Sage Advice in the Fourth of Dublin's Crown Jewels

Just before I got on the plane in Manchester the other day ,a German fella in the boarding queue asked me if there was anything in Dublin he shouldn't miss under any circumstances. Well, I didn't even blink. The Treasury of the National Museum, I said. The Long Room. The Chester Beatty Library. And Mulligans. Ah, Mulligans. Forget your Guinness Storehouse, except for the view. If it's a decent pint you want, Mulligans stands supreme.

I've been a largely teetotal gargoyle of late, but felt that if I was going to have even one drink at home it'd have to be there, so after lunch and an anxious blood donation yesterday I hooked up with an old friend of mine and sauntered into that most special of Dublin hostelries, where I was glad to see Pat Ingoldsby in the corner, improbably not flogging books on Westmoreland Street.

Hunched over our pints, my former protegee told me of a dilemma facing her about going to Rome. Ought she to go pronto, as planned, or take some highly opportune work first, though this would mean that her travelling partner, less well-trained in Roman ways than her, would have to find his own way in the Eternal City for a month or so.

'Sure, tell him not to worry,' I said. 'After all, there are only three things he really needs to know if he wants to get by in Rome.'
'Oh?' she said, raising an eyebrow.
'One,' I said, 'it wasn't built in a day. Tell him to remember that. Two,' I continued, 'all roads lead there. Except maybe that one that's paved with good intentions. And three --'
'Do what the Romans do?' she ventured.
'Exactly! Follow their lead. When you're there, at any rate. Sure, if that was a good enough policy for Ambrose of Milan, it ought to be good enough for the likes of us.'

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a lecture to attend.

If Only Hitchcock had made 'A Beautiful Mind'...

The Brother and I watched A Beautiful Mind the other night, with him commenting on how strange it is watching it a second time. He's right: I saw it when it came out in the cinema a few years back, but hadn't seen it since, and it's a very different film when you really just how much of it is simply meant to be John Nash imagining stuff. Basically, ninety per cent of the film is him being mad, with the maddest thing of all being the film's suggestion that you can basically sort out schizophrenia through sheer willpower.

The other thing that's troubling about A Beautiful Mind is how it bears about as little relationship to the reality of the tale it purports to tell as the cinematic John Nash's delusions do to his on-screen life. To say it takes liberties is putting it mildly. Granted, there is indeed a hugely influential mathematician called John Nash who suffers from schizophrenia, was married to a woman called Alicia, and shared in the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, but that's about as far as it goes. The rest of the film is pretty much made up. Yes, even the Princeton pen ceremony, that Dead Poets Society tear-jerking climax of the film. It's not that that never happened to him; it never happens at all.

So as we nattered, dismantling it away to our hearts' content, I mused that Alfred Hitchcock would have had great fun with a story like this, especially given that the film as it stands is hardly ten per cent factual anyway. Why not drop that ten per cent down to three per cent and really have fun?


The pivotal scene in the film, as far as I can see, is the bit when John Nash is giving a lecture and panics when he sees some mysterious men in black standing at the doors to the lecture theatre he's in. He quits his lecture and runs from the platform, scurrying out of the building and running down some stairs, being pursued by an aged Christopher Plummer, who cries out something to the effect of, 'John, John, stop, I'm a psychiatrist, I'm here to help you!' Professor Nash is tackled to the ground and sedated, waking in shackles some time later in Christopher Plummer's opulent office, where he is told that he's a very sick man, that he's been imagining everything, and that even his crucial government work is all an illusion. While he sits trying to take this in, Christopher Plummer goes and tells Mrs Nash the bad news.

So, hand that material over to Alfred Hitchcock, circa 1956, making the film he should surely have made, starring Gregory Peck and Grace Kelly, who never acted together, in what always strikes me as the greatest of the Twentieth Century's cinematic tragedies . . .

Just imagine . . . Gregory Peck is John Nash, a promising young professor of mathematics in Princeton, who's as socially awkward as he is intellectually dazzling. A charming young student of his, Alicia, played by Grace Kelly, asks him out, and witty banter ensues. Around the same time, his old college roommate, played by Cary Grant, shows up and recruits him to do some top secret work for the government. John courts and marries the glamorous Alicia, all the while conducting clandestine work of national importance. One night he's pursued by mysterious armed men, and grows increasingly distraught, but he can't tell his wife what's bothering him. She starts to worry, and wonders to whom she can turn for help . . .

And then, a few weeks later, he gives a prestigious lecture and panics when he notices several men in black stationed around the lecture theatre. He breaks and runs, darting through a fire door, bounding down some stairs, being pursued across the grounds of the college by an aged Claude Rains, who cries something along the lines of, 'John, John, stop, I'm a psychiatrist, I'm here to help you!'

John is bundled to the ground by the men in black, sedated, and wakes in shackles in Claude Rains's opulent office, all leather and mahogany, where Claude Rains patiently explains to him that he's a very sick man, that all his government work is an illusion, that he's imagined it all. And then Claude goes and talks to Alicia, telling her just how sick her husband is, asking her whether she'd ever wondered why she'd never met Cary Grant, and saying that she needs to keep a close eye on John, to check through his files to see what he's writing, and to bring copies of them to Claude so he can help her husband . . .

