Flapping zippers and missed chances

It was, I suppose inevitably, a French friend who told me the story of the English and French naval captains of the Napoleonic war meeting for dinner on the Frenchman’s ship (fortunately: the food at least was passable).

‘Tell me,’ said the Englishman, ‘why do the French always fight for money while the English fight for honour?’

‘I suppose,’ replied the Frenchman, ‘that everyone fights for what he does not have.’

We all seek what we don’t have.

What France doesn’t have at the moment is a President worthy of the office. Sarkozy-the-little is for ever standing on tiptoes to get himself noticed, always looking for the limelight, and achieving next to nothing.

Meanwhile, as the financial crisis bites, particularly in countries such as Greece, Portugal or Ireland, we need an International Monetary Fund that is enlightened, liberal, capable of playing the long game and not focusing all its attention on the short term.

In Dominique Strauss-Kahn we had the answer to both problems. Under his guidance, the IMF has shown that it can understand the problems of the countries that turn to it for help without abandoning any of its financial rigour. It can demand action to address underlying failings, but without insisting on policies that would crucify the population.

DSK: might-have-been man

And ‘DSK’ was the runaway favourite to win next year’s presidential election in France. With all the qualities to be an outstanding President.

Or perhaps all the qualities bar one.

Obviously, we may discover that the charges against him are completely baseless. It does strike me as odd that a chambermaid was in his room while he was having a shower – in my experience, if hotel staff step into your room while you’re there, they beat a hasty retreat and come back later. So maybe he’s as innocent as a babe in arms, and I’d be delighted if that’s established by the trial, even though it will be too late for France or the IMF.

But if he’s found guilty, or acquitted on a technicality (it's notoriously difficult to get a conviction on a rape charge), I shall merely drop a tear over a lost opportunity. ‘With so many gifts,’ I shall sigh, ‘and so much to contribute to others, why did you never learn the self-control to keep your zipper shut?’

Another case of flapping zipper syndrome in a powerful man.

Another case of always wanting what you don’t have, however much you already do.

The whole story reminds me of the comment an American friend made to me, back in the late nineties. ‘He could have been great,’ she said. She wasn’t talking about DSK, of course. At the time, Bill Clinton was finding it so difficult to hang on to the presidency that he couldn’t do any of the things the office in theory made possible.

Immigrants

If Luton is known for anything, it’s known as a centre for immigration. Races, cultures, creeds and colours rub along side by side, generally without uncomfortable levels of discord.

My favourite place in the town is Wardown Park, with its trees and its green spaces and the river flowing through it.

So it was a pleasure the other day to see these two characteristic features of the town come together, when I came across the phenomenon of a foreign community blending into the town, on display in the most attractive setting it offers. Yes, a group of immigrants, in this instance from Canada, had been breeding in Wardown Park.

A Canada goose and her brood in Wardown Park

They add to the charm of an already attractive place, wouldn’t you agree?

Strangely enough, given that Luton has a large population from Pakistan, it was in North London that we visited Pakistani friends yesterday. It all went well with entertaining conversation, a plaful toddler and a memorable curry with all the trimmings. In addition she, a barrister on a career break to launch her family, told us about an exchange she had had with a judge.

He had established that she lived in a neighbourhood with a large proportion of residents from South Asia.

‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘you have all those wonderful little shops, don’t you? On the street corners. What do you call them again?’

‘We call them newsagents, your honour,’ she replied.

It’s wonderful to know that certain traditions are alive and well. In this instance it's a particularly long-lived and hallowed English tradition, where judicial ignorance only gets pricked by the wit of advocates.

Getting rapturous about another lot...

What a privilege to have been graced with new enlightenment as a result of my posts about the rapture and Mr Camping. A benefit all the more welcome for having been entirely unexpected.

As a result of my most recent post, I received a comment pointing me to a site run by the Merkaba organisation. I was told that it contained information that is proving controversial, which is curious – the controversy has completely passed me by. It’s appalling, isn’t it, how one can live in a society and simply not notice a major debate of this kind?

