Sackcloth and Ashes

When we have the energy, and we try to dredge it up most weekends, we play badminton on a Sunday morning. It’s fun and it’s good exercise, but on top of that the atmosphere has its own special charm:  we play to the sound of hymns being sung to lilting African melodies and strong African rhythms.


This is because as well as the badminton court, the centre where we play houses not one but two African churches on a Sunday morning. In one of them, the worshippers turn out immaculately dressed in smart suits or long dresses. In the other, they wear flowing all-white robes. Both congretations sway, sing and dance. The children dress like the adults and smile when we turn up. If worship can be dismally solemn in a lot of churches, in those two it is unstintingly joyous.

Last Sunday, we had badminton, we had our singing and dancing churchgoers, we had sun and blue skies. Everything to encourage good cheer. And yet surely we should have woken to floods and earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and pestilence, with the rapturous amongst us long since raptured. If anyone deserves to be rapt, some of them would certainly be members of our two congregations, and yet there they were on Sunday morning, still among us, still as full of cheer as ever.

Harold Camping, who predicted the rapture and the start of the end of the world for Saturday, is apparently now admitting that he got the calculations wrong. Wrong? You think so? Perhaps that is the truest statement he’s made for a while. Is it time for him to don sackcloth in penance?

But he goes on to say, demonstrating his unerring command of the English language, ‘we have to be looking at all of this a little bit more spiritual, but it won't be spiritual on Oct. 21, because the Bible clearly teaches that then the world is going to be destroyed altogether.’ So he was wrong but basically he was right.

Camping used to be a civil engineer. I was once told that where a  mathematician will tell you that 1 + 2 makes 3, a physicist will tell you that it’s between 2.5 and 3.5 and an engineer will say, ‘well, it’s approximately 3 but let’s say 8 for safety.’ Sound like Camping to you?

That being said, things have started turning nasty – or I should say gone on turning nasty – in various parts of the world. Iceland, for instance, is producing another cloud of volcanic ash for us. The same thing happened last year. And two years before that, one of the first calamities of the financial crisis was the Icelandic banks crashing, spreading devastation far beyond their shores.



Unlike Camping's, Iceland's message is unambiguous

What have the Icelanders got against us? What have we done to trouble their tranquillity? And do they realise they’re playing with fire? I mean, they’ve got enough to contend with as it is, and surely they know that if Britain, France or the US get the impression another country is dissing them, the next thing you know is the bombers go in. Just as soon as the ash clears enough to allow planes to fly.

I wonder whether Camping is looking for the source of our tribulations in the right place. The damp squib that rapture day turned into on Saturday rather suggests that God doesn't really have it in for us just yet.

On the other hand, should we be getting concerned about some character in Rejkyavik?

What did we do to upset Iceland?

What is it with Iceland? It has a total population which anywhere else would just about make a reasonable city. It’s located in the North Atlantic so far from anywhere else that I can only imagine the original settlers turned up because they got lost on their way to somewhere more desirable.

Did you ever hear the Arlo Guthrie sketch about the last guy in the world? This is a guy with so little happening in his life that he doesn’t even have a road to lie down in for a truck to run him over. All that guy has to do is go out and bum a dime and phone the FBI and say ‘Hey, FBI?’; they say ‘Yeah’; he says ‘Chairman Mao and Uncle Ho are coming to dinner tonight’ (OK, I know that the sketch is a bit dated now), and then hang up. And within seconds the FBI will have files on that guy, tape rolling on that guy, thousands of agents finding things out about that guy, because there are things to find out about him: I mean, he’s the last guy, so how did he find someone to bum a dime off? There’s plenty of people who aren’t the last guy who can’t bum a dime; he comes along and he bums a dime. And if he was the last guy and he had to bum a dime to phone the FBI, how was he going to serve dinner to all those people?

As Guthrie points out, his country is the only one in the world, not that could find out that kind of thing, but that would take the time to find stuff out about that guy. Anyone else would say ‘hey, he’s the last guy, screw him.’ But not in the United States, where there is no prejudice, there is no discrimination – they’ll get anyone.

Now I feel a bit that way about Iceland. ‘Hey, that’s Iceland. That’s the last place. Screw them.’ But down the decades, I’ve found I can’t.

Back in the 1970s, it was the Cod Wars. How we thrilled. Nightly pictures on the TV news of plucky little British sailors in their warships battling it out with vicious Icelandic fisherman in their sinister trawlers. Exciting times. OK, in the end we backed down, but it was still the stuff of which epics are spun, with all that is best in the heroism and glory that makes Britain.

Then they went quiet for a bit until a couple of years ago, when they started falling apart financially. ‘They don’t have any money?’ I wanted to say, ‘Hey, they’re the last guys, screw them.’ Unfortunately, it turns out that a lot of the money they didn’t have any more came from our pockets – 300,000 British depositors saw their savings evaporate, nearly one for every single Icelander. That’s without taking account of the £900 million of investments from British municipal authorities and police forces that they seem to have lost.

Now they’ve been spewing volcanic ash into the atmosphere for the last couple of days and forcing us to cancel most of our flights.

What on earth are they up to? Are they upset that we’re not paying them enough attention? Is it something we said?