Because of course, this is just a gaslighting operation, an attempt to convince a sane man and his wife that he's going mad, so that these sinister Cold War era baddies can get their nasty communist hands on military secrets crucial to America's defence!

I know, it sounds far fetched, but it's not much more so than the film as it stands, and in Hitch's hands it'd definitely work.

If only . . .

Swords and Strategy

Last night was a dismal one on the fencing front, with me somehow contriving to lose all seven of my bouts. I'll freely admit I'm not the best of the club's novices, but I'm nowhere near the bottom of the pile. We've all got our distinctive weaknesses and strengths, whether those relate to strength, speed, size, skill, or strategy, and I'm generally good enough at the last one to do okay if a bout goes on long enough. Not this week, though: it started badly, with me having to stop several times when up against Jane, who trounced me, and got worse as I was toppled by fencer after fencer.

I'm tempted to just put this down to having been an off week, but I'm fairly surely the likes of Aldo Nadi would have no truck with such notions. I've recently been perusing his On Fencing. It's rather dated now, especially given the rise of electronic scoring and the parallel rise of to ubiquity the pistol grip and fall to near-obsolescence of his beloved Italian grip, but it's got lots in its favour for all that.

Um, skipping to the bit on tactics in competitive bouts:

Apart from what you have been told in the preceding chapter, it is impossible to tell you what to do in a bout. True, a great deal depends upon you; but your adversary is as free as you are, and no two fencers are alike. Strategy and tactics must therefore be applied differently to each opponent.

What I can describe, however, is the general pattern of combat the great champion employs against an unknown adversary. Even if you are a novice, and cannot be expected to apply it successfully in a week or two, I think you will readily understand what I mean. Engrave it in your mind forever.

First, I would like to quote a part of the Napoleonic record as related in the Encyclopedia Brittanica. It reads: "He said, 'The whole art of war consists of a careful and well-thought out defensive, together with a swift and bold offensive.' Simplicity, energy, rapidity was his constant admonition. . . . One must concentrate one's own forces, keep them together, lead the enemy to give battle in the most unfavourable conditions; then, when his last reserves are engaged, destroy him with a decisive attack. . . . Napoleon's power of rapidly summing up a situation and making his decision, explains his victories." . . . "One of the characteristic features of Napoleonic strategy," says Marshal Franchet d'Esperey, "is that, the goal, once chosen and boldly chosen, the method does not vary, though, being supple, it adapts itself to circumstances."

When I first read this passage I could hardly believe my eyes. For, almost word for word these were the same principles I had been repeating incessantly to pupils ever since I started teaching -- a long time ago. What a perfectly stunning similarity between the war principles of one of the greatest soldiers of all time and the fundamentals of the competitive fencing war! Well, to become a good fencer, memorize and assimilate the above quotations.

In the meantime, I may work on my lunges and parries.

If it rained men, wouldn't they explode on impact?

I've always wondered that about the Weather Girls song.

So, having mentioned the FHM 100 Sexist Women poll recently, and having said how it'd been NMRBoy who insisted I vote in it, and having grumbled about the gaping lacunae in the shortlist, I somehow managed to gloss over the fact that NMRBoy had made a similar point last year, but more succinctly, and with pictures. N's point, or part of it anyway, was that given a real choice in these matters he would vote for former Anglia weathergirl Becky Jago, a lady for whom N harbours deep affection.

Becky has a healthy Facebook fanbase, I see, with the 'Becky Jago Appreciation Society' having a respectable 124 members. Indeed, it seems she's not the only British weathergirl with a bevvy of Facebook admirers. The fresh-faced Laura Tobin has a mere 41 fans in the 'Laura Tobin Appreciation Society', but a rather more impressive 337 groupies in the 'Laura Tobin (BBC Weather) Appreciation Society'. ITV's Becky Mantin clearly reigns supreme in this area, though, with four Facebook groups to sing her praises.

The eleven-strong 'FANS OF BECKY MANTIN' isn't much to boast of, I fear, as creator Bernard Boyle hasn't yet followed through on his promise 'I WILL GET SUM INFO N PICS VERY SOON'. The other groups are more promising. 195 people are willing to proclaim 'Im a fan of Becky Mantin (ITV Weather girl)' whereas 359 hail her as 'Becky Mantin - The most glorious of all weather girls'. That's nothing, though, compared to the 1,156 members of the 'Becky Mantin (Weather Chick) Appreciation Club'.

Here are Laura and Becky, just to keep you in the loop.

I'm not sure how much these people really appreciate their meteorological idols, though. The portly and rumpled Kevin Woolley from the East Midlands, for instance, has left a comment on the smaller Laura Tobin site declaring 'She is so god damn SEXY i wouldn't kick her out of bed.' It seems an odd thing to say. Would he kick a less sexy girl out of bed? How much less sexy would she have to be? Would he be capable of raising his bloated leg to boot her out were he indeed so inclined? In fact, would there be room for her to squeeze into his bed alongside his corpulent frame in the first place? How big is his bed?

