Arthur C Clarke is dead

What a sad week: Terry Pratchett is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. No-one comes close as an F&SF comic writer and inspiration -- a pole star who says to me that (at least once) it can be done. Someone can write fantasy that's funny, shrewd, happy, with developed characters and crafted plots. The covers of his books lead you to expect some naff swords-and-sorcery romp; the insides persuade you are in the presence of a fine comic novelist. He too, by the way, like Clarke (and like me) trained as a physicist first.

Then Arthur C Clarke, aged 90, finally gives up his struggle with gravity and decay and leaves the planet by the conventional route. I read everything of his I could lay my hands on when I was a teenager. Like P G Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, and (to a lesser extent because I read him later in life) Terry Pratchett, his ghostly presence shapes what I do and how I think about how writing should be.

If not from him, where else did I get this:

• Studied physics at King's College London and then became a writer
• Was passionate about good, hard, accurate science and maths
• Was fundamentally optimistic about human beings and the future and the galaxy
• Saw technology as a navigable route to magic and wonder and aspiration

Clarke has left instructions for a strictly secular funeral. As a younger man he had a correspondence with CS Lewis which resulted eventually in a meeting in a pub. Each brought along a companion (Lewis brought J R R Tolkien). Lewis was the better theologian; Clarke the better scientist. Each adorned the worlds of fiction and popular apologetic. Each is so close to my heart. I am so privileged and enriched to have been able to drink deeply of them.

Mission: E Stanley Jones

Am rereading E Stanley Jones, missionary to India, friend of Gandhi and I believe several times nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. What a genius. Writing in the 1920s he anticipated, and answered, all the modern critiques of missions. And his book is soul food.

Are missionaries 'international meddlers, creed mongers to the East, feverish ecclesiastics compassing land and sea to gain another proselyte?' Or are we satisfying some 'racial superiority complex' (as many democracy and environment activists surely are today)? Is there 'spiritual impertinence to come to a nation that can produce a Gandhi or a [Rabindrath] Tagore?'

Jones replies that both East and West need three things: 'an adequate goal for character'; 'a free, full life'; 'God'. Christlikeness is the supreme goal for every character. Christ is life realized, not theorized. And Jesus is what God is like. Hence we speak.

Here are some of his juicier quotes:

'Jesus appeals to the soul as light appeals to the eye, as truth fits the conscience, as beauty speaks to the aesthetic nature. For Christ and the soul are made for one another, and when they are brought together deep speaks to deep and wounds answer wounds.'

'Religion is the life of God in the soul issuing in the kingdom of God on earth.'

The quotes are from THE CHRIST OF INDIAN ROAD

William Booth: who being dead, yet speaketh

Have been looking up some quotes from the 19th century reformer and founder of the Salvation Army, Gen William Booth:

“While women weep, as they do now, I'll fight; while children go hungry, as they do now, I'll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I'll fight; while there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I'll fight, I'll fight to the very end!”


“To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labour. You must in some way or other graft upon the man's nature a new nature, which has in it the element of the Divine.”

Reading Tolstoy and improving my domestic relations

Am enjoying Anna Karenina and going occasionally weak-kneed at the range and depth of the old boy's characterizations. That's what keeps the pages turning, even during the bits on new theories of Russian agricultural productivity. He even tells you what the dog's feeling on at least two occasions.

Am struck by two other things:
1) If the character Levin really is a portrait of Leo himself, he can't have been an easy bloke to live with.

2) I rather like the Russian habit of referring to people by Christian name and patronymic. It seems to add a certain old-fashioned dignity to conversation. Suggested it to my wife as a way of boosting her domestic performance:

'Could you put the samovar on, Cordelia Paulova?'

But alas I feel I would get the reply

'Do it yourself, Glenn Michaelovich.'

Anna Karenina (Wordsworth Classics)

Poverty: Bono demostrates why rock stars are the new prophets

We are supposed to have a war on something, but it isn't 'terror'.

Bono at the NAACP awards

The emmaus community, and social entrepreneurship

Talked recently with the founder of Emmaus Cambridge, who has just been awarded a CBE. Emmaus is a community that offers work and accommodation for single men. Many of them are people who, otherwise, would be washed in and out of the Magistrates' Courts as regularly as if carried on the tides.

1.When Emmaus was being set up, apparently a junior planner was handling the application and made a long list of every planning reason why it should be turned down: they proposed to handle scrap metal on the site. It was on the flight path of Cambridge airport. A senior planner, however, apparently took the case over and was determined to use planning law positively and find every reason why it could be allowed. The plans were passed by a single vote.

2. Emmaus Cambridge cost £2m to set up but careful research has suggested it saves the government £600,000 a year.

3. Government is extremely weak at letting social entrepreneurs experiment with government cash. Only Northern Rock directors get to do that, and they took it all. Otherwise, perhaps, there could be an Emmaus in every town.

Writing: Not a normal life

1. Got the latest royalty statement from my publisher. Books sold in the last period: approaching 1,000. They're good books, too. Royalties paid: Not even near to £100. Cue half-hearted rant: wish I had an agent, what am I doing wrong, etc.

