Matthew Parris

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.

My friend Stephen (let us call him Stephen) is an unsentimental sort of man. In his thirties, he has a sharper mind than his job as a middle-ranking civil servant really demands, but he has more or less settled down. Stylish (and one for the girls) in his twenties, he keeps his neat good looks and slight, alluring stammer, but seems content now in a steady relationship with a good woman in comfortable lodgings he’s able to afford, a long way from the centre of London. His intellect, though, still roves. He has an edge, a critical, sceptical outlook; and has avoided that benign, mellow fuzziness that can settle on people as they grow older. Though Stephen has maybe had to lower his sights a bit, he stays interested in things. He keeps his bite. That’s why I like him.

Another Remembrance Day app­roaches as I write. Another autumnal Sunday; another Last Post; those poppies again; in Derbyshire the church parades; another nationwide two-minute silence. The occasion always sets me thinking about what people call ‘perspective’ in history. Sir Percy Cradock, leaving Peking as ambassador nearly 30 years ago, said something about history’s rear-view mirror in his valedictory despatch: ‘In the socialist state,’ he wrote, ‘it is the past that is unpredictable.’ And not just in the socialist state. The longer one lives the more the past appears as a landscape in perpetual, usually gradual, sometimes radical upheaval.

Do you remember that classic 1980s American TV series about a group of elderly American women, The Golden Girls? You could call the sitcom the geriatric equivalent of Friends: equally sharp, and every bit as addictive. One of the central characters (she was called Rose) was forever lapsing into interminable accounts of uninteresting events. Her companions would try different means of cutting her short, doing so with a brutality born of desperation. One such intervention became almost a catch-phrase among her circle: ‘Where is this story going, Rose?’ I’ve always remembered it. And the more time I spend in the company of those now my age or older — men and women in their sixties, seventies or eighties — the more am I struck by that candid remark.

If you’re near a laptop and in search of a giggle, go to http://tinyurl.com/6gamb73. Otherwise, let me explain in words: that links you to a gallery of scores of photographs of Muammar Gaddafi in silly clothes. There are images of him in absurd, invented, full military dress, festooned with the gilt and silverware of bogus medals; sashes of every kind, colour and cloth, all gaudy. There are images of the tinpot dictator decked out in purple like a Roman emperor, swathed in silk with turbans, in mid-desert in combat gear, taking the salute in braid and twill, or crowned in gold.