And that's nothing compared to the comments you can read on YouTube clips of Ms Mantin. No, I'm not going to quote them. YouTube comments are, as we all know, almost certainly the lowest literary form. As a rule, though, they merely daze by their banality, but these fellows add filth to the equation...

Do women likewise drool over male weather forecasters? Did Michael Fish ever receive such adoration? How do girls feel about Liam Dutton nowadays? Do ladies find him rugged and sexy, or do they find him cute and feel a need to cuddle him?

Or when they look at him, do they get a tingly feeling as though they expect a deliciously painful pun, all because something about Liam vaguely reminds them of Rowlf the Dog?

Beautiful ladies in danger...

...danger all round the world...

So I was chatting to NMRboy the other evening, and he was explaining my manly duties to me. Apparently -- and I've managed to hit a sprightly four hundred and seven years old without knowing this -- it is my duty as a man to vote in the FHM 100 Sexiest Women in the World poll.

Well, I said, if it's my duty, I'd better find out what's involved, so over I moseyed to the FHM site, there to peruse the shortlist. I hadn't even known there was a shortlist, but I suppose it makes sense that there is one, as otherwise all the lads would surely just vote for their girlfriends, wouldn't they, or maybe ex-girlfriends they're hung up on, or even random pretty girls they might occasionally bump into in the library or the computer cluster or the pub, say.

Although my flatmate's none too impressed by my forays into the world of FHM polls, feeling it's deeply sexist, it was an interesting foray, and I have to say that I learned a lot. Who would have thought that the Queen owned not merely all the swans in Britain, but all the dolphins, porpoises, and sturgeon? Or that one lady could be so diversely talented as to be a qualified nurse, to possess a degree in microbiology, and to be able to put her legs behind her head? Or that, well, um, I can't really remember.

The thing is, I got pretty irate rather quickly just looking at the list. How had it been drawn up? What manner of methodology had been used? Putting it very bluntly, why do the Saturdays count as one woman -- have they only one personality between them or something?

The list is notable for its absences, it has to be said. Where are Michelle Pfeiffer, who even if she's been to the shop at some point surely still has a portrait in her attic, Kristin Scott Thomas, who is as beautifully brittle as ever, and my beloved Allison Janney? Please don't tell me its because of their age, because the Queen is on the list -- the Queen, I ask you, of whom FHM notes 'If you’re looking for a lady with more than just money and power, take a look at pictures of Brenda from the fifties. She had it. And yes, you most definitely would.'

Where are Claire Danes and Rosamund Pike? Where are the classic proverbial either/or duo of Eliza Dushku and Kirsten Dunst? Where's Amy Adams? Alyson Hannigan? Grace Park? Where are Sophie Marceau and Julie Delpy and Juliette Binoche? And Emmanuelle Beart? Seriously...

Look, don't get me wrong. Charlize Theron is still there, as are Christina Hendricks, and Heather Graham, and Kristin Kreuk, and Monica Belucci, and Lena Headey, and a legion of ladies of whom I've never heard. But the thing is, I don't understand the absences from the shortlist. And most of all, how I don't understand how I can fairly be asked to cast my vote for the world's sexiest women based on a list that includes Sienna Miller but excludes the peerless Sienna Guillory, she of the porcelain skin and the exquisite cheekbones, inspirationally cast a few years back as Helen of Troy.

I mean, come on!

Speaking Too Soon

Several of my friends are rather dismissive towards Microsoft, and scarcely a conversation with them goes by without me being barraged with questions along the lines of, 'Why don't you use Open Office?' and 'Why don't you use Linux?' and 'You don't use Explorer, do you?' and 'Why are you using Vista?'

For what it's worth, I rarely use IE, except on those odd sites that dislike Firefox. As for the other questions, the answers all come down to the same point, which is that I haven't time to learn about the alternatives to what Microsoft offers. I could make the time, I suppose, but I'd have to ditch something else, and I'm a busy man.

For example, the other evening I was chatting to a friend on GoogleChat -- yes, Messenger is generally neglected nowadays, you'll be glad to know -- and the inevitable questions arose.

'By the way,' said my friend, 'try Linux Ubuntu'
'And why?' I asked, after commenting on a previous point.
'Because it's not Microsoft and it works.'
'But Explorer works too,' I said, 'and I already have that.'
'Explorer? I don't even use that on Windows. which I rarely use these days. If you insist on windows, at least use firefox.'
'I mean windows,' I said, as I'd meant Windows Explorer rather than Internet Explorer, 'But broadly, I mean Vista, or XP, or whatever.'
'I hate Vista.'
'Yes, so do lots of people. I can never understand why.'
'Because it's shit.'
'That's nonsense,' I snorted, 'Why do you say it's shit? I've had no problems with it at all.'
'I have had loads of problems.'
'Like what?'
'Slowness, files not opening, lack of backward compatibility, messing up of my harddrive, constant reports to MS headquarters, valuable memory used on weird unmovable files.'
'How odd. I've had no such problems. The only thing I have trouble with is an apparent unwillingness to use the second 100gb of memory here, about which I must explore further.
'Well, I "migrated" and I am pretty impressed.'

