Features

More than ever in the UK, fuel bills now resemble school fees and so, despite the bitter cold, few of us can afford full-on 24-hour heating. But, driven by desperation, I’ve been researching the matter and have discovered several ways of surviving this miserable weather. Forget about replacement double glazing: it looks nasty and it doesn’t pay for itself until you are over 100. But if you don’t mind living in a house that shrieks ‘credit crunch’ to visitors, there are ways of keeping the cold out and the bills down. First attend to your windows: attach cling film with double-sided tape (try your local DIY shop) to your window frames. Apply a hair dryer to get it taut as a drum. It lasts one winter.

It being the new year and all, I thought I’d introduce you to some new mentalists, just in case you’re getting bored with the old mentalists. These new ones are the people watching the disquieting events unfold in Gaza with what might properly be called rapture. I use the word ‘rapture’ advisedly. As in ‘for yea, the rapture cometh’. And those shells landing on Gaza are to be welcomed, of course, for they are bringing the day ever closer. There was a trip to Jerusalem last week undertaken by a bunch of British Christian evangelicals — by coincidence, just as the Israelis began lobbing rockets into Gaza. They hadn’t planned it like that, although retrospectively they may claim to have seen it.

Douglas Murray says that he stopped being an Anglican after analysing Muslim texts and deciding that no book — of any religion — could claim infallibility Just over a year ago I told a lie. In print. In this magazine. I was one of those asked by The Spectator last Christmas whether I believed in the virgin birth. Since it had always seemed to me that if you believed in God a ‘pick and mix’ approach to the central tenets of the faith was pointless, I said ‘yes’. But in fact I felt ‘no’. It wasn’t that I had been wrestling over the doctrine of the incarnation, I simply felt that if I didn’t believe in the virgin birth, I would not believe in God. The truth is I didn’t and don’t. The guilt has been lingering since.

Tom Stacey says that there is a part of man’s collective soul that yearns for tribulations like the financial crisis and the philosophical and spiritual questions they force us to confront Amid all the doom and gloom, do you ever get the feeling we had it coming? I do. During all those balmy years of ever-rising property values, non-stop invitations to borrow more, to get-now-and-pay-tomorrow, wasn’t there a little bird telling us it can’t go on like this? And now that it’s all come to a stop, does anyone else get a whiff of relief, almost gratitude, that the bubble’s burst, we’ve all come back to earth, terra jolly firma, albeit with quite a jolt?

The days leading up to Xmas are such fun, aren’t they? All those cards and presents to buy and all those charity requests reminding one of starving children, crippled adults and abandoned dogs. Over the last few days I’ve been trying to concentrate on more important things, such as Sight and Time. Obviously the two go together, for both determine a view of the world. In regard to Sight, my bathroom ceiling fell down because the house next door put up scaffolding and the chap in charge stepped on to my flat roof and put his foot through it. He denied doing so, of course. When I now get into the tub there’s a bloody big hole up above and the rain comes through.