Charlie: It's Not All About Us

It's been very strange watching some Irish responses online to the week's horrific events in Paris.

 

Following the murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and subsequent hostage-taking and killings elsewhere, far too many people have seen this as a suitable time to demand that Ireland's 'blasphemy laws' should be repealed, and to scorn as hypocritical the Irish Times' criticism of the murderers' attempts to silence debate, given how our self-proclaimed 'paper of reference' once removed a cartoon from its archives.

 

Now, you might just think this kind of behaviour is just cynical opportunism, or is typical of that clueless parochial narcissism that so often blights our national discourse, and you might well be right, but it's worth looking at both issues separately for a moment.

 

 

Comparing Like with Loike, Totally

Just to take one example, Ed Moloney, one of the finest analysts of the Northern Irish Troubles and Peace Process, for instance, tweeted last night, 'When Will The Irish Times Remember The Cartoon It Censored At The Behest Of Religious Fanatics?'

 

Writing about this on his blog, where after some reflection he changed his headline from one identical to the tweet to one saying, 'Irish Times Leads Nation’s Protest Over "Charlie" But Forgets About Cartoon It Censored At Behest Of The Bishops,' he quotes the Irish Times's comment that 'The right to offend must be defended with courage and vigour', before saying that it would have been more 'uplifting' if the Irish Times editorial had expressed regret for how it had removed from its archives a Martin Turner cartoon because, he said, it had offended senior members of the Irish Catholic hierarchy.

 

'It seems,' he concludes, 'that sauce for the Catholic goose is not sauce for the Islamic gander.'

 

Now. Moloney's a smart man, and on the face of it you might think he's making a fair point. It's worth taking a look at the cartoon, though, which we can easily do because, well, it's not 1904, and things tend to end up online about two minutes after newspapers remove them. 

 

(For instance, do you remember in October 2004 when the Guardian removed from its archives a Charlie Brooker 'Screen Burn' column that ended by lamenting the probability of George W. Bush being reelected president, and said 'John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald,  John Hinckley Jr -- where are you now that we need you?' No?

 

Well, perhaps you remember how in August 2013, the Irish Times ran a front page piece about a twin pregnancy being terminated at the National Maternity Hospital as the first termination conducted under the terms of the Protection of Life during Pregnancy Act? Remember? You should: it was such an impressively detailed report that Peter Boylan, who was reportedly involved in the termination, spluttered about how the patient's confidentiality had been breached, and yet it was utterly revoked and wiped from the paper's archives a week later, with a small and inappropriately discreet page seven apology pointing out that the law was not yet in force, and claiming that 'The hospital has pointed out that the case described in the article did not happen.'

 

If you don't remember either of these peculiar episodes, well, don't worry, because this is 2015, and so I've kindly given you links to the missing stories. And then, if you really have an issue with censorship, go and write to the said papers to complain about their willingness to bow to, I dunno, angry politicians and embarrassing obstetricians. Or something.)

 

So, anyway, here's the Turner cartoon, the removal of which so irks Mr Moloney, because, of course, an Irish publication freely deciding to withdraw a cartoon while retaining the services of its cartoonist is comparable to a load of cartoonists and other magazine staff being butchered.

It is, we should start by conceding, not a very good cartoon. It's a leaden thing, where three priests, all rather surprisingly wearing what I presume are meant to be cassocks*, and one stepping out of a confessional box rather perplexingly wearing an alb as well as his stole, sing 'I would do anything for children (but I won't do that)'.

 

Presumably this is to the tune of Meatloaf's seminal return hit, 'I would do anything for love (but I won't do that)'**, though if you can get the priests' line to scan to the original tune you're a better man than I am.

 

In case you're too thick to realise that this was intended as a comment on Catholic opposition to one element in the child protection laws being introduced at the time, one of the priests -- presumably singing with his mouth closed -- is scowling down at a newspaper running the headline 'Children First Bill: Mandatory Reporting'. As an English friend pointed out the other day in a more general context, if you feel the need to include newspaper headlines to spell out what your cartoon is about, you've probably not done a very good cartoon.

And, of course, if you don't see the significance of Catholics taking issue with a particular proposal that might limit freedom of religion in return for nothing that would actually protect children, and if you're not willing to concede that the Church in Ireland has -- so, so, belatedly -- been pretty much the leader in Irish child protection over the last decade or so, and if you don't have a problem with government ministers crowing about this proposal while actual experts in child protection point out that the planned legislation wouldn't help anyone and was being conducted in tandem with policies that would endanger children, well, then you're probably not very bright, not very well informed, or just not really interested in protecting children at all.

 

The day after the cartoon appeared, there were two letters in the paper, both from priests, one describing the cartoon as 'bigoted, nasty and downright disgraceful', pointing out that given the Church has more stringent child protection guidelines than any other body in Ireland, it was a cheap shot and a betrayal of anti-Catholic bigotry to 'use the sins of the past as a stick to continue to beat the church of the present', while the other describe it as 'offensive in the extreme to every priest in the country', and required an editorial apology unless the paper was of the view that it was 'open season on priests'.

The following day there were four letters about the cartoon, one of which said the cartoon was below the belt, but that as a satirical cartoonist it was Turner's job to be offensive. The other three were less understanding. One described the cartoon as 'a new low in Irish journalism', reminiscent of the sectarian cartoons of the nineteenth-century American Thomas Nast. Another, from a long-time fan of Turner, said the cartoon was 'bigoted', 'nasty', and 'spectacularly unfunny', revealing a potent double standard where the paper's general 'zeal for anti-religious comment' was not being 'applied to critical analysis of current government scandals'. A third, from a reader of the 55 years, described the cartoon's publication as 'an error of judgement' that warranted an apology to Ireland's priests and the paper's readers.

 

That same day, speaking in Dublin's pro-Cathedral, Diarmuid Martin, the Archbishop of Dublin, said 'I am a strong believer in freedom of speech and of the vital role of satire in social criticism, but I object to anything that would unjustly tarnish all good priests with the unpardonable actions of some.'
 

What was the problem? Well, if you look down in the cartoon's bottom corner, in very small writing, you'll see an authorial aside saying, 'But there is little else you can do for them... except stay away from them, of course.'

 

Bear that in mind, when you read the Irish Times editorial that made clear why the cartoon was removed. The editorial states that the paper is bound by the Irish Times Trust's principles which require that the paper is meant to ensure that comment and opinion should be 'informed and responsible', with 'special consideration ... given to the reasonable representation of minority interests and divergent views, and that and it should uphold  'the promotion of peace and tolerance and opposition to all forms of violence and hatred, so that each man may live in harmony with his neighbour, considerate for his cultural, material and spiritual needs.'

 

No, really. No laughing at the back there.

 

'That means, however, that there is no carte blanche,' the editorial explained, 'and that there are ground rules which we try to adhere to, mostly with no argument from those contributors. Civilised debate, we accept, requires the eschewing of ad hominem argument, playing the ball, not the man, and avoiding crude stereotyping.'

