The Daily Novel

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.

According to BBC World Service a young Turk has just been arrested for the murder of the Armenian journalist. Hrant Dink was shot for daring to remind the Turkish public of the massacre of a million Armenians over 80 years ago. It adds to the growing number of journalists killed for trying to do a half-way decent job of reporting what is happening in the world. Including many killed by friendly and unfriendly fire in Iraq.
I learnt about the savage treatment of Armenians, not from books, but from two Armenians I worked with in the 1980s. One was a student, Haro Chakmakjian (class of 1982), who did his project on this subject. The other was Gerard Mansell, with whom I used to have long dinners up the hill in Hampstead. Mansell knew the story, not only because he was Armenian but because he spent most of his working life with the BBC World Service, eventually ending up as the boss. He was born during the Second World War, and grew up while these atrocities were happening. (Wikipedia gives a good potted history of the Armenians.)
I started to write this story in my head in bed. But over breakfast I came across the column in The Observer today written by another ex-City journalism student, Jasper Gerard (class of 1991). He is Armenian so I will let him take up the story, which is headed, ‘We must never forget Turkey’s ‘first solution’. This is his intro:

My wife is only alive because her great-grandmother hid in a laundry basket, peeking through slats as troops bayoneted the rest of her family to death. She is crying upstairs as I write because history stubbornly refuses to move on.

He goes on to make several points. Turkey has not apologised for this genocide. Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s greatest novelist, was recently prosecuted for criticising the regime. Criticism of Turkey is muted in Britain and America because we need the support of moderate Muslim states in the war against terror. He then writes:

To qualify, this is not all about religion, about Muslims (Turks) versus Christians (Armenians): nationalism as much as religion prevents Turkey uttering the fearful ’sorry’. But if Armenians weren’t Christian, would Turkey have refused for so long? And would the West have been quite so squeamish about pressuring Ankara?

Lower down he reminds readers that Winston Churchill once described the treatment of the Armenians as a ‘holocaust’.

These are all very serious points. My own considered viewpoint is that the treatment of the Armenians, by many countries, including countries in the old Soviet bloc, ranks as a series of crimes against a minority group, which is almost as awful as the treatment of the Jews. Like the Jews, Armenians have frequently been forced to flee their native country because of persection. And like the Jews they have developed a talent for international business and trading, turning to advantage the fact that their extended families are scattered all around the globe.

So I decided to award Gerard one of the much coveted dailynovel awards for journalism I like. Because of the serious points made. Because of his intro, which I found very moving, and which fits in with my own conviction that the personal is political and that journalists should disclose more of their personal lives, so that readers know more about what is causing them to write the things they do.

And for a third reason. I like the fact that he dares to mix humour with serious matters. Not everyone likes that. Just now I discovered that the current issue of Private Eye has done a hatchet job on him. But that is best told in a separate article which I will write later today.

It is not surprising the national newspapers got the name of my neighbourhood wrong yesterday and again today. Not only is it on the fringe of two quite different areas but, legally, it has several names. Belsize Park, which is what the national newspapers called it, is plain wrong. The local paper, the Ham&High, was legally correct in calling it Kentish Town but the name the locals use is Gospel Oak. Just why is an interesting story and reveals something about what constitutes a neighbourhood in London, which is really a collection of urban villages huddled together in close proximity.

As far as the postman is concerned the place where two-year old Saurau Shai was killed by a falling wall on Thursday is Kentish Town, post code NW5. My house, one-hundred yards north, on the other side of Mansfield Road, is in Hampstead, post code NW3. But the people who live on both sides of the road talk about their neighbourhood as Gospel Oak, which does not exist as a postal area.

Gospel Oak is a ward, with clearly defined geographical boundaries, for local and parliamentary elections. Which means that I vote at Gospel Oak School along with the residents of the vast council estates south of Mansfield Road. When I moved here in 1976 Gospel Oak Ward was part of the rock solid Labour St Pancras North parliamentary constituency. The local MP, Jock Stallard, was authentic working class. He regularly trounced the Conservative candidate, old Etonian Oliver Letwin, who is one of the inner core of the new Conservative Party leader, David Cameron.

Gospel Oak was switched from St Pancras North to Hampstead in the last re-defining of parliamentary constituencies, designed to even up the numbers of voters in each constituency. It is usually Labour, and the switch helped the votes of the sitting member for Hampstead, Labour’s Glenda Jackson. Hampstead usually votes Conservative. Jackson was an inspired choice for Labour, because her left-wing views were welcomed by the trendy middle class leftists living alongside the bankers up the hill. And, of course, lovers of the theatre of all classes were pleased to have a famous and articulate actor as their local MP.

