Day 7
Shillingford to Streatley
Woke World
Napoleon said that you should never disturb your enemy when he’s making a gross mistake.
Why do our enemies, such as Jihadists, Putin and the man in North Korea with the funny haircut, bother to bomb or poison us in the UK when we are making such a good job of destroying ourselves?
Our “gross mistake” is to allow an absurd and destructive ideology to sweep our land unchecked. Unless we face it down, it will eviscerate the few scraps of what’s left of our moral fibre. The champions of this nonsense describe themselves as “social justice warriors”. This is “WOKE!” – it’s pernicious rubbish and it’s intensely damaging.
Hearken to this. More than half of those born after 1996 believe that “systemic racism” is endemic in our society; 64 per cent think that rioting and looting are justified to some degree; 41 per cent support censorship of so called “hate speech”; and 23 per cent would support violence to prevent people being offended.
Cancel Culture
“Woke” nonsense is at its height. Careers are being destroyed or “cancelled” by wicked people on what is politely called social media. The police’s record of detecting the perpetrators of fraud or theft is poor, in part because the cops are concentrating on rooting out so-called “hate crime”.
Authors – google the alarming story of what happened to writer Kate Clanchy – are frightened of describing how women look in their novels in case their books are censored by weak publishers who cannot see a parapet without ducking beneath it. Comedians are struck dumb with fear. Scientific biological certainties are avoided – is a man a man and a woman a woman – for sheer terror of giving offence to the ranting blob trawling the net.
While our enemies are threatening Ukraine and Taiwan with rockets, bombs and tanks, and while the spooks in Teheran are well on the way to perfecting a nuclear bomb to destroy Israel – and anyone else while they’re in the mood – we in the West are obsessing about pronouns, rewriting history and planning to “decolonise” mathematics.
Then, as a treat, we spend time arguing whether men dressed as women should be allowed to use women’s loos.
You couldn’t write this plot line in a novel. Well, if you did, it would probably be censored.
National Treasures
Judy Dench
Maggie Smith
Matthew Parris
The Duchess of Cornwall
Michael Heseltine
Nigel Farage
Diane Abbott
Billy Connolly
Gordon Brown
Elton John
Ed Balls
Ian McKellan
Pleased to never hear of again…
Nicola Sturgeon
Meghan and Mr Markle
Prince Andrew
Many serving Anglican bishops
Donald Trump
Vladimir Putin
* Names and images may have been changed for privacy reasons
If you are already a ZANE donor, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts. If you are not a donor but would like to be, please follow the link below and know that every donation, however big or small, goes directly to where it is most needed. If you would like to help but can’t donate, please join the ZANE family and ‘like’ or ‘share’ our posts or write us a Google review – every positive step helps spread the word about the life changing work ZANE does.
Thank you – Nicky Passaportis ZANE Australia
Please donate to support pensioners struggling to survive in Zimbabwe
Any assistance is greatly appreciated and goes a long way to giving our pensioners a better quality of life and lift the pressure of money worries which is very debilitating emotionally.
(Donations made to ZANE in Australia, are tax-deductible)
Day 8
Rest Day
The Limits of Forgiveness
How can we offer forgiveness on behalf of people we don’t know or have never even met? The famous Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal illustrated this with a story that began on 10 October 1944. At the time, he was a young architect incarcerated in Janowska Concentration Camp, just outside Lviv, in Ukraine.
One day, Wiesenthal was summoned by guards to the bedside of a young Waffen-SS officer, Karl Seidl, who wanted to “speak to a Jew”. Mortally injured with burns, the dying Seidl whispered to Wiesenthal that the SS had herded dozens of men, women and children into a house, set it alight and shot all those who tried to escape the flames. Seidl admitted his involvement and claimed he was tormented by his conscience – he needed to confess his sin to a Jew and begged for forgiveness.
Wiesenthal listened to this tale of horror, pondered for a minute and said nothing. Then he walked out of the room.
For years, Wiesenthal was tormented by the memory. Had he had done the right thing? Should he have offered the dying Nazi his forgiveness?
However, when he told his story to Jewish friends and rabbis, they agreed that he had been right not to offer forgiveness. How could he do so on behalf of victims he had never met? He was right to walk away.
By the same token, the alleged “sins” of our ancestors should not be visited on subsequent generations.
* Names and images may have been changed for privacy reasons
If you are already a ZANE donor, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts. If you are not a donor but would like to be, please follow the link below and know that every donation, however big or small, goes directly to where it is most needed. If you would like to help but can’t donate, please join the ZANE family and ‘like’ or ‘share’ our posts or write us a Google review – every positive step helps spread the word about the life changing work ZANE does.
