One emerges from the tomb – as it were – pondering the mish mash of life on the other side. Poppy was reasonably content with the Poets’ Lounge on the P&O Express to Larne.
I’m still thinking about the man who parked his Range Rover [now there’s real prejudice!] at 4.45 pm yesterday on the road between Perth and the M90 and helped himself to a bunch of municipal daffodils from the verge. And a happy Easter to you, sir. The sooner we have those talking lamp-posts in Perth the better. I could have used my mitre as a megaphone and had a go myself.
Like everyone else, I have been pondering why it was wrong to allow service personnel to sell their stories to the press. Well, just to start with, it is distasteful to profit from circumstances in which other people are dying. The weasel words of the 2nd Sea Lord in his interview on the World at One today were just disgraceful – media pressure, money … He made Max Clifford, who was interviewed after him, sound like a paragon of restraint and integrity. Whatever other navigational issues were involved here, there is certainly a weakness in the moral compass department. Who knows where it will end? Clergy who have been croziered by the bishop coming out and selling their stories … what next? Which brings us smoothly back to Denis Healey’s famous remark about being attacked by Sir Geoffrey Howe as ‘like being savaged by a dead sheep.’ And that in turn seems to have some link back into pastoral ministry.