God on Twitter

Like any other ancient text, what the Bible doesn't say is almost more interesting than what it does. Hidden away in there are all kinds of assumptions, the things that were taken as understood without question at the time of writing.

And it seems surprising that God hasn't taken the chance - especially now social media offers such easy access to people - to update, amend, point out mistakes and misunderstanding, and fill in some of the gaps.

Think about it. If you were God, a Twitter account would give such an opportunity to set things straight, maybe give physicists a few extra clues post-Higgs about the general direction of String Theory. A few well chosen tweets could sort out the Palestine/ Israel issue, and we could feel easier about Sunday opening hours. And s/he could leave us in no doubt about which issues were troubling him/ her each week. That could be very effective.

And the gaps.

Wouldn't it be fascinating to know what interview procedures Jesus used when he appointed the apostles, and what went wrong when he gave Judas the job ? Was there a job description ? What was the person spec like ? Where were the interviews held ? (Maybe in the conference rooms of some inn in downtown Jerusalem ?)

It would be good to know why, even then, God chose not to set a better example vis-a-vis gender equality. Twelve male apostles with a sort of female amanuensis who washes their feet does not look good, and was such a missed opportunity. And what a different bunch it might have been with the inclusion of a few women. The whole sad history of Pauline misogyny could have been so different, so positive.

The difficulty is, it seems to me, that God has allowed the literalists, the fundamentalists to run the game. The more you write down, the greater the chance of misunderstandings, and guiding the production of the Bible millennia ago and then leaving us to it was always asking for trouble. And what do we have ? Look around. Trouble.

Living life by principles and practice which were relevant in the desert thousands of years ago feels slightly intellectually queasy. It is as if you are determined to fix your Ford Fiesta using only the best Chariot Repair Manual known to the Hittites together with a sample of tools and hot technology from 837 BCE. This would not be acceptable, even in a non-franchised garage.

If only some angel would do an Edward Snowden we'd be in business. How about it, Gabes ?

Ofsted and the one-trick pony

What are schools for ?

A product of a boys' grammar school in the sixties I was about 14 years old when it dawned that the school and its teachers had no interest whatsoever in me as a young person, and saw me merely as another exam statistic, and a chance to enhance its Oxbridge tally.

My education was highly effective in transmitting undue deference to authority, however crackpot and undeserving, and also in teaching a whole bunch of irrelevancies which were twenty years out of date even then.

As far as my school was concerned, literature stopped at some date as close to Shakespeare's death as teachers could pretend, while Shakespeare himself was close to sainthood.

Science made little recognition of Rutherford splitting the atom, and had all the excitement of a museum storeroom.

Geography (ah ! geography !) was an endless list of places and products (Shotton: Steel. Nottingham: lace.) and the real interest came from watching chalk dust drift Brownian dances in the tired sunlight of lost afternoons.

The masters (yes, masters) taught with a stern humourlessness and reinforced discipline with casual brutality. That is not too strong a word and is carefully chosen.

It was clear to me then that my school was serving some purpose other than my development or interest, which Is why I became so frequently absent both from it and within it. Perfecting anonymous and effortless invisibility was a key lesson from those days, and it has served me well through my entire life.

Then I must have hated learning. Not at all. I hated being taught, which is different. Particularly being taught by the authoritarian pygmies who mistook fear for respect and derived their power from status rather than stature.

That school would have pleased the Saints Michael (Gove and Wilshaw). Wilshaw, playing the role of over-assertive Baptist to Gove's Messiah is famous for his view that if staff morale is low, then you must be doing something right. There is something so profoundly dysfunctional about this remark that it could form the basis of a psychology module.

But what are schools for ? Merely preparation for work ? Preparation for life ? Personal development of the students ? Creating a passion for discovery ? Matching the educational achievements (though let's hope not the child suicide rates) of the far East ?

If we have a frankly coercive school system where parents are fined for children's absence, and where attendance is compulsory throughout childhood, then we owe more to the kids than the 'achievement' of a nugatory bunch of certificates (or not) and the illusion of a good job.

