Editorials 2002 and before

11 May 2002

I took as my bedtime reading last night, as one duz, my copy of The Oxford Companion to the English Language and wuz soon drawn to a seriez of articls on speling reform. At the begining of the last century, aparntly, meny prominnt peple wer very keen on the idea making the orthografy of English simplr. William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury in the erly 1940s, was an oficholdr in the Simplified Spelling Society, formed in Britn in 1908.

Ther have been many sugestns as to the best way of going about the proces, including ading mor leters to the langwj, so that evry letr is always pronounsd the same way, but nun hav been takn up.

One sceem proposd is cald Cut Speling, and it is basd on the observasn that many trublsm spelings involv leters that ar superfluus in terms of pronunciasn, and sugests that these be omited, acheving gratr eas of use and at the same time considrbl econmy of space. It ws first sugestd in the 1970s by the Australian sycologist, Valerie Yule. It would not involv as radicl a change speling as sum reformrs want, but it woud achive som simplificasn and might be a first step on the road to a mor logicl systm for English.

As yu wil hav noticd I hav been trying in this Editorial to use the principlz as I undrstand them. I may not hav got them quite ryt but yu must get the drift.

Praps I might start using Cut Speling in my catalogs. Obviusly not in the titlz of bookz, but I coud in ther dscripsns. We'l see.

2 March 2002 - Zimbabwe

In 1968 when I was nearly 21 I got my degree in English and Ecclesiastical History from Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, and went up north to Rhodesia, to teach English in an Anglican mission school way out in the bush. It was just meant to be for a couple of years, and it proved quite an interesting time.

At that stage the white government had already declared UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) from being a colony of Great Britain, much as some little colonies in North America had done in the late 1700s. The motive this time was not the desire to be free to throw cargoes of tea into harbours (Rhodesia does not have a shoreline, so this would have been a silly aspiration), but to be able to hold on to a country for a minority white population, keeping the black majority out of power.

Having chosen to teach black pupils I had declared my sympathies, I suppose. Apart from others in a mission situation - there were Anglican and Roman Catholic educational and medical missions all around within a 100 mile radius - I met very few of the white "settlers", and those I met I did not think much of. Having grown up in South Africa I had had no contact with members of the British lower middle and working classes, and when I did meet some of those who had emigrated to Rhodesia I was not impressed. With what I now admit was the over-reaction of youth I lumped them together with the less recent white inhabitants of the country as the "scum of the earth". There was an arrogance towards black people which seemed ironic in people who had come from the bottom of society in Britain but who now lorded it over the native Africans.

The independence movement was beginning, and I had every sympathy with Robert Mugabe, the leader and a graduate of Fort Hare, a sister institution to my own Rhodes University. If there was a fear about independence it was once the whites had gone there would be civil war between the southern Matabele people and the Shonas of the north.

Independence came, now nearly thirty years ago. Zimbabwe, as it became, had a great future ahead of it. There was a popular government, inter-tribal rivalry was not as great a problem as in some other African countries, and enough white people stayed on to make it likely that the country could exist as a multi-racial democracy with a strong economy.

Look at it now. Mugabe is as corrupt as you will find anywhere. The economy is in ruins, the people are starving. Of course the land needed redistribution. The white farmers needed easing out and the land turning over to the masses. There was money on offer from overseas to do that. But what has happened has beggared hundreds of thousands of black people in the farming sector, it has sent into exile white farmers who, whatever their past faults, did at least earn foreign exchange for the country as well as feeding it. They have been shamefully treated, as have many decent ordinary people, black and white, who had invested their lives in Zimbabwe.

Robert Mugabe and his henchmen, bullyboys the lot, are guilty of crimes against humanity, decency, and commonsense. It is a lovely country - nothing spectacular except perhaps the Victoria Falls and the ruins of Great Zimbabwe - with decent people. It deserves more than a government of black thugs who are even worse than the white thugs they replaced.