Turner's cartoon was described as having flown under the editorial radar, the editorial explained, picking up on the authorial aside about how priests should keep away from children. 'In making a legitimate argument about the debate over priestly responsibility for reporting child abuse and the concerns for the seal of the confessional, Turner also took an unfortunate and unjustified sideswipe at all priests, suggesting that none of them can be trusted with children. This has, unsurprisingly, caused considerable offence and we regret and apologise for the hurt caused by the cartoon whose use in that form, we acknowledge, reflected a regrettable editorial lapse.'

 

The Turner thing was very simple. The Irish Times has its own guidelines, Turner breached them by irresponsibly and ignorantly casting all priests as dangers to children -- and if you think this is a fair comment on the phenomenon of abuse in Ireland, you really should read more --  and so the paper pulled it. To make out that this has broader implications would be as outrageous as me saying that because my school magazine was once pulled from distribution because of a story I had done in it, so nobody at that school should ever be allowed to take issue with cartoonists being murdered.

 

It really is that simple.

Blas for me! Blas for you! Blas for everybody in the room!

Then there's the blasphemy law thing. It's probably worth starting with the fact that I don't much care either way about the blasphemy law, such as it is: it doesn't bother me, and it wouldn't bother me if it were removed. I don't know any Catholics who are fans of it, to be honest. Some are opposed to it, and many wouldn't even bother shrugging if it were removed.

Now, the standard line about the blasphemy law over the last few years that it should be removed because it encourages Muslim countries to introduce similar blasphemy laws has been tweaked in the last week to the effect that 'Because of Ireland's blasphemy law, Charlie Hebdo wouldn't even be allowed in Ireland!' As such, so fools argue, we should remove the blasphemy law as a mark of respect and as a way of championing real free speech.

It's worth bearing in mind where the blasphemy law came from. A constitutional quirk basically requires the state to have some kind of blasphemy law, but Ireland's politicians sat on this legal oddity for ages, without people jumping up and down and claiming that they had to give legislative force to a constitutional imperative. Eventually, though, when tidying up issues of libel and slander and such in 2009's Defamation Act, the issue of other limitations on speech came up. The result was the so-called 'blasphemy law', better known to those who read as section 36 of the Defamation Act.

Section 36 says that those who publish or utter blasphemous matter can be subject to a fine of up to €25,000. Matter should be deemed blasphemous, if says, if a) it is "grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion" AND b) if the causing of such outrage is intended.

That bit about intent is crucial, and not just because it is half the definition of blasphemy, such that in Irish law you cannot blaspheme unless you have deliberately caused large-scale outrage. The law goes on to say that it is a defence to allegations of blasphemy for a reasonable person to find 'genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value in the matter to which the offence relates'.

In other words, the law has a three-part test: has the matter under investigation caused outrage among a significant number of people of a particular religious line, was it intended to cause such outrage, and is it bereft of literary, artistic, scientific, academic, or political merit?

To all intents and purposes it's a deliberately toothless law, designed to tidy up a constitutional glitch in such a way that nobody is ever troubled by it, and surely pretty much unnecessary given how the actual crime here seems to be substantively covered by 1989's Incitement to Hatred law.  You might take issue with its symbolism, or feel it's anachronistic, but one thing you can't really do is say that it does any actual harm. Our laws are often merely aspirational; this isn't even that.

Michael Nugent and his friends in Atheist Ireland disagree, of course, and regard it as a great betrayal that the government doesn't see its removal from the statute books asap as a massive priority. But then, of course, Atheist Ireland has never really understood the law. When the law was first instituted, they ran a list of 25 supposedly blasphemous quotations, daring the State to prosecute them. Of course, leaving aside now many of the quotations could be said to have had literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value, and that their publication in 2009 did not provoke large-scale outrage -- nobody cared -- the simple fact of the list having been published to make a political point about free speech meant it was clearly safe from prosecution.

Could Charlie be published in Ireland? Well, put it this way: was it intended to provoke anger among Muslims or Catholics or whoever or was it intended to make people think? To take a non-religious example***, is the accompanying cartoon a homophobic or racist piece designed to anger gay people or black people, or is its aim to get people to think about the socio-economic realities surrogacy can entail, with poor women, often from developing countries, being paid to serve as vessels for others' children?

'Surrogacy is two parents... and one slave.'

No, I think, Charlie certainly could be published in Ireland. Whether shops would want to stock it, or people would want to buy it... that's a different matter.

 

There's no getting away from the fact that the intentional provocation of large scale outrage is a central element in Ireland's blasphemy law; it's a law less about offending God, as in other blasphemy laws, as about deliberately angering people. This matters if we want to think about the trope that Muslim countries, especially Pakistan, like using Ireland's blasphemy law to justify their own similar laws.

Do they really do this?

 

Now, I might be wrong, I've only ever really heard of one instance of this happening, and even then it's a pretty dubious instance. At an October 2009 meeting of the UN's Human Rights Council, discussing discrimination, Pakistan entered a six-part proposal to oppose discrimination based on religion and belief. The first of these six propositions was clearly modelled on part of the Irish definition of legal blasphemy: 'State parties shall prohibit by law the uttering of matters that are grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents to that religion.'

So, yes, clearly based in part on the Irish one. And yet also spectacularly different from the toothless Irish law, because it utterly omits the role of intent in Ireland's law, that crucial point which means that you cannot blaspheme accidentally or inadvertently, that blasphemy must not merely be offensive, but must deliberately cause large-scale outrage, and that even should large-scale outrage deliberately be caused, there are a range of legitimate defences, including 'I intended to provoke large-scale outrage, but I was engaged in scholarly research and was telling the truth', and 'I intended to provoke large-scale outrage, but I did so in an aesthetically pleasing way', and 'I intended to provoke large-scale outrage, but I was making a point about free speech'.

The Pakistani proposal entailed using a truncated version of the Irish definition, and tried to promote that. It did not explicitly acknowledge the Irish law, and its proposal was crucially different from the Irish reality, except as misrepresented by, for instance, Atheist Ireland, which falsely states on its Blasphemy.ie website that 'The law defines blasphemy as publishing or saying something "grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matter held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion."'

No it doesn't, you buffoons. Please learn to read.

It is disappointing that oafs and otherwise smart people like Ed Moloney have tried to draw links between a responsible editorial decision and brutal acts of murder, just as it is disappointing that others claim Pakistan uses Ireland's blasphemy law to push for blasphemy laws elsewhere and present part of Ireland's legal definition of blasphemy as though it's the whole definition.

 

But that's the thing about free speech: it allows people to say stupid things.

 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some work to do.

 

 

 

* It looks rather as though they're wearing mysterious black night-shirts over lighter-coloured shirts with clerical collars. It's almost as though Turner has never seen a cassock and doesn't actually know what one looks like. Whether such basic ignorance might somehow undermine his point I leave to you to decide.