And then last night the clock in my taskbar froze. Not the bells and whistles clock that you can stick at the right of your screen if you so fancy in Vista -- that behaves properly. No, the little on in the bottom right. It froze. And when I tried to fix it Vista went into a huff and needed to be shut down. It's happened several times since.

I said this to another friend today, a programmer who's a solid defender of Microsoft not least because he thinks people are unfair to them and tend to assume that Microsoft is always bad and the comptetition is always better.

He frowned, and for the first time ever didn't have a solution to my computer problems.

'That's wrong,' he said. 'That just shouldn't happen.'

It appears my confidence is misplaced. I may need to find time to examine the alternatives...

What Qualifications are Needed for a Job like this?

There's a fine passage in Chesterton's introduction to The Everlasting Man where he comments on the character of so many opponents of the Church in his day:

'They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith. Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda.'

I've found it difficult not to think of this over the past week, when following Ruth Gledhill's Twitter feed and Blog. Ruth has apparently been nominated as 'Digital Journalist of the Year' in the British Press Awards. I've been reading her stuff for years, though I've done so in the full knowledge that she doesn't seem particularly highly regarded among Catholic bloggers, with Mark Shea, for example, dismissing her as 'perhaps the single most clueless religion reporter on earth', and Jimmy Akin regularly refering to her as Ruth 'I'm Too Dangerously Unqualified To Keep My Job' Gledhill.

After this week, I'm starting to understand why. The Times ran an article by her a couple of days ago under the heading 'Give up Tweeting? Tell it to the birds, your Holiness' in which she said:

The Roman Catholic Church in Italy wants us to give up texting, Tweeting and other tecchie messaging services for Lent. This is the organisation presided over by a Pope who claims he did not know Bishop Richard Williamson was a Holocaust denier when he lifted the excommunication on him last month. [...]

This was even though Italian blogs had been writing about it, The Catholic Herald in England had covered it and I had blogged and reported it extensively for The Times.

These reports were easily accessible online. They had been the subject of debate on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. But they were not picked up by clerics who, we now know, believe texting is tantamount to sin.

Now, as I mentioned a couple of weeks back, it's a regrettable fact that as a rule you should never trust what the mainstream media says about religion. Seriously. Take anything you read or hear with a barrel of salt. In this case, take a look at the premise, itself not quite accurate, but let that go, that 'The Roman Catholic Church in Italy wants us to give up texting, Tweeting and other tecchie messaging services for Lent' and then look at the assertion that these clerics 'believe texting is tantamount to sin'.

Right. So the Religion Correspondent for the Times is reporting that the Church in Italy is recommending that we stop sinning for Lent, presumably being free to start again afterwards. Does that sound remotely likely to you? It's the nature of Lenten fasting that in order to develop our self-mastery we renounce good things, not bad ones! We're not meant to be doing the bad ones at all!

The rest of the article's pap too, but the fact that such a fundamental misconception underpins it should be fair warning that the whole thing needs extensive unpacking. For what it's worth, though, yes, the Archbishop of Modena has indeed suggested that young Italians might indeed 'cleanse themselves from the virtual world and get back into touch with themselves' by fasting from text messaging and social networking sites, say, over Lent. Although other bishops have echoed this call, not one of them has even hinted that these things are wrong in themselves, instead merely pointing out that they can all too easily become obsessive behaviour, the sort of thing from which we might do well to free ourselves.

The point of Lenten fasting, after all, is that 'by denying ourselves these good things we encourage an attitude of humility, free ourselves from dependence on them, cultivate the spiritual discipline of sacrifice, and remind ourselves of the importance of spiritual goods over earthly goods.'


And then there was the Trad Mass
The other lowlight of Ruth's week was her attendance at an Extraordinary Rite Mass at the SSPX church of St Joseph and St Padarn in Holloway in north London. In itself this would hardly be a bad thing, you might think, but Ruth appears to have gone mainly with a view to catching a glimpse or even exchanging a few words with Bishop Richard Williamson, a buffoon on whom I'd rather not waste words at the minute. Throughout the service she twittered away, reporting the mass as it happened with a view to having the whole affair explained to her -- and her readers -- by Chris Gillibrand of Catholic Church Conservation, who tweeted back over the course of the morning.

She's edited the conversation down into something fairly manageable on her blog, but I've managed to assemble a slightly less coherent but more comprehensive version of it here.

