cynicalbastard

regular readers will know that just after the Yorkshire Dales, Northumbria comes right up there on my list of ‘most beautiful places in the world’. So I was heartened by this campaign to return to the Northumbrian nation their most precious relic. By way of t’Grauniad. They don’t quite say ‘we recognise no king but a Percy king’, but they obviously mean it.

Forty pilgrims braved the bitterly cold weather to walk eight miles in the footsteps of the monks who carried the body of St Cuthbert from Chester-le-Street to Durham.

The march was organised by the Northumbrian Association as part of its campaign to have the Lindisfarne Gospels returned to the region from the British Library in London. The manuscripts were created by Eadfrith the monk on Lindisfarne and dedicated to St Cuthbert, Northumberland’s patron saint, who died in 687.

They were intended to stay in Durham cathedral with St Cuthbert’s body, but were taken by Henry VIII in 1537 and have been kept at the British Library since the nineteenth century.

Northumbrian Association treasurer John Danby told the Newcastle Journal: “The Gospels were written in the north-east and were meant to stay here. They’re part of our history and heritage.

“The British Library has claimed we wouldn’t be able to look after the Gospels and have said scholars wouldn’t be willing to travel to the north-east to visit them,” he said. “But as one of our members pointed out, we invented the railway for them to travel here.”

The gospels were seen by 180,000 people while they were on loan in the north-east in 2001.

Sorry have I missed something in this story? Iranian guards take prisoner fifteen sailors and Royal Marines. The latter are usually as hard as nails. And the Brits go meekly, submissively, into Iranian custody.

Why weren’t they authorised to use force to protect themselves? Why didn’t the ship they were from threaten to blow the revolutionary guard out of the water? Why aren’t we threatening a bombing raid on southern Iran? I can’t imagine the ‘merkins letting their guys be taken in the same way, can you? Shit, what’s the point of having nukes if we’re not dropping them somewhere? I mean, we’re renewing Trident, and its always best to use up your old stocks before buying in new (environmentally sound, one might say). Tehran’s a shit-hole anyway, could do with a clear out.

Fuck ‘not inflaming a tense situation’. You take our guys prisoner, you pay the price.

This has been Fox News, UK style. I say ‘bring back Lord Palmerston’.

So it turns out ecstasy is an extremely safe drug.

Anyone want to lay bets on the first media organization to get Paul Betts to comment? After all, death of a child always makes you an appropriate person to quote on pubic and health policy.

And a child must have been murdered over night. Sara Payne better be ready to get her meejah fix.

Got a couple of emails about ‘lost’ comments. Currently I’m getting around 200-250 spam comments every day. Anything held in the spam queue gets wiped without checking. If you comment with any links in the comment, you get treated as spam.

Sorry, but I love the wonderful brilliance of this.

It might be on Fox and all, but it ranks with a ‘Richard and Judy’ fxed phone in for coolness, I mean, whose gonna be taken in? And do any of those people matter?

Has fundamentalist athiest Richard Dawkins finally taken one step too far? Suggesting the not-exactly-pretty woman at the centre of the BA cross scandal had ‘one of the stupidest faces I’d ever seen’ is one thing. It’s all in a day’s work for the arch-rationalist bully covering his ears and shouting ‘la la la I can’t hear you.’.

But taking on Peter Kay, one of Britain’s most-loved comedians? Not very bright at all really. Certainly, it won’t be wise to come up to Greater Manchester any time soon.

And what’s the nature of his complaint? That people who happen to believe in God find comfort in it. Well, shucks, maybe that’s the point? And maybe the search for that comfort is rather central to the human experience—it hasn’t done badly for our culture in terms of art, music and all that stuff that makes life worth living after all. We can’t all find our sense of purpose in a blinding lack of self-awareness, a surfeit of smugness and total intolerance, as does Dawkins.

Funny, though, that he suggests his problem with religion is about ‘truth’. Never mind the rather deep philosophical nature of the search for truth, Dawkins’ connection to fact is somewhat lacking throughout ‘The God Delusion’. The permanent scar in my wall from the book being bounced against it was caused by the book’s lack of understanding of history, philosophy, ethics, or, well, anything very much.

And, patently, what ordinary people tend to think and feel. Course, they’re all ’stupid’ as far as the dear Prof. is concerned. And why should stupid people be allowed to publish books? It might affect Dawkins’ own future plans, of course.