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1 Feb 2002 - Jews & Arabs

I feel I ought to write about the situation in the Middle East, but I find the whole Israeli thing too horrible to think about. I grew up in a society with strong links to Israel and where Jews were prominent in the Arts, medicine and generally in the social, political and scientific life of the country, South Africa. The top form of every year at my school in Durban was composed of probably two thirds Jewish boys. While I can't say I made particular friends with any of them I certainly wasn't anti-semitic, and I appreciate very much Jewish humour and religion. Especially where they come together as in Buber's Tales of the Hasidim.

We grew up in a strong Judaeo-Christian ethos, one of the tenets of which was the belief that the return of the Jews to Palestine was God-ordained and very much to be approved of. When, in my last year at university the 1967 war happened and many of the Jewish young men left to go and fight for Israel I would have been very pleased myself to go and fight with them.

Thirty years on and all that is changed. I have lost none of my respect for Jews or Judaism as people and as a religion. But to be quite frank, I have come to regret the very existence of Israel as a country. I no longer buy into the religious myth of Return, be it protestant fundamentalist based or zionist based. Nothing, religious or otherwise, can justify a group of people coming back somewhere after two thousand or so years and kicking out by force of arms the inhabitants, as happened in 1947/48 when Jews drove Palestinians from their homes. Nothing, not even the Holocaust, foul as that was.

What would the world say if people from the United Kingdom this year invaded Frisia, Saxony and Southern Germany on the pretext that our ancestors, the Angles and Saxons, came from there? I think the Dutch, German and Danish governments might object.

Having said that, Israel has been political fact for the last fifty years. As a fait d' accompli it cannot and should not be dismantled. But it does have to come to a civilized compromise with the Arabs it dispossessed. The things that Israel has done and is doing to the inhabitants of the occupied territories, Gaza Strip, West Bank, etc, are cruel, inhuman, and not to be tolerated or condoned in a civilized world. How can it be that a people so tortured by the Nazis half a century ago are now in the position their enemies were then in? Are not the beleaguered enclaves of Palestinians so many Warsaw Ghettos under another name? No wonder so many Israeli men and women are in increasing numbers prepared to risk jail and ostracism by refusing to serve in the Israeli army because of what it does to the Palestinians.

In the Tablet, that marvellous Catholic weekly paper, a couple of weeks ago, there was an article by Emma Klein, their Jewish correspondent, about how on a recent visit to friends in Israel she despaired at the gap between their laager mentality and the perspective she has as a Jew but who lives outside Israel. Israel needs to be helped to stand back a little so it can see how its actions look to the world, and how they must look to their God. Labelling anyone who points out their failings as antisemitic is just name calling. In the South Africa of the 1960s those, inside or outside the country, who dared to criticise Apartheid were "communists". That didn't' help either.

In particular, Israel should not be allowed to hide behind the "refusal to deal with terrorists" ploy, especially since much of that terrorism seems deliberately encouraged by Israel in the sense that it knows that if it pushes certain buttons it will get certain responses from some Palestinians. And lets face it, there are some pretty nasty people on both sides. But I cannot help remembering, when faced with the arguments of those who in this context use the Old Testament to justify the Return ideology, that the architypal suicide bomber is a Jewish Old Testament hero, Samson, who brought down a temple on himself and his enemies. No explosives, but same effect.

All the extremists need curbing, be they Islamic suicide bombing groups or Jewish religious fanatics whose settlements on Arab territory are such a cause of ongoing tension. Britain and America would do far more for peace in the Middle East, and globally, if they addressed the problem in Palestine, than they will by taking on Iraq. Saddam is an ephemeral man of straw (set up originally with arms and intelligence by the West) and to martyr his country and inflame regional Islamic passions is shortsighted to say the least. We need to build a peace, not have a war.

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3 May 2001 - Scotland

We had a more interesting week than usual because of a load of books that needed collecting in Glasgow, a city in North Britain almost 400 miles from here.