RuthieGledhill: Church absolutely packed men in black women in lace headscarves. No sign of Bishop Williamson. My neighbour is two-year-old old girl... priest wearing biretta like my dad used to wear on moped when doing parish visits in gratwich kingston and uttoxeter
Gillibrand: What better place to celebrate St David's Day than a church dedicated to St Padarn, with St Teilo a companion of St David.'.. If it wasn't so packed -- people tend to sit near the front rather than at the back at Latin Masses.'
RuthieGledhill: No sign of Bishop Williamson.
Gillibrand: Suspect the SSPX will have locked the Bishop in a chapel at Wimbledon and be tempted to throw the key away.
RuthieGledhill: Priest delivering homily. Warns against speaking to the press in case we 'twist' words.
Gillibrand: Expect a long sermon. Traditionalists sometimes in far-flung places don't get to a Latin Mass so often... so priests preach long and repeat in different ways to get many messages across.
RuthieGledhill: Priest says desert fathers in Egypt determined to stamp out bodily desires in order to raise up the soul... the derts the hermits monasteries prayers fasting charity the love of God... What is the relevance of fourth century hermits to 21st century life?
Gillibrand: Epistle has a message for the Bishop - "Give no offense to any man that our ministry be not blamed."
RuthieGledhill: What should drive us is the desire to imitate the desert fathers - do similar great works for Lent.
Gillibrand: Back to the early church was the watchword of Vatican II.
RuthieGledhill: Homily over, Nicene creed. Genitum non factum. We all kneeling. A lot of kneeling and standing.
Gillibrand: In a modern Mass, there is no longer a requirement to kneel at the mention of Incarnation which I find strange!... Will be kneeling again at the Incarnation during the Last Gospel -- John 1 which will be read at the end of Mass.
RuthieGledhill: Two young men at back leading the sung recitation. Surprised priests don't have backs to us but facing across sanctuary... Put two pounds in collection plate. Not the kind of place that gives receipts. Can I claim it on expenses? Every penny counts these days.
Gillibrand: They turn their backs to the congregation for the canon of the Mass.... Your reward will be great in heaven.

RuthieGledhill: Maybe I will let the two pounds go for the good of my soul. Lavabo inter. Hand washing and sprinkling tinkling sounds. Sit kneel stand. Find nice young intelligent girl at back of church to show me where we are in missal.
Gillibrand: I was wondering if you had the texts.
RuthieGledhill: Bell rings loudly. Sanctus spiritus. Even I recognise this...
Gillibrand: I wash my hands among the innocent, and. ... and tell of all Thy wondrous works, O Lord, I have loved the beauty of Thy house and the place where Thy glory dwelleth
RuthieGledhill: adoration and elevation over. stand. Pater noster, qui est in caelis
Gillibrand: Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is He Who comes in the Name of the Lord ... which is said by only the priest. Some people familiar with Latin but new to the old Rite sometimes join in.
RuthieGledhill: Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi... priest reading in silence we skip three pages. Love the singing and the long amens.
Gillibrand: Symbolism being that it is the prayer Our Lord teaches us and the priest is acting in persona Christi. ... Agnus Dei and prayers of penitence prior to communion
RuthieGledhill: Libera me. yup i go along with that.
Gillibrand: ...also in Gregorian Chant - the music of the church... are there three or just one priest celebrating?

RuthieGledhill: [Holy Communion.] Do i go up for a blessing? As my mind has been on work and not the service praps not. what do you think Chris? ... 'Turn off that f*****g mobile' says woman.
Gillibrand: Ask the priest afterwards - wouldn't want to alarm the faithful.
RuthieGledhill: woman tries to grab BlackBerry and raises fist at me. Heart beating v fast.
Gillibrand: If you had asked the priest before hand it would be easier and would have been given. ... Retreat.
RuthieGledhill: Nice woman whispers: 'Don't let her worry you. We have quite a lot of nutters here. We have normal people too.'
Gillibrand: Home for sinners, the lonely the dispossessed and the just plain angry... All OK?
RuthieGledhill: 'I've a good mind to hit you,' says woman. 'Please do,' I say thinking of the copy.
Gillibrand: rather I suggest retreat to the doors and carry on.
RuthieGledhill: 'Oh you'ld love that wouldn't you,' she hisses, and backs off... Angry woman comes back for the killer blow. 'You aren't even wearing a headscarf.'
Gillibrand: She has hit you?
RuthieGledhill: Placeat tibi. Isn't what I am doing a form of homage to truth and justice? No-one asks me to leave, so I don't.
Gillibrand: Exactly.
RuthieGledhill: Angry woman left. I feel sad. Obsequium servitutus meae.
Gillibrand: May the tribute of my worship be pleasing to Thee, most Holy Trinity, and grant that the sacrifice which I, all unworthy... And now comes the Last Gospel sending Christians out into the world... Deleted from the new Mass, where the belief is that the Holy Spirit comes during the Mass rather than in the Commission. ... at the end
RuthieGledhill: Retreat to empty side chapel. sing beautiful hymn.
Gillibrand: Pray for her. When early Christians turned the other cheek, they weren't thinking about copy.

