Germany learned how to deal with the far right. Time the rest of us did.

The xenophobic European Right, in attacking the European Union, often criticises the dominant role of Germany. Which is interesting, because one of Germany’s most striking characteristics is its political maturity. It’s often said that if you don’t learn from your mistakes, you’re condemned to repeating them; Germany made the most catastrophic of political errors when it let its extreme right into power, but it has learned the lesson, and is now perhaps the nation least likely to fall into that trap.

No wonder organisations like UKIP in Britain distrust Germany so profoundly.

Some years ago, I read a study based on an American academic’s doctoral thesis, The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria. The author, David Art, contrasted German attitudes towards its past with the behaviour of Austria, which likes to present itself as the Nazis’ first victims. Austrians were incorporated into the Third Reich by force when German troops came across the border, but no one’s fooled: the majority of the population greeted the invaders with cries of joy.

The Germans by contrast have gone through an intense period of introspection and examination of a repellent period of their history. There is a widespread consensus to regard it as shameful. The result? Where in Austria the rise of the extreme right “Freedom Party” seemed irresistible, culminating in its leader becoming deputy Chancellor, in Germany the corresponding party, the Republicans (REP), had only a flash in the pan: it enjoyed a brief rise, even winning a few seats in parliament, and then faded into obscurity again.

Why did it vanish so quickly? Because no one would give them the time of day. Specifically, the Conservative CDU decided have nothing to do with them. They adopted a policy of “marginalisation” (Ausgrenzung). David Art explains that it:

…prohibited personal contact with REP politicians, reliance on REP votes to pass legislation, and support for any REP candidate or proposal. This occurred at every political level. Party members in communal parliaments were instructed to vote against even the most mundane proposals of the REPs, such as installation of traffic lights, on principle. Members of the CDU and FDP [their Liberal allies] who violated the policy of Ausgrenzung were immediately kicked out of their parties.

The CDU in several parts of Germany also officially classified the REPs as threats to the Constitution, which brought them under observation by the Verfassungschutz, the “Constitution Protection” police.

What this meant is that supporters of the REPs were liable to police surveillance, while voters began to understand that no elected REP member, at local or national level, would ever be able to realise any concrete measure: no one would allow him into a coalition, even if that was the only way of securing power for themselves, or pass any proposal he put forward, even if they agreed with it. Quickly voters learned that lesson too, and stopped backing REP candidates. The party vanished into the obscurity it so richly deserved.

Which makes what happened at the weekend in Britain particularly instructive. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, was twice asked on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, whether he would ever consider a coalition with UKIP. Twice he refused to rule it out.

Two Conservative politicians
But Cameron doesn't know how to resist the far right – while Merkel does

So it looks as though our Conservative party, unlike its sister party in Germany, has opted for the Austrian approach rather than the German one. Austria gave the extreme right the oxygen it needed to flourish, and that opened the road to nearly the highest office in the land. In Germany by contrast, they cold shouldered the corresponding toxic movement – and drove it back to where it belonged.

All this has become topical again because a new far right movement, similar to UKIP, has recently emerged in Germany. PEGIDA has much in common with UKIP, in its xenophobia and Islamophobia. But Angela Merkel has denounced them publicly, and today the Bild tabloid paper, usually similar to Britain’s Sun with its xeonophobic inclinations, publishes a call from fifty leading figures, including a former Social Democrat Chancellors and a former national football team captain, calling for opposition to PEGIDA and appealing for tolerance.

No wonder UKIP supporters dislike Germany so much. It has shown it won’t again fall prey to the far right, and is mobilising to make sure it doesn’t happen. In the UK, with an ambivalent Conservative Party, and a general environment that guiltily collaborates with xenophobia and Islamophobia, it sees an opportunity.

My own feeling? If the Germans can marginalise the far right and uphold tolerance, so can other nations. And we should. With no further delay.

Ah, this modern world, how far it is from realising its ideals

Have you ever given any thought to when “modern” started? Have we been living our modern lives a couple of years? A generation? Perhaps even longer?

Think of all those museums of modern art we have. When I was a kid, we’d never have included the impressionists in a modern art exhibition. But when I first began to be interested in art, the impressionist Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette was under a century old, and today Picasso’s modernist Demoiselles d’Avignon is over a century old.

Renoir. Modern Art? Don't be silly

So when will modern art stop being modern?

Picasso. Modern art.
From 1907? Seriously?

