It was a small coffee shop, not a chain, not especially fashionable, not particularly busy. There seemed to be a mother and daughter running the place. Above where there were a few biscuits and cakes there was a sign stating that supplies were difficult. Probably a result of the driver shortage, I thought. And underneath that, ‘Please bare with us.’ I looked at the sign, and said to the older woman, “I will, if you will.” She gave me a quizzical look, noticed me looking at the sign, registered it herself, smiled, and said, “It’s not going to happen.”

Michael Portillo was a Minister in the U.K. government from 1987 to 1997. When he was a politician he was frequently derided. These days he presents a number of television programmes. He is now a television personality and is often applauded. The late Sir David Amess was his parliamentary private secretary for ten years. In the Daily Telegraph on Saturday October 16th Michael Portillo began his article,

“Another parliamentary colleague has been murdered. I did not know Jo Cox. But I entered the House of Commons because my predecessor Sir Anthony Berry was killed by the IRA in the Brighton bombing. In 1990, my fellow Conservative MP and a dear friend, Ian Gow, was blown up at his home.
Members of Parliament may deserve many criticisms. But they do not lack courage. The chance that they will be slain doing their duty is now significant.”

The article then goes on to describe the hardworking constituency MP and friend Sir David was.

Of course there has been widespread comment on this latest murder and whether or not it will mean MPs are less able to meet their constituents. Both David Amess and Jo Cox, a Labour MP, were murdered while conducting their regular ‘surgeries’.

My awareness through all this is the ways in which the job of the politician has been denigrated increasingly in recent years. Members of the television and print media have focussed on the personal failings, mistakes, verbal gaffes, bad manners, supposed misuse of expenses and sexual misconduct of politicians rather than the work they do or the service they are attempting to give. I have the impression that the interviewer is there to trip the politician up and glory in their fall rather than to try and discover what they think or hope to achieve.

And it’s not only in the official media but, I’m told, in the ‘social media’ politicians are among those subjected to online abuse. And the practice has grown among otherwise intelligent people to use, in speech and in print, nicknames for politicians that in any school would be banned and the child using the nickname taken to task for bullying. Here in the U.K. at least one politician has contributed to this climate by referring to another as ‘scum’. The policies maybe. The person, no.

All too often, it seems to me it’s a matter of ‘sneer, smear and not a solution offered’. Sneer and smear is on the spectrum that has murder at one end, and at the other, respect. Those who destroy someone’s reputation with words are there along with those who use a knife.

The fundamental Christian and, surely, Humanist belief lies in having respect for every person no matter who they are or what they’ve done. Respect is the starting point for Christian love and its practice because of the belief that everyone is God created. Respect is also the starting point for Humanist belief and practice because our humanity is what we all share and we hope for that respect for ourselves.

Many years ago one of my nephews had two pet lambs. When asked what he would call them he said ‘Piggy Muldoon’ and ‘Maggie Thatcher’. You can guess the era. The boy’s mother said, ‘No.’ Not on account of her political persuasion but because, she said, they were each Prime Ministers and that to use their nicknames did not respect their Office. The boy called the lambs, ‘Mr Muldoon’ and ‘Mrs Thatcher’.

A most distinguished English visitor happened to call and met the boy and the lambs. He asked their names and was told, ‘Mr Muldoon’ and ‘Mrs Thatcher.’ The visitor said to the boy, “What do you know about Mrs Thatcher?”
Thinking he was asking about the lamb, the boy replied, “She’s very gutsy.” (‘gutsy’ New Zealand child speak for greedy).
Thinking the boy was speaking about the Prime Minister, the visitor laughed and said, “I must tell her when I get home, she will be pleased.” (‘gutsy’ English adult speak for bravery).

The Office was respected. The mother was relieved.

The English novelist Nevil Shute spent his latter years in Australia. I really enjoyed his novels when I first read them in, I suppose, the late fifties and the sixties. He was a wonderful storyteller. I gather from ‘Wikipedia’ that, in his novels,
‘Where there is a romantic element, sex is referred to only obliquely. A recurrent theme is the bridging of social barriers such as class (Lonely Road and Landfall), race (The Chequer Board), or religion (Round the Bend).’

I have been sorting out my books and found and read again, ‘The Chequer Board’. It is a great read and, as the Wikipedia article suggests, has the background theme of bridging racial barriers. However this novel reprinted in 2009 could not, I think, be reprinted today. The word ‘n….r’ is used in different settings, matter of factually, derogatorily and abusively. Now I may not write it down in full.

He also uses the word ‘Christ’ as an expletive. I don’t like that use of the word in print, or even less spoken, in that way. However I do realise that people did and some still do use it like this and when Nevil Shute uses it it is true to the character in the book. He never uses ‘f..k’.

Sometimes I have the subtitles on programmes on the television especially if my hearing is not so good. On a Sunday evening watching a contemporary thriller I was a little surprised to see that whenever a character said ‘f..k’, which different characters said frequently, the subtitles wrote ‘glock’. I’m told that the machine (only it’s not a machine it’s ‘software’) that creates the subtitles has a built in rejection of some words and substitutes another. Be it a machine or software a human being has thought to do it.

The fact is that certain words, unacceptable now, were used in the past. We cannot cancel out that past usage. And I fear that if we join those who say we cannot read those books now, recognising their historical context, or that these books must never be reprinted so that they cannot be read, then we are in danger of joining those who invoked a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for ‘The Satanic Verses’ or, in a much earlier age, of joining Savonarola in his ‘bonfires of vanities’.

I said, “You go ahead. You’re faster than I am.”
He said, “No, you go. Then I can pass you. I enjoy that!”

Statistics have never been my strong point but words I really enjoy. Some of the Covid statistics I have found bewildering and the use of words in presenting those statistics sloppy. To me there is a world of difference between someone dying ‘of’ Covid and someone dying ‘with’ Covid. The former suggests to me Covid as the primary cause of a death whereas the latter, the ‘with’ suggests that Covid was present but that the death was probably because of ‘underlying causes’. The BBC report always makes clear the ‘with’ refers to a positive diagnosis within the previous twenty eight days of a death.

The correct use of the words seems to me especially important because of the fear that surrounds this virus. The reality is that people do die and that there are many different causes. Of course Covid-19 is a significant cause especially now but it is not the only cause of death. It is the only cause, apart from murders, being reported on daily.

One article I found helpful recently was reprinted in ‘The Week’. In it I read that the vast majority of people who have died ‘from’ Covid-19 in England in the first half of this year had not been fully vaccinated. This ‘from’ I assume is ‘of’ but perhaps it is ‘with’. Maybe it doesn’t really matter

The information in the article is very important because it made clear that of 51,000 deaths only 256 deaths were classed as ‘breakthrough’ cases – in patients who’d been infected at least 14 days after their second jab. The vaccination programme has clearly been critical in preventing the spread of this virus which makes the anti-vaccination campaign and those who choose not to be vaccinated all the more astonishing to me. Clearly it is those who have not been vaccinated and have Covid-19 who are occupying hospital beds, placing a strain on the health system and preventing others who need hospital treatment from getting it.

The ‘I want doesn’t get,’ of my childhood is replaced by, ‘I want must have.’ Only in this case it’s, ‘I want wont have!’