The sleeper wakes...
THE LONG DAY CLOSES (maybe…)
10.20 pm. Reuben sleeps yet. I’ll just go & have a look. He’s stretched across the bed giving a plausible impression of a small woodland creature exposed in deep hibernation. All this could change in a heartbeat. I shall proceed, more in fond hope than reasonable expectation…
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An undramatic first day back at school. No one’s looking at me as if I have already started to become one of the Undead. Some students took me by surprise with some completed holiday work. I have got over the disappointment now & will lay into the marking with a will tomorrow evening.
A parent rung me to complain that her 12-year-old son was not being sufficiently stimulated by Drama within the school. The parents had selected St Chris because of its reputation for high quality performing arts & were feeling let down that we had not spotted his lambent talents & had him headlining a cast. At his previous school, he was always in the leading role...
I began a number of sentences but had them scythed down before reaching the first subordinate clause. In the end I had to resort to that good old telephone standby, the Steamroller Utterance. Here one refrains from comment, favouring all general statements with nothing more than polite but monosyllabic acknowledgement, until a specific question is asked. Then, in a moderately paced, pleasantly modulated voice one unrolls the answer, paying absolutely no attention to any interruption whatsoever, however peremptory or how ever frequently repeated. On completion, if the vocal activity on the other end of the line continues, one simply asks politely whether the answer needs to be repeated.
This tactic repeated generally works with all but the most fanatically driven of parents. Mrs. T. was a lightweight in comparison to some & I was able to replace the receiver after a mere 20 minutes of sweetly reasoned, densely packed complaint. I must remember to smile sympathetically at the son – a thwart, hunted-looking child – when I see him tomorrow.
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11.52 pm. Score so far: Reuben has woken up twice & been placated twice. I’m awaiting a third rising from the arms of Morpheus, at which point it’ll be R. & I side by side on the sofa watching continuous coverage of Celebrity Big Brother until it finishes at 4.00 am…
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Finally, I must share this cutting from the letters page of the December 30th edition of The Guardian. It had me smiling in spite of the gravity of the context...
Thursday December 30, 2004
The Bishop of Lincoln (Letters, December 29) asks to be preserved from religious people who try to explain the tsunami disaster. As well he might. Religious explanations for such tragedies range from loopy (it's payback for original sin) through vicious (disasters are sent to try our faith) to violent (after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, heretics were hanged for provoking God's wrath). But I'd rather be preserved from religious people who give up on trying to explain, yet remain religious.
In the same batch of letters, Dan Rickman says "science provides an explanation of the mechanism of the tsunami but it cannot say why this occurred any more than religion can". There, in one sentence, we have the religious mind displayed before us in all its absurdity. In what sense of the word "why"? Does plate tectonics not provide the answer?
Not only does science know why the tsunami happened, it can give precious hours of warning. If a small fraction of the tax breaks handed out to churches, mosques and synagogues had been diverted into an early warning system, tens of thousands of people, now dead, would have been moved to safety.
Let's get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering.
Richard Dawkins
Oxford
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12.00 am. And so to bed…
12:07:19 AM 
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