PUBLIC AND PRIVATE TRANSPORT

My much-loved Jaguar, sadly not running now

It all went back to Christmas a couple of years ago. I was driving my much-loved Jaguar to some friends on what proved to be a very wet (not a white) Christmas. I drove into a puddle and, to cut a long and painful story short, found my car being flooded. It was a write off and I never got to drive it again. Incidentally, I was impressed by the fact that someone local gave us a lift back to our cottage and another man turned up to rescue us and did not charge extra for working on Christmas day. Would he have done that in Britain? I doubt it.

Anyway, we became a one-car couple after that. I paid something towards our Toyota which Leena uses mostly. She chose it and is driving it to the stables as I write. Meanwhile, I rely on public transport to get around. It takes about two and a half hours to get to London door to door by train so I do not go early in the morning, but travel the night before and stay in my house in Brixton if I do. It is little too far to commute, although I sometimes go back in the afternoon

if I am doing a half-day tour. I usually enjoy going to London for work on the train.

 

However, sometimes the vagaries of public transport let me down both in and outside the capital. Recently, a points failure meant that the Victoria line was out and I had to take a roundabout journey to get back to Brixton. More seriously, a journey to London involved a roundabout trip via Brighton because of – you guessed it – a points failure. Instead of taking a couple of hours it required a whole morning. Fortunately, at neither time was in a hurry. I am all in favour of train travel but it does require the proper functioning of equipment.

 

I am worried that one day I will have to make an apologetic phone call to an operator saying that I cannot be where I am supposed to be at the appointed time. In fact, now I think about it, I had to do that once a year or so ago. The delay was actually caused by a car breaking down in the tunnel towards Heathrow and, although I had left a couple of hours to get to the airport hotel I was due at, I was running late. Fortunately, so was everyone else and the reason for the delay was accepted by the operator and hardly noticed by the clients.

 

I always leave plenty of time to get to the hotel/airport I am expected at as I factor in possible delays in the public transport system. If they do not occur, I arrive early but I do not mind being early and it is better to be early rather than late, If I have to wait at the lobby of the hotel, there are worse places to read the paper as I do so. Being very early is probably a bit naff, not to say naïve, but I have never quite been able to take a colleague seriously who I felt was cutting her arrival at the hotel too fine – a little close for comfort.

 

In an ideal world we would all take public transpor to get around and people would leave their cars at home. I never take my car into central London these days and rely on buses and the underground system. (Actually two thirds of it is above ground but that is a different story to be told another day.) However, we do not live in an ideal world and, frankly, will never will. It was the attempt to do so that caused communism to fail so dramatically. People preferred the occasional and admitted failures of capitalism to the unadmitted failures of communism in the end.

 

An essential part of building a successful society is learning from your mistakes and that means admitting to them in the first place. One thing I most remember from the film The Death of Stalin is the belief, expressed early in the film, that plane crashes never occur in Russia because socialism has made a perfect society where mistakes never happen. Dream on comrades. We all make mistakes and it is important in learning from them to first of all acknowledge them. Lots of fortunes were made by people who slipped up first.

 

Henry Ford is a name that springs to mind here, He had several false starts before he started he successfully started making cars. Ford, by the way, was a notorious antisemite and a far from admirable man but he had a certain knack. He is reported to have said that you can have any colour you want as long as its black. In fact, he later produced cars in several colours, reasoning that his customers would want more of a choice, but in the early days of mass-production black was both the cheapest and quickest drying type of paint available.

 

The fact is that any free society has to draw a balance between public provision and private choice. You have to wait for public transport but can drive your car whenever you want. However, you have to pay for it, both in parking, which is both difficult and expensive in central London, and because of the congestion charge imposed on car drivers or a combination of the two. The mayor of London might have introduced the congestion charge but he would never have done so without government approval.

 

As a result, as I tell clients, I never take the car into central London. This is partly because  I sometimes end a tour at a different place to where I have begun and it would be a pain to go back to collect the car; partly because it is expensive and difficult to park; and partly because I am now old enough to travel for free on public transport with my freedom pass. Maybe, by the way, we give older people too easy a ride but old people tend to vote and no politician wants to upset them – as good an argument for voting as I have ever heard. 

