it out loud - for a soul in peril of perdition for not having the right party line about a particular Biblical matter of God and salvation.

For all that though Charlie can have - as these young chappies must in truth - an eagerness for truth that can set the teeth a-grinding. He's done it before - no doubt will do it again - and has once more done it today.

Comes a story - perhaps no more than that - from you-know-where of a Bishop (male) and a close junior cleric (female) who may - or who may not, though don't put your mortgage on it - have been indulging in "Ugandan discussions" to the detriment of their respective marriages and the shame of the diocese.

Now Charlie may well have a point that no Bishop worth his reputation for sanctity or his stipend should be allowing any such person to be his 'PA', let alone one who is female, young and tolerably sprightly by view of all the many photographs of the woman now filling the Internet. (The one of her gazing with seemingly infinite adoration up at the man from her desk was not a wise move.)

Be all of that as it may, and howsoever it all pans out, I am not best pleased to have had to received six of the hottest telephone calls this late morning from church folk voicing the strongest objections to my Curate's harsh words on the subject, uttered - in a moment of madness it must be - at Mattins of the day.

Had he merely rushed to judgement, as these young sorts will do, I could have let that pass. Not entirely in the loving spirit of the Lord I would have advised him, yet not condemned the man the more for having fallen short in the mercy of God department.

But does he do that alone? No, sadly not. He cannot merely content himself with some pertinent if prejudicial ranting. He has to take the angle that a man in a position of power should not be dabbling in any improper exercise of that power over a subordinate.

Don't get me wrong. Although such a notion is, for me, too far into the deathly realm of sexual politics from which fell domain no person may return unscathed, I would not refute Charlie's central notion that men in power should learn to keep their hands to themselves. No Sir - or Madam - me.

Charlie's fault lies not in the subject itself - howsoever tangential to the main matter of Peace on Earth and all that - as in the chosen expression of his thinking. For Charlie, you must understand, came forth from the mournful land of 'meejah' to become the burgeoning cleric he is. And it is from that place his metaphor arose to the consternation of the Mattins masses.

It goes thus I am told: "Are we not minded when we hear of this possible great scandal of that sad motto from the world of television - the PA made the tea and the Producer made the PA?"

Well, no they were not so minded of course! Not one of them knows a jot or a tittle about the dark world of television and who does what to whom for what indulgent, sensual purpose. This is The Wolds and not the White City, or wheresoever television is made these days.

Charlie's perky remark might have played well among people for whom such matters are daily food and drink. Out here though they have caused a right stink, as well they might.

Silly boy - as Captain Mainwairing would have said!

Lenten Fare Too...

...oddly enough, having driven through the desperate winds of last night to spend a restful day en famille one finds oneself tonight completely sans same famille.

H and her sister - the latter only a direct descendant of Count Vlad I swear - having taken their mutual mother for a slap-up pre-Mother's Day outing and meal ("We're driving mum into the country for the day." "And bringing her back too?" "Oh so funny.") E and I could have been spending a jolly parent-bonds-with-child evening together, the latter pouring out the ten-year matured malt for the former in a dedicated if sympathetic manner whilst the thus soothed parent pours forth the equally distilled wisdom of even greater age.

But 'tis not to be, for E is off with her cronies to celebrate her seventeenth - no less - birthday, leaving Papa with but a single malt taken in solitude and some certain sad reflections on the rapid passing of the years. Gone forever the jellies and the ice-creams for twenty of one's best nursery chums, to be replaced by malibus and cokes all round.

One says 'cronies' though in truth one must add that a first and seemingly quite special 'boyfriend' is among that number of the birthday gang. Seems a pleasant enough sort of young cove. Clearly utterly smitten by E - which is reasonable one has to say - and is known for undertaking Duke of Edinburgh Awards rather than partaking in crack cocaine - which these days has to be a massive bonus.

