I haven't posted for a while. Busy. Busy.

I've been working on my sonnet and thinking about writing a Christmas poem for the local paper. The trouble with that is that I feel you have to be honest in a poem and I'm not sure that I can find enough rhymes for humbug. I doubt if the paper has the sense of humour to publish anything like that, even if it's good - and that's my other problem.

I just got a call from 'Eggheads' asking if I can get my team up to Leeds for an audition on Saturday morning. Some hope. A woman called 'Nazia' rang. Sounded quite nice; so I'll have to make an effort. I wouldn't meeting Judith Keppel either. Can't beat a bit of class.

Coincidences. My younger son has been reading Danny King - Hitman Diaries, Burglar's Diaries, etc. My elder son, who was up from London last weekend, knows him. So, of course, I have to read him and the library provides a copy. Review to come later. First impression, I could have written it myself, but couldn't be bothered.

Do you know - the news is still full of Muslims and their sodding veils!

* * * *

Joke of the day:

Girl to mother: 'Mum, what's an orgasm?'

Mother: 'I don't know. Ask your father.'

Update

I'm looking forward to reading Tom Sharpe's The Long Pursuit and The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler.

In the meantime I'm working my way through Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled. I was expecting a work of literary criticism (of formal poetry) but in fact is a manual of prosody. Since I'm still writing that sonnet, I'm picking up a few tips. 'Trochaic substitution', 'pyrrhic substitution', 'the hendecasyllabic pentameter' etc. I've seen them in poems, but didn't know their name. More importantly, I didn't know when to use them. The ear, of course, is the real judge, but often your ear tells you it's wrong and you don't know how to make it right.

* * * *

I heard John Humphreys talking to the Chief Rabbi Jonathan the other day, in the latest of that series of his. In the preliminary discussion, he asked what it was all about. Humphreys replied, 'You have half an hour to convert me to Judaism.'

'Why should I want to do that? Don't you have enough problems already?'

Jack Benny, Jackie Mason, Woody Allen - and now, Jonathan Sacks.

Extremists

An extremist is someone who who holds stronger views on something than I do and who wishes to use more radical methods to achieve his goals.

To call someone an extremist is often merely a way of avoiding logical debate -it's the 'argumentum ad hominem'. On the other hand, those who are usually thought as 'extremists' are so often incapable of reasoned thought themselves.

The BNP, for example, who have announced they are targeting Lincoln. I have an uneasy feeling that they might do well. I hear normally civilised people sympathising with some of their policies - capital punishment, withdrawal from the EU, tax reduction - bloody hell, I sympathise with those things myself. But in Lincoln, as anywhere I suppose, it's immigration, and that new term of abuse, 'asylum seekers.'

Now, maybe there is cause for concern. Maybe these people, many of whom have been dumped in this area, are being doled out large sums of money, council houses and cars, at the expense of good British scroungers - sorry, I meant to say benefit claimants.

But. But. It's always the way with fringe parties like this. They latch onto issues of concern to unthinking people, buying their votes with appeals to prejudice and easy answers. The days of demagoguery are over. Now the spokesmen are besuited, bespectacled and speak in reasonable tones. We do not see the frothing hatred of the bully-boys behind them, their foul-mouthed, drunken love of violence.

In the thirties, Hitler offered an end to ludicrous inflation, to mass unemployment and Germany's humiliation. People listened and he delivered. And he hinted that the Jews were to blame. The racism latent in even the most decent middle-class breast was stirred. But, when they voted for stability and employment and national pride, did they know they were voting for World War II, Auschwitz and eternal shame? I have a feeling they did.

For Christ's sake, I hope the British are better than that.

Sonnet 2 - quatrain 2

I'll leave the first 4 lines in the slow cooker and jot down a first stab at the second quatrain.

It's afternoon - better, noon - the hottest part of the day. Sweat Heat. The height of the affair. From now on it's downhill until evening and the parting.

Something like this:

At noon the throbbing sun has reached his height

And spreads itself across the rumpled earth

Thrusting aside the clouds with shafts of light

And blazing forward into dark sluggish death.

It will improve. It will improve.

Today I showed some of my preparatory thoughts to a friend - I use the word in a spirit of generosity. He compared the fuit of my labours to those parts of the male anatomy which are two of the most precious and moreover the very spring of life itself. What could I do but express doubts about his parentage, and secretly agree.

Sonnet 2 - back to work

I've kicked ideas about and they seem to have gelled into one basic image. Days are like women; they come and go with a sad inevitability.

