Prick: top order

Michael Gove. It takes some considerable talent, in a cabinet full of pricks, to stand out above all the others.

A Trojan Horse in Berlin

Whatever you might think about the Greek ‘profligacy’ of recent years, it’s quite surprising that we haven’t heard rather more about the debt that Germany owes Greece.

After the German invasion of Greece in 1940, the Greeks were forced to give the Germans a loan of 476million Reichsmarks, a figure that translates to about £60bn (€74bn) in today’s money, if you include interest. It was an inter-governmental loan, not theft, although the German occupation of Greece, of course, was characterised by theft, murder, genocide, brutality, all of it particularly extreme. Those crimes would have led – and did – to reparations claims. But the loan is a different kettle of calamares.

None of it has ever been paid back to the Greeks. That’s partly thanks to the London Debt Agreement of 1953, which relieved West Germany of 50% of its debt/reparations obligations, part of an American-inspired political settlement that ensured the so-called economic miracle of post-war West Germany in its role as book-end to Soviet Russia – with Japan, strange to relate, at the other end. Is that history telling us it’s good to lose?

Leaving aside the reparations debate, which is highly controversial, the matter of the loan is very clear-cut. Greece requested repayment of the occupation loan in 1945, 1946, 1947, 1964 (when German chancellor Erhard pledged repayment after the reunification of Germany), 1965, 1966, 1974, 1987, and in 1995. And?

Nothing. Nichts. τίποτα. The towels on the beach remain the only evidence of German repayment to Greece.

If I was Greek, how would I respond to the thinly disguised, moralising finger-wagging I’m now receiving from Angela Merkel? With something rather sharp, I think, inserted upwards. My hope – a forlorn one, I admit – is that the war loan the Greeks were forced to make in 1940 sits there in the vaults of the Deutsche Bundesbank like that horse the Trojans hauled into Troy and that some time soon, the Germans reap their just reward. I can wish, can’t I?

If you feel like it, get in touch with some Greek friends and sign a petition: http://www.greece.org/blogs/wwii/

And, speaking of Nigel...

Nigel Lofthouse was the proud owner of a piece of leather-working equipment called a skiving machine and in my time as his tenant at Station Yard in Halesworth, I was privileged to learn the fine art of skiving from a much-practised expert.

While we skived together, we would turn our towering, penetrating intellects to the contemplation of the great mysteries of our times, such as:

What’s the opposite of wind? Why can’t they make the whole car out of that airbag stuff? What’s the weight of a flame? Do compasses work in space? Can you buy a trouser?

To help us in our wonderings, we looked for enlightenment in the works of probably the world’s greatest Danish philosophical commentator, Carlsberg, and we would immerse ourselves in the output of the much admired French existentialist, Bordeaux, famously the proponent of the “I drink, therefore I am” school of thought to which Nigel so enthusiastically subscribed.

Our dedicated – indeed, devoted – work in these fields of endeavour was ably assisted, of course, by our shapely, white-clad laboratory technician, Virginia.

From these adventures came great discoveries, as yet unpublished: The Lofthouse Principle, for instance, which is a branch of Celestial Mechanics and describes how everything put together, occasionally by Nigel himself, sooner or later falls apart… or our Damp Squib Theory, which we felt was not only more plausible, but actually more likely than the Big Bang Theory… and there was our work on the search for the Oh My God Particle, which Nigel claimed he’d embarked on back in Tyne Tees days, when he’d had a go on a fairground Hadron Collider and thought it wasn’t up to much.

We came to the conclusion that if Higgs Boson was nowhere to be found, we might alternatively look for the boson’s mate, or the cox’n, or, at the very least, the cabin boy.

At every turn, Nigel and I found the exalted world of science lacked our steely, intellectual vigour, but at the same time, we appreciated some of the poetry of cosmography: Intermediate Disturbance Theory – we were very good at that; Orbital Resonance (the distressing noise made by a perfectly innocent piece of wood while Nigel ruthlessly sanded it down); and Late Heavy Bombardment, after which Nigel would retreat, in a not entirely orderly way, to bed.

What I haven’t yet worked out is what on earth to do, now that a bloody great Nigel-shaped hole has appeared in the universe.

Nigel was/is a singularity. He was/is/and always will be a kindred spirit for me, my glass more than half full, my partner in crime – mainly perpetrated repeatedly and with relish, on the English language.

Nigel: it has been a pleasure, a joy and a privilege to be your friend and accomplice. I will carry on the great work of skiving which you taught me – although I may never be quite as good at it as you.