Nonetheless the morphing from central male figure in a daughter's life into that of but a bit-part player (still handy for the wads of cash needed to maintain a teenager in the life to which she wishes to become accustomed, but no longer needed for the drives to town as T 'has wheels' - as they say) takes more swallowing than the third malt that somehow, by God's good grace, has found its way into my glass.

Thank goodness Curate Charlie is taking First Mass of Sunday this evening.

Lenten Fare...

Have you missed me?

Of course you have! A Lenten posting to the frozen North - a fine Minster city you'll immediately guess - robs me of Internet access during the week. Much good no doubt comes of this abstinence, not least as it was not on the self-selected list of not-to-dos this fasting season.

Dear Robin would always say that it was the unexpected - unwished for - trial that would put one to the test and not the "I'll do without the malt for a spell. Save some money, shed a bit of weight and lose the morning hangover" type of essentially selfish approach.

I'm not actually accusing the Bearded Bard of taking his revenge for some overheard remarks of mine concerning the central idiocy of the man, by sending me North to cover some 'much needed' (his words and no one else's!) administrative function for the duration. But if ripping a man away from his post and place in order to complete an audit of clerical equalities training needs for the coming decade is his idea of a 'vital role', then it is not mine!

There is some blessing in leaving the dear Curate in charge of said Woldean post and place at present, for it is not the least of the irritants of the job, as lived where one is, that one has to endure the perennial 'Grumpier Than Thou' faces of the penitential parishioners, too many of whom seem to see Lenten observance as nothing but an Olympic event: faster (more fasting than her), higher (more holy than him) and stronger (more rank from less personal hygiene).

I admit that I too have had my days in youth, when the endurance angle of Lent was to the fore; when thoughts of the early desert Fathers - saints on stilts some of them truly - atop their stylites and seeming to exist on nothing but fresh air and piety - did capture the imagination of the burgeoning cleric.

One has though - and not over-setting the significance of commitment to self-denial seen through to an end or rather to a purpose - largely let slip this 'No pain no gain' view of pre-Easter training of the soul.

'Tis even about the only occasion on which one has welcomed a change to the Liturgy. The old 'Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return' for Ash Wednesday has been replaced with the more positive spin 'Repent and believe in the Gospel'.

Yes indeed, the motif of dust was apt for the day, but one can become a bit too fixated on the bitter gloom of death - a form of self-indulgence really and no more - and not enough minded of the truly awful - as in awe-inspiring - glory of the Easter to come.

What was it Saint Paul said when asked by one of his numerous correspondents what was one to do whilst waiting on the Lord? "Rejoice and be glad" was his simple, startling and wonderful reply.

So on with the Lenten 'glad rags'. Let sinners all not mourn their shame by sanctimonious show of sadness, but let their delight shine forth rather in the great redemptive feast hoving into view.

"I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles"....

...nothing to do with West Ham football team, but some wretched television advertisement - all right, possibly the best as well as the worst ever - that has had H in stitches tonight.

Cue some impossibly handsome, freshly showered and naked-but-for-a-towel kind of cove sliding so easily towards the camera, explaining how some sort of chocolate confectionery has to be best enjoyed at a certain air temperature in order that the bubbles therein can release the true flavour of the sweet.

Cue then two unseen musing females - voiceovers I believe they are known in the trade - the one who remarks "So that's what the bubbles are there for!", to which the other responds "Sorry, was he speaking?"

Oh how we laughed! Well, H did anyways leaving me feeling so very mid-aged.

Death On The Railway...

One heard yesterday the desperate news of a man crushed to death by a train. The railway station is local, the man not known to us here.

We do not know, but we heard it said that he was in his fifties and that he jumped - not fell or was pushed.

Why do I immediately picture someone so bereft of hope at the impending collapse of all he has worked for and dreamt of - the result of impending financial ruin - that only death could end the torment?

It may not be thus - and God save his soul and protect his family - but I fear it may be so.

We have had, in our Wolds, the shotgun farmers and we have had the starving widows, but now too it seems we are just as likely to have the bankrupt bankers. Black bin-liners to clear the desk; not the anticipated, expected annual bonus.

