The Daily Novel

What a load of crap a lot of the sports journalists write these days. (Well, I sympathasise, they are probably asked to produce their copy before they have had time to think.)

All that stuff about how this final would lack a competitive edge because the contestants were sisters.

Have the sports journalists forgotten their own families? The competition between siblings is far fiercer than that between strangers. Although the rules are different. The elder sister in our society is expected to adopt a caring role to her younger sister. Which might have inhibited Venus’s competitive edge. But the younger sister is expected to be grateful for the caring attitude of her elder sister. So Serena also had familial inhibitions. But they fought it out and one of them won. This time.

The sports journalists have complained about a lack of excitement in women’s tennis. They are faced yet again with having to write about the Williams sisters, instead of telling us all about the new stars, and their detailed personal history.

(Blogging note. When I started my blog I intended not to write about things I did not know about. But given the reality of the modern world I know far more about Venus and Serena, then I do about my next door neighbours in Gospel Oak, where I lived for over 40 years.)

So I will go on. This year I have watched Murray, as the UK hope, behaving in a most un-English manner. Scowling at the umpire just as McInroe did, yelling and showing his muscles, as evidence that he had trained for this. If he listens to his coaches next year his biceps may be even bigger.

But that does not mean he will get to the final.

Contrast the Williams sisters. Who have refused to do what numerous coaches and the Wimbledon hierarchy suggests. Work out every day. Let your lives be devoted to becoming tennis champions.

But since the Williams sisters just happen to have been born in the US of A, not in the old Soviet Union, where Russian grunters like Shopalov, were ‘groomed’ to subject their individuality to the greater good of the Soviet state. Not in the new China, where the new totalitarianism is not driven by an urge to get back to the verities of the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. It is driven by the need to feed the starving. And produce products which the west will buy. And for less money than out west.

Of course, I am talking politics, not sport.

You think they’re in different categories?

As McInroe would say, ‘You can’t be serious.’

The Williams sisters not only fought each other in the women’s singles final, they beat all the opposition and won the women’s doubles’ final as well. But this does not get the kind of media coverage that the singles get.

So this is undoubtedly a triumph for American women’s tennis. Which this year is far better than the women of any other nation. And it is also a triumph for the nation which produced them.

And, as part of the audience, I can vouch that they play just as good tennis as Federer and Nadal, who are battling it out on the centre court all day, as I write this blog.

But back to the Williams sisters. They are a credit to America. Not least in that they have resisted the advisers who have told them to train all year. In effect to devote their whole lives to tennis. They insist in continuing to be individuals, despite the pressures.

They win because of the talents they were born with, but above all they win, because they believe they can win. They have a belief in themselves. Where does this come from?

Certainly not from the American culture, where their fellow blacks are much poorer than many of the most boring and inept whites.

In an interview with ABC Television recently one of the Williams sisters said how much she admired Barack Obama and how she hoped he would make it to be President.

But, she said, she could not vote for him, because she was a Jehovah’s Witness, and her religion urged her to stay clear of politics.

But it clearly has given her a strong sense of self, which the dominant American culture does not accord to blacks or coloured’s or Jews, unless they bow down and worship American consumer capitalism. That culture is still unwilling to elect a woman as President, as Hillary Clinton has found in her campaign.

So I have news for George W Bush. The enemy is not the Muslims. Not the Taliban. It is another Christian sect, which supposedly prays to the same God as George W does when he kneels down with British Prime Ministers like Tony Blair. (Not Gordon Brown, because although he worships the same God, he arranges his schedule so that his meetings with individual human beings are restricted to two minutes.)`

There just is not time to kneel down!

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, decried as a cult by the mass media on the rare occasions they write about them, is in fact an international conspiracy far more effective than the CIA, the old KGB and the Papal hierarchy.

Although I have been here in Dorset for less than a year, they tracked me down here. (Not because I told them, as I told the University pension fund, who still write to me in Gospel Oak.)

They have clearly marked my card. Because, even when I am writing an article, I don’t tell them to get lost when they come to my door. I explain to them just why I don’t to follow their God, or indeed any God.

So I am fodder for the flock. I am, after all, prepared to listen to them. But whatever I think of their beliefs, they have helped the Williams’ sisters to have confidence in themselves. Despite the messages which the American culture sends them daily.

Contrast the Church of England in whose doctrines I was schooled. In 2008 they are shooting at their present leader, because they don’t want to have priests who are female or openly gay.

Since I know the Church of England, this is a joke.