Thank you – Nicky Passaportis ZANE Australia
Please donate to support pensioners struggling to survive in Zimbabwe
Any assistance is greatly appreciated and goes a long way to giving our pensioners a better quality of life and lift the pressure of money worries which is very debilitating emotionally.
(Donations made to ZANE in Australia, are tax-deductible)
Day 9
Streatley to Reading
The Scots call it “drookit”, and that is good enough for me. We were drenched in a proper downpour. We went from drought to Noah’s Ark in a single hour. Neither Jane nor I mind walking in the rain, as we were brought up in the Scottish Borders and in Edinburgh, that is what one does. And as sensible Princess Royal said, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just inadequate clothing.” Incidentally, I can’t help wondering what that sensible woman thinks of Meghan.
While walking down the Thames Pathway, we were passed by several coppers, all chasing towards an “incident.” I immediately wondered if we were involved in a Telly film.
Notes From a Proud Island
Many years ago, George Orwell warned us that the “most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history”. We should not be surprised, then, that destroyers in our midst are promoting a false narrative. These critics claim that Western history is a litany of cruelty, greed, patriarchal oppression, sexism, racism, transphobia, theft, snobbery, and much more. They praise all other cultures (provided they aren’t Western), and then wonder why anyone should wish to live here in the UK when so much bigotry, racism and hatred is baked into our DNA?
Why these individuals behave thus is a mystery. Perhaps it’s because they hail from countries that have contributed little to the overarching wellbeing of mankind and, knowing that the West has contributed so much, are consumed with envy and bitterness? I am reminded of that old, cynical saying, “Why do you dislike me so much? What favours did I ever do for you?”
Her Crown is Honour…
Here, under the Crown, human life is regarded as sacred, people are endowed with dignity and wrongs are addressed in honest courts. Just consider the eternal beauty of Oxford and Cambridge, or of Salisbury and Ely Cathedrals. Think about Shakespeare and our rich cultural and artistic achievements. Then imagine what life would be like without our social services, our freedom of speech and religious freedoms, and democracy and the rule of law. Has this bounty been exceeded anywhere on Earth, in all recorded history?
Our critics fail to express gratitude for these blessings, instead expressing resentment and bitterness at all the things they lack. The countries from where many of them come are places where lives are brutish and short, where corruption is endemic, where the young have no chance to make a difference to the way things are run, and where thinkers and critics rot in jail. And they are often places where racism flourishes – but it’s black on white, so no one bothers to comment.
Under our monarchy, citizens experience a form of liberal government and access to justice for which they ought to feel profound gratitude. The blessings of our monarchy are summed up by the chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis:
“Her crown is honour and majesty; her sceptre, law and morality. Her concern has been for welfare, freedom and unity, and in the lands of her dominion, she has sustained justice and liberty for all races, tongues and creeds.”
Citizens in the West experience a form of liberal government and access to justice for which they ought to feel profound gratitude. Of course, our Western freedoms and ways of doing things aren’t perfect, but they are better, by far, than any of the alternatives on offer elsewhere.
The West is under relenting pressure to accept growing numbers of immigrants struggling to get to the UK. In terms of newcomers, we apparently add a city the size of Newcastle to our small and crowded island each year.
I can’t help but note the lack of immigrants desperately risking their lives to settle in Russia, Africa, India or China. Funny that!
Pure Poetry
I recently visited a vicar friend dying of cancer in Oxford’s John Radcliffe hospital.
“Please will you read a psalm?” she asked.
I read the best-known psalm of all, “The Lord is my Shepherd”.
A nurse nearby listened with great care. “That was lovely,” she said. “Did you write it?”
“Oh yes,” I replied, “I knocked it up in the lift on the way up.”
* Names and images may have been changed for privacy reasons
If you are already a ZANE donor, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts. If you are not a donor but would like to be, please follow the link below and know that every donation, however big or small, goes directly to where it is most needed. If you would like to help but can’t donate, please join the ZANE family and ‘like’ or ‘share’ our posts or write us a Google review – every positive step helps spread the word about the life changing work ZANE does.
Thank you – Nicky Passaportis ZANE Australia
Please donate to support pensioners struggling to survive in Zimbabwe
Any assistance is greatly appreciated and goes a long way to giving our pensioners a better quality of life and lift the pressure of money worries which is very debilitating emotionally.
(Donations made to ZANE in Australia, are tax-deductible)