But take that a stage further and the cycle of the day becomes a simile for a relationship, a love affair, an act of love-making. The overtures of dawn, the torrid afternoon, the regretful evening, the little death of night.

I'm sticking with the opening lines I came up with a few days ago, but I've altered them a little -

The day creeps in across my crumpled sheets,

Unbuttoning night's sombre, convent dress

I didn't like 'dress of night' very much. This way I drop a couple of non-contributory words (of, the) and I've got in 'convent' with its connotations of celibacy. 'Sheets' is slightly less unoriginal than 'bed' and besides I might want to rhyme it with 'heat'. I think I've broken that rule I set myself.

I could go on like this -

Cover'ing my body with caressing heat

Rubbish! 'Covering' is weak. How about fluttering fingertips? 'Caressing heat' won't do. In any case, 'heat' is wrong. Heat is for the afternoon. This time of day is warm, gentle, teasing. I've also got to use the double meaning of the word 'rouse' somehow.

With teasing fingers rouses me from sleep

or

With teasing warmth she rouses me from sleep

Needs working on. It's all a bit poetic, isn't it? I'd really like it to be more conversational, more like the original quotation I started with. I'll carry on like this though and then maybe recast the wole thing.

I'd heard a story once about a novelist and a poet who met up for a drink after a day's work.

'Had a good day?' asked the poet.

'Not bad,' was the reply. 'Two thousand words. How about you?'

'Well,' said the poet, 'this morning I took a comma out. And this afternoon, I put it back in.'

The day I met M. . .

What is this thing that men have about women in uniform?

When so many young women today seem to dress in order to show off the tattoos on their breasts and their backsides, their thongs and the stud in their navel, with all this on show, why do I ignore them with disdain and invariably give a second glance to policewomen and female traffic wardens?

Of course, I don't like nurses, all that smell of death, and even worse the thought of being helplessly in the power of dictatorial females.

'And how are we today, Mr Bolingbroke?'

'I dont know about you, nurse, but I'm ****ing ill. That's why I'm in hospital.'

I've nothing against traffic wardens - I don't drive a car. And I'm not a particularly persistent lawbreaker. So I'm not afraid of policewomen. Lady bus drivers I'm particularly fond of. It's a good idea, in any case, to be on the right side of bus drivers. If you're polite and friendly, they get to recognise you and sometimes wait when you're a bit late at the stop. Or even drop you off between stops at night. But the driveresses are a bit special. All that femininity encased in light blue shirts and navy blue trousers. I'll tell you, watching their feet working the pedals or their muscles straining aginst the steering wheel is - how shall I put it? - rather appealing.

There are all sorts of uniforms worn by women. From the air force blue of the girl, sporting a huge machine gun, who once demanded my credentials as I tried to get onto RAF Waddington to the the smock of a charlady. But the best is the neat, smart suit of an efficient businesswoman. Trousers are best - Marlene Dietrich knew that - but the skirt which reveals the black-clad knees, the patterned blouse, the practical jacket, the business-like hairstyle and the discreet make-up, the smile which may be more than customer care, these are stuff to dream on.

And this is what I saw yesterday in a local financial institution. I doubt I'll forget for quite a while.

A dog looks up to you,

A cat looks down on you,

But a pig treats you as an equal.

Winston Churchill

It is sickening and it's through gritted teeth that I applaud the acquittal of Nick Griffin and one of his BNP henchmen on the charge of incitement to racial hatred.

A victory for freedom of speech, but short-lived I fear, for he was prosecuted under an old law, not the new one banning incitement to religious hatred. And in any case, the Chancellor has said that 'the law may need to be changed' if convictions in such cases are to be secured. There's something very menacing about a statement like that.

As for hatred, I hate the BNP and all it stands for. I know that the besuited Griffin, intelligent and articulate, presents a reasonable image, but this hides bigotry, intolerance and igorance. And the visceral hatred and desire for violence in his followers is genuinely terrifying.

I wouldn't call Islam 'evil', because 'evil' is a religous word. I would call it stupid, a superstition, a reactionary, cruel creed which brainwashes its adherents as thoroughly as Moonyism or Scientology.

If anything should be mocked and insulted, it is religion. To believe in a religion is to sacrifice one's mind to obscurantism; to sell one's birthright of reason for a spurious certainty. And that applies to all religions, however meek and mild. So, yes, mock their silly rituals and clothes, lampoon their symbols, their incantations; their regressive views, their progressive views; their arrogance and their hypocrisy.

