You Couldn't Make It Up

The Bishop of Ebbsfleet is the latest to defect from the Church of England whom he accuses, in its willingness to ordain women, of 'making things up'. He'll be joining the Catholics, the people who brought us Transubstantiation. Wine into the Blood of Jesus, women into bishops. Yeah, one of those is definitely beyond belief.

Three Shocks and We're Out

Another week, another report about the effects of drinking in pregnancy. Shock number one: the children born to women who drink one or glasses a week aren't pigeon-toed mouth breathers. Shock number Two: it never occurs to any of these researchers that most people lie about their alcohol intake. Do the (very few) women who neck three double-vodkas a day through their first trimester actually own up? Or - Shock Three - do they only admit to having had the odd one? Conclusion: no-one knows anything. But, in an age without common sense, an endless rolling tide of 'guidance' is apparently all we have.

We're all Special Now

News that up to a fifth of children meant to have Special Educational Needs have been wrongly diagnosed should not come as a shock. The SEN industry has been expanding like mad - or like alternatively sane - to the point where even the little quirks of character that make us who we are are pathologised, labelled and - here's the nub, budgeted for. Children I know who fidget in their seats are 'dyspraxic'. The parents may be relieved by the 'diagnosis', the schools doubtless relish the extra cash. But the kids themselves aren't always quite so pleased.

When I was a child, I had classmates with all sorts of oddities. Some were good at maths and nothing else. Others only liked drawing, or rocked in their chairs when concentrating. There were even boys who didn't like sport. How ironic it is that forty years ago, before the supposed age of reason, the range of what passed for Normal was so much wider.

Television Kills- or does it?

New research claims to have proved that television gives children cardio-vascular disease later in life.

Evidently, those who make a career out of piling the guilt onto hard pressed parents want us to know that when we press On we are hastening the premature deaths of our children. While we await actual scientific proof - I'm not holding my breath here - I'll throw in this possibility for anyone who may be a television viewer but also likes to use their brain:

Kids who watch a lot of TV may be missing out on more active pursuits; when you're sitting you're not kicking a ball or running. So it might not be evil rays coming out of the box after all. Just a thought.

Thank you, Lorenzo

The death of Roald Dahl's daughter Olivia from measles induced encephalitis, revealed in the new biography serialised by the Daily Telegraph, must have made interesting reading for all those parents still shying away from having their children vaccinated. Did it also prick the conscience of Andrew Wakefield, the discredited doctor who led thousands of them to connect the MMR triple vaccine with autism and Crohn's Disease - despite no credible evidence that it caused either?

I went to primary school with a boy called Lorenzo, who suffered the same rare but terrifying brain inflammation after the measles as Olivia Dahl. He survived, but at age eight, having formerly been able to read and write, he became a wild, disturbed boy who could only scream, laugh and throw things at the teachers. When the health visitor offered us the vaccine for our children I read the information, but found my memories of Lorenzo focused the mind even more effectively. I'm guessing that the other kids in our class who are now parents might now also be remembering him with sorrow, and a shudder of gratitude.

Hairy bottom, control freak or nose picker?

Leaving, the new Kristin Scott-Thomas film, is a dark, heartstopping drama about a rich French housewife who falls in love with her Spanish builder. Her husband, whose passion for her expresses itself as icy control, is a fearsome yet pitiful figure somewhat like Karenin. There is sex - without Hollywood bodystockings and with hairy bottoms, grief, rage and some very convincing domestic violence. Watching these characters play out this gripping drama, I glanced at the man next to me, who at the height of the action was calmly picking his nose. And English men wonder why their wives romanticise the appeal of Europeans.

Are you a Catholic priest who's raped a child? Click here to learn about conscience

Another week, another revelation of abuse and cover ups in the Catholic Church. This week's Guardian Weekend magazine ran the account of a woman raped at age 13 by the priest living in her house, whose own mother chose to see her as the sinner. It takes a pretty big leap of faith to go for a perception quite that twisted, but if anyone can, a Catholic can.