** Yeah, I know that's not the actual video. Watch it anyway, though. It may prove an education.

*** Because I don't see much virtue in republishing things I know many people would be upset by for the sake of making a broader, if somewhat self-aggrandising, point about the importance of free speech. That strikes me as doing something bad in the hope of achieving something good, and, well, there are forbidden weapons.

Soapy Operatics

The other evening, while digging through recent tweets, I noticed how a fortnight or so back I’d said, “Hmmm. Must make tea before calling home again. Rang during a proposal in Coronation Street, something which is never mentioned on Twitter.”

And that time I paused, because I honestly couldn’t think of a time I’d noticed anybody talking about Coronation Street on Twitter. Or Eastenders, for that matter. Now, granted, I could just have been filtering out tweets on those topics, but it got me thinking about how roughly a quarter of Britain’s population watch soap operas every week, and yet they seem to go unmentioned on Twitter.

It turns out that there are official Twitter accounts for the two main soaps, with Eastenders’ official account having almost 220,000 followers, and Coronation Street’s having almost 180,000. Not Stephen Fry country – indeed, not even in the range of the QI Elves – but still, it’s not too shabby.

But here’s the thing. It seems that of the almost 800 accounts I follow, just two follow the Eastenders account, and two follow the Coronation Street one. And one of those is the NSPCC.

Am I typical in this regard? Or is it simply the case that Twitterati are radically unrepresentative of the British population – and perhaps the Irish and American ones too -- in general? Food for thought there, methinks.

Now there's a condundrum for you...
So, anyway, this got me thinking about the soaps in general. I’m sorry to say that I’ve probably clocked up a few thousand hours of passive soap-watching over the decades. I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately turned one on, but I’ve certainly been in the room innumerable times when others have been watching Eastenders, Neighbours, Glenroe, Home and Away, and most especially Coronation Street. I have a big family, after all. The telly’s hardly mine to hog.

And while the telly’s been on, there have been plenty of occasions when I’ve not averted my eyes, so I’ve picked up a good broad knowledge of soap operas over the years.

Occasionally I’ve pondered a question memorably put by one of my best friends in Dublin: “What do the regulars in the Rovers Return watch on telly at half-seven on Monday nights?”

The dogs that don't bark...
It’s a fair question. One thing that’s conspicuously absent from Coronation Street, as a milieu, is Coronation Street the programme. Indeed, absent too, as far as I can tell, are Eastenders, Neighbours, Emmerdale, the lot. It seems that Weatherfield is almost the only working class or lower middle-class place in England where nobody watches or talks about soap operas.

I saw ‘almost’, because Walford seems to exhibit the same peculiarity. So, I suspect, does Emmerdale.

Another thing that’s strikingly odd in the two shows I’ve seen are football references. I’ve been assured that football gets mentioned now and again in the shows, but I honestly don’t think I’ve ever noticed it happening.

Weatherfield, it would seem, is a suburb of Greater Manchester where nobody talks about Manchester United or Manchester City, and where the pub is singularly devoid of crowds of burly men shouting obscenities at a big screen. And, just as eerily, although Eastenders occasionally features a mention of Walford Town FC, we never see people camping out in front of the Queen Vic’s telly to watch West Ham, that being, I think, the local team.

Spectator sport, it would seem, is unheard of on Coronation Street and Albert Square. I can’t remember whether it was ever mentioned on Brookside Close. Is it tenable that this was the only street in Merseyside where nobody talked of Everton and Liverpool?

Were Merseyside’s two great teams ever mentioned in Grange Hill, for that matter, when the school was inexplicably relocated there from London in 2003, thus rendering nonsensical the teasing Ziggy had received for his Scouse accent back in the 80s?

Sometimes historians have so little to go on...
All of which leads me to think that we’d be in quite the pickle if future historians were left to rely on soap operas and the usual incomplete archaeological remains to figure out what life was like in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Britain.

What would they conclude? That ordinary English people didn’t watch drama programmes on television – so that the shows that had somehow survived must have been elite entertainments. That they didn’t partake in spectator sports, and rarely engaged in any physical activities. That their social lives revolved around drinking establishments called pubs, which were perennially popular and oblivious to outside social factors. That religion played almost no part in their lives, save sometimes at weddings and funerals. That adultery, abuse, rape, and murder were the small change of their miserable lives.

That those lives were short, with Londoners rarely making it past their mid-forties, and Scousers being lucky to reach their mid-twenties, though lifespans in Manchester were seemingly rather longer than those in London.

And then, just to complicate matters...

And, of course, if they were particularly unlucky they might also have a couple of episodes of Doctor Who, to really confuse them. If they had ‘Army of Ghosts’, for instance, they’d see the Doctor and Rose Tyler sitting in Jackie Tyler’s living room, flicking through the channels to see Eastenders’ own Peggy Mitchell confronting a spectral cyberman in the Queen Vic.

“Listen to me, Den Watts! I don’t care if you ‘ave come back from the grave. Get outta my pub! The only spirits I’m serving in this place are gin, whisky, and vodka. So you ‘eard me – get out!”
The Doctor turns off the programme, and turning to Jackie says,“When did it start?”
“Well, first of all, Peggy heard this noise in the cellar, so she goes down - ”
“No,” he says, “I mean worldwide.”

Might the historians of the future think this is metafiction? Well, you’d hope so, not least because of the improbable suggestion in it that ordinary people obsessively watched soap operas, which they would of course know to be false.*

Of course, if they had more than ‘Army of Ghosts’ to rely on, they’d realise that Doctor Who and Eastenders share a fictional continuity**, with the Doctor having visited Walford in 1993’s Dimensions in Time, where the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh incarnations of the Doctor, not to mention a medley of companions, battled the Rani, caught in timeloops that saw them visiting Albert Square as it was in 1973, 1993, and what appears to be an alternative 2013 where Kathy Beale, Pauline Fowler, Frank Butcher and Pat Evans are all mysteriously still alive.***

This might lead them to think that Eastenders is no more realistic than Doctor Who, or it might lead them to think that this is just a straightforward way of making Doctor Who seem more credible, on the Henry James principle that “a good ghost story ... must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life.”

Or it might lead them to think that Doctor Who accurately depicts modern British life too, with Eastenders being a reality TV show within the Doctor Who continuum, which might at least explain why Jackie watches it.

But that’s a whole other topic. Whatever way we look at it, it'd probably lead to some very strange documentaries.

________________________________________________________
* Especially if they had Twitter to go by.
** Subtly different from Red Dwarf, which though set in the same fictional continuum as Coronation Street is explicitly stated as taking place in a different dimension.
*** Don't even think of saying that as a 'Children in Need' special it doesn't count. Nobody says that about 'Time Crash'.

Trivial Pursuit...

I’ve always liked my brother’s self-indulgent 101 facts about himself, and while looking for something earlier I thought it might be fun to bump up an old Facebook note -- one of those meme things -- into a blogpost. That said, it’s probably a post for me and masochists only.