RuthieGledhill: Priests processing out. All my sins I now detest them, Never will I sin again, we sing...
Gillibrand: Dedicated to which saint?... What's the hymn?
RuthieGledhill: Waiting at back of emptying church to see clergy and apologise for upsetting worshipper... Hymn was God of mercy and compassion
Gillibrand: 'French Melody, adapt. from G.B. Pergolesi, d1736... Au sang qu'um Dieu, lyric writer unknown... French... Hymn magnificent espec for Lent where even the French put aside joie de vivre... Canadian possibly.
RuthieGledhill: Nice whiskered man apologises for angry woman and says best way to speak to priest would be join confession queue. I do... pulled from confessional by a bald worshipper bloke before have chance to apologise or receive absolution... Priest intervenes in corridor and hears my apology and thanks me, says he can make no comment... Go for coffee. Nice whiskered man says I can join him...
Gillibrand: Suspect he would give a blessing if asked - absolution is a different matter.
RuthieGledhill: Afro-Carib from on our table asks about Williamson. Whiskered man says he won't be leaving Wimbledon... afro-caribbean man from deptford produces a pic of him and family with Rowan Williams. I start to feel better... going now. if u have come late to this and are puzzled see blog. timesonline.co.uk/gledhill On Chris's advice go back and asked for blessing. Was freely given....
Gillibrand: That's a relief.

I suppose I ought to feel slightly impressed that she went at all, and Chris Gillibrand defends her actions by saying 'As someone who, albeit at a distance, could be considered an accomplice, I think Ruth should be congratulated on boldly going where Protestants rarely if ever have gone before and indeed via twitter to take others with her, even if only in a virtual sense. An enlightened idea and enlightening to others.'

The thing is, though, I can't help but be disheartened by her observation on her blog that 'Today, as Richard Owen reports, the Catholic bishops in Italy have said the faithful should give up texting for Lent. I know from personal experience now that some Catholics detest people who text.'

That's hardly fair, is it? The angry woman may well have been out of line with how she behaved and what she said, but I can kind of see where she was coming from. I'd be aghast if somebody sat beside me at mass spent the whole service texting away -- I'd find it generally rude, but probably contemptuous towards both the congregation and indeed the object of worship Himself. To be fair, I'd not be impressed if I went out for dinner with someone, and they did that throughout the meal.

Ruth defends her own conduct by saying:

'I was as far to the back as I could be without being outside the church, and when I sensed my neighbours were finding the constant movement of my thumbs an irritant, I slipped into the side chapel or a corridor. At no point did I make a call on the phone, which was switched to silent. Maybe I did cross a line, but I reckoned at the time that given this was a church that regularly welcomes a Holocaust denier to speak, any sin I committed in reporting a service there was under the circumstances forgivable.'

I'm not sure that works, though. Most of the 'traditional' Catholics who'd attend such services seem to go because of what they see -- rightly or wrongly -- as the beauty, the purity, and the authenticity of the liturgy. They don't go to hear crackpot political or historical theories.

It seems to me that if she really wanted to report the news, rather than make the news, she ought to have done her research in advance, maybe by reading something like Ronald Knox's old and elementary but genuinely excellent The Mass in Slow Motion, and then gone along with a Catholic friend, with whom she could have discussed any points of confusion after mass.

After all, would her actions have been greeted any more favourably in an Anglican church? Or a mosque? Or in synagogue?

I can't see 'Muslim Suicide Bombs' catching on as a Drink

Despite not getting it at all, I joined Twitter recently, mainly because I was curious and because I felt that this might be one of those things that you can only understand by doing it. I've hardly embraced it, it must be said, and in truth have hardly done more than touch it in as tentative a fashion as I can. I don't really see how it's anything other than a timesink, I'm afraid.

I'm not saying that it doesn't have uses, because I'm sure it does, but I'm not convinced that those uses outweigh the time lost on it that might be spent doing other things. There've got to be serious opportunity costs there, for most people in real jobs anyway.

Twittering on your phone, perhaps, is different, seeing as it's something you can do while stuck in a lift or on the bus, say, but given that a friend of mine was at Croke Park on Saturday and missed BOD's drop goal because she was tweeting at the time, I'm not even convinced of that.

But anyway, I'm on Twitter, as I said, and I 'follow' - in that passive way - about eighty people, one of whom is Amber Benson, best known surely as Tara from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I was a little perturbed when she tweeted the other day to say that she was 'headin' over to the Hotel Cafe for some wine and women. Scratch that. Music and irish car bombs,' adding a few hours later that she, 'Did an irish car bomb all by myself.'

Did a what? Was this a drink, I wondered. Yes, it appears. I've checked, and it really is. An Irish Car Bomb is a cocktail of the sort technically termed a boilermaker, being a beer with a shot. In the past shots tended to be served on the side with boilermakers, but nowadays the tendency is to mix the two, often by dropping the shot into the beer, in the style of a Jägerbomb. Now that you know that, brace yourself.

An Irish Car Bomb is made by pouring three quarters of a pint of stout, almost certainly Guinness, and dropping into it a shot glass into which a half measure of whiskey, probably Jameson, has been floated on a half measure of Irish cream, probably Baileys. Sometimes, and this may be the most perverse part of the equation, a small peeled potato is put in the drink too, like an olive in a martini.

You'll not be surprised to know that this is an American concoction, or that it's none too popular in Irish pubs and bars. At home it's unheard of, but I gather that Irish bars abroad often refuse to serve them, though whether this is because the barmen find them offensive in a political or an aesthetic sense I do not know. Probably both.