 

Public transport is socialism in practice, private driving is capitalistic. However, allowing or encouraging everyone to drive cars would not only cause much worse air pollution but clog up the roads more than they are already. Making everyone take public transport may seem fairer but it would always have a hint of ‘we know best’ about it and the chaos caused by the inevitable failure of the system on occasions would never work in a free society where disgruntled people could vote four or five years.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

 

LOOKING BACK ON 2025

First woman Archbishop of Canterbury,
the former nurse Dame Sarah Mullally

I was going to write about the aches and pains that come with old age, but I thought that people would not want to hear about my ailments and have decided to write about the advance of women in our society. I have touched on this topic in diaryofatouristguide,blogspot,com - my other blog on what I do for a living. I publish it every Monday, the first day of the week, while I post this blog on the last day of the month. It is about what I think rather than what I do.

As the photo above shows, the new Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman. So too is the Mayor of the City of London. She is not the first to have taken not his role but the third. However, she is the first to have assumed the title of Lady Mayoress instead of Lady Lord Mayor. It seems like a minor change but it probably reflects the growth of feminism in our society. Although the late Bridget Bardot said that 'feminism is not her thing' it has had an effect on what goes on.

You don't have to describe yourself as a feminist to be affected by the movement and what it stands for. The militant outlook often affect others who do not follow the fmeinist movement. No-one publicly argues in favour of automatically lower pay for women and for restricting their opportunities in order to allow men to 'support their families' or some similar trope. People generally accept the principles of gender equality these days.

Do they also accept the practice? In my business, tourist guiding, the question hardly arises because gender equality is more or less ignored rather than fought over. You work as  a tourist guide and get paid and never has it been said that because you are a woman should you be paid less. IN extended tours, the personal skew more to men, while tourist guiding (in which you work on a daily rather than weekly or two-week basis) the workforce is predominantly female.

While writing this piece, I have been half-listening to a conversation on feminism in which John Hunt was taking part. He was a racing commentator whose wife and two of his three daughters was killed by the former partner of one of these daughters. This is where male dominance of women is still prevalent - in the most old-fashioned way, in simple violence towards the female gender. Men are for the most part simply stronger than women and can inflict violence.

This has led to the growth in misogyny against women. No-one publicly supports misogyny but a few people follow the habits of it in private. Men are conditioned more to violence than women and often take out their fury on the female gender in violent ways, which if they gave themselves time to think about it, they would probably not countenance. Time to think.Men often commit atrocious acts of violence (sexual and physical) without thinking.

They often have a lifetime behind bars to regret their impulsiveness. It may have seemed satisfying to take out your violence by one act but it defines you for the rest of your life and I often wonder how many of these locked up behind bars for life would repeat their actions if they had a chance to reconsider them. Most would not, I am sure but it is too late to think again. Once the act is done, a life is lost or changed forever, and the perpetrator has to live with it.

Although I have no doubt that, If I was born a woman, I would be a feminist, speaking as a man, I have reservations about the movement and I would not wear 'I am a feminist' t-shirt. Why not? I suppose I have to think about my personal life here, I was involved in the break-up of my family some years ago and I was more or less forced out of the family home. Although I remained in touch with my children and my relationship with them is good, I feel that I missed out somehow.

There is still the assumption that the man will move out when a relationship ends, even if there are children from it and it is not his 'fault' that it has ended. I put that world in inverted commas because we now have no-fault divorce and the idea of blaming one person for a break-up has been consigned to history. However, my conscience is clear and I cannot help thinking that if he has been willing we could have made it work.