We even have the notion of “post-modernism”, one of the more ludicrous we’ve come up with. After all, what comes after modernity? Surely it’s the future, isn’t it? So unless we have a time machine, how on earth can we know what “post-modern” looks like?

At the moment, I’m reading a book by Elizabeth Badinter, a leading French philosopher and feminist, who adds to her range of talents a profound understanding, and knowledge, of eighteenth-century history of thought. The book confirms a feeling I’ve had for some time, that the “modern period” started in the middle of that century. She traces two remarkable women of the time, Emile du Châtelet and Louise d’Epinay. They were contemporaries for a while, but du Châtelet died in 1749, and Epinay’s writing dates from the 1750s onwards.

Badinter shows that there is a real watershed between them. Du Châtelet was a leading physicist and philosopher, the first major French woman scientist, and the last before Marie Curie. Epinay wrote principally about education, in an environment where the natural sciences were beginning to lose their popularity in favour of the social sciences and moral philosophy. This trend led to the emergence of a notion of Man as opposed to classes, which would later in the century inform such ideas as “the rights of Man”, applying to all men or women, regardless of their station in life.

In Badinter’s words, “increasingly, the idea of humanity took hold in minds, previously more used to distinguishing men by their station than to bringing them together within a single concept.”

The changing view is illustrated by a story told by a certain Longchamp, a former manservant of du Châtelet’s, who claimed in his memoirs that she would undress without any kind of modesty in front of him; on one occasion, she called him to bring hot water for her bath; she opened her legs wide so that he could pour the water between them and, when he averted his eyes, she told him to watch what he was doing so that he didn’t scald her (I suppose she scolded him to avoid being scalded).

Now du Châtelet would never have behaved that way with anyone she felt she had to treat as a man, in other words, someone of her own aristocratic caste. But Longchamp was a servant; he didn’t count.

That was the kind of thinking that began to change around 1750, so that in 1776 the nascent United States could declare that they were acting on the principle that all men are created equal. To them, there is a community of man, to which we all belong, and from which are derived certain inalienable rights. A world-changing concept after 1750, it held little sway before.

Since that’s a fundamental idea of our time, I like to date the modern from then.

And yet. No changes in human mentalities is sudden. The old ideas cling on long after the new ones have begun to emerge and supplant them. Even the framers of that great Declaration of Independence were in many cases slave-owners: equality of humanity clearly didn’t extend to involuntary African immigrants to America.

Nor are we out of the woods yet. You probably saw the pair of demonstrators from the States, one white and carrying a placard asking “is my life worth more than his?”, the other black and with a placard asking “is his life worth more than mine?”

Sadly, our societies don't (yet) value them equally

The founding fathers of the United States framed a constitution in which a black man’s life was officially valued at 3/5 of a white’s. The idea should have been buried by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, but was it? Judging by the apparent right for whites, inside or outside the police, to shoot with impunity young black men in the States, one would have to say we’re not there yet.

No-one in Europe should feel any self-satisfaction with respect to the US either. If you’re Muslim, or black, or simply a foreigner, there’s a view in most of Europe today that you’re a lesser being. Your rights can be denied. If you’re attempting to enter Europe illegally and your boat sinks, you should be left to drown. Behind such thoughts is the notion that other people are inferior, not fully entitled to human rights, perhaps not entirely human.

Not caring whether such a person sees you naked may be a little degrading, but it does no more ham than that. Thinking such a person may be gunned down in the street for no offence, or doesn’t deserve to be rescued from a watery grave in the Med, is much more serious. When we reach a point where our societies no longer find it acceptable to shoot young blacks or abandon drowning migrants, we shall at last have realised the ideals that began to emerge in the eighteenth century.

So my view? The modern period did indeed start around 1750. When will it end? Oh, it has a long way to run yet...

The tyranny of technology and the pace of progrss

There was a time when the pace of technological change was leisurely. In the Middle Ages, a craftsman could teach his son his trade, confident that the son could use the same tools as the father. The majority would be unchanged but even those that had been improved in some way would be broadly the same: progress occurred at a human rate, based on generations.

One of the few modern pieces on show in Florence
In the St Lorenzo basilica, Pietro Annigoni:
St Joseph showing Jesus his workshop

No more. Today revolutions take place between generations. A late friend of mine was an engineer in the 1930s, and described to me the excitement he felt at discovering the potential of plastics. He built plastic boxes, with a metal hinge so that the cover could be opened. Then another generation of engineers emerged that had been brought up with the new material. They simply extruded an area of the plastic to make it thin and malleable – and there was your hinge. No need for any metal at all.