I mean seriously. Can you imagine the damage that this would do to the head? This is sacrilege.

Student for Four Pounds Fifty Please

I went to see Seven Pounds on Friday with a friend of mine; I'd known nothing at all about the film, but she'd heard good things, and really wanted to see it, so I was content to run with that. I'd heard nothing bad, after all, and don't see enough of her, so I was more than happy to take chance on a film I knew nothing about. It's a funny time to be going to the cinema, really: what with Doubt, Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, The Reader, Revolutionary Road, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon which I have difficulty believing is still on, perhaps Gran Torino, maybe Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and quite possibly The Wrestler if it's still on anywhere, there's simply too much on that's at least worth seeing, if not quite worth going to see. And of course, I'm more broke now than I've ever been in my life, so most of these films will just pass me by.

But anyway, off we went to see the film, since that'd been my friend's choice and I had no objections. It's rare I'm so trusting. Normally I'd scour online and then reply by saying something like Seven Pounds? The film the Guardian gave a mere one star to, calling it 'supremely annoying'? The film the Times likewise graced with one star, calling it 'a profoundly irritating mystery about a profoundly silly man'. I've never seen either paper give anything one star! And then there was the New York Times which wondered whether the film was 'among the most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made'.

Surprisingly, you might think, despite this critical damnation, I have to say that my friend and I were evidently among the 76% of IMDB voters who didn't hate the film, rather than the 74% of critics who did, according to Rotten Tomatoes. I quite liked it, in fact. Sure, it was schmaltzy, and Will Smith seemed to spend the film wearing a permanent grimace, and I had serious doubts about the manner in which he was effectively playing God with people's lives, but I found it both engaging and thought-provoking, thought that Rosario Dawson was excellent in it, and felt that it was extremely well scored. Muse's version of 'Feeling Good' is a cracker, after all, and Bird York's 'Have No Fear' is heartwrenching. On top of that there's the simple fact that I'm a sucker for redemption stories - however flawed.

Given the redemption theme, and the manner by which that redemption is effected at the climax of the film, I'm still trying to figure out if the film's Catholic imagery helped or hindered it. It certainly got me thinking, it must be said, though there are people out there who think I do that too much anyway. . .

On getting home I decided to have a gander online to find out where the film's title came from, and it seems that it's a play on the pound of flesh demanded as repayment in The Merchant of Venice. Seven debts, seven pounds - that's the thinking.

And it was while I was looking that up that I discovered that a contract signed under a pseudonym is not legally valid, that corneas are the only parts of eyes that can be transplanted and that irises most certainly can't, and that box jellyfish poison is a neurotoxin that spreads through the entire body rendering every organ in the body unsuitable for donation. I think I understand now why the critics reckoned the film didn't make sense.

On the other hand, it's a powerful advert for safe driving, especially if it's preceded by a disturbing advert making a similar point. Ah, those canny nightmare-inducing advertising types.

Challenging Universities

I realise that with the world collapsing around us, the outcome of a British quiz show ought hardly to be the most important thing on the news. For all that, though, it does seem there's some hoohah about the legitimacy of Corpus Christi, Oxford's victory over Manchester in University Challenge as televised last Monday.

Apparently Sam Kay, the only member of the Corpus team with a background in anything other than the Classical World, had left the college and was no longer a student by the time Corpus took part in the Quarter Finals. In case you don't remember or didn't know, that was the stage in the competition where Corpus demolished Exeter by 350 points to 15, before going on to conclusively beat St John's, Cambridge 260 to 150, and finally stage a spectacularly comeback against Manchester, ultimately beating them 275 to 190.

The rules are utterly clear on this sort of thing, stating that all contestants must be students for the duration of the competition -- both its filming and its broadcasting -- so it seems perverse of Kay to come out with nonsense of the order of 'I was a student when I applied to be on the show and on the day when we filmed the first two rounds, so I don't think I've done anything wrong.'

Well, if the rules are that all contestants must be students for the competition's duration, then he has. Sorry. There doesn't seem to be any wiggle-room here. You'd think he'd be able to see that, as you need to be pretty bright to compete in University Challenge, even if the show's questions are biased more towards crystallised rather than fluid intelligence.

To be fair, it does look as though this started as a genuine error, in that he initially applied and competed in the early stages of the competition when planning on doing a PhD at Corpus; unfortunately for him his funding fell through, hence his going to work for PricewaterhouseCoopers, to whom he'd evidently applied in case the PhD had proved unfeasible.

For all that, though, surely he ought to have recused himself from the competition once his status changed, or at least raised the issue? The problem here, surely, is that it seems highly unlikely that his team-mates were unaware of this, which rather suggests that the entire team were knowingly breaking the rules.

And the thing is, leaving aside the moral question, why would they bother? This is like Putin fixing elections when he's so absurdly popular that he'd win by a landslide anyway. Good grief -- did you see Gail Trimble trounce all opposition? Sure, she was less prominent in the final against Manchester than in earlier rounds, but even so, look at her record. Coming into the final she'd scored 825 of the 1,235 points that Corpus had clocked up to that point, which rather begs the question of why you'd field somebody alongside her who could actually cause the Corpus victory to look fishy?

