The Answer's 42

A guide to pseudo-science for the gullible

2012-02-13T15:15:00.001Z

I've been ill for over 25 years with ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis), so I've tended to attract well meant suggestions about "treatment" from a few friends and others. Since there isn't any cure or treatment for ME, and no one has explained what causes it (though there are theories), ME patients are susceptible to the persuasive claims of quacks. I've been offered radionics, which involved someone directing healing radio waves at me from the other end of the country (for a "modest" fee of £100), and I know of sufferers who've spent £1000s on worthless treatments, some of which could do them a lot of harm.

As I'm also a sceptic (that's skeptic, if you're American), I've had no trouble rejecting all suspect claims, including homeopathy (one of the most popular) but if you're bothered by snake oil salesmen or their fans, just refer them to this invaluable guide to pseudo-science - click here to know more.

Just for fun...

2012-01-23T12:07:00.001Z

The trouble with Pat Condell

2012-01-17T18:45:00.003Z

Pat Condell is very popular among atheists who like to think that religion is the cause of all our ills and if everyone thought like them, we'd all be better off. His YouTube channel has 173,612 subscribers at the time of writing, and his videos are viewed millions of times. Apparently Richard Dawkins is one of his fans; he's reported to have said, "Pat Condell is hard-hitting, but always quietly reasonable in tone". It wouldn't be the first time that Dawkins' judgement has been suspect; if you don't understand what I mean by that, ask me to explain.

Condell always has something to say about religion, especially Islam, and it's always in negative terms. Sometimes he might be right, such as saying that Sharia law shouldn't be tolerated in British society or that women are discriminated against in Islamist societies, but I stopped watching his videos ages ago because of his hectoring tone and scatter-gun approach. I don't like him, so I won't waste my time listening to him. Unfortunately, many people do, and many of them might imagine that he's usually right. He isn't. He's probably wrong at least as often as he's right, which sort of cancels out the latter.

Condell is xenophobic and Islamophobic. He might deny it, but the evidence is there. One of his pet hates is multiculturalism, which he blames for all manner of ills. He campaigned for UKIP in the last UK general election, a party that includes plenty of xenophobes and Islamophobes but doesn't get as nasty as the BNP. It's OK to discriminate on nationalist grounds in UKIP, and it's OK to discriminate on religious grounds if you're Condell.

One of the issues that Condell got famously wrong was the 'Mosque on Ground Zero'. Like many others, he got very hot under the collar about reports that a mosque was to be build on or near the site of the 9/11 atrocity. It wasn't true. The Ground Zero Mosque wasn't a mosque and it wasn't on Ground Zero. Condell simply jumped on a very ill-informed band wagon and let rip (Google his video).

Why am I writing about this now? A humanist contact emailed me and a bunch of other people yesterday with a link to one of Condell's videos, The Final Destruction of Sweden (note the melodramatic title), saying "I find this quite shocking" and inviting comments. I replied, "You shouldn't be shocked. Condell is a ranter who exaggerates issues to suit his prejudices. When it comes to Islam, he's repeatedly demonstrated his ignorance, portraying all Muslims as a stereotypical fundamentalists. I doubt he knows many, if any." There followed an exchange, during which I said I'd ask a Swedish Twitter contact what she thought. She looked at the video, and replied, "Impression from the first minute: I suspect that guy doesn't know much about Sweden." I think she's right.

The video is about Sweden's recent constitutional changes, mainly these:

It will be written in the constitution that the ability of Sami- and other ethnical, linguistic and religious minorities to keep and develop their culture shall be promoted.
The current requirement regarding Swedish citizenship for some higher state positions is removed. One such position is the national prosecutor (riksåklagare) which might be held by non-citizens in the future. The requirement on Ministers to have been Swedish citizens for at least ten years is removed….

The Sami people are Arctic indigenous people who inhabit Northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.

Condell rants in the video about the high incidence of rape in Sweden and falls into the trap of blaming immigrants for this. However, there doesn't appear to be any evidence that Sweden's immigrants are the main reason for its rape problem. Some perpetrators may be immigrants, but Sweden's biggest problems seem to be old-fashioned sexism and the inefficiency of its police and judiciary.

My email correspondent has been in touch with a gay Swedish humanist who wrote,

I think that the man who speaks in the film - who is he? - cannot be taken seriously when he says that it is just a matter of time before Sweden becomes an Islamic state. Muslims are just a small minority - at most 400,000 of a total population of about 10 million. I do not know if the number of rapes has increased as much as the speaker says. But it is true that the authorities do not register which religion criminals have, and the press generally does not report their nationality or ethnicity. It is also true that the Norwegian police says that very many rapes in Oslo are committed by immigrants. And in Malmö, there have been Muslim attacks on Jews, and the mayor has made strange statements about Jews. But there have also been attacks on Muslims by people hostile to foreigners, both in and outside Malmö. And in various places in Sweden, mosques have been vandalised and even set on fire.

Many Iraqis have been deported back to Iraq, although it was not safe. But Sweden has also received more refugees from Iraq than most countries. I think the town of Södertälje, which had many immigrants from the beginning, received more refugees from Iraq than the whole of the USA! American delegations came here to study the town.

A disturbing phenomenon is the cultural relativism that has spread in Sweden, especially in the left, but not only there. Muslims and people from "foreign" cultures are not measured by the same standards as others, and they are more easily excused, when they violate human rights. And there is widespread "phobia of Islamophobia" in the media. Religious movements, both Christian and Muslim, get a lot of money from the state, even when they are homophobic and misogynist”

The last paragraph refers to confused and confusing attitudes towards people from foreign cultures (a problem that we have in the UK too), which is due to a failure to think sensibly about the values we should expect from all our citizens. This works against some people from ethnic minorities, especially women, but the fault lies with politicians who are reluctant to challenge so-called "community leaders" who exert too much influence.

Naomi Wolf wrote an interesting piece about Swedish rapists and the Assange case (another egotist who gets far too much attention), which led me to a report by Jennifer Heape that refers to Amnesty's report on Sweden's rape record. It ends: "Amnesty blames 'deeply rooted patriarchal gender norms' of Swedish family life and sexual relationships as a 'major societal flaw' and a reason for the continued prevalence of violence against women in Sweden." Heresay evidence apparently from the Swedish police that immigrants are behind the rape crisis might be about finding non-Swedish scapegoats, rather than facing up to their own inadequacies.

Condell's diatribe is typical. He gets it wrong because he can't see further than his own prejudices. Don't pay any attention to him. He's a trouble-maker. Use your brain and work things out for yourself.

Atheists, use your brains!

2012-01-15T21:54:00.000Z

So tired of atheist critics of religion, particularly Islam, talking about it as though all its followers were an homogeneous mass. Can't they see that's no better than religious people banging on about stereotypical atheists, as though we're all the same? Happy to say we're not.

Criticise how people behave, but don't judge them by their labels.

Season's Greetings

2011-12-24T21:32:00.000Z

Nothing stays the same

2011-12-01T11:46:00.001Z

Future, n That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary

There was a lot of argy-bargy during the public sector strike yesterday, which didn't really accomplish anything. One young friend said that he'd gone on strike, "... if only to try to reduce the amount of rage I have been feeling after hearing people who know nothing start spouting off about how I shouldn't complain, because being a civil servant is such a cushy job that I'll never have to worry about losing. Believe me: it's not and I am." Now that he's got that out of his system, I hope he feels better.

I don't have a public sector pension or a private one; only a state pension plus pension credit. This is because I stupidly became ill twenty-five years ago, and consequently never made sufficient contributions when I was a teacher. Since then, I've never earned enough to pay tax. So none of this will make any difference to me.

Will any of it matter in a few years time? I don't think so. In my lifetime, there've been enormous changes. The Welfare State and the NHS were introduced soon after I was born, when everyone looked forward to freedom from poverty, free education and healthcare, and a comfortable old age. My first salary after leaving school, when I went to work in a bank (before equal pay), was £21 a week, of which I gave half to my mum for my keep. My parents rented our home privately - I never knew from whom. They didn't own their own home until after retirement, when they bought a small house with my sister's help. I've never owned my own home, apart from a small mobile home I paid a few £100 for, after my son was born.

In the last fifty years, improvements in healthcare have meant greater longevity for most people. Since Mrs Thatcher decided that "there's no such thing as society", most people have aspired to own their own homes, and, during the 1990s, many profited from the increase in their value. Salaries have increased, and so have the differentials between the lowest and highest paid. If I was a bank clerk now, I'd expect to be paid over £2000 a month. Where does the money come from, to pay the higher salaries and the country's bills? It's all created out of thin air. Money doesn't breed. It's printed.

Meanwhile, the world economic system has changed dramatically. Most people find it bewildering. What are bonds? Why are countries that appear affluent in financial difficulties? Why do so many people still live on less than a dollar a day? China has been keeping the American economy afloat for the past few years, as well as investing in schemes in Africa and elsewhere, but China's success has been built on the export of cheap tat to countries like ours, and now that everyone's feeling the pinch, they're buying less. This is a good thing for the environment - all that plastic rubbish, all that wasted energy in transport costs - but it's making it more difficult for economists, whose crystal balls are misting up, to say how or when things might stabilise. That's because they can't, because they won't.

The public sector pension row is largely about expectations. One of my friends says she just wants what she's entitled to. Trouble is, this notion of entitlement is based on a fallacy; that things will stay the same, or hardly change. When the state pension was introduced, and when pension schemes were started, assumptions were made about the rate of inflation, about how long most people would live, and about where the money would come from. So public sector workers feel aggrieved because they think that promises have been broken, and they have. Trouble is, it was foolish to make those promises in the first place. A young teacher, say, who's been told that he or she will be expected to work another forty-odd years before he or she can claim a pension, is feeling that's not fair. But think about it. Where were we forty years ago? Could anyone have predicted where we'd be today? In 1970, the world's population was 3,700 million. Now, it's about 7 billion. In forty years, it will probably be 10.5 billion. Even if governments come to their senses and do something, quick, to slow down climate change, it's likely that we'll have run out of fossil fuels, there will be more extreme weather, water will be in short supply, and there will be far too many people for everyone to have a job, of any sort. How can anyone predict what state the world economy will be in by then? Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, imagined a society without money that was basically fair because everyone played his or her part and didn't take advantage of the system. That sort of Utopia is only in science fiction. In the real world, few people see past their own immediate concerns.

I'd like to be an optimist, I really would, but, to paraphrase the Chinese curse, we already live in interesting times. They're going to get a lot more interesting. Public sector pensions? Forget about them. Concentrate on the important things, like where we go from here.

Onward Christian proselytisers

2011-11-28T17:34:00.001Z

From the Oxford dictionary -

proselytize or proselytize: verb
[with object]
convert or attempt to convert (someone) from one religion, belief, or opinion to another:
the programme did have a tremendous evangelical effect, proselytizing many
[no object]
proselytizing for converts

The trouble with people who proselytise is that they don't see anything wrong with proselytising. Some use words like "witnessing", which mean the same thing. This is what missionaries do.

I recently tweeted several times, urging people not to support Operation Christmas Child, the ostensibly kind and generous scheme that invites children to fill shoeboxes with gifts for needy children overseas. The people behind it are evangelical Christians, whose activities are destructive, rather than constructive. To find out why, read what I've blogged elsewhere, and follow all the links: Operation Christmas Child - "racist and poisonous".

This resulted in an exchange of tweets with @mmmcounts, who doesn't seem to think that there's anything wrong with using charitable giving as an opportunity to foist your religious beliefs on other people, uninvited. This was the exchange:

Me (@Flashmaggie): Please, no shoe boxes for Operation Christmas Child. It's a cover for evangelical missionaries. http://bit.ly/sX0EcO Please RT.

Him (@mmmcounts): Are you also opposed to the Salvation Army? World Vision? World Relief? Catholic Charities? Any, all, or none?

Me: Christian Aid doesn't try to convert people (as SP does). I prefer ones with no religious agenda, like @ActionAid or @Oxfamgb.

Him: Do you have a legal issue related to the line between church and state, or are you a Muslim who doesn't tolerate proselytism?

Me: I strongly dislike proselytising by anyone and think that aid should come without strings.

Him: I agree that aid should come without strings. But if a religious agency wants to do two things at different times, that's fine.

Me: So, you think it's fine for evangelical Christians to convert people of other faiths as part of the deal?

Me: Suggest you read my blog post and follow all the links. It will answer your questions. http://bit.ly/sX0EcO

Him: Christians may ask people if they would like to convert, but aid may not be contingent on that. That's extortion.

Him: However, if a Christian works for a relief agency, that doesn't mean no witnessing. It just means do it without extortion.

So, the reasoning is that it's OK to tell people (in this case, the people are children) that God loves them, etc., and that if you confess that you're a "sinner", you'll be forgiven. This is some of the nonsense contained in a comic strip sent with the shoeboxes . . .

After some Bible stories, impressing that we were "created", mentioning "Satan", and explaining that Christ died for our "sins", a child tells his father, "I want to be God’s child, so I can be with him." The father replies, "This is the most important decision you’ll ever make! The Bible tells us our sin separates us from God. And it says, 'If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is by believing in your heart that you are made right with God, and it is by confessing with your mouth that you are saved.'"

The child is shown praying, "Dear God, I know I’m a sinner. I made wrong choices and did bad things. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I know your Son, Jesus, died for my sins and I believe you raised him from the dead. I want Jesus to be my Lord. Thank you for loving me and making me your child. Now, please fill me
with your Holy Spirit, so I’ll have all the strength I need to obey you. Amen."

At the end, the child and his family are looking straight out of the comic strip frame, as he says, "Hey! The best thing just happened! It can happen to you, too! You can believe and make the same decision I did! Pray, and God will hear you. He loves you. He’ll forgive you and make you his child." If you're converted, you can sign a pledge, there and then! Whoopee!

Christians who think that this sort of thing is OK are generally ignorant about religions other than their own, or even denominations other than their own. They're probably unaware that some non-conformists, such as the Religious Society of Friends (or Quakers) and the Unitarians, don't proselytise. They're unlikely to know much about the history of their religion, or to care that there's little or no archaeological evidence that the stories in the Old Testament are true. They think that Islam is simply wrong, or, as the man behind Occupation Christian Child, Franklin Graham, says, "a very wicked and evil religion". They think that it doesn't matter what you believe, you can be "saved", but people like me will go to hell. For uneducated, impressionable young people, the threat of fire and brimstone goes with nice presents - stick and carrot.

Mike (@mmmcounts) is typical of many, many evangelical Christians, mainly in the US, who see nothing wrong with trampling all over other people's faiths and cultures. They suffer from the arrogance of certainty and the blindness of ignorance. He says, "If a Christian works for a relief agency, that doesn't mean no witnessing...", oblivious to the fact that many Christians work for relief agencies like Action Aid and Oxfam that don't have a religious agenda, and don't feel compelled to foist their religion on the recipients. If they did, they'd be in trouble. Mike doesn't get it. Neither to thousands like him. They have no idea how much damage they do. And now gullible British teachers are asking the children in their schools to fill shoeboxes, and gullible parents think it's a lovely idea too. It drives me mad!

This is what a friend did, when her children were asked to fill an OCC shoebox:

When my children changed primary school few years ago we joined right in the thick of the OCC campaign. I discovered the school had been involved for seven years.

This gave me a real problem; as assertive as I am, I had no desire to mark my card in the first couple of weeks! I therefore did three things:

- I sat my children down and explained that if they wanted to fill a shoebox they could, but Mummy would send it to a different box scheme. Then I did my best to explain why - they get behaviour based on principles, as evidenced by the lack of Nestlé products in the house!

- I discussed it with parents, explaining that if the parallel was a fundamentalist Islamic organisation doing this in central London, would that be okay? Much as I didn't like using that example it seemed most effective for getting people to actually think.

- in February I gave a dossier of evidence (including alternative shoebox schemes) to the Headteacher along with a letter asking that both he and the Governors give serious thought to changing to an alternative scheme. Although not a faith school, many of the teachers are practicing Christians.

The outcome? No word from the Headteacher despite my chasing it up. But this is our 4th Christmas at the school and the school never participated in Operation CC again (despite a long history of doing so). That's enough of a result for me!

Sometimes, people do see sense.

Yeo Valley and homeopathy

2011-10-12T12:25:00.000+01:00

I like Yeo Valley yoghourt and I've been buying Yeo Valley light spreadable butter because it doesn't contain palm oil, which I avoid because of the deforestation issue. So I was disappointed to learn that they were "treating" their cattle with homeopathy, which isn't treatment at all. I emailed them via their website:

Sorry, Yeo Valley. I like your products but won't be buying any more since you said you're going to treat your livestock with homeopathy. That's not treatment because there's nothing in it, so I regard it as neglecting to treat them.

