{"id":252,"date":"2007-05-02T08:35:19","date_gmt":"2007-05-02T12:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=252"},"modified":"2007-05-02T08:35:19","modified_gmt":"2007-05-02T12:35:19","slug":"i-am-an-idiot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=252","title":{"rendered":"I am an idiot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You&#8217;d have thought, after ten years writing about religious journalism in this country, and twenty years perpetrating the stuff, that I would know better than to take any <em>Times<\/em> exclusive at face value. You would be wrong. I should have checked Ruth Gledhill&#8217;s blog post about the supposed poisoning of an English missionary in Malawi before <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/helmintholog\/archives\/2007\/04\/29\/even_for_the__t.html#002000\">mentioning it here.<\/a><\/p>\n\n<p>I didn&#8217;t. I didn&#8217;t get around to it until yesterday morning, when a couple of phone calls produced some interesting results.<\/p>\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>The three &#8220;poisons&#8221; that Ruth mentions on her blog posting were in fact prescription drugs &#8212; an anti histamine, an antibiotic, and a tranquilliser. You can&#8217;t check this directly, because the first thing she did after I rang her up and told her was to say &#8220;Oh Dear&#8221; and the second, to take the post down. It has been replaced by a copy of a letter I forwarded her giving a rather more credible explanation of these symptoms.<\/li>\n<li>Ruth had not checked the properties of the &#8220;poisons&#8221;. Neither had her source, Mark Hunter, the dead Canon&#8217;s nephew.<\/li>\n<li>Ruth rang last night, eight hours after our original conversation, to say that her co-author on the story <em>had<\/em> checked, and thus knew that they were writing a story about prescription drugs but had forgotten to tell her. Readers are invited to look at the <em>Times<\/em> story in the light of the fact that one of the authors knew when it was written that the &#8220;poisons&#8221; involved were an anti-histamine, an antibiotic, and a tranquilliser.<\/li>\n<li>The three priests dying in mysterious circumstances thirty years ago, put down to witchcraft, may not be true either. At any rate, I have spoken to Donald Arden, who was then the Archbishop of the province, and he has no memory of it, who might be expected to know. Before you ask; yes, his marbles are all in his possession.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Apart from those details, the story seems accurate.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You&#8217;d have thought, after ten years writing about religious journalism in this country, and twenty years perpetrating the stuff, that I would know better than to take any Times exclusive at face value. You would be wrong. I should have &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=252\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=252\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}