I mean, sure, Kay got two vital starter-for-ten questions right at pivotal points in the final, opening the gap that Trimble smashed through, but there's a fair chance that any number of Corpus students could have done just as well. I mean, it's not as if they'd have been fielding just three contestants on the day!

The Observer and the BBC report the Mancunian reaction rather differently, with the former having the Manchester team keen on a rematch, and the latter reporting that they have no such desire. Granted, given that University Challenge is a BBC show, you might think they'd be inclined to play down any such desire, but I'm inclined to believe the BBC on this, especially given defeated captain and Manchester historian Matthew Yeo's fine and magnanimous column in the latest New Statesman.

Whatever way you look at it, last Monday was a good night for historians and classicists, anyway.

So We Need a Referee as Well as Rules?

Yesterday wasn't a bad day on the sport front. Despite Ronan O'Gara's kicking being about as bad as I've ever seen, Ireland still somehow managed to grind out a 14-13 win against what seems an increasingly and perversely ill-disciplined English team, and it was nice on the football front to see a battered Everton winning and a faltering Liverpool losing too. With Arsenal dropping points again, Everton is seriously starting to look as though they may well overtake them, despite having six senior players, including our most creative player and our most effective striker, injured.

Speaking of football, and bear with me, I've mentioned the Alpha Course and Nicky Gumbel a couple of times in the past here, but haven't talked about either at length. Last May I described Christianity Explored as a mainstream rather than charismatic Evangelical corrective to Alpha, and the previous November I expressed some concerns about a presentation on The Da Vinci Code by the Reverend Gumbel, noting that he had misrepresented some things, made claims that couldn't really be supported, cherry-picked his evidence, and ignored the implications of what he had said.

No, don't ask me for examples. It was a long time ago. I can't remember what I was referring to. I'd need to watch it again, and the time just isn't to be found.

So anyway, I've recently been reading Gumbel's Questions of Life, which is basically Alpha for people who can't do the course, and I've been far from impressed. It's very simplistic, and I can't see how it would work in practice. Not a page passes without me frowning at things that just don't make sense, at statements that don't hold up, at quotations that are utterly out of context... I don't see how this brings people to Christ. I mean, obviously it does, but I just don't see how. I guess it must be linked with other things -- regular Bible reading, perhaps, or attendance at Church out curiosity -- and I suppose that when it's done as a course people have opportunities to ask questions and get answers, rather than simply scrawling in the margins things like 'hmmm', 'not quite', and 'but even Paul was unsure of this - see 1 Cor. 9.27, Gal. 5.4, and 1 Tim. 4.1, also Heb. 3.14, 6.6, 2 Pet. 2.15-21, and Matt. 7.21!'

One bit that particularly bemused me was this passage, on page 75 for what's in worth, in a chapter entitled 'Why and How Should I Read the Bible?'

A few years ago, a football match had been arranged involving twenty-two small boys, including one of my sons, aged eight at the time. A friend of mine called Andy (who had been training the boys all year) was going to referee. Unfortunately, by 2.30 pm he had not turned up. The boys could wait no longer. I was press-ganged into being the substitute referee. There were a number of difficulties with this: I had no whistle; there were no markings for the boundaries of the pitch; I didn't know any of the other boys' names; they did not have colours to distinguish which sides they were on; and I did not know the rules nearly as well as some of the boys.

The game soon descended into complete chaos. Some shouted that the ball was in. Others that it was out. I wasn't at all sure, so I let things run. Then the fouls started. Some cried, 'Foul!' Others said, 'No foul!' I didn't know who was right. So I let them play on. Then people began to get hurt. By the time Andy arrived, there were three boys lying injured on the ground and all the rest were shouting, mainly at me! But the moment Andy arrived, he blew his whistle, arranged the teams, told them where the boundaries were and had them under complete control. Then the boys had the game of their lives.

The point of this story, Reverend Gumbel tells us, is that without rules there'd be anarchy; people, he says, would be free to do whatever they wanted, causing people to get confused and hurt. Rules are needed, he says; people need to know where the boundaries are, so they can be free to enjoy the game. In some ways, he says, the Bible is like that -- it is God's rule book, in which he tells us what is 'in' and what is 'out', what we can do, and what we must not do.

Think about that, and have a read of the story again. The analogy doesn't really work, does it? After all, in the story, the problem isn't a lack of rules, it's the lack of a referee. Sure, Reverend Gumbel did his best, but he realised that he wasn't as familiar with the rules as some of the boys, and the boys themselves didn't agree on how to interpret or apply the rules. What's more, without a whistle he didn't have the authority to insist that the rules be applied consistently, and so he had difficulty preventing things from getting out of hand and people getting hurt.

What Reverend Gumbel appears to be saying here, and it would probably horrify him to realise this, is that we don't just need a rulebook, we need a referee to definitively interpret them. In effect, he's made a fine argument for the Papacy.