He realised that what he’d done was to use plastic as though it were another kind of wood. They used it as a material in its own right, taking advantage of its natural properties.

Even worse, anyone over forty or fifty will remember technologies that have not only emerged, but even disappeared again. Anyone remember the old Roneo and Gestetner duplicators? You’d type (yes, another technology that has all but vanished) your text onto a “skin”, without an ink ribbon, so that the waxed surface was struck through with the shape of the letters. Then you’d load it onto an ink-filled cylinder and print off your 500 or 1000 copies. When I decided it was time my college had a subversive and humorous alternative to its rather stodgy newsletter, I ripped off its Roneo machines, stealing its paper and its ink, wholly without authorisation, though I did have the tacit understanding that the principal had decided to take no action against me…

Yes, not that subversive really.

Well, the duplicator has vanished. Who’d use one with photocopies or, better still, printers available? And, rather like the younger engineers letting plastic stand on its own merits, wouldn’t the self-appointed subversive student today stick his riotously funny pieces on a website anyway, without ever bothering to print them out in the first place?

Some technologies cling on, though. One that seems to be proving persistent is the telephone. By which I mean the landline. It doesn’t show any sign of disappearing any time soon, and yet there are few innovations of the last century or so that I’d sooner be shot of. It’s imperious, tyrannical, demanding and generally it wins immediate attention. Like a baby’s crying, it doesn’t allow us to ignore it. That awful jangling starts and, whatever we’re doing, we have to jump up to answer it.

It’s not like that with mobiles. The sound can be turned down. It can even be turned off. In any case, it’s generally a more gentle ringtone, which we may have chosen. In addition, since reception isn’t as reliable as for a landline, it sometimes doesn’t work – you go on undisturbed with whatever you were doing, only noticing some time later – on occasions, a great deal of time later – that you missed a call. At which point, you can decide whether to phone back or wait till a more convenient moment.

Emails, of course, sit patiently waiting for you to read them when you want to.

Far more civilised.

Demanding our attention for a century and more
Doesn't it look smug?

I was reminded of all this when I recently read Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller. This remarkable book has the reader as protagonist (it’s a second person narrative), and what the reader’s trying to do is get through a novel – instead being condemned to read the start of one novel after another, without ever getting beyond the first chapter.

One of those initial chapters has the phone as a principal character. The protagonist explains that he is dominated by that shrill ringing, sometimes looking up and wondering who’s calling when he hears a phone in a neighbour’s house. And, in the narrative, as he’s out jogging, he hears a phone ringing in an empty house he runs by. It rings and rings. He has to go and look. He finds a back door open and wanders in. There it is, jangling at him. So he answers.

And the call, inevitably, is for him.

You see? Calvino has it right. This isn’t a convenient invention making life easier. It’s a tool of domination, reaching into your life and demanding your attention. But I suppose we’ll put up with it, at least for as long as calls to mobiles remain so much more expensive than calls to landlines, and the remaining reception problems haven’t been solved.

Technological progress is fast. But in one case, at least, I feel it isn’t  fast enough.

At the end of 2014: a glimmer of hope for 2015?

If 2014 had a dominant issue, it would have to be immigration.

Anti-immigrant feeling is on the rise across the rich nations, with some countries such as Britain, France and Sweden seeing brutally xenophobic parties of the far right advancing threateningly. Indeed, such views are affecting, or perhaps I should say infecting, the entire political establishment: the British government has even announced it no longer intends to help finance rescue missions for migrants left to drown in the Mediterranean. It seems a death sentence is a fitting punishment for people attempting to reach Europe illegally.

Citizens of a Christian nation show their compassion

Much of the hostility comes from significant sectors of the working poor, traditionally the natural supporters of the Left, so it too feels pressured to make concessions to views it should be resisting.

While there’s no excuse for it, the spread of xenophobia among the poor isn’t hard to understand. Men and women in unskilled work are on pay that barely allows them to survive. The alternative of eating or heating is starkly posed to many families, especially to the 622,000 (according to the most recent UK government figures) on zero-hour contracts, technically in employment but with no guarantee of either work or pay. It’s no surprise that Britain’s Trussell Trust, which was feeding 30,000 people at food banks in 2007, is now feeding a million.

Life for the poor is even more precarious because, in economies struggling to recover from the 2008 shock, redundancy is an ever-present threat. So yawning before them is the black hole of unemployment, an increasingly desperate state as benefits are reduced in the name of austerity, or withheld as increasingly stringent conditions of entitlement are imposed.