This was their reply:

Dear Margaret

Thank you for your recent email.

The health of our cows is the top priority on our farms. Organic systems include a proactive approach to animal welfare and are designed to minimise stress on livestock that might result in illness; the routine use of antibiotics as a preventative measure to treat our cows’ ailments is forbidden.

As a result of this Steve, the Herd Manager on one of our farms began investigating alternative options to the use of antibiotics and began studying a course on homeopathic treatments. Since then, Steve has been implementing what he has learnt by using homeopathic treatments and remedies to treat his cows for a number of issues, including warding-off flies and easing the cows’ stress levels when having their feet clipped. The treatments have so far proved successful and, unlike antibiotics, cows don’t build up immunity to these remedies. In fact, they encourage the cows’ immune systems to fight bugs themselves. The use of homeopathic treatments not only helps to develop a more robust immune system, it also means no withdrawal periods for milk and meat while the animal is being treated, as would be the case when antibiotics are used.

However, this doesn’t mean we completely avoid more conventional treatments; if we need to treat an animal quickly and effectively we will always choose the treatment, either conventional or alternative, that will be most beneficial to the cow to aid its recovery and this may involve antibiotic use. I would like to reassure you that we operate the highest level of animal welfare standards on all of our farms. Not only are we strong supporters of the welfare system developed by The Soil Association for cattle producing organic milk, we also take care of the environment in which we operate and act responsibly and ethically in how we do business. Organics standards strictly admonish zero grazing techniques; cows cannot be permanently housed, but must spend the majority of their lives outdoors. The cows must have appropriate bedding and adequate space when they are brought indoors during bad weather during the winter months.

Being an independent, family owned British business, we value our reputation and the loyalty of every one of our customers who buy our products. We have built our reputation on a combination of quality and word of mouth and would never knowingly do anything to jeopardise this.

Thank you once again for writing to us.

Kind Regards

Sally Laurie - Marketing Team

www.yeovalleyorganic.co.uk

I'd like to see farmers who "treat" their livestock with homeopathy prosecuted for a failure to ensure the welfare of their animals - they should call a vet, not a homeopath, when an animal needs treatment.I've changed to using the Co-op's spreadable stuff, which is made with rape seed oil.For more on homeopathy, see Skepticat's blog.

Dale Farm: Monday was E Day

2011-09-18T01:22:00.000+01:00

Sunday 18th September

With so many accusations and counter-accusations about the Dale Farm travellers flying about, it's hard for most people, including me, to understand how Basildon Council decided to forcibly evict about 400 people who are living on land they own. The problem is that they don't have planning permission to live there. Some travellers at Dale Farm are on legal sites; others are not. After ten years of legal wrangling, the bailiffs are due on Monday. Amnesty UK, Vanessa Redgrave, and a long list of the Great and the Good have been campaigning for a stay of execution of the eviction, arguing that the travellers have nowhere to go, that it's an infringement of their human rights, and that they must have a place that is culturally appropriate for the traveller lifestyle. And so on. A lot of supporters have turned up to help resist the eviction.

The people at Dale Farm are Irish Travellers, not Romany Gypsies:

These are the so-called “Irish Gypsies”, who are Celtic by ethnicity. They are by tradition caravan-dwellers and metal-workers. Their origins are remote, very likely the ancestors of these Travellers were wandering blacksmiths already present in the island before the arrival of Roma in the British Isles, and this hypothesis would reasonably explain why Roma did not settle in Ireland.

They are Catholics with strong links to Ireland. In fact, some of them have very strong links to the town of Rathkeale in County Wexford, which some claim is their "spiritual home", though no one seems to know why. As Catholics, the families that live at Dale Farm, who spend their high days and holidays in Rathkeale, have gradually been increasing in number, as Catholics will. The Telegraph and the regional BBC TV News, Look East, have reported the link with Rathkeale over the last week, but it's old news. A Basildon Echo reporter, Jon Austin, did a story about the travellers' property interests four years ago, when he found out that traveller clans had land or rented homes in other parts of the UK, not just in Ireland. Although some of the travellers' supporters have said that this is all nonsense and a deliberate ploy to undermine the travellers' position, it does seem that their claims that they have "nowhere to go" are not entirely true for all of them.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of the Dale Farm situation, and whether or not some of the people there have anywhere else to go, the Government (the current one, and the previous one) has failed to ensure that there are enough sites for travellers around the country. It only "encourages" local authorities to provide sites, and as travellers's sites are deeply unpopular with non-travellers, local councillors know that they'll lose votes if they propose any. I was amused that a government website refers to "seeking to remove barriers that are stopping them from taking part in the Big Society." I doubt that travellers are any more interested in the Big Society than the rest of us.

The UN's got involved, and there are claims that the eviction is "racially motivated", however I'm having a bit of trouble understanding the pleas for a "culturally sensitive" solution to the problem. Since multiculturalism became all the rage under Tony Blair's premiership, when religion seemed to become more important than ethnicity, culturally sensitive people have been desperate to demonstrate how sensitive they are towards other people's cultures. At the same time, groups such as the conservative Lancashire Pakistanis and the Hasidic Jews in Stamford Hill, London, have shown absolutely no inclination to integrate into British society, but have carried on as living anachronisms, sticking to social rules that conflict with modern values and generally disadvantage women. The travellers' "culture" is about travelling, they say, but in reality it seems to be more about squatting wherever they feel like it, as they claim that they can't bear to lives in houses but want to be out in the open air. Romany gypsies and Irish travellers have been nomadic for generations. Some stick to their own tribal communities and avoid integrating with the Gorgios (as the Romanies call us) or the Gadje (the Irish Travellers's word for us). In effect, they impose their own form of apartheid. In many traveller communities, it's almost impossible for young people, particularly young women, to get involved with non-travellers. Their fathers and brothers enforce a strict non-fraternisation code. Domestic violence seems to be more common in the traveller communities than in the population as a whole, and "cultural barriers" prevent the women from escaping violent relationships. So which bits of their "culture" are we supposed to respect? And why should any group living in the 21st century in our over-crowded country, on our over-crowded planet, expect special privileges, such as being provided with land where they can settle as a group, rather than spreading themselves about, as other families have to do?

East Sussex County Council says it's a fallacy that travellers don't pay taxes, because those who live on legal sites pay council tax and rent like everyone else. But do they pay income tax? Since they transact business in cash and most older travellers are illiterate, I doubt that any of them fill in a tax return. Some may not have much money and rely on state benefits, for good reasons, while others are obviously doing very nicely, thank you, though you'll have a hard job to prove it. One of the men in this series of videos (You Tube - The truth about Irish Travellers), who earns a living laying tarmac, says he does a lot of work in America, where he has a house.

It seems that many of us who've taken an interest in the Dale Farm situation feel conflicted about it, including Richard Parry, who's got to know the families very well over the last six years. He, like many, queries the huge cost of the eviction and the problems that the families will face, but accepts that green belt land must be protected. Basildon Council has already spent an enormous amount of money on legal fees and is unlikely to have a change of heart at this late stage. It just seems absurd that it should have taken ten years to get to this stage, without taking up better, and cheaper, options. Perhaps Dale Farm has been a no go area for council officials, but if the site had been properly managed from the start, it should have been possible to turn away travellers who didn't have permission to stay before they got settled. It should have been possible to employ private investigators to check on the claims that some have made about having nowhere to go, and sort out the liars before finding suitable alternatives for the rest. It should have been possible for the travellers to cultivate better relationships with their neighbours, so that they weren't all tarred with the same negative brush. But compromise appears to have been impossible.

Here are more sites that you might find interesting:

Eric Pickles boosts councils' powers on unauthorised sites, from The Guardian.

Dale Farm's former owner claims Basildon Council "concreted over" the site.

The Big Fat Truth about gypsy life, and how it disadvantages women.

The Irish Travellers' website.

As a footnote: 36 years ago, I lived on a council caravan site with Romany Gypsies as neighbours, after I'd been made homeless (that's another story). As an impoverished single mum with a small baby, I was grateful for the help and support I got from them, in return for helping them with letter-writing and form-filling. They gave me things, like an old stone sink that I still have in my garden, and a coal scuttle that I used for years, and my immediate neighbours, who traded in rags, used to set aside clothes, towels and bedding for me, after they'd collected the remains of jumble sales. We got along fine, and there was none of the mess and rubbish around the place that you see in many places after travellers have moved on. One old couple settled there when they got too old to carry on travelling. Other families stayed so that their children could go to school. Similar groups have settled in other parts of the country, some in houses, though they still maintain their close family ties. Click here for a film about a group in Lambeth, made to celebrate their way of life, and BBC Kent on "Romany Roots". Living with gypsies needn't be difficult.

Update: Monday 19th September

5.30pm, and there seems to be a stalemate. Some daft woman has tied herself to the gates with something so that if the bailiffs force them open, she'll be garotted. The bailiffs are saying it's a "health and safety issue".

I like the Daily Mash's version of events that starts "IRISH travelling folk will today reaffirm their ancient, mystic right not to have planning permission for their houses.":

Another local resident, Jane Thompson, said: "I've got nothing against people who roam the countryside while not leaving a horrible mess and being really nice to everybody. I would gladly grant them planning permission in my heart. But some of them have been at Dale Farm at least 10 years. Forgive me for saying so, but they don't seem to be very good at travelling."

Meanwhile, the local primary school has lost almost all its pupils. Out of 110, 107 lived at Dale Farm. For several years now, the school had plummeted down the league tables as non-traveller parents withdrew their children, the whole of the governing body quit, and teachers struggled on the brink of nervous breakdowns. It's had one of the worst attendance rates in the UK, which suggests that the travellers' kids' education was being disrupted long before the eviction loomed.

6pm, and the news that Mr Justice Edwards-Stuart granted the travellers an injunction so that the bailiffs can't do anything before another hearing on Friday. The judge seemed to think that there hadn't been enough enformation about what is allowed on each pitch, and what must be removed. Makes no sense to me. Half of Dale Farm is legal, the other half isn't. What could be clearer than that?

I spotted Gloria Hunniford at the gates of Dale Farm on the local BBC TV news. Irish solidarity? Stupid BBC presenter referred to "Romany gypsies", which they're not.

Update: Tuesday 20th September

Last night's Dispatches on Channel 4 was interesting. Reporter Deborah Davies spoke to travellers and some of the people who've had to put up with their anti-social habits, like crapping in field margins and near public footpaths. When she asked a couple of girls if they didn't have toilets in their caravans, they said they did but it wasn't their way to use a toilet inside a caravan, so close to where they cook food; that's disgusting, apparently. One woman spoke of seeing the kids walk off into the bushes clutching toilet rolls, and there were bits of used toilet roll all over the place. After they leave an illegal encampment, a specialist unit has to go in and clear up all the faeces.

What about sanitation at Dale Farm? Is there any?

Wherever travellers have parked as they move around in the summer, it's left to local authorities to clear up tree prunings and lumps of hardcore and asphalt that they've dumped, in addition to all the rest of their rubbish. This is stuff that they've collected while trimming hedges and laying driveways for people, so it's commercial waste that attracts charges for disposal on landfill sites. Rather than pay, they go fly tipping. It costs tax payers between £100 and £150 million a year to deal with fly tipping.

Candy Sheridan, who's related to the Sheridans of Dale Farm, is a Liberal Democrat councillor and a member of the Gypsy Council. She tried to achieve a compromise with the bailiffs about how the eviction was carried out, and has been threatened and warned that she won't be allowed back on the site.

The programme ended with a pony pulling a traditional gypsy caravan along a road, uphill. Not a horse; a pony. It made me wonder about the welfare of the travellers' dogs, ponies, horses and hens.

I get the feeling that even people who'd previously been sympathetic towards the Dale Farm travellers have changed their minds as they've learned more about them, such as the suggestion that Basildon Council should pay them £6 million for the land, which isn't worth a fraction of that, and their refusal to move into council accommodation or onto other sites where there are spare pitches. Unreasonable demands that can't be met, such as being offered one site where they can move en masse, have lost them support. Even Max Clifford would struggle to improve their PR ratings. Someone on Twitter responded to this blog:

Very interesting post. I really struggle with this myself. My experience (keeping poultry) with travellers was awful. Regular thefts of any bird they thought they could fight, breaking doors/gates to get in. A neighbour had bloodied birds thrown back over his fence (dead). When he built a shed to keep the birds safe, they set fire to it. Police not interested. Of course it's all anecdotal, and I wouldn't like to generalise but I have to admit it has tainted my opinion a little.

The general perception is that travellers want to be able to continue living as they please without accepting the same rules as everyone else, and without contributing anything to society outside their own insular community. News Thump sums up their image perfectly:

“We’ve highlighted the part of the statue book that we’re happy with. And firstly, you have to ignore the sections on tax – I think our relationship with the tax authorities could be described as tenuous at best. And is taking something that doesn’t belong to you really theft? I heard that possession is nine tenths of the law, so when I possess something it becomes mine and I don’t see how that can be illegal. And all this stuff about violence, I’m assuming we can ignore that amongst ourselves, right? We do love a good fight, you see. And ‘planning permission’? We’re not convinced this is really a law anyway. Reason? Oh, say we don’t agree on religious grounds. But apart from that, yes, we’re as lawful as they come.”

Is it racial prejudice that's prompting criticism of them, as some suggest? How can it be? They're not a separate racial group, like the Roma. They're Irish. Irish people as a whole are probably just as fed up with the travellers as the rest of us.

When people start using words like "culture" to describe the behaviour of any group, they find themselves justifying all sorts of nonsense for fear of offending or upsetting people. Consequently, unreasonable behaviour remains unchallenged. This has been a problem associated with "multiculturalism" in the UK, which has led to honour killings, the unfair and medieval treatment of women, and a continuing reluctance of some minorities to seek proper healthcare or education. Ask yourself what sort of cultural values ought to be encouraged, and which ones deserve to be consigned to history.

According to Tim Black at Spiked (who thinks this is a freedom issue, not a humanitarian crisis), not being able to build on land you own is "a cruel restriction on people’s freedom and liberty." So, if I buy a field I can build a house on it, right? What, anywhere?

Sunday voices on 9/11

2011-09-12T00:49:00.003+01:00

There's a poem by Joyce Grenfell that I've often used at funerals:

If I should go before the rest of you
Break not a flower not inscribe a stone,
Nor when I'm gone speak in a Sunday voice,
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must.
Parting is hell
But life goes on
So sing as well.

That line about a "Sunday voice" struck a chord the first time I read it. I've avoided listening or watching any of the 9/11 stuff on TV because I knew there'd be a lot of Sunday voices. And what about those pits in the ground where the twin towers stood? They're deep, and they've got water in them. The first time I saw them it occurred to me that they'd be a magnet for would-be suicides. It would have been far better to use the site for a practical, positive, life-affirming purpose.

Too much and too little

2011-09-11T13:58:00.005+01:00

I've been listening to The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4. It was about food poverty and food banks. Like the Americans, it seems an increasing number of British people are relying on free food from food banks to avoid going hungry and to feed their children. One woman spoke about how her husband had had a wage increase, which meant that they lost some of their benefits, ending up worse off. An American academic was interviewed about the difficulties of distributing food vouchers in the US, where they're not necessarily used to buy the most nutritional food. I've read elsewhere that they've been used to pay for sugary drinks that rot children's teeth and contribute to obesity.

In England and Wales we're throwing away 3.6m tonnes of food waste a year, which adds up to £9bn a year. A lot of it is due to over-buying food in supermarkets and then throwing out stuff because it's past its "best before" date, which isn't the same as the "use by" date. See the link on the right (Love Food, Hate Waste).

I'm old enough to remember post-war ration books. I might still have one somewhere. When food was rationed, most people ate a healthy diet because it was carefully balanced by nutritionists. Many more people were doing physical work too, so they burned off the calories from saturated fats and sugar. When I worked on a farm, my breakfast (after I'd already done a couple of hours work) was double-yolked eggs, bacon, sausages, fried bread, tea and toast and marmalade with butter. I weighed far less than I do now, and was far healthier.

Maybe it's time to bring rationing back? It would make people think twice about throwing good food away, while ensuring the low paid ate properly. You could favour British producers and save a fortune on food-related health care. Yes, I know it won't happen, but I can dream.

Illustration: WW2 propaganda poster.

Who broke Britain? No one.

