The Medieval Manichee by Steven Runciman

A few days ago I received a message with the very sad news that one of my most influential teachers at SPS had passed away — the Revd Hugh Mead, back then the chaplain, but from 1990 also the school's biographer.

It seems fitting to me that he attained a position at the Temple church as I imagine that had he been born almost a millennium previously he might well have signed up as a Templar. His eyes used to light up with every mention of William Marshal.

I lastingly associate two (very different) books with him: The Castle by Kafka and this one. Both were plugged regularly. I got my own copy of Steven Runciman's acclaimed 1947 dualist survey at Heffers in '86. I've been re-reading it this week in the Reverend's honour.

Gifted linguist and aesthete, Runciman was old school in that what we tend to venerate as 'western' civilisation was for him little more than the barbarian hinterland of where the real action always was, the eastern Med.

In late antiquity this region played host to a complex theological ecosystem, held up by resilient levels of mass education and bookishness. And back then, the more sophisticated you were, the more likely you were to be bothered by the presence of evil in the cosmos.

Heresy would probably not be the most suitable way to describe the resulting explanations, many of which were more semi-obsolescent than new-fangled.

The Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia, for instance, had been 'in the air' for a long time — two perfect realms of light and darkness had somehow become venn-diagrammed, resulting in reality. The rise of Islam had shunted these notions westwards.

Mainstream Christian belief was then being formulated by a series of officially sanctioned compromises, but out 'in the field' many of the key issues remained up for grabs. Was Jesus God, man or both? Did he arrive with his status fixed or did it change in his lifetime etc. And most importantly, what kind of psychotic idiot had fabricated this flawed world?

In 1717 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu stopped at Philippopolis en route to Constantinople and noted the presence there of a strange sect she called 'Paulines'. Not the sort poor Hugh Mead had to contend with, even though they had originally been called Paulicians, or 'contemptible' Paulines. They were a remnant of an 8th century Armenian group who had maintained their own mini-state in Tephrice and had sometimes aligned with Islam against Byzantium, depending on the balance of unhinged puritanism then current between the civilisations.

They were periodically persecuted by the emperors and in the tenth century one made the fateful decision to re-settle a load of them in Thrace (Bulgaria), from where their dualist fancies would seep into the minds then in the main managed by the Bishop of Rome.

Those that remained back east seem to have forgotten most of their old doctrines by the time Lady Mary passed by.

Like many gnostic sects they had been dividing humanity into named classes of spiritual worth based on their level of initiation. Some referred to the masses as 'materials'. Meat, basically.

Amusingly, some believed that a person could become so fused with the holy spirit that they could return to a life of luxury and license and it would make no difference to their ultimate salvation status.

While some strove to make their Christianity more Judaistic, others wanted to demote Jehova to the status of semi-divine being aligned with the Demiurge. As such, anyone who stood up to this false deity in the Old Testament might be hero-worshipped, like Cain, or indeed the Sodomites.

Anti-social types, like V and me, present as least awkward for everyone else when we stick to our own private spaces. But when we become militant, roaming the world whilst declaring it to be one big waste of time, we can present as a serious social, political and economic pathology to the powers that be.

By declaring the visible word totally toxic, literally the devil's work, gnostics were setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy, particularly during an epoch when our civilisation was generally struggling to keep its head above water.

But Orthodoxy had a solution to hand: monasteries. Just stick all the world-rejecting, constitutionally anti-social types in a kind of walled garden. Therein the people who most despised society could be made to do useful things for it (healthcare, education, regulated thinking etc.) within a contained, if not entirely hermetic environment.

And this ultimately worked pretty well, as the gnostics were just a bit too anti-social for their own good. Not everyone could spend every waking hour worrying about the origins of darkness and malign forces, and the sects often seemed more concerned with protecting the wellbeing of pockets of light in this world than the wellbeing of actual fleshy human beings. And so their support levels never reached the tipping point…

Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai

Published in 2021 (though not until ‘25 in English, after his Nobel), Krasznahorkai was relenting on his pledge never to pen another novel. Perhaps the great doom-monger had been tempted out of silence by the pandemic?