The Pope's choice to run the UK inquiry into the whole horror, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, has blamed it all on the creeping menace of 'secularisation'. Unless that's the new term for sexual psychopaths, I'm confused. Out here in Secular World we generally believe child rape is wrong. We have not only a judicial system but also, most of us, a conscience. Clue for clerical rapists: that's the bit of you that tells you when you're doing something harmful to others, so that even when your own bosses don't hold you to account, you take responsibility yourself and stop. That way, when you somehow escape prosecution for a crime that in Secular World would put you in prison, you can still Do the Right Thing. See?

Of course, you'd think, being so big on Guilt and Sin and all, this lot would feel just a little badly about wrecking the lives of so many innocent children on a scale that amounts to psychic genocide, but that's the brilliance of their particular brand of DoubleThink. They are, after all, the people who helped promote anti-semitism by labelling Jews the killers of Christ, and supposed concocters of sinister, global conspiracies against nice, harmless Christians. Time to re-examine that one, I think. When it comes to international conspiracies, the Jews can't hold a seven-branched candlestick to these guys.

Sobbing into a £695 handbag

Following the "I can't cope any more" sobbings of several high profile females, it's been observed by one or two of the group formerly known as the General Public that rich, famous women complaining about depression is a bit, well, rich. Try being poor in today's Britain, said one pissed off correspondent to the Guardian's Letters Page, and quite right too. This weekend The Sunday Times' Style section contributed its two bobs' worth to the hand-wringing with a heartfelt feature that made a reasonably sensible effort to point the finger at women's futile tendency to think they can live a fantasy. (There is another word for this, by the way, and it is Stupid.)

As for the distance between that piece and one promoting said fantasy, I found it was a mere two pages further on: the ‘How I Make it Work’ feature showed us a 34 year-old PR woman who had her first baby in September and started her own company in January. She works through into the evenings so as to be ‘in contact with New York and LA’. (Ever heard of e-mail?) And in case we didn’t get the message, her belongings - £695 bag, £40 tiny Smythson notebook etc, were made to sound as essential as vital organs. Ironically, as Shane Watson said in the same magazine, we now look to a commercial - for John Lewis, which is after all, a shop - to remind us of life’s ‘real’ values. Well, supposedly.

It's at times like these you realise your mother did talk some sense after all.

Heaven Can Wait

Four Lions, the suicide bomb satire from Chris Morris and Peep Show writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong is extremely funny but suffers from a credibility gap as everyone in it is so ridiculously thick. You can't see how people that stupid would be able to get their own clothes on in the mornings, let alone master Key Stage Two chemistry.

According to Morris, this low level of, shall we say, attainment was found frequently during his exhaustive research. Watching it, one can't help being reminded of screenwriting guru Robert McKee's warning, that 'verisimilitude does not equal dramatic truth'. In other words, the reality is too bonkers to believe so sometimes has to be toned down.

However one leaves the cinema vastly reassured, as it means that most of the people who are currently trying to kill us may indeed achieve their aim of blowing themselves up - but not of taking the rest of us with them.

Time to Bring in the Bottom Inspectors

We've been reminded, and we really do need reminding, that bowel cancer kills 16,000 people every year in this country, more than any other kind barring lung cancer. And you know, it really shouldn't still be so many as they actually do have a test for it. The trouble is, no-one likes things being poked up their bottom, even not for very long. Even by doctors. They'd rather die.

What they need is a popular celebrity to get the ball rolling, or the endoscope unfurling. But bums, unlike bosoms, just aren't sexy. Brown ribbon on your lapel, anyone? Thought not.

Philip Pullman and Hell's Angels

Philip Pullman, revered author of the trilogy His Dark Materials and other quality bestsellers, has been condemned to 'eternal hell' and 'damnation by fire' by Christian zealots up in arms over his new book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Well, they're upset by the title. They haven't actually read it yet, as it isn't out till the end of this week.

As it is a criminal offence to threaten someone with violence or death, the letters are being taken seriously, and Pullman is expected to be accompanied by bodyguards when he appears at the Oxford Literary Festival on Sunday.

Those who taken an interest in that side of religious belief that justifies harming or murdering those with different values may remember the writers and producers of Jerry Springer The Opera having to leave their homes for police protected safe houses when they were similarly threatened. In that case too, the Christians had not let seeing the show get in the way of deciding it was blasphemous. Of course, the trouble with reading the book or seeing the play is that you might, God forbid, change your mind.