But she was not willing, so I was made to live apart from the children. I suppose she was a perfectionist and I am far from perfect, so she is on her own and I am in another relationship (and quite happy) while she is by herself (and probably also fairly happy). Things have worked out ok in my life. The kids are ok and I have come to terms with separation and family break-up but I still won't wear the t-shirt. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

    

 

MEN ARE CAR PROUD - WOMEN ARE HOUSE PROUD

My much missed but now defunct Jaguar

There is a reason broadcasts of football matches on Sky are sponsored by car companies. They know that the games are watched by men so they target their advertising at them. Of course, women are not forbidden from turning on the television if a football game is being broadcast, just as men are not obliged to. Some men are not interested in football while some women are. Advertisers aim at broad markets and they assume that it is mostly men who watch games.

As I have always said, there is a difference between a generalisation and an assumption. The title of this post  is a generalisation but it is accurate enough to provide the advertising exec with a fair assumption that the audience for a football game will be mostly male. In the same way, golf games broadcast on tv are where conservative advertising is most often seen. The audience is successful and skews to conservatism, so the advertising follows.

 

Advertisers probably spend a lot of time and research finding out about these audience make-ups and figure that, although it is not against the law for golf lovers to be socialist or otherwise left-wing, it is fairly unlikely so they can concentrate certain types of advertising at them in the hope that they will find a receptive audience. I do not pretend to be an expert on the advertising business but certain things are obvious.

 

In the same way, nothing obliges the male part of the human species to be prouder of their cars than their homes, but they usually are. Men are built for movement, while women are nest-builders. This is a ‘by and large’ observation. I am probably slightly untypical because I am writing this under a ceiling that is going to be prepared (soon I hope) in a house that has frankly been more important to me than any car I have owned.

 

I no longer own one but share a car with my partner, who uses it almost every day when she is not working while I am happy enough using public transport to get around. I still remember when my last car died, however. It was on Christmas day and we were in Ireland where Leena had been doing a bit of nest-building. We had visited friends and I – wrongly, as it turned out – assumed that the puddles we were driving through would not cripple it.

 

To cut a long story short, the racing green Jaguar (of which I was very proud) drove into a deeper puddle than we had previously encountered and I soon had to say, ‘Goodbye, Jag’. I have not owned another car since that Christmas Day and, although I miss the Jaguar, I have managed fine since then. The taxi drivers hate him but our mayor in London is encouraging the use of public transport and bicycles to get around.

 

I have noticed the younger generation is more concerned with getting a mortgage than a car these days and often do not even bother to learn to drive until that is sorted. I have a niece who is learning to drive but is not bothered with learning to do so in a manual car and is quite happy to do so in an automatic, even if it gives her a restricted licence. Her reckoning is that most cars these days are autos so why bother with a licence for a manual change car?

 

In the USA, they do not even have a distinction between licences as most cars are autos and ‘stick shift’ cars are in the minority. Those who want to drive ‘stick’ have to learn how to do so and are not tested on their competence. You hear horror stories about Americans, used to autos at home, who cannot adjust to driving manuals. Personally, I always liked driving a car with a gearstick but drive an auto now without complaint.

 

It gives me an illusion of control, and makes me feel that I am more in charge of the car than it is of me. Women probably do not bother with such considerations and happily drive automatics if they are available. Yet, they are less likely to tolerate a badly maintained house than they are a car. It is a rite of passage to own your own home that usually comes after marriage. 

 

That is another thing. A man is often expected to provide for his wife and this will often mean buying a house which she will turn into a home. In these days of increasing divorce, a man may move out of this home if the marriage ends (as I had to do). He may end up in a flat with a car, the car taking up a large part of his income while the former wife and children stay in the house. The man is still expected to move out, even if he did not desire a break-up.

 

This has always seemed unjust to me. Another thing I say is that there are basically only three things you can give your children. These are time, money and love. Love – we take that for granted. Money – well. That is what the CSA was set up to supervise. What people forget about is time spent with your children. In many ways, this is the most important thing. Like it or not kids judge their parents on how much time they spend with them.

 

All too often a disappearing dad rides off into the sunset and does not see his children again. This admittedly happens less often these days but it still happens too much for comfort. Virtually any child will tell you that, even if they are not together, they would like to have a relationship with both parents. They may also want the couple to bury their differences and stay together - but that is another story.