The format is a single 406-page sentence which darts between perspectives as it zigzags around a central temporal line. Knowing this and that the underpinning of both style and subject matter was particle physics, I was concerned that it would read like one of those smart-arsey American postmodern novels.

Nada que ver. A lightness remains even as the material darkens. I tried to recall when I was last so eagerly devouring a narrative like this. Krasznahorkai has avoided all the tricks of the genre writer (short chapters, cliffhangers etc) only to fashion an elemental impetus, reminiscent of how I’d find myself compulsively turning the pages of Bolaño’s tomes with the nagging suspicion that this shouldn’t really be happening.

The protagonist is Florian, revealed as a gentle giant embarking on a seemingly unrequited correspondence with Angela Merkel. He has been plucked from an orphanage by ‘The Boss’, a Neo Nazi gruppenführer with a Bach obsession. Florian will come to share this, indeed this music will become his ‘state of being’, but his initial fixation has come as a result of attending evening classes with a local scientist. We are left to ponder just how big an idiot Florian might be, but as he posts his letters to Berlin, it also seems he might be something of a savant: a half-wit whose wit is half full, not half-empty.

Existence is a surplus, an excess, a mistake which might be corrected at any moment, Florian advises Merkel. As he becomes gripped by this absolute dread, the people of made-up town Kana in Thuringia become beset with a dread of a far more creeping kind. The fancied cosmic apocalypse is replaced in reality by a piecemeal combination of human, social and natural decay (all part of the same phenom for Krasznahorkai) against which we are equally impotent....beyond ringing up information hotlines.

Nationalisms require desacralising...

Nationalism is almost never an unalloyed positive force. Just as the structures it seeks to supplant (typically 'empires') were never an unalloyed negative force. 

This is as true in the Middle East — Zionism, Arab and Kurdish nationalisms etc — as elsewhere. History is never a simplistic morality play in spite of concerted efforts in the contemporary world to portray it as such. 

The most obvious flaw in most expressions of nationalism is how easily it becomes a piggyback prop for more mean spirited and ultimately extremist modes of thought.

In the case of Arab Nationalism it is easy to trace the pattern, from resistance to both long-standing Ottoman domination and the European interference of the early twentieth century to a set of ideals that had been distorted by exposure to militant Islamism, itself a religious impulse contaminated by twentieth century secular western totalitarianism. 

The end result is a form of nationalism which regards Arab sovereignty as inextricably Islamic sovereignty, constitutionally unable to share or even properly coexist with non-Islamic peoples and their own national aspirations. The deeper history of Arab presence in the Levant is one of conquest and colonialism, yet modern Arab nationalism not only denies this, it turns this denial into something SACRED. 

And therewith issues which need to be pondered carefully when not picked apart, compromises always on the table, become matters of almost childlike commitment and obstinacy. 

Legends

From its foundation in 1209 until the late 19th century Cambridge University dedicated itself unabashedly to the spreading of complete and utter nonsense.

Just to get a degree you had to had to pass a 'religious test' and swear allegiance to the Church and non-faith based bachelor's degrees only became available after 1856.

Even Isaac Newton used his position to promote what he called chymistry, some combination of alchemy and occult ceremony.

In my day, there was King's College, ground zero for all sorts of ideological affectation and the Anthropology part of Arch & Anth, it then seemed to me, only existed in order to shout down anybody who dared to suggest that human biology could play any role in the formation of our societies.

But surrounded as we were by cretinous charlatans, we somehow failed to enter into any kind of dire, dribbling moral panic about it all.

Read the 'papers' today and you'd think that they had pinpointed poor Jason Arday as some sort of canary in the academic coal mine, a harbinger of barely veiled decay if not imminent cultural collapse.