And so, in emulation, here goes...

1. When I was a child I wanted to join the Household Cavalry, which can’t have been normal in 1980s Dublin. The Life Guards, to be precise. Part of me still wishes I could. Let’s face it: they look like knights, don’t they?

2. Mikhael Gorbachev once rubbed off me. Not in an inappropriate way, just while he was trying to get to his seat at Hampton Court Palace. He was clearly keen on hearing what Salman Rushdie and Quincy Jones had to say.

3. My first night on mainland Europe was spent in a twelfth-century castle overlooking the Rhine. I went back there on my third trip to Germany. The hundreds of steps up the hill seemed far less arduous as an adult.

4. Despite a weakness for toffee, caramel, millionaire shortbread, cheesecake, and Black Forest gateau (especially if made with morello cherries), I maintain that I do not have a sweet tooth. I do, however, have a freakishly long tongue. People stare when I unleash it. I’m never sure if they’re horrified, impressed, or intrigued.

5. Once, on Ash Wednesday, I was given ashes in the shape of the Batman symbol. I suspect this was not intentional.

6. Years ago I discovered a letter written by Thomas Hardy while rummaging in an old copy of his collected poems. I’m still not a fan of his books, though. Realism is one thing, but pessimism on that scale? The glass might be half empty, but at least there’s a glass, Tom.

7. After a day spent wandering about Krakow, going as far out as the camp in Schindler’s List, I was taught to dance the Macarena by Mexicans in a supposedly Irish bar where we drank 12 per cent strength beer until four in the morning; a few hours later I received the results of my final exams, learning that I’d topped my year for a third time running, and visited Auschwitz. It was an eventful 24 hours.

8. One hot summer day in Athens, I gave inaccurate directions to a flustered Dylan Moran and his family. Realising I’d sent them the wrong way I tracked them down and gave them proper directions to the street he wanted to go to. At no point did I indicate I had any idea who he was. I hope he appreciated that.

I later discovered that the museum he wanted to visit was on a different street, and was closed till September.

9. I once ended a statistics lecture by banging my desk, tearing off my jumper to reveal a lumberjack shirt, and singing Monty Python’s ‘Lumberjack Song’ to 300 bemused Commerce students.

10. The longest I have gone without a haircut was eight months. I shall try to refrain from repeating that error.

11. I once cut my own hair, just a couple of weeks before I sprained my wrist jumping off a roof; that was clearly a troubling summer for my parents. The hair cut was not a great success.

12. On the way to a wedding in the Lake District some years back, I was delayed for an hour on a train because workmen the previous night had conducted work on the line and forgotten to replace the tracks. I doubt I shall ever hear a better excuse.

13. I’m not much of a man for water, favouring tea in a big way, but I drank six litres of the stuff in under an hour when I climbed Masada at noon. There’s a reason why the Israeli army only go up it in the early hours, but I had a bus schedule to work around.

14. A comic strip drawn by me for my school magazine when I was fourteen was censored; one drawn for it when I was fifteen led to the school magazine being banned and never revived. The following year we had a yearbook, and the strip I drew for that, two pages of which you can see here, was – perhaps wisely – never published.

I appear to have drawn Brian Cowan in the final panel. And Roger Mellie.

15. I spent several years wanting to be a comic artist, and when Bryan Talbot and Steve Pugh looked at my work they told me I’d definitely make it if I kept at it. I’ve hardly drawn since.

16. I caught a burglar in the early hours of Easter Sunday, 2006. A Ryanair flight I was on arrived in Liverpool a few minutes early, and my luggage was first out; this enabled me to catch the Manchester bus an hour earlier than I had planned so that got home an hour ahead of schedule; being in the right place at the right time led to the burglar’s capture. The City of Manchester thanked me for this. The institution where the burglar had been operating did not. Quite the opposite, in fact.

17. My command of my ancestral tongue leaves a lot to be desired, but I prefer my name in its Irish form.

18. I read vast quantities of Enid Blyton books as a child, including all the 'Famous Five' books. Despite this, I never knew what smugglers were. Too lazy to use a dictionary, I always trusted that the meaning would become clear. It didn’t. They were obviously bad guys, though. Like thugs. And ruffians.

19. I only ever had one organised fight in school, fought to establish definitively who had won an impromptu fight the previous year. The outcome of the arranged fight was itself disputed. This episode clearly haunts me even now.

20. The Irish Independent once quoted me as a cultural authority, accusing Brian McFadden of jumping onto a ‘cool bandwagon of pain’. He was, too. It was to be a long time before the Irish Times quoted me, and then it was under my pseudonym. That said, I’d had a letter in the paper a few weeks earlier, under my real name.

21. I have fallen asleep standing up on at least three occasions, and have fallen asleep mid-sentence at least once.

22. The furthest north I have been is Dalmally, in Scotland, where I celebrated the Easter Vigil with one of my closest friends in 2011. On arrival there I quipped to her that this would be the first time in ages that I’d be at Mass and not be asked to do something; walking in the door we were promptly asked to bring up the bread and wine at the Offertory.

23. The country I’ve been closest to without setting foot in it was the Lebanon. I was a passenger in a Syrian taxi on a road that ran within two miles of the border; my driver was unable to use his rear-view mirror as he’d clipped a small television screen over it.

24. As a teenager I didn’t believe in God, but rather than saying so would dutifully disappear for an hour every Sunday, often spending the time daydreaming in the back of the church, walking around the neighbourhood, skiving in a snooker hall, or chatting with mates in a ruined pre-Norman church. I didn’t see any virtue in distressing my parents by kicking up a fuss. Converted as an adult by reading a lot, thinking very carefully, and engaging with a succession of Atheists, Agnostics, and Anglicans, I have prayed at the tombs of St Francis of Assisi, St Peter, St Paul, and Our Lord.

25. I have an unhealthy weakness for secondhand bookshops, where my greatest finds have been an 1895 leatherbound and gilt-edged collected Chaucer, a collection of GK Chesterton’s poems once owned by and still bearing the name of a teenage Eavan Boland, and a volume of Chesterton essays signed by the man himself.

26. I am still disappointed I never managed to meet Patrick Leigh Fermor before he died.

27. I have twice attended receptions in ambassador’s houses, and have been disappointed by a distinct absence of Ferrero Rocher on both occasions. At the first reception I was greeted at the door by Benazir Bhutto and spoke briefly to Olivia de Havilland; at the second reception, my host informed the ambassador that she was spoiling us.

28. When using my parents’ exercise bike I used to read while listening to the radio. I still feel this was impressive multitasking on my part; I must see if I can still do this.

29. I’ve twice attempted to visit an improbable battlefield, located on a Greek mountaintop. The first time, after I’d explained the nature of the route to my archaeological friend who was driving us, he stared and said “So we’re going to follow an impassable road to the possible site of a badly-described battle which may not have happened.”

We didn’t make it there, though we did manage to damage our already unreliable rental car in the process.

Three years later we made it to the top only to be chased down the hill by dogs.