But that's where faith comes in. You don't need information or insight when you have faith. It holds firm no matter what. That's why it's called faith, and not reason.

Yes, Yes - oh YESSSS! Never Mind the British: the Women are Coming

How fitting that the first Academy Award for Best Director to be won by a woman should be awarded within a few hours of International Women's Day. It's a headline writer's dream.

It's also a reminder that winners don't have to be blockbusters. True, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is a war film. But it is also an intimate portrait of characters under huge tension, because of outside forces - and their relationships with each other. The moment where the black soldier (Anthony Mackie) calls the white one (Jeremy Renner) "a white trash redneck" sets the movie apart from war films which are only about, well, war. It also serves as a neat metaphor for a challenge to the status quo. Way to go, Kathryn - and fellow Oscar winner, screenwriter Mark Boal. On which note, let's just check how many women have won for Best Screenplay....

Equal Rights for faiths but not women

The much-discussed Amendment means that the government's position on sex education in faith schools effectively amounts to saying,

"This is how you put on a condom, but you will go to Hell if you use one."

As ever, the right of same-sex partnerships to be given equal status to marriage in those lessons is regarded as a given by all civilised people, yet there is no mention of the rights of girls. It's girls who in the Catholic faith are solely responsible for the sin of fornication and what used to be called 'unwed motherhood', and girls born into Muslim families who can be forced to marry as young as twelve.

The now retired headmaster of my old school, a former grammar turned comprehensive, told me that during his tenure, thirteen and fourteen year olds were being taken back to the home country, typically Pakistan, to 'visit granny', and returning married.

Is this going to be covered in the new mandatory PSHE?

And is Ofsted going to be coming round to check?

Blue Heaven

Avatar, nominated for Best Picture among others at the Academy Awards this year, has caused the American Christian right wing to work itself to a greater frenzy of rage than even Bill Clinton or the Harry Potter books. Its crimes include not just promoting paganism - hell, we knew they'd hate that, but also being 'anti-capitalist'.

Anti-capitalist? Sure, you know Jesus the Capitalist. So who was the Jesus who overturned the money lenders' tables at the temple and said the meek would inherit the earth? Guess that must be another one.

A fag by any other name

Quote of the Day surely goes to Forest, the people who bravely campaign on behalf of cigarette manufacturers to preserve our God-given right to kill ourselves, slowly. On the Today Programme this morning, in answer to the news that the government wants to cut the number of British smokers by half, spokesman Simon Clark called the proposal 'dangerous'.

Call me old-fashioned, but I'd always thought that selling a product which can give you 69 different kinds of cancer with absolutely no upside is far more deserving of the adjective. In fact, if trying to help people stop smoking is 'dangerous', then presumably promoting lung cancer as a lifestyle choice should be renamed too. Hmm, isn't there a buzz word that would fit the bill? One that has quite a bit of support. Assisted Suicide it is then. And it'll look nicer on the packet.

The far-sighted Mr Blair

Thank God Tony Blair has cleared up any uncertainty about why we went to war with Iraq over the non-existent WMD. Saddam didn’t have them ready at that time, no, but he had the scientists and therefore the capability to build them as soon as the UN turned its collective back. This pretty much covers all bases till the end of time. I must remember that next time I tell the children off for anything they claim not to have done.

"You've got the rubber bands and there are stones outside in the garden so you could break a window at any time in the future."

You see? If only we all had that kind of vision, we wouldn't have run the risk of avoiding a costly, illegal war. Phew!

Internet is not Utopia Shock

The wave of horrified amazement which greeted the news that the Chinese, Iranian and other regimes allergic to debate use the internet to spy on their citizens is in itself rather shocking. It's surely tailor-made for the job, leaving as it does a permanent trail of one's communications and contacts like an indelible stain on the carpet. The real tragedy is not that dissidents and free thinkers are being spied upon - as they have been since the 16th Century at least - but that anyone was naive enough to be surprised.

Meanwhile, those campaigning against the seemingly unstoppable spread of online pornography involving children may be intrigued by the ease with which the Indian government apparently manages to block all material featuring sex of any kind. And they told us it couldn't be done.