(Off the subject, but interesting. At the last local election the Conservatives swept Labour from power in Gospel Oak on the crest of anti-Blair feeling, which crossed the class divide. The Conservatives, crafty as ever, chose one of the councillors from the street next to me and another living in the heart of the council estate across Mansfield Road.)

Back to geography.

The vast collection of council blocks stretching from Mansfield Road towards Camden Town in the south and Kentish Town in the west, are not a legal entity. But they are an informal neighbourhood. The district housing office, which deals with the problems of many residents, is called Gospel Oak and has its own on-line newsletter, run by the Council.

My own neighbourhood I would define as the streets of terraced houses wedged in between Mansfield Road and the southern part of Hampstead Heath, which contains the running track and Parliament Hill, where the beacons would have been lit had Napoleon invaded Britain in the days when we really did hate the French. This area has no legal status. But it does have a residents’ association and its own web site, which is updated mostly just after the annual street party.

This area is mixed in political and class terms. Some houses are owner occupied. Others are owned by the Council or by housing associations. These houses were built for rent by speculative builders in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. The ideal target resident was the bank clerk working in the city or the West End. There was excellent transport from the new North London Railway from Gospel Oak station and from the trams which follow the route of the present 24 bus, which takes you to Trafalgar Square, the West End shops and the Houses of Parliament. (Michael Foot was often photographed getting on to it in his duffle coat, when he was leader of the Labour Party and trying, not very successfully, to stop the headlong rush into de-regulation, when the House of Commons was dominated by Margaret Thatcher.)

Neighbourhoods are defined by all sorts of informal contacts. The newspapers are not exactly wrong in defining a neighbourhood by its tube station, which is still the quickest and most frequent public transport in London. But when people in Gospel Oak use the tube they divide between those who walk to Belsize Park and those who walk to Kentish Town, both ten to fifteen minutes walk away.

So many of them hop on the bus instead. Only a few use the North London line. Because a few years ago the managers decided to close the stop at Broad Street station, which gave easy access to those who work in the City of London. In the interests of efficiency and profit!

Oh, in case you’re wondering, where did the name come from? That goes back to the days when neighbourhoods were often defined by the parish and social meetings at the parish church. Allegedly there was an oak tree on the site of Gospel Oak railway station, where the parishioners stopped in the annual ceremony of beating the bounds of the parish.

Today there is no Gospel Oak Church. But there is a Gospel Oak Methodist Chapel, which is the nearest place to my house where I can pray to the Christian God.

(This post also answers the points made by Matt in a comment to my article yesterday. And just to make it clear, I like it just as much as he does.)

Another correction. As Ana has pointed out I made a dreadful blunder in my article about Ruth Kelly by writing that Opus Dei was run by the Jesuits. As the Wikipedia article will tell you it was founded by a Spanish Roman Catholic priest as a result of a vision he had. Not characteristic Jesuit behaviour. And the Opus Dei was, in fact, criticised by a leading Jesuit.

There is no excuse because I have read articles before explaining its origins but when I first heard about it I assumed it was a Jesuit creation. That is because that during one of the defining moments in my life, lying in a hospital bed for months aged 19, I was regularly visited by a Jesuit priest. I was impressed by his intellect, by his rigourous seven year training, and above all by his psychological skills. In later life I had several friends who had been educated at Jesuit schools, who re-inforced my view, that when it came to to winning intelligent converts, the Jesuits were second to none. The combination of the highly trained rational mind, with their Machievelian skills in dealing with people and politics is difficult to resist.

By comparison Opus Dei is a crude and amateurish cult.

Ruth Kelley is relegated to the inside pages, but she will be even less pleased than she was yesterday when her Press Officer puts the cuttings on her desk.

The Sun has been talking to her constituency workers and thinks she is in danger of losing her seat. Here is the essence of the story.

MINISTER Ruth Kelly faces losing her seat as an MP in a backlash over her son’s private education.

The Communities Secretary’s decision to send her boy to a posh school has disgusted Labour members in her Lancashire constituency.

And it has damaged her hopes of being parachuted into a neighbouring safe seat before the next election.

Ms Kelly had hoped to move from marginal Bolton West — where her wafer-thin majority is under threat from the Tories — to Bolton South East, which has a rock-solid lead of 11,000.

But party workers angered by her “betrayal” of socialist principles have vowed to block the move.

