Every few weeks I stand by an Oxfordshire roadside and watch as the coffins of dead British soldiers are slowly driven by. It is one of many places along that sad highway where people quietly and modestly assemble to show that these deaths matter to them. This was the original point of the gatherings in Wootton Bassett, now distorted by TV coverage – quite against the will of those involved – into a self-conscious national event. I have no idea of the opinions of the hundred or so people who turn out, often in filthy weather, to show their respect for chivalry, courage and sacrifice, and their proper awe of death. When we chat before the hearses arrive, we do not discuss such things. I hate the Afghan War, but when the coffins go by I am at one with the man standing next to me who, for alI I know, supports it with all his heart. I suspect we feel mainly that these young men are coming home and need to be welcomed and honoured, and that their families need to know that their unbearable loss has not gone unnoticed. We feel, in short, that a country where nobody could be bothered to stand by the roadside for its dead soldiers wouldn’t be worth living in. So of course I think to Hell with Mr Anjem Choudary and his plan to stage a political parade through Wootton Bassett. Mind you, I also suspect that he is just a publicity-seeking phoney blowhard who speaks for almost nobody and who wants me to write about him. So normally I wouldn’t. I’m unmoved by all these fanatics with their wild sermons and their beards. What concerns me is that we have trashed our own patriotism and make so little effort to encourage normal Muslim citizens of this country to become British and share our pride, or our sorrow. So I was greatly heartened last week when I saw the picture of Abdul Latif and his wife Samina, standing with hands on hearts as the procession went by in the Wiltshire town. Like many British Muslims I have met, such people respect our culture, laws and institutions rather more than many ‘ethnic’ British people do. I would guess they are as sick as I am of our swear-word and sex culture, and that they understand that courage is the greatest of all the virtues – because none of the others is worth anything without it. Their gesture is a reminder to us that there is an alternative to multiculturalism and decay. You’ve got a nerve, Kirsty Comely Kirsty Young publicises a TV series by attacking parents for pushing their children too hard. I think very rich mothers – who don’t have to leave their children in ‘day care’ – should be more careful what they say about such things. Most women with children, given the choice, would be full-time mothers. They would then be able to play a real part in their upbringing. But they cannot be, since the sexual revolution (which everyone but me supports) compels mothers to go out to work, often within weeks of giving birth. So, troubled by their consciences and naturally worried that paid strangers in day-orphanages aren’t giving their young the attention a mother would, they worry about their development. And then some superstar sitting on a pile of money has the nerve to call them ‘pushy’. I gather Miss Young’s TV series will ‘blow apart the myth’ that a Fifties childhood was a golden age. Well, I never said it was a golden age. No doubt there was lots wrong with it. But a 21st Century childhood – spent drooling in front of the TV, or zonked by computer games, or drugged with Ritalin, almost entirely deprived of exercise and separated at birth from natural mothers – is certainly a dark age. And, like all dark ages, it seeks to defame the past to try to make itself look better. The snow has silenced a growling menace... I have been enjoying the snow, above all for the beautiful silence in city streets in the evening. Some time about 30 years ago, car traffic became continuous, so that at almost all times, and almost everywhere, the boring swish of tyres and the maddening growl of engines became the permanent background to our lives. It is wonderful to be able to hear my own footsteps again. As for the journey to and from work, I am always careful to have a book or two with me. And there is something mildly exciting about never knowing when trains will turn up, or where you might need to be diverted. It reminds me slightly of the winter 20 years ago when, my work done in Bucharest, I set off for home by just turning up at the main station and getting on the first train that moved. My fellow passengers (as it happens they were a Russian orchestra) shared their bread and sausage with me as we crept through the lovely mountains of Bulgaria towards Sofia. I had only discovered this was the destination about an hour after we set off. I didn’t care as long as it wasn’t Bucharest. Cannabis, and why you should not see this film I quite liked the trailers for Meryl Streep’s new film, It’s Complicated. And I thought she was wonderfully funny in Julie & Julia. But I shan’t be going to see It’s Complicated (and I urge you not to) for one simple reason – a scene in which she smokes cannabis and raves about how much stronger it has got, and that this ‘rocks’. When will Hollywood and the TV industry learn that cannabis is one of the most dangerous of all drugs, increasingly closely linked to severe and incurable mental illness among the young? Promoting it, and making light of it, in this way is deeply irresponsible. All those involved should be invited to take a tour of the mental wards where the victims of the cannabis PR campaign now languish, staring or muttering. ************************* ************************* Good riddance to Jonathan Ross. I hardly ever watch TV and had no idea exactly how repulsive he was (though even from a distance it was obvious he was repulsive) until I endured his interview with David Cameron. Mind you, Mr Cameron – who had willingly subjected himself to this in an effort to get down with the kids – was at least as much to blame. It was all part of his conscious self-abasement before the BBC and the culture of slime and coarseness which it represents. I never could understand how such a person could claim to be a keen supporter of marriage, and now his pathetic, politician’s flip-flop on the subject confirms that I was right. ************************* On the coldest day of the year so far, when Britain came close to running out of gas, how much of our electricity was produced by wind power? I will tell you. One tenth of one per cent.
10 January 2010 1:37 AM
So dignified, so British... the Muslims who put Mr Choudary to shame
There’s nothing like this at the spot where I stand, and I hope it stays that way. It is moving largely because it is not political.
Would so many people have stayed at home, so many schools have needlessly closed, if the broadcasters measured snowfall in inches, which people understand, rather than in centimetres, which they don’t, and which make a light coating sound like an Arctic drift?
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Posts
