Matthew Parris

A day or so after writing a column, when the horse has certainly bolted, you read it in print. Now you are hit by l’esprit d’escalier. Ideas you left out stare you in the face. Friends call with arguments you never thought to include — obvious, once mentioned — and again you kick yourself. My Times column last Saturday is a case in point. I wrote after David Cameron had warned Phillip Schofield (on a TV programme called This Morning) against giving a stir to the unfounded belief that there’s a link between homosexuality and paedophilia. I suggested this was one of three great subterranean public prejudices that campaigners for homosexual equality have had to combat over the past half-century.

Military commanders, announced last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph, ‘have warned the Prime Minister that Afghanistan’s future could be jeopardised with al-Qa’eda returning to the country if foreign troops are withdrawn too quickly’. What the newspaper calls ‘senior sources’ have been singing and I don’t doubt the burden of their song is as reported. The same briefing process is under way in the United States, where the Pentagon is letting it be known that President Obama’s promised troop withdrawal after the American ‘surge’ is premature; that the Taleban are by no means beaten; and that the Afghan security forces whom Nato-Isaf are training are not yet ready to take the insurgency on unaided.

I have just spent a day in a GP’s surgery. I was not detaining her with any complicated medical complaint of my own. I was shadowing her as a journalist. Some weeks ago I wrote a column for the Times whose headline (though not my choice) brutally summarised my argument: that general practitioners were becoming glorified receptionists for the specialist medical services offered by the NHS; that patients should be able to save time and money by going straight to a specialist if they were sure of their problem; and that GPs, though hard-working, were often busy with counselling that a less expensively trained and less well paid nurse practitioner or medical assistant could provide.

War in South Africa — the second Boer war — was already brewing by Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Two years later it began. By the end of the century Britain was bogged down and struggling. On the Queen’s death in 1901 the unholy mess continued. In 1902 we were finally able to declare victory; but bloodied, shocked, shamed and considerably cut down to size. The whole campaign had been an ill-conceived, over-confident and grisly blunder. Even Kipling hated it. How could the numerical superiority and technical might of Britain’s armed forces be fought to cruel draw by a smaller band of ill-equipped zealots, as light on their feet as the modern-day terrorist? It was humiliating.

Observing the fealties of football supporters, I’ve been struck by a contradiction that troubles any non-sporting mind. To a fan, which team you support is often a matter of chance. But once you’ve attached yourself to a team, the loyalty can be ferocious, and run deep. It can become part of who you are. So do we say that because your support becomes unshakeable your association with your team is a profound thing? Or do we say that, because you could quite easily have developed the same loyalties to a different team, the association is shallow? The apparent contradiction can best be explained in terms of the instinct for the pack by which the human hunter and warrior is driven.

I’ve much respect for the Matlock ­Mercury: our part of the Derbyshire dales would be the poorer without this lively and conscientious local paper. And were it not for the Mercury’s useful report I’d never even have learned about the county council’s plan. But I do take issue with the headline. ‘Big switch-off to hit Dales villages’ turns good news into bad; and most of us won’t see this as bad news. The idea is to switch off street lighting in the county, where appropriate, first in villages and then in parts of towns, between the hours of midnight and 5.30 a.m. For most people this will be no inconvenience, and for many it will be a blessed relief.

A slow reader but someone who has to plough through stuff for work, I skim and flick uneasily, and by middle age had almost completely lost my teenage habit of unhurried reading for pleasure. But in the last decade I’ve started again in a gentle way to read fiction and biography for amusement alone. It was George Eliot who tempted me back. Middlemarch fair blew me away. The Mill on the Floss followed, then Silas Marner. And while in Africa last month I decided to tackle her first novel, Adam Bede. Eliot’s reputation has no need of my support. Suffice it to say she’s the reason I’ve never attempted a novel: after George Eliot, what would be the point? The chord she strikes in my soul resonates on every page.

I’m not the first columnist and will not be the last to shrink from finding out too much. For this there are subtler reasons than laziness: a half-acknowledged fear that one’s argument will lose shape; that complexity may overwhelm understanding; that counterfactuals and shades of grey spoil a simple picture, and resolution sink beneath a mass of on-the-other-hands. If that’s always true, then I should never have revisited Zimbabwe. I last crossed the border in 1968, heading north for Cambridge at the age of 18. Salisbury (now Harare) had been my home from the age of eight.

My reaction last week, I suppose, will not be dissimilar from those of the majority of my readers. I growled. From my radio came a report about problems that British researchers were encountering with supplies of mice for medical experiments. Apparently anti-vivisectionists have been targeting the transport companies that bring supplies of mice from the Continent; and, having frightened the airlines off, were turning their attention to ferry companies, one of which had just decided to stop accepting lorries loaded with this living freight.