I'm not sure I was even aware Cambridge had an Education Department during my undergrad years. So if this is now somehow a den of opportunists who could never get a 'proper' MA Hons Cantab, this locus of what Dicky Dawkins calls 'obscurantism' remains somewhat obscure to me.

Yet the sad and somewhat foreseeable end to this over-inflated story has reminded me of a phenomenon I noticed both on arrival at Cambridge...and here in Guatemala.

Some people, faced with a wholly new environment in which to strive, socially and otherwise, choose to invent a 'legend' for themselves: in effect an essentially phoney, usually flattering backstory.

I had direct contact, friendships even, with several people who had basically made up their pre-Cambridge past and/or aligned themselves with a high viz pre-exisiting identity and its related postures as they believed this would make their life lift off in the new environment, particularly if they could lean into endemic tribal pretensions and groupthink. One of my college peers was even using a pseudonym to this effect.

And, as I suggested above, something similar seems to occur with certain ex-pats who show up down here.

In most cases having a legend, as I put it, is harmless. But in certain circumstances the combination of personal and collective dishonesty can turn a little more toxic.

And the degradation of a phoney backstory tends to happen a bit like bankruptcy as Hemingway characterised it — gradually then suddenly.

I suppose that when it comes to teaching standards, the big change since my time is thay today's students have to pay for this fraudulent crap, at least personally.

Which raises more pressing issues about deceit and impersonation on perhaps a more obviously legal level.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

 

As reasons for wanting to turn vegetarian go, wanting to — in effect — turn vegetation is probably an uncommon one.

The summary on The Complete Review of Han Kang’s novel is ‘Nicely done, with some exceptional moments’.

That is also pretty much how I ultimately felt about Nolan’s The Odyssey. In both cases I kind of knew in advance that I’d find the composition of the work enthralling enough to overcome any deeper reservations. And so The Vegetarian was the only book I took with me on this trip.

I’ve mentioned before that I warm to literature which presents as apparently un-filmable. I was going to note that Han’s book falls into this category for a slightly unusual reason in that it consists of a triptych of narratives — one told in the first person, two in the third — each of which would be difficult to render as a conventional drama in its own right and collectively even more so — but then I learned that film-makers have already attempted to get around these difficulties, with two of the sections adapted for the screen separately, most notably the first as Chaesikjuuija (2009), which duly notched up a not-very-impressive IMDB score of 5.7.

Han originally published the three parts as separate novellas and they all derive from an earlier short story entitled The Fruit of My Woman. This reminded me a little of the five parts of Bolaño’s 2666, which lack the explicit unification around a single titular character, yet somehow fit together just a little bit better as a whole novel than the three here. (Dramatised — five hours — if not yet filmed.)

Whilst there is patently a gender-based perspective underlying this story (or stories) there are wider lessons here for anyone pondering a belated assault on the inflexible structures of society, some of which may have previously seemed ‘natural’, or at least unthreateningly conventional, along with a sense of the implied costs involved in any human battle for self-ownership, not just in the context of the Korean social ambience, but elsewhere too, especially when the aforementioned structures have an ingrained tendency to respond with violence.

A fine iced coffee con crema de that.

FOMO Danger

Another tourist died last night on Acatenango.

In previous years some have been washed away by torrents of water at this time of year, but 2026 has been comparatively dry and this one took the cardio-respiratory shortcut.

Prior to England's match in the Azteca last month there was a lot of detailed examination of just how oxygen-starved the players' bloodstreams would be and how much time might be needed to acclimatise in advance of the fixture, and that was just CDMX at 2240m above sea level — compared to Acatenango's 3976m.

Peer pressure mediated by social media is driving visitors up the volcano slopes often within a couple of days of arrival in Guatemala. The FOMO starts on the shuttle from the airport.

I've been here for years now and don't really feel the altitude at city level (1545m), but when I was coming in and out more I very definitely did.