30. I once played a clockwork mouse in a primary school play; the following year, in a clear attempt at preventing similar malarkey, I wrote the scene performed by my class, insisting on special effects and incidental music. Grieg, since you asked. The dragon’s head built at my request became a standard feature of school plays there for years afterwards, it being the only purpose-built prop they had. It was customised more than once.

31. I have narrowly avoided colliding with Seamus Heaney and Dara O’Briain when turning corners in Dublin; I wasn’t quick enough to avoid colliding with PJ Mara one night on Waterloo Road. He dropped his phone. It should be noted that he wasn’t quick enough to avoid colliding with me either.

32.  My most treasured possessions are an Edwardian swordstick, a policeman’s cape, a medieval human skull, a Carthaginian coin, a bullet and a shrapnel ball from the Great War, a fossilised trilobite, a painting of Dublin Bay, a linoprint of Brighton’s West Pier, two signed pages of original Sandman artwork, and the aforementioned collection of essays signed by G.K. Chesterton.

Some treasured trinkets

33. I would like to see every Vermeer in the world, and think this is a manageable ambition, there being only three dozen or so all told. I’ve seen five since deciding I wanted to do this. I think I’d seen eight others over the years in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, and Edinburgh but feel they need seeing afresh.

34. I was a very aggressive defensive end when I played American football as a twelve-year old, perhaps a bit too aggressive, even; I wasn’t picked for the Nerf flag football ad a few of my mates were in!

35. I have spent long journeys working out detailed advertising campaigns for Sure anti-perspirant, Werthers Originals, and Erdinger. Only the Sure one would ever stand a chance of seeing the light of day, the others lacking a certain historico-political sensitivity.

36. Over the years I have given four Claddagh rings, two of silver with little stones in, and two plain ones of white gold, all were as twenty-first birthday presents for very dear friends.

37. The furthest I’ve ever cycled in a day was 97 miles, going to Glendalough via Blessington and through the Wicklow Gap, and coming back by way of Bray and the centre of Dublin. That was my second cycle trip to Glendalough that summer, the first time having been via the Liffey Valley and the Sally Gap.

38. While driving back to Rome from Cannae, when making a BBC documentary in Italy, I used the line ‘After Cannae, Hannibal thought his plan was really coming together.’ It didn’t make the final cut.

39. Two childhood friends of mine and I once failed to dam a stream with rocks, but on finding a slab of lard in the stream dammed it successfully using the lard as mortar. Don’t ask what the lard was doing in the stream. Really, you don’t want to know.

40. The strangest thing I have eaten was a lamb’s brain. It was delicious.

41. The most unpleasant thing I have ever eaten was tripe boiled in milk with potatoes and onion. I’ve had tripe since, though, in Rome, and would have it cooked that way again. I might not pick it from a menu, but I’d eat it.

42. A resolute defender when playing football at school, I once volleyed a tennis ball the entire length of what counted as a football field for us. And scored. It was my only ever goal.

43. My first paid job was working at the Irish Open. I spent four days in a little hut, reading books, listening to a crackly walkie-talkie, peering through binoculars to see what other leaderboard operators had heard through the crackles, changing scores, and being shouted at by golfers because I was using a walkie-talkie. The entire experience thoroughly inoculated me against golf.

44. The two girls with whom I’ve been taken for the longest periods in my life shared a birthday, albeit a few years apart. Those who know me very well may be surprised to learn that only the latter of these was a redhead.

45. I may have been the only person in Palmerstown not to boast of having seen Julia Roberts when she hid out from the world press there. I did, however, see her when she returned a few years later.

46. Ever since I was a little boy, there have been four places I’ve wanted to visit more than anywhere else in the world: I visited Petra in 2000 and Krak des Chevaliers in 2010. I fear I’ll never visit Machu Picchu or Angkor.

Before going to find the Holy Grail

Oblivious to the tarantula sitting across the table from me

That said, maybe in 2020 and 2030...

47. The furthest south I have ever been is Aqaba, crossing into Jordan and leaving it. I’ve still not seen the town properly, and half wonder if the guns are still there, facing out to sea.

48. In September 1998 I dreamed that Akira Kurosawa died, and the following day he did. It has been pointed out to me that he was both rather old and very famous, and so there’s a good chance that on any given day somebody in the world was dreaming of his death. I've seen ten of his films in the cinema – more than by any other director – and my favourite film is still Seven Samurai: it’s elegiac, beautiful, exciting, funny, tragic, instructive, and thoughtful, without a wasted shot.

49. I have seen at least 281 films in the cinema, and have fallen asleep during at least eight of them: The Madness of King George, Three Colours Blue, Pulp Fiction, Seven, Shine, The Phantom Menace, The Empire Strikes Back, and The Two Towers. There was a fire in the Lighthouse when I went to see Farewell My Concubine. I still don’t know how it ends.

50. I once went to a very small theatre with a girl with whom I’d gone out the previous year, and was startled when one of the male leads stripped off in the second half and strutted about in front of us for several minutes. We did not speak of this until several weeks later. When I returned from the play and told the mutual friend with whom I was staying what had happened, she asked whether my ex had blushed during this. I didn’t know, I said; I had been too embarrassed to look.

51. The most disgusting experience I’ve ever had was when I stepped in the carcass of a dead dog. In my defence, it was a dark night. I only wish I hadn’t been wearing sandals.

52. Over the course of four trips to Greece I have sprained both ankles, smashed my head off a tree, been abandoned by a taxi driver after midnight, walked into a cloud of tear gas, watched a cockroach land on a friend during dinner, narrowly avoided two lethal motorbike accidents, and, as mentioned, stood in a dead dog. There is a reason why friends of mine use the term 'Greece Wins Again' when bad things happen there.

53. I have long joked about giving a pseudo-academic paper on the interlinked phenomena of GWAs, en taxei, and Hellenisation, drawing almost all examples from Greek myth and ancient history. Worried that I might upset Greek friends, I have resisted this temptation.

54. In a Paris park I bumped into a girl I knew from college, and a year and a half later in Killarney I met a customer I knew from work. Both these events seemed unusual at the time, but since then I’ve made a habit of such encounters, with me meeting so great a succession of friends and friends of friends in such diverse spots as London, Athens, Damascus, and Gallipoli that I’m now almost surprised when I don’t meet somebody I know, to a greater or lesser degree. The world can be a very small place.

55. The longest letter I have ever written ran to 236 pages. I got carried away.

56. My favourite song is ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’, and I was oddly pleased when, the only time I’ve seen the Pogues live, Shane messed it up. Drunk as he was, he sang the last verse too early in the song, and so wound up returning to it, treating it as a chorus. Has there ever been so fine a compliment as ‘You’re the measure of my dreams’?

57. I sat my university finals when I was twenty. Had I stayed the course as a teenage Commerce student, I’d have done so at nineteen. This strikes me as worryingly young. Life would have been rather different had I done that, of course.