Retiring Bolton South East MP Brian Iddon was said to be “bitterly dismayed” at her sending her dyslexic son to a £15,000-a-year boarding school in Oxfordshire.

The Times has an article by one of its leading columnists, Alice Miles, arguing that Kelly should have resigned her ministerial post. The 18 reader comments are split roughly half and half for and against what Miles wrote.

Taken together these two articles demonstrate that Murdoch papers do not always follow their master’s voice. According to everything I hear Murdoch is still very friendly towards Blair and he has, of course, sympathy with that rare species amongst the British ruling elite, the devout Christian.

More interesting is how Downing Street will react.

They will also have to take on board much the most devastating article on the subject by Simon Jenkins, in today’s Guardian. Jenkins makes the link between Kelly’s old job as Education Secretary with her present role as minister for communities. This is his final paragraph, which is the most elegant hatchet job I have seen so far this week.

Ruth Kelly’s freedom to decide about her children is absolute. Her wealth confers on her a choice that cannot realistically be extended to all. But she is also minister for “communities” who removed schools from local control and deluged them with central targets and directives. She told cities and counties that private financiers and management teams could run education better than they could. She destabilised every staff room and blighted every headteacher with bureaucracy. Now she parades as minister for “communities” while declaring her lack of faith in their chief institution. That is the real charge against her.

The Guardian headline writer summed it up well.

Introducing the minister of no faith in communities

What is even more interesting are the comments, of which there were about one hundred, when I looked at 2 PM. Some of them very long indeed. As far as I could guess from a quick read, they were equally balanced between praise and detailed arguments proving Jenkins to be writing rubbish. And not a few of the readers disclosed that they were sending their own children to private schools.

As those who read my blogs yesterday I think Kelly should have resigned. And so naturally I do not agree that this is a case of journalists hounding a minister. What it does show is that education is a hugely divisive issue. Not a few journalists have done the same as Kelly. But there are just as many have resisted that option, not because they were unwilling to pick up the financial burden, but because of a belief in supporting the state system, and a wish that their children be schooled where rich and poor kids were together, rather than places only open to the rich.

This blog is motivated by the demo outside the House of Commons tonight by factions of Christian believers, who are uncomfortable with the proposed legislation making discrimination against gays illegal.

And it would not have been written unless I had read, earlier this evening, the blog on it, by Ruth Gledhill, the religion reporter for The Times. Who is a declared Christian. But who also blogs against, the current fashions amongst some Christians, to persectute gays, which I am reasonably sure Jesus Christ, would not have gone along with. (Although, Paul, who took the Christian message to Rome, did have some problems with gays.)

My present position arises from thinking and scholarship. But it is also strongly influenced by my own defining experience in life, which was when I nearly died at the age of 19 from tubercular meningitis in 1954.

My life was saved then by a combination of science and religion. This is a fact. Which I will demonstrate.

Suffering from the most dreadful headaches I went to see the university doctor. He told me that I should go back to my digs and take some aspirins. I told him that these were no ordinary headaches. But he continued in his assertion, that there was nothing to worry about. He would not listen to what I had to say.

Happily, I did not even go back to my digs. I went straight back home, where my mother called in her doctor, who, as it happens, was a Quaker. She examined me as a doctor, at 7 PM on a Friday evening, and conjectured that I might have something serious.

So she did not knock off for the weekend. She got in touch with a local consulatant, and came back to see me, three times on Saturday, when most doctors, then and now, were playing golf, and checked on my symtoms. She was still working on Sunday, when she came again and ordered the ambulance which took me to hospital and saved my life. Her behaviour was dictated not by her profession as a doctor, but by her Christian belief.
This blog would not be written if it were not for the behaviour of one doctor, who happened to be a Christian, and followed her beliefs.

But, what is equally true, this blog would not have been written, were it not for science. Because the disease from which I was suffering, tubercular meningitis, was fatal, until two new drugs were discovered by science. One was penincillin, which, as you all know , was discovered in the 1930s, by Fleming. The other, which was equally important to my condition, was Izonasid. That was discovered by an obscure Hungarian scientist, and, at the time I became ill, had only been widely used in the United States.

It was the drugs which saved my life. But if it had not been for the Christian doctor of my mother, I would have died in my digs, although the drugs to save me had already been invented.

Fast forward, to the present, where nearly all my Oxbridge friends are totally sceptical of religion, and those who still believe. They know, which the people demonstarting at Parliament tonight, do not know, that many Roman Catholic priests, and Church of England priests, were gay. And part of the reason they obeyed God’s calling, was that it offered them a way of doing something in life which sublimated their sexual urges. Wth some of them, as we all now know, the sexual urges were so strong, that they seduced the choir boys.