Aged just 28 I participated in a Christmas expedition up to El Hato, carrying gifts up to what was then a very under-developed settlement on top of that hill. I'd only just arrived in Antigua and soon found myself gasping for air like never before in my life.

Antigua used to be a place which people came to to stick around. They'd enrol in a Spanish school and use the the city as a hub for adventures beyond. Nowadays it is more common to see the 'smash and grab' groups, in and out in a matter of days, and the volcano hike is seen as the blue ribbon Tiktokable activity.

Yet many of those involved in encouraging this are locally-based travel operators (or indeed bureaucrats) who have themselves long acclimatised to both the local conditions and the endemic levels of risk-aversion, and have seemingly no real sense of the cardio-respiratory dangers to young people with limited experience of such ascents…and none of their own responsibility thereof.

This poor chap was just 17. Maybe his parents should undertake some legal action, if only to finally encourage a bit of accountability.

Last night we could very clearly spot the little lights flashing around the edge of the crater of Fuego as it experienced multiple eruptions.

One fixation to bind them all...

Recent events in Ceuta have brought out a whole load of what I like to call 'the single issue thinkers' out into the open. These people have one way of looking at every single thing that happens in the world.

So yes, you have your 'Pedro Sánchez, hijo de puta' cohorts in Spain, but elsewhere we are seeing plenty of the 'Muslim Invasion of Europe', the 'This is all Israel's doing', or indeed 'just blame Trump' mobs and there are always the so-called liberals who are quick to deploy the 'anti-colonialism' smokescreen, not because it assists with understanding or even dealing with the actual situation, but because it helps smother any anxieties they might feel about the complexities of the contemporary world.

With regards to Ceuta these complexities would seem to involve some fairly recent decisions by Spain with regard to its gas supplies, e.g. doing a deal with Algeria which the Moroccans feel is prejudicial to their own interests (all this following supply issues in the Gulf owing to the on-off shooting war transpiring over there) and so it would seem that the Moroccan government has chosen to stoke up the migratory, self-bettering instincts of its own population by way of revenge. This is almost certainly an over-simplification. Pedro Sánchez is still a bit of an hijo de puta, and so on.

In the case of Morocco the 'colonialism' issues are also a bit more complex than many are willing to acknowledge (especially those for whom colonialism is their very own single issue thought process.)

As per Guatemala, the dominant culture post-independence was basically the same as the one prior to it, albeit a Middle Eastern one not a European one (and as such possessed of its very own smokescreen).

Abuses against any internal groups who visibly showed signs of non-participation in this transferred hegemony continued long after 'self-determination' was achieved, and just as they were here, suppression leading to oppression of indigenous tendencies was arguably significantly worse in the more recent post-colonial era.

Pedro Sánchez might well be a monster hypocrite when it comes to 'settler colonialism', and yet Morocco's claim on Ceuta is beset with many of the same basic problems and double standards as say Argentina's over the Falklands, and unlike the Argies, the Moroccans are right now actively carrying on like an aggressive, old-school colonial power at the margins of their own territory — as they seek to put an end to the Sahrawi movement of national liberation.

In ancient times when the Greeks and Carthaginians were doing their settler colonialism thing, the area was known as Abylya. The Romans then named it Septem Fratres (Seven Brothers), shortened to Septem, and following Islamic conquest, this morphed into the Arabic Sebta, which the Castilians later shifted to Ceuta.

Seven Feet of English Ground

The Viking era was previously thought to have ended on September 25, 1066 when the invading army of Harald Hardrada, blond, XXXL, saga-tastic King of Norway and claimant to the English throne was defeated at the Battle of Stamford Bridge (Gefeoht æt Stanfordbrycge) in the East Riding of Yorkshire.

Undoubtedly a more fun battle narrative than Hastings — and not just because we won this one — it is often dismissed as little more than the amuse-bouche to events related in the Bayeux Tapestry.

Back in the winter of '83 I visited York and did a little side trip with my father to 'Battle Flats', the supposed site of this last great Viking denouement.