Do I grieve for such souls as much I would the others? Yes, without any shadow of a doubt I do.

My greatest dread has ever been death by mechanical crushing. It is my certain belief that this dread came about because when but a child of less than seven years I was nearly run-down by a car reversing out of its driveway.

Mother was following as I rode my tricycle along the pavements towards the shops. We were off to buy food for Father's tea. (Well, perhaps we weren't. Maybe we were doing anything you might care to imagine. But what we were doing was totally ordinary and safe to the child I then was.)

There was a low brick wall to my left. The driver of the car would not have seen me and my tricycle coming. He passed slowly backwards just as I reached his driveway, trapping me under his rear wheel. Mother - people - screamed as they saw what was happening and could happen. The driver heard and stopped. I lived. I might not have done.

That then, from that day, has been my abiding fear. An impersonal machine grinding my soft flesh. Our - and he is our - man on the railway line did die that way, split and sundered in a second. From life to death in a moment of agony.

God save us all from such an end. For whatever reason. For whatever purpose took him there. Good Lord preserve us.

A Regular Lent...

...do you recall that preamble to the Easter liturgy that goes more or less thus: "We now having faithfully completed our Lenten observances...etc, etc"?

I do so always love that line gazing out, as one does, over the sea of faithful faces gathered in whilst they collectively wince at the painful reflection on all the things they so earnestly promised, strove or intended to do - or not - as signs and portents of preparation and reparation, yet now acknowledging to themselves that to have been so much straw in the wind.

Of course, had any of the flock the foresight or gall to glance my way at that moment they would note the most solemn of wincing as I - ever thus - can in no way pretend or aver that I have stuck one iota to the fast.

Just the one iota - if such a thing can be singular - perhaps, and that in being so, so sorry for having taken one's hand from the Gospel plough as ever one did.

Lent, of course, is not a marathon endurance race of self-restraint or denial. There are no heroic garlands for managing a bare forty days withot a drink or a raised temper.

This we know, but is it not a mark of the feeble soul who cannot abstain from meat or drink or whatever a mere month and a bit? All right, a tee-total vegetarian is not the sort of clerical image I would wish to push on the world, yet such was my intent this year. No beef, no beer. Seemed simple enough at the time. But 'twas never thus.

Three things comfort me here. Our beloved Saint Peter for starters, keeper of the keys and so forth, was the most abject exemplar of failure to sustain in times of trial: "Me know the Lord? Get out of it!"

Then there is the remembrance of one Lenten time when coffee was forsaken utterly. Did I turn to God in my time of temptation? Did I heck. All I could think of was that first caffeine hit after the Vigil. It was the only - the only - thing on my mind the entire season. Not entirely helpful to anyone or for anything.

Finally, blessed above all, was dear Robin - late Prior of Q - who once confided that he always took a bite of chocolate on Good Friday of all days to remind himself what a hopeless soul he was.

But he wasn't of course. He was a veritable saint. Patron saint of Lent in my book and a regular guy.

Bless You!

...odd the things one comes across.

This from a useful tome on the practical application of science:

It seems that some time past an experimental anti-depressant drug was noted as having an unexpected impact on the women on whom it was being tested.

For when the women sneezed the drug induced an orgasm! (Quite a find you might argue, and who am I to disagree indeed?)

Being diligent researchers of course the boffins were concerned about these 'side-effects', so one of them asked "What do you take for this syndrome then?"

"Pepper" said the woman!

Bless her!

Begone Bearded Bard....

...What a loon! What on earth possessed the Bearded Bard to be so inept as to assume he could, as head of the Anglican Church, stand up before any congregation - never mind it were an 'intellectual gathering' (one reaches for one's pistol naturally at the very name of the thing) - and say anything quite so daft as that Sharia Law was a) a good thing or b) that we ought to be having it here.