 

We are getting worse at marriage but better at divorce these days. (We have had plenty of practice.) Yet, the man is still expected to move out and the children to stay with their mother. This may be the result of previous arrangements but it probably reflects a deeper habit in which men tend to move, while women stay still. Even if they have not ended the relationship, men are expected to move on and out when it does so.

 

That does not alter the fundamental truth in our society – houses start increasing in price as soon as you get the keys to the front door. Cars, on the other hand, tend to go down in value once you get your hands on the keys. That, curiously, does not affect how much men love their cars. No matter how smart they are with money, a good car is somehow seen as the mark of a successful man.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

SPEAKING VERSUS SINGING

Bow ties are usually worn by men at Wexford Opera

As I have previously said, I like to go to see a play and a performance every week. By performance I mean a live event of some kind – a play, an opera, even a football match. This week I have been going to the Wexford opera festival every night so I have been seeing plenty of performances. I have not seen many films, apart from on Netflix, and many of these have been of variable quality.

 

The operas have been of a high standard. As far as I can tell (which is not very far) the singing has been up to scratch and the stagings have been adventurous and original. I was not entirely convinced y how the Spanish civil war roped into Verdi’s Il Trouvere, which is the original Italian version of Il Troubadore and took place long before the war had begun. Verdi rewrote the opera for a French audience and had died before the war in Spain had begun.

 

Yesterday we went to Deidamia, Handel’s take of the start of the Trojan war with Achilles in a Mediterranean island where, disguised as a woman, where he falls in love with the princess there. I was so used to the Achilles-Patroclus story that I found it difficult to adjust to a new trans version, but it gave the legend a new slant at least. He is later uncovered as a man by Odysseus when he chooses some weapons instead of female trinkets.

 

Handel wrote quite a few operas in Italian, having been trained in it before he became a naturalised British citizen in 1717. In those days we welcomed people like Marx and Handel who were unwelcome or could not make a living in their native Germany. (Sadly, no longer.) We think of him as a composer of religious works like his Messiah or Water Music but he had written a lot of operas before he turned his hand to more sacred subjects.

 

Wexford has a tradition of reviving ‘lost’ operas, so we see a lot of works that we would not in otherwise more traditional settings. I admire them for it and, mainly because my partner loves opera, we make a point of going there in late October when the tourist season has ended and they have their annual opera festival. They even encourage (but do not enforce) the wearing of bow ties and dinner jackets for men attending the main theatre.  

 

I have kept my house in London, which is the centre of the British tourist business and, when I am not working, often enjoy the theatre in the capital. London is one of the great cities in the world for theatre and I usually go to see a spoken word production, just occasionally an operatic one. Put simply, I prefer plays to operas, the spoken word to the sung aria. It is not something I am particularly proud of – it is just my preference.

 

Part of this is related to price. Opera tickets are expensive, whereas I manage to get a theatre seat of about £20-30, by using such things as the TodayTix app and restricting myself to the cheaper seats. I even make my decision occasionally based onprice, not going to The Lady from the Sea, but instead to Clarkston, a gay love story of dubious quality simply because the seats were cheper. (I may revise this decision when I get back to London.)

 

I sometimes go simply because I am curious about the theatre. I went to a matinee of Ragdoll, a play inspired by – bit not officially about - the Patty Hearst story, where she became a participant in robbing banks with the Symbionise Liberation Army, who had kidnapped and raped her. I learned that many of the followers of Charles Manson came from privileged backgrounds and been seduced by the certainty to ‘liberators’ like Manson.

 

Both Clarkston and Ragdoll were short plays without intervals, as was Mary Page Marlowe, about a fictitious American woman which was written by the actor Tracey Letts and starred Susan Sarandon and Andrea Risborough as the woman at different stages of her life. I will not deny that it was the star power of the actors and writer that drew me to the play. I am, when all is said and done, as much a star-fucker as anyone else.

 

I could not name many figures in the world of opera – a few singers like Willard White and Maria Callas, who are as much stars as their theatrical counterparts. Many opera goers will be as aware of the abilities of the performers and the intricacies of the plots as their theatre going equivalents, if not more so. Opera is almost made for the anorak tendency of some fans to get to know the ins and outs of the performers.