Monday morning we set off to Scotland. When we got to Gretna Green we didn't go directly to Glasgow but went off westward towards Dumfries. It was and this stage that we started seeing signs of foot and mouth disease. There were various places where you had to drive very slowly across mats soaked in disinfectant. Much good they must do - most of them were quite dry. We made a mistake in Dumfries and went through the town instead of on the bypass. Lots of traffic. The problem with all these places in southwest Scotland is the Robert Burns came from there. Every town and village has a museum to him because he lived there, or because one of his children died there, or because one of his illegitimate children was born there, or because he wrote a poem there. I can't imagine who would want to stop them look at such places -- I suppose the Scots themselves and possibly tourists of Scots ancestry. The trouble for English like us is that Burns' language is rather inaccessible. Shakespeare, despite being from two hundred years earlier, is easier to understand. Burns is boring and incomprehensible. The only interesting thing in Dumfries (and that was incomprehensible) was a statue in the middle of a housing estate of a rhinoceros and its baby. Why?

We ended up for the night in a little place called Largs which is a sort of seaside resort for Glasgow. In itself a rather boring dump but the views across the sea to some of the Scottish islands were magnificent. We sat in the hotel dining room watching the sunset over the islands and the sea and that was really lovely.

After we had collected the books from Glasgow on Tuesday morning we went down south into Dumfries and Galloway again, calling at a little ruined abbey and having lunch in a place called Girvan, as miserable a little hole as you could hope to find anywhere. Actually we found somewhere even more miserable later that afternoon. We went to Wigtown which bills itself as the Scottish Hay-on-Wye - in other words a Book Town. The town is way off the beaten track and the range of books is not good. Maybe it will get better one day.

Having driven through lots of little towns looking for somewhere to stay we eventually found ourselves in a motel on the A66. It promised to be noisy but it wasn't as all the traffic stopped at about 9. The fun was that our room was actually at the edge of a lake and we had swans and ducks and even heron to look at.

Next day, Wednesday, we drove first to Carlisle where we looked at the lovely Cathedral, unfortunately only half there because during the civil wars the parliamentary troops knocked the nave down to get stone to repair the castle. And there is a really good bookshop, better than all the ones in Wigtown put together. We had lunch in Appleby and spent part of the afternoon of the Bowes Museum outside Barnard Castle. It's one of my favourites in the whole country, an enormous French chateau in the middle of nowhere, stuffed with the most gorgeous artifacts, porcelain, costume, and fine art, mostly nineteenth century French, but with some earlier and later. The story of how it was created by the illegitimate scion of the Bowes family (as in Bowes-Lyon, the Queen Mother's family) and his French actress wife is quite extraordinary.

I was pretty disgusted by the police and government's response to the May Day protests in London. As with their total clampdown on peaceful protest on behalf of the Tibetans in London and Cambridge when the Chinese leader visited last year, they totally stifled legitimate protest. As for violence, the only examples of that we saw on the television coverage were the police laying into people with their truncheons. Jack Straw is quite as reactionary and unpleasant a Home Secretary as anyone the Tories ever put in that office.

13 January 2001 Honorific Titles in the Church

This editorial is addressed to people who speak and write English, rather than those whose first language is American, so if you are the latter persuasion you don't have to bother to read this. Whoever you are, you might want to give this editorial a miss because I am in rant mode. Again! I hear you say.

My moan this week is about the misuse of the word Reverend, or Rev as it is more commonly shown. There are a lot of people round who should know better who use this word as a title rather than an adjective. The most ignorant of them actually talk of someone being "a Reverend". But it is just as incorrect to to use it as a plain title in front of a surname. Too often we read even in respectable newspapers that "the Rev Smith said today...". He is not the Rev Smith, he is Mr Smith, or the Rev Mr Smith. It is an act of gross bad grammar to put the word Reverend straight next to the surname. "Rev" should be used like the word "late". We talk about the late Mr Smith, or the late John Smith, but not about the late Smith. It is the same with Reverend. A person should be the Rev John Smith or the Rev Mr Smith.