They can’t be serious.

Yet they are.

Despite the fact that the priest in my local church here in Charmouth is a woman. And despite the fact that my local neighbourhood church in Gospel Oak has been used by the Church of England for many years as a living to give to gay vicars, because it is in NW3, where even the faithful mostly don’t think that spiritual guidance is determined by sexual promptings. So you do your priestly job in Gospel Oak, without the parishioners being bothered to tell the Daily Mail that, actually, when it comes to going to bed, your preference is for a bloke, not one of the tabloid bimbos.

So my message to the Williams sisters is that you no longer need religion for your sense of self. So I hope you will both follow your own instincts and vote for Obama.

For the sake of the America I love. And for the sake of the planet in 2008 where America is, temporarily, the most powerful nation on earth with by far the biggest armoury of weapons of mass destruction.

Frustrating late morning trying to do something for the daughter of our friends in Bath, who has to write her essays, using a combination of the knuckle of one hand on a conventional keyboard and a voice recognition system called Dragon Naturally Speaking. But when I was there yesterday I found that the Dragon software had been wiped and the wireless keyboard she was using had annoyingly stopped communicating with her computer.

So went into altkeyboards, the user group, which was inspired by August Dvorak, who not only designed a better keyboard layout than QWERTYin the 1930s, he designed Dvorak layouts for people with only one hand and for those with no hands at all, who used a stick, guided by their forehead. The last useful comment on voice recognition was in 2001, which is the Stone Age as far as the new technology is concerned. And I could find nothing useful at all about keyboards using a stick.

So I went into Google. Joy. The first reference was to MIT, which in my book is just about the best university in the world for computers. Sure enough they had a section on Dragon Naturally Speaking, the best in the world for PC’s, but NOT available for the Apple Mac. For the Mac the MIT lot suggested IBM Via Voice.

At that point I decided to give up, because yesterday I was sure that I was staring at a giant Apple Mac screen in front of the bed. Maybe I am suffering from the dread disease of too much early morning blogging.

So I opened the post. Joy. We have won the lottery for a beach hut. So off we went to inspect it, catching the beach superintendent just before he left for lunch. He gave us the key for the hut, which is the one he currently occupies himself. There is ample room for the kids’ buckets and spades. There is even enough room for a card table so that, if I am so minded, I can blog a pebble’s throw away from the ocean.

So my mood soared again. Maybe there are some Gods up there and maybe they do answer prayers.

I was too tired when I got back to do any more Googling. So I decided to take my cue from The Great Book. Ask and it shall be granted, or some such.

But just to hedge my bets I decided to put my question to the Blogosphere before I knelt down to pray.

Surely there must be some human being out there who knows of a viable stick type wireless keyboard and who knows whether Via Voice actually is a better alternative for someone with only one knuckle available to input a three thousand word essay.

The mighty nature God must have been looking over my shoulder while I wrote the previous blog. She drummed on the roof of my bungalow half an hour after I had finished with some of his hail stones. And, as if to demonstrate her, super-human powers, she kept the sun shining, melting the stones as they hit the roof.

Not only that she messed around with my computer connections to try and stop me posting the story to the web. The screen told me that the computer could not find a connection to the internet.

I checked all the connections at the computer. All firm and fast. I got up the carpet to check the connection to the wire that leads to the socket in the hall. Equally firm and fast. I tried a phone in the last link before my computer. It worked OK.

So by now I decided that it must be the wicked Lord of Sky, Rupert Murdoch. The Sky server must be down, breaking under the load of serving the millions of customers who have signed up for its seductive package, thereby swelling the profits of Murdoch plc.

I was about to ring the Sky help line, when I remembered the First Law of Computing.

‘If a program stops working, and you cannot find the cause, turn everything off at the mains. Count from one to ten. Then restart the computer.’

This law has no basis in science that I know of. It derives from ‘trial and error’. Based on my own experience on the humble Amstrad PCW, which was the greatest achievment of Alan Sugar, and was the first personal computer that enabled the poorest Brits, not only to replace their typewriiters but to get on to the net. What a shame he now barks at people on the telly instructing them on how to make as much money as possible.

Many computer techies I have known also subscribe to this law. It seems to work just as well in the age of Vista, Google, and MySpace as it did in the days of CPM and the Amstrad PCW.

So if you get an error message on your computer. Remember the First Law. And remember the God of Trial and Error.

Test your eyesight. Can you spot Portland Bill?