 

Going to the theatre, however, is probably a more results-based experience than the opera, where the high price of tickets coupled with the sense of occasion it generates, is more likely to result in a better reception for a traditional version than it possibly merits. For all the reputation of opera goers for expressing their disapproval, lots of this must come from the breaking of tradition at the opera, which is probably less tolerated than at the theatre.

 

Reinterpretation of, for example, Shakespeare is almost compulsory these days, leading to some eccentricities on the part of directors keen to reinterpret the bard in their own way. In the conservative world of the opera, you mess with tradition at your peril, as some directors have found out to their cost. Going to the theatre is fundamentally an intellectual exercise, while going to the opera is related to the occasion. This is why I prefer theatre to opera.

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspt.com

TAKING PILLS EVERY DAY

Just some of my daily pills intake

What is the difference between youth and old age? I had been happy enough to consider myself middle-aged until a recent visit to the doctor who had given me a series of pills I had to take very day. These are statins and Metformin, tablets for diabetes, which both my mother and grandmother suffered from and so it is hardly a surprise that I have it too. Every night and morning I have to remember to take my pills.

No longer can I point out the tablets that the average male and female take over the course of a lifetime with that mixture of scorn and dismissal as I now have to take daily pills. I can no longer pty the man I overheard who had to get up every two hours in the night to pee. I have to do the same thing myself these days as my bladder is no longer strong enough to survive a night in bed without a visit to the loo. No wonder people want a private bathroom when they book a hotel room. Walking across the corridor does not seem that like a minor inconvenience when you have to do it in the middle of the night.

 

Add to the daily tablets I have to take the occasional course of antibiotics for a bladder infection and you have quite a few pills that have to be taken every day. This, I have belatedly discovered, is the real difference between youth and old age: your body is slowly but surely declining in its ability to ward off disease.

 

Leonardo di Caprio has recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday, although he has not settled down to start a family yet and is still going out with younger women, these days half his age. He says that he still feels like he is thirty rather than fifty. God luck to him but sooner or later old age will catch up with him and he will have to get up in the night (if he does not do so already) and start taking the tablets to ward off the effects of old age.

What did Mark Twain say? Only two things in life are inevitable – death and taxes. There is no point in trying to avoid either of them, the first because it comes to us all and the second because sooner or later the Inland Revenue (what Americans call the IRS) will catch up with you eventually. Better to pay your share and have a good moan. Almost everyone moans about taxes because we take the result for granted but disparage the means of collection.

 

Still, I am able to work, to walk and to drive – three of the most important things to me. I rarely use the car and am certainly not going to return to driving guiding, which is simply too much hard work and expense for the reward. I often take people around on public transport and hardly ever bring the car into central London, the cost of parking and congestion charge being too high. I also get free public transport so why not take advantage of it?

 

I am blessed in finding my work enjoyable and interesting and have managed to adapt my career gradually to my aging and failing body. My mind, however, remains sharp. Although I forget names of people and words occasionally, they usually come back to me, so I have decided to continue to work until, as I said to a colleague only the other day, “I drop”. Not that I have any plans to do so anytime soon. That is one decision that is out of my hands. 

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

WNY I AM (STILL) A ZIONIST

The flag of Israel, recognised by the UN in 1948

It is almost like admitting to being a paedophile these days – saying you are a supporter of Israel when there has been virtually universal international condemnation of their actions in Gaza, where women, children and journalists have been killed by the Israeli Defence Force. In the name of wiping out Hamas which they (rightly) see as their mortal enemy, Israel seems to be conducting a policy of ethnic cleansing in the areas they have conquered.

I should say first of all that there are two types of Zionist – those that think Israel is like any other country and can attract criticism and condemnation if it does things that are wrong. Then there are those that think everything Israel does should be defended and justified. There are similarly two types of people who believe in a Palestinian state – those who think it can coexist with Israel and those who think Israel should be abolished in order to create it. 