To my shame, I have to confess I’d never even heard of the organisation before.

The site includes a sonorous audio message which started off by telling me that Harold Camping was talking complete rubbish. Imagine my shock. This cast a wholly new light on the whole Camping prophesy business. Might he have been wrong, I asked myself? Was there perhaps some incontrovertible evidence out there of his having been mistaken? Had I missed it?

It seems that Camping and his followers are suffering from ‘diseased right-brain thinking.’ I hope they’re aware of that – they might be able to get it treated. Though perhaps not those who’ve given away all their worldly possessions in readiness for the rapture, if they’re dependent on the US health system where ability to pay remains a pretty significant factor in access to care.

The Merkaba people utterly reject Camping’s idea that the world will end on 21 September. This is complete rubbish. It will clearly end on 21 December 2012. This is a date not deduced by some ‘dart throw’ method from questionable interpretation of the bible, but one that was (imagine a particularly sonorous voice here) ‘given us by the ancient ones who built pyramids that still cannot be duplicated today.’

I don't want to quiblle, but I rather suspect that we could duplicate the pyramids today. The problem is that nobody can be bothered to do it just to prove some sect wrong.

Anyway, the rapture may not have happened on 21 May, but then it was never going to. Then Merkaba assures me that sometime between the later months of 2011 and the early months of 2012, there will be a ‘massive coronal ejection’ of matter from the sun which will strike the earth and that will bring about the rapture.

Coronal Mass Ejection - the initial sign of the coming rapture?

And then, finally, the end of the world on 21 December 2012.

Isn’t this wonderful? We now have several predicted events we can await with pleasure, knowing that we’ll be able to wake up the following day and have a bit of a laugh at the expense not just of one set of doom-mongers but two. I know you can’t get a hell of a lot of laughs out of prophets getting things wrong, but even a bit of a chuckle is a good way to start a day, and it’s kind of Camping and Merkaba to want to provide us with at least that much.

It may also give me material for a couple more blog posts. And who knows what enlightening comments they might generate.

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?

It's goodbye from me. And all of you

It seemed important to get this post up in a hurry, since I have it on good authority – well, authority anyway – that the end of times happens this evening. At 6:00, apparently, though of course we’re on British Summer Time here, so I assume we have an hour longer – I presume divine institutions, when organising events like raptures, would base themselves on Greenwich Mean Time when they prepare the schedule for England.

So, it’s goodbye to all my readers. To the small number of you who will be caught up in the rapture, and ascend naked to heaven to join the Lord and his Saints, I can only say congratulations and happy eternity. For the rest, well see you shortly, I suppose, and let’s hope things don’t turn out quite as vile as we've been led to believe.

The authority on which I’m basing my plans for the rest of the day (the rest of time, actually) is of course the Bible, but transmitted via the Reverend Harold Camping of California (natch). At the cost of seeming churlish, I have to point out that he did previously predict the end of times for September 1994, which is perhaps a good reason for marginally downgrading the credit due to his forecast for tonight. Time to take a leaf out of the credit ratings agencies’ books – let’s downgrade Camping from triple-A to A. I reckon that’s about as reliable and rigorous a downgrading as the ratings agencies generally manage.

The biggest problem with Camping’s prophesy, though, isn’t the fact that he’s been wrong before, it’s his name. However seriously you might want to take his pronouncements, it’s really hard, isn’t it, with a name like that? It just kicks off far too many unfortunate trains of thought.

• For instance, I keep wanting to ask what he’ll do at the end of the world – fold his tent and steal away?
• Is Camping blessed with second site?
• Does he have the support of enough strong guys?
• Should we congratulate him on driving a peg so firmly into the ground?
• Might the police suspect him of prophesying within tent?

Camping out with the bible

That kind of thing introduces an unfortunate note of levity. Obviously, if he’d been called Tiresias or Isaiah, we might be able to take him much more seriously. And then I might have spent the next few hours cancelling any arrangements for the evening and preparing myself to meet my maker (not, I suspect, an occasion from which either of us could hope to gain very much, as a headmaster once told me when I was eleven).