This life-long townie is filled with wonder at his first spring on

Nature is also the Great Painter, who paints a different picture for us every day, no, every hour. Presently the skyscape is crowed with a mixture of dark grey rain clouds and billowing white clouds. The sea is a light green, merging into a band of dark grey in front of Chesil

Only three weeks ago, the Great Conductor, summoned her most powerful player, to perform a mighty crescendo, which rained the car park at Charmouth, with pebbles, driftwood and assorted plastic bottles and boxes. This morning she is playing the slow movement. Yesterday’s chilly and gusty wind has been displaced by a gentle breeze. The sun has already demonstrated that even in Britain in April it can raise the temperature to a level warm enough even for Americans reared in centrally heated homes. But the sun has not had it all his own way. There have been light refreshing showers to quench the thirst of all the players in the orchestra as they emerge from hibernation.

On mornings like this I can understand why people like Tony Blair and George W Bush and all those fundamentalist Muslims, believe that all these wonders must have been created and orchestrated by an all powerful God or Allah. And I lose patience with Richard Dawkins, who I think gets near to making science into an all powerful God.

I wish Dawkins would take more account of the kind of truths discovered by great artists and poets.

I am content with William Wordsworth who urged us all to get out and let nature be our teacher. That leads me to respect the findings of Charles Darwin and his successors, including Richard Dawkins. How could I not respect their findings, because the evidence for those findings is all there in the fossils of Charmouth

But I wish Dawkins and his ilk had more respect for the things in nature, and in human nature, which are not yet explained by science.

It is highly unlikely that I would ever have read The Flower Arranger at All Saints had it not been for the fact that this murder mystery was written by Lis Howell, who is a colleague of mine in the journalism department at City University. I prefer my flowers to be left in the garden. And I am not in the least bit interested in those ladies who spend hours cutting them up and creating floral displays to lighten the gloom of Britain’s Gothic churches.

The All Saints church I knew as a boy which stood at the end of All Saints Road, Wolverhampton, was even gloomier than the nineteenth century terraced house in which my grandparents lived and in which my father grew up. I was taken there occasionally by the women folk in the family. Reluctantly because my Gods resided at Molineux. And I worshiped them on Saturdays, when my grandfather and I made regular pilgrimages of a few hundred yards to the terrace behind the goal facing the cow shed end.

Reading the first few chapters reminded me of the feelings of being dragged off to the Church of England services of my youth whose dominant characteristic was boring, boring, boring. Each of the short chapters is headed by a quotation from the Book of Common Prayer, which still stands on my bookshelves, though it has not been opened for at least forty years. As I read them I felt I was being preached at. And by the time I got to Chapter 35 and read:

Be ye sure that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves.

I knew where I stood. My own conviction is that man did indeed invent God.

But by Chapter 35 I was hooked. And reading on with mounting excitement to discover who had murdered the flower arranger. And whether it was to do with the bitter dispute between the new young happy clappy vicar of All Saints and his older parishioners or to do with the hidden passions and betrayals in the love lives of the villagers from Tarnfield in Northumberland, where many of the parishioners were related to each other. Most of them rarely went any further afield than Newcastle.

The book is written from the point of view of Suzy Spencer, who is a television producer (like the author) and who is stranded in Tarnfield with two young children. Because her husband has run off with his younger personal assistant, which happens all the time in the real world of television. Suzy frequently explodes at the boring old farts she finds in the village.

But the story which unfolds is not at all boring. And it is not just a cracking good whodunit, because there are several interwoven themes. The villagers are not at all the stereotyped figures you think when you first meet them. And Suzy Spencer changes during the course of the book. She sees the villagers and church through the spectacles of journalistic scepticism but she is also attracted by the certainties of belief. So the reader is turning the pages ever more rapidly to discover what will happen in her life. Will she turn her back on the boring old farts and move back to town? Or will she find happiness in Tarnfield?

To write more would spoil it for you.

The Flower Arranger at All Saints is published by Constable. Price £18.99.

One of the things I learnt when I was looking into theories like Jung’s sychronicity is that co-incidence often happens. The statisticians have proved it with massive computer models based on large sample studies. But when they happen to you it is still pretty mind-boggling. Even the sceptical begin to wonder whether there is an Unseen Hand which is controlling our lives, or a President of the Immortals who is having his sport with vulnerable human beings like Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the Durbervilles.

