Category Archives: pensées

70 years of Few and Phew

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In Roald Dahl’s autobiography Going Solo, one tale he tells is of going out by himself for a drink in wartime London. He was wearing his RAF uniform. He came across a gang of bruisers who had had a few too many and were all set to beat up someone, anyone in uniform. He was their next obvious target, until he turned round and they saw his pilot’s wings. Then they left him alone.

That is how highly RAF pilots were respected during the Battle of Britain. Not that Dahl flew in that at all – rather ironically he had already been invalided out of flying duties due to a bad crash earlier. But anyway.

It’s 70 years since Churchill’s the Few speech, in case you hadn’t heard. (“Excuse me, sir, I want to join the Few.” / “Sorry, we’ve got too many” etc.) There’s an interesting set of pages on the Beeb. This one describes why the other side came second: our side actually (despicably, if you ask me) used tactics and planning and good communication while Jerry was more of a “it’s better to travel hopefully than arrive” disposition. There was also the simple fact that we were over home territory, so if our boys baled out they landed at home and could get back into another plane and take off again. For them, the war carried on. And such tactics as Goring had made the somewhat elementary error, when dealing with Britain, of requiring 4 consecutive days of blue skies. Is this where “blue sky thinking” comes from?

And then there’s this one, which gives a day-by-day graphic of planes and men lost from 10 July-31 October 1940. And, wow. Take 15 August 1940, the Luftwaffe’s worst day. Boys in blue, 35 aircraft and 11 men lost. Boys in grey: 76 aircraft, 128 men, the imbalance being because our planes were single seat fighters and theirs were both fighters and multi-crew bombers.

On the RAF’s worst day, 31 August: 41 planes and 9 men on our side, 39 and 21 on theirs. Looking at the chart I don’t think there’s a single day when our losses outweighed theirs.

It’s hard to talk about this and not sound like I’m gloating or discussing cricket scores. Whenever I catch myself heading in that direction I try to think of it in the terms of the time: the death columns in the papers, the telegrams from the War Office and all that.

Doesn’t stop the warm glow, though. And if you should chance to meet a Battle of Britain veteran, take time to thank them.

Vroom vroom bork bork bork

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In Switzerland, apparently, speeding fines are determined by the speed you were doing and by your ability to pay. So, the Swedish gent who was clocked by Swiss police doing 290km/h or 180mph in a Mercedes sports car “could be given a world-record speeding fine of SFr1.08m ($1m; £656,000), prosecutors say.”
This being Switzerland there will be four words for “schadenfreude“, one of which is “schadenfreude”.
And yet …
This guy is Swedish, which I happen to know means he comes from a land where the average speed limit is 80 or 90km/h. Occasionally, just occasionally, a really good stretch of road will let you up to 100 and sometimes they go mad and let you do 110 for a stretch of about five miles before welcome sanity kicks in and they rope you back to 80 again.
For ease of reference, 8km = 5m. Do the maths.
Approaching a junction, even if you’re in a 110 zone, the limit goes down to 70. And there are a lot of speed cameras. They’re sign-posted but they’re also unobtrusive – just slender little blue poles by the side of the road.
Not that most Swedes pay the limits the slightest attention, as far as I could see. We were rocking in the slipstream of Saabs and Volvos more times than I could remember. But even so, I do sympathise that this guy has probably wanted to go fast since he was born, and putting him a Merc in another country is just asking for trouble.
Should have been a fighter pilot, then …

Women can wear dresses too, says CofE

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The CofE is to allow women bishops. Excellent.

The saddest part of the Beeb’s report is the line “although supporters were celebrating a breakthrough, some traditionalists had left the synod chamber in tears.” Well, of course, and that was the teeth-grittingly inevitable bit that had to come. This was not going to happen without a lot of people feeling that the church they love has slapped them in the face. Sadly, the nature of that love is not the fully-featured bi-directional give and take of a proper loving relationship. It’s the love of a stalker for their victim; of Mrs Van Hopper for the future second Mrs De Winter; of Michael Corleone for his family. It’s a love that says “I give you so much because I love you, now you must respect that love and do exactly what I say or else you don’t love me in return.” In any such relationship, for the secondary partner to have a future they can can only tear themselves away, maybe in tears themselves, knowing that any damage caused is only by the first partner refusing to let go and is not their fault.

Don’t let the door hit you as you process out in all your finery.

I remain utterly baffled why anyone who would consider conversion to Catholicism over this issue isn’t a Catholic already. What does the future hold in the eyes of these people from Planet Trad? Especially the ones with wives and kids? I’ll tell you.Palpatine Benedict will regard them as used goods and his open arms of welcome will at the same time usher them into a securely guarded enclave of the church behind several firewalls where they will be second-class citizens forever more, but they won’t mind, because like the denizens of Hell in CS Lewis’s The Great Divorce, they are in a fool’s paradise of their own making. And because the most important thing to them is the absence of women bishops, they will never notice.

On Planet Trad, the whole Reformation was just friends agreeing to disagree; Martin Luther’s Thesis no. 1 was “women clergy now!” while the other 94 were just nitpicking over details; Bloody Mary would have been Lovely Mary if only Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer hadn’t insisted on such dangerously liberal issues as letting women read the Bible in English. (Thankfully they will admit that more sophisticated avenues of dialogue have evolved since those days.) Whereas in the fantasy world that I live in, the whole ministry of Jesus Christ might be seen as instituting the salvation of all humankind in a manner equally applicable to every nation and everysociety of every part of the world in every era of history (and that includes the utterly unimaginable future), in actual fact it was to set up an exclusive, male-dominated, highly ritualised church based heavily upon the rites and practices of an extinct pagan empire.

I don’t have a theology degree but I’m suspecting the divine purposes ran deeper than that.

So, three cheers for the synod, and just don’t get me started on Jeffrey John.