Matthew Parris

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Untitled_2_AAC_audio.mp3" title="Matthew Parris and Anne Applebaum debate the Ukraine situation"] Listen [/audioplayer]‘You can’t always get what you want,’ chorused Mick Jagger, ‘but if you try some time/You just might find/You get what you need.’ The danger with Ukraine is that the western powers will get what they want, not what we need. I write this as one who has travelled in Ukraine, loved the country and seen that its people (though poor) are talented and energetic. Any reference I make to basket cases refers to the Ukrainian state, not the country’s human resources.

About 55 years ago, when I was about ten, my younger brother Roger and I discovered a slave pit in Africa. Actually it probably wasn’t a slave pit and we probably didn’t discover it, but ‘Arab’ ‘slave pits’ were what Southern Rhodesian schools offered as an explanation for the circular, room-sized, stone-lined pits sunk about five feet below ground but open to the sky. And if Roger’s and mine were not the first modern eyes to behold this antiquity, then we were able at least to persuade ourselves of the claim, as there was no path trodden into the small patch of dark, dense primary forest in whose midst we found the pit; and nobody else seemed to know about it. This felt like a discovery.

In a comic-strip cartoon, beads of water apparently radiating outward from the head of one of the characters indicate embarrassment. Lines flying horizontally from a character, all in one direction and tailing off with distance, indicate rapid movement in the opposing direction. Every western child knows this; but were you to show the cartoon to a Tuareg nomad in the Sahara, these ciphers — which are really more a form of hieroglyph than a depiction of any recognisable object — would be meaningless. Likewise in a film, cutting between scenes  would totally confuse our Tuareg, who would wonder why we had apparently left one place and gone suddenly to another.

A gay friend phones over the New Year break. A lovely chap (let us call him Richard) and long retired, he has done well and made money over the years. Richard has called to tell me how he is spending it. I know that in the past he had helped the gay lobbying organisation Stonewall; and that in memory of his late civil partner he had helped endow a local state school in need of funds. Now, he tells me, he has bought a house for a young friend and his partner: someone who helped Richard during the low time after his bereavement. ‘There was no way they could find the savings to get their feet on the ladder,’ he tells me, ‘and I just thought “What’s all my money for if not to do some good?

Bitcoins have been in the news, after a story about an unfortunate fellow who jettisoned his computer’s hard drive that contained (apparently) the code he needed to access his stash of this electronic currency — its value more than £4 million. I don’t even pretend to have an opinion on bitcoins. I only just, and most imperfectly, understand what this electronically traded currency is and why it appeals to people. But it has got me thinking. A bitcoin is a single currency, a global currency, a currency beyond the reach or control of national governments around the world. In theory (unless governments try to ban the bitcoin) it would be politician-proof.

Nations seek their souls in the strangest places. We English, for instance, have illustrated ourselves to the world and to ourselves with a stark choice between Cool Britannia and Ye Olde Tea Shoppe. When not hawking to tourists in London those T-shirts scrawled with obscenities, we picture ourselves in country lanes and rose-covered thatched cottages. A few of us actually seek out the vestiges of that countryside world and live a pretend-rural life there; but most Spectator readers would be bored to tears after ten minutes of Morris dancing; and a fortnight of hobnobbing over a honeysuckled garden fence with a rosy-cheeked jam-maker who had never heard of the Today programme would have us screaming for release, almost as horrified as we’d be in a Soho nightclub.

This is probably the most self-indulgent column I’ve written. I hope not to make a habit of it. It’s an ode to — and something of a lament for — my own right arm. I was six when I fell off a small cliff above a disused railway embankment in Nicosia, Cyprus. The blue bicycle I was wheeling was new: a birthday present and my first bike. A novice, I let the back wheel slip over the edge — and if you’re holding the handlebars and the back wheel slides, a bicycle moves in counter-intuitive ways. Mine pulled me with it. I refused to let go. I came to in a heap, in the dust, bicycle beside me and blood everywhere. Two small Greek boys were staring at me in horror. I struggled to my feet.