There is also another problem to do with the use of such words as Reverend, Very Reverend, Right Reverend, Most Reverend and such titles. This is to do with the meaning of the word. To be reverend means to be worthy of being revered, to be worthy of reverence. Is it not rather arrogant of anyone to claim this for themselves? It is of course within the competence of any Church to declare that its ministers are worthy of reverence, but I am always rather shocked when people give this title to themselves. Perhaps I am over fussy, but I am always scandalised when somebody phones me up and announces that he is "the Reverend John Smith" or whoever.

My feeling is the clergy should introduce themselves as Mr Smith or John Smith and then leave it to the people they are addressing to attach the honorific "reverend" into their written form of address. Which leads of course of the question as to whether the churches should be into this game at all. It's all about self aggrandisement anyway isn't it? I rather suspect that that is what the general public thinks.

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16 December 2000 - Paradise Lost

This week I started to do something that all my life I have sworn I would not do. I began to read Milton's Paradise Lost. Why had I sworn to avoid it? Well, for a start it seemed unutterably long, the subject matter was dull, and the language incomprehensible. And anyway I had this theory that Milton had only ever written the first 113 lines because nobody would ever read that far, and that after that point the typesetters just filled the lines with random words. It turns out that I am wrong on that point. The Oxford edition of Milton's Works that I bought in Cromer this week appears to have twelve whole books of the poem. And indeed I have got to the end of Book Three.

As to the subject matter, it is not quite as dull as I feared, but it is certainly long-winded. Milton would have saved everybody in awful lot of hassle if he had written the work as a sonnet. The language itself is very very difficult. This is mostly due to the cavalier way in which he treats word order. I actually find it easier to read Chaucer than I do Milton. But one thing I do find interesting is that Milton's language has echoes of the language of the late medieval mystery plays. There's a sort of earnest didacticism about it. Perhaps it is just down to the similar subject matter, though I think there is more to it than that.

The reason for my breaking the principles of a lifetime is that I have just finished reading The Amber Spyglass, the last book in Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials. His eager readers have waited a long time for this last volume, and we have not been disappointed. Children's books they may be, but childish they ain't. Set partly in parallel universes and partly in our own, the books are all to do with the Fall, and as a reviewer said last week are in some ways a rewriting of Paradise Lost . Hence my interest. As far as readability is concerned Philip Pullman wins hands down.

If I have inspired a few of you who do not know the series to start on it (the first volume is called Northern Lights and the second The Subtle Knife ) it would not be fair to reveal the plot any more than I have. However I don't think it will spoil things if I reveal that one of the villains of the trilogy is the Church, and the Magisterium, but because this is in a parallel universe it is not quite the Church that we know, but one in which Pope John Calvin removed the papacy to Geneva, and where the papacy itself has subsequently been abolished.

4 November 2000 - Trip to Rome

We spent Tuesday, on Wednesday, and most of Thursday in Rome having an exhausting though welcome break. We had with us someone who had never been before so we tried to take in the most important sights.

On the first day we looked at the Colosseum and the Forum, and some of the churches with marvellous early mosaics -- S Maria Maggiore, S Prassede, S Pudenziana and S Clementi. And we did a lot of walking, ending up at the Spanish Steps.

Wednesday was All Saints Day, so we decided to avoid St Peter's during the morning. We did however hear the choir singing in St John Lateran while we crept down the aisles, and looked in at the Cloister. Then we got the bus down the old Via Appia to the Catacombs of St Sebastian. They lack the early Christian paintings that the catacombs of St Priscilla have, but are moving in their own way. It was hot that day and we had quite a long way to walk through the countryside. After lunch we did manage to get to St Peter's where the papal mass had finished, but only just, so that it was almost impossible to move.

Our last day was somewhat complicated by the fact that I had my wallet stolen on a number 64 bus (it runs between Termini, the main station, and St Peter's). I lost a little money and all my credit cards, so we had to ring England and cancel them and report the loss to the main police station. The first police we talked to where young Caribinieri who did not even know where the main police station was. The theft did put a damper on the whole trip. The really nice thing was that we had such good warm weather, only realising when we got back what a terrible time Britain had had. The irony is that when we checked the BBC web site before we left it told us we were going to have rotten weather in Rome.