My own experience is rather different. While, I like them, have realised that some of my CofE vicars were gay, they did not ‘interfere’ with me, when I was a child. To put it bluntly, in tabloid press language, none of them tried to pull my trousers down.

But when I was in risk of my life, in 1954, flat on my back and restricted to half an hour a day visiting hours, I spent a lot of time talking with priests, who had the right to visit me at any time of day and stay as long as they liked.

My bedside visits were blessed by four men of the cloth. The one I wanted was the Methodist, because in the year before my illness, I had broken away from the Church of England, where spiritual matters were not on the agenda. But he proved the least helpful to me in my illness. He never moved from the foot of the bed, from which position he delivered, quite eloquent sermons.

I was also regularly visited by two members of the Church of England, which visits were asked for by my mother’s eldest sister, who was a pillor of the main church in Wolverhampton. The senior of them was called Austen. I can still see his face as I write now, but I cannot remember a word of what he said. Because, he never said anything which meant anything to me. He was simply doing his duty of sick bed visiting.

The number two CofE man, Waterhouse,  was quite different. He was dominated by his heart. He blushed scarlet whenever a pretty nurse passed the bed. He was clearly having difficiulty with his sexual urges. But he at least realised that sick men in bed want to talk, so he talked to me about one of our then mutual passions, which was cricket.

The only priest who in any sense answered my real needs at that time in 1954 when I was flat on my back for four months, knowing that I had a disease which killed people, but not knowing whether I would recover, because, as the registrars, though not the consultants, told me, I was an experimental case. They were doing their best, but they were not sure whether what they were doing would save my life. And they were equally not sure, whether my brain, which had been affected by the meningitis, would make a full recorery. So I might live, but I might live as person with a brain which was not the same as the one which had enabled me to pass my exams and get into university.

My fourth visitor was the only uninivited one. He was a Roman Catholic priest, who was regularly in the ward visiting the Wolverhampton immigrants. Not West Indian black. Nor Pakistanit Muslim. But Irish Catholic, who had come into Wolverhampton in large numbers, when the motor industry needed unskilled labour to man the production lines.

He was the only priest who answered my needs. And oddly I cannot remember his name. Although I can tell you the two CoE vicars were called Austen and Waterhouse.

The RC priest did not stay at the foot of the bed. He came alongside and held my hand. So that all the conversations I had with him were made with this very physical and emotional connection. During which, I quizzed him about his background. And discovered that his seven years training had been at the feet of the Jesuits.

But the most important thing is that he listened to what I was saying and responded to it. I was grateful to him then. And I am grateful to him now.

Nevertheless, he was, in a sense, seducing me, when I was in a very vulnerable position. Not in a physical sense. Despite the physical contact, which was unusual according to the norms of the times, he was not making sexual advances. He was responding to the very human needs of someone who thought he might be dying.

I am grateful to him, because he helped to save my life, in the sense that even though I was recovering from my physical illness, I might have died of boredom, because I like to spend my days talking to people about ideas, and, life flat on your back for four months, is not any life at all, when you are 17. You do want to get up and fling the women on to the bed, however immoral that may be. And, if you are me, you do want to talk about ideas.
But I do think, in retrospect, that the Jesuit was trying to seduce my mind.

And I do think that the armies of the Jesuits are seducing the minds of Ruth Kelly, Cherie Blair and her husband. The press corps don’t know what Tony is going to do, after being Prime Minister. Maybe going to work for Rupert Murdoch, and looknig after the family budget. Maybe going for a great and good job, like Clinton and Carter, and therefore getting a decent write up by the historians. But most of them think he is going to declare himeself a Roman Catholic.

Yet another convert to the gob-smacking excellence of the Jesuits, who are trained intellectually to the equal of Oxbridge, but emotionally far beyond. Tony Blair learnt his touchy feeling qualitiies instinctively (or while he was a band leader playing guitar) but the Jesuits teach it, as a matter of policy.

And the Jesuits, now, as in the time of Galileo, do not govern their behaviour according to what science has proven to be true. And they are still very good at adapting to the current fashions, whatever they may be.

The treatment of the Kelly story by different newspapers is interesting. The Times, for instance, downplays the story. Apart from a long blog by Religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill. Gledhill gives a ringing defence of Kelly, and argues that the case that it demonstrates the inadequacies of state education compared with private education. But she ends with this extraordinary paragraph.