We do not have the right to waste years of life in compulsory education without giving something of real substance in return, without providing a real service to children and their parents.

Instead of tinkering at the margins of education, and wasting unthinkable piles of cash on discredited and doctrinaire inspection, maybe we should start again, and think about what we could really provide of use and value with a decade and more of captive time, preparing children for a future we can barely envisage.

Not drowning but waving

About to leap into the bath this morning, something caught my eye....

Goodbye, cruel world.....

£50 fuel bill reduction

How generous our government is.

After years of annual above-inflation price rises, the government flails around thinking of what to do. Neither the Labour Party nor the government appears to have any clear idea of how to rein in the feral multinationals, nor the avaricious energy companies.

So, erecting impotence into policy, the Labour Party offers 20 months price freeze, should it be elected. The government counters with a £50 reduction in energy bills.

The small print ?

The reduction will be available in full to dual-fuel customers. The rest will get less. And those, like me, who depend on oil through a lack of a gas supply rather than through choice, well, who knows what we will get.

Let's work with the maximum: £50.00. 365 days in most years, so that works out at less than £1 per week, less than 14 pence a day.

Call me Mr Grumps, but that seems a pretty insulting reduction to me. 

Worse. The latest price rise this autumn means that in my bill my winter fuel allowance PLUS the reduction will not cover the increase alone.

The government just doesn't have the will to fix this problem. Look at the years it has taken to wake up to the problem. The Labour Party, too. And what is their big idea ? A temporary one-off reduction of a handsome 14 pence per week.

If the problem is going to be fixed, it will take us, the customers, to fix it.

Here's an idea. If we divvy up the days of the week to a bunch of surnames - eg surnames A, B, C, D take Monday, E to I take Tuesday and so on, we can arrange for each group to live without energy for that day each week. At a stroke we reduce the energy companies take by a seventh. That's got to hurt. Stepping up to two days a week might be necessary. But we could beat them at their own game if we got together.

Come on. Unplug your stuff. Let's take them on. If we don;t, nobody will. That's for sure.

Love this sign

My Californian son sent me some pictures of a family trip to collect a Christmas tree. Among them was this sign, which is so delightful.

We don't seem to have this happy skill of making a point in a fun way here.

Seeing this sign, I guess every parent laughs, and holds that hand tighter, too.

ISON is gone

The comet of the century IS gONe.

There it is, tucked away in the phrase. And also into dISappOiNtment.

Physicists like their frissons to be precise, measured, careful, restrained, unspeculative. And I guess that most physicists failed to get excited by the unlikely hype of the sky bisected by a bright tail from horizon to horizon, of a comet so bright that the daylight would not be bright enough to conceal it. They would not be easily drawn to their windows by the prospect of the the first similar view since 1680.

Even the name is carefully dull. ISON: International Space Observation Network. I mean, who would name a once-in-four-hundred-years comet THAT ?

But it was fun while it lasted.

In these enforcedly austere times, this was going to be some show. The best (and cheapest) helping of bread and circuses since the Olympics (yawn) and the latest royal close encounter with something approaching normality.

Richard Feynman (Nobel prize winner, bongo-player extraordinaire, general good egg) while thinking of religion famously and laconically remarked that the stage was too big for the drama. He preferred to find awe and wonder in the immensities of the unthinkable universe, and the everyday immensities that surround us all unseen: the quotidian ballet of sub-atomic particles in every desk and sandwich.

And the real frisson of ISON was not the flim-flam, the promise of cheap pyrotechnics on an unimaginable scale. The real delight was in the hidden reminders of the vastness of where we live. And not just the vastness in distance and time, but of mystery and strangeness, too.

Here, hidden in the Oort Cloud (Oort Cloud. Even the name is beyond weird.) not for millennia but for billions of years, this left-over remnant from the origin of the universe, from the beginnings of time, is suddenly nudged by something unseen, something unknown. It begins its trajectory towards the sun in a journey that makes Greek myths look truly, spectacularly tame.