The government's desire to bring in religious hatred laws is based on fear. Unlike other laws promoting equality or outlawing discrimination, which are inspired by a desire to protect the weak and by a sense of fair play.

The religious hatred laws are a government quid pro quo, a sop to Muslims. 'We're going to lock a lot of you up, because you are prime suspects in terrorism cases. On the other hand we're showing you how reasonable we are towards your religion (and patronise you at the same time). Older discrimination laws may have been enacted to protect the weak. These laws are designed to protect us, the non-Muslim majority from their potential violence.

OK, these laws apply to all religions, but we know it's all about Islam. After all, as Linda Smith quipped, 'if you insult a member of the Church of England, what's he going to do? Offer you a sherry in the wrong glass?'

In the time of Elizabeth I, the country was afraid of Catholics. Not primarily because of religious intolerance, but because they did not owe full alliegance to the state or the Queen, believing that God (by which they meant the Pope) was to be obeyed first. In practice, this meant Spain. In the twentieth century, members of the Communist Party felt the same way. Kim Philby made some remark choosing his principles or his friends rather than his country. Of course, this meant in practice that he was choosing the Soviet Union.

What I fear is that the so-called Muslim 'community' is the latest of these states within the state.

Five-minute sonnet

I wonder would you like a cup of tea
From sunny India where the tiger roams;
Or cocoa from that land across the sea
Where elephants and lions make their home.

I've Kenyan coffee, some from far Brazil,
And sugar from the beets of Lincolnshire.
And if your tender nerves are prone to thrill
I've even got decaffeinated here.

No, what I want's a pint - and make it snappy -

With frothy bubbles foaming at the brim

- regards to Keats the great -I touch my cap.

I wish I could have shared a round with him.

See, sonnet-writing isn't quite so hard,

Affectionately, Bolingbroke the Bard.

Celebrity is the mask that eats the face of those who wear it.

John Updike

Sonnet 2 - spadework

I've got 3 sections for the sonnet- morning, afternoon, evening. The basic image is already there, namely days are like women.

Morning is the time of hope, enthusiasm, promise, anticipation, etc

Afternoon is fulfilment, satisfaction, heat, sunshine, sluggishness, etc.

Evening is decline, disillusion, loss, regret.

What I need to do now is a little brainstorming, jotting down words, phrases, possible rhymes, alliterations, similar sounds. I might find ideas developing as I do that.

Morning

Morn/ing, dawn/ing; day break > bragging, boasting, bouncing, brazen, breasting the horizon, brassy, flashy > lashes (eyelashes). Pretty dawn (also a girl's name). Warmth, welcome, soft.

Dawn is seductive, flirtatious, insidious, false hope.

It's already getting sexual. Obviously, you're in bed at dawn and the day arrives in your bedroom unexpectedly, with promise in her eyes, which rhymes with rise, and size, and dies. Better keep it clean.

How about

The day creeps in across my crumpled bed

Unbuttoning the sombre dress of night

This is good stuff, isn't it? Well, it's a start.

* * *

On a different subject, I like the comment of a Radio 4 listener who e-mailed the BBC about a Church group's plea for the white poppy to be treated with the same respect as the red at this time of year. He said,

There's only one word for this idea - Poppycock!

Sonnet 2 - thinking about the structure

'Sonnet-writing for dummies' says that a sonnet is a lyric poem of 14 lines, each a iambic pentameter.

In the Shakepearean form (also Spenserian), the poem contains 3 quatrains and a final couplet. The rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, efef, gg.

As a rule the quatrains deal in turn with an opening idea or idea, followed by a development, then a shift, with the couplet summing up or providing a punch-line or a surprise. My theme - that days and women are both precious, but that both desert you, fits neatly into this scheme.

Namely: morning, afternoon, evening. And I've got surprise of sorts. So far, so good.

A few things to remember:

• I mustn't let the iambic pentameter become boring. 14 lines of dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum will not do. Shakespeare would often start a line with the emphasis on the first syllable of the line. For example, 'Now is / the win / ter of . . .' And, 'Shall I compare thee . . .' where the first two syllables are pretty even in strength.
• Enjambement gives variety and force, as in: 'Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate.'
• In this day and age poetic ellisions like 'ope' and 'oe'r' are inappropriate, although the iambic pentameter cries out for them. 'Open' and 'over' waste syllables.
• Beware 'poetic' cliches, such as abstract nouns, too many adverbs, putting the adjective after the noun, etc.
• On the other hand, don't be afraid of long words, if they are natural to me.
• Don't let the need for rhyme dictate the content. Substitute with assonance and para-rhyme if you like.