'Holy Fool' does not do justice to the man. He is too plain daft to be the sanctified other. Let him be some unauthorised scholar, labouring away safely in some quiet college, if he wants to come out with such nonsense. But as the Head Boyo of what's left of C of E he had no right to be putting all us underling clerics in this ridiculous position of having to run around after him trying to explain - well God knows what he was saying to be truthful.

As for putting up the poor old Bish of Southwark to bleat further nonsense about the writ of British law being just an 'umbrella' under which all other religious laws can shelter, I simply shudder.

How can he have not foreseen the damage his words would have on relations between British Muslims and others of different or of no faiths? What kind of dream world does he inhabit?

He must go and soon is not swift enough.

Harry Gregg's One Life...

...Well more than one really. Quite a few actually. 'The World's Best Goalkeeper' for starters.

'The Hero of Munich' too. Though not according to the man himself. You would perhaps have heard Harry speak last night in personal memory at the fiftieth anniversary of that dreadful aeroplane crash, which killed half a team of the most promising footballers of their day and many of the journalists who followed them in their pursuit of glory and triumphs.

It was indeed an era of 'jumpers for goalposts', a time when promotional photographs would show the boys practising their skills and grinning for the camera, not in some mighty stadium - or on a Brazilian beach - but on waste-ground behind the houses of the men who would pour out of a hard week's work at Trafford Park to rejoice in the artistry of the players of Old Trafford across the way. (That was the message to the team from Matt Busby - show respect for the workers. And they did.)

But when Harry Gregg dismisses claims that he was a hero for going back into the aircraft to saves lives when others were fleeing - and it was the choosing of the risk that makes him brave - it is not the stern, generational self-deprecating sentiment he reveals, but the tormented, unending agony of the guilty survivor.

He lives and they died. Them he could not save and Harry's pain is that he believes he needs to be forgiven by them for this. Forty years he stayed away from the the families of the men who died, because he could not bear to look them in the eye.

Ten years back, however, Harry was persuaded to attend a fortieth remembrance service with those families. And they thanked and praised and loved him for what he had done, not spurned him for what he had not. It was some great relief from a heavy burden.

If you do not understand the guilt of a survivor, then count yourself very fortunate for only they who live with this pain can comprehend its strength and power.

I've had it seven years. I'm not sure I can wait another thirty or more to be forgiven, but then perhaps Harry's one life gives hope for mine.

Thank you then Harry Gibb for living a part of my life as well as the many of your own.

Saint Cuthbert - Fat or Thin?

...Possibly not the first question you'd ask yourself when considering Saint Cuthbert: was he a fat or a thin monk?

Granted, many may not pass any a moment giving reflective consideration to the fellow. Even a 'Who he?' remark might be heard among you. Sad that really, as the life of this early Christian British - we'll address that point of his Britishness in a moment - hero is a rich and interesting mixture of the scholar, the monk, the cleric, the soldier too, the hermit and the peace maker.

British? Irish many say, and indeed Cuthbert's allegiance to the Celtic rite - an adherence he renounced in obedience to the Church and his monastic vows - may indicate a homeland. Scots perhaps, born close to Melrose Abbey where his monastic life commenced.

It is not though either Cuthbert's nationality or even all he was as a temporal and spiritual leader that compels my attention tonight. Was he a fattie or was he not I ask?

And why so? This so...

Go to the Holy Island of Lindesfarne, as I have done once more today, where Cuthbert was Prior - when he wasn't busy being hermit then Bishop then back to hermit once more - and you will see a tall, lean modern statue of the man gazing south across the Priory lawn towards his monastic Church then on towards Farne Islands.

Well could you understand the sculptor's thinking here: stern life-long fasting not the diet to build a big fellow. Ascetic by habit and conviction, one can't really picture Cuthbert tucking into the massive monastic meals that some Abbeys did and do enjoy.

Convincing though the portraiture, my diffuculty with this image is that I know a real live monastic Cuthbert who is neither tall nor lean in the slightest. Doubtless - indeed so - a man of deep spirituality, committed to the cause etc., my Cuthbert is nonetheless a jolly round fellow. Always has been and not, over time, losing girth far from it.

