the sweets of fame

Three journalists interviewed me in the last week: the last one came completely at random, as the result of a vox pop on the weather in Uddevalla; someone from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Sydney tracked me down in a hotel room on the Swedish west coast to say rude things about the Anglican Communion; the arts pages of one of the Stockholm papers interviewed me about the book I am writing, though that has not yet come out.

(updated with links, mostly in Swedish)

To all of them, I explained what I was doing here and when I had lived in Sweden. In the Uddevalla paper, the fact that I had not lived here for twenty years was printed without the “not”. On the ABC site, it appears that I have retreated to Sweden to write a book about the Anglican Communion. Expressen was fine (ie flattering), though one snarky reader noted that the Aurora Borealis is not often seen in the berry picking season.

You have to be written about to realise just how easy inaccuracy is even in the simplest matters, though, god knows, you can learn this lesson by writing, too, if you care too. The point is that in both these cases, the journalist heard or assumed what fitted into the story they were writing.

All this is a long way round to saying that I think last week’s piece on Rowan Williams wasn’t fair. I shall try and write a longer piece defending him later. But his letter was so much clearer than almost everything else he has said on the subject up till now that it suggests he has also started to think clearly. This matters. In particular, I can see in it answers to points I had earlier raised — not that my opinions matter; but there is a sense in which it contains answers to his critics, and it is then ungenerous and wrong just to rehearse old criticisms.

In the mean time I learn from the morning’s paper that the North Sami for “And so I wash it down with coca cola” is “de doidilan kokkákoláin buot” — assuming that they’ve got it right.