In truth nobody is entirely sure where it went down. The bridge itself, spanning the river Derwent was made of wood and no archaeological trace of it has been found. Detectorists have not uncovered any tell-tale clusters of weapons buried beside battered skeletons. But the designated location seemed appropriately bleak that morning.

Hardrada had sailed across the North Sea with a host of 7000 keen Scandinavians. They then performed the ‘RO!’ up the Ouse, capturing the city of York/Jorvik.

He was joined there by the English King’s disaffected younger brother Tostig Godwinson, who had been stripped of the Earldom of Northumbria and was aggressively chippy in the age-old manner of royal second sons.

Harold's response was to march his army up north in record time, catching the Norwegians by surprise. They covered 185 miles in just 4 days.

As the two hosts gathered either side of the river, a loan horseman is said to have ridden across the bridge and approached the Vikings for a bit of pre-violence diplomacy.

He offered Tostig his old titles back in return for changing sides. Tostig then asked what might be on the table for his mate Harald, and the rider famously responded...

“Seven feet of English ground, as he is taller than other men.”

Well, that was how Snorri Sturluson tells it. According to Henry of Huntingdon it was only six feet of English soil.

As the rider departed, Harald asked Tostig if he knew this fellow with a heap of attitude ‘That was my brother Harold’, Tostig replied.

The contest did not start especially well for the English. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates that a giant Norwegian armed with a Dane-axe prevented the English from crossing the bridge. (I think we can all picture this particular bloke, but anyway, we now have AI...)

He is said to have systematically cut down forty Englishmen, but one was eventually cunning enough to float himself under the bridge in a barrel which enabled him to skewer the Norwegian human barrier with his spear.

The Vikings then did their low block (parking the bus?) shield wall thing and the battle raged for several hours, but after Hardrada took an arrow in the neck and Tostig was also cut down, it seemed like game over.

Yet ‘extra time’ ensued. 

Hardrada’s prospective son-in-law, Eystein Orre, back guarding the ships, launched a counter-attack which Norwegian tradition refers to as ‘Orre’s Storm’. They briefly slowed the English advance but eventually succumbed after Orre himself was slain.

 

Doubts over the back four...

At the time of Starmer's 'sacking', the most salient issue in British governance has been Defence. 

This may turn out to be vaguely coincidental, but the interest of both Putin and Trump will have been piqued.

And it reveals one of the key quirks of British democracy, as when we go to the polls in roughly half-decade cycles, this particular matter is rarely at the very forefront of the election chatter, for we are then in the process of electing our local representatives and the composition of Parliament and only on a somewhat secondary level our national leader — yet we do somehow all retain the notion that an essential part of his or her job description is protecting us from the threats that the Defence budget is expected to address.

Trump has gone on record to say that Sir Keir is a 'nice man' but...windmills.

Andy Burnham will become PM two days before England win the World Cup.

'By Mutual Consent'

We have arrived at the point where a change at No10 is about as noteworthy an event as a switch of manager (coach?) at Stamford Bridge.

At least at Chelsea there does always seem to be a more honest and earnest debate every time about whether the whole problem goes a lot deeper than the person with the high viz, high stresss role at the top.

I suppose Starmer has actually suffered a fate similar to Arne Slot at Liverpool e.g. he ought to have had a bit more 'in the bank', but was ultimately undone to a greater extent by the erosion of his bond with die-hard supporters, rather than results on the field which, whilst not great, were not entirely calamitous.

It's not so much that the fan base fell out of love with him as that they discovered that they had only really cared for him when he won. There’s a certain kind of personal aura which will bleed out more readily.

And it just so happened that a seemingly very attractive alternative had just become available...

Burnham is an Everton season ticket holder.

Hard Coded

Islamic antisemitism will take some beating...especially if we look away from its roots. 

Each new generation of committed Muslims is exposed to a series of supposedly sacred texts which contain multiple antisemitic references. 