Last night we went out to dinner to a neighbour up the street. It was by way of a celebration of her engagement to a jovial Spaniard. The only other guest was a woman called Jane, who, as it happens is teaching little Dulcie in the nursery over on the Holloway Road. Jane is also tying the knot next weekend (marriage must be back in fashion). She is marrying a bloke called Michael in Lichfield, which was the seat of the bishopric of my youth, which included Wolverhampton. It was the Bishop of Lichfield who confirmed me about sixty years ago, when my aunt hoped that I would enter the church and channel my talkativeness into weekly sermons.

They are getting married in Lichfield because Michael is a Wolverhampton lad. He came from the Claregate area where Billy Wright, perhaps the best player ever in the long history of Wolverhampton Wanderers, lived in my youth. I used to go round reguarly on a Sunday afternoon, ostensibly to see an aunt who lived there but really in the hope of getting a glimpse of my blonde god, whose head bobbed above all the other heads, although he was not a tall man. Michael had no idea that Billy Wright had once lived there. By the time Michael grew up Billy Wright had moved south to manage Arsenal and marry one of the Beverley sisters. He was the David Beckham of his day.

Michael did not go to the Wolverhampton Municipal Grammar School like me, because by the time he grew up it had been abolished. He went to a school that had not even been invented in my youth. Jane then discovered that my wife, like her, had been brought up in Watford, and that they had gone to the same school. Watford Grammar School for girls has been going for just over 400 years and shows no sign of being closed down, or even forced to take boys as well as girls. Incredibly,  given the age gap, they had been taught by several of the same teachers. But then teachers tend to stay around a long time at Watford Grammar rather than moving every few years to up their salaries.

Since both Wolvehampton and Watford a quite big towns it is statistically probable that there are other Wolverhampton boys who have married Watford girls. And so the fact that two such couples met in Gospel Oak on Saturday night is probably just co-incidence. But next weekend when I am down in Dorset I shall be gazing up at the stormy clouds over Egdon Heath and wondering whether there is a chance that the statisticians  have got it wrong. Perhaps there is someone up there who is organising such encounters and listening to the conversations they provoke around  Saturday night dinner tables.

It’s late but I did not want to go to bed without adding something to my previous post. Because I did not disclose my own experience of the Alexander technique. I was first recommended to try it when I was in my late thirties, by which time I had developed a slight stoop, which is one reason why friends recommended it to me.

I had two series of lessons, one from a pure Alexander disciple and one from a teacher who combined the Alexander technique with Tai Chi exercises. Both experiences gave me a better understanding about how my own mind/body system worked. Both of my teachers were good. But in both experiences, which were a few years apart, I did not keep up the exercises, for more than a month or two, after the lessons ended.

Tai Chi is something that I see other people doing under a special tree on the heath, which is supposed to have special mystical properties. Alexander is an approach which I still use from time to time in my daily life. Which was an important part of Alexander’s teaching. It was not the exercises that were crucial to Alexander, but developing the awareness of how your bodily postures affected your breathing and your emotional reactions to threats or crisises. So I still check what is happening to my body when in crisis.
Alexander set out to cure his own stutter, not to cure ‘old women’s stoop’. He was more concerned to correct the kind of ramrod stiff back upright posture, instilled in many men of his generation by military or cadet training.

So the first lessons urged you NOT to try and stand up straight. But to allow the teacher to ease the tensions in your neck and arrange your head in it’s natural position. While you concentrated on an image of your head floating upwards to its natural elevation.  The lessons did help to reduce my stoop.

It is the only in the last year or two that my stoop has become worse, and that probably sit do with the fact that I have stopped teaching and am doing all the work I do sitting at my desk, rather than standing before a class.

So, if I am not too tired when I finish this, I shall do an Alexander favourite. Walk around the room balancing Alexander’s slim book, called ‘The Resurection of the Body’ on my head.

Good Night.

Just read a story on The Guardian website, by Joan Bakewell, who used to be known as the thinking man’s crumpet to people of my generation. She is, if my memory is still in working order, almost exactly the same age as me. I remember her fondly, not so much for her looks, but for the religious programme she did, which made a serious attempt to look at a variety of religions from a number of different angles. Her programmes were very thoughtful and had much of interest to believers and sceptics.

So I clicked on her story, entitled ‘Fit for my age’, with expectations that it would convey a thougtful message useful to me. As I read it I got quite a different reaction. The ‘thinking’ in it, was of a kind working class yobos like me used to call ‘half-baked’ but her judgment, based on her evident ability to learn from her actual experiences, rather than be dominated by all those intellectuals who conveyed their thoughts to her, means that she has learnt to base her actions, on on results she has experienced not on theories she was told about, mostly by men.