2011-09-11T01:31:00.001+01:00

David Cameron goes on about "broken Britain", as though it was once a law-abiding haven where socially responsible people with family values lived; the sort that Margaret Thatcher was fond of referring to. Who broke it? And how? When did this happen? Cameron did history at A level, then PPE at Oxford, so maybe his grasp of history, particularly social history, is tenuous, but it doesn't take much research to discover that things have been a lot worse in the recent past. Far from being "broken", Britian's fixed a lot of things.

They mentioned an interesting fact on QI; crime went up by 57% during the Blitz. Hitler provided a helpful distraction while home-grown criminals went looting. Some pretended to be ARP wardens, complete with helmets, so that no one questioned them when they were helping themselves. They didn't confine themselves to looting shops, the wartime criminals; some went into bomb-damaged homes and helped themselves to other people's valuables, even while there were bodies close by.

Last month's riots started when a few idiots high-jacked a peaceful demonstration. Once the fires started and civil disorder spread, urban criminals seized the opportunity to go looting. It was nothing like as widespread as what happened in the Blitz. The proportion of offences committed by people who already had criminal records has been disputed - Boris Johnson claimed it was three quarters (in one report, it said he referred to "three fourths"), while the police say that they targeted known criminals - but whoever was right, criminal opportunism seems to explain a lot of it.

It's been said that civilisation is a thin veneer. There will always be people who'll exploit any opportunity to get things the easy way; by helping themselves. There will always be people who behave as if no one else matters. They're a minority. Nothing is "broken".

As for "family values" - here are just a few examples of "the good old days":

The number of births outside wedlock shot up during and immediately after the war.
Infanticide was far more common than now in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, as girls in service who'd been raped by their male employers or their employers' sons were desperate enough to abandon their babies to die because they had no means of support.
During the same era, the fear of crime drove people to wear spiked collars, like the ones worn by modern S & M aficionados, to protect themselves from thieves who garrotted their victims - today's muggers are tame in comparison.
There were enormous numbers of prostitutes in London and other cities during Victoria's reign, and many wives were infected with VD by their erring husbands.

Since the 1960s, when many imagined that the introduction of the pill and women's liberation meant the end of civilisation as they knew it, we've become far less tolerant of drunkenness, domestic violence, and casual criminality. Most people's lives are far safer, healthier and more comfortable than the lives of their great-grandparents (as a funeral celebrant, I've heard lots of life stories about people who were born at the beginning of the 20th century).

Nobody broke Britain. Cameron's fluent in bullshit and crap at running the country.

Illustration - spiked collar to protect yourself against garotting, 7s. 6d.

Nuclear power? You cannot be serious!

2011-08-29T13:24:00.004+01:00

The Japanese will have to deal with radioactive pollution from the Fukushima reactor for generations. A reactor in Maryland has been damaged by Hurricane Irene. Don't forget Sellafield. What they all have in common is that they're by the sea, which no one can control. We have a nuclear power station at Sizewell on the Suffolk coast, where a North Sea surge caused huge damage in 1953, and it's likely to happen again. I don't care what the nimbies say, I'd sooner have the whole country covered with wind turbines than one more nuclear reactor.

The Sizewell Debate

CANE (Communities Against Nuclear Expansion)

e-petition against nuclear power

Illustration © M Nelson 2010

Ernie the ignoramus

2011-08-19T15:24:00.000+01:00

Ernie Rea presents a BBC Radio 4 programme called "Beyond Belief", described as "A series exploring the place and nature of faith in today's world." It's sure to irritate people like me because it's hopelessly biased in favour of the religious, who are given a sympathetic hearing and allowed to talk utter twaddle without fear of contradiction. For this reason, I don't usually listen, but the radio was on the other week when I was busy, and I didn't get around to switching it off before I became incensed over Rea's ignorant use of the words "secularism" and "secular" as synonymous with atheism or anti-theism. This happens a lot, you might say; religious leaders, such as pontificating bishops, do it all the time, but this was the bloody BBC! They're supposed to know what words mean. I expect BBC presenters to use the English language correctly. So I complained:

It's incumbent upon a Radio 4 presenter to use words correctly, even if his or her guests do not. During today's programme, Rea and his guests all demonstrated their ignorance of secularism by using the word to mean atheism or anti-religion. Secularism means the separation of religion and the state, so that no one religion dominates. It's the only system that allows everyone to practice his or her religion freely, or not to follow any religion, provided that he or she does no harm. The UK isn't totally secular, as we still have an established church, but the US, Canada, France (and others) have secular constitutions and are secular states, guaranteeing their citizens freedom of and freedom from religion. I spoke about this at a local Forum of Faiths a while ago: www.suffolkhands.org.uk/node/530. This isn't the only instance of the word being used incorrectly in BBC radio and TV programmes - it happens all too often - and it drives me mad.

I've just had a reply:

Dear Ms Nelson,

Thanks for contacting us regarding ‘Beyond Belief’ broadcast on 15 August on BBC Radio 4. We understand you’re unhappy with the use of the word ‘Secularism’ in the programme because you feel it’s used incorrectly.

The BBC is conscious of the need to maintain high standards of spoken English and pronunciation throughout its broadcasts; standards that not only include fairness and impartiality, but also proper use of language.

We’re sorry you feel this hasn’t been the case when using the term ‘Secularism’, we can assure you no offence or annoyance was intended.

We'd like to assure you that your feedback has been registered on our audience log. This is a daily report of audience feedback that's made available to many BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive Board, programme makers, channel controllers and other senior managers. The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions about future programming and content.

Thanks again for taking the time to contact us.

Kind Regards
Leigh Mallon
BBC Complaints
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

Will Rea make an apology on air? I doubt it. You can still hear the programme, for a limited time.

It's all those bloody cuts/foreigners/gangs/Tories/kids ...

2011-08-11T12:20:00.003+01:00

My lovely home help commented on the riots, "They're all bloody foreigners, aren't they?" Have you noticed how many people have blamed the riots on whichever group they're particularly prejudiced against, or the group that fits in with their pet theory about what's wrong with society? I know I've done it myself. The list so far: poverty, the cuts, the Tories, envy of the super-rich, gangs, "bloody foreigners", "bloody kids". Think it's time that we had some solid research into the reasons that people behave the way they do. Evicting council tenants won't solve the problem. Understanding why it's happened might. These are some of the commentators who've made the most sense to me so far:

No shame, no limits: Has the behaviour of the mob destroyed the idea of British civility for ever?

Camila Batmanghelidjh: Caring costs – but so do riots

The London Riots - On Consumerism coming Home to Roost

None of these offers a total explanation but they're all relevant.

If MPs try to turn this into a party political issue, they'll confirm a popular opinion that they're all idiots. After all, as someone on the news pointed out, the 11-year-old who was arrested the other day grew up under Labour.

I wrote a blog post about this a few days ago, then deleted it when it became out of date. However, I haven't changed my view that there's been a large group of young people, mainly boys, that's been out of control for years; it's just that there are more of them. They haven't had good parenting, mainly because their parents didn't have good parenting either. There are more of them because it's a cycle of chaos and neglect. As Batmanghelidjh says, putting that right will take time and money. With everyone clamouring for swift action, it doesn't seem likely that that will happen.

The Guardian reports that it's setting up a survey to get to the bottom of why people riot, and have referred to a survey done after the 1967 Detroit riots. The results were interesting:

"One theory was that the rioters were poor and uneducated. No, the survey found otherwise. There was no correlation between economic status and participation in the disturbance. College-educated residents were as likely as high school dropouts to have taken part."

As British rioters have been appearing in court, people have expressed surprise about who they are, as some don't fit the stereotypes; a primary school teaching assistant, students, a graphic designer, etc. If those who've already made up their minds would pay attention for a change, they might find more of their prejudices challenged.

As for my home help and her willingness to blame "foreigners"; it's a familiar theme in her family, where periods of joblessness have been attributed to "foreigners coming over here and taking our jobs". I resisted the urge to tell her about the tweet that said,

"Turkish and Asian groups have stood up to, chased off rioters. Coming over here, defending our boroughs & communities."

Euw!

2011-07-17T00:54:00.000+01:00

I had a haircut the other day at a place in town where you don't need an appointment. I don't remember how we got around to talking about dirty people, but the young man who cut my hair told me that sometimes he'll ask a customer if they'd like a shampoo first and they'll say no, so he has to cut hair that hasn't been washed for days. I said that I feel sorry for dentists, when they have to work on smelly mouths with rotten teeth. I don't suppose that dentists can refuse, but I don't think I'd be willing to cut someone's smelly hair.

Grumpy old Goddess

2011-07-13T14:57:00.002+01:00

If there was a god, and if she was any use at all, she'd get her act in gear and consider the following:

Smite all the despots, tyrants, bullies, and anyone who's really annoying, like Piers Morgan.

Control humankind's fertility, as the super-breeders clearly can't do it themselves. Place similar restrictions on the fertility of dogs, cats, domestic livestock, and those annoying little thrips that drive you mad before harvest-time.

Introduce a few predators and acts of goddess to cut down the numbers substantially, only with minimum pain and suffering.

Make all the homophobes homosexual - it's possible that many already are, but in denial.

Punish any misogynist, patriarchal women-botherers by instantly tying their penises in a very painful knot whenever they have any misogynist, patriarchal women-botherering thoughts, until they stop.

Instantly correct the malfunctioning thought processes of any women who utter the words, "I'm not a feminist, but..." to preface some half-baked whinge or other. There is no "but"!

Make money vanish, so that humanity adopts the Star Trek system ("Money doesn't exist in the 24th century." - Picard), which is like the old socialist system of "from each according to his/her means to each according to his/her needs", but with everyone playing a useful role in society that won't involve things like producing moronic Saturday night television.

Make it impossible for news outlets to tell an untruth.

Humanity really isn't as bright as it thinks it is.

Google maps memories No.2

2011-07-07T22:55:00.004+01:00

I've found a few more of the places where I've lived on Google Maps - see yesterday's post.

As far as I can tell, as Google only drove past the end of the drive, this might be the farm on the English-Welsh border near Chirbury, where I worked when I first left home. It was called Moat Farm, but I like to think of it as Cold Comfort Farm, only worse. I got the job through an advert in Farmers' Weekly. It was no rural idyll. For the first few weeks, my friend Ann kept me company, before she left to go to university. After that, I was on my own with a weird family - Mum, Dad, chain-smoking Auntie, several unpleasant kids, and an old man whose origin I never knew, who wore creaky gaiters and lived in the attic. They bred Friesian dairy cattle, now commonly bred with Holstein imported from the US. If you've seen black and white cows in fields, that's them. They also produced fertile hens' eggs to be sold to the hatcheries, so we always had the double-yolkers, which were rejects, for breakfast. I milked cows and cleaned up after them, as well as a variety of other jobs, from 6.30am to anything up to 10pm, and all for a few £ a week. In those days, the milk was collected every day in large churns that had to be loaded onto a lorry from a milk stand about a metre high. Some churns were aluminium, some were steel. They were all heavy, but the steel ones were heaviest. I soon grew muscles on my muscles from lifting the damn things. The best thing that you could say about the place was that I was well fed. I had to be, all the calories I burned every day. Apart from that, it wasn't great. They sacked a couple of men the week before I started, and I was expected to do a lot of the work they'd done for less money. It didn't take me long to realise that I was being exploited, so I left. I spent the winter of 1962-63 on another farm, near Flint, where my boss was a kind man who'd survived the war as a prisoner of the Japanese in Changi Prisoner of War camp and working on the Burma railway. Bill said that the film The Bridge on the River Kwai was nothing like his experience; it wasn't horrible enough. One of the other prisoners was the illustrator Ronald Searle, most well known for the Belles of St Trinians, who drew everything that went on around them. When I left the farm to go back to Liverpool and art college, Bill said that he'd always think of me when he saw a box of Kleenex; we'd spent a lot of time that winter delivering milk around Flint with a box in the van, suffering from never-ending colds.

After a year at Liverpool College of Art, Ann and I spent the summer working in a market garden in Poeldijk, Holland, run by the Van Wingerden family. Ann lived in the house on the left with Papa and Mama and their unmarried son and daughter, while I lived next door in the bungalow, with the married son, his wife and baby. There were acres of greenhouses at the back, where they grew tomatoes, cucumbers, grapes, peaches and other crops. We were very healthy, with so much fresh food. We mostly worked with the tomatoes, either pricking out seedlings or picking ripe fruit. We went on a barge to take them to market once or twice. The family was very kind. Papa spoke no English but that didn't stop him telling long-winded stories about the war, when they'd been occupied. One of his favourite stories was about fooling the Germans when they came to inspect the house with a view to billeting soldiers there. Papa borrowed some babies and small children from friends and deliberately made them cry, so that the Germans decided the house was far too noisy and crossed him off the list. He used sign language when Theo (his youngest son) couldn't translate fast enough to keep up. Papa smoked fat cigars and whenever he laughed it set him off on a wheezing session. Ann and I learned enough Dutch to get by; enough to fool the tourists when they saw us walking down the street in our wooden clogs and assumed we were local. We'd wave and smile and say a few words of Dutch, and the Americans (it was usually Americans) took photos and went away happy. One weekend, Papa decided to take us to the museum in The Hague, where we joined a party with a tour guide. She was giving a commentary in English, Dutch and French. For some reason, she thought Papa was English, so she directed some of her English commentary at him, while Ann and I were assumed to be Dutch. Papa played along, nodding furiously and saying "O yes!" now and then, while we said "Ja!" whenever she looked at us. As we left, Papa was laughing so much that he couldn't stop choking on his cigar.Theo was a student at the university in Amsterdam, where he shared a house, so we were able to stay there some weekends, drink a lot of lager, and explore the clubs and galleries. It was a good summer.

After a year at Liverpool College of Art and a summer in Holland, I went to Exeter College of Art for a three year course in Fine Art. To begin with, I had digs with a family in Topsham, on the River Exe, a short train ride from town, then I rented a flat here, in Monmouth Street, with another eccentric family. The house with the arch over the door on the right is where I lived. The couple who owned it dealt in junk of one sort or another, so the hallway was always full of the overflow. The wife's standard of hygiene left a lot to be desired, so it wasn't surprising that her husband, a small, weedy looking man, was frequently ill with stomach claimants. Apparently he'd been a prisoner of war too, which hadn't done his health any good. His wife's cooking didn't seem to be doing him much good either.

Wile I was in Topsham I worked here, at The Lighter Inn, for a man called Harold, who had a heart attack late one night after a lock-in. Small cargo boats used to moor at the quay next to the pub. I was going out with (or staying in with) one of the regulars, a former professional footballer called Patrick, when a small Dutch crew invited us aboard after closing time for a few drinks. I was so busy enjoying myself that I didn't notice that my glass was being surreptitiously topped up with Dutch gin as fast as I was drinking it. When we went up on deck I was so drunk I couldn't stand up. Patrick gave me a fireman's over the gangplank. The next day, with the worst hangover I've ever had, I realised that (a) he was almost as drunk as I was and (b) the tide was out, so there was just thick mud under the plank, and (c) I can't swim anyway. If he'd dropped me, that would have been it. Patrick and some of the other guys took me fishing with nets in the Exe, so I often got to keep the smaller fish they'd otherwise have thrown back. I used to collect buckets of mussels along the shore as well, which were good with brown bread and butter, and if I hadn't been fishing, there'd be fresh mackerel for sale off the back of a van in the pub car park at weekends.

After a year or so in Topsham, I moved into Exeter, where I shared a flat in Wonford Road, on the left of this photo. I bought some old furniture for my room, including an enormous desk where I worked, kept my pet rat, Oscar, and a collection of skulls and pickled creatures in formaldehyde (I got there before Damian Hurst). While I was in Exeter my friend Lyn (who shared the flat for a while) got married one summer. We trooped off to the register office and then went paddling in the park with another friend's baby. Lyn and Nick are grandparents now.

Google maps memories No. 1

2011-07-07T01:22:00.005+01:00

I started looking for places where I've lived or worked on Google Maps the other day, to see how they'd changed. I couldn't find some. I'd either lost the addresses or they'd changed so much I didn't recognise them. Some buildings have had a change of use. Some have deteriorated, others have been done up. Hardly any were as I remembered them.

This is where I was born, in Waterloo, Liverpool. In 1944, before the establishment of the NHS, it was a Catholic maternity home. My family wasn't Catholic, but it was local and my mum didn't want a home birth. In fact, she'd have preferred not to be at the birth at all, just like she'd rather not have been at the conception, so my dad had to find the money (over £100, which was a lot in those days) to pay for private care. It's called Park House, and it's still run by nuns, though now it's a bed and breakfast. Nathan and I stayed there when we went up for a family funeral a few years ago. It was very clean and the breakfast was good, but Jesus and Mary were everywhere, and there were crucifixes over our beds. I told the nun who brought our breakfast that I'd been born there and she said we were in what had been the nursery.