My preferred route from the Times’s offices in Wapping on to the main road takes me across a precinct then down a short flight of concrete steps to the pavement below. Across the top step (for reasons unclear to me) a yellow line has been painted behind the step’s edge, like those lines you’re supposed to stand behind on railway platforms. Crossing this, and turning right when I reach the pavement, takes me straight to the right-hand side of the steps. A rational pedestrian seeking to shorten his journey would choose such a route, but not with any precision: one could plot a range of courses down the steps, all about the same length, the very shortest taking one right up against the border of the steps.

I wish I were a religious conservative: the field’s wide open. It must be dispiriting for believers to encounter so little intelligent support for belief. It’s certainly infuriating for us non-believers, because there’s hardly anyone left who seems capable of giving us a good argument. In search of a stimulating conversation about religion, we are reduced to arguing with ourselves. Which, still seething at a Spectator article purporting to be a serious examination of the case for miracles, I shall now do. I cannot argue with Piers Paul Read because he never produces an argument to answer. The magazine tagged his piece ‘I believe in miracles’, which was accurate because the essay was not a reasoned case; it was simply an attestation.

Apparently I’ve proposed to my civil partner. He claims that on BBC Radio 2, on the Jeremy Vine show (he thinks it was the JV show) I expressed myself in terms which presumed his prior acceptance. I can’t remember a thing about it — on live radio one does tend to throw these thoughts out heedlessly — but my partner swears I said, ‘Oh yes, well I suppose we’ll have to get an upgrade.’ He found this a graceless way of popping the question, and has forbidden me from using the term ‘upgrade’ again. Ah well. But in that case, if not ‘upgrade’, what shall we call it?

It is within the experience of even the humblest of MPs that those who oppose what you do will berate you with a great deal more passion than you will ever attract from those who support your plans. Any help you can give may be treated by its beneficiaries as no more than your duty; but the people on the other side will treat your unhelpfulness as a massive personal injury. And if this is true of minor political players, how much more is it true of serious policymakers. As the second Lord Falkland remarked on losing a bill in the upper chamber because not all his supporters had bothered to turn up at an evening sitting, ‘Those who hated it hated it worse than the Devil; while those who loved it loved it not more than their -dinner.

An email exchange with a Conservative-leaning friend this week left me feeling sheepish. But if shameful my behaviour be, I’m not alone in the shame. I thought it worth sharing the conversation. We were corresponding about Ed Miliband’s stand-off with the Unite trade union. In a message to my friend, I remarked: ‘It’s reaching the point where (paradoxically) EM’s tendency to take the line of least resistance may actually push him into confronting Unite.’ And that’s true: worms turn and it’s not always good politics to corner people. But it is the next part of the message that I’m hard-put to defend.

Why is Christianity so unhelpful on the very ethical dilemma that most concerns ordinary people in our everyday lives? Why does Jesus have nothing helpful to say about the ranking of obligations? Last weekend, digging a huge hole in the ground to receive a gargantuan granite trough I’ve just bought, I was about four feet below ground level and wielding a pickaxe when, with a panic-stricken tweet, a fledgling coal tit fluttered down into a puddle in the depression. There were high winds on Saturday and I suppose the bird had been blown from its nest somewhere. This one managed to half-fly, half-hop to the water’s edge where it stood tweeting desperately and trying to fluff out its wings to dry them. It could nearly fly, but not well enough for the required vertical take-off.

Gweru on the central Highveld of Zimbabwe used to be called Gwelo when I was there as a boy but seemed otherwise largely unchanged when we passed through a couple of weeks ago. Sleepy, laid-back: a petrol station, a few stores and a scattering of offices and little townships of bungalows on the main tarred road between Harare and Bulawayo. Less in Zimbabwe has changed than people think. We were on our way, though, to a place that was certainly new to me: Antelope Park, a lush, green riverside encampment at the end of a long dusty road out of Gweru. At Antelope Park you can walk with lions. I will not enter upon a debate I know exists about the viability of the park’s overall project.