 

In both cases, I am a believer in the first definition of a Zionist and a supporter of a state for the Palestinians. This means I support a ‘two state solution’ (a phrase you do not hear often these days) in which Israel lives side by side with its Palestinian neighbours. If might be too much to hope that the two countries would do so in peace, but it is essential to the future of the Middle East that they each recognise the others right to exist.

 

Many Israelis are suspicious of the Palestinian desire for a separate state because they say that this will only allow them to move their rockets closer to the Israeli border. They prefer to see the Palestinians as contained in an area where they cannot threaten Israel. In that way, Israel can continue to exist in security if not in peace. Safety and security come above everything else – the rights of the oppressed and the need to make peace permanent.

 

For what it is worth, I think that what the Palestinians lack is a Mahatma Gandhi or a Nelson Mandela, someone who says to his people: “We may not like these people but we have to live with them, so we had better learn to do so.” Everything that comes out of Palestinian leaders seems to say: “Burn, destroy and abolish Israel, so we can create a Palestinian nation in its place.” Is it any wonder that the Israelis have stopped listening?

 

If anyone should know about ethnic cleansing and the destruction of a people, it is the Jews. They suffered – as they often remind us – at the hands of the Nazis and were systematically and comprehensively destroyed in the Holocaust, surely the worst example of mass killing devised by man. “And now they are doing the same to us,” said a Palestinian guide to the Holocaust Museum, according to my partner, who has a lot of sympathy for their cause.

 

Even if they succeeded in destroying Israel, what would happen to the roughly six million Jewish people who live there today? This is a hugely significant number, of course, and I dare say that even those who are most vociferously anti-Zionist are not suggesting the reintroduction of Zyklon B to solve the problem. I make no apology for using it, however, as the matter of what to do about Israel’s Jews is not going to go away.

 

They are hardly going to end up in Florida, are they? Even if the USA supports Israel’s war against the Palestinians, the country would be unlikely to welcome in its people. They have an increasingly closed-border attitude and a hostile view of incomers, both legal and illegal, despite the fact that they rely on them for a badly paid and non-unionised workforce who will work at jobs that ‘real’ Americans are increasingly reluctant to do.

 

We are rapidly approaching the eightieth anniversary of the establishment of Israel by the United Nations in 1948 after the horrors of the Holocaust became clear. I am old enough to remember how (almost) everybody supported Israel in the six-day war in which it was fighting for survival and defeated the Arab - and undemocratic - enemies that surrounded it. As Howard Jacobsen has said, they should have lost that war to retain public support.

 

But this is a very western approach to the problem. Israel wanted – indeed needed – to defeat its enemies to survive. They knew that defeat would result in destruction and wanted to continue to exist rather than be loved. Everybody hates us: we don’t care, as Millwall’s sing with a bit of sarcastic pride. A country’s first duty is to protect its people and the failure to acknowledge this is what is holding the Arabs back.

For various reasons – many originating in Jewish contempt of Arabs, it has to be said – Israel has never been accepted as legitimate by the Arabs. When we saw the film about the Palestinians, there was little doubt about the wish to destroy the Jewish state by the Arab rock-throwers, who were aiming their stones at Israeli soldiers with the aim of driving them out so that a Palestinian state could be established - without any Jewish presence.

 

We seem to be no nearer a solution to the problems of the middle-East. Jews keep voting for Netanyahu, who has never accepted the idea of a Palestinian state; Palestinians want to see Israel destroyed so that this Palestinian state can be set up without Jews; believers in a two-state solution like me are dismissed as hopelessly naïve and unrealistic. Well, let idealism and naivety triumph over defeatism and a repeat of the holocaust.  

 

This explains why I am still why a Zionist, albeit an increasingly reluctant and apologetic one.

Edwin Lerner 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

CHRUCH BUT NOT RELIGION

Rev Giles Fraser, the kind of priest I admire

I believe two things when it comes to religion: first, that there is no after life. ‘This is it. It’s all we have,’ a friend said to me not long ago. An afterlife in heaven might prove a little dull – being nice to people all the time, not enjoying sex or sleep or food - the things we like on this earth. That was best expressed by John Mortimer’s father in his play A Voyage Around My Father in which the same father railed against the sheer pointlessness of life in Heaven.