There is no direct equivalent in the other two 'desert faiths' in part because they came earlier and there were no Muslims around to hate on while the key books were assembled. This is one reason why all the 'Islamophobia' whataboutery whenever antisemitism is discussed in Britain is a bit of a red herring. 

Now clearly it is possible to be a Muslim who has no issues at all with Jews just as it is possible to be a Christian that's completely fine with homosexuality. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the fact that millions of people in these belief systems lean on scripture in order to condone and sometimes also preach bigotry. 

Or indeed that the Quran has a load more horrendous and explicitly dehumanising things to say about Jews than the Bible does about gays. ('Apes and pigs', 'apes and swine' etc. Surah Al-Baqarah 2:65–66, Surah Al-Ma'idah 5:60, and Surah Al-A'raf 7:166). 

In disparate other sections Jews are described as 'cursed'.

Beyond the Quran itself, there's that 'Gharqad' Tree Hadith, included in the Hamas founding charter, which exhorts the Islamic faithful to go out and murder any 'hiding' Jews they might locate. 

This is representative of is one of the key issues I have with all forms of scriptural religion in the wider sense: one can do all sorts of things that may work to change the balance of attitudes across society, improving people's willingness to live together in peace (which often means not taking everything so damn literally!), but those texts with imagined supernatural authority simply never go away, and there never ceases to be a danger of relapse via a return to the letter of the ancient word...which always appears to benefit from protections that other parts of the culture and the conversation clearly lack. 

(Meanwhile in the US, CAIR is pursuing actions against children who share AI-generated memes connected with nonsense tunes on Roblox which they deem insulting to Muslims or their beliefs. Baffling double standard?) 

The sheer Imbecility...

Like, 'if this bunch of fringe nutjobs are anti-zionist, anti-zionism can't be antisemtism, cannit?'

Yet one can't just plug into this isolated aspect of another group's extremism: Neturei Karta openly fraternises with Iran and Hezbollah.

Here in Guatemala we have Lev Tahor, a highly comparable sect of ultra-orthodox, ultra-insular Jews disowned by the mainstream, and by Israel.

They too are rigidly anti-zionist, yet they are also into forced underaged marriages plus denying education to girls and have been repeatedly investigated by the authorities here for child neglect/abuse and kidnapping.

If I were to amplify just one aspect of their worldview — that a Jewish state must not be permitted to exist before the Messiah shows up — conveniently ignoring other aspects of their beliefs and practices, I would surely be outing myself as some sort of morally-deranged moron.

But many on the Far Left, aka 'wokerati', fully engaged by a set of modern human-rights infused doctrines, are seemingly fine with sidling up to cultish clusters whose motivations are wholly theological and apocalyptic.

And this is precisely why so much hate has been enabled by their public demonstrations. They have accepted as fellow travellers fundamentalisms which are far more committed, uncompromising and ultimately serious than their own.

Collaborations with contrasting forms of militancy of questionable compatibility have never worked out well in the longer term for progressive movements and are anyway deeply damaging to the coherence of their cause.

And it goes without saying that the appropriation of Jewish voices, fringe or otherwise, in order to ziz zag around charges of (the oldest) chauvinistic prejudice, can not only be negligent as outlined above, it is also by nature unprincipled and probably further indicative of the very prejudice it is apparently seeking to camouflage.

Mind the Gap

For the first time in recent memory I found significant empty spaces — retail and restaurant — on almost every block along Quinta Avenida in Playa....gaps which are less Madonna than Mike Tyson.

One has to presume that the economy is now facing challenges from the sargassum inflow, plus the wider international awareness of it.

Nowadays Playa is a city of over 300,000 inhabitants. Coming in from the NW one gets a sense of just how vast the place has become on that side of the 307 highway.

Tourism may not be the essence of all these people's daily lives, but like the sun's rays on planet Earth, it is certainly the starting point of everything.

