vinculafido

It's that time of the year again...Hallowe'en prep in Cottesmore Military metaphors abound in Christian hymns of a certain age: ‘Fight the good fight’ : ‘Onward Christian soldiers’ : ‘Soldiers of Christ arise’ . Some of them draw from biblical sources, others more from the lived experience of Victorians. After our first visit to Israel in 1977, I remember going into church the following Sunday to discover we were about to sing ‘Who is on the Lord’s side?’ , a hymn steeped in nineteenth century battle imagery.   It made me so angry that after the second verse I walked out.   We’d just spent three weeks under a more or less perpetual security alert. It had come as a shock. We’d been guests of a Tel Aviv local authority. Our group of teenage dancers and musicians had been accompanied by an armed guide wherever we went. There’d been at least two incidents related to our presence. Near the Lebanese border our evening meal was interrupted as men with rifles dived into the bushes,

  Fort Henry: Exton estate ‘He lives in a house, a very big house in the country…’             (Albarn/Coxon/James/Rowntree)             A holiday over: warm and unseasonal weather, flaneurs on the pier watching the dots of Dutch and German bathers and sun-worshippers spread along Scheveningen beach (though the sand restaurants were mostly packed away for the winter). Here, back in Rutland, the slow, clever slip from summer to autumn, a cool northerly breeze under a brilliantly blue sky. And a couple of thousand miles away, unspeakable mayhem in a desecrated Holy Land, with the threat of far worse to come. It’s one of those occasions when the normality of a British Saturday morning seems grossly inappropriate. I write to our MP, the excellent Alicia Kearns, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Commons, pleading for an even-handed response from the British government.   After our pilgrimage visit in 1997, I said I thought we personally would never return to Israe