This is Fernhill Avenue, Bootle, where my paternal grandmother lived in the first house on the left with her youngest son, my Uncle Colin, who didn't marry until I was in my teens. My mum and I stayed here when I was a toddler, while Dad was still away at the end of the war - he served in Norway. Mum and her mother-in-law didn't get on especially well, from what I can gather. Nana wasn't a generous woman. She continued to use war rations in her cookery long after rationing ended. We always celebrated Christmas here on Boxing Day with my dad's family, when I'd have to share a bed with Nana. It was hot and uncomfortable, as she had a feather mattress with a big dip in the middle, so you slid together however hard you tried not to. Her hair was long enough to sit on (it wasn't cut until she got old, to make it easier to care for her), and seldom washed, so there was an overpowering smell of unwashed hair in bed. It was always a relief to go home, and back to my own bed.

We moved a couple of times after my birth in 1944 and my sister's in 1949, until my maternal grandmother died in 1953, the same year as the king, as Mum pointed out. This nana wasn't especially old - she couldn't have been more than her early sixties - and my mum was devastated. Nana had raised five kids virtually single-handed, as my granddad was a merchant seaman, so away a lot. When he was home, he wasn't much use about the house. When Nana died we moved into their rented home so that Mum could care for her dad, who was a miserable old man. I didn't like taking friends home while he was still alive, because of his antisocial habits. Mum had a lot to cope with; caring for her dad, fostering a baby nephew when her sister had a breakdown, and two stroppy daughters. The house has changed a lot. New rendering on the walls, new windows, and the shared access to the rear of the houses, where a crazy neighbour once tried to set fire to Dad's car, divided up and fenced off. I left here as soon as I could, when I was about seventeen or eighteen, to work on a farm in North Wales, but had to come back for about a year when I went to Art College in Liverpool. That was on condition that I worked at weekends and paid all my own expenses. Mum used to complain that I embarrassed her because I came home on the bus covered in paint or plaster dust.

This is where I had my first job when I left school at sixteen, as a clerk with the Midland Bank. It's not a bank any more. It was near the docks but not so far from home that I couldn't cycle to work. It was before equal pay, and I got about £21 a month and gave half to Mum for my keep. On the weekends that I didn't have to work (we did alternate Saturdays), I sometimes took my rucksack to work on Fridays so that I could meet my best friend, Ann, who worked in another branch of the bank nearby, and we'd go and catch the ferry to Birkenhead, then a bus to North Wales, where we went youth hostelling.

This is a view across to Liverpool from Birkenhead. The ferry was always packed with commuters on Friday evenings, and we delighted in walking around the deck with our rucksacks on, in the opposite direction to everyone else.

After a couple of years working on dairy farms in North Wales for £4 a week plus my keep, I got a place at art college and Ann went to university. I worked here at Lewis's department store on Saturdays, moved from one department to another to cover for absentees. When I was working in the cafeteria on the top floor, the manager asked to see some of my drawings, took the nudes from my life drawing class into his office for half an hour and appeared rather flushed when he emerged, saying "Very nice", before rushing off to do something he'd forgotten to do. Some of our regular customers were prostitutes who worked on Lime Street, including one whose face was covered in pock marks. She was always very friendly. I worked with a woman called Joan, who wouldn't wear the regulation nylon overall but brought her own semi-transparent one with a pleated skirt. You always knew when she was coming because she had so much cheap jewellery on that she jingled like Santa's sleigh, and she used to whoop with laughter at the slightest thing. She was great fun to be with and had a fund of funny stories to tell, including the one about how her friend had sat on a man's knee in a pub loo during the war, because it was the blackout and she'd been in so much of a hurry to pull her knickers down that she hadn't checked that she was in the ladies. The man got the surprise of his life.

After my Pre-Diploma course at Liverpool College of art, which I did in a year instead of the usual two because I was classed as a "mature student", I spent a summer working with Ann on a market garden in Poledijk, Holland, before leaving home for the last time to study in Devon. Every time I went home, things had changed, so that eventually I hardly recognised lots of the places I'd known. I haven't been back for years.

How to beat cancer with money

2011-05-25T12:55:00.001+01:00

I contributed to an online focus group for Cancer Research last week. They wanted to know what we thought of the various ways they use to get their message across. Obviously, those of us who've had cancer, or who've known someone with cancer, are far more receptive to their appeals.

It reminded me of a Thought for the Day I did on BBC Radio Suffolk in October 1998. This is an edited version:

My life is divided into two — BC and AD — Before Cancer and After Diagnosis. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve conducted too many funerals for people who died from cancer, and every time I think that could have been me. I’ve lost friends and relatives, and so have my friends and relatives.

Breast and testicular cancer are two of the commonest cancers. Both involve wobbly bits of our bodies that help to generate and nurture new life, so it’s especially cruel that those same bits can kill us — or maybe not, if we catch the disease in time and take effective action.

Since cancer drew attention to my mortality life has changed. I’m less tolerant in some respects, more in others. It infuriates me to see people doing stupid things, like driving one-handed with a mobile phone clutched to their ear as they take a corner, risking their life and mine — the life I wanted to live for much longer. What sort of pathetic excuse would they offer my family for killing me with carelessness? I’m less inclined to sympathise with whingers who don’t know when they’re well off. I tolerate things that used to bother me, things that really don’t matter. I worry less. I value my family and my real friends, those who’ve seen me through the bad times. I’m more inclined to say what I think, but maybe that’s just my age?

If you value your life, take care of yourself. Feel your wobbly bits regularly in the privacy of your bathroom or bedroom, and if there’s anything there you’re not quite sure about, go and see your doctor. Stay well. Be happy.

There are several charities that cancer patients and their families donate to, often after they've lost someone, including MacMillan Nurses, Marie Curie Nurses, and their local hospice, but what about a donation to Cancer Research UK, who've helped to keep many more of us alive? Just click on the logo at the top of the page.

Oh, with reference to my previous post about reports that people have "beat cancer", or lost a "fight" with cancer, and how annoying they are, wouldn't it be good if, just sometimes, journalists would drop the tired old clichés and give credit where it's due, to the medical profession and the research scientists, when one of us survives?

Too much to tweet

2011-05-21T14:37:00.004+01:00

On super-injunctions and Twitter

The Lord Chief Justice is quoted as saying "modern technology is totally out of control and everybody can put anything on it". The Iranian and Chinese governments (among others) would probably agree with him.

On the Rapture and the End of the World

The end of the world story has attracted a lot of attention because it's absurd and the jokes keep coming. Meanwhile, the consequences of climate change, which threaten everyone on the planet one way or another, are ignored. The sort of religious fundamentalists who issue dire warnings about salvation are often the same people who deny that there is such a thing.

On Monsieur Strauss-Khan and his embarrassing and inconvenient difficulties

Hugh Schofield of the BBC wrote:

I have always thought the British-French dichotomy to be hokum of the highest order. The basis of the idea is that while the British are prudish and repressed about sex, the French are triumphantly open about it.

Therefore it would be impossible to conceive of a French sex scandal, because no-one would find it shocking if prominent people were engaged in extra-marital affairs. It would just be perfectly normal behaviour. But I think this view of the French is wrong.

It is the same lazy stereotyping that perpetuates the notion that the French are extraordinary lovers. They have no hang-ups about sex, so they cut to the chase and perform the act with all the fiery passion of their frenetic Gallic genes.

One must presume innocence until proven guilty, but Dominique has a reputation for not keeping his trousers on in situations where it would be wiser to do so. "The great seducer" appears to be nothing more than a clumsily randy old man. The fallacy that French men are all "great seducers" and the convention that the sex lives of the rich and powerful should be protected by powerful privacy laws (unlike the UK) seems to allow no end of sexual shenanigans to be ignored. Not in New York, though.

Silvio Berlusconi also fancies himself as a great seducer. What is it with these ugly old men, that makes attractive young women prostitute themselves? Oh, silly me. Money.

Whenever she heard of male sexual misbehaviour, my mum would suggest that whoever had misbehaved should "tie a knot in it". If only.

On Netanyahu saying no to Obama

It would be political suicide for Netanyahu to agree to President Obama's suggestion that Israel should go back to its pre-1967 borders. He referred to "certain changes that have taken place" but the biggest change wasn't mentioned, which is that Israel has accepted thousands of immigrants since 1967, while thousands of Palestinians have been displaced by this influx. Le Monde says, "The 2.6 million immigrants who have arrived since 1948 have made Israel the only country whose population has multiplied by nine in the space of 50 years".

Immigrants from America appear to be some of the most ignorant and prejudiced Zionists, as recent TV programmes by Louis Theroux and Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou suggest. Dr Stavrakopoulou found Israeli tour guides giving very fanciful explanations for the archaeological evidence for Israel's claim to the "Promised Land". She said that her research led her to think that much of what's been taught about King David and the Jews right to the land is simply untrue. However, as long as a majority of Israelis believe the stories they've been fed since childhood, and as long as they keep building to house the next influx, no Israeli Premier can afford to agree with Obama.

Letter to my MP

2011-05-18T14:24:00.000+01:00

Dear Mr Yeo,

I’ve relied on the NHS more than most people. I was born in 1944, so I’m just a few years older than the NHS. Soon after it was introduced, I had pneumonia. I remember very little about it except a frightening visit to hospital for an X-ray with my mother.

About 30 years later, my son was born in an NHS hospital after a procedure to prevent premature birth, because I’d previously miscarried.

I’ve had treatment or care for hepatitis, pyelitis (thanks to a kidney deformity), depression, cancer (twice), heart disease, asthma, arthritis, cellulitis and macular degeneration. I’ve had ME for 25 years, and I’ve had a hysterectomy, a lumpectomy, a mastectomy, an abdominal sacrocolpopexy, and surgery involving a plate for a broken ankle. Before it was computerised, my file at my GP’s surgery was enormous. My hospital file is similarly large.

Without the NHS, I’d have been dead a long time ago.

So you can imagine that I feel very strongly about the NHS, and how it should be managed. I do not accept that increasing privatisation will benefit patients or reduce costs. PFI, used to build hospitals like the Norfolk & Norwich under Labour, has been enormously wasteful of public funds. I see no good reason for extending its use. I fully agree with all the points made by the BMA: http://www.lookafterournhs.org.uk/more/

Please restrain Mr Lansley and urge your colleagues to think again about the changes being proposed to the NHS.

Sincerely,

Margaret Nelson

The RE effect

2011-05-16T23:50:00.002+01:00

If taught properly, RE can immunise young people against religion. The more they know about it, the less likely they are to be it. I don't agree with the National Secular Society about this. Their latest newsletter refers to a "Big push to get RE further into schools," with reference to the new English Baccalaureate, as though it will infect gullible young minds. Not true.

The NSS says:

From the moment the Baccalaureate was announced, the religious establishment started pushing for the inclusion of RE as one of the core subjects. Wildly exaggerated claims about the importance of RE have been repeatedly made by those with a vested interest in keeping it at the centre of the curriculum. Self-serving leaders of Sikh, Buddhist, Roman Catholic, Muslim and Hindu organisations have also joined the campaign.

Each of them realises the importance for the continuation of their religions of gaining access to children at the earliest opportunity and continuing the indoctrination throughout school life.

I've written back:

With reference to your piece about a "Big push to get RE further into school", and the efforts of religious leaders; "Each of them realises the importance for the continuation of their religions of gaining access to children at the earliest opportunity and continuing the indoctrination throughout school life." If RE is included in the new English Baccalaureate, it will presumably have a national syllabus, to replace the current system of local syllabuses decided by SACREs (Standing Advisory Councils for Religious Education). Parents can withdraw their children from RE under the current system. This right has been exercised by fundamentalist parents who don't want their children to know anything about alternative beliefs systems to theirs, religious or otherwise; to keep them in ignorance.

In my experience, as a former teacher and recently retired long-term SACRE member who visits schools to contribute to RE, when children learn about different religious beliefs in school, they're more likely to reject religion altogether by the time they reach secondary school, if they ever believed at all. They recognise the contradictions and inconsistencies, when comparing one with another. Young people have often told me that they think it's all nonsense, displaying healthy scepticism. In the US, where RE isn't taught, fundamentalism thrives, as does ignorance about religions other than Christianity. Nominally secular America is far more religious than we are.

Rather than campaigning against RE, it would be better to campaign for a national syllabus, properly taught by trained teachers (it's often taught by teaching assistants), to include history, freethinking and secularism (terms which are widely misunderstood). Proselytising should be prohibited.

Let the religious leaders lobby for RE; it will backfire on them. Ignorance isn't bliss; it's just ignorance. Not knowing about religion doesn't confer immunity; just the opposite.

Meanwhile, the British Humanist Association calls for the retention of RE, but with a national syllabus, saying:

The BHA campaigns for reform of RE, not for its abolition or for mass withdrawal, because we believe that all pupils in all types of school should have the opportunity to consider philosophical and fundamental questions, and that in a pluralist society we should learn about each other’s beliefs, including humanist ones. We campaign for a reformed RE called by a more inclusive name such as Belief and Values Education, which would be characterised by inclusiveness, impartiality, objectivity, fairness, balance and relevance. We believe that such a subject should take its place on the National Curriculum.

I don't agree with the BHA about all its campaigns and policies, but I mostly agree about this. However, if a national syllabus was introduced, it should include:

the historical development of religions;
cultural differences;
gender differences;
religion and politics.

This would involve much better training for RE teachers, so it's no longer a soft option.

I'm not so sure about learning about "humanist beliefs", as there's no real consensus about what they might be. It would be better to stress the importance of freethinking role models and a naturalistic world view. The older I get, the more I think that the term "humanism" is too often used to describe a belief system, which it isn't, and I don't care to be labelled any more.

Multiple choice answers

2011-05-15T14:07:00.002+01:00

The Big Questions on BBC TV this morning was amusing. It was supposed to be about "The future of British Islam". Nicky Campbell lost control of a bunch of Muslims all shouting at one another, while Dame Anne Leslie kept chipping in with comments prefaced with "When I was in Pakistan/Iran/Afghanistan...", etc. When she referred to the burqa as a "bin bag", that really fanned the flames of indignation.

I had to Google Dr Taj Hargey, whose posture indicated his contempt for most of the opinions being expressed by sitting right back in his chair, while others leant forward as they tried to outshout one another. He's described as "the imam who took on the 'Muslim McCarthyists'".

While there are similarly diverse views about the correct version of Christianity among those who care about such things, a majority of nominal Christians neither know nor care about the theology of the religion they claim to follow, and rarely, if ever, read the Bible. You don't get the feeling that a majority of Muslims are equally casual about their religion. They all read the Qur'an, for a start.

There was no consensus about what the future of British Islam might be, though most of those who spoke were keen to distance themselves from extremists and terrorists. Judging from the diversity of opinions on the Big Questions, they're going to be so busy arguing with one another about who's right and who's wrong that their future will be fractious, which is why the Government should not consult any of their self-appointed "leaders" on matters of public policy. None of them represents anyone but themselves.

All over for AV sigh

2011-05-07T00:47:00.001+01:00

I was going to write a post about the response of the British electorate to the AV campaigns, and why FPTP is rubbish, but Jonathan already did. Thanks Jonathan. Click here to read his blog. Now all I can do is mutter "Arse!" to myself.

If you didn't vote, you don't deserve a political opinion, so shut up. If you voted no to AV, you need your empty head examining.

A C Grayling's favourite part of the Bible, and mine

2011-04-21T21:40:00.004+01:00

In this month's New Humanist magazine, Anthony Grayling is interviewed about his new book, The Good Book, his alternative Bible. I was pleased to note that " ... the Bible contains some sound moral lessons and moments of great beauty (his favourite being the Song of Solomon)...".

My Bible was a ninth birthday gift from my Uncle Vic, my mother's youngest brother, in June 1953. It's a commemorative copy, published to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on June 2nd; my birthday is on the 11th.

The Song of Solomon has always fascinated me, and I've revisited it many times. It's always amused me that the commentary along the top of the pages says, "The love of Christ and his church", "The church glorieth in Christ", "The love of the church to Christ", etcetera. Only someone with a very strange imagination could suggest that this prose poem of love and lust could have anything to do with Christ and the church.