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1 April 2000 - End of Methodism predicted

At last, this week the Archbishops' Commission on Religious Book Publishing has brought out its Report. And not before time, some of us think. It was in 1993 that the subject was first mooted in General Synod, and it was not until two years later that the Commission was set up, leaving Christian publishers and booksellers in a very uncertain position all this time.

It has to be said that from the very beginning there have been misgivings about the whole project, and these were compounded by the appointment as chairman of the Suffragan Bishop of Spalding, the Rt Rev Tom Cushbert. There were two reasons for this, first it being claimed that he was not enough of a heavy-weight either in the councils of the Church of England or academically, and second because of the incident which happened in his student days at St Wilfrid's College, Durham, when he was involved in the notorious "Burn a Book from Birmingham" campaign. The insurers did pay out to rebuild the refectory, but observers of the church scene have always been somewhat surprised that the incident seems to have done no harm to his rapid rise in ranks of the Church.

Be that as it may, he did chair the Commission, and the report is now before us, though I notice that with timing typical of the C of E they did not manage to get it out in time to feature in this week's Church Times, which is a pity.

The main recommendation put forward (and we understand that both Archbishops have agreed to this) is that from Advent Sunday 2000 all newly published books which the publisher wishes to have recognised as religious books will have to carry a Certificate of Doctrinal Acceptability (CDA for short) from the Secretariate to be set up by General Synod. We understand that office space for the staff of some twenty has been found at Lambeth Palace, though it is not clear whether they will be able to continue there once the staffing level rises to the one hundred or so envisaged when the scheme really gets going. One has to question whether the resources of the Church should be going into such an ambitious scheme of this sort, but the Commission claims that the levy on every book sold will more than pay for the administration, and is even expected to bring in a welcome surplus of around four million pounds a year (once up and running fully) for the Church Commissioners. This remains to be seen.

The whole concept is an interesting one, given that the Roman Church has of latter years rather given up on its own Nihil Obstats, which served the same sort of purpose of warning the faithful of what is considered suitable reading matter.

No decision has been made yet as to what to do about the religious books of other faiths. The Commission is maintaining, despite the objections of particularly the Jewish and Muslim communities, that it will vet all religious publications, as the Church of England, as Established by law, has that right. There are bound to be further developments over this before it gets its way. Bishop Cushbert was yesterday at the press conference talking about a new act of parliament to make quite clear the Church's position.

It became clear too, from what he said (though this was only hinted at in the actual Report) that there will be no chance in future of any Methodist publication ever again seeing the light of day. The Commission was apparently unanimous in deciding that no more latitude should be shown to Methodism.

As secondhand booksellers we are not directly involved in the whole process, as the Commission decided that it would be impractical to retrospectively certify books already published. However, we have decided to do our bit, and will, from Advent this year, be adding the CDA mark to all books where we find the Secretariate has granted one.

Only time will tell whether or not this is a massive own goal for the Church of England or a Glorious Step Forward for the Faith in these islands.

3 March 1999

This week I have read the most inspiring book I expect to read this year, probably the most inspiring I have read in years. It is by a man who may well have done more for the poor of the world than any other this century, and whose influence may shape the course of the next century far more deeply than any American president.

The book is Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economics professor who founded the Grameen Bank in his home country. The bank (Grameen means village) lends money to the poorest, with no collateral demanded, and has transformed the lives of millions both in Bangladesh where it started and in other parts of the world where the concept has been exported.

Since its start in one village twenty years ago the Bank has grown to the extent that this time last year it had over two million borrowers who use the money to set themselves up in business, had loaned money for the building of nearly half a million houses, and was lending money at the rate of 33 million US dollars a month. And that is in Bangladesh alone.

Get it and read it, and rejoice that there are people like Muhammad Yunus who not only have ideas, but can put them into use for the good of the world.

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