It plunges through space, travelling vast distances at impossible speeds, and is finally spotted in the last leg of its trip. It is a sun-grazer, a comet passing indecently close to the sun, and, in the hype, catapulting away into deep space forever, trailing at least one show-stopping tail, and maybe two. The money note of astro-physics.

Where is this happening ? Where are the immense darknesses ? Where is this drama taking place ? In our own infinitesimal star system, our own solar backyard, a place so huge that we have not yet managed to visit a single neighbouring planet. And our teeny green-blue planet, so soon to be as red and dry and deserted as Mars travels around our unremarkable sun, one small star in the billions that make up our own galaxy, itself one of countless billions.

With such mathematical fireworks, with such impossible immensity, who needs a mere comet tail for excitement ? Such baubles might be fun for a moment, but the delight and strangeness of our home is around us daily.

Lightning rod

At last. A banker we can finally get at.

OK, so he is a rather portly lightning rod and certainly doesn't look like the kind of thing you'd really want strapped to your chimney. But the unfortunate Rev Paul Flowers, lately of the Ethical Bank, seems perfectly suited for the job.

He has it all. Incompetence. Shady political connections. Indiscretion. (Let's be generous and call it that.) A religious carapace (perfecto mondo !). And not only that, but as a riotously inept and apparently inexperienced top banker, he was also keen on the fast lane. Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, maybe without so much of the musical element.

And he has even been arrested, rather than laden with a freight of honours and plaudits. Unusual for a banker.

And why ? 

Not because the Ethical Bank has hideously betrayed and let down those who (like me) have been naively trusting customers for decades. No, nothing fiscal. Nothing about dodgy dealings and false prospectuses (pospecti ?). Nothing about the bungling dishonesty which has wrecked, yes - wrecked, a bank.

No, drugs. With lots of excitable public disapproval about the sex to garnish the arrest.

Rev Paul Flowers isn't the first banker to adopt a hedonistic life-style. Not even the first reverend. He is just a little unfortunate in having so easily excited our collective prurience, sniffy disapproval, and visceral hatred of the professional that in a decent society would not dare to speak its name.

So although this feels as if the huge animosity towards bankers has finally caught up with a straggler, in fact it hasn't, and the whole damn herd has happily moved on to new pastures, doing what bankers do. And what bankers do (besides seeking out exotic coke-uninhibited sex, which I guess is a pretty normal and eminently affordable hobby for bankers) is to hoover up money from whosoever is daft enough to become a victim, which seems to be most of us.

Ho hum.

My father sings in my head

One morning in 1918 my father woke up right-handed, and went to bed left-handed. In the hours between he had clambered up onto a milk cart - the kind attached to a horse at the front - and had fallen off, breaking his arm. It was a micro-second that changed his life.

With his arm still in a sling, he contracted polio - then called infantile paralysis - and his arm did not recover when he did. At least he did not get the flu that year.

Bizarrely, though most family photos were lost in a fire, the two plates of the x-rays on his arm remain, a sepia reminder of the force of unexpected change.

He was four years old.

The educational route for him was to go to a 'school for delicate children'. My father and the word 'delicate' don't really fit well in the same sentence, and somebody thought so at the time. As a result he never went to school. (Think of that. Bliss.) Instead he educated himself in libraries, and remained a voracious and joyfully ill-disciplined reader all his life. 

Age brought asymmetry, the years and his physical lopsidedness accompanying each other step by step. While one half of his body remained under-developed, his arm a flaccid and alarmingly white icicle, the other was unusually muscular, and if he did get hold of something, it didn't get away easily. He had a climber's strength in his hand, and the physique of a bowman - short, squat, powerful, little neck to speak of. He would have fitted in well at Agincourt given a different century and an extra arm.

As a kid, his arm bothered me, and I made up constant recipes to fix it for him. It was a riff of childhood, so I must have felt constantly uneasy about his disability.

