Guilty and shameless

• I haven’t posted anything for a couple of days. So I’m guilty; mostly because I have been on trains or racketing around in London when not writing two rather difficult pieces, but also because Santa came on Tuesday with a box containing a dozen hardback copies of the Swedish book. They look beautiful, and they read all right. I asked the FWB for her opinion, and she said “In this draft, there were six typos.” But I’m still feeling shamelessly happy.
• Sitting in a bar with Louise on Thursday evening and talking about our Viking slavery talk¹ I needed to come up with a reason why we were not demonstrating for human rights outside the Chinese embassy, as my wife and daughter were. “Radio Three”, I said, “will get you through times of no human rights better than human rights will get you through times of no Radio Three.”
• I spent most of today writing a review of Nicholas Lash’s new book for the New Statesman. It is quite impossible to imagine that paper wanting a review of a collection of intermittently very dense theological essays ten years ago. People interested in what belief in God actually means could do a lot better than to start there.
• If, on the other hand, you want to know what a belief in Christianity looks like, head over to the comments section of George Pitcher’s blog on the Telegraph. Note that he actually discovered one of the missing bits of the story: what it was that two American fundies were handing out in a Muslim area of Birmingham that got the (Muslim) policeman to tell them to go away or they would get thumped: yes; it was a Chick-like tract which claims that all non-evangelicals will go to hell.

¹ This is an interval talk for one of the proms, which will explain how it was that every respectable Ukrainian family in the eleventh century could keep a British au pair girl.