In these circumstances, it’s easy to believe that immigrants in unskilled work are taking jobs which might otherwise have gone to native-born unemployed. Many of these immigrants accept lower wages, so there’s the sense that they are undercutting applicants from within the country. When skilled jobs, for instance in healthcare, go to immigrants, that too can be seen as denying opportunities locally.

So it’s easy for the far right to whip up bitterness against immigrants. And yet it isn’t immigrants who introduced zero-hour contracts, but employers wanting to cut payroll costs. Nor do immigrants demand lower wages, they merely accept them as preferable to the conditions they’ve left behind. Nor, finally, is it immigrants who are keeping locals out of skilled work, but short-sighted economic policies that deny training opportunities to our young people.

The attraction of making immigration the issue is that immigrants are generally easily identifiable, whereas the corporate or political figures responsible for the real problems prefer to say out of sight. Immigrants become an easy scapegoat for all our ills, easy to fear, easy to hate. Parties based on humanity’s baser instincts, like UKIP in Britain or the Front National in France, rise on those feelings.

So it was refreshing, in this toxic atmosphere, to sense a glimmer of optimism at the end of the year. At the beginning of December, the OECD, the club of the most prosperous nations, published a study which, first, confirmed the blindingly obvious, that inequality is increasing, but then went on to assert a truth which badly needed stating: far from encouraging growth, inequality holds it back.

Estimated consequence of changes in inequality (1985-2005)
on subsequent cumulative growth (1990-2010) 

This is dynamite.

Firstly, it gives the lie to the Reagan-Thatcher sacred cow of trickle-down economics: let the rich grow richer, and their wealth will flow downwards to enrich the poor in turn. It turns out that enriching the rich just makes the rich richer. The only surprise is that anyone’s surprised.

Secondly, it shows that inequality doesn’t even encourage economic growth. Many once believed that it was better to have unjust distribution of a bigger cake, but the OECD shows that unjust distribution itself slows the growth of the whole cake. Increasing inequality between 1985 and 2005 held growth back by 8.5% on average across the OECD between 1990 and 2010.

It seems that fairness isn’t just morally preferable, it’s more economically efficient.

So, if all but a tiny minority of us are feeling poorer, it’s because we’re becoming poorer. The zero-hour contracts, the downward pressure on benefits, the cuts in public services aren’t about fixing the economy. They’re the necessary price of growing inequality, where the wealthiest 1% or even 0.1% prosper, but the least well off 40% see nothing grow but their suffering.

These are key notions, and all the more so since they’re being voiced in the wake of one of the more important publishing events of recent years: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st century. He shows, with real data to support his argument, that inequality is growing ineluctably. What’s more, while in the twentieth century there was a reduction in inequality in income, that trend is recent and by no means guaranteed. Nor has there been any corresponding reduction of inequality in wealth:

… the upper decile own 60 percent of Europe’s wealth and more than 70 percent in the United States. And the poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910.

Piketty’s central contention is that for as long as the rate of return on capital is higher than the rate of growth in the economy, the gap between the wealthiest in society and the poorest – note the depressing finding that half the people own less than 5% of the wealth – will continue to widen. And we now know this restricts overall growth.

Why do we allow this to happen? Because people with property of $100,000 or $200,000 think of themselves as on the brink of wealth, and believe their interests lie with the very wealthiest, those whose property is measured in the millions. They support measures to shore up inequality because they believe they may in time benefit from them.

Meanwhile the poorest, apparently impotent to change anything, with no voice in politics, look for an easy target. Blaming immigrants is a convenient way to explain their difficulties, and they rally behind UKIP or the Front National or their ilk.

But Piketty and the OECD, joined even by the IMF, have highlighted the real cause of their problems: inequality.

That’s what gives me some encouragement at the end of 2014. The terms of debate are beginning to change, at least at top levels of economic thought. Perhaps we can encourage some trickle-down in ideas, even if it has failed in finance. If the parties of the Left can find the courage to reject facile immigrant-bashing, and to challenge the failed economic wisdom of the Reagan-Thatcher legacy, then they may mobilise support for progressive change. Towards greater justice, and towards greater efficiency at the same time.

It wouldn’t be a moment too soon.

Happy 2015. I hope.

Maggie, the poll tax, and the danger of firmness

A benefit of the thirty-year rule for disclosure of British government papers is that it can provide a salutary reminder of just how unsavoury certain people were, at a time – three decades on – when there’s a tendency to canonise them.