58. I have spent two summers working on archaeological digs, both in the field and in the lab. On my first day on site I discovered an early Christian grave in a Hellenistic artillery tower, when I picked up a tiny shard and recognised it as a fragment of human cranium.

This was my first day on the dig. The weather improved. A lot.

59. People tend to think of me as well-travelled, but I’ve yet to spend even one night in fifteen of Ireland’s thirty-two traditional counties, and I’ve never so much as set foot in Antrim or Fermanagh.

60. I can’t help feeling a bit jealous of people who’ve been to Skellig Michael, Dun Aengus, and the Giant’s Causeway. That said, I realise that rather than being jealous, I should just figure out a way of going there.

61. The first time I was on television was during a documentary about the Phoenix Park: I was a little boy, sitting on the steps on the Wellington Monument, and the camera swept over me as I got up.

62. The first time I said a word on television, I was a talking head in a documentary about Hannibal. On the way to the studio in Ealing, both of my shoelaces broke. It was a troublesome walk.

63. I have twice seen pigeons getting the Tube in London. On both occasions I’ve had a camera handy.

64. Columns by Con Houlihan, clipped for me from the Evening Press by my father, taught me the importance of the Oxford comma. I get annoyed when people don’t use it.

65. Until I was twenty-one, I had never flown anywhere.

66. I was briefly nicknamed ‘Zanussi’ in school, having got 98pc in my Inter Cert science mock exam; Zanussi, lest you’ve forgotten, billed itself as ‘the Appliance of Science’. 

67. Some years ago, when picking up a friend’s husband from work at CERN, I asked what exactly he did, and whether he just sat round drinking tea and bouncing particles all day long. He laughed, and said he’d show me, taking me into the bowels of the earth to see the Large Electron-Positron Collider. Its control room looked like a hybrid of Homer Simpson’s office and the bridge of the original Enterprise.

68. I used to know all the words to ‘... Baby One More Time’. In German. Now I remember little more than the title: ‘Schlag Mich, Liebling, Noch Einmal’.

69. I used to go out with a girl who lived a couple of miles from the site of the Battle of Hastings; her grandparents lived on the site of the Battle of Edge Hill. Over the years I’ve visited the probable sites of the battles of the Ticinus, the Trebbia, Lake Trasimene, Cannae, Pylos, Mantinea, Plataea, Leuctra, Coronea, Chaeronea, Thermopylae, Marathon, Thyrea, Ypres, and Gallipoli. As you do.

70. I have, I think, 2824 books. Despite storage problems, this isn’t really that many – two thousand, after all, is the minimum anyone should have if they want to be taken seriously, though hardly something to be proud of. No, I’ve not read them all. I’ve read the vast majority of them, but not all. Give me time. 

71. Well over six hundred of my books are novels, and of those my favourite is The Man Who Was Thursday. If you’ve not read it, you should rectify that. My favourite edition, annoyingly, is out of print, but you can read most of the introduction here; if you’re tempted, then ABE and Amazon Marketplace may yet be your friends.

72. When I was a little boy I read most of Robinson Crusoe, but stopped a few pages from the end. As far as I’m concerned he’s still on that island.

73. The first time I went to a football match, it was to see Everton draw with Liverpool on Good Friday 2000. We scored a perfectly good – if impossibly flukey – goal with twenty seconds left on the clock, and the ref disallowed it, saying he’d blown the whistle, whereas he was clearly scared of a riot if the goal was allowed. Years later he admitted he’d been wrong. This, I’ve learned in the intervening years, is typical.

74. The furthest east I have ever been is Palmyra, where I hurried up a hill to watch the sun set and got up absurdly early to return to the same hill to see it rise, and watch the dawn light over the ruins.

Sunset over Palmyra

And Palmyra in the light of the rising sun - worth getting up for!

75. I was unreasonably excited to see my name in the acknowledgements of Jess Nevin’s Impossible Territories. I had written eight blogposts on Moore and O’Neill’s Black Dossier and thrown the encyclopaedic Jess a few lines, so I shouldn’t have been surprised, but still. That said, I’ve yet to buy Jess’s book.

76. The first time I walked across a guarded border, there was a bomb scare; the second time I crossed over nervously, as I could overhear a furious man shouting in Arabic behind me, trying to persuade the soldiers there to stop me. I’ll tell you about it another time.

77. Somehow I’ve accumulated an absurd number of anecdotes as the years have gone by. I tend to forget which I’ve told, so have a habit of resorting to a rather small repertoire. The longest tale I tell I refer to as ‘The Paris Incident’, but I don’t think I’ve ever told it from egg to apple more than twenty times all told. It’s very good, but it’s a bit long for casual deployment.

78. I have played ‘... Baby One More Time’ on the ukulele. Sadly, it was a brief intensive lesson, and it’s not stuck, not least because I no longer have the tabs. Now I can barely manage ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’.

79. David Kelly and William Sessions have both sat beside me on buses. Not at once, I should point out. I talked more with the former FBI head; he recommended an interesting book to me.

80. I have attended Mass in at least 75 places, and heard it in nine languages, including Arabic and Czech.

81. I was a year into my research master’s before I realised that there was a general consensus that I was attempting something that couldn’t be done. Since my book’s publication, I think at least half a dozen other academics have done the same thing I did. Sometimes it pays off for fools to rush in where angels fear to tread. I'm not convinced I write ‘from an upper middle-class status’, though.

82. Whenever I see streams of bunting I think of underwear. I found the Jubilee very difficult.

83. Despite what the Oracle of Bacon thinks, I have a Bacon Rating of 3. The man who did the voiceover in my first Hannibal documentary, perhaps best known for playing Felix Leiter in the new Casino Royale, has a Bacon Rating of 2, having been in D-Tox with Rance Howard, who was in Frost/Nixon with Kevin Bacon. I reckon that gives me a 3.

84. A few years back, police asked if I could identify a murder victim from a photograph of his corpse. I couldn’t.

85. When playing Cluedo as a child I once had to accuse myself of committing murder. I found this so funny that I doubled over laughing and accidentally stabbed myself with my pencil. 

86. I have never travelled more frantically than in Malta, where in the space of thirteen hours I went on five bus journeys, hired three taxis, got the ferry twice, and hitch-hiked. It was exhausting, but it was worth it.

87. I’ve dabbled in karate and aikido over the years, but didn’t last with either; aikido, though wonderful, seemed less necessary than catching up on sleep, which could be done by retiring to the library and using a big old law book as a pillow. 

88. I have crossed a picket line, but only because the people on strike advised me to do so. It wasn’t a pleasant experience.

89. I once stayed awake for four full days. I’m never doing that again.

90. Much as I loved Batman, Robin Hood, and the Knights of the Round Table, my childhood hero was indisputably Johnny Alpha. I copied the cover to 2000AD prog 339 innumerable times, like Simon Pegg’s character in Spaced I shed a tear when Johnny died, and the words ‘because I hate you’ still send a shiver down my spine.

