The Church of England, bless it, was still divided over whether living life in an imitation of Christ might have meant following his teachings rather than contriving to be born with a penis But even this was not diverting enough. The two of them talked for about two and a half miles about their evangelical London churches, the witch-doctors they'd known in Nigeria and the improving synergy between the Christian Church and African magic in the capital I was longing to take notes, but too intimidated to do so. On the bus the other day, I listened to a very loud African woman engage another in conversation. The really bad news was that a new Harry Potter was being published, with Catholic and Protestant united in condemnation. Surely, whatever contribution that can be made to such a project, however nominal, is valuable.
* No one has been at pains, over the past few days of sad revelation, to point out that the number of innocent victims of the London bombings has diminished by four. Nor, in the avid discussion of the lives and motivations of the bombers, has there been too much inclination to dismiss these mass murderers as "evil" or "monstrous". Perhaps this indicates that there is a broad consensus that these young men were victims too - of ideology, of hatred, of history, of modernity, of fanaticism, and mainly of their own malleable gullibility and lack of self-respect They wanted, the fools, to be martyrs. Instead, they died as pawns and patsies, idiot victims far more pitiful than those they so blankly annihilated. Harry Potter and the African witch-doctors Those of us looking to the Christian faith for insights into the depth of the Islamic schism were disappointed this week. Yet, even as we observe in despair the crawling progress that is made on these issues, so we send our various mixed messages, that leave governments - even those not in the blatant grasp of the oil industry - in a cleft stick.
My own belief, though, is that if we can fix this, then everything - everything - will fall into place. And those of us with our compost bins and our dishwasher-cleaned glass for recycling in China? Are we the Marie Antoinettes of our age, playing milkmaid as an ugly, self-righteous revolution gathers pace? The baffling thing about the environment movement is that its inroads into daily habits have been so marginal. Make Poverty History campaigners are the most touching, because their ideas about free trade and industrial development are so horribly doomed to create the worst environmental damage in just the places they want to help so sincerely. This is the point at which many people decide that their own little attempts at saving the planet are pitiful drops in the ocean.