The accident had made my father into a problem solver.  Having one arm did not stop him doing things. He was a small adventurer, determined not to be limited. He saw boundaries as things to be crossed. He thought prohibitions were laughable.

He had a motor scooter, and in my head is the picture of him driving up the road on his scooter in heavy snow, wrestling with the bars, all the controls on the left handlebar.

He found ways round most things. His tool kit consisted of a selection of hammers, a screwdriver, and a poker, which he used for boring holes by making it red-hot in the fire. DIY was something to see in our house. And something to smell, too.

Clearly, he was not a hugger. Or not an effective hugger. To overcome this, he intensified a hug by patting. The first stage of hug-plus was to flap his hand from the wrist with a gentle patting motion. A turbo-hug involved flapping noisily from the elbow, and clapping your back as if beating a carpet or chastising a horse. It took me to the age of 20 to realise that this hugging technique was neither normal nor widely appreciated, especially by startled women who did not understand the background.

He ran an off-licence in a tough part of town. Those were quite violent days, and a refusal to serve could result in a brick through the window, and sometimes did. But you did not tangle with my father. He was placid and pleasant, but when he said something, nobody doubted that he meant it. And he kept guns, one of which was under the counter, just in case. 

His typewriter was down there, too. He was never a great writer, and his large letters sloped backwards at such a rakish angle that you feared the whole sentence might collapse at any second like dominoes too hastily stood up.  So between customers the typewriter was constantly and slowly clacking. It was a huge thing. He needed the weight to keep it stable. When it came to writing personal letters, his choice of notepaper was often the white paper bags he served sweets in. I still have a few bag letters, some of which he sent me when I was at university, usually accompanied by a £5 note. (The letters, not me.)

He was a keen driver. He drove pre-selector cars, which had an early version of an automatic gearbox. We had a long series of Lanchesters. They were upright, decorous, black, and had suicide doors at the front. The last one we had was two-tone, the tones being black and a sort of grey pretending to be blue. We went all over in them, though I do remember having to descend some hills backwards as the car couldn't quite cope with the slope, or boiled over.

In 1960, my father inherited a little money from his aunt, who had emigrated to the States nearly 70 years previously. He was her main legatee, but the majority of her estate was shared between the medical fees of her last months, and her attorney who managed the estate. When my father's legacy arrived, he knew exactly what to do with it.

He lashed out on a Ford Zodiac. This vast car was a riot of modernity. Fins out at the back, chrome eyelids on the headlights, it was a riot of colour after the Lanchesters. This was a car that knew how to party. Pale cream bench seats, light interior, and outside two-tone again, but this time blue and cream. Decorous it wasn't. It looked like a huge Neapolitan ice-cream on wheels.

And it was a step too far. Before power steering, a car like this was heavy work. And my father, even with a busman's handle on the wheel, found it impossible. Parking was a nightmare. Driving along was fine, but any slow-speed manoeuvre was physically demanding. Was the Zodiac ambition or desire ? Either way it had to go. My father loved it, but it was a folly. It went, and we had to slum it with Hillmans after that. 

When I was fourteen, and he was beginning to suffer ill-health, he became a little depressed. I was already working with tools, and one day my mother asked me quietly if I thought I could modify his guns to make them incapable of firing. I knew what she was driving at. Some research at the library turned up the best method, and I surreptitously shortened the hammers, wondering guiltily what might happen should he ever find himself grabbing for them in extremis. 

Before mobile phones, before even landlines, a policeman came in the middle of the night to wake me to tell me that he had died. I was 20, and it was 42 years ago, but I still have the note he gave me. It was a scrap of paper that would have appealed to my father, casual, ragged, portentous. I can remember howling. Not crying, but more feral. It was a howl. 

After the funeral, I was relieved and pleased to turn the guns in and see the back of them.

Though he died in 1971, it is only very recently that I have lost the sound of his voice in my head.

If I am not thinking, though, I can still end up patting people.