Years after I was given the Bible, I read Elizabeth Smart's prose poem, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, which includes lines from Psalm 137 and The Song of Solomon. I think that I was in love with someone when I first read it (I forget who but whoever it was, it probably ended badly), so the raw emotion of Smart's work struck a rather strong chord. It's based on her love affair with the poet George Barker, whose daughter Raffaella wrote about it in The Independent a couple of years ago. Love like that makes you crazy. You do stupid things, you say stupid things, you yearn constantly to be with your beloved. The Song of Solomon is just like that; pure passion. Nothing at all to do with Christ or the church.

Click on the image to read the Bible. It doesn't bite.

This is what I'm raising money for

2011-04-20T23:48:00.001+01:00

See the link to my Just Giving page on the right.
So far, I've raised enough money to pay for one and a bit boxes, and have lost half a stone. It's not easy!

Dear Kausik Datta, to answer your questions...

2011-04-18T15:33:00.003+01:00

My last post about the French burqa ban elicited a response from Kausik Datta in the US. Not content with posting a comment on my blog (which he didn't seem to expect me to allow; he says he regards moderation as censorship), he also wrote about it on his blog. I'm not interested in a protracted debate but since I decided to respond at length, I'm doing it as a post, not another comment. This is addressed to Kausik Datta.

__________

“First, atheists have no prima facie problem with secularism.” How would you know? When were you appointed spokesperson for atheists in general? An atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in a god or gods. Describing someone as an atheist doesn’t tell us any more than that. It doesn’t imply a value system of any sort, a political position, or anything other than a rejection of religion.

“So, as a ‘secularist’, do you think that religion adheres to your lofty 'Live and let live' ideals?” Religion doesn’t function in a vacuum, nor does it adhere to any ideals. It can’t force itself to do anything. People do these things. Talking about religion without acknowledging its complexity is pointless. There are many religions, and every religion is practised in different ways, in different cultures and communities. An increasing number of British people, for example, don’t subscribe to any organised religion but have developed an individual belief system, which some may describe as “spiritual”, others may call “Christianity”, that owes nothing to theology. The proselytising religions, such as those that thrive in the US, exploit people’s ignorance and confusion. The ones that are inextricably linked to different cultures in the developing world are regarded as part of their followers’ identities, hence very difficult to reject. Nevertheless, in countries like India, which was led at independence by the humanist role model Jawaharlal Nehru (a passionate advocate of secularism), most people live harmoniously with their neighbours; Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Christians and non-believers.

It’s interesting that you should describe the US as largely secular. It’s true that the US has a secular constitution, yet a very large proportion of its population is religious. Dawkins has frequently pointed out how many of its fundamentalist Christians reject evolution. The UK is a far less religious country, yet we have religious education in schools, something that you do not. In my experience (as someone who’s been involved with education for a long time), the more that students learn about different religions, the less likely they are to be religious. This observation has been borne out by research conducted by the University of Manchester and the Church of England. When I visit secondary schools I find that only a small proportion is willing to say that they’re religious. This is despite the fact that many primary schools are still church schools, a legacy of the UK’s dual system.

We have a problem with faith schools, due to muddle-headed politicians, including Tony Blair, who’ve promoted “multiculturalism”. Some religious organisations agree with British Humanists that segregated education is not good and campaign with us to stop their proliferation. There are a few Muslim schools and a significant proportion of them have attracted very poor Ofsted reports (reports on standards commissioned by the government), and are liable to be closed if they don’t improve.

“... the good Baroness - from her privileged position - may well find Dawkins' view 'simple-minded'. I somehow doubt that she has actually bothered to read 'God delusion'.” Baroness Mary Warnock did not inherit her title. She was elevated to the House of Lords as a reward for her achievements in the fields of education, philosophy and ethics, where she's an asset and a useful counter-balance to the irrational influence of 26 bishops. I can only imagine that you think that she hasn’t read Richard Dawkins' book because you know nothing about her.

As for your assertion that religion and faith cause “harm to rationality, sense and sanity (that leaves the mind open to arrant superstitious nonsense of various kinds), not to mention the psychological toll of indoctrination,” this is a familiar argument against religion that I’ve used myself, and that’s been used by many humanist critics. If you read any of Mary Warnock’s work you’d know that she doesn’t ignore the harmful effects of religion. Her position (and mine) is that religion, whether you like it or not, has been woven into human history for millennia, and that there have been benefits. Many of those who criticise aggressive Islam in the 21st century, for example, may not be aware that Muslim scholars led the world in science, medicine and mathematics between the 8th and 13th centuries BCE, the Golden Age of Arab Science. We have inherited art, architecture and musical masterpieces from people who were patronised by Christian individuals and institutions. Many children would not have learned to read and write in the UK between the Industrial Revolution and the 1944 Education Act, had it not been for the philanthropy of the churches, including the non-conformists, that often struggled to pay for their work. Yes, this education came at a price, which was religious instruction. RI is now RE in the UK, no longer about making children religious but teaching them about religion.

The trouble with taking a polarised view of the negative effects of religious is that it’s too simple, and that the story isn’t all bad. It’s about people, and their messy, disorganised lives.There have been freethinkers who were more than mere atheists since at least the 6th century BCE, all over the world, who have developed ideas and values independently of religion, and we owe a lot to them. But atheism, in itself, isn't anything more than a position on faith and atheists, in general, do not set an example of rational, well ordered lives. They can be just as irrational, intolerant and ignorant as the religious, and I'm sometimes irritated by the air of superiority adopted by some of the most anti-theist contributors to Internet debates on religion. They, like Richard Dawkins when he’s most exasperated, remind me of Professor Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’, who thinks that all would be well if everyone was like him. I often get the feeling that Dawkins doesn’t really understand people very well. When he writes about science, he’s brilliant. When he writes about the stubborn resistance of religious people to accept what he tells them, he sometimes makes me laugh.

As for the burqa, which is where all this started; I agree that the burqa should be discouraged but I do not agree that it should be banned by law. In the UK, there is more than one sort of burqa-wearer. A very small minority may be bullied into wearing it by backward imams and male relatives. Even the Muslim Council of Britain, which the Blair Government actually consulted on multicultural issues, to its shame, has said that women should wear it, as rejecting it can be seen as a rejection of Islam. The niqab is mainly worn in the UK by women from communities that have immigrated from rural Pakistan, where literacy standards are poor, women receive no education, and boys have been educated in religious madrasas, as their families cannot afford anything else.

You wrote, “... the burqa is the ultimate symbol of religion-inspired subjugation of women; it brands the burqa-clad women as chattel, the property of some man, father or husband, and is often enforced by Islam on pain of death. What would you think if you suddenly found at an open place a woman put on a collar and a leash, being pulled by a man? The burqa, enforced by tribal patriarchal customs, is symbolically equivalent, although you may not quite understand this parallel unless you have lived in or in close conjunction with an Islamic country.” On the contrary, I fully understand the significance of enforced burqa-wearing in Islamist states. Most British Muslim women, like educated Muslim women from countries like Egypt, do not wear the niqab or even the hijab. Two Muslim women at a school sixth form conference last year were asked about their choice – one wore the hijab, the other did not. It was agreed that the choice is largely determined by culture, rather than the Qur’an. There is a worrying trend among young British Muslim women, including converts to Islam, who wear the full burqa from choice, against the wishes of their families. They appear to think that this demonstrates their devotion to Allah. However, schoolgirls who’ve adopted the niqab, in contravention of a school’s rules on uniform, have been sent home to change. Appeals by parents have been lost.

I fully accept that it must be necessary for the niqab to be removed in some situations, for security reasons, and I fully agree that burqa-wearing should be regarded as socially-unacceptable. However, I’m not alone in thinking that a ban enforced by law would not be appropriate in Britain. I’ve discussed this with members of my humanist group and with sympathisers on Twitter and Facebook. All of them, men and women, have said that though they hate the burqa, they would be deeply uncomfortable with the idea of arresting otherwise harmless women for their mode of dress.

On your blog, you asked if I’d still think it’s “a ‘human rights’ issue if, for example, Klan members decided to wear their white Klan costumes (robes, masks, and conical hats, designed to be outlandish and terrifying, and to hide their identities) to public places in the Southern parts of the US?”. I’d suggest that the best response to modern Klansmen wearing their outfits in public would be to point and laugh. If that’s all they were doing, I wouldn’t want to ban them from wearing fancy dress. I have no doubt that there is still racial prejudice in the American South, but the civil rights issue has been dealt with and now that black people have rights, Klansmen (and women) are no longer the threat that they once were. There’s a world of difference between them and their costumes, designed to threaten and intimidate, and the burqa and niqab, worn by women who are seldom a threat to anyone; if anything, they’re more likely to be threatened by racists and Islamophobes, here and in France. The racist politics of Jean-Marie le Pen and his ilk have had a lot to do with the French ban because Sarkozy has been losing votes to them. In the UK, one of the groups in favour of a ban is the British National Party, a nasty bunch of ignorant thugs. I wouldn’t want to be associated with them on the burqa issue, or anything else.

__________

Click here to read what I wrote previously about the damage to women and children's health from the burqa.
Click here to read what I've said about secularism.

The French burqa ban has nothing to do with secularism

2011-04-17T01:30:00.001+01:00

I've blogged about the burqa before, when the French were still deliberating about banning it. Now that they have banned it, there's an online debate, if you can call it that, about whether or not to ban it here. Predictably, the anti-religionist atheist and UKIP member, Pat Condell, thinks it should be banned. I find him so irritating that I'd slap a preservation order on the burqa, just to annoy him.

One of my Facebook friends wrote something the other day about France enforcing secularism with this ban, or words to that effect. I think he confuses secularism with atheism. A secular society is one where religion doesn’t dictate political decisions – where the state and religion are separate – and where freedom of religion is possible, as no one religion dominates society. There are religious people who support the principle of secularism, recognising that it's the fairest system there is. Of course, hard-line atheists who are anti-religious don't like this idea; one told me he lived for the day when all religion would be gone. He'll have to live a very long time, possibly forever.

Nicolas Sarkozy is very unpopular - one poll puts his approval rating at about 29% - and the burqa ban seems to be a cynical ploy to win votes from the far right. Until now, few women have worn the burqa and niqab in France. It's possible that more will adopt it now, in gestures of defiance. Apart from security considerations, such as those that apply to motorcyclists who are asked to remove their helmets when it's necessary to identify them, it's an infringement of someone's human rights to legislate about what he or she may or may not wear in public. Yes, I know all the arguments about oppressed Muslim women being forced to wear the burqa, but the answer to this is education, not legislation.

Communist states have banned religion and its manifestations in the past, only for it to resurface from the underground when repressive sanctions have been lifted. I sometimes wonder whether those atheists who seem to imagine that religion can be forcibly eradicated or sneered into submission have any understanding of people in general. I'm inclined to agree with Baroness Mary Warnock, who, when interviewed by Laurie Taylor for New Humanist, said:

I find Dawkins’ simple-minded view of religion very difficult to take. It pays no proper attention to the history and tradition of religion. It says that religions have done nothing but harm but that is manifestly not true. He omits all the good things, the education, the cathedrals, the music. All that’s disregarded.

There are many things about religion I find difficult to understand, like how intelligent people can believe so much nonsense, but as a secularist, I'm happy to live and let live, as long as they do the same. However, wearing the niqab and the burqa isn't just about religion; it's mainly a cultural thing. The monotheistic religions are inextricably linked to patriarchal politics, but would banning the burqa improve the lives of the women who wear it? Not necessarily. They have a variety of reasons for doing so; it would be a mistake to assume that they're all forced by male relatives. I doubt very much that Nicolas Sarkozy had women's interests at heart, and nor do the most vocal advocates of a British ban.

The Wayne Rooneyfication of society

2011-04-07T09:36:00.001+01:00

I emailed my funeral celebrant colleagues yesterday about a report from The Co-operative, on funeral road rage - and increasing number of people don't seem to have any manners when they come across a funeral cortège, sounding their horns and breaking into the procession. The report reminded me of something a funeral director told me, years ago (he's retired now). He said that he was both angered and saddened by the change in attitudes towards funeral cortèges by the public. He could remember when, if a cortège passed in the street, men would stop and take their hats off, and bow their heads. Now, he said, no one bothers.

I was driving in a cortège recently. We were on our way to a remote rural cemetery, and the only person who knew the way was the driver of the hearse, at the front, so it was important to keep the cars in front in sight until we reached the turning-off point. About half way along, a white van driver broke into the procession in front of me. With lots of bends in the narrow road, it was impossible for him (I'm assuming it was a man) to go any further, and it was impossible for me to see past him, so when we did reach the cemetery I almost missed the turning. There have been many other examples of this sort of thing happening, particularly at roundabouts in town.

One of my colleagues replied:

I had heard about this and it doesn't surprise me. I've seen it happen myself many times. It's the 'Wayne Rooneyfication' of society.

My daughter and her husband both have stressful jobs and to unwind they walk most evenings from their home to the hospital in Heath Road and back, around six miles in all. Almost every night they are subjected to the foulest imaginable language from passing motorists many of whom slow right down, wind down the windows and let rip. The offenders often include females. There seems to be so much pent up anger in society and perhaps that's how they let it out. If only they'd direct that anger to more constructive purposes.

Not sure how though.

See less of me, send a Shelterbox

2011-03-14T16:53:00.000Z

I'm raising money for Shelterbox by losing weight with Just Giving. Click on the widget to the right to donate, please!

Women, serpents, matriarchy and patriarchy

2011-03-11T00:08:00.003Z

I'm looking forward to a TV series that starts on Tuesday 15th March on BBC2. Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou is an atheist and a senior lecturer in the Hebrew Bible at the University of Exeter. She says things about the Bible that a lot of traditional Christians don't want to hear, but I do. She's quoted in the Telegraph:

Dr Stavrakopoulou said she had battled sexism in her field. "Most biblical scholars are middle-aged, bearded men. It's fair to say there's been an amount of sexism in the discipline and, as a young woman in the field, I've had to develop my own ways of coping with that."

Merlin Stone, the American sculptor and academic, who wrote "When God was a Woman" in the 1970s (published as "The Paradise Papers" in the UK), made similar comments about biblical scholars. I came across her book after I'd taken a keen interest in the figures of female forms discovered by archaeologists in the Middle East. They inspired some of my work at college, in two and three dimensions.

Around the Mediterranean in the pre-Judeo-Christian era, societies were mainly matriarchal. The balance shifted and the social order changed, apparently because men wanted to be sure of the paternity of their children. They wanted to control women, and control who inherited their property.

From the introduction to Dr Stavrakopoulou's series in the Radio Times, it seems that she's made a connection between Eve and earlier goddesses:

There are hints in the Genesis story about the Garden of Eden that Jahweh was Eve's husband. The symbols we associate with Eve - particularly the trees and the serpent - are ancient symbols of fertility and regeneration associated with goddess worship. But Eve, particularly in the Christian tradition, has been very unfairly maligned as the troublesome wife who brought about the fall.

Now that I think about it, it seems obvious. Myths get recycled but in the retelling, this one helped to place women at a disadvantage for over 2000 years. I've never understood why women want to be priests in such a patriarchal institution as the Christian church.

Illustration - On the left, a Minoan Snake Goddess from Crete, approx. 1600 BCE. On the right, Eve in the Garden of Eden, 12th or 13th century mosaic, Sicily.

On arms and poverty

2011-02-28T13:41:00.001Z

In 2000 I did a Thought for the Day for Suffolk Humanists on BBC Radio Suffolk to mark the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on October 17th. I quoted some statistics, as follows:

"The cost of providing basic social services for all in developing countries is estimated at about £27½ billion a year over the next 10 years, which is less than 0.2% of the world income of £17.22 trillion. The sum needed to close the gap between the annual income of poor people and the minimum income at which they would no longer be poor is estimated at another £27½ billion a year, so the total cost would be roughly £55 billion, or less than the combined net worth of the seven richest people in the world."

These figures are out of date now, of course, but the differentials will be about the same. When I wrote that piece, I didn't refer to the cost of arms sales worldwide. If some of that money was diverted into the eradication of poverty, it would make a huge difference. In 2000, Britain exported arms worth £4,406 million. In 2007, this had risen to £5,474 million. Many of these arms have been sold to Middle Eastern and North African countries that are currently in the news, where they're being used against civilians who are demonstrating for democracy. In the middle of all this, our Prime Minister goes to the same region, to try to sell more arms. You couldn't make it up.

The photo is of an F-15 fighter jet by Boeing. Last year (2010), the US was considering selling 84 of these to Saudi Arabia. They cost £105 million each. King Abdullah has just tried to bribe his disenfranchised young people with £22 billion, in anticipation of the widespread unrest affecting his subjects.