Now I'd better get on with it.

Remember that all glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Sonnet 2 - choosing the theme

I once contributed to a message thread on IMDb which was devoted to quotations from movies that had passed into our everyday conversation.

I suppose it shows a lack of original thought or eloquence on my part that I seemed to have a fund of them, and not just from the movies. I often quote Tony Hancock's 'Stone me, what a life!' Or, if someone has just come out with a cliche designed to clinch an argument, I will reply, 'Yes, and a dog is a man's best friend.'

Pete and Dud provided my first wife and me with material for in-jokes. If a visitor were to say something like, 'Well, I love gardening,' one of us would reply, 'As indeed who doesn't.' The other would take it up with 'I don't particularly,' and elicit the response 'Oh, really?' Well, it made us laugh, anyway.

Laurel and Hardy provided material for me and my children particularly. I suppose Stan and Ollie were just big kids, and so fitted very easily into father/child dialogue. 'Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into' was often appropriate, as was 'Why don't you do something to help me?'

In later years I've found useful quotations from Assault on Precinct 13. Recently, standing at the bar, apparently ignored by the staff who were rushing to serve everybody but me and my companion, I turned to him and said, 'Life just seems to pass us by.' And when deferring reluctantly to a fellow crossword-solver who insists on an answer, 'You can't argue with a confident man.' (Of course, it's better if you've seen the film).

And, after that roundabout journey, back to the theme for my sonnet, which I take from Assault. Napoleon Wilson, convicted murderer and awaiting possible execution, says, 'In my situation, days are like women. Each one is so damn precious - and they all end up leaving you.'

Now there's a poem in that.

I'm not going bald. I'm just getting taller than my hair.

Oh, Muse, where art thou?

Courting two women simultaneously calls for great skill, for it is dangerous work. But I have no choice, because I cannot decide which I need more. One is named Erato, the muse of love-poetry; the second is Euterpe, the muse of lyric poetry and music.

Both have made eyes at many a man, whispered honeyed words into his ear and stirred him to powerful feats of creativity. Both ignore me, the *******.

I'm told they might visit in the night, creep into my bed and share my dreams, but each morning the notebook by the alarm clock has remained virgin white. Some say they arrive punctually at 9 o'clock each morning, after a hearty breakfast, and leave promptly at lunchtime. Or that they like to be wooed on bracing country walks at dawn. Others say they enjoy a drink and that the way to win their favour is to treat them to long sessions in the pub. Now that is certainly preferable to early morning walks, but whatever record of their words I find in my notebook after such interludes is usually rubbish, even when legible.

So I'll live without them. As Richard Widmark said of women in The Law and Jake Wade, 'They sure do slow a man down.'

Yes, I'm trying to write a poem, another poem. Don't ask me why. You can't sell poems. Hardly anyone will appreciate them. And in any case, when you think of all the great poets who have gone before, you know you're not going to be any good.

If I were to hazard an answer to that 'why?', I'd have to say that we all have an urge to create. To produce something uniquely ours. Making up a joke, preparing a meal, playing a tune on the guitar, writing a decent letter or a blog, producing a film or painting the Sistine Chapel.

So I want to write 150 sonnets. More than 150 would be arrogant.

Sonnets, because they are short and deal with just one idea. As a form they are simple, which of course doesn't mean easy. Because they have a structure and I like a framework within which to work. I don't like a lot of modern free verse. I get the impression that the writers think that a poem is a few random words higgedly-piggedly set out with lots of white paper around them and line breaks in odd places. Prose dressed up in borrowed clothes.

It might be interesting to log my thought processes as I compose this thing

Culinary advice to a daughter

My drinking companions and I are all single men (more or less) and it should not surprise anyone that, as well as discussing women and the price of beer, football and politics, our deliberations often focus on cookery.

There's a lot of argument - is a chicken kebab a well-balanced meal; competition - who's found the best bargain this week; co-operation - I taught a friend how to make his own yogurt and he repaid the favour with a recipe for haslet. There are stories of failure - my attempt to make gin from a marrow was not a success.

Personally I come in for a lot of mockery because of the allegedly odd combinations of ingredients that I produce. I was actually beginning to doubt whether trout is an appropriate companion to macaroni cheese, when I came across the Arnold Bennett omelet, which reassured me.