When I first came Playa was little more than a collection of thatched huts around the dock. in my lifetime I have had no other experience of such a place becoming a major urban sprawl.

V has compared it to a game we used to play in the noughties called Tropico in which, as a bemedalled dictator, one was tasked with developing an palm-lined island as fast as possible without creating the sort of unrest which would likely lead to one's downfall. The rounds were set to a background audio track of the endless TAP TAP TAP of construction work, and for years that was the essential soundtrack of PDC.

Around the turn of the millennium Playa had around 40,000 inhabitants. This, in my opinion, was probably the ideal moment to visit, an insight which cohanits with the more general notion I hold that in general the five years either side of 2000 were the best time to be an independent traveller in one's twenties in Central America.

The earlier period of my own experience had some obvious downsides of its own. For a start, below the Yucatan most areas were an active war zone until the mid to late nineties.

But perhaps the greater inconvenience was one of communications. There were hardly any phones — and I mean landlines, let alone mainstream online connections — so keeping in any kind of touch with the outside world was a complete chore.

I loved Antigua back then, but it would be fair to say that there was not much on offer in terms of basic entertainment and catering infrastructure for foreign visitors around town.

By the turn of the century this had hit something of a sweet spot, not just here, but also up in Playa, which was entering its heyday as the Saint Tropez analogue of the 'Mayan Riviera'. It was hard to imagine just how badly over-commercialisation would subsequently bodge things up. There really are but a handful of destinations in the region which have continued to improve in terms of overall experience since around 2010. (Mérida being the most obvious one.)

And if one wanted to get from place to place, the ADO network (and related terminals) was starting to take proper shape. Transportation had generally been a lot more iffy in the previous era.

The problem Playa now faces is that the annual sargazo plague is worsening year on year and it coincides neatly with the traditional peak periods, such as Spring Break.

Herod(s)

There's almost a surfeit of Herods in the story of Jesus.

The Biblical tale locates Christ's birth during the reign of Herod the Great, who ruled over all of Israel at the time.

This aspect of the timeline is extremely awkward for Luke's Christmas story, which features Romans and a census operation which in turn requires Joseph, supposedly a descendant of King David, to hurry back to Bethlehem (his own and David's hometown) along with his pregnant wife, in order to be counted — at a moment rather like Easter here, where everybody shows up simultaneously and there are not enough hotel rooms to go around.

Some elite liberals are inclined to characterise this extremely inconvenient situation as akin to being 'a refugee'. But as the devout Catholic author GK Chesterton (OP) once remarked: 'An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.'

Anyway, it is fairly safe to assume that during the time of the ministry and 'rebellion' of Jesus, Herod's son Herod Antipas was the relevant Jewish ruler, but not in Nazareth in Lower Galilee up north, then a fairly mixed society of Jews and Greeks, where the 'Nazarene' was most likely actually born.

By this time the Romans had assumed direct control of a significant part of Judea and so were in a position to start with their census nonsense, but it is very unlikely that they would have needed everyone to suddenly rush back en masse to their birthplaces in order to conduct one.

There's one more Herod for us to worry about: Herod Agrippa, a nephew, who had St Peter imprisoned and did away with the apostle James, aka Santiago, an important figure for the citizens of Antigua, believers or otherwise.

As a Gallilean, an area outside of direct Roman control, Jesus was not at first handed to Pilate after his arrest, but instead to the middle of the three above-mentioned Herods.

This one wanted his captive to perform miracles for him on demand and when this didn't happen, he decided to make the self-proclaimed Messiah a Roman problem, for the circumstances were more visibly and dangerously political than religious at this stage for the King and his subject community.

Right now getting the EFF out of here is exactly what Antigua's roughly 1.3m extra inhabitants — such is the annual population superabundance for the 7-week stretch of Lent and Holy Week — are accomplishing, albeit gradually.

Any foreign guests still lingering inside the Casa Santo Domingo who haven't yet done so are probably wishing that they had.