Mark Steel wrote a brilliant piece in the Independent about hypocrisy, suggesting that the US government's line on Mubarak was, "It's not our place to intervene in a country run by a dictator we've armed and financed for 30 years."

Click here to join the Campaign Against the Arms Trade.

Keep civil marriage simple, and don't let's have legal humanist weddings

2011-02-16T01:38:00.007Z

Since 1837, when the Births and Deaths Registration Act of 1836 led to the appointment of a Registrar General for England and Wales, it has been possible for anyone to have a civil wedding ceremony that's free from religion in this country. Since the 1994 Marriage Act, it's been possible to have a civil ceremony in a building registered for the solemnisation of marriage - stately homes, hotels, and so on - as well as in a register office. I don't understand why some atheists and humanists have been complaining that they're "discriminated against", because humanist weddings aren't legally recognised in England and Wales.

The subject's come up again because the Liberal Democrats in the Coalition Government, with the best of intentions, want to equalise gay marriages with straight ones. So far, it sounds like a bodge, which will create even more muddle than we have now. Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, is frothing at the mouth at the prospect of vicars conducting same-sex civil partnerships, while the liberal Dr Giles Fraser, canon chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, is eager to perform weddings for gay couples in church. Good, you might say, it's time that the church started recognising gay rights - but is it that simple?

In response to all the hoo-ha, the British Humanist Association produced a briefing for Valentine's Day on marriage and civil partnerships, which muddles things even more. They're broadly in favour of equality in marriage law for gay couples, but not in favour of bringing religion into civil marriage or civil partnership ceremonies. They repeat the same tired old complaint about discrimination against humanists. They say:

People wishing to get married in England or Wales all have a choice, if they wish, of a register office ceremony, which by law must not be distinctive of any religion or belief, including Humanism. Only the religious have the additional option of a legally recognised ceremony conducted according to their own religious beliefs. Although BHA-accredited humanist celebrants conduct hundreds of weddings every year, these have no legal validity and have to be supplemented by a register office ceremony.

In other words, there is a clear discrepancy in the law whereby, in England and Wales, religious marriages have legal validity but humanist marriages do not. The BHA believes that this unequal treatment on grounds of religion or belief is clear discrimination against humanists in marriage law and that the situation should be rectified.

This is nonsense. I've conducted humanist weddings for some lovely people, but I wouldn't say that many, if any, of them were very interested in humanism. Who decides who's a humanist? They were people who wanted the freedom to plan a wedding without religion that included lots of personal stuff, poems and music, in venues that usually wouldn't qualify as suitable for a civil ceremony, using words that wouldn't be allowed in a civil ceremony. They mostly went to a register office a few days before their humanist wedding to do the legal bit, but without exchanging rings, just keeping it simple.

Religious people have specific rituals to observe during their wedding ceremonies. Sikhs, for example:

Most marriages take place in the morning. The ceremony starts with a meeting of the two sides called Milni at which holy shabads (hymns from the Sikh Scripture, Guru Granth Sahib) are sung. Often an Ardaas (supplication) is also said at the Milni (not prescribed).

The two sides say the Sikh greeting to each other with "Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh" (Khalsa belongs to the Wondrous Giver of Knowledge; to whom also belongs victory.)

And so on... There are no rituals at a humanist weddings, apart from ones that the couples devise themselves, or the familiar one of exchanging rings. This is one of the good things about humanist weddings; you have total flexibility. Anyone can conduct them, anywhere (within reason), anyhow. It's up to you. I've conducted one for a lesbian couple in a pub, for an impecunious couple in the bride's mum's garden (the family did everything themselves, including tea in the Scout hut later, and I got paid in firewood - he was a tree surgeon), and for a musical couple in an old chapel. They've been out of doors, in front of a log fire at night in an Elizabethan mansion, in a small terraced house, in a field by a river - all sorts of places. If the state were involved, its dead hand would limit your options. Why change things?

I suspect that some BHA celebrants quite fancy the status of being a registrar, authorised to conduct weddings. It sounds so much more important, doesn't it? But have they thought it through? The incidence of sham marriages in the UK has increased, so you'd have to be extra careful to ensure that the couple were entitled to marry. Would you be allowed to refuse to marry anyone who was entitled to marry? I have, when a couple planned a wedding that would have involved everyone (including me) dressing up in the local football team's colours, on the pitch. I put them in touch with someone who liked football.

What the BHA won't tell you, though it should, is that you don't need one of its celebrants to conduct your wedding. You can do it yourselves, with a friend or relative acting as celebrant. Some of the best weddings I've been involved with have had the least "professional" input, with family and friends contributing food, fun and favours. The wedding industry is responsible for charging people huge sums of money these days - £20,000 or more in some cases - and none of it guarantees a happy marriage. I conducted funerals for an old couple from Suffolk whose wedding cost them less than a £1 (for their bus fare into town and the registrar's fee), yet they were happy together for over sixty years.

My main objection to the BHA's silly campaign is that it undermines its stated position on secularism. If we want a level playing field, an end to religious privilege, we can't start demanding privileges for ourselves. The fact that BHA and non-BHA celebrants conduct lots of nominally humanist weddings every year isn't a valid reason to make them legal. The couples who think it's a good idea to make them legal would probably appreciate that it would save them the bother of having to go to the register office, but you need a better reason that convenience. This stuff about "equality" is nonsense. Where does it end? Who'll decide where to draw the line, when every minority religious group wants "equality"?

The church used to decide marriage law in the UK. Those days are long gone, but some religious groups have retained their privileges for historical reasons. The way to equalise things for everyone - religious or not, gay or straight - isn't to keep messing about with marriage law, but to reduce it to the same simple system they have in France and Germany (and in other countries further away); a civil ceremony for everyone, which may or may not be followed by another ceremony, religious or otherwise. The second ceremony would have no legal significance, as the legal bit would already have been done.

Rather than clamouring for "equality" with religious people and alleging discrimination, the BHA ought to be focussing on disestablishment and removing all religious privilege, so that we might have a truly secular state, fair to everyone. The NSS is doing a much better job of this. The BHA has lost its way.

Read more on civil registration.

Read about humanist weddings, Suffolk style. We'll help people with DIY weddings too, in return for a small donation to our funds.

What is Humanism?

A good life without religion.

Photo: A humanist wedding in a Suffolk garden, (c) M Nelson.

Yes, that's all very well, but back in the real world...

2010-12-09T16:04:00.010Z

Listening to the university fees debate in the House of Commons, I've been half-expecting someone to say, "We lived in a shoe box on a motorway, so I had to lick poison off the landlord's boots to earn a place at university," especially after David Blunkett tried to out-anecdote everyone else. Per-lease! So far, I haven't heard anyone talking much sense, though I did have to go to the loo a few times and tidy up the kitchen. And do any of the MPs persuade anyone else with their prepared speeches, apart from being able to say to their student constituents, and their mummies and daddies, that they did their best? I doubt it.

So, this is how I see it, Madame Deputy Speaker:

There are too many students doing too many courses. Limit the numbers, especially for things like media studies, photography and so on, that have the highest graduate unemployment rates. The market's already saturated with them. You may say that other countries are increasing student numbers, but they're facing similar problems, so expect them to change too.

The argument that a university degree makes you a better, more well-rounded person, with more employment prospects, doesn't seem to be supported by the evidence. It's more important to spend money on education at the bottom end, so that kids study philosophy and are taught to think, and to get rid of specialist schools, academies and GCSEs. Have comprehensives where everyone has to do a broad syllabus, including languages, working towards a Baccalaureate qualification, so there are no easy options. Then universities might not need to spend money on remedial classes for undergraduates whose English and Maths is poor. Refuse entrance to science courses for would-be undergraduates who don't accept that evolution is true - why should anyone waste time on them? Some of these idiots want to be doctors! Raise the standard of teaching, which isn't good enough, and pay teachers more. Incidentally, research has shown that a good teacher isn't necessarily one with a first class degree. His or her personal qualities matter just as much.

Make degrees mean something again, because they're for the brightest and best. The Association of Graduate Recruiters says that we need fewer graduates, and that action must be taken to correct the “devaluation” of degrees in recent years. Degrees seem to be on everyone's wish list, together with owning their own home, having lots of foreign holidays, and more than one car, but never mind the quantity, what about the quality?

Push for more apprenticeships and vocational courses, and more help for would-be entrepreneurs with socially-useful ideas. Raise the so far unmentionable matter of population control; discourage families from having more than two children, with expensive tastes and high expectations.

The numbers are unsustainable. Too many people, too many students, too many courses. We might have been able to afford free tuition for everyone if we weren't in so much debt, if the numbers weren't out of control, if the Labour Government hadn't taken us to war in Iraq (the £9+ billion it's cost us would've come in handy), if the number of undergraduates was kept at a sensible level while ensuring fair access.

The Liberal Democrats have become convenient scapegoats while Tories are happy for them to take the flak and Labour MPs conveniently ignore the fact that they commissioned the Browne Report, and would almost certainly have raised fees if they were still in power. I've never heard so much sanctimonious drivel for .. well, actually, it's not been that long. Do shut up, the lot of you.

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PS: While I was blogging, Twitter was frenzied with stuff about the student demo: parents complaining that their schoolkid darlings were at risk of kettling or being trampled by police horses, while being denied their "rights"; others being nasty about the police superintendent who suggested that schoolchildren shouldn't be there; stuff about lighting fires, etc. Meanwhile, @Rose_Darling wrote, "Judging by the VI-formers being interviewed on the BBC right now, I'm wondering whether they should go to uni. They're really inarticulate." Quite. On 24 November the BBC interviewed some students. One said, "This is what happens when they oppress us students for so long." Another said, "Our rights are being impeded on." I'm guessing they were from the remedial class.

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15 December - more on devalued degrees. Norwich firm on regional news programme said that despite high unemployment, they have trouble recruiting graduates because they're just not good enough. Was also told last night by someone who's studying for a masters degree while looking for a permanent job that employers look for people with higher degrees because first degrees aren't enough any more.

Men are expendable

2010-11-15T12:37:00.001Z

During the recent BBC TV series, Escape in Time, where two families compete to complete tasks involving skills that were familiar to Victorian farming families, presenter Ben Fogle commented on the gender divide, observing that the men did all the heavy and dangerous work. The social historian he was with said that this was normal, because "men were expendable". Women did the domestic tasks, raised the family and the young animals, fed the poultry and so on, while men did jobs that needed physical strength, often involving working with dangerous machinery or animals. This was because women had to be protected, said the historian; they were required to care for the family; it was more important that they survived than the men. I'm not sure how this worked when they were widowed and lost their homes and means of support, but I guess that many widows either remarried or coped on their own.

It reminded me of the social history I've managed to absorb about marriage, and that a significant proportion of the population didn't marry in the 19th century because they weren't considered marriageable - they didn't have any skills or assets to bring to a union. The rich married to seal family contracts and so on, while the poor looked for partners who were useful because they had skills and strengths. The weak and feeble were a poor prospect. An old nursery rhyme illustrates this:

Sukey, you shall be my wife
      And I shall tell you why:
I have got a little pig,
      And you have got a sty;
I have got a dun cow
      And you can make good cheese;
Sukey, will you marry me?
      Say Yes, if you please.

I've quoted this at school marriage conferences quite often.

It would be a mistake to assume that women had an easy time of it, because they weren't expected to do dangerous work. Childbearing was dangerous enough, and they did physical work for long hours. Men may have been expendable, but some were just useless. I found this when I went to work on a Shropshire dairy farm in the 1960s. My boss sacked a labourer when he hired me (because I was cheaper, at £4 a week plus my keep), but the man in question was a lazy so-and-so. His wife complained that he drank most of his wages and didn't believe in exerting himself if he could avoid it. Still, I should have been paid the same as him, but this was before the Equal Pay Act.

Before health and safety regulations, farm workers had to be extra careful but if they did get hurt they generally didn't make a fuss. I conducted a funeral for a retired farm labourer once. He'd accidentally sliced off a toe while working in the fields - the weather was so cold at the time, he didn't even notice at first. He picked it up and put it in his pocket, and carried on working for another ten minutes, before he was persuaded to get help. That story reminded me of the French and Saunders sketch about the two countrywomen, where one accidentally chops of a finger, then throws it to the dog.

I suppose you could say that 21st century life is much easier than 19th century life for wimps and weaklings, and those who can't make cheese.

Photo: Men with early corn harvesting machine, Suffolk, from 'The Farm and the Village' by George Ewart Evans.

Family values

2010-11-12T17:07:00.004Z

In last week's NSS Newsline, the question "What would be your advice?" was asked about a query in Coleen Nolan's advice column in The Mirror. The questioner began,

I'm furious after discovering recently that my mum's been taking my five-year-old son to church behind my back when he stays with her at the weekend.

Some of the answers in this week's Newsline made me wonder about the respondents' abilities to relate to their own families, so I've belatedly joined in the debate by writing to Newsline.

-----------

The responses to the Catholic grandmother who took an atheist’s child to church story in last week’s Newsline were interesting, but two in particular made me laugh. One wrote that “Anyone who abuses her own mother by using her as a free baby-sitter deserves all she gets!” Abuse? For taking advantage of a grandparent’s willingness to babysit? Give me strength! That’s how families work, surely? Then another wrote, “I would tell the old bag that if she persisted I would find another babysitter and she would not have any further contact with me or her grandson again and remind her that her actions were and should have been obvious to her were contrary to the way I intend to bring up my son.” Oh dear. Old bag? He doesn’t know the woman, yet he calls her an “old bag”? These two would make appalling agony aunts/uncles!

Over the last week or so I’ve been treated to some vitriol dished out by an Islamophobe in response to a story on the Suffolk Humanist group’s website. Among other things, this ignoramus claims that exposing children to religion, Islam in particular, is “child abuse”. I get the impression that there are quite a few readers of Newsline who share this view. I’ve found that people who’ve expressed such opinions haven’t known any Muslims or few (if any) followers of other religions. Instead, they parrot the caricatures they’ve read on the most reactionary websites or in the tabloid press. This is ignorant and lazy. They don’t see religious people as just people; they see them as representing the worst aspects of the fundamentalist versions of their religions, regardless of their culture, ethnicity or, most importantly, their behaviour. It’s indistinguishable from the sort of ignorance we’re treated to when the Pope makes ill-informed comments about atheism, lumping us all together with Nazis, or whatever.

Anyone who’s confident enough in his or her own values to tolerate other people’s irrational opinions or behaviour will convey, by example, a relaxed attitude to his or her children, who may learn to understand that people, in general, don’t necessarily think clearly or act sensibly. As long as you do, what have you to worry about? A clergyman I know was caught in the act of kissing an atheist (me) in the local crematorium vestry. A member of staff, in mock horror, said to him, “You kissed an atheist!” “That’s all right,” said my friend, “it’s not catching.” That’s my attitude to religion. There’s a world of difference between organised indoctrination, when children are never exposed to other beliefs or religions that might contradict what they’re being taught, and being exposed to beliefs or religions that are different from their parents’ beliefs. This is why I’ve come to believe that withdrawing children from RE lessons in school is not a good idea; in some Muslim communities, the right of withdrawal is being used to keep children in ignorance.

The Catholic grandmother in the newspaper advice column was clearly unable to comprehend her daughter and son-in-law’s position, and was possibly determined that her grandchild wouldn’t end up in hell for lack of the necessary instruction. Or it may just be that she wasn’t going to allow her baby-sitting to interfere with her church-going. Whatever the reason, this family should be talking to one another, not writing letters to Coleen Nolan. Most of what goes on in a Catholic church service would go over a five-year-old’s head and when he’s a bit older he’s likely to find it all rather boring, if he doesn’t already. If he’s included in sensible discussions about what various members of the family believe at home, as long as they’re appropriate for his age, and if he’s taught about various religions in school, it will become clear to him that there are contradictions and inconsistencies in religious teachings. He should also be encouraged to question his parents’ beliefs and values, without anyone getting upset. The most important thing for him to realise is that no questions are off limits, and that we can still love people in spite of our differences. His grandmother may give up her attempts to turn him into a good little Catholic when he bombards her with questions she can’t answer.

Comedy Christians and Pagan hedonists

2010-11-01T19:46:00.004Z

There are Christians with a sense of humour (I've met some) but the plonkers who've been whingeing that the BBC gave more attention to a bunch of Druids than to them over last weekend clearly don't have one, or they'd realise just how silly they were. The Telegraph reported,

Mike Judge, spokesman for the Christian Institute, said: “I understand the BBC might choose to concentrate on something for one day, but I consider it to be symptomatic of a much bigger problem across the BBC ... They down-play Christianity and up-play paganism which is unreflective of British society. It does create an atmosphere where it’s OK to marginalise Christians.”

