Angeldubba

  No, it’s not gobbledegook. Not any more than these columns usually are, that is.   For I have concerns (noun) about (preposition) the word, “concerning” (when used as an adjective). Because it’s taken over from our old friend “worrying”. It received a tremendous fillip in the pandemic when serious-faced officials everywhere in the English-speaking world were finding that the latest numbers/variant/crowds were concerning.   Concerning became a cliché, a go-to word to end a sentence that the speaker appeared to believe made them sound serious and responsible. It is concerning. We are all concentrating on this problem. It is of concern. OK, but isn’t it rather more than that? In short, worrying?   Worrying got thrown on the refuse pile of words-we-don’t-think-are-cool-enough. It happened some years ago when “gave” fell under the bus while “gifted” rode high in the polls. “I gifted my husband some socks for his birthday.” (I did actually write to the newspapers about t...

  Imagine a world without the BBC. None of those TV channels, radio programmes, podcasts, top reporting, imaginative takes on topics, off-centre approaches …   But it’s just what certain parties are aiming for. The BBC-haters of late seem to comprise Rupert Murdoch, the Johnson government, and the Royal family, in the wake of the fuss over  Martin Bashir and the famous Diana interview  of 1995.   Granted that Bashir used some trickery to get access to the Princess, but the story is much more complex than “and the interview led to her death”. That is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who observed the events of those years and Diana’s desperately unhappy and dreadfully public marriage. Television veteran Esther Rantzen told Andrew Marr that it could hardly be argued that Princess Diana had not wanted a famous opportunity to tell her side of the story to a sympathetic public via a respectful interviewer. “She said what she wanted to say.”And it is reported th...

  Are you old enough to have been influenced by Stephen Covey’s   The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People?   It was big in the ‘90s. If so, you have something in common with a beleaguered band of young Syrians, the subject of an extraordinary recent book. They were residents of Daraya, a small town on the outskirts of Damascus, brought to ruin after battles with, and bombardment by, the regime of Bashar al-Assad. And Covey’s self-help book became one of the most popular volumes in the library they salvaged from the devastated town, lovingly created and maintained in the basement of a wrecked building. The story is told by French-Iranian journalist Delphine Minoui, who I first heard interviewed on Sean Moncrieff’s programme on Irish radio. She wrote  The Book Collectors of Dar aya  to tell this inspiring story, after many surely difficult Zoom sessions and WhatsApp messages with the librarians of Daraya. I won’t go into the story in too much detail here – tha...

Doing a masters’ some years back, I met a fellow Australian who mysteriously described himself as “working for a long-established multi-national corporation”. When pressed, he eventually revealed that he meant the Catholic Church – he was a priest in civvies. That corporation has been buffeted by storm waves in recent decades, mostly through its own severe failings. But now, like all the Christian churches, the pandemic has it propelled headlong to fight for its survival. Closed churches and bans on weddings and baptisms initiated a habit of staying away. According to the Spectator magazine, a leaked Church of England document in Britain showed it expects membership and congregations to be 20 per cent lower after lockdown. This is on top of a 40 per cent decline in congregations over the past 30 years, stated  in an internal report  for the CofE. In Germany, major Christian churches were seeing a  quarter of a million people  a year leaving even before the pandemic s...

What should have happened when Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, saw there  was no chair for her  at a summit with two important men? Evidently, somebody, indeed everybody there, should have shouted “We need another chair” and some flunky rushed off to get one. Maybe fancy gilt chairs were in short supply, but they could have found something, surely, and one of the men should have sat on it. Then all would have been equal. Von der Leyen’s retreat to the adjoining sofa was a pragmatic acceptance of defeat, but it was a mistake. And so was her detailed speech about the matter in the European Parliament last week. “The status of women is the status of democracy,” she declared, before going on to complain about her treatment in Turkey. “I cannot find any justification of how I was treated in the European treaties” she said, standing at the podium before MEPs, before adding that she had not seen any shortage of chairs in previous photographs of all-male me...