I could just write this tomorrow and save the speculation

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… but it’s lunchtime on a cold, grey day and I have an hour to fill.

So, Ben’s prediction for the election: whoever wins tomorrow, the losers will indulge in months if not years of navel-gazing trying to analyse their defeat, and produce a new winning strategy for the next election almost indistinguishable from the strategy that lost them this one. An interesting article by Ben Goldacre explains why. Studies show that people can be comprehensively owned by clear and incontrovertible evidence that is contrary to their beliefs, and not only continue to believe but actually have those beliefs confirmed (in their own minds) by the contradiction. It’s now a scientifically observed phenomenon. (Scientific? Yes: it’s a theory that offers an explanation for observed data and is independently testable and verifiable. Scientific.)

This also explains current behaviour as well as future. It explains why Labour continues to believe that the affairs of man can be micro-managed by legislation, despite an ever more lamentable catalogue of badly written laws: look after the letter of the law and the spirit takes care of itself. On second thoughts, just dispense with the spirit and make do with the ever-more badly written bit.

It explains why even if the Conservatives aren’t quite the party of Norman “on your bike” Tebbit any more (and Cameron, I think, is genuinely trying to distance his party from that era), the spirit still lurks not far beneath the surface. “Phwah phwah phwah what you don’t have a comfortable financial cushion to fall back on at any time phwah phwah how can you not be absolute master of your own destiny it’s all your own fault you know phwah phwah phwah.” And it explains how they can still be the party that can adopt a candidate who ‘founded a church that tried to “cure” homosexuals by driving out their “demons” through prayer’, and believe that a prospective MP with that on her CV is still in with a chance. If Sutton and Cheam is Conservative tomorrow morning it really can only be that the other candidates just didn’t try hard enough.

(It would be fun to be a fly on the wall at one of her exorcisms.

Priest: “Be gone, demons of gayness!”

Demon 1: “Not in these shoes, girlfriend.”

Demon 2: “Ooh, get you!”

Demon 3: “Nice frock …”

In keeping with Goldacre’s article, of course, failure to produce any demons at all will not dissuade people from trying.)

And it explains why a Lib-Dem government, or even a Lib-Dem-controlled balance of power, just wouldn’t work, because they would consistently expect everyone to be sensible and rational and grown-up and they’re not.

And all of this explains why I don’t particularly want any of that lot to win, but am resigned to the fact that one of them will and I do hope it’s not Labour.

Department of Oh Get Over Yourself You Big Tart

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From the Beeb:

“A legal battle has begun in an attempt to stop prayers being said before a Devon council’s meetings.

The National Secular Society (NSS) is seeking a judicial review over whether prayers said at Bideford Town Council breach human rights legislation.”

No. They don’t. Legislation, maybe, that being a purely artificial construct. Human rights, no.

The regime currently ruling Burma/Myanmar breaches human rights.

The Taliban breach human rights.

A town council that has voted, twice, to keep the prayers before its meetings start isnot breaching human rights. You don’t like it, turn up to meetings five minutes late. Or mutter “arse” when everyone mutters “amen”. Or whatever. Exercise your own human rights in response. But stop whining when a democratic vote offends you.

And while I’m in full Tunbridge Wells mode, telling a teenager to pull his trousers up doesn’t breach his human rights either. I’m reasonably certain my right not to have a human backside thrust into my face takes priority.

End of rant. Resume your lives.

What to do on a bank holiday weekend

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You could go on the Sarsen Trail, choosing either the 7 mile, 11 mile or 26 mile option. Any of these would involve getting up around 5am, probably earlier, and paying money for the privilege of walking through most of May’s monthly rainfall and freezing temperatures across Salisbury Plain, admiring the beautiful views you would be getting on a clear, sunny, warm day. Depending on which of the above options you choose you could also get to hang around in the cold and wet for a minimum of one coach trip to take you back to your starting place. (That’s the 7 miles, taking you back to Avebury. For the other two you park at Stonehenge and a coach takes you to the Avebury starting point. If you bail out at 11 miles then another coach brings you back to Stonehenge. And did I mention all this happens in the cold and wet?)

Or, you could not.

We didn’t.

We went instead to the morning service at Sherborne Abbey, for no particular reason except that I haven’t been to a service there since leaving school in 1983, and we had already budgeted mentally for getting up early (just not as penitentially early), and we could drive there in a warm, dry car through the rain and look at the sky to the west and think, hmm, it’s probably still wet for the walkers. And a lovely sung eucharist service it was too, appealing to the senses of sight and sound. The choir were tuneful and skilled and didn’t bang on too long with the set musical pieces; and, despite or perhaps because of five years of compulsory services there, I hadn’t appreciated how lovely the abbey looks. A few centuries ago there was a fire which discoloured the sandstone to a pinkish-red. The place is now decorated with that in mind, subdued reds amidst all the usual ornamental bells and whistles of ecclesiastical architecture, and it works very nicely.

Also nice:

  • being dispensed the wine by Mr David “Billy” Smart, retd: former maths teacher whose rapid-fire Ulster-intonated mathematical pedagogy influenced a generation of boys and makes Tom Lehrer look a little slow, and a key influence in my own spiritual development.
  • seeing in the abbey newsletter that the old school is getting a lady chaplain.

Less nice was the pre-service chat a member of clergy had with the lady sitting behind us, who was obviously a regular. “So, how are you?” Well …” And, unfortunately, she told him, in full symptomatic detail, for about 10 minutes, at the end of which Best Beloved whispered to me, “I don’t want to take communion any more …” She only went through with it after working out that we were sitting in front and so would get to the chalice first.

Then we ate our sandwiches in a layby on the A30 overlooking the Fovant regimental badges cut into a hillside, with the intent of using our temporarily bored-teenager-free window of opportunity to looking around Wilton House. This intention lasted as long as getting through the door of the ticket office and seeing this:


Pardon?

The point of Gift Aid is surely that it augments the price paid at no cost to yourself? So, they expect us taxpayers to pay slightly more than the already high basic rate for the privilege of augmenting their income even further? I think not. Besides, Best Beloved picked up a pamphlet for Mompesson House, only five minutes away and a fraction of the price, so we went round that instead. It’s also a fraction of the size of Wilton House, but even though it belongs to a bygone age it retains the sense of actually being a home that real people lived in, once.

And did I mention how warm and dry all this was?