Marginalise? If only!

Hallowe'en (October 31st) is All Souls Eve, the night before All Saints Day in the Christian calendar, when they're supposed to pray for "the departed faithful". The departed unfaithful can go to hell, presumably. What few people realise is that it's another example of the church claiming a much older festival, Samhain, when pagans have always celebrated the coming of winter. The old festivals celebrated around the Northern hemisphere make much more sense than Christian ones, even to those of us who aren't religious, because they mark solar and seasonal events, which had real significance for our forebears. When you were dependent on the sun's warmth and the weather for your survival, pre-modern conveniences, it was natural to mark the special days in the solar calendar with festivals.

The main solar festivals were the midsummer and midwinter solstices (the longest and the shortest days) and the spring and autumn equinoxes, when night and day are of equal length. The Christians, realising that they couldn't stamp out the old ways, simply made up stories to fit them. So the midwinter solstice, which is on 21st December, became Christmas. The early Christians didn't celebrate it at all for the first four centuries, and the Puritans under Cromwell banned it, but people would insist on enjoying themselves in midwinter anyway.

Then there's Easter. Some say that the name comes from a pagan goddess, Eostre or Ostara, but apparently she was invented by Grimm. The egg is a symbol of fertility, and people have been celebrating the arrival of Spring and new life, when crops started growing again and animals started breeding, since long before the Christians decided it was when Jesus was crucified. Christians and pagans each had their own myths and I really couldn't care less, but I'd rather celebrate the arrival of Spring than a death.

So far, the Christians haven't managed to spoil the midsummer solstice with their silliness, and they don't seem very interested in the autumn equinox, but give them time...

The midwinter solstice festival is much older than Christianity. It's been celebrated in the Northern hemisphere as the festival of the death and rebirth of the sun, when people drank and ate to excess, masters and servants swapped places, and so on - feasts and parties! I bet the BBC won't mention that though, for fear of upsetting those Christians who insist on carping on about "the real meaning of Christmas". Killjoys!

Photo (c) M Nelson - Midwinter sunset.

Postscript: This post was edited after I was criticised for a creative explanation of Easter. Regardless of my casual disregard for the history of the Easter goddess myth, my point was that the Christians have no exclusive claim to any of these festivals, which have been celebrated in different ways at different times. The 21st century versions seem to be more commercial than anything else, which is extremely irritating.

Suffolk County Council - save it or lose it

2010-09-30T20:08:00.001+01:00

Wouldn't it be great if our politicians used the brains they were born with? How does this make sense to the numpties?

At its meeting on 23 September 2010, members of Suffolk County Council were asked:

to agree the recommendation from Cabinet that the future role of the Council will be an enabling one (focussing on becoming a strategic body with much less service delivery), based on the Council’s New Strategic Direction of transforming public services through collaboration and strengthening communities while reducing costs by 30%.
to approve the further development of a model to reshape the Council to ‘divest’ services; reduce its size, cost and bureaucracy and build community capacity to enable Suffolk citizens to take greater control of their lives.

The motion was passed with 52 members voting in favour and 11 voting against.

If you're in Suffolk, please sign my petition. Just click on the banner...

And if you're really keen, go to my Save Suffolk Services blog to download some petition forms and collect more.

The BBC and the Pope

2010-09-19T23:11:00.001+01:00

I've complained to the BBC about its coverage of the Pope's visit -

'The BBC’s coverage of the Pope’s visit has been completely OTT. The tone adopted by most reporters and correspondents on BBC News verged on the obsequious. I agree with the British Humanist Association’s view of the news last Thursday, that there was “no analysis of the Holy See’s destructive policies and no guest talking about them, no balance – only Catholic attendees of the events were interviewed. Correspondents repeated the Pope's insulting views on secularism and non-religious morality with no critical analysis at all.” The Pope aligned atheism with Nazism, infuriating thousands of people like me, and spoke about “aggressive secularism” – there’s no such thing. I wonder how many of the BBC’s staff know what secularism means? There was no attempt to challenge this nonsense. Hitler and most Nazis weren’t atheists. It’s well known that many Catholic clergy were enthusiastically involved with Nazism, while most of Germany’s atheist and free-thought organisations were banned. Was this ever pointed out? No, Pope Benedict was allowed to make any preposterous statement he liked, without challenge.

'Things didn’t get any better over the weekend. I heard BBC reporters, on TV and radio, interviewing Catholic priests and laity about the Pope’s comments on faith without challenging claims that it’s being “marginalised”, which is totally untrue. Robert Piggot, the BBC’s Religious Affairs correspondent, was interviewed today (Sunday 19th September). He ended his contribution by saying that the Pope’s message was, “Do you really want to live without the moral underpinning of religion?” This was left without comment – no mention that a significant proportion of the UK’s population live good, decent lives without religion, and that Catholicism’s claim of “moral underpinning” is debateable.

'So, not only were we expected to watch and listen to an unbroken stream of Catholic PR, courtesy of an inexplicably biased BBC, the news schedules were completely dominated by it. Why was it considered necessary to have simultaneous Pope coverage on both BBC News 24 and BBC 2? And why was this uninterrupted by any other news for long periods, even when all that was going on was someone trying to find something interesting to say while we watched the Pope’s convoy speeding through the streets from a helicopter, or while the faithful congregated in various parks in anticipation of another open-air church service? I was enjoying coverage of the Great North Run, until that too was elbowed aside to make room for the Pope, while other channels covered the Battle of Britain service and the Liberal Democrats conference.

'I can’t help wondering if BBC producers hadn’t been instructed to adopt an uncritical approach to the Pope’s visit. Why else should it have been so nauseatingly deferential? The BBC News team has alienated many previously loyal viewers and listeners, including me. I think we’re owed an apology. I know we won’t get one from the Pope – he’s incapable of seeing his errors – but maybe the BBC might do something to restore its reputation?'

If you want to complain too, go to BBC Complaints.

I didn't fight cancer, I've survived it (so far)

2010-08-31T23:29:00.001+01:00

I was disappointed to read today,

The British Humanist Association (BHA) has expressed its sorrow at the death of Lord (Andrew) McIntosh of Haringey, following a long fight with cancer.

I wasn't disappointed over Lord McIntosh's death - he seems a perfectly decent chap, but I had no idea who he was until I read he'd died - but I was disappointed that whoever wrote his obituary for the BHA resorted to that old cliché about a "fight" with cancer. People don't fight cancer, or do battle with it. Some (like me) survive it, and others don't. And if you don't, it's not because you lost a battle or didn't try hard enough.

You read the same clichés in the press almost every time someone of note dies, and it really pisses me off. Independent columnist Christina Patterson, also a cancer survivor, wrote about cancer metaphors,

It was Susan Sontag, writing 25 years before she herself died of cancer, who warned of the dangers of "illness as metaphor". "Theories that diseases are caused by mental states," she wrote, "and can be cured by willpower are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease."

Lord McIntosh was ill for a long time, apparently, but if he had any sense he didn't waste any precious energy fighting or battling cancer, which would have been exhausting and utterly pointless. If he was as sensible as we're led to believe, he'll have taken care of himself, got plenty of rest, and made the most of the time he had, in case he didn't have much more of it.

Oh, and the BHA's report is headed, "BHA mourns the death of Andrew McIntosh..." I know I'm being picky, but the BHA is an organisation, not an individual. It can't "mourn" anyone. Only those who knew and cared about someone who's died can mourn him or her, as I'm sure Lord McIntosh's family and friends do.

______________________________

PS: Was reminded by a Twitter friend that John Diamond said, "Cowards get cancer too."

British education - what a mess!

2010-08-21T17:42:00.000+01:00

Here's another reason why I didn't vote Labour over the last few years: specialist schools and academies. Whose barmy idea was it for schools to specialise in the arts, business, science or IT, among other things? Ed Balls was education minister, wasn't he? Well, I wouldn't have voted for him. Children need a broad general education. How can a child who starts to develop an aptitude for science be given the help he or she needs if he or she attends a school that specialises in the arts? Or a budding musician do well in a business school? Most children don't know what they want to be or do until they're past the basics, and what if they find they're in the wrong school then?

Of course, many schools apply for specialist status so they can gain the extra funding that goes with it. I've heard that a school might go for IT status, then when they've got all the PCs they need, switch to another specialisation so that they might get, oh, I don't know, sports equipment? As for academies run by religious organisations, they should never happen.

The result of all this specialisation is that kids may end up with the wrong exam results for the courses they'd really like to do, finding out when it's too late. I bet that happens often. The problem with some faith schools (particularly Muslim ones) is that some kids give more weight to religious teachings than to academic ones. An increasing number of science faculties are finding that some undergraduates reject the theory of evolution, yet expect to study biology or medicine. Crazy!

Watching Dateline London today, I was interested to hear Agnès Poirier talking about the French Baccalauréat. They were discussing the usual media reports about A level results, and whether they've got too easy, or whatever, and the competition for university places. Agnès said that French kids don't get to choose which subjects to take, as British students do. No opting for A levels in your strongest subjects. You do them all, including two foreign languages. They all study philosophy - if only they did that here! Because France is strongly secular country, there's no RE. Not surprising that a small number of British schools are teaching the International Baccalaureate, which the universities like.

Meanwhile, what's the Government doing? Leaving education policy in the hands of politicians with pet projects, such as "free" schools. It's much too important to leave it to them. Ed Balls or Michael Gove - they're as bad as each other. They're both failures.

Reposts to follow

2010-08-20T17:24:00.001+01:00

By request, I shall restore some of the stuff I deleted, but it'll take a while.

The wrong sort of people

2010-08-20T12:19:00.004+01:00

There's a hoo-ha in New York over the objections to a "mosque" being built on "Ground Zero" - the site of the 9/11 disaster. The fact that it isn't a mosque, nor is it to be built on Ground Zero but several streets away, and that there were Muslim victims of 9/11, seems to have been overlooked by the grim-faced, placard-waving bigots who are making a fuss, claiming that the area is "hallowed ground". You'll find a gentlemen's club, burger joints, betting shops, and all the usual inner-city rubbish on this "hallowed ground", so why not a mosque?

After I'd posted several of these links on my Facebook page and Twitter, a friend sent me a link to this page: The 9/11 holocaust and the ground zero mosque.

If Americans were polled today and asked which city they associate with “ground zero,” would any answer “Hiroshima” or “Nagasaki”? Most likely, very few — even though the anniversary of the nuclear bombings has only just passed.

Paul Woodward makes a lot of sense. He doesn't mention the murderous regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia or the orgy of killing in Rwanda just a few years ago. There are many other examples. It's interesting how some episodes have been claimed by one political or religious group or another to further their agendas of vengeance, conveniently ignoring all the untidy evidence that might have clouded the picture of victimhood, such as America's support for Israel and its aggression in the Middle East, which has turned countless young Muslim men into potential martyrs for Islam. What all of it demonstrates is that humankind is the most dangerous species on the planet, not just because it's over-breeding and making the planet uninhabitable - some areas faster than others - but because it has always been willing to kill the wrong sort of people. As far as I'm concerned, the wrong sort of people are the stupid, prejudiced and ignorant ones, because they're dangerous, but I'm not about to kill anyone.

Postscript: Keith Olbermann's view...

Nothing to see here

2010-07-15T23:58:00.006+01:00

Sorry if you were expecting to read some fascinating blog posts. There are none. There might be, soon, or there might be some boring ones.

I've decided to make a fresh start.

Images of torture banned in Italian schools

2010-07-03T17:14:00.010+01:00

Catholicism stopped being the state religion in Italy in 1984, but the Catholics don't seem to have noticed. I was asked to write a report on a Humanist conference in Turin in 2007 (a conference I didn't actually attend), where delegates spoke about the Vatican’s interference in state affairs and its parasitic presence in all areas of public life. Among other things, the church interferes with education, enrolling thousands of religious teachers who're chosen by bishops and paid from state funds.

Now the Italian government is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights to overturn a ban on classroom crucifixes - the government, not the church, for crying out loud! The case against crucifixes was won by a woman who argued that her children were entitled to a secular education. The BBC report doesn't say whether anyone's pointed out that images of a tortured and bleeding man nailed to a cross aren't appropriate interior decoration in schools, especially primary schools. British Catholics presumably don't have a problem with it. No wonder they're all so f****d up. Say your prayers children, and don't have nightmares.

Update, 18 March 2011

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that crucifixes are acceptable in the continent's state school classrooms, describing them as an "essentially passive symbol" with no obvious religious influence. In its judgment, handed down in Strasbourg, the court found that while the crucifix was "above all a religious symbol" there was no evidence that its display on classroom walls might have an influence on pupils.

Atheist Ireland has an interesting reaction to this:

Today’s judgement lays down many important points of human rights law in favour of secularism, and it leaves open the possibility of further legal challenges about crucifixes in classrooms where the overall school environment is not secular.

There'll never be enough jobs

2010-06-30T17:26:00.003+01:00

Free market capitalism is not capable of creating enough employment for the population that exists now.

Michael Goldfarb, speaking on the BBC's Dateline London, 26th June 2010

There's been a lot of argy-bargy about the loss of jobs because of the coalition government's budget deficit cutbacks. I've stopped listening, mainly because most of the people who've been commenting about this are talking as though we're going to get back to some sort of "normality", but only of we do things their way. We're not going to move forward by trying to recreate the past, especially as what's happened in the past hasn't had a lot to do with planning. No, we've lurched along, behaving as though economic growth could continue forever, without considering the several elephants in the room.

As Goldfarb pointed out, the population has risen. It's still rising, and I don't mean from immigration. People in the developed world go on having babies because they like having babies and think they can afford them, and who'd be brave enough to tell them they shouldn't? A couple who were filmed for a BBC report about an area of high unemployment last week had several children, and so did all their neighbours. Though they were unemployed, they said they aimed to spend at least £2000 on their kids at Christmas. No money, and no sense. In the developing world, there are too many babies for different reasons.

No one has a right to a job. I've never believed that because it doesn't make sense. Any old job? Even producing toxic products or the tons of junk we cram into landfill? You hear it every time there's an industrial dispute; pickets saying they want their jobs back, whatever those jobs were, regardless of how unprofitable or unnecessary the business. No one has a right to a job that pays silly money. It's nonsense to claim that a six-figure salary is the "going rate". It's all artificial. Fifty years ago, even allowing for inflation, there wasn't such a huge differential between the highest and lowest paid. It snowballed, this culture of greed, and now it's melting.

We import too much food. During the war, we dug for victory. Before long, we'll have to do it again again. The British have got used to being able to buy cheap food. UK farmers are going out of business because of the derisory amount they're offered for products like milk, for example. We employ fewer people than ever on the land, due to automation. There are seasonal blips, when an army of foreign workers comes to pick our fruit and vegetables; British workers can't or won't work in the fields for a minimum wage. Now, with the financial crisis, consumers will expect their food to be even cheaper. It can't be. You can't have cheap food unless you're willing to grow it yourself, or someone's making a loss, or farmers overseas are growing cash crops that soak up all their precious water - and that's another developing crisis.

We waste resources producing stuff that no one really needs and that we can't afford, collectively, then we waste even more resources moving it about the country. Ever heard of peak oil? It's time for rationing, because it's running out. If we're sensible, and I'm afraid we're not, we'll stop wasting resources. That means that all those people involved with wasting them will be out of a job - HGV drivers, car manufacturers, oil central heating suppliers. And so on.

Currently, the jobs under threat are in public services. People want public services but don't like paying for them. If unemployment goes up (and it will) there won't be enough money to maintain public services as we've got used to them. Pared-down services, back to basics, like it or lump it...

And why is all this? Basically, too many people. You can't create jobs simply to keep people employed, so they'll have money to spend, ensure growth, and carry on regardless.

Stop whingeing. Get used to a simpler life style. Don't have more than two babies, preferably one or none. Be prepared to pay for food or grow your own, and do without luxuries, like foreign holidays.

What the politicians won't do, because some of them are as deluded as the majority and the rest are too chicken to spell things out, is take drastic action. You think what's happening now is drastic? Ha!

What can we do?