So say 'Cuthbert' to me and I picture not this awful lean - gaunt almost - figure that sits on Lindesfarne lawn. But was the sculptor right? I suspect he might have been more lifelike in his presumption than I. For I noted today for the first time, just how narrow and tight the residual spiral staircases are at Lindesfarne.

The night stairs from dormitory to choir are so narrow a couple of pencils would have problems passing each other. The day stairs rather slightly wider, though not by much, and granted that Prior Cuthbert would have had his own quarters apart from the rank and file, that not withstanding the whole tone of the place reeks of 'slim or stuck'.

Really. No Friar Tuck could fit, literally, into Lindesfarne. Nor indeed would my modern Cuthbert.

As we then begin our season of liturgical fasting (I hate 'Slimming For Jesus', but you can see the joke I hope), I must aspire more to the Cuthbert of ancient tradition than of modern actuality.

His Father's Library...

Christ has given us to understand that there are many rooms in His Father's House. This is splendid news of course as it gives hope for us all. Somewhere there will be an allotted space - howsoever tiny or peculiar - for each and everyone, if only we would choose to take up residence therein.

A veritable heavenly Gormenghast no less, peopled with some utterly bizarre coves no doubt, each pottering about in their unique and particular manner. I do rather love that notion, it is so wonderfully inclusive. Heaven will have its standard saints of renown and proper fame, but also there will be room given to the so many who never quite understood their purpose on earth or ever appreciated that their quirks and oddities added to the necessary theme of redemptive humanity.

I would aspire no more - and no less - to be one of these latter sorts. It's a goodly and a Godly intent. And should it so pass that I find, in time - or rather perhaps out of time and into eternity - that a room in that mansion is mine, I do so jolly hope it can be the Library.

For there must be a Library in that mansion mustn't there? None would be complete without it. Some may wish for the billiard room or the kitchen garden in which to feel at ease, but for me the Library is the thing.

An eternity in which to read could be for some a hellish prospect one owns. But when I consider the volumes I simply must either return to or to try anew, I simply find there cannot be sufficient time in this mortal life to do it all and that Heaven must supply the gap.

To put it thus. In just some twenty hours or so it has struck me that I cannot rest until I have once more completed 'War and Peace', taken a revisit to 'Moby Dick', been nostalgic about a thirty year old yet intensely relevant dissertation on the nature of literary fiction titled 'The World and the Book', absorbed the entire output of Thomas Mann and not just 'The Magic Mountain', taken at least a dip once more into Albert Camus not to mention finally reread Sartre's 'Roads to Freedom' trilogy, compared Herodotus to Thucydides again, given Dante one more go, not failed to appreciate George Eliot as one did as a callow youth, spent a happy month in the company of Eliot, T. S., remembered what it was like to be sixteen and enthralled by Robbe-Grillet, suffered with dear mad William Blake and pondered in the serious company of Tennyson.........there is hardly an end, and all this is just what one would wish to achieve before the weekend were out.

You can see the difficulty. Quarts into pint pots do not ye go. There is the day job to consider, yet to mention family commitments and so forth.

Time simply does not permit it all. Only eternity is sufficient for the purpose.

"Gotta Pick A Suitcase Or Two...

...We'll have noted the not unusual tale of hordes of Eastern European folk being recently nicked for offences of theft in London town. Quite Fagin-esque sending young children out to pick the odd pocket or, more in the modern mode, mug some poor punter who has just squeezed his last fifty out of a cash machine.

Not terribly tasteful all round, but as one says not entirely without precedent.

But a tale of thieving from Sweden that you may not have spotted has me in giggles.

The plot is thus. Buy a ticket for a long-haul bus trip. Queue with the other passengers to load your unassuming looking suitcase into the hold. Enjoy the journey then walk off with same suitcase, but one now full of stolen goodies.