Incidentally, how did this story get out? It wasn’t a disgruntled councillor in Tower Hamlets, we know that. The person who sold it to a newspaper, according to informed newsroom gossip, got £15,000. And the school’s fees are … £15,000. Now, there’s a coincidence!

Is she suggesting that one of Kelly’s friends leaked the story and passed on the money to Kelly? Which newspaper paid the money? Was it the Mail who got the original story? Or the Daily Mirror which first named Ruth Kelly as the minister involved?

We should be told.

By co-incidence the rows over Ruth Kelly’s decision to send her dyslexic son to a £15,000 a year private boarding school and the prime minister’s extraordinary interview with Sky television last night, in which he disregarded all the scientific evidence about climate change, have happened together.

But taken together they demonstrate very clearly that it is Blairism that must go. Not just the Prime Minister. The huge successes of Blairism have led to the oldest problem in the world. The inner circle have become arrogant and self-deluded. Their success has gone to their head.

The prime minister was asked on television about whether he was ready to give up his long distance holiday flights in the interests of climate change. His answer was that he was doing his bit by recycling his rubbish and that it was not reasonable to ask people to give up their sunny foreign holidays. He even used the fact that China was causing more pollution than Britain as an excuse for his attitude.

That totally ignores the evidence that the worldwide growth in air transport is the most important factor in global warming. If it is going to be reversed the habits not only of the Blair family, and the millions of not very well off Brits taking their cheap holiday flights to Spain, which have to change. It is the habits of most of the relatively affluent human beings on earth. We need fewer flights starting now to tackle the problem.

This arrogance and self delusion is also behind the Kelly row. This has not become clear yet because of the Downing Street spin. This has produced a wave of public sympathy for the mother who is doing her best for her disadvantaged child.

That is not the issue.

There are several schools in Ruth Kelly’s area, Tower Hamlets, which provide specialised teaching to help dyslexics. But her son has been in one of the state schools which do not have specialist teachers. Her children are in this school because it is a Roman Catholic School, and Kelly like Blair’s wife (and increasingly Blair himself) is a Roman Catholic. Kelly is not only a Roman Catholic. She is a supporter of Opus Dei, which is an elite organisation run by the Jesuits, which wants to secure the whole planet for the Roman Catholic God.

Downing Street reportedly moved Ruth Kelly from her job as Education Secretary to a new role when she was considering going private with her son’s schooling because such a decision would have been controversial for an Educational Secretary.

But consider the responsibilities of her new role. Just look at the Government’s own web site.

This is what Kelly is supposed to be doing in her job as minister:

Our role is to build the capacity of communities to shape and protect their own future. We want to see:

• empowered and confident communities, with higher levels of democratic participation and citizen engagement
• working together to offer more choice and quality in public services

That means working for local facilities for all dyslexic children in the neighbourhood. Not opting out by sending children to posh boarding schools which only the rich can afford.

There is another issue about dyslexic children, which Ruth Kelly is not addressing. What dyslexic children need is lots of individual attention. Teachers are not enough. They need much more attention than most children by the parents as well. The unpleasant truth is that by sending her disadvantaged child to boarding school she is depriving him of this parental support.

Far better for him to go to a non-Catholic boarding school. Then she can spend her time helping him with his dyslexia by taking him through the Bible, Roman Catholic edition, page by page. Thus fulfilling her own wish to bring him up a Roman Catholic as well as helping him cope with his disability.

The link between the Blair and Kelly rows is Roman Catholicism and I have just read Polly Toynbee’s article in this morning’s Guardian. She writes:

Religion may appeal to some on the left yearning for moral certainty in a complicated world.

She is actually writing about the homophobia. But the quote is just as fitting for this topic. Both Blair and Kelly seem to think that only religious schools can inculcate moral attitudes in their children.

(The most detailed story containing the facts about the Kelly schools is in this morning’s Daily Mail. The best detailed coverage of Blair and climate change is in The Guardian and the Daily Telegraph.)

Well, it is in the British media and amongst the British intelligensia, which was never very keen on it in any case. But it is of course alive and well in California, which was where it started. Yesterday I happened on a blog by an Australian woman who is living near Telegraph Hill. Her blog is a creative mix of the personal, the political and the spiritual. And her postings mix words with pictures, many of which she takes herself.

Some of her pictures of the local sunsets reminded me of one evening in San Francisco, when I walked up Telegraph Hill one evening, pausing to look back at the view behind me of the Bay Bridge. I reached the crest of the hill at sunset and there in front of me was the Golden Gate bridge, and above and around it a red sky. The scene filled me with awe and wonder.