For a while now, and never more than since her funeral, there has been a growing tendency to sing the praises of Maggie Thatcher. A strong woman, we’re told, a conviction politician, firm in her beliefs, determined to see them through.

That all sounds like praise indeed. So we sometimes have to remind ourselves of the irregular verb: I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pig-headed. What looks like firmness when you feel it’s in a good cause, is simply dogmatism bordering on fanaticism in a bad one.

Firm? Resolut? Or just inflexible?

The Guardian has done us a service by publishing details of the advice Thatcher received from Oliver Letwin, now a Minister but then a 29-year old special adviser, concerning the proposed move to funding local government based on a “residence charge”, later renamed the “community charge” and ultimately known to practically everyone as the “poll tax”.

This was pretty much an unmitigated disaster. Projections in 1985 showed that 44% of the population would be made worse off. The then Chancellor, Nigel Lawson – the minister responsible for Financial matters – declared the tax would mean that “a pensioner couple in inner London could find themselves paying 22% of their net income in poll tax, whereas a better off couple in the suburbs pay only 1%.” He described the scheme as “completely unworkable and politically catastrophic.”

Letwin maintained that it was the way to go, backed by Lord Victor Rothschild, now revealed to be the man who first had the idea. Letwin even supported the approach it has long been suspected Thatcher adopted, of using the Scots as guinea pigs and only introducing the poll tax in England and Wales after running it for a year north the border.

Despite the opposition of many of her most senior ministers, Thatcher made this an issue on which to prove her “firmness”. The poll tax was imposed on the rest of Britain after Scotland, amid increasing resentment and indeed resistance, culminating in widespread rioting in 1990. Her dogmatic attachment to a bad idea had lasted five years and done huge damage – not least, to herself. It was in 1990 that Tory Party grandees decided that they’d had enough of a good thing, or that Thatcher was no longer the good thing she had been, and dumped her.

She could never forgive them. Like all people who have her brand of “firmness’, she knew she could do no wrong. The poll tax hadn’t been her calamitous error, her utter failure of political sensitivity towards the real concerns of voters, it had been a policy that others hadn’t had the courage to see through, preferring instead to bring her down in an act that could only be qualified as treason.

That’s the kind of history we need to recall each time anyone speaks with nostalgia of the Thatcher period. Remember that her departure was the end of an error as well as the end of the era.

But we should also remember that the man who advised her down this destructive route was Oliver Letwin. Thatcher’s gone, but he’s still in government. The Guardian quotes Lord Rothschild expressing some reservations: “…I am nervous lest [the poll tax] is accidentally or deliberately misinterpreted, for example: ‘Tories hit the poor again’, ‘No compassion for the have-nots’.”

How ironic. Those are precisely the charges anyone with empathy for the poor makes of the government in which Letwin, architect of the poll tax, serves today.

Which demonstrates that this kind of story not only provides useful insight on the reputation Thatcher really deserves, it also reveals how balefully her legacy still affects us today.

If you've let "The Escape Artist" escape, get him back in your clutches

It appals me how I can completely miss a film or series I really shouldn’t have. 

When I say “completely”, I really mean completely: I’d never even heard of The Escape Artist until Amazon decided to recommend it to me, and I thought I might give it a whirl, principally on the basis that I find David Tennant worth watching. Certainly, I liked him as the somewhat manic (desperately ill and, just to make sure we’ve missed none of the potential pathos, bereaved) detective inspector in Broadchurch, opposite a stunningly good Olivia Colman as his sergeant.

You didn’t see Broadchurch? One of the best British police thrillers for years – the first to have learned from the Scandinavians that you don’t need a string of bodies to make a murder drama dramatic, that just one can generate all the suspense you need (“one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic”, though I’m not sure many of us would quote Stalin as a movie critic). I strongly recommend you catch up quickly on season 1, especially since season 2 starts next week.

But then get hold of The Escape Artist. 

Tennant’s not a policeman in this one, but a lawyer, specifically a junior barrister. For those not familiar with the arcane ways of the English legal system, a junior barrister can be a senior lawyer – even an old one – but one who has never “taken silk”, as we quaintly refer to the moment he or she becomes a Queen’s Counsel (strictly speaking, “Queen’s Counsel learned in the law” – isn’t that great?) , thereby earning a silk gown (no, you don’t have to wait another ten years to get the high heels to go with it). 