Thank you, for being Nigel.

Nigel Lofthouse

Nigel Lofthouse, much loved dear and close friend, companion and occasional fellow chef, has died after a long struggle against the bastard cancer. I've never known a man quite like him: he had rare qualities, not least among them a fine sense of humour and an utterly insatiable curiosity about the world.

We never did get to the bottom of string theory. Requiescat in pace, dear, dear boy.

Confessions of an unbeliever

I’m rather proud of the way I have restrained myself from writing about Baroness Warsi, the Muslim peer – and, sharp intake of breath, Conservative party chairman – who made a complete arsi of herself in the Vatican by prattling on about the growing danger of militant secularism. I know that when I first heard about her comments, I could feel the heat gathering under my collar, but decided to let it dissipate a bit first.

Having calmed down, I now feel able to offer a more carefully considered, thoughtful and balanced view. Stupid, stupid, stupid woman.

“For me, one of the most worrying aspects about this militant secularisation is that at its core and in its instincts it is deeply intolerant,” she says. “Aggressive secularism is being imposed by stealth.”

Aside from the positively Pythonesque idea of an aggressive secularist movement imposing itself by stealth on the unsuspecting population (imagine the Terry Gilliam animation), the accusation of intolerance by a Muslim, speaking to a predominantly Catholic audience in the Vatican, has a priceless, to-die-for irony about it. In that sense – and only in that sense – it was worth hearing.

Presumably, the tolerance of such notoriously secular states as the Netherlands and the US – in spite of your Palins, Romneys and Santorums – is a thing of the collective imagination. Now that it's been outed, the oppressive yoke of secularism can be thrown off, and we can expect a return to the fine practices of beneficent, intolerant religions, in the form of amputations, stonings-to-death and burnings-at-the-stake (not things of the imagination). That, after all, is what the majority of people have been wanting all along, but have been too cowed to say so by this wicked, secular tyranny.

It might be the case that we secularists have deserved it. The trouble with the whole debate about atheism is that it has become so stridently Dawkins-flavoured. As I understand it – and cheerfully practise it – atheism is a personal point of view, an unbelief that doesn’t seek to recruit. If you want your god, go right ahead: just please don’t seek to impose it on me or – more importantly – anyone else. Unlike Richard Dawkins, I don’t see the need to try to disabuse believers, even if I think their fervour is misplaced.

One of my many problems with religion is that it’s never enough, as a participant, merely to believe in a god, or God. I am also required to worship one. And that’s where I come particularly unstuck: the idea of worshipping the concept of something, failing its actual, tangible existence, I find at best comical, at worst stupid and in the middle, humiliating. That’s not to confuse ritual with worship – in fact, I quite get ritual and in many ways, don’t mind it. There’s ritual in the way we do lots of things: when I shave, there is a ritualistic quality to what I do and the way I do it. Church rituals, such as taking communion (insertion of wafer into mouth, wafer sticking to top of mouth, sip of wine much too early in the day, but unsticking wafer, soft mumblings of a form of words that could just as easily have been written by Edward Lear – what’s not to like?), have little impact on me, as long as it’s not mistaken for worship.

I suppose I’m not sure that I’ve ever really worshipped – I mean properly worshipped – anyone, or anything. If I was a football fanatic, maybe I’d have worshipped Eric Cantona, but the key word there is fanatic, not worship: that’s what fanatics do, isn’t it? Maybe some people worship the domestic goddess that Nigella Lawson is supposed to be. Fourteen year old girls worshipped Paul McCartney in the early sixties and certainly would have built shrines to Him in their bedrooms. I can’t say that I’ve ever felt the need.

No, proper worship requires people in fancy dress leading a congregation of some sort. With the act of worship comes the corollary of prayer, in which the deal is: I worship you and in return, you grant me a wish or two. Prayer is OK, just about: I guess everyone prays, just a little and hopefully quietly, that their lottery numbers will come up. But otherwise, worship, praise and various other fawning religious practices aimed at securing a comfortable place in the afterlife seem to me to be abundantly ridiculous.

Which brings me back to the fatuous Baroness Warsi. She’s a mate of David Cameron. He endorsed what she said in the Vatican. Before him, there was Tony Blair, an evangelising Catholic convert. It’s enough to send me off to the recruiting booth of the mechanised wing of the Militant Secularist.

Off with their heads, I say. They’re not using them, after all.