That mood stayed with me when I reached the apartment of the man who had invited me to dinner. We sat sipping long gin and tonics and gazing through his huge picture windows, at the lights across the water. We were meeting for the first time and we had much to discuss. But both of us were happy with some silences as we gazed at the scene in front of us. I was seeing it for the first time. He saw it every day. Yet he was still moved by it.

Of course, you can find beauty anywhere when you look for it. The night time scene from hills near my childhood home of Wolverhampton could sometimes look incredibly beautiful, when on a clear dark night the sky was filled with the glow of fifty or more blast furnaces. But on the scale of beauty San Francisco is the Premier League compared to the third division. It is not only the landscape it is the splendour of the man-made Golden Gate bridge. Not only an engineering feat at the time it was constructed but most definitely a thing of beauty. A combination of function and aesthetics. A memorial to what the human spirit is capable of.

At such moments it does not matter whether God invented man or man invented God. Unlike Richard Dawkins I do not find it all difficult to fit religious belief in with Darwinian theory. The young people of the New Age, widely disparaged by rationalists for their woolly thinking, were revolting against the dominant materialistic capitalistic and militiarist culture. In their search for the spiritual they were looking to the east, towards Indian and Buddhist gurus, rather than to the ruling Christian churches, which they saw as too close both to governments and to big company hierarchies.

Since the 1970s there has been a revival of the old religions, in both east and west. So it seems to me quite reasonable to speculate that religious belief has survival value. Most religions include the notion of God as a voice within, which if human beings listen to, provides a different kind of guidance to the reasoning mind. Religions are also based on the belief that the human being is part of a much bigger whole, and they nurture a respect for all human beings in their infinite variety and, in the case of Buddhism, a respect for all living beings. Make love not war has clear survival value in a world where there are enough stockpiles of mass destruction to destroy all humanity. And the focus on spitual values, rather than materialistic values, has clear survival value for the planet with is threatened by spread of consumer capitalism.

The fact that many wars have been fought in the name of religion does not mean that religion caused those wars. The religious wars in Europe, were in fact much more political than religious. Protestantism arose to wrest power from the Catholic church, which had aligned itself with the ruling monarchies of the day. It was Protestantism which led to governments elected by all the people in Britain in Britain and which led to the founding of American democracy.

There are still many Christians, like the Roman Catholics, who in political terms favour Government by an elected elite. The Roman Catholic Church does not have a ballot of all Catholics in the world when it comes to choosing the next pope. Although the Synod of the Church of England has got more power over the last twenty years, the votes of the laiety are still far outweighed by the votes of the clergy and the bishops, who are appointed from above not elected.

The Iraq war is not a religious war. It is economic, political and cultural. So is the rise of Muslim fundamentalists as a political power. The differences between what Muslims believe and what Christians believe is far smaller than than the areas of their agreement over the moral and spiritual vacuum provided by the dominant consumer capitalism which pervades nearly every corner of the globe.

But religious leaders also have political power. Particularly in the age of the mass media they have the power to sway votes, as did Archbishop XXX when he spoke out against Thatcherism in Britain. Now, according to reports by Roger Boyes and Ruth Gledhill in The Times this morning, Archbishop Stanilaw Wielgus, co-operated with the secret police of the anti-Christ communist regime in Poland. (Though he has categorically denied it )

So why is the New Age old hat? Its values are threatening to the dominant consumer capitalism, whose economy is also buoyed up by all that American military spending.

Oh, and I have just checked the breaking news before I posted this. The Polish archbishop has resigned. So no doubt we shall all be reading lots of articles about the differences between what he preached in his sermons and what he actually did.

The one person to come out with any credit from the very public execution of Saddam Hussein, which has filled television screens during the Christian Christmas celebrations and the holiest time of the year for Musilms, was the wicked dictator himself. He behaved with great dignity in the face of the shouted abuse as the noose was put around his head.

That does not excuse the atrocities he was responsible for. I learnt about those earlier than most, because in the early years of the City University international journalism course we had mature students from Iraq, seeking a respite from his dictatorship and Kurdish refugees who had fled for their lives.

It underlines how unsatisfactory the present regime is. Time for that international conference to try and help Iraq deal with the intractable problems of a nation, artificially created by the British, and including three distinct ethnic/religious groups. The manner of the execution has nothing to quiet the tensions between the  Sunnis, the Shias and the Kurds.