These are my culinary principles:

• 
  
  Delia Smith is the true domestic goddess, not Nigella Lawson. The Word of Delia is what guides the true believer. But I must confess that I have been tempted to stray. I once watched Nigella stuffing a chicken, then smearing butter over its plump naked carcass, and sucking her fingers clean. I was seduced and for a while I was unfaithful, but I always come home to Delia.


• 
  
  Buy cheap and buy in bulk. Supermarkets. Own brand goods only. Bent tins and dodgy sell-by dates. If you want fresh vegetables, go to a market at 4pm on a Saturday afternoon. A freezer is an essential and has unexpected benefits. Imagine the thrill of finding a packet of crumpets and a brie under all those jars of mushroom soup you made last year.


• 
  
  Cook in bulk. This saves on energy and means that you only have to cook once a week. Admittedly eating cottage pie every day for a week can become monotonous, but use your initiative. Curry? Thank God for the microwave cooker.


• 
  
  Never throw anything away. A stew covers a multitude of leftovers.


• 
  
  Beans on toast is for wimps. Add onions, garlic and tomatoes to your beans and put it all on a jacket potato.


• 
  
  Percentages: 50% stodge (pasta, rice, tates); 25% veg; 25% meat, fish etc. This assumes you're starting with a basis of onions, garlic tomatoes and mushrooms.


• 
  
  Colours - there should three distinct colours on the plate.


• 
  
  Avoid sardines (unless they come in a tin, and then follow the guidelines for beans above).

My avoidance of sardines stems from a recent unfortunate experience. True to my principles I had a mountain of mashed potato to use up and a kilo of 'fresh' sardines in the freezer. Ever inventive, I thought 'Fish cakes'.

By the time the sardines had thawed the kitchen was already reeking and I had discovered the fish need gutting, a skill I do not possess. For this operation, according to Delia, I would need a sharp knife, an implement I do no possess either. But I persevered and soon the kitchen table was running with blood, some of it mine. My own guts were threatening to join those of the fish on the kitchen floor. The smell by now could justly be called a stink and ten minutes of grilling the sardines did nothing to improve it. I removed the withered and wrinkled creatures from the oven and realised most of the bones were still there. Oh dear, I thought to myself.

But, nil desperandum. I began picking and scraping and my efforts were rewarded with a return of approximately three ounces of fish.

I remembered another cooking principle, coined by W C Fields: 'If at first you don't succeed, give up - there's no point in making a damn fool of yourself.'

So, fish in the bin and bubble and squeak.

• 
  
  Final principle: treat yourself to a Chinese once in a while. You're worth it.

When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant that I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in 7 years.

Mark Twain.

Serendipity

One of the joys of the internet is serendipity.

For example, following a conversation in which my daughter confessed to complete ignorance of Alastair Cooke, I found transcripts of many of his Letter from America on the BBC website, most with an audio facility. I e-mailed her one or two and took the opportunity to listen to many of them myself.

In one of them Mr Cooke paid tribute to a recently deceased New York Jewish writer, who wrote novels about the wheeling and dealing of a first generation immigrant rogue in the garment district of the Lower East Side. Cooke lamented that the reaction of most people, on hearing his name, Jerome Weidman, would be to say, 'Who?' That, indeed, was mine.

But of course, all I have to do is switch over to the county library website, check their catalogue and, if the object of my search is held somewhere, reserve it. And a week later, I receved an e-mail asking me to pick up I can get it for you wholesale from the Central Library. Judging by the date-label, I was the first person to borrow it for over thirty years.

The narrative technique reminded me of Raymond Chandler and P G Wodehouse. In this respect: It is written in the first person, adopting a distictive voice, and maintaining it. This is not easy to do. I know, having tried it.

I've made other serendipitous discoveries at my local pub, which I may have mentioned from time to time. It has a few shelves of books, no doubt bought by the yard. Most of them are absolute rubbish. A 1929 guide to accountancy springs to mind. But amongst the dross there are a few pearls. Or there were, because they seem somehow to have found their way onto my own shelves at home. Well, the amount of money I spend in there, I'm entitled to a few perks, aren't I? No, I'm not. I'll take them back.

Here are three recommendations:

John Harris: Covenant with Death, which I've mentioned before.

