It Looks like Rain.

It looks like rain.  Ask any Londoners and they'll tell you it's going to be a lousy summer.with a rotten winter not far behind.  And let's not even mention the English Test cricketers.  They are angry, as I am, of the fuss caused by terrorism: the media droning on and on with the same film clips, the total lack of perspective.  This event at London Bridge is not even a subject of conversation amongst Londoners, but the inconvenience is.

 "Can't get my train from London Bridge?  That's two buses I'll have to catch to get home and it looks like rain."  Most Londoners (and I include myself here) are angry, not scared, and are already sick and tired of the London Bridge Incident.  Buckingham Palace most unusually has a flag at half mast.  Most of the stores in Piccadilly don't.

I was woken at 2 am this morning by my Australian insurance company wondering how I was.  I felt like telling them that I was OK sleeping off a  hangover until they phoned me.  That's how I was.  Angry.  Not trembling with my head under the pillow.  I'm angry, too, about the price of the Underground.   4 pounds 90 for a single journey of five stations!

Several years ago, now, I woke up with a shock to find that I was only four miles from Baghdad.  Four miles up, that is!  As we flew on down towards the Arabian Gulf at sunset, I looked at the Euphrates, with the little towns and villages on its banks, full of honest people with steady jobs and bringing up young families just like ours.  They were Muslims because their ancestors, their families, were Muslims, in the same way most of us became Christians..  The Muslim faith is a moral faith, just as Christianity is a moral faith, and Christianity has spread the same way.  I have the greatest respect for those who live by a moral code, but the particular faith is a choice.  It is not factual, but is an opinion.  The Euphrates reminded me so much of the Severn Vale, with its good and bad families.  The helpers and the helped.  The old people and the children.  Virtually what happened on the Euphrates happened on the Severn.  It is the intolerance of the thoughts of other people that causes the trouble.

It is the extremity of faith: the sureness that you are right and all others are wrong causes the problems.  Some of the biggest jihads, holy wars, were the Crusades, when thousands of Muslims died in the name of religion at the hands of Christians.

Me, I'm a scientist, and I like absolute truth.  I'm suspicious of "I believe that:"  That's only an opinion.

And in the words of Forrest Gump "That's all I have to say about that . . . "