The Guardian sub-editor, in the strap, asserts that we all need more exercise, not less, as we get older, but that Joan Bakewell has found that as we get older you also have to pace yourself and recognise your own limitations.

Bakewell’s story tells of two forms of ‘exercise’ which she took up in later life. When she was in her late 50s, she realised that although she was much fitter than most, she was developing ‘old woman’s stoop’. Not good box office for a television presenter. So she tried the Alexander technique, which many of my younger readers may not have heard of. She writes of it very positively. She reports it is not just exercises but rather:

It’s more like a way of learning how your body works and educating it to minimise the tensions that a lifetime’s bad habits have built up.

What she learnt from Alexander felt restful and right. She notices the difference when she fails to do the exercises, she feels ‘lumpy and wrong’.

But it was not enough for Bakewell, and when she was visiting one of those health farms she got hooked on the currently fashionable Pilates exercises. She describes in detail some of the benefits they brought her, but in her final paragraph she expresses, very politely, some scepticism about the Pilates doctrine urging people to push their bodies to the limits.

So what she actually does now, is avoid the treadmill of pushing herself to the limits, but combining her bits of Alexander and her bits of Pilates, with walking in the country, the gentle pleasures of which she has discovered late in life.

I don’t know anything about Pilates, apart from what I have heard at parties, but I am quite sure that F. E. Alexander, would have applauded what she is doing now, joined her in her country walks and told her many interesting things. And probably he would have cautioned her that not all of the Pilates approach is compatible with Alexander.
Alexander was an Australian, who liked to figure out things for himself. He wanted to become an actor, but he had a dreadful stutter, which none of the medics could cure. So he devised the Alexander technique to cure his own stutter, which it did. He figured out that it was all to do with breathing, and that there was a human tendency to hold the breath, when under the tension of performing. His exercises are still used in many drama and singing schools today.

But in the 1930s the Alexander technique became very fashionable in the late thirties London for many purposes. Stafford Cripps was one of it’s followers, and it no doubt helped him, in feeling easier in his body and mind, while he was, as Labour’s post-war Chancellor of the Exchequer, continuing to ration the pleasures of the multitude (like sweets for the boy who now writes The Daily Novel). We all suffered so that the our factories could be rebuilt and our exports increased.

Now, if I was walking side by side with Bakewell on the Cotswold Way (which I can still manage) I would be telling her about the Bob Jones notions. Not exactly wisdom, but based on actual experience and things I have read in rather good books, including some by scientists.

I might tell her that it is not only physical exercise that ‘get’s oxygen into the body, keeps the circulation going’ and ‘exercises the heart muscles’. It is also analytical thinking and experiencing emotions. The brain is also part of the body and it works in a mysterious way. The latest research shows that it does not work in the way most scientists thought it worked, even as recently as twenty years ago.

So the message, dear Joan, is that you are getting quite a lot of exercise while writing your articles for The Guardian, which I hope you will keep up. Because you have earned a Daily Novel gong by disclosing your own personal experience and telling the readers how it has affected the opinions which you express.

Carry on writing, enjoy the walking, but go easy on the hills.

A Daily Novel gong for Andrew Pierce of The Daily Telegraph for his article this morning on the battle over whether the Catholic adoption agencies should have a special exemption from the equalities legislation. Because he discloses the intimate details of his own life, which is still pretty unusual amongst mainstream male British journalists. I am all for transparency by journalists, particularly when dealing with issues like this whiich raises very powerful feelings and prejudices on both sides of the debate. The most poignant paragraph is this one:

Sadly, I have no memories of life in Nazareth House (the Catholic orphanage in which he lived until the age of two). Nor do I remember Margaret Connolly (his birth mother), who was encouraged by the nuns to visit the son she loved, but could not cope as a single parent in the harsh moral climate of the 1960s.

His article did leave me curious to know more, however. Even the Jesuits say they need to have a child til the age of seven in order to guarantee a lifelong allegiance to the Pope. Was Pierce converted in his later life? Or were this adoptive parents Catholic?

The article was a salutary reminder to me, that my own position on Catholicism and gays is still influenced by the accidents of my personal biography, despite the efforts of my reasoning mind.

My own views on Catholicism are still influenced by my Sundays in the church of my youth, which went through four changes off vicar, which took it from a plain near Methodist place of worship to an Anglo-Catholicism, with all the pomp and circumstance and incense that surrounds the Pope. My father hated the change, because the important thing for him, as self-educated working class, was to think things out for yourself. And to him Catholicism was the antithesis of that.