The other thing I believe is that the creation of religious belief is one of the most creative things humanity has done. Almost every society has religion and a belief system based on the afterlife. That was instilled to make people behave themselves and accept their lot in life on this earth (as another friend said). The existence of an afterlife in which you are rewarded for not creating a fuss is a fairly cynical way of looking at Heaven but a realistic one.

 

It is for this reason that, despite being seen as an atheist who has no belief in the afterlife, I still go to church (occasionally) to reaffirm my belief, not so much in religion as in the church which is a manifestation of it. Religion may be ‘the opiate of the peoples’, as Karl Marx said, but it is still an effective one. Marx had little ability to manage his own life and was very dependent on his friend Engels for financial assistance but he did hit on a few truths here.

 

Christian Aid, a charity I support, puts it well when they thought up the slogan: ‘We believe in life before death.’ People might – or might not – have faith in an afterlife in which their good deeds and acceptance of their fate in this life are rewarded in Heaven, but the charity wants to concentrate on bringing a degree of fairness to this life on earth before death inevitably claims us, as it must do for all – rich and poor on this earth.

 

Once, when I went to a talk given by some African-American writer, he has one of his characters say words to the effect that slavery does not exist in Heaven. Life as a slave was so miserable – giving the lie to people who say and think it is best for those same black people – that it was impossible it could exist in the afterlife as well as this one. I agree with this – it is impossible to imagine a Heaven in which people are not both free and equal.

 

Freedom and equality cannot exist side by side in this world but are alternatives. Start everybody from the same line and some will reach the finish post before others by virtue of ability, luck or the support of parents who are able to help their offspring. Do not underestimate the power of nepotism. We may talk about the dangers of being born with a silver spoon in your mouth but the dangers of a poor background are, in reality, far worse.

 

That is why the church has so often failed people: it encourages them to accept their lot, when it should be supporting them if they rise up against it. The only successful societies that were unashamedly atheist (with ‘museums of atheism’ of all things) were communist ones but their failure has led to churches being packed once again in those same former communist countries that once rejected their teachings.

 

Chruches did not grow because they were imposed on an unwilling people but because those same people wanted them – and still want them – as they believed in a higher power controlling their destiny and at least keeping a tally of what they did and did not do so they could be rewarded (or punished) in the next world. Belief in an afterlife is so strong that only man made societies can reject it and even they have limited success in this.

 

Vladimir Putin is supposed to have embraced the Russian Orthodox church because, presumably, be believed it would be worthwhile. (He is, after all, a politician.) However, he proved to be unwilling to prostrate himself before God, saying words to the effect that was leader of Russia, what did he have to gain by being answerable to some (probably fictitious) deity. He showed his true colours here - not believing in God but knowing that others do.

 

I remain convinced that priests do enormous good in society, going to places which social workers have given up on, and offering comfort to many people who would otherwise face darkness. (Giles Fraser, a writer and priest I admire, has said this.) However, I cannot believe in the Bible as being a true account of how God made the earth and, even if say the Creed when I go to church, I do not really believe in the truth of it in my heart.

 

Yet, I do not think that I am being a Putin-like hypocrite in going to church. Working as a tourist guide, I tend to go in and out of churches quite a lot and, evidently, some of it has rubbed off on me. To fully appreciate a church, you have to experience it as a worshipper who attends a service there sometimes and, even if it is just evensong, you should go to hear the Psalms, readings and choir, who make up so much of the modern church.

 

That church needs worshippers, more than it needs sceptics like me, to survive, so I do not sneer at those who believe in the literal truth of the Bible even if I cannot share their beliefs. In essence I take my religion seriously – but not literally. That is why I cannot believe in an afterlife and I accept that death is the end of what we have on this earth. It is also why I am getting ready for it as my years advance.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide,blogspot.com