I’ve a page of 'Strontium Dog' original art put away at home. I’ve never been able to afford the cost of framing it.

91. I once tried to play Gaelic football. Soloing was beyond me. It’s best not to talk about it.

92. I don’t think I have ever been further west than Kerry. I’m not sure, as I can’t remember where exactly in Kerry I’ve been, and there’s a chance that I may have been further west on one of my trips to the Mullet in Mayo. I’ll have to find out.

I don't know where this is. Other than Kerry, obviously.

93. Aside from a handful of books, the only things I’ve kept since my childhood are a box of dominoes from the Soviet Union which I bought for £1.75 when I was eleven or so, and a wooden cigar box I once found and filled with foreign coins. I’ve still got the coins, though I'll leave the story of how I got them for another day. It’s an unsystematic collection.

94. There are lots of ways of dividing people up, but for me the one that rings most true and tallies most deeply with experience and observation is that there are two types of people: those who are dogmatic and know it, and those who are dogmatic and don’t.

95. During the darkest month of my adult life, the happiest moments were spent on my birthday, standing under a tree while the rain poured down.

96. When at twelve years old I first read Douglas Adams I thought the Hitchhiker’s Guide was the cleverest and funniest book I’d ever read; rereading it a couple of years back I found it painfully forced and as dry as dust.

97. I once went to a concert with a student of mine – just a couple of years younger than me – and her dad. He kept leaving us alone, to give us space. Given that space wasn’t needed, it was a bit embarrassing. The concert was great, mind. 

98. At Christmas 2004, I think, I received a Christmas card so wonderful that I’ve kept it up ever since. It depicts a Nativity scene, made from sprouts. And I like this, because it’s funny, and because when you’re a Catholic, stuff matters. And sprouts count just as much as wood and wine and water and wardrobes do.

99. I prefer dogs to cats. I’m sorry, but there it is.

100. Despite having loads of family and friends with children, until this year I had never been asked to be a godfather. I’ve now been asked three times. I may joke that it’s like buses, but each time it’s been an honour and a delight. 

101. Few things annoy me quite as much as the ‘Too Long – Didn’t Read’ attitude that seems to define internet argument. It’s a lazy, stupid, and utterly counterproductive way of dealing with people with whom we differ when we’re talking about something that matters. We’re all in this together, one way or another; we should make a serious effort to listen to each other.

That said, it’s an entirely legitimate response to a list of personal trivia.

The Parthenon Sculptures: A Reflection

The internet being the internet, Stephen Fry having added his voice to those calling for the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum to be returned to Athens will doubtless lead to a great clamour in his wake, largely from people who've hitherto not given the subject more than two minutes' thought.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It is, at any rate, not an unusual thing. 

Remember the invasion of the Falklands? Sue Townsend got it right in The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾:

'10am. Woke my father up to tell him Argentina has invaded the Falklands. He shot out of bed because he thought the Falklands lay off the coast of Scotland. When I pointed out that they were eight thousand miles away he got back into bed and pulled the covers over his head.'

Fiction, sure, but one that reflected something all too true; despite all those nowadays who claim that the Falklands are as British as Whitehall, back in 1982 huge numbers of Britons had no idea where they were.* Still, in no time at all Mrs Thatcher had Britain crying out for their return, for reasons of national pride and strategic sheep purposes.

Having won her glorious victory over a few thousand ill-equipped Argentinian youths, she went back to the polls in 1983 and was rewarded by having her share of the vote drop to 42.4%, while the two main opposition parties garnered 53% of the vote between them. Of course, the British electoral system being a model of democracy and known for how it so accurately reflects the will of the people, this translated to a massive victory for the Conservatives.

If burglars sold your most treasured possessions...

But I digress. The important thing, at any rate, is that huge numbers of Britons knew nothing about the Falklands when they were invaded, but brushed up quickly. 

Likewise, even those who've never given the Parthenon Sculptures a moment's thought before Stephen Fry piped up will have been able to think quickly about this, do some research, and quickly realise that there's not really any good reason why they're in London rather than Athens.

No, it won't do to claim that they were bought fair and square from the legitimate rulers of Greece two hundred years ago. Greece was occupied by the Ottomans at the time, and the Greeks were far from happy about being under imposed foreign rule -- so unhappy, in fact, that within nine years of the Parthenon Sculptures being shipped overseas, the Greeks began a successful revolution that won them their independence.

The Parthenon Sculptures weren't the Ottomans' to sell. That so many of the Parthenon Sculptures are in London now is a simple case of receipt of stolen goods.

Yes, we all know they'd probably have gotten damaged had they been still on the Acropolis during the War of Independence, with the Turks using the Erechtheion as a munitions store, just as they'd so disastrously used the Parthenon a century and a half earlier during a war with the Venetians. That most of the sculptures were away safely in London at the time surely preserved them. That's great. The Greeks are genuinely grateful for this. And as a reward, the British people have had two hundred years to admire them. It's time to give them back.

It is, frankly, dishonourable to try to pretend that they belong in London. It's the kind of thing that utterly gives to lie to any supposed sense of 'British fair play'.

That said, it's important to understand that we shouldn't be talking about returning them to Greece. We should be talking about returning them to Athens. There'd not be much point in sending them back if they were to end up in Corinth or Thessaloniki.

Pull up your seats. This bit matters. I'll simplify, but not by much.

An Education to Greece

The Acropolis -- the 'high city' -- was the ancient historical heart of Athens, a safe hilltop settlement. As time went on, more and more people began living around the base of it and on nearby hills, such that it became the religious and ritual centre of the city, the city's temple precinct. During the Persian invasion of 480-479 BC, the Persians occupied the city and destroyed the temples on the Acropolis as an act of revenge for their humiliation at Athenian hands in the battle of Marathon a decade earlier. Having eventually driven off the Persians, the Athenians resolved to leave the Acropolis as it was, as a permanent memento of what they'd experienced and triumphed over.

A few decades later they had second thoughts, and under Pericles embarked on building programme that -- in tandem with much else -- was destined to make Athens not merely, as Pericles put it in his famous Funeral Oration, 'an education to Greece', but an education to the whole world.

On the Acropolis this led to the construction of the huge monumental gateway called the Propylaia, the small Temple of Athena Nike which stood beside it, the rather ornate Erechtheion -- one important part of which is also in the British Museum, a series of smaller shrines, and above all the Parthenon, the great temple to Athena the Virgin.

Designed by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates, who factored in a couple of marvellously subtle optical illusions that made the building even look more elegantly regular than it actually is, and with the whole project supervised by the sculptor Pheidias, later to become known as the creator of the Statue of Zeus at Olympia -- one of the seven wonders of the ancient world -- the Temple was an architectural and artistic eulogy to Athens.

It's crucial to understand this. The Parthenon wasn't just in Athens. It was of Athens. It was about Athens. Its whole purpose was to celebrate and glorify Athens. It makes no sense save in the context of Athens. It is this, more than anything else, that makes the Parthenon Sculptures a special case.