My views on homosexuality took much longer to form. I truly cannot remember ever have met a homosexual until I was in my early twenties. (Which shows something about my own incredible naivity as well as the taboos of the times.) For a long time I thought that homosexuality was a disease you caught from the English upper middle classes if you got sent to public school.

My awakening came around 1960 when an American made a pass at me in the shower when we weekending in a large house in New Jersey. He was overcome with remorse when he found I was not gay and we became firm friends. It was from him that I got some notion of how it felt to be gay, and the difficulties it produced when growing up in a society which saw homosexuality as either bad, mad or ‘the English disease’.

Since I have been writing this blog co-incidences seem to be happening to me all the time. So much so that I am beginning to think that God might actually exist. And that he might be running my life.

Take this morning, for instance.

I turned on my green-friendly wind-up radio in the bedroom, hoping to listen to Radio Four. Some unseen hand had moved the pointer to a pop station. I fiddled around. Radio Four seemed to have disappeared. So I settled for the World Service. The first item I heard was the breaking news of the arrest of a suspect for the murder of Hrant Dink, the Armenian journalist, about which I had been thinking of blogging on.

When I eventually got down to the breakfast table my wife was reading Page 13 of The Observer, which contained an article by Jasper Gerard, an ex-City University journalism student. I knew that, but what I did not know until I read the article, was that he was an Armenian.

After breakfast I sat down to write my blog. The very instant I was typing in the word ‘boss’ my wife appeared in the room. That struck me as funny because that is what I call her for all the obvious reasons. (She runs the house and frequently tells me what to do, like put on a clean shirt when I am off to mix with the great and good.)

She told me we must go instantly to my daughter’s house where we were expected for morning coffee. As we drove up Denis Campbell appeared at the door bearing his baby child. Like Gerard, Campbell is both an Observer journalist and an ex-City University journalism student (class of 1991). Campbell told me he had just been reading a hatchet job on Gerard in the Private Eye. So he ran upstairs and gave it to me.

When I told my daughter, Holly, about this she said sceptically; ‘Dad, Denis is always coming out of his front door.’ So I better leave aside matters of divine intervention and concern myself with things I really know about like journalism and Private Eye.

The Gerard article is in their Hackwatch slot in issue number 1175. I could not find it on their web site, so if you want to read it you have to buy the printed version. It is a hatchet job par excellence.

The thrust of the article is that Gerard, far from being a ‘brilliant new columnist’ is a ham-fisted half-wit who’d be more at home on the Daily Express.’ They see it as an example of the tabloidisation of The Observer; ‘Amongst Observer readers, fears grow that “Jasper Gerard” is the new pseudonym of Gerry Bushell.’

To be fair to Private Eye Gerard does occasionally let his sense of humour run away with him, so that he becomes downright offensive. There is one quote in their article, which I remembered being disgusted by at the time I read it. After making the point that the Suffolk murder victims were particularly vulnerable because they were drug addicts Gerard wrote that the solution was to stop the Afghans growing poppies and then he added; ‘if farmers still sow fields of poison, bomb the buggers’.

On the other hand, I was not all shocked, when Gerard referred to Jordan’s breasts, ‘which have, by their very high standards, not had enough exposure this year.’ And I thought Gerard’s satirical article about Christmas was very funny. He said it was dead, ‘killed by us, nailed on the cross. Brent Cross.’ Later in that article he wrote:

‘The jury might be out on Christ, but you don’t need to be a wise man to see Christmas has risen again.’

Not a few Christians I know would not have been offended by this. Most would have agreed with the salient point that commercialisation has killed the Christian message. We have made shopping malls like Brent Cross into the temples of our age. Where the multitude are wooed by their favourite Christmas carols as the tills ring up the takings.

I think Ruth Gledhill, the Religion correspondent of The Times, probably shocks more Christians than Gerard does. Remember her article about the fatness of our Archbishop? Look at her latest story on Jade’s eviction and you will see what I mean. She is sometimes deliberately populist and provocative. But her long and mostly serious articles are read by far more people than any other Times blogger. And the God Slot is not exactly the most read section in newspapers.

In conclusion, Gerard is not that different to many of the other young humourous writers in the Guardian/Observer camp. They occasionally offend me by using words like ‘bollocks’ which I cannot write without hesitating. That is a generational thing. But I would rather be provoked and shocked than bored.