2. Yesterday got a phone call on a satellite-delayed line from Singapore. I entered a competition before Christmas organized by the Singapore Govt and they were telling me I'd won: one A4 piece of paper with marks on it translates into two business-class roundtrip tickets to Singapore plus a stay in a five-star hotel. It's all here

It partially makes up for being roughed up by publishers. I still want to get them back, though, by publishing a best-seller.

Poverty: Those wonderful funds

'Major global health financiers, such as the Global fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation are showing returns on their investments. In less than four years, financing through the Global Fund alone has resulted in more than 1.1m people receiving treatment for AIDS. Now, overall, more than 2m people receive AIDS treatment-- a tenfold increase in four years ...

'And more than 30m insecticide-treated bed nets have been distributed to protect families from malaria. The number of people saved from early death through these interventions is already 2m, and this increases by 100,000 ever month.

Michel Kazatchkine, executive director, Global Fund to fight AIDS, HIV and Malaria in The Economist publication The World in 2008. My italics.

Astronomy: my first non-disappointing comet

Went to the astronomy lecture and viewing at the
Institute of Astronomy last night with my son, and queued up with many others to see Comet Holmes, which has undergone some kind of terrible bad hair day and is half a million times more fuzzy than it was last week -- and now an easy naked eye object.

Fan of astrononmy though I am, I have to admit that most objects in telescopes are a bit of disappointment -- Mars, the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn are about the only really good ones. But this here comet Holmes was definitely the most non-disappointing comet I've seen. Here's some pictures.

Lived faithfully a hidden life

Just finished listening to an abridged version of George Eliot's Middlemarch. The abridgement didn't bring out all it could've -- especially the book's modern-sounding theme, that noble ideals sometimes lead to disappointing lives -- the noble outcomes being subverted by naivety, pride, mistakes, or unforgiving convention.

The abridgement kept Eliot's original ending in full, which was a kind of resurrection for this subverted idealism, and a lovely quote:

that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to
the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Science and religion: Polkinghorne at the Royal Society

I've listened to this three times. It's really good.


Here's roughly where it goes, from the introductory blurb to the lecture.

'Science and religion are both concerned with the search for truth, attainable through well-motivated beliefs. The aspects of reality they investigate are different - in the case of science, the impersonal, physical world; in the case of religion, the transpersonal reality of God. Neither can tell the other what to think in its own domain, but their insights have to bear some consonant relation to each other.

'Science tells theology about the structure and history of the universe and, in particular, emphasises its evolutionary nature.

'Religious insight can set the laws of nature in a more profound context of understanding, so that their deep order, rational beauty and anthropic fine-tuning become intelligible features and need not to be treated as brute facts.

'As a consequence, there is a vigorous and enlightening intellectual exchange between the two."

Spaceflight: The beagle is grounded

Went to a lecture by Prof Colin Pillinger last night. All the times I've seen and heard him, I never realized that he was disabled, hobbling around on two sticks. What a fighter.

• He did Beagle not because it was easy but -- in the Kennedy-like cliche -- because it was hard
• The UK is the fifth richest nation on the planet, but spends on space like we were the 17th richest
• Two-thirds of probes to Mars have failed. The Public Accounts Committee told Pillinger that they didn't want British taxpayers' money involved unless a project was 99% likely to succeed (so why did they let us go to war against Iraq?)
• Beagle II aimed high, briefly caught the imagination of a nation, fired up a new generation of scientists, and increased the £5bn contribution that space already makes to the UK's GDP. Not bad for a failure that cost us less than a quid each.
  
• The folks at the European Space Agency said they'd help pick up where Beagle left off. The date of this proposed mission has shifted from 2007, to 2009, to 2011, to 2013 and now to 2015. ESA, by the way, criticized Pillinger's management skills.
  

On the other hand: one elderly, crippled, eccentric scientist, against all the odds, nearly pulled it off -- nearly put a probe on Mars, nearly dug into its soil, nearly got to a point where it could have made the greatest scientific discovery of them all.

Beagle cost £55m. When I got home, I read that Cambridge County Council has just put a bid in for over £400m of government money, in order to improve Cambridge's congested traffic.

I am beginning to think I may not walk on the moon, after all.

Rolling Back Malaria (not)

The British Medical Association (back in 2004):

"We have the three tools we need to curb malaria deaths—bed nets, effective combination treatment based on artemisinin, and insecticides. What we urgently need to do is make these tools much more widely available to affected communities, which are almost always too poor to pay for them themselves."

"But even with Roll Back Malaria's best efforts [This is a World Health Organization campaign, started ten years ago], only about one in seven children in Africa sleep under a net, and only 2% of children use a net impregnated with insecticide."

State giving to Roll Back Malaria is running at about 10% of the $1bn or so needed per year that would have halved malaria deaths between 1998 and 2010 (and now won't).

Here's how we can buy and distribute some bed nets, at the bargain price of 10 for £27.

Social Justice: The importance of early years

Just read that

'A child’s education developmental score at 22 months can accurately predict educational outcomes at the age of 26.' (Source: the Social Justice Policy Group report Breakthrough Britain set up by David Cameron, overview, p 8.)