Send Help (2026)

V loved this movie, almost every moment of it, entirely unperturbed by its tonal wobbles.*

Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian was way more censorious, stating that Sam Raimi, a horror genre native, must have felt obliged to dish out periodic goriness which served no real purpose within the narrative.

I pondered this for a while and have concluded that these moments are amongst Send Help's strengths not weaknesses, probably also necessary for a mainstream movie like this to land its chosen and slightly outrageous ending.

Hollywood likes to hedge its bets these days with audience worldviews, so Linda from Accounting/Strategy and Planning can be read as either a bunny boiler or as a vengeful rather than vindictive feminist revanchist. That this ultimately works is down in large part to a really outstanding and memorable performance from Rachel McAdams.

* May also be worth mentioning that she is usually turned right off by projectile vomiting and hasn't seen Triangle of Sadness.

Let's not be instinctual ostriches...

This is overall a very well-considered and structured piece tackling a complex issue.

It does however repeat an all too familiar liberal fallacy: the imaginary or wishfully-thought level playing field. e.g.

"If you’re someone who is against all forms of worship in a public space then fair enough – but don’t single out one group."

It's not even so much a fallacy as a failure to think. WHY NOT single out one group if all groups are not in fact the same...beyond being, in this instance, religious or ideological groups?

Some religious groups are more externally orientated than others. Islam is one such. And after a very brief period of persecution at the start, it became one of the more recognisably aggressive of the 'traditions' with regard to non-adherents. Christianity in contrast took roughly 300 years to really start murdering heretics and unbelievers.

How relevant these peculiarities of the belief system might be to the modern world and British society in particular is at the heart of the complexity of the issue.

If we extend our concern from religion to other forms of delusional ideology, Nelson's Column has been the UK's ground zero for their large gatherings for some time now.

How ought we to compare men praying to a far more diverse group of anti-vaxxers and crackpot conspiracy theorists?

When England beat Germany 5-1 in Munich in 2001 V and I hurried to Trafalgar Square to join the celebrations, which were irreproachably joyous — at least at first — but the longer we stayed the more we noticed a 'sectarian' drift in the proceedings with the singing and chanting addressing certain political matters, foreign and domestic, in strident, often unpleasant tones.

So maybe here you have your level playing field, not between harmless public spirituality, but between discreet groups in society who use Trafalgar square as a microcosm of the whole society around them and demonstrate therein how shouty — and shout-downy — they would really like to be in the wider public context…like governments that use airport security to show us their ideal MO.

We have to match our desire to be tolerant with an appreciation of the composition of certain groups which choose this space to reveal the drift of their political sociability. Crowd management in Trafalgar Square, a few thousand people in one small part of the capital, can be a canary in the coal mine.

It's a performative space and many of the performances are demanding to be critiqued.

How it works...

 

THIS is how it works.

You can hate a foreign government without this hatred taking over your entire political personality. 

You can hate a foreign government without hating the people ruled by that government, by consent or otherwise, but if you consistently apply different standards to the behaviour of that government than others, you will inevitably reveal something which deserves a probing searchlight: is your hatred fundamentally discriminatory and in a sense fundamentalist?

You may believe that you can hate or demonise virtuously. This may be possible. 

But whether you think you can unfailingly separate good and bad hatred personally is not the issue (nor does it matter at all if you can find a few members of the foreign nation in question who seem to hate in the same way that you do.) 

For the key questions are these:

— Of all the people worldwide (there have to be millions) whose political personality has been overrun by this particular hatred, how many of them are truly hateful in the old school, deeper, highly toxic way? (I would suggest that the majority would fail the simplest of purity tests. Check the comments of a post like this.) 

— Does your version of this hatred, however ‘above board’ it might seem according to your self-examination, inevitably feed into a dogmatic discourse that actively foments twisted ethnic animosity and sporadic acts of violence, much of which is only tenuously linked to the matters which have driven you to hate the foreign government?