Work at population control.
Try a damn sight harder to reduce CO2 emissions.
Eat less meat.
Grow more food using traditional labour-intensive, crop-rotation methods.
Encourage the development of new energy-saving technology in any way possible.
Change planning laws to allow increased energy generation by natural means, ignoring nimby objections.
Teach children more practical skills in schools, so they can make and fix things themselves.
Penalise businesses that create waste and produce junk, and encourage socially useful businesses.

If this sounds like communism, it's not, but it does mean less personal freedom to behave like a selfish prat. So shut up and lump it.

Bring them sunshine

2010-03-14T18:58:00.000Z

The French are currently debating whether or not to ban the burqa, while some in the UK would like to ban it here. So far, almost all the debate has been about religion and social cohesion. Last week, Jenni Murray (on Woman's Hour) interviewed UKIP's Nigel Farage and Salma Yaqoob from Respect, whose views are diametrically opposite. It was disappointing that the issue of women's health wasn't even mentioned. It seldom is.

Vitamin D is essential to good health and requires exposure to sunlight for its synthesis. It can be obtained as a dietary supplement but we get most vitamin D from sunlight on the skin.

Before the 1956 Clean Air Act, British skies were full of pollutants from domestic and industrial coal fires. Children were born with rickets, a condition that causes severe bone deformities, as a result of their mothers' vitamin D deficiency, or they developed it when very young. After the act, rickets was virtually eliminated in the UK. Now it's on the rise again, partly due to inactive, indoor lifestyles, and partly due to the burqa. Women who cover themselves from head to foot in dark garments, or who stay indoors in poorly lit homes, risk not only their own health but that of their children. Areas where there are large Muslim communities report the greatest increases in cases of rickets. There's also an increase in cases of osteoporosis and other conditions resulting from vitamin D deficiency.

While pro and anti-burqa arguments fly back and forth, with opinion divided about a ban, it seems to me that there's another way to deal with the problem.

Most people know that smoking and drinking too much alcohol are bad for you, and they're bad for the baby during pregnancy. Most people know that a healthy diet and exposure to sunlight is essential for good health. There are public health campaigns on smoking and alcohol, but efforts to educate people about vitamin D deficiency have been patchy and half-hearted. A full scale, in your face campaign to persuade Muslims to abandon the burqa is overdue. Unlike smoking and alcohol, which are addictive, burqa-wearing is due to religion, or a particularly backward type of religion that's all about sexual repression. Why should women and children suffer serious health problems because of these daft ideas, and why should the NHS have to deal with avoidable conditions as a result of them?

The link between wearing the burqa and conditions due to vitamin D deficiency have been well known for some time in Pakistan and in Middle Eastern countries. I can't help feeling that government inaction may be due to an unwillingness to cause "offence" to Muslims, the sort who are quick to take offence. Male Muslims take offence, while Muslim women, including those who adopt the burqa voluntarily, suffer the consequences.

Read more:

Bugger the Burkha; Lancashire Telegraph - 56 cases of rickets; The Food Standards Agency - Vitamin D; Vitamin D deficiency in UK Asian families; Prevalence of Vitamin D deficiency in South Asia; Wearing the burqa is neither Islamic nor socially acceptable - Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Illustration (c) M Nelson 2010

What does "assisted suicide" or "mercy killing" mean, anyway?

2010-02-25T22:07:00.004Z

Since the aquittal of Kay Gilderdale for the attempted murder of her daughter Lynn recently (see previous posts), other people have been confessing to killings, or failing to prevent people from committing suicide. One was Ray Gosling, a rather odd man who'd previously publicly aired his financial problems. He says he smothered a sort of friend who was dying from AIDS-related illnesses, though he was vague about the details. Another was Barrie Sheldon from Suffolk, who says he helped his wife, who had Huntingdon's Disease, to hoard prescribed drugs until she had a fatal dose, then went out while she took them. She didn't die then - it took another four days.

Now the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, has introduced some new guidelines on so-called "assisted suicides". According to the Guardian,

Starmer made it clear that relatives who actively help a terminally ill individual to die are not covered by the guidelines and individuals could be expected to be charged with murder or manslaughter.

Kay Gilderdale could still face criminal charges.

The BHA has contributed to the debate. Andrew Copson is quoted as saying,

Terminally ill or incurably suffering people do not have full autonomy and choice at end of life, and those that are vulnerable are still at risk because legal safeguards, which would accompany the legalisation of assisted dying, are not in place to protect them from coercion or other malice.

It's still a muddle. No one who pleads that he or she killed someone to be "merciful" should automatically be believed and treated sympathetically, however much the victim appeared to be suffering, without a full criminal investigation. That would give the pro-life lobby a huge advantage and set back the cause of legal euthanasia by decades.

Dr Crippen and the "militants"

2010-02-14T22:14:00.001Z

Yes, I know I wasn't going to write any more about this, but...

I came across a Facebook page, FMS/CFS/ME Information. Not sure I want to be a "fan". There seems to be some sort of a letter-writing thing going on, about Dr Crippen and The Guardian, not sure why, but it could have something to do with an article called "the ME debate", which I tend to agree with.

ME is surrounded by a sad potpourri of cod-science, misunderstanding, prejudice, anger, denial and indifference. Both doctors and patients are to blame. Doctors are victims of their rigid training. If the history, examination and tests do not produce a diagnosis, the doctor's wiring starts to overheat and there can be only one conclusion. The patient must be mad. "Mad" is a diagnosis. The doctor sighs with relief. The patient cannot win.

Some people with ME are even more blinkered than the medical professionals. Patients with chronic illnesses such as cancer or heart disease sometimes get depressed and are helped by psychiatric treatment. You cannot suggest this to a militant ME sufferer.

One of the few treatments offered to ME patients is access to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT. Oh dear! The "militant" sufferers that Dr Crippen refers to don't like this at all. They think it means they're being dismissed as loonies. Maybe some of them are, especially the very screechy ones. However, the idea behind CBT is to encourage people suffering from a variety of problems to rethink their attitude towards those problems, and adopt a more realistic one. What's wrong with that? However, maybe a cheaper alternative might be to offer assertiveness training on how to state your case effectively, without appearing to be a loony. That'd help. "Brain fog", a common effect of TBI (this bloody illness), isn't an excuse for not thinking.

I've noticed that whenever I've attracted lots of negative feedback on this blog (the last time was when I blogged about men who use prostitutes), there's not much in the way of rational argument on offer, which is why I don't approve many comments. When someone doesn't have a reasoned argument to offer, he or she will often resort to sneering, or name-calling. My mum used to tell me, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." Maybe not, but they annoy me. When I was about eight, I'd get into trouble to for thumping idiots. Nowadays, I'd rather ignore them.

Dr Crippen wrote about "the many who march under the ME banner but who have nothing wrong with them other than an inability to cope with life." He's right. I've met them. No wonder it's so hard to get some doctors to take ME seriously. How can you take someone seriously who wears a little plastic box on her belt that (she says) focuses "healing rays" on her body? Or someone who swears that she's really, really ill with ME, but arrives at a support group meeting out of breath after a session at the gym? Or people who say, "ME? Yes, that's what's wrong with me. I get awfully tired..." before going on to describe a typically hectic lifestyle, with copious amounts of alcohol thrown in.

The sooner they work out what this bloody illness is, and offer a foolproof test, the sooner we can disassociate ourselves from the inadequates. Oh, and before anyone takes that personally - if the cap fits, wear it, otherwise don't be so bloody silly.

Note: This post has been reinstated after it was deleted, with all my other posts, some time ago. Consequently, all the comments were deleted too. As I anticipated, there were some that were strongly critical, but that's not why I deleted them.

More on managing ME, and Dr Ben Goldacre on systematic reviews

2010-02-09T20:26:00.000Z

I knew that my previous blog post would upset people. After years of trying to convince doctors, the Benefits Agency, the Daily Mail, Uncle Tom Cobley and All, that ME (or whatever you want to call it) is a real physical illness and not a form of hypochondria, it's understandable that some ME patients should be a bit touchy about the subject. So, just in case you didn't get it last time, I didn't say that ME isn't real, or that severe sufferers are all malingerers. According to Dr Charles Shepherd's definitions, I fall into the "severe" category, but since definitions of ME are so muddled and confusing, I'm beginning to wonder if there is such a thing; practically everyone I know who's been told that they have it, or thinks that they have, has a different set of symptoms. It seems to have become a convenient way to define a whole bunch of illnesses we know very little about. Take myalgia (the M part of ME) for example; myalgia means pain in a muscle or group of muscles. Some people with "ME" have myalgia, some don't. I have aches and pains from time to time, apart from the pain of arthritis, but I couldn't say they had anything to do with ME; it's about 22 years since I was diagnosed, so I don't remember whether they decided that there's anything wrong with my muscles, apart from flabbiness.

Those who do have a lot of pain shouldn't rely on morphine long-term, as Lynn Gilderdale seems to have done. It's an opiate, it's addictive, and is soon tolerated so that it becomes less effective and the dose has to be increased. It also causes constipation, which is likely to be a problem if you're not moving much anyway. Codeine, which can be used in combination with paracetamol, is also an opiate, and can also cause constipation. Paracetamol can cause liver damage in heavy doses - I've conducted a funeral for a young woman who took an overdose and didn't tell anyone for two days, by which time the damage was irreversible; she died two weeks later. I've used codeine and still do, from time to time, but I'm very wary about using it a lot, since it's addictive. I have pain from the arthritis in my spine but have hardly needed to use chemical pain-relief since I've learned pain-management techniques, partly from my physiotherapist and partly from a pain management course. Knowing what tends to exacerbate the pain is helpful. The other important things are movement (to avoid stiffness and spasm), distraction techniques (learning to take your mind off the pain, in similar ways to the de-sensitising to sound I mentioned earlier), and various therapies, such as applying heat. I'm still in pain - always will be - but I can live with it.

One of the causes of weakness in ME appears to be mitochondrial damage, which inhibits the body's ability to convert energy. This explains the delay in reaction to exercise; on a good day, you might feel well enough to go shopping or carry on gardening for longer than you know is good for you, only to find that you slump into achey exhaustion a day or two later, for days at a time. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. The answer isn't to avoid any exercise, but to know your limits.

In my last post I suggested that something might have gone wrong with the way that Lynn Gilderdale's condition was managed, so that she deteriorated into a brittle-boned, physically spent young women with a very old body, and then persuaded her attentive, caring mother Kay that she should help her to commit suicide. This drew indignant comments from a couple of people who took the suggestion personally, as they clearly identified with Lynn Gilderdale. That's the trouble with trying to talk objectively about ME and its consequences. There are two extremes; on one side, those who deny that there's any such thing (it's psychosomatic/depression/hysteria); on the other side, those who get very upset at the merest suggestion that we might question the science, the management methods, or whatever, because they imagine you're questioning their experience. Well, I suppose they'd be right. I am questioning the experience of some people with ME, specifically people like Lynn Gilderdale, and I am questioning the ways that some people manage their ME, because I think they might make things worse for themselves.

One of the things that I find depressing about ME is the victim mentality of so many of those affected by it. Some teenage girls in the developed world (those in developing countries have other things to worry about) do seem to exploit problems, like eating disorders, to attract a lot of attention to themselves. If they also have a physical illness, do they get perverse satisfaction from this, by using it to justify their attention-seeking? The statistics show a gender inbalance. Boys' problems are more likely to manifest themselves in violence, often towards themselves.

So, before the touchy squad start shouting abuse at me again, I'm saying that having a teenage psychological disorder about something like body image, diet, self-obsession of various sorts, plus an illness that physically restricts normal behaviour, is a recipe for trouble. Just as a teenager with anorexia can be amazingly resistant to any efforts to change her behaviour and eat sensibly, so might a teenager with ME resist any attempts to change the management of her condition, by exploiting her parents' concern and sympathy.

After I wrote the last post, I read an article in the Guardian by Emily Levick, who corresponded with Lynn Gilderdale online. Several things struck me about her account of her illness:

"I slept well into the afternoon and was wide awake all night."

Yes, I know a bit about that. I've stayed awake late at night, and then slept very late next day. We do need more sleep than most people, but we need to sleep at night, when the body tells us that we should be asleep. Re-educating the body involves waking up at a reasonable time, using an alarm clock if necessary, and staying awake. An afternoon nap is fine, but not so long that you can't get to sleep at bedtime. It's all about adjusting your internal clock. It's more difficult to maintain a normal sleep pattern when you can't exercise, because exercise naturally makes you physically tired. When you feel tired all the time, night will blur into day. Disturbed sleeping patterns are also common with depression - depressed people sleep longer. It's natural to feel depressed about being ill, but it can become a vicious circle.

"All day, every day, I lay in bed..."

Why? The more you lie in bed, the weaker you'll get. Moving around, even a little, helps to prevent the serious problems that result from inactivity. Anonymous, who commented on my last post, said that exercise makes ME worse. Not true. A total avoidance of any movement (which counts as exercise) makes ME worse. Use a wheelchair, lie on the sofa, practice some stretching exercises, but don't stay in bed for long periods. Eventually, you won't be able to get up, not because of the ME, but because your muscles have atrophied through lack of use.

"I could not cope with visitors, even if I didn't see them - just the knowledge that there was someone in the house (other than my parents) was too exhausting to contemplate."

The knowledge that there was someone in the house? You're telling me that that was due to the ME? Please!

"My curtains remained closed all day to keep out the daylight..."

Sensitivity to light can be be a problem with many conditions, including migraine, but persistently avoiding daylight can lead to serious physical problems because the body needs it to be able to absorb vitamin D. Without it, you lose bone density (one of Lynn Gilderdale's problems) and develop a variety of other problems. Women who wear the burka develop serious health problems because of vitamin D deficiency and their children may have rickets, a completely avoidable condition.

Instead of staying in a darkened room, it's better to wear sunglasses or filters over normal spectacles. The wrap-around kind, favoured by Bono, way make you look like a dork, but they keep out light from the sides as well as the front. I wear them when I need to because I have macular degeneration, an eye condition that causes sensitivity to light.

Anyone who's too ill to go outside without help might be carried or pushed outside on fine days.

"... any sound had to be quiet, and any activity (such as my mum reading a page or two of a book to me) could last no more than a few minutes..."

Sensory sensitivity can become exaggerated for psychological reasons. Anyone who's conscious of an annoying noise, for example, may become so fixated on it that they notice it when hardly anyone else does. Two examples...

I live within a couple of miles of an air base; so does my friend Ron (he's actually further away than me). The air-sea rescue helicopters are based there, and they often fly overhead. Ron hears them several minutes before his wife does, or anyone else, for that matter, and has been writing letters of complaint about them to the base because he says they ruin his enjoyment of his garden. He's tuned in to the sound they make, so that he anticipates it even before it gets close enough to bother most people.

A friend who works for a local authority recalls receiving frequent letters and phone calls from a tenant who complained about a noise nuisance in his block of flats. He took special equipment out to the flats, several times, and couldn't detect anything. It turned out that what the tenant heard, and was highly tuned into, was slight hisses and clunks in the pipework that fed the central heating system from the communal boiler. No one else noticed it, and no one complained, but because the tenant had become obsessed by it, he did.

It is possible to treat extreme sensitivity like this psychologically, such as by hypnosis. When dogs become hyper-sensitive to sounds, like any sort of bangs, after being frightened by fireworks, they're treated by gradually getting them used to sudden noises in stages, from quiet to noisy, until they build up a tolerance.

With all these sort of things, the answer needn't be avoidance, but adjustment.

... the amount of food I could eat in one go could fit easily into an egg cup...

The stomach shrinks if you don't eat much. The answer is to eat small amounts of nutritious food more frequently and gradually increase the amount. The gag reflex, common in anorexia patients, is self-induced in anticipation of doing something you don't want to do. You can observe the same thing in very young children who are allowed to develop food fads. If strong flavours or smells are off-putting, start with bland food and drink and gradually introduce more flavour. Again, small children raised on bland diets tend to develop very conservative tastes. Their palates haven't been educated.

I doubt that I'll be writing any more about this for now. I'd rather use my limited energy resources on other things, unrelated to illness. I hope we won't hear any more sad stories like Lynn Gilderdale's. We might not, if more people with ME and their carers were taught coping strategies that avoid making a bad situation worse.

Oh, as for the fuss about the XMRV research (mentioned in the comments on my last post) - maybe caution is called for. Dr Ben Goldacre (who's questioned the "alternative therapies" offered at the private Breakspear Hospital in Hemel Hempstead, where they "treat" ME) has spoken about "the startlingly new idea of systematic reviews" on BBC radio. We could do with a few of these before ME patients get excited about the next "cure" announcement.

I'm going for a lie down. If you see any spelling or other errors here, let me know and I'll sort them out later.