So if you assess a 2 year old, you can predict whether in 24 years time they'll have no qualifications at all or just be tidying up the final draft of their PhD.

Here's some data from the same source about marriage, cohabitation and the welfare of very young children:

• Nearly one in two cohabiting parents split up before their child’s fifth birthday,compared to one in twelve married parents
• Three-quarters of family breakdown affecting young children now involves unmarried parents
• If you have experienced family breakdown, you are 75% more likely to fail at school,70% more likely to be a drug addict and 50% more likely to have alcohol problems.

A thanksgiving prayer for the ability to urinate

Not found in common books of liturgy, I reproduce it here with thanks to the peerless Neal Stephenson who puts the prayer into the mouth of Samuel Pepys. (Lithotomy is of course the removal of a gall stone.)

'Lord of the Universe, Your humble servants Samuel Pepys and Daniel Waterhouse pray that you shall bless and keep the soul of the late Bishop of Chester, John Wilkins, who, wanting no further purification in the Kidney of the World, went to your keeping twenty years since. And we give praise and thanks to You for having given us the rational faculties by which the procedure of lithotomy was invented, enabling us, who are further from perfection, to endure longer in this world, urinating freely as the occasion warrants. Let our urine-streams, gleaming and scintillating in the sun's radiance as they pursue their parabolic trajectories earthward, be as an outward and visible sign of Your Grace, even as the knobbly stones hidden in our coat pockets remind us that we are all earth, and we are all sinners. Do you have anything to add, Mr Waterhouse?'

'Only, Amen!'

(Neal Stephenson, The Confusion, p500)

I am reading Stephenson's vast Baroque Cycle, made up of the books Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, historic novels based around the people and the times of the Scientific Revolution -- and I've been reading them for several months -- with something approaching sheer delight.

Humour: anagrams, continued

Here's a couple more:

The London Olympic games = Logical to spend money? H'm.


The Department for Education and Skills = Daft kids learn, on hated Intel computers

Humour: the fine game of nil

I am enjoying some of these wonderful anagrams from this site:

The countryside = No City Dust Here

Astronomers = Moon starers

Evangelist = Evil's Agent

The cockroach = Cook, catch her!

The Morse Code = Here Come Dots

Slot Machines = Cash Lost in 'em

Conversation = Voices Rant On

Software = Swear Oft

Eleven plus two = Twelve plus one

The Meaning of Life = The fine game of nil

To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. =

In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.

and some of the names:

William Shakespeare: I am a weakish speller

Tony Blair, MP = I'm Tory plan B

Virginia Bottomley = I'm an evil Tory bigot

Florence Nightingale = Nigel, Fetch an Iron Leg

Society: how to really, really, really govern badly

Cost of the national probation service: £860m per year

Cost of the headquarters of the National Offender Management Service (into which the entire probation service was folded in 2004): £899m per year.

The probation service had its origin in work done by Christians and churches.

Government took it over in 1907 and it has steadily grown and changed since, providing more and more ways of dealing with offenders other than by jailing them. Between 1910 and 1930, thanks to Probation, the number of people in prison in the UK halved.

In 2001, our government gave the probation service a huge once-in-twenty-years' shakeup.

In 2004, they did it again --merging prison and probation together into the NOMS.

And in 2007, plans are afoot for yet a further epoch-changing restructuring, to allow for private tendering of probation work.

After these three major efforts, they should have got rid of most of the good people by now.

Society: An invisible hand

Four visits in the last month:

1. A tour round Jimmy's Nightshelter in central Cambridge
2. Taking some furniture to be recycled at the Emmaus community north of Cambridge
3. Buying some fairly traded food at the Daily Bread Cooperative in the North of Cambridge
4. Popping in to see the manager of our own St Martin's Centre for the elderly.

Each place exuded peace and a kind of a quiet well-ordered-ness. Each place runs through the hands of many volunteers and a number of full-time staff who are not paid well. Each fights almost daily battles with bureaucracy and politics that threaten to capsize the whole ship. Yet each provides a vital service to a large part of a city.

Each is an expression of Christian faith that is unsung, long-term, wholly appropriate for the 21st century.

Then I read this quote:

'Alongside the political, economic, social and technological revolutions ... which have commanded enormous media attention and coverage ... there has been this far less trumpeted, but equally important revolution in the status and standing of worldwide Christianity. Few have taken on board what is happening.' (Kenneth Hylsom-Smith To the ends of the earth ISBN 978-1-84227-475-0.

A little glimpse of a new world

'... It's a place of welcome and laughter, of healing and hope, of friends and family and justice and new life.

'It's where the homeless drop in for a bowl of soup, and the elderly for someone to chat to. It's where you'll find people learning to pray, coming to faith, struggling with temptation, finding new purpose and a new power to carry it out.

'It's where people bring their own small faith and discover that when they get together with others to worship the true God, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. No church is like this all of the time. But a remarkable number of churches are partly like that for quite a lot of the time.' Tom Wright Simply Christian (ISBN 978-281-05481-7), p. 105.