Matthew Parris

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Minister that Afghanistan’s future could be jeopardised with al-Qa’eda returning to the country if foreign troops are withdrawn too quickly’.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.

Is The Spectator like the owner of ‘a wall which has been festooned, overnight, with defamatory graffiti’? At its most thrilling this magazine does sometimes feel like that; but, in truth, the editorial hand here (though it may seem marvellously light to us contributors) is a quiet background presence protecting us and our potential victims from the publication of defamatory remarks. Not only would our editor do his best to chase away spray-painting hooligans before they did their work on his wall, but, should offending graffiti appear, he would come out fast with a brush, a bucket of whitewash and if necessary scaffolding: the equivalent of a published correction and apology. Or the law would do it for him: we could be sued.

This goes to print on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. So allow me to pitch in to February’s religion-versus-secularism debate from a new direction. As an unbeliever I wish to complain on behalf of serious religious belief. Faith is being defended by the wrong people, in the wrong way. ‘Faith’ means faith. Doubt is not faith. Faith is not seeking but finding. Real Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Jewish believers are being patronised by kindly agnostics who privately believe that the convictions of those they patronise are delusions. A lazy mish-mash of covert agnosticism is being advanced in defence of religion as a social institution. But ‘whatever floats your boat’ is not the wellspring of Judaic belief.

I think her first name was Denise. It was hard to discern on her small easyjet name badge; but the surname was certainly Williams. So let’s call her Denise Williams. The name matters less than the circumstance. It was Luton Airport departures corridor (gates 1 to 8 to the best of my recollection); the time was Sunday 5 February, from before dawn until at least lunchtime. This (you may remember) was the morning after snow had blanketed most of England; and south-eastern airports including Luton were in the near-ritual state of mayhem we all but demand of our transport infrastructure when there’s snow. It gives us something to talk about. ‘My airport hell’ stories are uninteresting. Airports are not hell. Honestly, try hell, and you’ll prefer Luton.

James Moriarty, Hannibal Lecter, Silas Lynch, Simon Legree, Iago, Iscariot, Schettino… pity Francesco Schettino:  all but doomed by his name alone. What a great name for an alleged villain. The skipper of the Costa Concordia, the cruise liner now wrecked off a Tuscan island whose name sounds like a typographical tweaking of ‘gigolo’, presents an Anglo-Saxon media in search of cliché with an embarrassment of riches. The disaster happened because (it’s claimed) Schettino was ‘attempting a “sail-by” salute to impress the islanders and passengers’. Tut tut. He fled his ship ahead of 100 passengers and crew. Boo hiss.

Infrastructure. Still reading this? Well done, because the word alone will have lost half my readers at first sight. Infrastructure is a big idea dogged by a dreadful modern name. If Thomas Telford, John Rennie, Joseph Paxton, Isambard Kingdom Brunel or Joseph Bazalgette had been informed as little boys that they were to dedicate their lives’ work to something called infrastructure, they’d probably have become tinkers or tailors instead. No, in their minds it was the great glories of 18th- and 19th-century Britain that they were to build and have the honour of being forever associated with their names: roads, canals, bridges, fountains, gardens, towns, tunnels and railways.

Sometimes it is by catching ourselves unawares that we see ourselves best. That unprepossessing fellow with a dull, crumpled, peasant face and a faintly disobliged expression that you caught a glimpse of in the shop window while Christmas shopping on Oxford Street — oh crikey, that was you. Our looks, however, are not our fault. Our attitudes are surely under our control. Or are they? the other day I caught myself, as if in a shop window, in an attitude I’d never acknowledged, do not like, and do not seem to be able to do anything about. And now I’ve spotted it, and the more I think about it and look out for it in others, the more prevalent it seems to be. It may even be at the root of those global economic problems with which 2011 ends and 2012 begins.