How then is it done, this almost magic trick? Simple. Inside your own suitcase you hide a dwarf - a thieving dwarf not just any sort of small fellow. Once bus in under way, your chap emerges from hiding, rifles through the other bags and baggage for any valuables he can find, then zips himself back up inside your own suitcase near journey's end with the loot.

Presumably there must some risk that the poor thieving dwarf will be stuck at the bottom of a whole heap of cases, not be able to move or hardly to breathe. Perhaps one legs it into the bus station at the very last minute to avoid just such a tragedy.

Clever, darn clever all round. Except clearly they've now been rumbled. Not sure how, the report did not tell. Perhaps as ever sin will out. Bit like thieving dwarfs then.

Gawd Bless Yer Ma'am...

A royalist by ardent persuasion and very nearly a Cockney by accident of birth, you'll not find me among any lining up - and there are such sad souls - to cast aspersions on Her Majesty the Queen, whom God preserve long enough to save us all from the machinations of her eldest son as monarch!

It is, of course, respect for the post than for the person that drives one primarily. If Churchill averred that a democracy was the worst of all possible political options apart from all the rest, what he really meant was a democracy under a constitutional monarch being so far the better than presidential rule as per France or America or anywhere.

One does though have enormous personal affection for the person of the Queen. The years of duty and so forth. But also for the very occasionally revealed wit of the woman. Not too many bon mots have escaped the inner sanctum over time, but one came up the other night on the television that had me purring.

Some programme or other about - I forget precisely - the arts or culture or somesuch, had a smartish looking chappy moaning about the lack of public taste in modern England. Well, you and me both ordinarily I would agree. But in his case one could tell that by 'taste' he meant something terribly fashionable, a la mode, and accessible only to those of desperately refined minds. (If one says, at this point, that he came over as terribly 'precious', one does not by that mean in any way valuable!)

So, it seems this chap had once nerved himself to ask of Her Majesty at some 'cultural event' what were her views on taste qua taste? A rather impolite question on the whole and one clearly intended to land her in it.

But rising triumphant to the occasion as ever she might, it appears that Her Majesty merely - wisely and softly - replied "I am not sure it really helps."

Marvellous, simply bloody marvellous! Gawd Bless Yer Ma'am!

Rosemary Macdonald - A Tribute...

...You will have noticed, no doubt, that in response to H's modest proposal the other day for a 'Fat Tax' to cure the nation of its habitual obesity, the Government has rushed out its own silly idea instead to reward lardies who lose weight.

A ridiculous and a preposterous notion you'll agree. Why on earth should good money be spent to reward people for failing to maintain dietary control in the first place?

What? Fifty quid to shed a stone, then a further fifty when you put it back on and lose it once more! I think not!

But, they argue, companies will benefit from a fitter workforce; conveniently overlooking the fact that most fatties are not workers. (There aren't indeed many office couches on which potatoes can lounge, you'll have spotted. Apart that is from in the Directors' suite, but that's a different matter altogether!)

And who would pay for such a nonsensical scheme? Need we ask!

You can imagine the ire and sharp gritting of teeth that greeted this latest Government nonsense in the Palladas household as we munched on a dry biscuit for tea!

Pens were firmly grasped to send off a cannon of rebuke to the appropriate national organ, when sadly one was deflected from the purpose by a different Canon altogether. Canon Derek no less a personage - though no more - of the Cathedral 'phoning to ask if we were interested in hosting an ecumenical choir from Bulgaria the week following.

Normally you would have found me charitably disposed to take on his off-casts - clearly the Cathedral didn't want them, so send them out to the hapless parishes to smile and sing was the note of the call - but being in such pestilential mood I could only respond to his reasonable, if devious, request, by enquiring if any of the choir weighed more than ten stone as my chancel steps were a bit wonky at present.

From the ensuing brief silence at the other end of the telephone it was clear that dear - and he is - Derek was wrestling with the startling possibility that a diocesan cleric of his keeping had gone suddenly, barkingly and irrecoverably mad. A difficult thought for a quiet Thursday of course.