Alfred Duggan: The Little Emperors. Duggan wrote historical novels thirty or forty years ago. I accept that he is a more serious novelist than, say Jean Plaidy, and I'm sure his research is impeccable. But, my God, he can be turgid. All the same I've read several of his books because he chooses such interestingly obscure periods of history for his plots. The first one I read was Count Behemond about the Norman nobleman of the late 11th century and his participation in the (first ?) crusade. Another was the story of Lepidus, the third member of the second Roman triumvirate with Mark Antony and Octavian.

The last one I read was The Little Emperors, which is set about 410 AD when the Romans started to withdraw from Britain. It's known that the Romano-British set up three of four of their own 'emperors', when they realised that Rome was too busy defending itself to bother about Britannia.

Sinclair Lewis: Dodsworth. I first read Lewis about 20 years ago, soon after I'd seen Elmer Gantry, the film in which Burt Lancaster won his Oscar. I've recently become reacquainted with him, reading Dodsworth, the story of a middle-aged businessman and his trip to Europe with his airhead wife. Lewis also wrote Babbitt, which gave the language a word for a self-important, self-satisfied, hypocritical middle-class businessman. Rather like an American version of those Yorkshiremen J B Priestley used to write about.

Small have continual plodders ever won,

Save base authority from others books.

Shakespeare. Love's Labour's Lost

Faith, crap and clarity

I listened to John Humphreys interviewing the Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday. The basis of the programme, which was one of three, the other two being with leaders of the Jewish and Muslim 'faiths' in Britain, is that Humphreys asks them to overcome his scepticism about the existence of God.

As expected, it was a waste of time.

What is it about this word 'faith'? If you honour any idea, however outlandish, with the label 'faith', it is treated with respect. Why? If Humphreys were interviewing the Prime Minister, he would be quite happy to call him, effectively, a crook, a liar, a cheat, dishonourable, self-serving, self-deluding, etc . . .etc. But he treated the Archbishop as a wise man, who appeared to possess some secret mystery, that he, Humphreys, just couldn't grasp. Rather like me talking to Albert Einstein about relativity.

First question: 'You cannot say for certain, can you, that you know that God exists.'

Reply (more or less): 'I believe in the reality of God.'

Don't you call that begging the question?

And neither man defined what he meant by 'God'. Zeus? Odin? An inner light or some transcendent personal being? Voltaire's clockmaker or an unknowable immanent universal force? Even so-called Christians can't agree. There is a world of difference between the God of the evangelicals and the Catholics and the one preached (oh so politely) by liberal theologians. And what's all this about Jesus being the Son of God?

The trouble with the Archbishop is that he's not an evangelical. They do know. They have a personal relatonship with him, talk to him, have prayers answered, know about miracles. They say. Of course, sometimes the answer to a prayer is no, and more often than not the miracle doesn't happen. They still don't know, in the way I know they're is a computer in front of me at this moment. (Don't tell that it's a figment of my imagination and that nothing exists outside my own consciousness. You may be right.)

If something demands faith before it can be believed, then you have to be pretty desperate to believe in it. No-one, for example, can prove there are no unicorns in the world. So why do I feel no need to live as if there are unicorns? All it takes is faith. With God, it's partly cultural, but I think it's fear, primarily. If there is no God, of any sort, there are no easy answers to the beginning and end of the universe or of our own lives. We have no meaning. We have no fundamental moral rules to live by. We are all alone in a cold, alien universe, random specks of life, as meaningless as a brief spark from a fire.

Does God intervene in the world, they discussed. Does it conflict with free will? And so on to the old chestnut about a loving God allowing wars, disease, genocide, and so on. It was taken as read that God is loving. It was taken for granted that man has free will, forgetting that many Christians do not actually believe it. 'By their fruits shall ye know them' it says somewhere in the Bible. Original sin makes all human actions sinful, according to Calvinists and others who believe in the sovereignty of God. Of course, they have contradictons of their own to contend with.

The Archbishop steers clear of such fanaticism, preferring to accentuate the 'niceness' of Christianity, to which he would never try to convert anyone. 'Faith is a gift,' he says, forgetting for a moment that God does not intervene. No, I forget, we can use our free will to reject that gift.

So, let me get this clear. I have the choice to accept a gift called 'faith', which is a decision to believe something which is not defined and for which they're is no proof and which may be in total contradiction to the belief of somebody else, who has also accepted this gift.

Beware of Archbishops bearing gifts.

(The cartoon, by the way, was found on The Cartoon Blog)

Oxymoron of the day: A theological scholar