And I certainly wouldn’t already be planning my first post-rapture blog post.

Dorset moonlight and dance

A good weekend, down in Dorset, celebrating the 50th birthday of my old friend Patrick (a lot older, obviously, than when I first met him and he was just 31 and I wasn’t even 40. Ah well – as I always say, the only way not to grow old is to die young).

Patrick and Mary put us all up in a hotel right on the cliffs overlooking an English Channel as gloriously, deeply blue as the Mediterranean ever is. Amazing for May. It was beautiful at night too, when I took Janka for her evening walk along the beach. There was a half moon which sent one of those staircase reflections over the surface of the sea towards me, the kind of thing which always used to make me feel as a child that I could walk along it to some magical destination. And then, when clouds came scudding across, there’d be a moment when the moonlight became just a patch of silver on the waves before vanishing altogether.

The party itself went well too.

It’s quite extraordinary that some people don’t like dancing. Generally, their antipathy is based on a lack of confidence in their ability to dance, and a fear that they might cover themselves with embarrassment if they tried. The reality is that they probably have only to let themselves go to enjoy one of the great sources of joy for humanity, in every climate and at every period.

My own position is entirely different. When it comes to my ability to dance, I suffer from no lack of confidence whatever. On the contrary, there are few things on which I have greater certainty than my incompetence as a dancer. Nor do I have any unjustified fear that I might cause myself embarrassment by trying to dance. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that if I so much as step onto a dance floor total abject embarrassment would be an immediate and inevitable consequence.

I’ve actually got the moral scars to prove it. Decades ago, two women on separate occasions gave me all that guff about ‘anyone can dance, you just have to overcome your lack of confidence and let yourself go with the rhythm.’ Each occasion ended with them saying, ‘OK, I see what you mean, perhaps you really had better sit down.’ So I spent the rest of the evening nursing a drink while they danced with a series of vastly more talented young men.

It’s extraordinary how attractive to women a young man looks, viewed by a boyfriend sat by a dance floor watching them dance with his girlfriend.

All of which perhaps explains why I was out on Saturday walking the dog on the beach and trying to work up enthusiasm for the moonlight.

Fortunately, there were lots of other things to do during the weekend. On Saturday, we went to Lyme Regis, one of the most precious jewels in the crown of English towns. It’s also a setting used in some remarkable novels, my favourite being Jane Austen’s Persuasion but also including Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

Danielle and I visited Lyme in 1981 (thirty years ago – chilling thought) when the film of that last novel, starring Meryl Streep, was all the rage. The poster showed Streep looking fetching in a hood, standing on that iconic place in Lyme, the Cobb, the long, curved jetty that thrusts out into the sea. Inevitably, Danielle insisted on taking a photo of me with my head covered in the same way, in the same place. Since I had a beard at the time, the resemblance to Streep was somewhat less than eery.

She took another picture this weekend. Not sure whether the resemblance is any more striking.

Streep in 1981

Me in 2011. Spooky likeness or what?

And the one horsing around in the background? Here's her attempt at a Streep - not a patch on mine, of course.

Vanessa attempts a pale imitation of my
tribute to a great artist

Fish have rights too

Judging by its window display, the prestigious department store Selfridges in London’s Oxford Street, is proud of the principled stand it has recently taken. ‘We don't sell endangered fish’ they proclaim with obvious confidence in their moral credentials.

Selfridges sides with the fish. Or does it?

That's all very well and fine, but I'm not sure that things are quite so clear cut. After all, we're entitled to ask: they don’t sell endangered fish – what?

In fact, what do endangered fish generally buy?

I suppose they might want to equip themselves with some kind of security system, to mitigate the dangers they face. And if they did, why should we refuse to supply them the protection they crave? Don’t they have rights too, to live in safety?

Is it time to launch a counter-campaign? Or possibly an over-the-counter campaign?

My modest proposal for a possible slogan: not so self-righteous, Selfridges.