Resisting clearly the challenge of questioning my sanity, Derek merely soothingly replied that he would take that for a 'no' and would see if the Rev. 'Simple' Simon down the road fancied some folk hymns in a language none would comprehend.

That done and dusted though, my attention had been sufficiently deflected not to sound off to the Telegraph on the subject of pain and not gain for fatties.

Well, hence today my tribute and thanks to Rosemary Macdonald, a simply splendid woman of Suffolk, who wrote on behalf of myself and millions of rational like-minded coves the very point that I would have made had I made it to make it. Viz., fat people should not be rewarded but should be punished instead.

Blessed female. Even used the very phrase 'Fat Tax' that we had but coined, H and I, the other evening.

Clearly then a groundswell here, a mood and a tide to catch: "What do we want?" "More fat tax!" "When do we want it?" "Now!"

Fat Tax - A Modest Proposal...

...you may have heard one of Brown's hirelings on the wireless today ranting about the Government's intention to pass yet more new legislation, this time to force food producers to adopt a single system of coding their goods for fat and sugar content etc. (All cheese will necessarily have to be 'red' coded it seems.)

This, we are told, is necessary in order to tackle the rampant 'obesity crisis' that, again we are told, is threatening to overwhelm us as a nation.

I, of course, will have none of that. People know good food when they see it and if they have not the sense or will to choose to buy and consume reasonable portions of said goodly, God-given, food then let them grow 'til they burst. (Much as that wretched toad Henry VIIIth did.)

Also I - as we all are - am wretchedly fed-up with a Government that thinks the answer to any social ill is more 'command and control' legislation. (We have, thank you, the Ten Commandments of 'Thou shalt not' and that is enough for any man or nation, had we but the wit to live by them.)

It is but an oppressive, dull, lazy and ineffective way to go, and I am dismayed - if I can be bothered to be so cross - that yet again this is the best they can come up with.

H and I were discussing the matter just now. I in usual Jeremiad mode of gloom and doom, she more alert to positive alternatives.

"A fat tax," she said. "That is what we need. A tax on fat people. That would stop them eating."

And how right and logical she is. Being fat is but a personal matter of choice and taste - or rather perhaps lack of the latter. But if there is a social cost to their bulk because we must have more fuel in our aeroplanes, larger beds in our hospitals, oodles more cash to be spent on diabetic clinics, etc., etc., then let the lardies pay the price.

Need a wider, stronger seat on the 'bus because your belly hangs over your feet? Then stick your fat paw into your bulging trouser pocket and bring forth the means to pay for it. Need more nursing care because you're too bulky to wipe your own arse when in hospital, then stump up the readies for the purpose.

If you add to that fine argument the clear correlation between being fat and not being green - you require more precious energy to feed your ferocious bodily appetites - then you can see just how right this wonderful idea is in principle and purpose.

We begin a campaign tomorrow. Early ideas on the kitchen table tonight include a compulsory 'speak your weight' device in every household in the land. Citizens will be required to own up to their bulk each morning and anyone over their appointed BMI target (see how we have built the beloved target into the idea, not to mention mass compulsion - how can the Government resist?!) will be fined an incremental penalty. The charge to be debited automatically from their bank or benefit - more like - balance.

There will also be proper congestion charging called 'Fat Free Zones'. Any fatty wanting to enter a town or city centre, to the inconvenience of properly slim and svelte people, will be required to pay a fixed sum in advance. Foot patrols will look out for fatties - not in itself a terribly tricky task - and escort them out of town if they fail to show the proper 'licence to pollute'.

Power stations will be run not by coal, gas or nuclear fuel, but by fatties in treadmills as punishment for their crime. (Obesity, per se, will be the new criminal offence, not fart-arsing around with labels on packages!)

Naturally there will be Fat Reality TV too in which overweight contestants will be subject to more social opprobrium and disdain than even your most ardent indoor smoker.

All in all a thoroughly modest proposal you'll agree, and a darn fine solution to a beastly problem. Well done H!