A City Immortalised in Marble

The first phase in the sculptural project was the carving of 92 metopes in high relief; the metopes were square marble slabs, just over five foot high, depicting battle scenes, placed high up around the exterior of the Parthenon. The first ones visitors to the temple precinct would see were a series of metopes showing Greeks fighting Amazons, but as they followed the images around the long northern side they'd see a series of fights and duels from the Trojan War, then an array of depictions of the Greek Gods fighting giants, and finally, along the long southern side they'd see episodes of combat between Greeks and Centaurs. 

Every single set of metopes is designed to convey the same message: Greeks are not barbarians -- strange and sometimes savage people who make weird 'Bar bar' noises when they speak --  and when Greeks fight barbarians, they win. The Greeks, the Parthenon was saying in none too subtle a way, are the best.

Why would visitors experience the metopes in that order? Well, that's because the order in which they followed the imagery was largely dictated by the inner Ionic frieze, carved in low relief around the main body of the building, and visible from a distance between the Doric columns. It's represented in blue in the following diagrams, with the metopes being in red.

More than five hundred feet long and more than three feet high, the frieze, carved after the metopes were complete, focuses sharply on Athens itself rather than Greece in general. Depicting an idealised version of the annual Panathenaic Procession, the main narrative of the frieze heads north from the south west corner and turn east along the temple's long northern flank, the procession culminating at the eastern end with a depiction of the Gods, and what seems to have been the presentation of the peplos -- or woman's robe -- to Athena; every four years the highlight of the procession was the decoration of Athens' main cult statue of Athena with a newly-woven peplos.

Of the 378 figures that were on the frieze, 192 were cavalrymen. This is no accident: they represent the 192 Athenians who fell defending Greece in the Athenian victory at Marathon, that victory that John Stuart Mill said was a more important event in British history than the Battle of Hastings. 

Those 192 Athenians were buried just twenty-six miles from the Parthenon, graced with the rare honour by the Athenians of having been buried where they'd fought and died, rather than being brought home. It's impossible to downplay how much Marathon meant to the Athenians; when Aeschylus, arguably the greatest of ancient dramatists, died, his epitaph said nothing about his many artistic achievements. Instead it said just one thing: that he had fought at Marathon.

If the Doric metopes had celebrated Greece and Greece's superiority over barbarians, using legendary victories to celebrate such recent triumphs as Salamis and Plataea, so the Ionic Frieze celebrates Athens, Athena, and the immeasurably great Athenian achievement in having defeated the Persians at Marathon. 

Don't think for a moment, by the way, that it would have been difficult to have seen the frieze, tucked away as it was high up behind the columns and under the shadow of the roof. Greek sculptures in Antiquity weren't the understated  white marble beauties we see today; they were painted in the most vibrant of colours and were designed to catch the eye. Here, for instance, is a reconstruction of part of a pediment from the temple of Aphaia on Aigina:

The Parthenon sculptures would have been just as brightly painted, and would have been quite clear from some distance.

At either end of the Parthenon were its own pedimental sculptures, rendered in green in the diagrams; carved in the round after the Ionic frieze was complete, these were among the supreme sculptural achievements of classical Greece. At the western end, visitors would see the famous conflict between Athena and Poseidon over who would have patronage of Athens -- and can you imagine a better visual boast for a city than a depiction of the Gods themselves competing to see who would have the honour of being associated with it? 

Supposedly it was the legendary King Cecrops who chose between the Gods, picking the one who gave the greatest gift. Poseidon drew forth sea water from the ground, offering the Athenians that mastery of the sea they would later use to beat the Persians at Salamis, but Athena simply planted an olive tree, giving the Athenians the plant that would be the source of much of their wealth from then on.

Pediment on top, Doric metopes below, Ionic frieze within, all facing out. Simples.

 The eastern pediment depicted the birth of Athena, fully armed and fully aware, from the head of her father Zeus. A war goddess, she was prudent with it, unlike the bloodthirsty Ares, and so it was that the Athenians were to see themselves as people who could and would fight with courage and skill, but would not dedicate their lives to combat. As Thucydides records Pericles as saying in his funeral oration:

'... we rely, not on secret weapons, but on our own real courage and loyalty... There are certain advantages, I think, in our way of meeting danger voluntarily, with an easy mind, instead of with a laborious training, with natural rather than state-induced courage.'

Inside, of course, was the giant chryselephantine statue of Athena herself, a wooden core plated with gold and ivory, just like Pheidias' later masterpiece at Olympia; alas, it has been lost to us for many centuries.

As it should be...

In the summer of 2010 I visited Athens for my fourth time, and on a memorable day that saw me twice giving directions to a flustered Dylan Moran and later walking into a lingering cloud of tear gas, I made my way to the new Acropolis Museum.

Situated just a few minutes walk from the Acropolis, with just the Theatre of Dionysus** between the two and with the Acropolis itself clearly visible from inside the museum, it's pretty much a model of what a museum should be.

Visitors to the museum walk in at ground level, looking down onto archaeological excavations of the classical city that's below nearly every footstep in central Athens, and work their way upwards through the museum, each floor representing and featuring artifacts from a later period, culminating, as you'd expect, with the Parthenon Gallery on the third floor. 

A few pieces of sculpture are all that's original there; otherwise plaster casts take the place of missing pieces, the vast majority of which are  in Bloomsbury but which are also scattered in the Louvre and elsewhere. Not merely do massive windows on all sides give a clear view of the Acropolis itself and the Athens guarded over by the Acropolis, but the gallery is arranged in such a way that the pieces -- or their replicas -- are placed in such a way that they can viewed in the same order that they were always meant to be viewed, seen in the same Greek light by which they were always meant to be seen.

Spaced out as they'd have been on the Parthenon itself, the pieces in the Acropolis Museum are organised in the correct order, facing outwards in glorious natural light, telling the same story they first told almost 2,500 years ago.

They're not crammed into a dimly-lit room, with the metopes huddled around the pedimental sculptures at the ends, and the frieze facing inwards in the centre.

Yes, I know people get to see them for free in London. That's wonderful. I'll genuinely miss them if they go back home, as they're something I make a point of visiting almost every time I'm in London. But I've seen them lots of times, and the British Museum will hardly be impoverished without them. No museum housing the Sutton Hoo or Mildenhall treasures -- or indeed the Lewis Chessmen -- could ever fall from the first rank of the world's museums; and I don't think there's any danger of the Rosetta Stone being credibly summoned back to Egypt.

The Parthenon Sculptures are about Athens. They only really make sense in Athens. We've had two hundred years to look at them. I think it's time the Greeks had their own chance.

And let's face it, they could do with the money.

______________________________________________________________________

*Down in the south Atlantic, if you're still wondering. Careful when you spread out your map, as the odd toastlet or biscuit crumb is liable to render them invisible.

** Not to be confused with the Theatre of Herodes Atticus, a mistake memorably made by Indiana Jones' fraudulent father.