David Tennant and still more junior colleague looking good at work

Some years ago I came across a barrister (the cousin of a colleague, if you must know – yes, it’s that kind of story: not quite “a chap in a pub told me” but not far off) who had suffered a nervous breakdown from having successfully defended a rapist who then went on to rape again. It’s clear, and a principle strongly stated in The Escape Artist, that everyone deserves a defence, but it must indeed be hard when someone like David Tennant’s character artfully builds the escape for a man who turns out to be – how shall I put this to avoid spoilers? – let’s just say, no better than he should be.

Incidentally, his turning out to be no better than he should be leads to the first episode ending with some of the tensest TV I’ve seen for years.

Careful: the one on the left may turn out not to be so nice after all

The result is excellent drama, in which we swing from rooting for the defence, to rooting for the prosecution, to ultimately, by a convoluted but gripping route, rooting for perpetration of a serious crime. Brilliant. It's a single–season series, with just three one-hour episodes, making it less long than two decent-length films. We watched it in one sitting: once into it, it’s hard to tear yourself away.

On the way, we even saw how the Scottish legal system differs from the English, not something many people know about. Ever heard of the verdict “not proven”, alongside “guilty” and “not guilty”? They have it in Scotland. No wonder the pressure for independence seems to grow unstoppably – why, they’re so much more subtle in their thinking.

Tennant’s Scots, as it happens. And gives a great performance in The Escape Artist. Not to be missed.

A funny way to celebrate Christmas. Or perhaps not? Plus: a Christian story

Merry Christmas to you all.

We’ve just got back from Oxford, where we had Christmas lunch with my mother and brother. Not at home, you understand: at ninety my mother rightly feels she can put behind her all the labour and heartache of the preparation of a massive lunch.

No, we went to a restaurant that proudly proclaims itself to be open every day of the year. Having spent a long time looking, let me assure you there aren’t many places that can say the same.

Al-Shami: open 365 days
Except in leap years

Al-Shami is a Lebanese place. It’s sat right opposite the Oxford Synagogue. Indeed, it was members of the Jewish community, in which my mother has been active these last few years, who recommended it to us. They live, it seems, by their recommendations because, as lunch rolled on, more and more members of the community turned up for their own lunches.

So we enjoyed Tabbouleh and Sujuq, Shawarma Lahme and Daoud Basha, without necessarily knowing what they were, and capped it all off with one of those dishes which seem to be mostly cream, at the mere sight of which one’s tongue salivates and one’s arteries fur. All with a splendid view of the Synagogue across the street and the chatter of cheerful Jewish voices all around.

It struck me as perhaps a slightly odd way to celebrate Christmas. But then again: Levantine cooking while surrounded by Jews? Perhaps that’s rather more appropriate a way to mark the birth of Jesus than what we generally do.

The Oxford Synagogue, opposite Al-Shami
An appropriate view on a day dedicated to a Nazarene Rabbi?

Postscript: Just to mark the season – a story to illustrate the Christian message at its best (hope you’re listening David Cameron, with Christian values always in your mouth, never in your deeds).

This story was told us by friends from Dublin, dating back to the time they still lived two or three decades ago.

A friend of theirs was in deep trouble. Recently abandoned by her husband, she’d been left with two kids and no means to finance her mortgage, on which she was now three or four months in arrears and with the bank beginning to threaten foreclosure.

There was a knock on her door and her heart sank still further when she realised she was being visited by Jehovah’s Witnesses. They began to talk to her about their beliefs, and hers, until one of them suddenly interrupted the flow.

“You seem very unhappy,” he said.

“I have my problems,” she curtly replied.

“Can we come in, have a cup of tea, and talk about them?” 

She let them in and made the tea. Then, to her surprise, she found herself unburdening herself of all her problems, to these two complete strangers. They listened politely without making any judgement or offering any advice. They even asked the extent of her arrears and, again to her surprise, she told them.

They left soon after but were back on her doorstep the following day. She let them in and made tea again.

“We’ve brought this for you,” one of them said.

“This” was a cheque. For the full amount of the mortgage arrears.

Her first reaction was overwhelming relief. Out of nowhere had come a solution to her immediate problems. With that money, she could rise above her difficulties, rebuild energy and morale, and work on a future for herself and her kids – as, indeed, she later did.

But then a terrible thought occurred to her. What would they expect in return?

“I don’t plan to convert, you know,” she said, “I’m not attracted by your movement. Why, I don’t even like having Jehovah’s Witnesses on the doorstep.”

“You’ll never see us again,” they told her.

And she never did.

Dessert at Al-Shami
Great substitute for Christmas Pudding
Less appreciated by my vascular system